The Children (3 page)

When he was at Dartmouth, Spin wrote his thesis on the negative effects of invasive species on New England lakes and ponds. He did much of his research here on Lake Marinac. He majored in environmental sciences, with a minor in musical theory. He was the only one of us who was truly gifted musically; the rest of us had to work at it, even Sally.

The afternoon of Whit's funeral service, after everybody had finally left our house but the family, Sally kept playing the same melody on her violin. It was Bach, or something grim like that. Over and over and over again. She and I were sitting on the porch swing as she played. I put my hand on the body of the violin for a moment. My intention was to get her to stop, but then I felt the long whine of the bow running through the instrument and into the tips of my fingers. The vibrations went all through me. I felt the pull of the bow across the strings and wished I had learned the violin or cello. We spent a good part of the afternoon like that. Sally weaving the bow up and down, me with my hand touching the body of the violin. It was Spin who got us out of our funk. He brought out one of Whit's banjos.

The banjo is a happy instrument. Even if you play along with a sad song, as Spin did that day, the rolls that accompany the chords do something. They add humor. Soon Spin had Sally on some other melody altogether. It was a Celtic-sounding thing. Some kind of reel, one of those fiddle and banjo songs you hear on Saint Patrick's Day. They went round and round with it and were becoming extremely amused with themselves. I walked down to the lake and dove into the cold water. I swam out to the float. I could hear their song from there.

 

THREE

“She's into yoga,” I reported to Sally the day we learned that Spin had asked Laurel to marry him. We were all completely surprised by the news of the engagement. Spin had met her that January. Now it was April and they were engaged? I work on my computer—I'm on it all the time—so I checked out her Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts as soon as he told us. I called Sally to fill her in.

“Lots of yoga,” I said.

“Does she do it for fitness or is she into the whole energy thing, or what?” Sally asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “She's just doing poses. Standing on her hands, with her legs up in the air. That kind of swastika legs pose? Over and over. Oh, here's one where she's standing on one foot, pulling her other foot over her head. From behind. Like a figure skater.”

“What?” Sally asked. “Why?”

“She's flexible. Some are selfies, with a mirror.”

“Oh, okay, as long as it's just a showing-off thing,” Sally said. “As long as she's not one of those positive-light, quiet-energy, serene, contemplative fuckwads. One of those people who talk about blessings and gratitude all the time and meanwhile, they're so bitter and angry and self-absorbed, they literally suck the energy out of every room they're in. As long as she's not that.”

“She doesn't really write much on the posts. It's mostly photos. Thousands of followers. She's got over ninety thousand Twitter followers.”

“I wonder why so many?” Sally said.

“She has a beautiful body, maybe that's why,” I said. “I guess from all the yoga.”

“I don't care how many followers she has as long as she doesn't talk about being
present.
About having thoughtful, present mindfulness. I hate that.”

“Lots of selfies. Some are just her face.”

“Is she smiling in them?” Sally was on a break at a recording session and couldn't look.

“Yeah, most of them.”

“Good, then she's not trying to look all soulful. I hate that. As long as she's not into
mindfulness,
” Sally repeated.

“I do hope she's not boring,” Joan said later that same day, when I told her about all the yoga. “Yoga people always seem so, well, tedious, don't you think?”

“No,” I said. It bothers Sally and me how judgmental our mother can be.

“Don't they always have those glazed eyes?” Joan persisted. “Missy Wentwood is obsessed with yoga, and she always has that little smile and those glazed eyes. Like she's in a cult or something.”

“I think that's Missy's medication,” I said. “I don't think yoga does that to you.”

“I just hope she's not one of those people who bores everybody, like Perry's Catherine,” said Joan a little later. She had actually come up to the attic, where I work, to say this to me. My mother will go out of her way to be a snob. She makes an effort—you have to give her credit for that.

Sally came out from the city almost every weekend during the short period of time between our learning of the engagement and our meeting Laurel. Spin usually joined us for Sunday dinner, and we'd act very casual when he spoke of her. Later, after he'd left, we would dissect every tidbit that we'd been able to glean from him. One night, Joan cooked linguini with clams, and Spin mentioned that Laurel was allergic to shellfish.

“Oh no,” Joan said, her voice conveying a deep sadness, but not because she pities people who have food allergies. Joan doesn't believe in food allergies. She thinks people have them to get attention. “I'll be careful never to make them when she's here,” she said, leveling her eyes across the table at Sally and me when Spin looked away for a moment.

Good Lord
, is what her gaze said.
This is even worse than we imagined
.

Joan worried that Laurel was “needy.” “High-maintenance.” Joan disdains this trait in a person more than any other. And though she isn't the cuddliest person, and Spin isn't actually her own son, Joan adores him. She always has.

The plan was that Laurel would move into Spin's campus apartment with him once the school year ended. The wedding was planned for sometime during the summer. Holden Academy doesn't like having unmarried faculty or staff living together as couples on campus, so that, we assumed, was part of the urgency. But we were a little bit worried. Everything was happening so fast. They hadn't known each other long. Most of the time they were together, they were apart. They had met only a few times after the ski trip. Spin flew out west for a couple of long weekends, I think. But they e-mailed and texted every day, and Spin said that through those communications they learned more about each other than they would have in many hours of face-to-face conversation.

I could see his point. When you talk to a person, the surroundings often distract you. You can become too absorbed with the other's appearance—the person's beauty or blemishes. When you're reading texts and e-mails, you're able to focus on what the other is saying. At least that's been my experience. Recently, most of my exchanges with other people have been via e-mail and Facebook. And I've met a lot of people online whom I consider to be my very good friends, though we've never actually met in real life. I met many of these people through my blog.

I started the blog a couple years ago, and this past January I was voted one of the Top Ten Mommy Bloggers by
The Huffington Post,
which boosted my already high daily page views and brought in a good amount of advertising revenue. No, I'm not actually a mommy; that's why I can't reveal the name of the blog. People think it's real. I'm supposed to be a snarky suburban housewife. I never show photos of Mia, my four-year-old daughter, or Wyatt, my six-year-old son, because I want to protect their privacy rather than exploit them like certain famous mommy bloggers whom I could name. Lots of people follow me just because of that—the fact that I go out of my way to protect the privacy of my children. Instead of photographing them, I write about the adorably crazy things they say. I include rage-filled thoughts aimed at the sancti-mommies at Wyatt's school, and sometimes at my adorable but clueless husband, Topher. That's all I'll say. And I'm not Charlotte Maynard. I have a different online name, a variation of which is also the name of my blog. I have many more Twitter followers than Laurel. Sometimes I wish I could use my real name so that people would know what a following I have.

Advertisers are paying me now. One is a diaper company, and I don't want to out myself. I frequent online parenting discussion forums; that's how I learn terms like
sancti-mommy,
and about vaccination controversies, preschool problems, and kids with special needs. Wyatt has a rare genetic disorder. It's a miracle he's alive. I'm able to joke about it, even when he has setbacks, which readers say they love about me—the fact that I can always find humor, no matter what tragedies this life might throw my way. Don't judge. The blog brings joy to many people; every day I get hundreds of e-mails and comments telling me so.

My point is this: I think you can get to know a person very well even if most of your interactions are online. I said this repeatedly to Sally whenever we spoke of Spin's engagement. She was a little worked up about the fact that they were already engaged and we hadn't even met her yet.

Sometimes we'd tell Everett Hastings our latest discoveries about Laurel, and he'd have fun at our expense. Everett lives in the old carriage house on the property. He's a dog trainer by profession, but he works around here in exchange for his rent. We've known him all our lives. His father, Bud, was the caretaker before him, so Everett grew up here. He's a year older than Sally. Everett doesn't go on Facebook or anything, and he didn't understand how we felt that we knew her so well, based on what we had seen there. He thought we should reserve our judgment until we had met her. “There'll be plenty of time for hating her once you've actually been introduced in real life,” he said one warm spring night when he, Sally, and I were out smoking a joint at the end of the dock.

Sally protested. “Who hates her? I don't hate her. I've never met her. What are you even talking about?”

“Just don't use up all your contempt before she gets here,” Everett said, and laughed.

“We're not haters,” Sally said. “She's odd. But we don't hate her.”

“Right,” Everett said.

That first week or two, we did judge her a little harshly, but that was because we had only been looking at her recent Facebook updates. One day, I decided to look back on her timeline, and what I learned changed our opinions completely.

I discovered that she'd had a terrible white-water kayaking accident in 2004. It had destroyed her career as a skier, ruined her chances for the Olympics. She had been with her sister; they were teenagers at the time. They had been caught in some rapid water and both kayaks had flipped. Laurel was thrown against a rock and fractured her spine someplace up near her neck. It was a miracle that she could even walk, let alone ski as well as we had seen in the video. Unfortunately, the sister had drowned. Laurel had chronicled her recovery on her blog. That's how she had developed the large following on Facebook and Twitter. She had to put off college for a year for all the rehab. No sooner was she back on her feet than she was working tirelessly to help others with spinal injuries and also with grief over the loss of a loved one. She had experienced both at such a young age. She went to college there in Idaho, and when she wasn't studying, she volunteered her time working with veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually, she went to Afghanistan with a veterans group. She also kept a journal, and it was this journal that had caught the attention of the MFA program at USC and, later, the publisher.

We were in awe, my mother, Sally, and I. We had judged her too severely. The yoga was no longer seen as show-offy. It revealed her strength and resilience. It gave others hope. Sometimes, in the comments, people would post things like, “I had a C3 fracture two years ago, and you are my inspiration.” Laurel would respond by asking where they were doing their rehab, or what kind of fracture it was. “Water therapy,” she would say. Or, “There's a study at Johns Hopkins involving stem cells. PM me for more information, I know the doctor who's heading up the study.”

We, like her many online followers, were humbled by Laurel's heroism and fortitude. Joan still found her “a little braggy.” Sally and I told Joan that she was a snob. Sally, Joan, and I talked about her, wondered about her, praised her, criticized her, and argued about her. We were proud of her one day, and making fun of her the next. Some of her posts were a little too self-congratulatory and she used outdated acronyms like LOL and STFU all the time. And her sense of humor seemed off at times. She overshared about Spin, too—posting the weirdest stuff about how they're soul mates and how she knows him better than she knows herself. She didn't use his name, though; she called him “the Professor.” Perhaps that was why he didn't object to her posting about his apparently insatiable sexual appetite.

“Teachers at prep schools are not professors,” Joan said when we showed her one of Laurel's posts. The post had revealed, in very graphic detail, that our Spin was an oral-sex virtuoso. Sally and I were at the kitchen table, laughing uncontrollably while reading it. Joan asked what was so funny. I turned my laptop and showed it to her, just crying with laughter. Joan put on her reading glasses, read it coolly, and then removed her glasses and made the remark about how prep school teachers are not professors.

So, we were a little fascinated with Laurel, to put it mildly. We devoted so much time to the idea of her that we were bound to be disappointed when we finally did meet her in person. But she didn't disappoint.

*   *   *

It was the second weekend in June. A Saturday night. Joan had gone off to a dinner party. Sally was going to the Pale Horse Tavern to meet some old friends. Everett was sitting on his porch, drinking a beer and playing with his dogs. He has one dog, a Jack Russell named Snacks, and that week he had two others staying with him—a pair of young Australian shepherds who needed some training. I was in the driveway, having just said good-bye to Sally, when Everett gave a low, long whistle. I pretended I didn't hear him. I'm not a dog.