Eighteen
Eighteen
After coffee, Ellie stops back into the bookstore to tell Gabby she isn’t feeling well. She needs to head home, lie down, work out a few thoughts, but will return after she gets some rest. A headache, she says, and blames it on the breakup, which isn’t untrue. It’s just not because of the specific breakup (A scuba diver? Really?) Gabby thinks.
Ellie is back in her car now and driving through town. The alternative rock station she’d clicked on yesterday, right before her accident with Jonah, is still turned on. Some sad, acoustic love song—a perfect soundtrack—plays as she navigates the vehicle along the bustling suburban streets, past the window displays and picturesque cafés, and tries to figure out what she’s meant to do next.
Unlike yesterday, Ellie no longer needs to call the attorney ( Hello, I would like to divorce my husband, who isn’t actually my husband, because we’ve never been married, and because we technically just met for the first time this afternoon ). She has a deep desire to contact Maggie. (Where is her daughter right now? When she stepped onto her respective plane, did she somehow escape all this?) But she’s afraid to hear what strange something might greet Ellie on the opposite end of this communication. She no longer needs to call Frank to tell him Bunny is inexplicably at her house in New Jersey and saying unhinged things, because Frank is here.
Click, click, click.
Ellie flicks on her blinker and turns the car down a quiet side street, a little ways off the beaten path. For her whole life, her family has been the epicenter of her universe. Bunny and Frank. Jonah, more or less from the first day they met. Maggie from the second the doctor set her in Ellie’s arms. Whenever she’s had a problem, these are the people she’s turned to for help. Whenever she’s felt lost, their small circle has served as Ellie’s true north. But not today. This time, Ellie needs to solve this issue alone.
Ellie shifts the car into park. She walks up the marble steps of Saint Mary’s Church. It’s the middle of the day, no masses anytime soon, but the door, as always, is open. Ellie pulls it wide. She dips her fingers into the holy water, like she was taught to do when she was small, and makes the sign of the cross over her body. A faint scent of incense lingers in the air. Up high, the stained glass windows are illuminated by the late-spring sun, though not enough to actually provide light to the darkened church nave. Ellie takes a step forward, her tennis shoes creating a dramatic echo each time they hit the shiny floor. She moves past several empty pews, all of them cast in shadows, before she settles on one closer to the altar and slides in.
“We almost retired to Florida once,” Bunny explains without turning around. She coughs. “You were in your twenties. You’d just broken up with that boy.”
“How did you know it was me?” Ellie asks from a few pews behind her mother. “It could have been anyone who walked in.”
Bunny twists the upper half of her body. “A mother just knows, Ellie. I can sense when you’re near me even when you’re still miles away.”
Ellie scoots out of her pew, joins Bunny. “So, why didn’t you?” She looks down, noticing that both she and her mother are rubbing their ring fingers—Bunny’s, for the time being, still outfitted with a metal band.
“It wasn’t the right time, Ellie,” Bunny explains, turning her decades-old wedding band on her aging skin. “We flew down for a week, just like for any other trip. Before we went, your father made some appointments with a Realtor in the area, lined up a few properties for us to see. She showed us one we liked.”
Before Bunny speaks another word, Ellie already knows how she will describe it.
“Let me guess,” Ellie says. “A little sunroom. A community pool. Shuffleboard courts.”
Bunny looks at Ellie, her forehead creasing.
“Those types of places are always the same,” Ellie notes and bites her lip.
Bunny clears her throat and then laughs softly at the memory of the place. “There was this big palm tree out back,” she continues. “I joked with your father that if we bought that place, I’d wrap the trunk of it up in multicolored lights every Christmas.” She smiles at this thought. “A little tropical holiday.”
It’s hard to fully see inside of a marriage, especially one that is not your own. What unfulfilled wishes exist inside it. What broken promises or abandoned dreams haunt it. What disagreements or fights have remained hidden from public view. An only child, Ellie had always felt especially close to her parents growing up, as if they also functioned as her stand-in siblings. As narcissistic as it sounded, she’d often believed she knew everything about her mother and father’s relationship, as if there wasn’t a single secret in their home she hadn’t been briefed on. Now, while seated in this church pew, Ellie wonders what other secrets her parents have kept from her—in this life and in any other. She thinks about the secrets she’s kept from them, too.
“Did you tell me you were doing that?” Ellie asks, unsure where her actual memory stops and where new memories—ones she isn’t familiar with—set in. “That you two had planned to look at condos on that trip and that you wanted to move?”
Bunny unlaces her hands, waves one, slapping away Ellie’s question. “For what? To give you stress that we were going to leave?” She looks at her daughter over the shoulder of her unseasonable sweater. “We were only daydreaming.” Bunny shakes her head at some private thought. “We knew we wouldn’t do it until you were settled into your own life first.”
“But I am settled, Mom,” Ellie states. “Right? I have a job and the house. And I think I have a few friends,” she tries, still in disbelief that Gabby now falls into this category. “Maybe I was never meant to be married,” she suggests. The church is so empty that every sound is amplified. Her words all echo back at her. “Maybe that’s just not my destiny for this life.”
Looking up at the altar, Ellie can almost see her and Jonah—two children in their twenties—dressed in their fancy clothes, minutes before they said “I do.” Neither of them realized how much they were agreeing to with that vow. They had so much life ahead of them. Good and bad, a whole spectrum of experiences and emotions. How could they ever have known as they slipped the rings on each other’s fingers what their future might have in store for them, how they might change or stay the same, or how they’d react to it all?
Ellie inhales deeply, the residual incense fragrance tickling her throat. She coughs, causing her eyes to become wet with tears. They fall down her cheeks. She wipes them away, looks back at the altar, and wonders what she and Jonah might say to each other—what new vows or promises they’d make—if they had the chance to stand up there again.
Unlike some of their friends, who’d taken extravagant honeymoons to Hawaii and to Europe, when Jonah asked Ellie where she wanted to go after their wedding, she said home. She’d meant it partially as a joke, though not entirely. Ellie had no desire to jet off to Paris or to Bora Bora or wherever it is that some people they knew had gone. That all felt to her like pretend. She wanted their life together—the real one they’d live every day—to begin right away.
Jonah did ultimately convince her to go someplace, though they’d settled on a pretty resort nearby. For a week, they drank wine on their hotel balcony—only an hour from home—and looked out at the changing autumn leaves, both of them enjoying the subtle change in scenery and the chance to step away and be alone.
“What do you think we’ll be doing twenty years from now?” Ellie had asked Jonah on one of those nights. She was buzzed from the wine and also drunk on the idea of those vows.
Ellie had half expected Jonah to make a joke about some fabulous, over-the-top life they might be living together. He didn’t. “I don’t know,” he said as he looked out at the rust-colored landscape. “I hope it’s something simple and easy like this, though.”
Here in the present, Ellie’s eyes remain on the altar, that sturdy slab of stone.
“I told Father Donovan the news,” Bunny admits, shifting the topic. “So I suppose it’s official now.” She clears her throat and then lowers her voice. “At least in the eyes of God.”
“What?” Ellie’s heart begins to race. She knows her mother, and what her faith means to her. To tell her priest this information is more significant than if she’d told an attorney. The many legal steps involved in making a divorce official are merely bureaucratic details. To Bunny, this announcement to her church is what makes the situation real. “You can’t leave Dad. You two made a vow. An important one.”
Behind them, a noise.
“But apparently not important enough,” a voice announces. Ellie and Bunny both turn. Frank stands at the far end of the aisle. “How could you, Bunny?”
Ellie bolts up, energized by panic. “Whatever it is you two are going through, it’s—it’s not real, Mom.” As Ellie speaks, the sun catches the stained glass windows. “Dad, tell her it isn’t real!”
“I can’t tell her that, Ellie,” Frank says, his expression nothing but hurt. “It’s real now, whether it’s what I wanted—what I thought would happen—or not.”
Bunny looks back at the altar. Her tone remains calm, a suggestion that she’s thought through this topic again and again. “Marriage is hard, Ellie,” she explains. “Even at our age.” She sighs, which makes her cough again. “It never gets easier. People think it does, the longer a couple has been together, but that’s not true.” She turns to face Frank. “It’s just not true.”
Never in all their years has Bunny spoken about marriage—her marriage, in particular—like this. Her face looks old. Tired. Sad. And yet, beyond all this, Ellie can still see it: right here, past the pale, wrinkled skin, the sagging neckline, and the thinning hair, the young woman who still lives inside it. The one who took a vow all those years ago. It’s like seeing superimposed images, these two women who sit next to Ellie in this church pew.
“You guys can’t do this,” Ellie pleads, her words catching with tears in her throat. “You can’t just leave each other.”
“It’s too late, Ellie,” Frank states. “Your mother already made the choice.” He pivots toward the door, his brows tightly knit. “Now it seems it’s time for me to make mine.”
And then he walks out.