But just like that—pop!—the most elaborate of the colors began to fade and dip, and little bits of gray snuck in behind the oranges and mauves, and it was almost too late to get the girls up for it. Sunsets, like childhood, were gone in a blink.
“What’s the plan for storing her over the winter?” Brock was asking. About the boat, of course. It was always about the boat.
“Going to get her back up to Southwest Harbor,” said Rob. “Might sail her up myself, we’ll see.”
“Hey, well, if you need a hand with that—” Brock cleared his throat, and when Rob didn’t answer immediately Brock looked a little embarrassed, like he’d started to take his clothes off in front of someone who might not be interested in sex after all.
“Definitely,” said Rob, and Brock looked relieved. “You’ll be my first call.”
Rob’s mention of storing the boat over the winter led Eliza to unseasonable thoughts of Christmas, which made her think about scheduling the Barton family Christmas card photo. They usually took it in August or early September, on the beach. She used to put the girls in matching outfits, but of course she couldn’t get away with that now. Eliza loved sending out Christmas cards—she refused to call them holiday cards—and she loved getting them back, too. She still got cards from college friends, med school friends.
Wait a second. Med school friends. The little thread of a thought she’d first had when she learned about her father’s disease, but that she hadn’t had time to study carefully, and then she’d forgotten about altogether, was still there. She pulled at it.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Christmas cards, Christmas cards. Zachary Curry.” Brock and Rob looked at her, both startled. “Sorry.” She slipped her hand out of Rob’s grip. “I have to go look something up really quick. I’ll just be a minute.” The longing for her iPhone was almost a physical desire.
Was Evie, the electronics policewoman, still bent over the Clue board?
“Send the girls up,” called Judith. “Can’t be long now.” And Eliza refrained from suggesting that Judith go and get them herself.
“I’ll get them,” called Deirdre. She disappeared belowdecks and returned followed by Zoe, Evie, and Sofia. Eliza passed them on the way down.
“Where are you going, Mom?” asked Evie suspiciously.
“Bathroom.”
“The head!” called Rob.
“The head.” Of course Eliza knew that, but there weren’t bathrooms on lobster boats, so she didn’t use the term too often. If you were a man on a lobster boat you just took care of things over the side of the boat; if you were a woman or a girl you just goddamn held it. Or, if things got really dire, you called on a used bait bucket. Ugh. Those were not the days. She remembered practically dehydrating herself as a teenager so as not to suffer the indignity of the bait bucket.
On A Family Affair, of course, the head was practically gilded.
Zachary Curry, Zachary Curry. Her friend from medical school. The year before last she’d tracked him down after reading a mention of him in The Boston Globe. She’d put him right on the Christmas card list, where she put everyone, whether they wanted to be there or not.
She found her phone and sat for a moment on one of the plush salon berths surrounding the table, waiting for it to power up. The girls had left the Clue envelope opened in the middle of the table: it had been Colonel Mustard, that sneaky bastard. Library, candlestick. (Gruesome, when you took the time to think about it.) Evie had won. That must have made Zoe irate; no wonder she’d been snarling when the girls came up.
The first thing Eliza noticed when she powered up her phone was a missed call from a Maine area code. No voice mail. Not Russell’s, she’d put his in as a contact. Not her dad, not Val. She tried to call the number back, but there was no answer.
Never mind that now, though. Safari. Google. Eliza and Zachary had been partners for the cadaver dissection, long before Eliza stopped out, long before Zachary got one of the three coveted spots in the Johns Hopkins neurological surgery residency programs. She remembered it like it was yesterday: the cadaver’s olive-green gallbladder, the toughened skin on the elbows and knees, the smell of the formaldehyde. After the first day with the cadaver, Eliza and Zachary had taken the T to Pizzeria Regina for a large pepperoni pizza and beer, which made a lot more sense at the time than it did in retrospect.
And now Zachary Curry was a neurosurgeon at Dana-Farber. Tough stuff, he’d scrawled on his card back to Eliza, but I hope we’re making strides. That was the thread she’d forgotten to pull at. Quick, Eliza, quick, hurry up, search. Dana-Farber was recruiting for a Phase II clinical trial studying the efficacy of an antigen vaccine to treat glioblastoma multiforme. Zachary Curry would be able to put Eliza in touch with the recruiters for the trial. Zachary Curry could possibly save her father’s life.
“I’ve got it!” Eliza called out to anyone who would listen. “I’ve got it, I think I figured it out!”
Nobody heard her, because at the exact same moment the fireworks started. Bang, bang, bang, pow, bang again, pop pop pop.
17
BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Deirdre
Deirdre could feel herself gearing up to pick a fight with Brock after the Fourth of July fireworks.
There was no reason for it, none at all. It was a treat to have Brock home for the holiday weekend, because he was so often away. The fireworks had been just as splendid as they always were. They’d watched them from the deck of Rob’s boat, moored out in the harbor, along with Eliza and Rob’s mother and the three children. It had been crowded and festive, just the way you wanted the Fourth of July to be, and both Deirdre and Eliza had made copious amounts of food, although Eliza’s roasted vegetable salad with walnut pesto had put Deirdre’s simple Caesar to shame. (Of course.) They’d had a cocktail called a Saffron Cooler, which was an update to the wine spritzers Deirdre remembered her mother and her mother’s card-playing friends drinking in Deirdre’s youth in Darien, a card table set up on the backyard patio, suntanned faces thin-lipped with concentration.
Yet she’d come home after the fireworks feeling prickly and out of sorts. It had nothing to do with the luxuriousness of A Family Affair: Deirdre really and truly didn’t care so much about boats, she’d grown up dutifully sailing with her father when her presence was required, she understood the difference between a mainsheet and a jib sheet, but she didn’t live and breathe the ocean the way many people did, the way Rob did, the way Brock did. If either of them were to envy Rob’s boat, it would be Brock. Brock, who was never impressed by anything, was impressed by Rob’s boat. Everybody was. Three million was the price tag being thrown about town for the Hinckley, but of course Rob hadn’t bought it himself, his mother had.
But it wasn’t the boat. It had more to do with…well. It had to do with a different kind of envy. It had to do with watching Rob and Eliza, who had sat together, the sun setting behind them, lighting them up like a tableau. There had been that odd little bit where Eliza had been glued to her phone, which was unlike her (even Evie had scolded her), and then she’d disappeared belowdecks for a while, until she’d suddenly shouted, “I’ve got it! I think I figured it out!” and after that her entire demeanor had changed, and she’d seemed for a little while almost like she was on something, jittery and unfocused.
But then, back up on deck, sipping her Saffron Cooler, Eliza had sat next to Rob and they had talked for such a long time. What had they been talking about? Deirdre didn’t know. But every now and then Rob would reach out and touch Eliza’s unfairly beautiful hair, or Eliza would put her hand on Rob’s arm to make a point and then keep it there long after the point had been made. And the prickly feeling had come upon Deirdre, and now it refused to leave.
It was a terrible thing, to envy your best friend. Made Deirdre feel like a monster. And she wasn’t a monster! She was a good person, she was just doing her best. Look at all she was trying to do for the EANY kids, look at all she did for her own family.
Sta
nding in the kitchen, Deirdre could see a wobbly version of her reflection in the door on the microwave. She looked tired. An ex-boyfriend, in the process of breaking up with her, had once told Deirdre that she had a good heart but that her angles were too sharp. She even looked sharp: sharp nose, sharp elbows, sharp clavicle, sharp cheekbones.
She supposed she could get fillers, like Sheila Rackley, soften things up a bit.
If she got fillers, would Brock give up his occasional sleeping berth in the guest room and return full-time to the marital bed? (Did she want Brock to give up the guest room and return full-time to the marital bed?)
Once, when they’d both had one too many margaritas at Don Pepe’s, Deirdre and Eliza had got to talking about sex and Eliza had described her and Rob’s sex life as “robust.” Deirdre had experienced a flash of envy then that was so bright and hot she thought Eliza must have seen it.
Sofia had gone to spend the night at the Barnes’s house after the fireworks, and Deirdre supposed that Sofia’s absence had contributed to the prickly sensation. She always felt the fact of her one child most strongly when Sofia was gone overnight.
Because the quiet of the house on those nights when Sofia was invited to a sleepover made Deirdre painfully aware of what life would be like when Sofia went off to college and left them for good. Deirdre heard her own footsteps echo in the hallways (a slight exaggeration, fair enough, because of the no-shoes-in-the-house policy) and stood underneath the lintel staring at Sofia’s tidy, empty bedroom and wondering what would become of her and Brock, without a child to hold them together.
She’d wanted hordes of children, she’d wanted a whole army. She’d wanted the mess and the chaos and the crazy soccer schedules. One family in their town had five children—five! And not even a set of twins in the bunch. The Bryants. Becca Bryant was always running around like a chicken who couldn’t find the time to get its head cut off. She got at least a dozen speeding tickets a year and didn’t even care: that was just the price of the life she’d chosen. (“We count it in the budget!” she’d say breathlessly, dropping one kid at the soccer field, ushering three more into the minivan, some of them not even hers, but who was Becca Bryant to notice a small detail like that, for she was busy busy busy.)
But Brock wanted only one. He was first in line at the new vasectomy clinic when it opened.
And that’s where the fight started on the Fourth of July.
Brock turned on SportsCenter as soon as they got home, checking the baseball scores. Something about the sounds of SportsCenter put Deirdre right over the line. She couldn’t help but think of those SportsCenter voices as the soundtrack to the rest of her life.
“Maybe we could adopt,” she said, apropos of nothing.
Brock was a Yankees fan; they’d lost by six to the White Sox, so he was already in a mood. Deirdre moved so that her body partially covered the television screen and Brock shifted correspondingly on the sofa so he could still see.
“Adopt what?”
“A baby, Brock. Maybe we could adopt a baby.”
“Deirdre, you’re in front of the screen, I can’t see.”
She moved so that she covered even more of the television. She thought of the kids in the EANY materials, the undernourished, potbellied, huge-eyed creatures who numbered in the zillions. They all needed to be fed, every single one of them.
She said, “Maybe we could adopt a baby from Africa. A little African baby.” She’d want a little girl, girls had such a harder time of it in the rest of the world, there were terrible things awaiting so many of them. They should bring all the girls here, to Barton, where they could go to science camp and visit the dentist twice a year whether they needed it or not and get their eyes checked if they couldn’t see the last line on the eye chart. Yes, a little East African girl with a big gummy smile. She’d call her Asha, because that meant “life” and was a word Deirdre and the rest of the citizens of Barton would be able to pronounce without trouble.
“Deirdre, come on. You know we’re not doing that.” Brock’s tone was perturbed, but not angry, not yet.
Although presumably little Asha would come with her own name.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not. It’s not a realistic scenario.” Brock probably used phrases like realistic scenario at work all the time; he probably didn’t know that it sounded ridiculous in everyday conversation. “But if you want to fight about it, fine, let’s fight about it.” Now he was going a little bit beyond perturbed. Brock made a great show of sighing and switching off the TV—he really had to lean around Deirdre now, because she was blocking it almost fully, but somehow he managed to find a hole between her body and the television into which he could point the remote. The SportsCenter noises evaporated into silence, and the only sound remaining was Deirdre’s elevated breathing. Her eyes felt hot, and she tightened her hands into fists.
Brock said, “We made a decision to have one child.”
“We did not make a decision, Brock. You made a decision.”
He sighed again. “That’s not how it happened, Deirdre. You were as on board as I was, at the time. You know that’s true.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. It wasn’t fair, it really wasn’t!
The lyrics of one of Sofia’s favorites from the previous summer came to her then, unbidden but catchy as hell. Didn’t they tell us don’t rush into things? Didn’t you flash your green eyes at me? “Wonderland,” by the indomitable Taylor Swift.
“Life is not a Taylor Swift song,” she’d told Sofia recently. Wasn’t it though, sort of?
Or shouldn’t it be?
It’s all fun and games ’til somebody loses their mind…
It wasn’t fair of Brock, he’d caught her off guard when Sofia was tiny. There’d been the diapers and the middle-of-the-night crying and the way every part of her body seemed to be leaking something—tears, milk, blood. She’d been lost in Sofia’s confounding, round-the-clock neediness and a bit in her own despair and Brock had gone on a work trip just two weeks after Sofia was born and even though Deirdre’s mother had come from Darien to help out it had still been really, really hard and so when Brock said he had made an appointment at the clinic for (his euphemism) “the ol’ snip-snip” in two months she didn’t know or care enough to argue back.
“Okay,” she’d said, too exhausted to pull any additional words out of her mouth besides the irrevocable two: “Snip-snip.”
By the time she came out of it and Sofia had resolved into something wonderful the deed was done.
Oh, but it was hopeless. Even if they got a baby tomorrow (unlikely), Deirdre would be three hundred by the time little Asha was eighteen. Deirdre wouldn’t know where to get Asha’s hair properly braided—they’d have to drive into Boston, or Everett—or how to raise her in a way that respected both the culture she came from and the one into which she’d been placed. Little Asha would be the only person of color in Barton’s bright-white school system. Then she’d grow up and leave Deirdre too, just like Sofia was going to, and Deirdre would be left with the very same emptiness she was trying to avoid.
It was impossible, of course, to compress these thoughts and fears into one or two sentences. So instead she said ridiculously, “If Eliza wanted to adopt an African baby, Rob would let her.”
Brock said, “What?”
“He would. I know he would. And you never want to do anything, Brock. Anything.”
“You don’t mean that. Do you mean that?” The fact that his tone softened somehow made things worse instead of better: here came a pity party for poor little Deirdre.
“No,” she said. “I guess not.” Oh, hell. Maybe she was getting her period. Maybe it was early menopause. Maybe she’d simply had too many Saffron Coolers on the deck of that painfully gorgeous boat and hadn’t had enough food and needed to go to sleep.
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
“Okay,” said Brock. “Good idea.”
First she’d go upstairs to check Sofia
’s Instagram feed—that feeble ligature tying her to her daughter.
Once she left the room she heard the television go back on.
Was this how it went, you knew every inch of your daughter, every book read and bowel movement produced and favorite television show watched, and then breath by breath she began to depart, leaving only vestiges, a lone soccer sock behind the hamper, an uncapped toothpaste tube in the bathroom, until eventually she was gone, a ghost sailing toward the ceiling, or (worse) toward a future that contained nothing of you?
“Oh, Deirdre,” said Eliza once. “It’s not all that bad, sweetie, you’re making it sound so dismal. It’s just life! Time passes.” Easy for Eliza to say, she still had sweet chubby Evie, who adored her, who almost never scowled, who didn’t yet own an iPhone, just an iPad. Evie was a true innocent: she could text only from a wireless zone! And Eliza had Rob, of course. She had Rob.
Rob, who had that blond lock of hair that fell impertinently forward. Really, it was ridiculous for a grown man, a man of forty, to have hair like that: so blond, first of all, and thick enough that there were actually locks to fall forward.
Brock wore his hair in a defensive crew cut.
There were things in this world that Deirdre didn’t trust. Dentists with off-white teeth. Her father-in-law after a martini. Her mother-in-law before a martini. Screw-top wine bottles. The backstroke.
But some kind of instinct made her trust Robert Barnes more than she trusted most. She’d follow him to the ends of the earth and back. If only he’d ask. If only he’d ask!
No, life was not a Taylor Swift song, she’d been right to tell Sofia that. Life was more like an Adele song: heartrending, wide-ranging, beautiful, sad, and painful, all at the same time.
18
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
The Captain's Daughter Page 13