“I think that’s what they say in Home Depot.”
“Don’t be fresh, Robbie.”
It was hard to feel chastised and angry and nervous all at the same time, but, as Rob learned at that moment, not impossible.
“Robbie? Are you still there? You know Christine has several friends who want to build houses even bigger than hers in that same area. Work like that could keep you busy for years. If you are intent on making your own way in the world.”
“I know, Mom. That’s why I took this job in the first place.”
Ruggman called, “Hey! Barnes! We need you over here!” Rob liked being called by his last name. Made him feel salt-of-the-earth.
“Mom, I’ve got to go. I’m working, Mom—”
“But you’ll help her sort it out?”
“Of course I will.”
The elf with the hammer: tap, tap, tappity tap.
“That’s my boy, Robbie. I knew you’d get her in by Thanksgiving.”
He looked down. “Mom, Eliza’s on the other line, I have to go.”
Eliza was crying. More than crying. She was sobbing. He hadn’t heard Eliza cry like that since—wait, had he ever heard Eliza cry like that? He couldn’t make out what she was saying. The paddleboarder had reached the dock. Ruggman was striding toward him.
“Rob?” asked Eliza, from another world. “Are you there?”
A cloud passed over the sun, and for an instant the world went dim.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m here.”
10
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
This can be fixed. That’s what Eliza thought after she got off the phone with Rob, who had listened while she sobbed, and waited until she could speak, and then offered to drop everything and drive up to Little Harbor that minute. That didn’t make any sense, they both knew that, but she loved that he offered.
Everything could be fixed, with enough determination. Eliza was a firm believer in that; she was always repeating those words to her daughters. Torn math sheet? No worries, we’ll download another from the teacher’s website! Colored outside the lines on the social studies poster? Scribble over the blue part with a white crayon, there, good as new. Broken car? Heart? Dreams? All repairable. This can be fixed. She repeated it on her way to the wharf, over and over again, like a mantra.
Was it money that was holding Charlie back from talking to her? Well, she had money, they had money. Rob’s mother had gobs and gobs of money, more than she knew what to do with. You couldn’t buy yourself a new brain. But you could buy yourself the best doctor in Boston, you could buy yourself options. She just needed her father to come in off his boat so she could talk to him. She picked her pace up to a jog, then a run. When she arrived at the wharf she was breathing aggressively.
Oh, damn. She was hoping to be alone, but the girl from the coffee shop was there, the sweet girl who made the uncertain designs in the cappuccinos. Mary. She turned when she heard Eliza approaching and her face had such an open expression that Eliza felt terrible for wishing her away.
“Hey,” said Eliza. “Hope you don’t mind if I join you.” She tried to make her voice sound normal and sociable, not at all like someone who’d just learned devastating news. She didn’t even know yet what she would say to her father; she hadn’t worked that part out yet.
“Sure,” said Mary. She did something interesting with her body where she didn’t really move but appeared somehow to make extra space for Eliza beside her.
“It’s Mary, isn’t it? From the café?”
“Right.” Mary smiled shyly at Eliza.
“Eliza.”
“I know. I remember.”
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“Yeah,” said Mary. “My boyfriend. He’s…” She cleared her throat.
“He’s a fisherman?” Eliza supplied.
“Yes.”
“What’s he doing coming back now? It’s only—” Eliza checked her watch. “Two thirty.”
“Yeah. Sometimes he, I don’t know. Sometimes he doesn’t go out all day. If he had a bad day the day before. He gets sort of, I don’t know, upset.” Mary laughed, but it was that uncertain girl-laugh that Eliza sometimes heard from Zoe and her friends. That laugh made Eliza feel both incensed at and tender toward young girls. She wanted to say, “Don’t laugh if you don’t think it’s funny, you don’t owe this world anything!” and at the same time she wanted to say, “Come here, sweetie, let me give you a hug, it’s going to be okay.”
She turned and studied Mary: she was really very pretty, with pale blond hair and gorgeous skin. But she didn’t hold herself like a girl who thought she was pretty. Eliza had given up on the gorgeous skin after so many years on lobster boats; there was no amount of high-end products that could undo her freckles. Now, when she went out on sailboats at home, she slathered herself with sunscreen, though to hear the dermatologists tell it the damage had been done long ago. It was all a lost cause.
Eliza could see the Joanie B out on its mooring, and she could even see her father moving cautiously around on it, and she tried to ignore the way her brain kept repeating the words He’s sick he’s sick he’s sick over and over.
After a while she said, “Sometimes I think about how many people have sat here waiting for these boats to come in. Through the ages. You know? It’s such a funny thing, a town like this. I mean, growing up here it seemed totally normal that this was what most of the men did for a living, disappearing in a boat and then coming back at the end of the day. And then I went out in the world and I saw that most people don’t do that, most people go off in cars and go to offices and move money around or design buildings or manage international businesses…” She trailed off. Tumor tumor tumor, went the little voice in her head.
“I never thought about it that way,” said Mary.
“Why would you?” asked Eliza. “This is your world. Am I babbling? Sorry if I am. I do that, I babble when I’m trying to keep my mind off something.”
“That’s okay,” said Mary. “I don’t mind.”
Cancer cancer cancer.
“My mother used to wait here for my father. In fact, she met him right here. She was a summer girl, and she fell in love, and that was that. She never left. She always told me it was like a fairy tale.”
“That’s beautiful,” breathed Mary. She smiled.
“She died when I was twelve.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come right out with that. It’s just—I guess I’m just feeling maudlin.”
Glioblastomas were almost universally fatal.
To change the subject, to keep the terrible words from marching back and forth across her mind, Eliza said, “You have really pretty hair, you know. I bet you get out of the shower and it just dries like that, so smooth and flat.”
The occipital lobe was at the back of the brain, where you would cup somebody’s head to help them sip from a cup of water if they were sick. If they were dying.
Mary looked startled, like she hadn’t ever really thought about it. “I guess so.”
“Lucky.”
“My mother says my hair is a disaster. No body to it.”
“That’s crazy,” said Eliza. “No offense to your mother. But my hair is a disaster. Can’t do a thing with it except stick it back and hope for the best.”
That, in fact, was the subject of Lesson Number One in the letter Joanie had left for Eliza: hair.
Your hair will make you crazy but it will make others envious, and the second thing will make up for some (but not all) of the first. I had the same hair before it was ravaged by chemo. I hope you remember me with it more than you remember me without it.
I am beyond tears, Eliza. I’ve leaked them all out. My body is drying up beneath me: my lips, my skin, my organs.
Sometimes you bring me a bowl of ice chips, my darling, and they are like nectar to me.
Here’s what you do with your hair, Eliza. Nothing. When yo
u were young I used to braid it for you. I used to take a fine-toothed comb and part it straight down the center and create order out of the chaos. When you turned eleven you didn’t want the braids anymore (my heart broke a little at that) and then you were truly at a loss. You are just now getting a handle on it. I suggest the following. Don’t try to tame it. Trims twice a year. (I’ll have Val take you, Charlie won’t be up to the task.) Always air-dry; never blow-dry. Never cut layers; never allow anyone else to cut layers. If you’re going out somewhere and you want to look especially beautiful, pile it on top of your head. Use Conair Secure Hold bobby pins in black, always buy in pack of 90. No hairspray. Let a few curls fall around your face. They will swoon.
“Oh no,” said Mary. “Your hair is beautiful, all those curls. I’d give anything.”
“You’re sweet to say that,” said Eliza, even though the terrible words were still marching.
A glioblastoma, on a scan, showed up white and glowing against the gray of the brain.
Mary laughed more sincerely. Now Eliza was glad that Mary was there, taking her mind off the awfulness a little bit. “But I guess we always want what we can’t have. Human nature.”
After a few beats Mary, looking not at Eliza but down at the navy-blue water, kicked her legs against the wharf and asked, “Are you glad you left? Like, for good?”
Eliza didn’t even have to think about that. “Oh boy, I’m so glad I left.”
Mary looked stricken, and Eliza added quickly, “I wasn’t always! It was hard, leaving. It really was.” At Brown, freshman year, first semester especially, she had been completely lost. Providence, though not a big city in anyone’s idea of big cities, seemed gigantic to Eliza. Her roommate, a sophisticated beauty named Francesca Spencer from Manhattan, was so private-school polished and chic that next to her Eliza felt like she’d grown up in a hamster cage. She worried constantly about Charlie, rattling around the little house alone. She was so strapped with college expenses that she never had any money; a sandwich from the Hole in the Wall on Thayer Street was a grand extravagance.
She got over each of those points in time, but, in fairness, she had called Russell once from the pay phone in the student union and begged him to come get her.
He had refused.
He hadn’t forgiven her. Not then. She wasn’t even sure if he’d forgiven her by now.
Mary still looked troubled, so Eliza went on. “And there’s a lot to be said for growing up in a place where everybody knows everybody—”
She stopped, because she could see Mary’s shoulders start to quiver just a bit, and then to shake in earnest, and then she was crying for real. Eliza said wretchedly, “Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean—”
Mary waved at her, as if to indicate that the crying jag was unrelated to Eliza, and gulped out, “No, it’s not…it isn’t…” before her crying began anew.
Eliza was momentarily at a loss, and then it occurred to her that to put aside one’s own worries for a moment to help somebody else with theirs was always the right move.
“Mary? You don’t have to talk to me, you barely know me, but you can. I’m a pretty good listener.”
Mary made a great heaving sound that seemed like a marriage between a cry and a swallow.
“Do you have someone to talk to, even if it’s not me?” Eliza moved closer to Mary and put her arm around her. Maybe she was out of bounds, but she was around enough teenage girls to know that you did not leave one alone and crying unless she specifically requested to be left alone. You always tried first. She waited: Mary didn’t request to be left alone. If anything, she leaned in toward Eliza, and she could have been Evie or Zoe, distraught over a recess slight or the party invitation that never came.
“It’s okay, Mary,” Eliza said firmly, even though she didn’t think anything was okay. Nothing was okay. That silly little song again: My brain controls everything, everything my body does.
She thought about all the daughters and wives and sisters and lovers who had ever waited on this wharf for someone to come in off the water. He’s sick he’s sick he’s sick. She thought about how sometimes the people you were waiting for didn’t come back at all. She felt her own eyes begin to fill, and she had to blink the tears back and take a deep breath. Beside her Mary’s crying had slowed and she said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what…”
“No,” said Eliza. “You don’t need to apologize for a thing. Okay?”
Mary didn’t answer.
“Okay, Mary?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going home for a few days to see my family and then I’ll be back up for—well, because I have to do some stuff for my dad. But here, give me your cell phone. I’m going to punch in my number, just in case you need an ear.”
Mary hesitated.
“It’s not optional.” Eliza tried to look stern, the way she looked when her children started to walk away from the dinner table without clearing their plates.
“Okay.” Mary pulled her phone from her pocket and presented it to Eliza without looking at it. Before she found the contacts Eliza saw a text that said HEY BABE SORRY ABOUT B4.
She glanced at Mary, who was looking out at the water again. She entered herself as a contact along with her phone number and, what the heck, her email address. You never knew. By the time she looked up again she could see a skiff coming toward them, Charlie as passenger, an unfamiliar man rowing.
“Here comes my dad,” said Eliza, and her heart started thumping to the beat of tumor tumor tumor. “I can’t tell who that is rowing him in—”
“I can,” said Mary. “That’s my boyfriend, that’s Josh.”
They both stood up and waved.
In the moment before the skiff reached the wharf Eliza did something that surprised her. Later, she couldn’t have said what on earth possessed her to take the conversation in this direction. She turned to Mary and said, “You know what my mother used to tell me?”
“What?”
“She used to say, ‘When in doubt, choose brave.’ ”
Mary considered this. “I like that,” she said.
“It sounds corny,” admitted Eliza. It really did, now that she’d spoken the words aloud, it sounded like something Zoe would roll her eyes at. Although truthfully the words had sustained her again and again throughout her life. “But it’s amazing how many different circumstances it suits.”
“Maybe,” said Mary.
Eliza took a deep breath and watched as the skiff grew closer and closer and she steeled herself for what was to come.
11
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Mary
The lady at the clinic reception desk had brown eyes, dairy-cow eyes, and a soft bosom—her boobs were practically napping on the desk in front of her—that made Mary want to sink into her arms and stay for a week and a half. Mary’s throat was dry and scratchy, and when she opened her mouth to say her name she realized she hadn’t spoken to anyone since Vivienne left for work in the morning. She hadn’t eaten anything, either, and her stomach complained about that. Loudly.
“Okay,” said the woman. “Let’s get you sorted out, then. Better get comfortable, there’s a bunch of forms the first visit. If you have an insurance card, I’ll go ahead and make a copy.”
Mary lowered her eyes and whispered, “I don’t.”
“Okay,” said the woman, extra cheerfully. “No problem, insurance isn’t required for treatment here.”
It was your basic form: name, address, date of birth, previous health conditions, etc., etc. Date of last period. Reason for today’s visit. Ugh ugh ugh. Pregnant, Mary wrote miserably, but she didn’t allow her eyes to fill. In not too long she was going to be a mother. She couldn’t allow herself to go to pieces over a simple little form. Pull it together, Mary.
The dairy-cow woman at the desk told Mary that a counselor would call her any minute, so Mary picked up a magazine and pretended to read it until she heard her name. When she did, she followed the counselor d
own a long hallway and through a doorway and into a room with white walls and two chairs. This woman looked nothing like a dairy cow; she was small, smaller than Mary, with brown hair cut close to her head (too short, too boyish, Vivienne would say), no makeup, no breasts. “I’m Sa-rah,” said the woman, leaning on the first syllable. “I’m a medical assistant and a counselor here, and I’m going to start by asking you some questions, and then you’ll see our nurse practitioner, Patricia. K?”
“Okay,” said Mary. She sat in the chair Sa-rah motioned her to and pressed her knees together so they wouldn’t quiver.
Sarah looked at the forms, cocked her head, and said, “We’ll have you take a pregnancy test in just a minute. Even if you’ve taken five at home, even if you’ve taken fifty. We still do our own.”
“Okay,” said Mary.
Sarah asked the questions the way she seemed to do everything else: quickly, with no movement wasted. She reminded Mary of Vivienne’s friend Sam, who worked in the ICU at Maine Coast Memorial. Sam was Mary’s favorite of Vivienne’s friends.
These were the questions.
“Are you in a committed relationship?”
“Do you feel safe in your relationship?”
“Was the sex consensual?”
“Do you feel safe at home?”
“Are you at all worried that you might have contracted an STD?”
“Are you having any pain?”
These were the answers.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, no, no.
Mary was blushing madly by the end, she was blushing like a freak, but Sarah could have been talking about the weather, she was so casual about the whole thing, and if she noticed the blushing she didn’t say a word about it. Mary put a hand to her cheek to try to cool it and Sarah didn’t seem to notice that either.
When she was done with the questions Sarah sent Mary into a nearby bathroom with a cup and instructions. “To collect your urine,” she said, like it was a hobby, like collecting stamps or exotic rocks. Before filling the cup, Mary let her eyes roam around the bathroom: there were all sorts of posters, and business-card-sized information about hotlines, and full-sized pamphlets. There’s more to life, use protection, said one. Half of all STDs are in people under the age of 25, said another. Silence hides violence, with a woman’s mouth covered by a man’s hand. You are not alone. A third—ugh—showed a pregnant woman with bruises all over her arms. Mary looked at the posters, and what flashed before her was the odd hooded look Josh’s eyes sometimes took on when he got impatient with her.
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