But who is to blame? This is what my lawyer, Betsy Rusk, wants to know, and I can’t answer. Slowly, I tell her, the unseen was seen; the invisible became visible. Nothing was as it appeared. Cooper had become his own fictional version of himself: the stage our house, the players being Gwen and me, the backdrop his job. Meanwhile, the real Cooper was another man entirely, and the double sidedness of the man and family life were both familiar and disturbing.
And I had done the same, I admit, I’d pretended. I needed to believe in the facade, in the Family with a capital F. I desired the family and the man and the love. I desperately needed it all and refused to see I didn’t have it. I’d been holding on to something that wasn’t even there, like an old photograph that fades because it wasn’t living at all, just a captured shadow.
Cooper created the man he wanted to be and acted it out, and I’d cheered him on, colored inside the lines of his drawn character. In a way, he was telling the truth: The accident wasn’t his fault; the dead man’s life wasn’t relevant. In the end, it was the fictional version that had become true.
You really think I’m that guy? You really believe I could do that?
Yes, I do.
Yes.
* * *
I told Gwen, in the presence of her therapist, about the divorce. We’d have to move and close the studio, I said. She cried but looked straight at me, tears running down her cheeks like silver scars, and said, “I know, Mom. It sucks, but still … I know.”
Late one night, a week later, all the Ten Good Ideas cards are complete, lined up in their beauty as stones on an artful walkway. Francie, Max, Gwen, Willa, and I stand over them like a parent at the nursery window, admiring in bleary-eyed exhaustion the red-faced newborns. We know what this finishing means. It is not only a new card line but also an ending.
We are silent for a long while, no one knowing what to say. Some endings are wordless. Then together, we walk outside into the dark night. It’s Gwen who looks up and says, “Full moon.”
As everyone wanders away, Max and I are left standing side by side, and I try to speak first, but it’s his proclamation that overrides mine. “I took a full-time job at SCAD.”
“What? I thought we were going to try to teach classes at the studio. Expand things.”
He turns and faces the studio, the barn that has become home. “I know you’ll have to give this up and find a new place. It’s the right time for me to move on, too.”
“No.” I take one step toward him and place my hand on his chest. “Please don’t.”
“I took the job.” He waves toward the barn doors. “I’ll never forget any of this. And I know it won’t be here anymore, which maybe makes it easier to leave.”
“‘Easier to leave’?”
He touches my cheek. “No, not easier to leave. Just thought it sounded better.”
“I’ll find a new place for the studio and—”
He places his finger over my lips. “Stop.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small box.
“What is this?”
His answer is a smile.
I unwrap the tight knot of paper and find a vintage Paragon letter T—the one we’ve been searching for all these years. “Oh, wow.” I look at Max. “How did you find this?”
“I was looking for something else in Cameron’s store, and there it was.”
“All those years when I looked on purpose, and you find it without trying.”
He wraps his arms around me and pulls me to him. With my head on his shoulder and his hands on the back of my neck, he says, “Please be well. You have so much ahead of you.”
“I want you ahead of me,” I say before I know the words have formed in my mind at all.
He pulls back and looks at me. “It’s too late for all that. It is. We had all those other chances and we didn’t take them. We were either too early or too late. I know this is a terrible time for you, with Cooper leaving, but I’m not your plan B. You can’t, after all this time, say ‘I want you now that everything else has fallen apart.’”
“You are not a plan B. That’s not it at all.”
“You’re in the middle of a firestorm that will demand all of you. I can’t make it better, and we’ll both end up hurting if I’m in the middle of it all.”
I take a step back and then another.
“Us.” He waves his hand in the space between. “We’ve never had our timing right.”
He is right. I have—again—been trying to save my family, but this time in a different way, in a parting way. I’ve let go of everything in order to know the truth, and I won’t grab hold of Max, pull him back from the life he wants and needs to make.
“I know you’ve always wanted to teach. I was hoping it would be … with us.”
He hugs me one more time, then leaves. Truck tires crunch across the gravel and taillights fade as he makes the sharp right onto the paved driveway.
A swirl of static electricity wraps around my stomach. The free fall of losing him; the painful shock of loss again and again in the middle of my body, and I see that, yes, there’s more to lose than a house and a studio and the image of a family.
Minutes pass as I stare at the empty driveway. It isn’t fair to grab hold of Max him as my life comes undone, as the waters rise and the storm thunders again. I am still staring down the driveway when I hear the growl of a grunting truck. Headlights appear where taillights have just receded. I grip the fence, my smile rising as hope takes flight.
The full moon spreads its reflected light onto the drive, and with a sinking, a dropping of the heaviest stone, I see the truck. It is dark green and larger, not Max’s at all. The vehicle pulls into the parking lot and a tall man with a handlebar mustache, dressed in a black suit, gets out. He holds a large manila envelope in his hand as he steps onto the gravel. “Are you Eve Morrison?”
I nod.
Without another word, he hands me the envelope. Of course I don’t need to open it to know what’s inside. Another ending.
Francie walks outside then and glances at the envelope with the lawyer’s logo stamped in dark black ink. “Divorce papers?” she asks in a whisper.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Eve. So sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m the one who’s sorry,” I wave toward the studio. “We’re going to lose all of this.” They come now—the tears hidden somewhere beneath the frenzy of finishing our card line, below the bobbing-in-space peace and denial.
“This is not ending,” she counters quickly. “I know a warehouse we can rent. I’ve been looking. We can do this. I know we can.”
I try to smile. “A warehouse.”
“It’s the best I can do so far. But I’ll keep looking.”
“No, it sounds great. I’ll go look with you. But I’ll understand if you want to move … on.”
“Move on? You’re not getting rid of me. This is what I do.”
“The cards,” I say. “They’re good.”
“No,” she says. “They’re great.”
From inside the barn, a watery light spills out the window and onto the ground, the washed-up remains of all we’ve been and done here. The last two Ten Good Ideas sit ready to enter the world. Once again, the false commandments are breaking apart what has been: a beginning built into an ending.
twenty-four
The loft isn’t big, but the tall windows on either side of the corner unit offer us both a sunrise and sunset of such varying hues and contrasts that Gwen and I decide to put up plain white linen curtains, allowing nature to offer all the color it can and will. This morning, three months after I moved out, Gwen is late for school.
I pour another cup of coffee and toss a glance at the typewriter—my Remington—on the counter. Gwen is reading Ulysses in her senior Advanced English class and has taken to leaving me quotes from the book. There is a note propped on the typewriter’s platen roller in a Lanston Monotype font, stating “Love loves to love love.”
I holler down the hallway of
our two-bedroom place. “You’re late.”
“I know. I know. Relax, Mom. I have study hall first.” Gwen emerges from her bedroom, which we have designed to look so exactly opposite of her old bedroom that even the sheets aren’t the same. Her backpack hangs off her right shoulder. Her hair is loose and she wears only mascara as makeup. Her beauty still stuns me.
In this new life, there are things I thought I’d miss that I don’t miss at all, and things I didn’t know I would come to appreciate: the simple mornings in a sunlit space; a daughter across the hall who isn’t angry or tangled with anxiety; a peace that is free from the desperate need to please someone who can’t be pleased. That approval I sought with such desperate busyness, well, I don’t need it anymore.
I pour another cup of coffee and look through my cell phone for the name of the man Cameron recommended to fix two of my presses that were damaged in the move. I can’t remember the repairman’s name and a small spark of anger flicks, like biting a Life Saver in the dark when we were kids—the spark gone before I’m sure it was there at all: anger at Max.
Francie and I now run the Fine Line, Ink from an empty garage warehouse in downtown Savannah, walking distance from my loft, but not quite the short walking distance it was from my house to the barn. We’ve done what we can to make the studio look the same, to set it up almost exactly as it had been, but with Max gone, emptiness looms. I want to blame the fact that there aren’t open beams and stall doors, that there aren’t painted concrete floors and the sweet aroma of ghost hay, but the real reason the garage feels wrong is that there is no Max.
The Ten Good Ideas card line entered the world with its own heart and life, becoming the most successful and mass-ordered line we’ve ever done. From high-end department stores to boutique stationery stores, the orders are overwhelming us. Yet Francie and I have found our way, working long hours, with Gwen coming after school to help. Both Oprah and goop chose the full collection as a “must have.”
There was a melancholy heartbreak in seeing this creation enter the world just as my own world came undone.
“Gwen,” I say without looking up. “Do you remember the name of the repair guy? I put him in my phone yesterday at Cam’s store.”
“Van,” she says.
“Yes! That’s it. Thanks, sweetie.” I tap my forehead. “Things are falling out.”
“Don’t lose your mind on me now, Mom.”
I laugh and look up, kissing her cheek as she walks out the door for school. “I love you, Pea. Have a great day. Good luck on the math test.”
“I love you, too.” She’s gone and I walk over to a floor-to-ceiling window divided by iron mullions to watch her. She doesn’t know, but every morning when she leaves, I stand here and watch her turn right out of the parking deck and onto Drayton Street. I spy on her car until it disappears around the bend.
Standing at the window, I search again for the repairman’s number and tap it out on the phone’s keyboard, leaving a message when he doesn’t answer. Francie is meeting me at work in an hour, and before then I need to sift through the pile of documents on the kitchen table. I’ve learned a term I wish I’d never known: financial infidelity. Uneasiness fills my gut, making me feel seasick, as if I’m tossed on the divorce’s storm-battered waves. No matter how many forms I sign or read or review, there always seem to be more, like Cooper is attempting to drown me in paper so I’ll give up. I won’t.
He stayed in the house, but why wouldn’t he? It’s his family estate. While I wait on my “equitable share,” I review affidavits and documents. It will take a long while to untangle the mess he’s made. I still don’t fully understand where all the money is or was, and I’ve come to understand that equitable share is a term I never want to hear again. How can a marriage or a love ever be divided into anything equitable at all? Truth? Belief? Not one of these is divisible by anything else, like an algebra equation without an integer. And because, like the baby in Solomon’s law, something living—a marriage or love—can’t be split, I lose all the intangibles, gaining only material goods, wondering if that is really all that remains. Dividing money that Cooper is hiding is the trick; he’s mastered the art of monetary shifting (a term I made up in complete frustration one harrowing afternoon with my lawyer).
I take blame, too: I was part of the image making, complicit in the act of family design without heart. Now there is a great calm, a tremendous relief, as if those things were mirages in front of a smaller world that holds larger good. It’s a much more ordinary life I lead now, one without backstage passes and front-row seats, and yet somehow it is a much more extraordinary life. Every day there is a new wonder. The emptiness isn’t as empty as I’d imagined.
Willa is still healing, losing words and mixing facts, but writing songs and singing with Francie on the weekends at local venues. It’s there, in her songwriting and singing that her mind becomes whole and heals itself a little every day. She moved in with Benson, and his love for her is an umbrella that protects her more than I ever had been able to do while soaked in my own rainstorm.
Cooper’s scarred face and severed scalp have undergone two surgeries. I tried to visit him after the second, but his mother, Louise, turned me away at the door, announcing—as she must have practiced in her living room for hours—“You are dead to us.” She stood tall and upright, smiling with her proclamation.
Sometimes I feel dead to myself, I’d wanted to tell her all those months ago when I was as numb as if my body had been injected with novocaine.
I am still standing at the window as Gwen’s car turns, leaving my sight. I hear a shuffling outside the door: the neighbor’s dog. The tiny, yappy poodle named Tinkerbell often makes a yellow puddle outside my doorway before her owner, Shawn, gets to the elevator. I glance down at my phone, impatient for the repairman to call me back. I hear a knock on the door and I walk toward it, ready to face Shawn while he apologizes for his dog’s mess. I prepare to smile and hand over some paper towels.
And it is Shawn standing there, but he’s holding a silver envelope, one I recognize from our Ten Good Ideas card line. He smiles and hands it to me without saying a word, then walks away. TinkerBell glances over her shoulder as if to say, “I’ll get you next time.”
The metal door clicks shut and I sit on the oversize white couch, which Gwen and I chose from a catalog. My finger slips beneath the envelope fold and I pull out the card I know so well, the one Gwen designed with the ragged heart: Forgive, number nine. I think how nice Shawn is to apologize with my own card line. I didn’t realize that he knew what I did at all. I smile at the unexpected generosity. A lot different from the last cards sent to me from my own business.
I open it slowly, but inside is a note from Mary Jo, not Shawn.
“Please forgive me,” it says.
This is all that’s written inside, except for her slanted signature. I place it on the table. I will write her back and maybe I will tell her that there is nothing to forgive, neither the car accident nor the cards, that the truth would have come out with or without her. Cooper misrepresented himself to her as he did to me. Endings. They come over and over, and with each one there is also a new beginning. Cooper was right: Everything was lost. But what Cooper didn’t know, could never know, is that it is here in the loss that I finally believe in kindness, in truth, and, mostly, in love.
* * *
The autumn sun is warm, but cold air is pushing in behind and will be arriving soon. Savannah feels, on days like this, to hold me in the palm of its hand. The river pulses toward its destination as if somewhere that I can’t see a heart is pumping these waters. Palmetto tree branches shudder against one another with the faux sound of rain. Light is cradled in the leaves, as if the sun needs rest also.
I walk slowly to the garage studio this late afternoon, soaking in what feels holy and good. Tonight, Francie and Willa are singing together at a songwriter’s showcase downtown. Max will be there, and this knowledge walks next to me like a companion. I’ve seen him a
couple of times since the night he said good-bye—at Cameron’s shop, at the farmers’ market, and at Larry Ford’s restaurant one night.
Willa, Gwen, and Francie are waiting for me as I walk in. Today, we’re wrapping boxes of the Ten Good Ideas card line for shipping. It will take all week.
“Hey, Mom.” Gwen doesn’t look up as she tapes Kraft paper around a box. She’s come here straight from school.
“You excited about tonight?” I ask Willa and Francie.
Their guitars are propped in the far corner, waiting, and Willa points to them. “Nervous. Mostly nervous.”
“We’re singing our new song, the one we wrote together.” Francie drops a pile of envelopes into a box and then looks up at me. “The one inspired by you, actually.”
“You mean the one you won’t let me hear yet?” They’ve told me about how they wrote this song it after I moved out, after they saw the quiet change in me.
“Yep, that one,” Francie says. “We hope you won’t hate it.”
“I won’t,” I say, sure as I can be that I won’t hate anything they’ve written.
“Mom…” Gwen says my name with a long groan built into it. “You didn’t bring my college app folder?”
“No, because you don’t need to work on it here. Go home. Work on it. You do not need to be doing this.” I spread my hands out across the cluttered table, the same project table we took from the old barn. “College is more important. Go, Pea.”
“I’m almost done. I thought I could just do the last bit here. With you and Willa.”
I love this about her, this willingness and need to be near us, when only months before she’d cringed at being in the same room with me. My fear, my greatest one during the divorce, had been that I was doing harm to Gwen, but now I see that we both understand that although things aren’t exactly the way we want them, at least they’re honest and real.
“You can run home and get it,” I say. “Bring it back here.”
Willa looks up from her work, and even now, although I see her every day, I am immersed in her beautiful healing. The tiny scar has almost disappeared and her mind is now mostly clear. The empty spaces and damaged synapses are finding new ways to function—neuroplasticity, they call it. I haven’t told her that I actually love the way she mixes up her words and finds new pathways in her lyrics—it might not be the traditional way, but now it’s her way.
The Stories We Tell Page 24