Chapter 22
22
Eleanor
When we meet the Wards outside a forest preserve, Carson’s dad is the first to notice me.
“Eleanor!” he calls out. “Seems like I’m the last person in the family to meet you. I’ve heard nothing but good things.” He kisses me on the side of my face.
I kiss him back the same way, the corners of my lips coming closer to his temple than they do to his cheek. “You must be a fan of women named Eleanor staying in your guest cottage, because I don’t know what else you could’ve heard about me.”
He laughs, looking at Carson with a knowing face. “I heard you were funny and likable. I’d say that’s ringing pretty true.”
Taking in his khaki shorts and button-up Hawaiian shirt, it’s hard to imagine him as the man who quietly tore apart his family with the revelation of his affair. He’s harmless-looking, dorky even, if that’s a way people are even allowed to be classified anymore. Everything that Carson told me in the car yesterday makes more sense. Seeing this man while processing his choices feels impossible to do.
Anthony Teller springs forward in my thoughts, another man whose role has been rewritten in the postscript of our relationship. If you can even call it a relationship. Situationship is more accurate. I wonder what’s happened with his fiancée. If they’ve survived the message I sent, and the revelation that’s come with it.
I don’t know what’s worse—they don’t have the kind of love that could survive infidelity, or my actions have contributed to the same kind of pain that’s rippled through the family I am picnicking with today.
“You can call me Andy if you want,” Carson’s dad tells me.
“Or Dr. Ward,” Carson chimes in. “He loves that, but he wants to seem humble to you right now.”
“Why go through all the trouble of getting a title if no one’s going to use it in your everyday life?” I say. “Thanks for having me, Dr. Ward. I hope I haven’t been an inconvenience.”
“You’ve got our kid showing up on time and bringing the approved dish.” He points to the sherbet Jell-O cake Carson spent the morning making. “I think we could be throwing this whole shindig in your honor instead. Or maybe we should save that for convincing Tatum to come back for some of this.” His eyes gloss over as he shrugs his shoulders. “Ah well, what can ya do? Anyway, it’s a pleasure to have you.”
“I hope Tatum sees some of this too,” I say, as if I know her at all. It feels like I do. I can see her in the space between everyone else, the weight of her absence forming her shape. She seems to be a lot of things to a lot of different people. My attention has always been best served when it’s focused on one thing. I was good at my job because that was the place where I gave all my attention and effort. But everywhere I go in Trove Hills, someone knows Tatum. Relies on her.
Carson and I head for the picnic shelter, which houses several tables full of family members of all ages. The faces from the stairway, as I’m starting to think of them.
“Your cake is a pastel vision,” I say, waving off flies as Carson sets it down on the food table. The air is thick with a wet, heavy heat. Sweat trickles down my neck. I can feel the pressure of the stairway faces watching me.
What am I doing here, at this family’s party? Who the hell do I think I am?
“They make me bring this to every function,” Carson whispers, looking over their shoulder to be sure no Ward is listening. “Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July. No one ever eats it.”
“What would they do if I cut myself a piece?”
“There’s gelatin in it. Neither of us can eat it.”
“What if I pretend? Cut a slice and mimic the act of bringing it to my mouth?” I ask. “What happens then?”
“Impossible to say,” Carson tells me. “My whole family might disappear. Entire bloodlines could vanish into thin air.”
“A cake that could cause a rapture,” I say. “What power you have.”
“I know. Heavy is the head, et cetera, et cetera.”
To be safe, we leave Carson’s Jell-O masterpiece untouched. Carson takes me from table to table, introducing me to more aunts, uncles, cousins, and miscellaneous relatives than I could ever remember at once.
“Where are you from?” one of the aunts asks me.
Before I go to my default—which is to say New York—I pause, considering the truth. Being here has excavated so many pieces of myself I’ve allowed to be buried by time and distance, including the home I haven’t been back to since my parents died.
“I grew up in Pennsylvania,” I say. The syllables sound unnatural, like I’m speaking a language that’s foreign only to me.
“Uncle Paul and I go up to Pittsburgh every few years to watch the Pirates games,” the woman tells me. “I’m Irene.” She gets up to kiss me on the cheek the same way Dr. Ward did.
“Your family loves a kiss,” I whisper to Carson.
“Tell me about it,” they whisper back.
“So, Eleanor, what do you do?” Irene asks.
“She’s a press agent,” Carson offers.
Irene lights up with genuine interest. “What’s that mean?”
“It’s just a fancy word for a publicist,” I say. “I work for a firm that handles some of Broadway’s plays and musicals. We don’t represent the individual actors. We represent productions. Basically, we’re the ones who get write-ups about shows in magazines or online. We book the leads for interviews and press opportunities with various media outlets. That kind of stuff.”
It’s all such bullshitty PR-speak nonsense that it takes me a while to realize that I’ve said it in the present tense, forgetting once again that I got fired. So much of my life has been spent giving this exact speech, I don’t even know how to work in the fact that it’s no longer true.
It occurs to me that in all of my life, I have never met someone else’s entire family. No partner of mine has been serious enough for us to spend the holidays together. I haven’t had friendships deep enough to merit traveling out of the city and into whatever random town they’ve come from either.
I’m an imposter of the highest form. My life used to be my job and my cats, and currently I have neither at my disposal. It’s hard to make small talk as is, but right now, nothing about my life feels very small anymore.
“I’m actually in between agencies right now,” I add, patching over this unintentional gap, even though I’m the only person who understands how wide it is. “I’m hoping to head over to my last firm’s competitor.”
“That’s just fantastic,” Irene says. She has to be one of Dr. Ward’s siblings. The kissing, for one. But also, she has the same earnestness, though her exterior is more serene than it is dorky. “What a fascinating job.”
“It’s really not as glamorous as it might sound,” I tell her. “It’s a lot of emailing people saying things like, ‘Just circling back here,’ or ‘Checking in on this one again.’ Being a professional nuisance, really.”
“I still think it’s cool,” Irene says. “And what a beautiful young woman you are too. Very smart and composed. You’re just lovely.”
“She really is,” another aunt adds. “I’m Fran,” she says, rising for the kiss I’ve now come to expect. “You’ve got the nicest shade of blond in your hair. Could I take a picture of it? I wanna show my stylist. She always makes me too brassy.”
“Oh,” I say, my surprise genuine. “Sure. And I don’t think your hair looks brassy, for what it’s worth.”
As Fran fumbles with her phone to set up the shot, Carson puts an arm around me. The surprise of it makes me offer up a bigger smile than I mean to give.
Fran turns her camera around to show us the image, she and Irene murmuring another round of praise for me as she does so.
While I’ve never before thought of myself as lovely, Carson and I do look lovely together. We used to talk about this kind of thing at Garber and Link, how certain actors just look right when photographed together. Even though I feel sticky and overcooked, it doesn’t come through in this picture. Carson has their eyes squinted, giving a sly expression, and I’ve got my head angled toward them while still holding the camera’s gaze. I’d done this to show off my hair, hoping to catch the blond in sunlight. In the photo, it creates an intimacy between Carson and me. We look like we have secrets that only we know. Which is true, in some ways.
Even stranger, I look…happy.
“Look at you, Trouble,” Carson says. “You’re glowing.”
Irene grabs the phone from Fran. “Eleanor, you could be a movie star!” She turns around to look at one of the other tables, where several of the Ward men are chatting in low tones. “Paul, honey! You gotta come meet Eleanor from Pennsylvania! You’re gonna love her!”
Her admiration is so sincere it pricks my heart deeper than I expect, letting in more sadness than I’ve made space for in a long, long time. Maybe it’s that she looks to be the same age my mother would be, if she were still alive. Or it’s the way she doesn’t need to know much about me to decide I’m worth liking.
“Excuse me for one moment,” I say, unable to staunch the flow of tears that’s begun to surface.
I wander into the trees and the breath of heat that’s stuck between them. Holding myself like I have countless other times in my life, I walk until I can no longer see the picnic tables, so I can whisper the words that have always comforted me in times of unexpected distress—the mantra I have for me and me alone, my last line of defense against whatever threatens to overwhelm me.
“You’re okay, Eleanor,” I say. “You’re okay.”
It’s never enough, but it’s usually something.
Right now, for the first time, these words devastate me. How many times have I soothed myself back to a false state of normalcy? How many struggles have I endured all alone, no one around to care for me except myself?
I’m so tired of being brave and self-sufficient. I don’t want to wipe my tears and paste on a smile.
I just want a hug.
“Eleanor,” Carson calls out. I can hear branches crack under their feet, their pace frantic. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know,” I call back.
“That’s okay,” they assure me, their voice already growing closer. “Just keeping talking to me, baby. I can find you.”
My tears flow hard enough to induce snot. “I don’t really know what to say.”
“How about you count out loud?”
The hiccup in my throat fights me with each number.
It takes Carson nine seconds to find me. I fall into them, my arms wrapping around their torso, holding on like they might disappear if I don’t squeeze tight enough. They might be a dream—one of those romance novel fantasies—and I can’t let it evaporate.
They match my pressure in an instant, squeezing back in the exact way I hoped they would, letting me melt into the assuredness of their arms.
They are real. They are here. For me.
“What’s going on?” they ask, rubbing soothing circles into the fabric of my shirt.
“I hate that you keep finding me like this,” I say. “I swear this doesn’t normally happen.”
“I hate that it keeps happening to you now.” They put my face in their hand, and it’s the exact kind of gentle I want the most. It undoes me, rips off the last paper-thin barrier that stands between me and the truth—I care about them. Way more than I should.
I lean back into their embrace, letting myself be held. Their arms are unyielding, grabbing me without reservation. My head fits so nicely into the crook of their neck.
“I’m not used to having so many people interested in me,” I tell them. “It’s just overwhelming.”
“It’s not hard to care about you,” Carson whispers into my ear.
If the hug was my undoing, these words are my reshaping. They form me into someone I have never met, reinforcing the softness within me that’s been desperate for a safe place to land. I want to find something adequate to say back, but words can’t match the way it feels to be seen.
After a while, it’s enough to make me stop crying.
“I’m ready to go back to the picnic,” I say, stepping back.
Carson laughs. “No, you aren’t.” Their thumb reaches for my face again, wiping under my eye to show me a wet smudge of mascara. “You do not want to go see my entire family looking like a raccoon. Not that you don’t pull it off. But something tells me we’ll get a little distance from this event and you won’t want the proof to be on your face like this.”
“Okay,” I say.
And so Carson walks me to their car, parked away from the event, so I can get a tissue and adjust my face.
Years of grief have taught me to school joy. My every success has been measured against what I’ve lost. There are so many barricades around my heart that it’s become commonplace for me to work around those obstacles, moving farther and farther away from the core of me—the wild, beating dream of desire inside my chest that reminds me the sun is out and the sky is blue. I’ve been living in my stomach. In the acid that gurgles and stews. Only now do I realize that I’ve been crying so much because for the first time in fourteen years, I’m starting to find my way out.
I care. A lot. Too much. I care that I am good at my job and I lost it because of my own recklessness. I care that no one ever meets my standards.
I care that I’m lonely.
And maybe, for the first time in my life, I care enough to do something about it.