“No we can’t, you dope!” I blurted, although I knew this was only a husbandly offering, like suggesting we get a new puppy. “Are you nuts? This is it!”
The cool fan and its reassuring whir hummed.
I cried some more. It felt good to cry, to just let everything—heartache, regret, years we couldn’t reclaim—well up, roll down my face, and soak the pillow.
Something about the feel of the washcloth, the way I was clutching it, and the weave of the unfamiliar bed’s cotton blanket reminded me of another place long ago. I let myself burrow deep and far away from the present, drifting back to that place: the hospital bed (two, actually) in Manhattan at Mount Sinai, where each of my sons was born. And where, in the blissed-out high following each of their births, I dozed, exhausted and ecstatic, cradling each tiny baby wrapped tight as a bean in the hospital’s worn cotton receiving blankets.
I didn’t wish for those days back, not at all. And yet…
I lay there in that strange room the night before Jeff and I were to leave our son and found myself longing for our first apartment on West Ninety-Second Street in New York City, for the yellow-painted kitchen where we washed every dish, fork, and spoon by hand—and it still seemed such a luxury to even have a kitchen. I longed for summer nights on the Upper West Side when I’d come home from work and walk the boys to the corner pizzeria in their pajamas for Italian ices. I longed for the drafty old farmhouse in Connecticut, for the boys’ upstairs bedroom with twin maple beds tucked under the eaves, and their wooden Brio train set under eternal construction on a green shag rug. I longed for another weekend, for a chance to read the boys stories without hurrying, or to sit with them on the floor and actually play with those trains instead of thinking about all the other things Jeff and I thought we should be doing. I longed for winter nights when Jeff would push back his chair after dinner and exclaim, “I know, let’s go night-sledding!” I longed for the Flexible Flyer and the toboggan, and even for the dripping snow boots lined up on a mat.
Most of all I longed for the sense of possibility we had then—for the years ahead, and for the sense of discovery that on the best days would turn even the most ordinary moment into a shared memory: the kids standing on kitchen stools dying Easter eggs turquoise and yellow in spring; the barn with its smells of hay and horse manure and sweat in summer; the antique cider press that mashed crisp apples into juice each fall; and in winter, the night-sledding. I longed for the kerosene lanterns staked out on our dark hill, their glittery snow trail illuminating the night like stars.
I thought about all these things, lying in bed next to my husband of twenty-five years, in that old frame guesthouse, letting long-shelved memories pop up like balloons, hang suspended for a bit, then float away. I realized that the wonder of it was that any of these things were ours to begin with; because, of course, they weren’t ours, not really. I knew that our sons, like everything—the snow, the stars, the seasons—had their own journeys. Our job, with luck, was to shepherd them along their way, to get them to this point—really, the start of that journey.
I let the past push against the walls of my heart until the present stepped in. Get a grip! You need to be there for James in a few hours! As the sun was coming up I finally fell asleep, exhausted.
* * *
The alarm went off with a loud beep at seven. Jeff peered out the window and said, “Not very nice weather for Move-In Day, I’m afraid.” At seven thirty I could hear Ford Explorers and Grand Cherokees, and I watched cars with roof boxes crammed with gear rolling past. By nine the three of us had packed up and were making our way toward campus in sticky late-summer rain. It was the worst weather imaginable for a college Move-In Day—the picture they never show you in the application brochure: an utter deluge, a fiasco.
Upperclassmen in St. Lawrence T-shirts stood forlornly on strategic street corners, pointing the way. A few of the lucky ones had umbrellas; most were soaked to the skin, as if they’d just swum across one of the North Country’s many rivers or lakes fully clothed.
We found James’s dorm, pulled our rented SUV up front, then all hopped out and began sprinting back and forth through ankle-deep water, thinking that if we ran fast enough, we might keep dry. But sprinting didn’t make the least bit of difference. None of us had thought to bring a raincoat, because it was August—well, maybe Jeff had a raincoat, but that’s Jeff, always planning ahead. I was wearing my favorite sandals, jeans, and a wrap sweater. James had on shorts. In less than ten minutes we were soaked to the skin, hair plastered to scalps, shoes squelching.
Jeff and I stood around in James’s room, dripping, then helped him unpack his things and mop the puddles up off the linoleum. Since everyone else was bolting in and out of the storm as intently as we were, no one felt particularly friendly. The mood was tense. The only good thing that happened was the dad who rushed in carrying a heavy stereo speaker, began to slip on the wet floor, and then caught himself just before his feet slid out from under him.
“Man, that would have sucked,” James whispered.
“No kidding. They haven’t made speakers like those since nineteen seventy-six!” quipped Jeff, appreciatively.
We made a trip to Walmart for a minifridge; had lunch with a bunch of other drenched, anxious-seeming parents and their teens in the student center; and then it was time for Jeff and me to leave. Like many colleges dealing with the latest wave of superinvolved parents, St. Lawrence had wisely instituted a schedule for incoming freshman. The schedule makes it explicitly clear when parents should literally say goodbye. In our case the Velcro-parents’ unsticking hour was four o’clock in the afternoon, after the president’s welcome ceremony. But we’d decided to hit the road by three o’clock to drive back to Ottawa, catch a flight across Canada to Vancouver, and get back to Heron.
James hadn’t met anyone yet, not even a roommate; somehow he’d wound up with a single. And he confessed that the giardia symptoms he’d contracted by accidentally gulping water while river kayaking earlier that summer (and which we only then realized probably linked to the intestinal illness he’d had on the boat) had suddenly returned. Did we maybe have any Imodium?
“What?” Jeff howled. “Are you serious?”
After a quick huddle the three of us decided that Jeff would find a drugstore, I would stay behind in James’s dorm room to keep the door from locking, and James would join the rest of his dorm mates for the freshman welcome ceremony. When Jeff returned we’d leave the medicine in James’s new room for him and dash to make our flight.
“Bye, Mom, I love you,” James said, bending over to give me a great big bear hug. My boys are so tall, such men. I felt absurdly small and tears welled from my eyes, but I knew it was time, and that he’d really, truly be okay. “Bye, James, have fun settling in. It’s going to be great!”
“Bye, son, I’m proud of you. We’ll call you tomorrow,” Jeff said.
And then suddenly lots of jittery freshmen were gathering at the end of the hall. Jeff rushed off in search of James’s medicine, and James walked out to meet the other students. I sat in James’s room at his new desk, which faced the window, and watched as he and his dorm mates ambled—maybe fifty or sixty of them in shorts and flip-flops, impervious to the rain—up the long, grassy slope leading away from the building.
As they grew smaller and smaller I could still pick out my son—his broad shoulders, easy relaxed gait. He was chatting with a girl to his left. They reached the crest of the hill and vanished.
Thank god he’s rid of us! I thought. That poor kid must be so relieved we’ve all finally said our goodbyes.
And I realized with a little start that everything leading up to the Big Drop-Off—the countdown, the preparation, the anticipation of saying goodbye—had been worse than the goodbye itself. It had all felt bewildering, and yet perhaps this was what it felt like to be an empty nester.
I didn’t know. I only knew that this was exactly what was supposed to happen—our sons and daughters were meant to walk of
f into their own lives.
And I knew it was time to go. When Jeff came back with the pills, we shut the door to James’s room behind us and, feeling relieved that we’d done all we could, stepped out into the rain.
PART THREE
We always talk about the spacecraft as being a child, maybe a teenager. There was absolutely nothing anybody on the operations team could do, just to trust that we had prepared it well to set off on its journey on its own.
—ALICE BOWMAN, mission operations manager
NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto
TRUE NORTH
The first thing I saw, back on the boat, was the boys’ guitar case lying on the forward berth. The first thing Jeff saw was the boat. “She looks good—like we left here a few minutes ago, not a week ago,” he said.
In the past twenty-four hours we’d skipped the St. Lawrence parents’ welcome (where they basically tell the most hopeless helicopter parents it’s time to leave), flown back across Canada to Vancouver, spent the night at an airport hotel, and risen at dawn to catch a small plane full of fishermen to the northern tip of Vancouver Island, where a teenaged driver in flip-flops met us at the one-room airport and ferried us in a Dodge Ram to Port McNeill. As we crested the forested hill and coasted down the long road toward the harbor, we could see a tall white mast soaring above the whale-watching boats.
“There’s Heron!” we both cried, relieved.
Stepping out of the taxi truck and walking down to the docks, we noticed the weather had turned. While we were gone a wedge of cold had brought a new scent—the smell of sockeye salmon, of coming rain, of animal fur, of old conifers. Although it was late August, September was in the air, Port McNeill’s handful of stores already advertising back-to-school sales. The school banners didn’t make us melancholy—they just caught us off guard. While it was strange not to be in back-to-school, back-to-work mode, we discovered we had plenty to do.
We walked to town and raided the grocery store, stocking up on everything we’d need for the next month at sea: a mountain of produce, milk, eggs, hummus, cheese, bacon, meat, bread, more wine.
After reprovisioning, we walked with our laptops to Mugz Coffee and logged on to the free Wi-Fi. We wrapped up stray business and, most of all, let people know that as we headed north—into the wild and the Great Bear Rainforest—we might be out of both cell and email range.
* * *
Lugging our laptops back to the dock, both lost in our growing unease about the days and weeks ahead, my core ached. It was as if I’d been punched in the gut. I felt utterly adrift and extremely unwell—waves of shock and dislocation washed over me.
I exclaimed out of the blue, “I don’t like this, it’s not right!”
The tide had gone out, leaving a wide mudflat between the two of us and the boats. A great blue heron on one leg surveyed the bleak expanse, still as a lawn ornament in the muck. “It feels so off-balance having James this far away, and Sam back on his own in San Francisco…like one of my arms has been accidentally misplaced, or a leg chopped off!”
“I know. I think we’re both grieving,” Jeff said, sweetly.
“Do you feel bad too?” I asked him, surprised. “Physically bad?”
“I do, Bug,” he said.
I was caught off guard that my husband would feel the sense of loss so acutely as well. But of course he would. He’s an emotional guy, a terrific dad, and as the boys had grown into young men themselves, he’d had a pair of compadres around the house. I thought of all the character traits he’d modeled for them—integrity; smarts, ingenuity, intellectual curiosity; a great sense of humor; loyalty, empathy, and even I had to admit, a highly evolved emotional IQ (for a guy). I thought of the eclectic passions he’d shared with the boys: their love of music, film, surfing—not exactly the easiest sport to learn in Pacific Northwest waters—and sailing.
“Well, it sucks,” I said, reeling from the magnitude of it all, trying to fathom what this meant for all of us, moving forward.
My husband and I walked down the dock ramp in silence, past the seaplanes, the charter boats, the marine research vessels. I felt like our hearts had been ripped out of our chests and were floating along the dock in front of us.
We turned toward the wooden finger pier where Heron was tied.
“I don’t like this,” I said again in a sort of strangled voice. It was all I could think of to say.
“I know you don’t,” Jeff said. “I don’t like it either.”
* * *
By that afternoon it was raining hard. The rain pelted the roof of the cabin with a steady drubdrubdrub, and we cranked up the heater while making dinner: jasmine rice, cioppino, Caesar salad. Jeff pulled out a bottle of Burgundy. The late-summer light dimmed, then it was dark. Abbey Road was playing on the iPod, a good choice, those Beatles, for a nostalgic evening. I set two mats on the table, two place settings, two glasses, and I lit one candle. There were four pillows on the banquette, so now we each got two. Still, when dinner was ready and we slid in, those pillows weren’t enough to bolster us. Not even close. It felt like we were swimming in space, adrift in quiet.
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” I said, “having the guys gone so suddenly. I feel sad, don’t you? Physically sad.”
“It’s going to take some time,” Jeff said. “But I know this is the best thing, especially for James—he needs this. It’s going to be great for him to be torn from his comfort zone in every way.”
We sat hunched over the one candle, poking at our cioppino. “And, I also keep reminding myself what a ripping good time he’s going to have, must already be having,” he added, grinning.
“Well, that’s true,” I said, brightening.
“I remember so clearly when my parents left me at college—that feeling of freedom.”
“I know. Me too…”
“It was the first time in my life I could do whatever I wanted—that I felt like my life was mine.”
He was right, of course. This was exactly the way it was supposed to be, the way parents want it to be. Still, the wine tasted thin, the cioppino like filler. We sat side by side, taking in the new normal: just the two of us.
Then, out of the blue, my phone rang, a rarity aboard Heron, where we’re often out of cell range. I walked over, glanced at the screen: it was Sam!
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Sam, it’s so good to hear from you!” I exclaimed, my heart flooded with a fizzy champagne feeling; it was such a rush of pleasure hearing his voice.
We placed the phone on the table, stood it up like a little person, and put it on speaker.
“You’re back on the boat, right? How is it?”
“It’s good!” I chirped, which wasn’t at all true. “Although it’s pretty quiet without you guys.”
“Yeah? How’d Heron make out while we were gone?”
“She’s in good shape,” Jeff said. “Like we left just yesterday.”
“Wow,” Sam said. “That’s gotta be a relief.” He updated us on his job in San Francisco and on our friends who had returned from vacation and were, though never having met Sam, letting him live with them until his internship was over.
“Have the Hendricksons adopted you yet?” Jeff wanted to know.
Sam laughed. After all, he was going through an adjustment too: his brother on the East Coast, his parents on a sailboat headed god knows where, and him navigating an adventure of his own: new city, new job, and a new family.
“So how’d it go at St. Lawrence?” he asked.
We filled him in on the Big Drop-Off: James’s room, the cute girl down the hall, the two hundred streakers who supposedly dashed naked through freshman orientation, a longstanding senior tradition.
“Really?” Sam said, clearly interested. “I’d better give him a call.”
* * *
After talking with Sam, both Jeff and I felt better—and I realized the whole family was grieving in a way. How much sadder it would be, I thought, if we were g
lad to be separated, if there was nothing to grieve. From the instant they learn to roll over, every move a kid makes is one away from us. Crawling, cruising, walking, running, driving. I’d always understood, deep down, that our personal gauge of success as parents would be how far, how brazenly, the kids ventured into the world—coming back to us with their own discoveries as we’d look forward to returning to them. Maybe that’s why I’d taken so many pictures of the boys side by side walking away from me: because part of me had always known that their futures would be walking out of my arms and into the world, and the knowledge broke my heart and filled it up at the same time. But none of that made the first nights of empty-nesting any easier.
Jeff stepped to the nav station and switched the iPod to dish-washing music while the sink filled with water. This usually meant cranking up J. Geils, or Talking Heads; instead, Kool & the Gang came on…
He was doing dishes to “Ladies Night”?
I had to laugh. The song was so darn cheesy, so seventies, so…
Discoing two steps back toward the galley where he was supposed to be doing dishes, my goofy husband grabbed my hand instead. Uh-oh, I could see where this was going; he dragged me up from the settee, danced me around the ten-foot-wide cabin. I tried out a few moves—not feeling particularly lithe in jeans and Ugg slippers, with less than six square feet for the two of us on the wooden raised floor. Still, we pranced forward and back, shook it, spun around like one of those little plastic couples twirling in endless circles atop a wedding cake.
“You can bet they aren’t doing this on those other boats out there!” I shouted over the music, doing a faux boogie back across the four-foot sisal rug.
“Come on,” Jeff quipped. “You don’t think they’re getting down on that hundred-fifty-foot Russian icebreaker?” He moved his hips in an exaggerated slow grind, then pranced forward and back, holding one hand in the air over his head, palm out, like a flag. “Get down, girl!”
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