Chapter Ten
Ten
Evelyn
August 1951
I wake throughout the night, not because Jane’s crying, but because she’s not crying. I need to make sure she can cry, she can breathe, so I jolt from frenzied nightmares with a desperate need to check on her. Tonight is no different. Sleep evades my body, still sore from giving birth, my mind races. I slip away from Joseph and pad down the hall, my resentment mounting with each nighttime feed. Up once more, haunting the house, while he remains sound asleep on his stomach, the unbothered slumber of fatherhood, unscarred from pregnancy, untethered to this tiny being, all consumption and need. After four years in our tiny apartment, I had nearly forgotten how sprawling this place was, our innkeeper’s quarters separate from the guests’, three whole bedrooms for us, a place meant to grow a family. Our future laid out, a blueprint for a good life.
The Oyster Shell Inn fascinated me when I was a girl. There was a comfort in its messiness, its mismatched floral furniture, everything soft and plush. The dust on the bookshelves in the study, granules of sand in the foyer, everything smelling faintly as though it had once been wet. The way the light fell hazily through the windows, inviting you to cuddle up in an armchair. The odd little doors that led to storage nooks, no taller than a child, but if you knew to push aside the boxes and brush away spiderwebs, they connected in narrow passageways. Joseph and Tommy and I played hide-and-seek during the slow season, contorting in the dingy crawlspaces, straining to hear footsteps. I’d wrap my arms around my knees, eyes closed tight, and wish for the Oyster Shell to be my home.
I steal into Jane’s room, across from another bedroom, empty except for an ironing board and drying racks. Once intended for Joseph’s siblings, hoped-for-babies who never came, his mother used it instead to press the linens. Joseph said it was better to leave the third bedroom as is for now, that we could fill and decorate it when we had more children.
More children. He always tacks it on at the end of a sentence, like it is something to add to my grocery list. More butter, more milk, more children. Romanticizing a big family before we even had our first, before I knew the white-hot pain of labor, the terror of hearing the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. Before swollen breasts, nights blurring into days, before distrusting the murky landscape of my own mind. The rocking and holding and bouncing, her intoxicating newborn smell and the overwhelming depth of my affection, the feeling of always being on the brink of tears. How much I could love her, this tiny person I made, that I just met. How little desire I had to put myself through it again, to tear myself in two in childbirth, only to split myself further in motherhood, slicing and slicing until I am a wisp of a woman, unrecognizable.
I slip into the nursery, a faint light from the lamp on her dresser illuminates her. It’s funny to me that someone so little can have her own dresser yet here it is, one Joseph made as she grew inside me. He loved all the projects, painting the room, building the crib. I don’t think I have ever seen him so happy. Ever since we got home from the hospital Joseph has shouldered the operations of the inn, open for a few months now, after weeks of cleaning and restoration, a brand-new carved sign declaring The Oyster Shell Inn and Now Open since May, the guestrooms filling as the temperature rose. Which leaves me alone with Jane, and the days and nights spent feeding and washing diapers and hanging towels to dry stretching endlessly before me. Stirrings of longing for my old life, when hours were lost playing piano, when I had lists of dreams, things I was sure I would have done by now, places I would have seen. How improbable it all seems now, how long ago it feels. No way out of this new reality, this all-consuming motherhood. Demanding more of me than I could have imagined, the saddest happiness I’ve ever felt, because she’s already bigger today than yesterday, already a little less mine. I’m already missing the baby she is, desperate to remember moments I’m certain to forget.
When I was pregnant, Joseph ran his fingers over my stretched skin, put his ear to my stomach and whispered to the baby at night, but his affection couldn’t calm my nerves. As we packed boxes he approached timidly, asked, “How are you feeling?” and wrapped his arms around me and my growing belly, holding us both. I couldn’t answer. He squeezed me close, then left me to my thoughts, swirling storm clouds in my mind. I could never have handled the truth of all to come, the certainty I have now, that those nine months were the easiest part.
There is silence in the hall as I approach Jane’s room. Before she was born, we considered different names, but when I held her, I knew she was Jane. Jane, like Jane Eyre, from the novel Aunt Maelynn bought me from that bookstore in Boston when I was homesick. Jane Eyre, an independent and fiery girl who believed in and sought out love. There could be no other name for the beauty I saw in my arms, the sudden fullness in my heart as she clutched me, burrowed into my neck like I was the safest home. Before Jane I couldn’t understand why everyone talked about a baby’s fingers and toes, but now I know. I could sit with her in my lap all day and touch the soft pads of her feet, watch her toes curl, and her impossibly tiny fingers ball into fists. Even at one week old she can have her own dresser, and her own room, and she can hold my whole world in her tiny hands.
Joseph was right. I am happy we had her, I’m happy we’re home. My childhood wish, whispered into the darkness, granted by kismet or grand design, or sheer force of will. The boy seeking me, all the times I’ve been found. But I am also scared. Scared because so many babies stop breathing, and eat the wrong things, and get sick and hurt, and people we love get taken away for reasons I’ll never understand.
Jane sleeps on her stomach, pudgy little arms by her ears. I stride close, put the back of my wrist near the tiny O of her mouth, wait for the tingle of her breath on my skin. I wait for five breaths before I exhale, lean my chin against the top of the crib, watching her, pleading to a god I’m not sure I believe in, bargaining everything I have to keep her safe.
Joseph
November 1953
Mrs. Saunders gives her bun a pat to be sure her hair is in place, and chides, “Support his neck, dear.” Evelyn does not reply, but her lips tighten. Thomas cries in her arms. She stands, bouncing him as she circles the sofa. Only two guestrooms are occupied tonight, a newlywed couple who has barely left their room and an older man visiting his daughter, so we have the place mostly to ourselves. If it were a warmer day, she would walk him along Sandstone Lane, but winter has come full force now, night falling early and bringing a cutting wind. Jane sits by the fireplace and throws blocks across the room.
“Hush, Thomas...it’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” Evelyn coos at him but her face is stone. A block hits her in the ankle and she turns with a scowl. “Jane, enough. Stop throwing.”
“Evelyn, have you fed him? That’s the sound of a hungry baby.” Mrs. Saunders’s voice is shrill, though she sits calmly on our couch, her hands folded in her lap. Her mother doesn’t seem to remember this is not Evelyn’s first baby, or how she managed with Jane without help.
When we moved back to Stonybrook a few years ago, she dreaded returning even to the periphery of her parents’ world. Evelyn hadn’t spoken to them since my father’s funeral, and even then, their conversations were strained. But when we stepped back into the foyer of the inn, even with dust-coated furniture and the rotted wood on the front porch, I could imagine our children running through the field behind the house, could see a piano tucked into the study and Evelyn and I directing guests toward the beach. I looked at Evelyn, desperate to know if she saw what I did, and she laced her fingers with mine. The Oyster Shell Inn. Our home.
We dropped by that first afternoon, Evelyn begrudgingly, and knocked on their door to let them know we were back, and here to stay. The porch was littered with leaves, the yard overgrown, the brass knocker tarnished. The front door creaked as Mrs. Saunders appeared behind it, squinting her eyes against the daylight. She had always been thin, but there was something eerie about her structure, like she, too, had been neglected inside the house.
If she was surprised to see us, she didn’t show it. “I was wondering about the inn, sitting there vacant all these years. Your father is working, but I’ll relay the message.” Her eyes flickered down to Evelyn’s curved belly, but her face gave nothing—not anger or joy, just a sunken expression as she said, “I never thought I’d see you pregnant. I thought...”
Evelyn cut her off as she turned away, “Yeah, well, you didn’t seem that interested in our marriage, so I don’t expect you to spend time with our baby, don’t worry.”
We didn’t see much of her after that. She never came to Bernard Beach, and there was only the occasional lamplight and glow of her cigarettes on the front porch after dinner. We were busy with the inn, with Jane, with navigating our new life that was a strange, inverse reflection of our old one. Then Mr. Saunders died, a heart attack at sixty-one, and Evelyn’s mother didn’t have any friends or other family to turn to. Her husband had rarely been home, never showed her affection, but I assumed his lingering cigar smoke as he came and went filled the house with the pretense of his company. After he passed away, she must have felt alone enough to swallow her pride, and when another grandchild came along, a boy, she found herself at our door. Evelyn, delirious with exhaustion and desperate for an extra set of hands, accepted their ceasefire.
“Yes, I’ve fed him. Of course I have. He cries all the time, fed or not.” Jane throws her blocks again. Evelyn’s eyes harden.
“He should be changed,” Mrs. Saunders insists. “I thought he smelled when I held him.”
“He is fed and changed, I told you, he just cries. Please stop.”
A knock on the swinging door from the sitting room stops the conversation short, a white-haired gentleman, our frequent guest, pokes his head in to ask for extra towels. Evelyn hands me Thomas and follows him out, and I am grateful for the diversion. Thomas calms from screams to a low moan. My heart slows, and I hadn’t realized it was racing until that moment, Evelyn’s stress acutely mine.
That night as we get ready for bed, Evelyn is quiet, lost in her thoughts.
She gets under the covers and turns toward me. “We did the right thing, right? Letting my mother back in our lives?”
“I know she can be tough sometimes—”
“All of the time.”
“Okay, all of the time. But she doesn’t have anyone else, and besides Maelynn, she is the only family we have. I’d give anything for my parents to know our kids.”
“So would I—you know I loved your parents. But my parents, they’re different.” She pauses, winding a strand of hair around her finger. “Do you know I haven’t cried about my father? Not even when I’ve been alone. He was so busy working, I never really knew him, and he never tried to know me. And I am still so angry at them for acting like Tommy was the only one worth anything. When he died it was like—” She stops herself, and sighs. “And then she comes here telling me how to raise my kids? Like she knows anything about it? She sent me away. What kind of mother does that?” She pauses, then quieter, “What kind of daughter doesn’t cry when her father dies?”
I open my mouth to reassure her just as Thomas screams, awake again in his crib. She sighs, then yanks back the covers to tend to him.
“Want me to?” I ask, but she waves me off, agitated. He is a much more trying baby than Jane was, and I see the gray circles under Evelyn’s eyes in the mornings after a long night of feeding and rocking him.
I feel guilty sometimes, for pushing for children, but four years was a long time to stay alone in the island of our bedroom, holed up in sadness under our covers. Those four years became a new lifetime; Tommy’s death split our life into halves—a before, an after. The memories of before a hazy daydream, the three of us suntanned and bobbing in the gentlest waves; the after marked by my limp, by loss, by the feeling of being scraped out from the inside and somehow standing upright, as though I wasn’t made of rapidly escaping air. Running all those years didn’t change anything, our grief lay dormant here, awaiting our return.
After we settled in, I bought a secondhand piano, a wooden Baldwin, and surprised Evelyn, a scarf over her eyes as I led her to the study where I had polished it until it looked new. She played concerts in the evenings, Jane in her lap, as the guests sat clutching glasses of scotch or wine, the windows open to the salt air, seeming at peace once more. But when Evelyn told me she was pregnant for a second time, her face was white. She withdrew, brushed me off when I reached for her belly. She didn’t want to talk names, even many months in, “Just in case.” But on the day she gave birth to our son she was overjoyed again, smiling in a way I hadn’t seen in months. She held him and stroked his cheek, Jane cuddled up on the hospital bed next to them.
I sat beside them, kissed her forehead. “How about Thomas?”
She had tears in her eyes, whispering, “Thomas,” and she reached for me, and I reached for them all. Our family, now four.
Now that Thomas is a few weeks old, I feel Evelyn drifting further into herself again. I watch her in the hallway, swaying the baby in her arms as he wails, her body hunched with exhaustion. She is twenty-eight but this second pregnancy aged her, her cinched robe hides the soft pooch of a maternal stomach, the faintest stretch marks on her swollen breasts. She moves with the cadence of a sentry on duty as she rocks him. This time, she is not drifting with me, into our secret, sad oasis. She is drifting to a place that is becoming hard to wrench her out of. A tense, distant place.
“Let me take him.” I approach her in the hall, cautious.
“Oh, now you want to help?” She scowls, turning him away from me.
I follow her into Thomas’s room. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Convenient.” She makes a loud shushing sound in his ear. “You sleep right through it in the middle of the night.”
“We talked about this.” My voice is even, treading on hot coals. “I have to work during the day.”
“And what do I do?” she snaps, razor sharp over Thomas’s screams.
“I know your days are hard too. I’m not saying that,” I say, my hands up in retreat.
“Just forget it. Go, get your precious rest.” She shoos me away as she sits in the rocker, eyes closed, Thomas pressed against her chest, too furious to look at me.
I thought moving back was the answer, if I could only get her to the sea, we could recover some of that ease we craved, but now I am not sure. There are rare moments when I glimpse the old Evelyn. Glimpses that gave me hope she would again find her way back to us. One summer night as we cooked together, Jane in her high chair, dark clouds rolling in. Suddenly it started to rain, then pour, and she ran to grab the sheets from the line. I turned off the stove so dinner wouldn’t burn, rushing to help. She stood unclipping pins and balling towels in her arms, racing the storm. Then she stopped, drenched. She tilted her chin up at the sky and laughed. I wanted to join her, to grab her and kiss her, to share what she was feeling, but I stopped in the doorway. It seemed sacred, the way she smiled at the rain. It was fleeting, if I had looked down I would have missed it.
She stopped laughing when she caught my eye, but called out, “Isn’t it beautiful, Joseph?”
I couldn’t look away from her, the droplets falling down her cheeks. She ran in to meet me, her dress soaked through. And she kissed me. But those moments were outweighed by the heaviness she carried, like rain-soaked laundry straining the clothesline, dragging it toward the earth.
After a day jammed with late checkouts and a difficult-to-trace roof leak, my leg throbs from overuse. I reach for my pain pills on the nightstand, and knock Evelyn’s book, a tattered copy of Jane Eyre she is rereading for the hundredth time, onto the floor. When I lean down to pick it up a folded page falls out, Dreams written in bold letters and circled in a cloud.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these,” I say, lifting the crinkled sheet and turning it over in my palm. “I didn’t know you still had them.”
“It’s stupid, Joseph. I was using it as a bookmark.” She grabs it from my hands, stuffing it back inside the book without finding her page.
“Evelyn Myers, I have never known you to think a dream is a stupid thing,” I tease. “I think you should keep it up. Why not make a new list?”
She used to smile every time I called her by her married name. A name I heard her repeating once, as she applied her lipstick in the mirror, when she didn’t think I was listening. She smiles now, but it holds a trace of sadness. “Well, maybe Evelyn Saunders didn’t, but Evelyn Myers has no time to spend on a young girl’s dreams.”
“It’ll get easier, with the kids. You’ll see.” I kiss the backs of her knuckles, and wish her good-night.
After a moment she asks, “What if we make one together? A dream list, for us.”
“Marrying you, running this inn together, that’s my list.” I trace her arm with my fingers. “Making you happy, starting a family...to be honest those are the only dreams I’ve ever had.”
Her face sours. “I hate when you do this.”
“Do what?”
“Act like everything is perfect.”
I suck in, gut punched. “You’re twisting my words.”
“I barely have a second to shower. You’re killing yourself running this place on your own. This is really what you always wanted?”
“Damn it, Evelyn.” I pull away from her. “Yes. This is what I want. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect. But most people would be happy here.” My stomach tightens with her contradictions, this homecoming she asked for, that she said she wanted, that she treated like a death march. “But not you, no, no it’s never enough.”
“You try watching the kids all day and see how you feel.”
“You wanted this. You said you wanted kids.”
She tips her head back at the ceiling, infuriated at my incompetence, apparently, my insistence on reality, the terms we created somehow my fault. “It doesn’t mean it’s all I wanted.”
“Okay, so you unclog toilets and scrub showers and fix the roof and I’ll go play on the beach with the kids if it’s that horrible for you.”
She lowers her eyes at me, her voice cold. “You say things like that and it makes me hate you.”
I should backpedal, I know how hard it’s been on her, I know her days are long and draining and tedious, I know life with a toddler and newborn is far from easy, but I’m too mad, I’m too tired, and I’m sick of feeling like the bad guy, the one who always has to say the right thing, do the right thing, be patient and understanding and gentle, never upset her, never overstep, never ask for anything because I’ve already asked for this one big thing, to be with her, to go home. “Am I wrong? Or do you have the better end of the deal here?”
“ You made the deal. That’s the point.”
“We both agreed to this. I didn’t force you into anything.”
Her arms cross, defiant. “Well, maybe I’ve changed my mind.”
I reel back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s a pretty big statement.”
“Well, I feel pretty trapped.”
“Trapped?” I ask, incredulous. “Okay, then, go. Go, if that’s how you feel. If this life is so terrible, and you hate me, and you hate being with the kids and all you want is to go play piano and live in some made-up fantasyland where you have no responsibilities.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“I’m saying go! You’re trapped? Then go.”
“Like that’s a real choice,” she says, pure venom.
“I’m not forcing you to be here!” I yell. “I don’t want you here if you don’t want to be.”
“Just forget it, okay? You don’t understand.”
“Great, sure.” I throw my hands up. “You hate our whole life and I’m supposed to forget about it.”
“Now who’s twisting words.” She storms off to brush her teeth, tossing her book onto the bed as she goes. It hits me in the knee, the paper poking out, taunting me. I wait to hear the water rush in the bathroom, unfold her list and steal a peek, fuming, before sliding it back in its hiding place. The words float in my mind, a line added to the bottom of the list, in different ink, fresh.
Perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
A banished dream, a relic from another time, brought back to life. I lie awake long after she stomps back in, pulls the covers over her shoulders, her back to me as she clicks off her lamp. Afraid for her again, afraid, for the first real time, for us. Afraid she may go, that she may be happier leaving us all behind, and that this time I won’t be able to find her and bring her home.