Chapter Seven
Seven
Evelyn
August 2001
The screen door creaks open and Rain’s and Tony’s voices fill the room, popping over unannounced, as they often do, our foyer always a revolving door of our children and grandchildren, shouting out hellos before raiding the refrigerator or grabbing sand chairs on their way to the beach. All except for Thomas, who keeps himself at an arm’s length, a visitor when he enters, more distant than ever now.
Tonight, Rain peels and slices cucumbers to go with dinner while Tony disappears to help his grandfather-in-law tend a leaky sink. They are both fixtures here. Tony assists with repairs or offers a pair of strong arms, Rain works beside Joseph in the garden; he taught her to identify weeds, to deadhead the spent blooms, how to support climbing wisteria by lashing it to stakes with twine, at peace in the house where she was raised until Jane found her footing. The Oyster Shell is her home; it has always been her home, as it always has been mine.
We sit down to eat, but before we can fill our plates Rain blurts out, “I can’t wait anymore! We have news.”
Joseph puts the salad bowl down, and I place the tongs back on the platter of chicken, giving them our full attention.
“I’m pregnant!” Rain says with a girlish giggle. Tony grins, and we jump up to hug and congratulate them both. It seems impossible she could be twenty-seven with a child growing in her womb. She was just a baby herself, babbling between my ankles as she dumped sand from a plastic bucket.
“How far along are you?” I ask, breathless with excitement.
“We just found out,” she says, beaming, “we haven’t even gone to the doctor yet, but I took, like, five tests. I know most people keep it secret for a while, but...given everything...”
I nod, shame rising in my cheeks. The whole family is feeling the weight of time.
“When are you due?” Joseph’s voice is tinged with joy as he pulls out Rain’s chair, gesturing for her to sit.
“May,” she says, and her smile falters.
May . The month before we say goodbye. A great-grandchild we may barely meet, entering this world as we leave it. A newborn we may hold for a moment, only to miss the first word, the first steps, the child the baby will become, the mother Rain will grow to be. Her swelling belly a reminder of all we’ll give up. Of all I’m taking from Joseph because I’m afraid. An immeasurable loss. A new crater forms in me, deep and throbbing.
“I thought if you knew, maybe—” she looks down, not meeting my eyes “—it would give you a reason to stay.”
My throat constricts, my sad smile a meager offering. “I wish it were that easy.”
“Let’s not talk about it anymore tonight, huh?” Tony says. “My only job so far in this thing is to keep my pregnant wife happy. Tonight, we celebrate.”
“Agreed,” Joseph says, almost too eagerly.
“Can you do something for me?” Rain rests a palm against her still-flat belly. “Can you make the baby a blanket? Like the one you made for me.”
Rain was over a year old when Jane brought her home from California, more toddler than infant, but she dragged it everywhere she went until the pink edges were frayed, for years after.
“Of course. Of course I can.” I say with false confidence, hoping it’s true. And I hug her, hug them both; the mother and the baby, while I can, maybe the only way I ever will. Rain’s child not yet formed into pudgy legs or tiny toes, still merely cells, an absence of a period. The crater within me widens. Nine months to grow, ten months to say goodbye.
Days later, the needle trembles in my grasp and misses the pastel yellow cotton, once, twice, three times, and I glance up, grateful Joseph hasn’t noticed. I don’t want him to ask if I’m okay. Okay compared to what? I try to focus on the task at hand, use my thimble to force the needle through and the string tangles. I’m having trouble seeing clearly, my vision sometimes like living inside of a soap bubble, the light refracts and ripples into distorted rainbows, shifting and sliding before me. I blink, try tracking backward, but the passage is too narrow, my aim unsteady, so I will have to cut it, tear it out.
The living room is flooded in harsh morning light, another hot August day guaranteed to chase us into the ocean by lunchtime, a reprieve I look forward to. Floating on my back, weightless, eyes open beneath a powder blue sky, before the sunset sail out of Mystic Seaport Joseph planned for tonight. Ride off into the sunset , a Hollywood dream, two glasses of wine, breeze in our hair, someone else at the helm as the colors fade to twilight. I fight the urge to sleep until then. Joseph fills an armchair, reading glasses perched low on his nose, his head covered in thinning white hair. Built like his father, solid as the trunk of an oak, he has begun to wither; crepe-paper skin loose around his muscles, his stomach a soft pouch. If he still mirrors Mr. Myers at this age, it’s impossible to say. He is twenty years older now than his father ever was.
The phone rings, and I am grateful for the interruption. My heart leaps as I answer. “Hello?”
“Morning, Mom.” It’s Violet. “I’m headed over soon. Is Dad waiting for me?”
“He’s reading the paper, no rush.” This Sunday morning her youngest, Patrick, has baseball practice and Ryan, following his older sister Shannon’s footsteps, is away at freshman orientation at Boston University. That would leave Violet and Connor home alone, but instead she’ll come here, preferring weeding to time with her husband. I nudge her, recognizing a worrisome pattern. She’s forty-five and still underfoot, eager to help, to play her part. She left teaching when Molly was born, and chooses to spend her days with us, stirring a steaming pot for me in the kitchen, or crouched in the soil beside Joseph. “But if Connor’s home, don’t feel like you have to come by. Or bring him.”
“No, he has stuff to do around here. I’ll see you soon.”
I rest the phone back on the receiver with a soft click. I don’t realize I am glaring at it until Joseph peers over the top of his newspaper. “Not Thomas, I presume?”
I shake my head and resist the urge to dial his number. He’s never been one to reach out first, but he always followed up between meetings or when he had a moment at his desk, our conversations rushed yet consistent. Since we told him our plan, he has yet to return a single call.
“He’ll come around,” Joseph says, his calm tone grating against my frustration.
“How many times has he been home since we told them? Twice?” My brain shuffles through the past two months, my mind a sticky deck of new playing cards. Moments from years past slide around in my mind—three-card monte, and I can always find the queen. But recent memories are stiff, glossy, and the bridge I bend riffles clumsily, cards spilling away.
Joseph’s brow furrows; he thinks I should know this. “He’s been home only once since we told them, for your birthday. We all went swimming, remember?”
Of course. That night, everyone diving into the water, the moon shining above, life was a palatable thing. The memory sharp as it dings into place. The froth of the blue-black tide turning over on cold mottled sand. Thomas, sputtering in the surf after his sisters dragged him under, an oyster pried open, a tiny pearl of boyhood, of playfulness and wonder, glimmering inside.
“Once...” I stare out the window at the sunlight filtering through Joseph’s garden, a symphony of bursting color, the soothing notes of lavender, bright and brassy tiger lilies, steady chords of deep blue hydrangeas. “I knew he wouldn’t understand, but this?”
Joseph flips a page in his newspaper. “You know how he is. It’s how he protects himself.”
“I don’t know how Ann does it.” My gaze lands on a pewter-framed photo of their wedding, Ann clutching a bouquet of calla lilies as they retreated down the aisle, her demure expression, his restrained pride. On their wedding day, the ballroom was packed with their coworkers and business associates. Between greeting tables, Ann released her hold on Thomas’s elbow and intertwined her fingers with his. He turned toward her, his face aglow, and kissed her. Her joy, his tenderness, was so intimate I looked away, back to the half-eaten cake littering the tables. I always knew he cared for Ann, I knew she cared for him, their relationship made sense, but that was the first time I glimpsed the depth of their private affection for one another.
Joseph folds his newspaper in his lap, and I hope he doesn’t come over to join me; his comforting touch would loosen a valve I am desperately wrenching shut. But he stays in his chair, tapping his fingers together. “I think he feels like if he calls, he is supporting our decision. He needs to work it out on his own.”
“I want to shake him sometimes, you know?” I laugh, a forced gust of air. “I’m worried, there’s only so much time... I don’t know, I worry about them all, there’s still things they don’t have figured out, important things...” My gaze traces the dozens of framed photographs. The grandchildren kneeling in a pyramid on the sandbar; Rain and Tony dancing at their wedding; Jane, Violet and Thomas, faded figures in their footed pajamas beside a Christmas tree.
Joseph pauses, his expression one I’ve seen before, an ax splitting me in two with the force of its love. “You know if there was anything I could do for you, I would, right?”
“I know.” My eyes soften; my guilt bubbles up once more, for being selfish, for not being stronger, willing to face whatever comes. “And what can I do for you?”
“Stay strong for me.” His voice has a husk to it, emotion creeping in. “Stay as strong as you can until June.”
Violet arrives in jean shorts and her faded Tufts University T-shirt, her hair a messy knot at her neck. I follow her out back with my sewing and settle on the wooden bench Joseph built for our anniversary one year so I could keep him company. He is already digging up and dividing overgrown hostas with a metal shovel, replanting them in smaller bunches so they flourish. Sunflowers tower beside him like nosy neighbors supervising his work, thriving in the late summer heat. I’ve learned there is much more to gardening than planting seeds and watering, it is a constant battle of weeding and fertilizing and pruning that I find exhausting. But not Joseph; he is steady in his care, patient with the elements outside of his control. Joseph seeks no recognition for his labor, his joy is in watching them blossom on their own.
The garden sprawls an acre from our back door to Violet’s house where I grew up, where my mother lived until she was found roaming the neighborhood, disoriented, forcing us to send her to a nursing home. My father had died much earlier, a heart attack, and she deteriorated into her dementia, and her death, mostly alone. I imagine the air around me smells of dirt and pollen and the richest potpourri, but scents, too, have become a memory, a locked gate. Never did I imagine my suggestion to spruce up the yard would turn out like this.
When we closed the Oyster Shell, Joseph didn’t know what to do with himself, his steps hollow without the jingle of keys in his pockets, without the constant tinkering required of a house in overuse. He hovered while I practiced, picked at what I cooked, sampling diced tomatoes or sticking a finger in cake batter. I pleaded with him to find something, anything, that was his own. I had so often wished for more time together while we toiled separately during peak seasons, imagining days on Bernard Beach like those we shared as teens. But without the Oyster Shell to occupy his time he became buzzing and tiresome, a knot between my shoulders.
The meadow had long sat untouched, home only to clover and the occasional game of croquet. Sometimes I imagined it a sprawling garden, and as my frustration grew the idea took shape. Something I could ask, a gift for me, that was secretly something for him. He agreed to my suggestion one night as we lay together in bed, although I felt his embarrassment like a festering wound as he struggled to admit he didn’t know how to spend all this time he suddenly found himself with.
In order to turn the meadow into a garden, Joseph first had to tame the wild violets. They grew without abandon in the first few weeks of May until the entire field burst purple. The fragile flowers hid the strength of the roots beneath; they spread with the fervor of weeds, stifled anything in its path. They were beautiful, and yet, without malice or intention, they could strangle to survive. He boxed them in to save them, a protected bed where they could blossom. All I could think about while I watched him was how he showed up each morning at my doorstep clutching violets in his fist. I wondered if he thought of that, too, as he fumbled with the fertilizer and overwatered the plants. I feared this wasn’t what I meant at all, he was chasing some ghost, Tommy, or his parents, or the life we used to have.
But soon it became so much more than a favor to me. He researched which flowers grew best in New England, which varieties preferred shade to sun, how to organize seedlings so something was constantly in bloom. He came home with stacks of books and read them long after I had fallen asleep. He carved out beds to represent each of our children. Daisies, their hope and innocence for Violet. Lavender’s virtue, to represent Thomas. Gladiolas’ strength of character, for Jane. As the years went on, he cleared space for a larger garden, planted a dream bulb by bulb. He took each of our grandchildren to the nursery and let them choose their own, snapdragons, zinnia, marigolds, lilac, primrose, peonies, daylilies, irises, to create a rolling tapestry of color. It started with violets, it all started with violets. Now there is an Eden, a dewy secret garden of our love and our family.
Joseph and Violet kneel side by side in the earth. I wonder even now as he works if he already misses it, like as a newlywed I missed Joseph even while I lay in the crook of his arms.
Who will tend to it after we are gone?
Violet yanks a stubborn root, then stops to brush the hair out of her face with the back of her wrist, her exhaustion palpable. “Dad, can you stop for a second? I need to talk to you both.” Her expression is pained. Always our popular one, our vibrant one, our beaming light. I’m not sure where she has gone, can’t find her in this woman with tired eyes. She straightens and sits beside me on the bench, takes a long gulp from a sweating glass of iced tea.
Joseph senses the weight in her words. I can tell by the careful way he gets up to join us, deliberate, as if any sudden movement could cause the eruption of tears.
“We know this is hard,” I begin, preempting her fears.
Violet shakes her head, and blurts, “I think I want a divorce.”
My eyes widen, and I peek at Joseph. If he’s surprised, he hides it better than me. Violet has always leaned on us, confiding in her parents because she lost many of the friends she used to have, kids and husbands overtaking girl-talk and sleepovers. I knew they’d been struggling; her marriage eroded in the usual way, the same way pebbles become sand—imperceptibly, without permission. But I had no idea it had come to this.
She continues, “I...I don’t know. I thought it would be different. Marriage. I thought if we loved each other, it would be enough. When we got engaged, we were so happy and so young, and it happened so fast, and that was so many years ago, and I don’t know...it’s never been what I imagined.”
I try to counter, but she plows through, her voice hurried and breathless.
“And I thought I had to accept my life as it was...but when you told us your plan, I—” She begins to cry, tears racing down her cheeks. “I felt so many things. I was terrified to lose you both, and still am, and I was in disbelief, but mostly I felt envy—” Her words are getting hard to discern, muffled by sobs. “Envy because I don’t think Connor loves me like that, and I don’t think I could do it for him either, and all I’ve ever wanted is what you have, and I thought Connor was it, and I thought I could wait until the kids were out of the house to figure everything out, but I can’t. I want the happily-ever-after, and I don’t want to waste any more time.” She stops abruptly, breathing heavy, and wipes her nose with the hem of her T-shirt.
My underarms prickle with perspiration. We fractured an already delicate vase. Violet, our strongest advocate for love. I didn’t think divorce was in her vocabulary.
Joseph speaks up first. “I know you and Connor have drifted apart—”
“But that doesn’t mean you throw it all away,” I interrupt, finding my words, drudging up old questions in me, battles fought years ago. “Marriage isn’t always easy, Violet, because life isn’t. Not every love is worth fighting for, but think of the family you’ve built, the partnership you have. Yours is .”
“I see the way you and Dad are. You’ve never had to work at loving each other.”
“There were difficult years for us, trust me. You don’t know everything about our marriage...there were times life didn’t make it easy at all.” I yearn for her to understand, to decipher my cryptic message. A secret from my past bubbles up, nagging. A day I almost left it all behind.
“Have you talked to him?” Joseph asks, although we both can guess the answer.
“He should be able to see I’m not happy.”
“I’m sure he can, but he may not know why, or what to do,” Joseph says.
“But I don’t even know how to explain it, I don’t know how we got here...there isn’t that spark I used to feel about him, or about life, it’s all so—” she’s worked herself up again so she fumbles through her words, caught on her emotion “—so ordinary and so boring.”
I can see her ambivalence and disappointment form, and Connor at the center of it. Connor, who had never done anything wrong except become a steady and ordinary husband. Settling for ordinary, to Violet, was its own betrayal.
“Sometimes it’s easy to focus on what’s missing, instead of all of the things that are right.” I’m hyperaware of the echo in my words, the things I wish I could go back to, tell myself. “But the way you loved each other? No one could deny it, seeing you together. It was a cosmic force. To take that and build a life together, to start a family, that’s what real love stories are made of. It may not feel the same as it did then. You were twenty-one, honey. Of course it doesn’t.” My shame reverberates, history repeating. A mistake I nearly made.
Joseph rubs at a streak of dirt on his forearm, agreeing. “Things were tough between your mother and I after the war, but if we had given up because it was hard, we would never have experienced the best parts of marriage, the closeness that comes from being tested and coming out the other side.” Violet sniffles. “Do you still love him?” Joseph asks gently.
Violet wipes tears from her cheeks. “He’s a good man, and a great dad, but we’ve grown so far apart...”
“Talk to him.” I put my arm around her shoulder, the way I should have let myself be held back then, to release what I had bound so tightly inside. “Tell him how you feel, what you need. It may take time, and work, but what you have is worth it.” I need her to see, although I am afraid it may take losing us for her to understand how rare the love is that she and Connor have found. It is not something to rip out like weeds. Real commitment requires cultivation. It’s not about the tingle in your belly and a rush of adrenaline. It’s not magic, or fairy dust, that sustains a spark. Steadiness over time is what makes it beautiful.
Violet begins to cry again. “But, how can I? If you’re gone? Who will I talk to? I’m afraid he won’t get it. You are the only ones who understand...” She hides her face, shoulders heaving, and now I know this isn’t really about Connor at all.
“I know, sweetie. It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.” I make hushing sounds like she is a child, my resolve breaking. The oppressive sun beats down, the panels for Rain’s baby’s blanket in a crumpled pile on the wooden bench, Violet shaking in my arms, the weight of a deadline, of all we will miss. The weight of those we leave behind.