“Oh, darling, that ship has sailed.” She takes a grungy-looking rag and starts wiping down the other tables, though I’m the only customer and, given the dead air swaddling the rest of main street, there won’t be many others this morning.
“I know.” I sigh. “But figured I’d ask.” I sip the coffee, and it burns my tongue.
“I saw him here a few years ago,” she says, reopening the conversation I thought she’d just closed. “When Heather was sick.” She winces ever so slightly. “God rest her soul. No one deserves that.”
“Cancer or my father?”
She stares at me for a beat too long, and I hope that I haven’t offended her.
“Oh, child, the cancer! Heather and your dad—
and
your mom—well, they were grown-ups, and they knew what they were getting into.”
“And what about the rest of us?”
In my mind, I can still feel the water ebbing over me, the cold, murky water from that day on the lake, how it lapped up against my cheeks, how it nearly suffocated me and pulled me down to the
bottom. God knows what lay on the bottom. And part of me knows that I was unconscious, that I
can’t
really remember those blackened moments because my brain had all but turned off, but another part of me wonders if maybe I can. If, like so many other things, I’d just spent years blocking it out, building that wall because, as a kid, what other choice do you have? My father didn’t rescue me, and then, months later, he drowned me all over again by leaving. Really—
Eleanor Rigby—
did I stand any chance?
I gulp down the coffee too quickly, and I feel its heat all the way into my guts.
Enough of that for now, I think. Anderson had told me as much. That it is only a song, not a destiny, and maybe it was just some stupid Wikipedia entry in the first place. Something we all took as lore but wasn’t any more real than anything else. Why must my father’s abandonment have to trail me forever? Maybe this was the cork that needed to be popped, and now that it’s off, everything else—the memories, the instincts, the trust in my own self instead of everyone else—will follow.
“And what about the rest of you?” Mimi echoes, her dirty dishrag slowing to a stop as she considers the question.
“Yes, what of the rest of us? The kids who were damaged in their wake? What of us? Did we deserve that?”
“I suppose not,” she says, her bosom rising and falling. “But eventually, kids become grown-ups, too, and from there, the world is whatever they choose to make of it.”
I’m on my third cup
of coffee when I hear Wes’s Land Rover before I see it. The muffler must have fallen off, so it comes clanging down the road, echoing through the glass storefront of the coffee shop,
until he careens into a parking space just across the street. A dinky little bell rings overhead when he enters, and a sole couple who has ventured out for pumpkin muffins, young retirees who look like former investment bankers who made a few million and then figured
what the hell
and bought a farm, turn and give him a little nod.
“How’d you know I was here?” I ask. I’m picking at a scone, thinking of way back when with Jasper, at Starbucks, and soaking up both how much and how little can change. Despite your best efforts, despite everything.
“Mimi,” he says, then gestures toward her. She toddles over with a full mug and a croissant.
“Wes”—she greets him—“the usual,” and slides the plate across the table.
“Is it okay that I’m here?” He tears the corner off the pastry and places it under his tongue, looking just like I imagine him to be as a kid, and the memory of who he was, who we were, is so close on my brain, so acutely begging to come out, that it’s as if I can physically feel it lighting fire to my gray matter. It doesn’t yet, but I trust that it will.
“It’s fine,” I say, “though Mimi’s a pretty good therapist.”
He laughs. “One of the best.”
I think of Liv and how I have to call her, but that also how, one day soon, I’d like not to think of her so much, not to have my sentences begin with phrases like “my therapist.” How one day soon, accountability to myself will be enough to keep me in line.
“The keys,” I say. “Why send them?”
He chews on the croissant for a moment, then swallows. “As a gesture, I guess. After Mom died. That, as cheesy as it sounds, we had the power to reopen the doors, despite the mess that our parents made of everything.”
“Do you miss him?” I say, out of context but not really.
“Who? Our dad?”
I nod, pushing my scone away.
“No, not really. I let go of him—or the idea of him—a long time ago.”
“So you’ve never wanted to find him, track him down?”
He considers this for a long time, watching a pickup truck loaded with dead branches amble down the street, stopping for the red light, then skidding out too quickly when it finally turns green.
“Not really,” he says finally. “I guess I always felt like he gave us what he could, and when he couldn’t any longer, he didn’t. And of course, I spent a few years being royally messed up by it.”
“Ergo, the weed arrest.”
“Ergo that.” He chuckles. “But I got tired of wondering, tired of wasting so much goddamn energy on a guy who didn’t deserve it. Sure, yeah, wouldn’t it have been great to have him there at baseball games and college graduation and
blah, blah, blah
. But he was always with you guys, most of the time anyway—he only did summers at our place, and even then, a few weeks here and there for the most part, so I guess it was just one more thing on top of the other.” He sighs. “I don’t know, at what point do you start owning your own life?”
I smile. “That’s exactly what Mimi just told me.”
“We raise them smart around here.” He smiles back, and we fall into a bubble of comfortable silence.
“I’m thinking of selling the house,” he offers, after we’ve drunk nearly half of our coffees.
“Your mom’s house? Really? How could you?”
“I don’t know, not a lot is left for me there. I have an apartment near the university. The house is too big for me, too much
maintenance. What’s the point in trying to deal with the upkeep? It’s just history, that’s all it is.”
As he says this, something small but tangible snaps in place, the cork moves just a little farther out of the neck of the bottle, and I remember. Yes, I remember asking Tina Marquis to show me that apartment because I was determined to leave Peter, not to simply let him leave me—no matter what I told Rory. I wasn’t going to pretend that the smoking ruins he’s created could be rebuilt, not in the way that my mother pretended as much in her own marriage.
My dad deserted her, deserted us,
and I am paralyzed with this realization: that
she never left,
not even when his own hands inflicted purple welts around my arms, not even when he spent his summers with a woman whom he might have loved more. So I asked Tina to find me a new home, and then what? What was I going to do? I focus and grind my teeth just a bit, and Wes, rightfully perceiving that something was shifting in me, interlocks his fingers with mine and doesn’t let go.
I was going to start making music again. Raise the baby and make some music. Of course. Playing the piano. Writing. Singing. See what that could do for me, what direction that may lead.
That is who the new me really was, really is.
Yet because I remain my father’s daughter, I chose a studio that mirrored his. And that’s why Rory and I were fighting: not just about Peter and that she was the one who told me. But that I was going to leave her to pursue something that could have been mine, that I could have claimed rightful ownership to, rather than peddling the wares of a man who made it all too clear that he didn’t want to be owned in any capacity.
Jesus. I feel sick.
Even while I was trying to untangle myself from him, from how much he defined me, I never really did. With the studio, with my innate comparisons of my marriage to theirs. With the years I delayed in getting back to the one thing that I loved more than
anything other than him.
Even in my attempts to run away from him, I snared myself back in his net
. And now, for the past few months at least, I’ve done it all over again. Working at the gallery. Listening to my mother and accepting my too-flawed husband because I didn’t trust myself to stand out on the high wire and walk across it on my own, without a safety net below.
I unlace my fingers from Wes’s and push my chair back, standing upright and feeling my legs steady beneath me, ready to take ownership of what is mine. My life, my name, my memory.
“Eleanor Rigby…waits by the window, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for?”
Of course it’s only a song. How was I ever foolish enough to think something otherwise?
33
“Forever Young”
—Bob Dylan
M
y mother is waiting on the front porch when we pull up. I slam the Land Rover door shut, and Wes does the same—
bam, bam
—the sounds of the metal doors reverberating through the quiet country air like gunshots.
She starts to rise when she sees us, like she’s actually going to greet us as if this were some sort of homecoming, but for once in her life she reconsiders and flops back on the bench, which has been righted after Peter and Anderson’s earlier melee.
As I get closer, I can see that her eyes are bloated, the skin around them puckering like cauliflowers, and they are pink and watery and guilty. She opens her mouth to speak, but I flare a hand up quickly—
don’t
—because I do not, not for one second, want to hear another excuse from her.
Wes scoots around me and heads inside with a squeeze of my shoulder, and I stop, there on the front steps, and jut my chin, wondering if words can ever be enough to clear the debris from the fallout, to say what needs to be said. After a lifetime of carrying around
the weight of her—of all of the grown-ups’—sins, of the debt that mired us, what is there even left to do to move toward healing?
She clears her throat. “Before you say anything, I sent Peter home. Rory took him to the airport.”
“And?” I say, like I’m supposed to thank her for this when I didn’t ask her to bring him here in the first place. Didn’t ask her to stick her head into
any of this in the first place,
until a wiser voice reminds me that, in fact, I did. Back in the hospital, when I didn’t know where to lean, I leaned on her, and asked indeed. So maybe the lines are blurred between black and white, family and foes, instinct and self-preservation. The new me and old. And also, my responsibility in this and to her and my loved ones.
“And I’m sorry,” she says, hiccupping like a toddler.
“For which part?” I contemplate sitting next to her but it feels like too much of a concession.
She gnaws her upper lip and blinks, and for a split second I think she’s going to delve back into her plasticized, spiritual guru self. I can see her debating it, slipping under that mask because under that mask, she never had to reveal her true self. The woman who stayed with him despite my purple welts. But then she surprises me.
“Look,” she says in a voice so guttural I barely recognize it. “I screwed up. I screwed up from the minute your father first met Heather, and I didn’t stop until now.”
“And you’re only realizing this now? Because of everything that’s happened?”
She shakes her head, staring down at the painted white porch. “No,
no.
I’ve pretty much known it from the start. I just didn’t know what to do about it, didn’t know any better. And he was everything I had, back then, when they met at some party for the artist crowd. I was just…I didn’t find out for a few years. He always told me
he was in Vermont at his studio.” She loses herself to something, then circles back. “And by then, well, I was desperate. You’d already been born, and I had no career, and our lives rose and set around your father, and so when I discovered that he was screwing other people, well, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”
“What else were you supposed to do? Are you seriously asking me this question?” After everything, is she really asking me
this
?
“Well, sure, now, today, you guys are all very I-am-woman-hear-me-roar, but it wasn’t like that back then. And besides, he promised that he wouldn’t leave. Not
leave
leave. I mean, not leave
us.
Just for a few weeks in the summer because, well, there was Wes, and then you sometimes went with him and seemed content. He had his terrible moments.”
“Clearly an understatement.” I instinctively reach for my upper arms, and she knows exactly of what I speak, her eyes welling.
“I drove down and got you as soon as I could,” she says, her voice breaking. “Of course I knew that he had his moods, but never once…”
“You know what I hear? I hear a whole slew of excuses. I hear a mother who didn’t do right by her daughters twenty years ago and who didn’t do right by one of them this past year, either.” I am suddenly seething, rage boiling viscerally in my guts, that she could sit here and still not own it,
still
not see the weight of my inheritance. Even though I know that I’m better than this anger, even though I know I need to let it go if I’m ever going to find it in me to move on. “I’m seeing a mother who didn’t learn from her own goddamn mistakes! Who instead urged me, when I was most vulnerable, to repeat them! To take my own dickish husband back, for god’s sake!”
“You don’t get it!” She stands now and squeals. “It wasn’t just me! It was you, too!”
“Don’t make me complicit in your games! Don’t tell me that I knew what I was doing when you told me to forgive him because I was, for all intents and purposes after the crash, a goddamn newborn! How can you hold me accountable for my decisions when I had no information—except what you told me—in making them?”
“No, no,” she says more quietly now, retreating and sitting back down. “I meant with your dad.” She sighs and regroups. “After I picked you up that summer, you refused to talk about it. Refused to even acknowledge it. And you were so very, very angry with me for ruining your time here, for making you leave. So angry.”