“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Barrett said, burrowing his head into Tate’s side.
He revisited the dropped coffee cup a few days later without provocation, and Tate was grateful. She didn’t want to push, but she wanted to know. She felt like she was watching a movie and she knew something really bad was going to happen and then, at the critical moment when she was bracing herself, the reel broke and the screen went blank. Tate was caught up in a sense of sickening dread.
Just tell me!
If he could give her the nightmare stuff, then she could be his happy ending.
“She dropped the coffee cup and it smashed against the floor,” he said. “And I thought she threw it out of anger, because that was where we were with each other. There was a lot of anger and resentment, and a smashed coffee cup wouldn’t have been the worst thing that had happened. But Steph said she dropped it accidentally. She said her hand had stopped working.”
This seemed odd, he said, but they ignored it. Steph’s hands were numb, and then her feet. She had problems walking in a straight line; she weaved like a drunk. Her handwriting deteriorated because her fingers didn’t work right. It was strange. She thought it was a symptom of the pregnancy; some women got acute carpal tunnel while carrying. It had something to do with the way the baby was positioned. When Steph mentioned the symptoms to her obstetrician—and added the fact that she kept biting her tongue—he suggested she fly to Boston for some tests. At first, Stephanie declined. They didn’t have the money to go to Boston, she wasn’t sure her medical insurance would cover the tests, she couldn’t miss work. But the symptoms got worse, and she said she’d go. She went alone. Barrett had to work and pick up Cameron at day care.
“I should have gone,” Barrett said. “But honestly? I wasn’t that worried.”
Stephanie was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was always fatal, though no one knew how quickly the disease would progress.
Always fatal.
Here, Barrett tried very hard not to cry, but his voice was thick and his lower lip trembled. Tate had seen the very same look on Tucker’s face the day before when he fell down in the boat and skinned his knees.
“So we went from being one way to being completely another. She was
going to die.
I had one kid two years old and another kid not even born yet, and Stephanie knew she wasn’t going to live to see them grow up. She wasn’t sure she would live to see their next birthdays. I don’t know if there is anything sadder than a mother who knows she has to leave her babies behind, but if there is, I don’t want to see it.”
He was crying, oh, God, of course, and Tate was crying, and she thought of Barrett Lee, five years old, sitting on the stern of his father’s boat in his orange life preserver. You just didn’t know what life was going to hand you. You didn’t know what love you would find, what love would be snatched away.
They performed a C-section, Barrett said, got the baby out five weeks early. Tucker was on a respirator for six days, but he was fine. The doctors immediately went to work on Stephanie—drugs, therapies, experimental procedures meant to slow the sclerosis down. But the disease was brutal and aggressive. Tucker was born in February; by May, Steph was in a wheelchair. Cameron would ride his tricycle, and Barrett would push Tucker in his carriage with one hand and Steph’s wheelchair with the other hand. They would go up the street, then down the street; it was the happiest they were during that time, but Barrett said he couldn’t stand to think about it.
Steph lost the ability to speak, and she could no longer write. Still, she used a kind of sign language. A fist to the heart meant “I love you.” Cameron still held his hand to his heart every time he and Barrett parted, and Barrett hoped he always would.
“The worst thing was that Steph had lucid thoughts. Intellectually, she was fully functional, the doctors said, but she had lost the ability to communicate. She was trapped in this failing body. And I just worry that she didn’t get everything out. There were so many things she wanted to say—to me, to the kids.” He looked at Tate. “I don’t know how to raise them.”
“Of course you do,” Tate said.
“There were times after Steph died—like when Cameron got the chicken pox—when I would think,
You didn’t tell me how to deal with this. Where
are
you?
”
Steph died in November, at home, thanks to a full-time nursing staff that Barrett borrowed a large sum of money to pay for. Stephanie had been bedridden since September and on a feeding tube since October. Barrett would bring the kids in to her and he would read stories aloud to all of them. Only funny stories. Happy stories.
“And then she died. Early in the morning, while I was watching her. She looked at me and I could see her trying to move her arm, and the next second her eyes closed, and she was gone. And in a way I was relieved because I didn’t have to be strong anymore. I cried every day for twelve months. I cried with the kids and I cried alone. I thought back on all the arguments we’d had and how angry we’d been, and I felt ashamed. But at the time those things were happening, they seemed unavoidable. We were young parents with young kids and no money and even less time. I always knew we were in a phase of our lives that would pass. I believed things would get easier and we would grow older and wiser and we would have our chance at perfect happiness.”
Perfect happiness: Tate knew it was naive of her, but she believed in it. She had, for example, been perfectly happy on the beach when the kids came to Tuckernuck for the bonfire. Sitting on the cold sand, intertwined with Barrett, Tucker asleep across their laps, with the fire and her mother and India sitting bundled in blankets, and Chess throwing rocks into the water with Cameron, and the full moon and the stars above, Tate had thought:
Stop time. I want to stay right here.
Once Barrett had finished the story, Tate lay beside him, humbled. She wasn’t worthy of him. She hadn’t survived what he had survived. She hadn’t survived anything. Her life had been bloodless. Maybe that made her the ideal partner for him. She was whole and strong and unscarred; she could be a pillar for him, if he would let her.
Perfect happiness existed, but perhaps only in small increments. Because not two days later, Birdie—Tate’s darling, beloved mother—spoke the words that drove a stake through Tate’s heart. She called Tate and Barrett’s relationship a “fantasy”; she called it “make-believe.” Tate was deeply hurt, and she was angry. She fled from her mother’s words, and even though Birdie came up to the attic to apologize, she didn’t take back what she had said. Tate wondered:
Was
her relationship with Barrett a fantasy?
Was
it make-believe? Why? Because it was summertime? Because she was supposed to return to her condo in Charlotte? Or was it something else? If Tate was in a relationship, it must not be serious. She was, in Birdie’s words, “as naive as a child.” Only Chess’s relationships were to be taken seriously, such as her relationship with Michael Morgan. That relationship had been taken seriously—because they lived in New York City, because Michael Morgan owned his own business and wore a suit to work—and look what had happened there. Tate didn’t know why Birdie would have said what she said, but Tate didn’t dare probe deeper. She couldn’t bear to hear Birdie say that Barrett wasn’t good enough for Tate or that he was unsuitable because he hadn’t been to college, or because he worked with his hands, or because he was a native islander and was therefore somehow a lesser person than Tate, who had been born and raised in New Canaan.
Everyone else was jealous, Tate decided. Her mother, her sister, India—and India was the only one who might admit it.
Tate decided that the three of them could go suck eggs (she was sad that she even had to think this about her mother). She would spend more time on Nantucket with Barrett and the kids.
When Barrett pulled up in his boat for his usual late-afternoon stop, Tate was waiting on the beach with her overnight bag packed.
“What’s this?” he said.
“I’m coming with you.”
His face registered a look she hadn’t seen before (she had been cataloging all of his expressions): it was discomfort, unease, fear. Immediately, Tate felt like a fool. He had asked her four times in the past seven days to spend the night with him on Nantucket, and three of the four times she’d declined because she felt she should be with her family. Now here she was, ready to go, and he didn’t want her.
“I’m not coming with you?” she said.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea you were planning—”
“I wasn’t
planning,
” she said. “It was a spontaneous decision.”
“I like spontaneous,” he said. She knew this; he had told her this. “But there’s something I have to do tonight.”
“What?” she asked, though it was none of her business.
“Something for work,” he said.
“That’s awfully vague,” she said. But he didn’t elaborate. Instead, he did his job: he carried two bags of groceries and a bag of ice up to the house. There was an envelope in his hand. “What’s the envelope?” Tate asked.
He said, “Boy, you are just full of questions today.”
Tate didn’t like the way he said this. They were lovers, right? They had made love and slept in each other’s arms; they had told each other intimate things. She should be able to ask him anything and get a straight answer. But here he was, making her feel the way she’d felt most of her life: like a pesky ten-year-old boy. And to make matters worse, she had to follow him up the stairs with her overnight bag, which she would now have to unpack. Birdie, India, and Chess were all watching from their usual spots on the beach, and they would all guess what was happening.
Humiliating.
She trudged up the stairs behind Barrett, hating him, hating herself, hating her anger and her hurt. It could have been exactly the opposite: he could have been thrilled she was coming, and she could be waiting smugly in Barrett’s boat while he made the delivery. Birdie and Chess and India would see this was
not
a fantasy, not a figment of Tate’s goddamned imagination: it was real, they were in love, and Tate was going to Nantucket to spend the night.
Love was awful. It was unfair.
Tate stormed into the house behind Barrett and blew past him up the stairs. “Have fun tonight,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing.”
He said, “The envelope is a letter for your aunt.”
“I don’t give a shit about the envelope,” she said. She turned on the second floor and stomped up to the attic, where she threw her overnight bag willy-nilly into the air and it landed with a splat that she hoped Barrett heard. She threw herself facedown onto her bed. He would come up after her, right? This was their first fight. Certainly he would come up. She waited. She couldn’t hear anything, and because there was only the one inaccessible window, she couldn’t see anything.
What seemed like a long time later, she heard footsteps on the stairs and held her breath in anticipation.
Chess said, “Are you okay?”
Tate looked up. Her heart spluttered like a dying motor. Chess? No! “Where’s Barrett?” she asked.
“He left.”
“He left?”
Chess sat on the edge of Tate’s bed. She looked concerned in a very annoying, older-sisterish kind of way. “Do you want to talk about it?”
The irony wasn’t lost on Tate: Chess asking
her
if
she
wanted to talk about it. Ha! This was too good.
“No,” Tate said. “God, no.”
For the first time since they’d been on Tuckernuck, Barrett Lee didn’t show up in the morning. At first, Tate didn’t believe it. She ran as usual, she did her sit-ups from the tree branch as usual, she ate the breakfast that Birdie had prepared as usual—and the whole time her stomach was churning with nerves about the moment that Barrett arrived. Would he apologize? Should she?
Tate checked her running watch: 9:15, 9:29, 10:07, 10:35. At eleven o’clock, Tate took her running watch off and threw it into the living room, where it skittered under the lobster-trap coffee table like a mouse. It was pretty clear Barrett wasn’t coming.
Birdie said, “I wonder what happened to Barrett. This isn’t like him.”
“Maybe one of the kids is sick,” India suggested.
“That must be it,” Birdie said. “Good thing we haven’t run out of anything. Well, we only have one egg left. And I do like to read the newspaper in the morning.”
Tate didn’t comment. She doubted one of the kids was sick, and when they did get sick, Barrett’s mother took care of them. So Barrett hadn’t come… because of her? Because the unthinkable had happened and he didn’t want to see her anymore?
He finally showed up at four o’clock. Tate heard the boat’s motor; she had been listening for it so intently for so many hours that when it finally materialized, far away at first and then nearer and nearer, Tate feared it might be a figment of her imagination. She turned her head ever so slightly from its position on her towel and opened one eye. His boat. And—holy expletive expletive expletive—she couldn’t believe it. He had a woman with him in the boat. Anita Fullin.
Tate closed her eyes. Her heart was slamming in her chest. He’d brought Anita Fullin.
Birdie said, “Who is that woman?”
India said, “She’s very attractive.”
Birdie said, “Oh, look, Barrett brought flowers again, Tate.”
Please be quiet, Mother,
she thought. She tried to put herself in a Zen state—for Tate, this was most easily achieved when she was in front of a computer screen—but she couldn’t keep herself from listening to Barrett help Anita down off the boat, and Anita saying,
Honestly, those flowers are exquisite. Someone is very lucky!
And Barrett saying,
You wade on in. I’ve got to get these bags.
Tate didn’t move, didn’t turn, didn’t look. She heard Birdie get up from her chair.
“Hello, hello!” Birdie said in her meant-for-company voice.
“Hello!” Anita Fullin said. She had reached the beach; Tate could tell by the proximity of her voice. “My, what a wonderful property you have! I hope you don’t mind my intruding, but I told Barrett I just
had
to see Tuckernuck. And he talks so much about your family, I feel like I know you.”