Chapter Eleven
Eleven
Joseph
October 2001
We are driving down the coast, adventuring to cross another line off a list from long ago. Touch the sky. A biplane ride, open to the air as we climb, gliding over the tree line, autumn colours at peak, above the shoreline we have only known from the ground. It astonishes me, after all this time, that something imprinted so deeply can still be seen anew. Evelyn sits beside me in the car, her chin juts forward, opened-mouthed, as she dozes. Even her posture betrays how she is fighting and losing. It tears at me, each time she fumbles with the buttons on her cardigan or finds her keys in the freezer or drifts through the house at night like a phantom, unable to sleep. It is a new kind of heartache, watching her. But we don’t dwell, instead we look ahead by tracing a route she mapped years ago, dance a waltz, search for buried treasure, learn to speak French , line by line, like leaping from rock to rock, a way from here to there.
For me, there is no scrambling for greatness, no unanswered ambitions that surface, there is an unexpected relief in knowing what is done is done. The seeds planted, soil turned, and all I can do is enjoy what blooms. As I face it, my death is abstract, an idea, and as we get closer it shape-shifts and slips away from me. It is something I’ve always known is coming and yet I’ve never prepared for it. How do you prepare to cease to exist? And yet, here we are. October, with the crunch of golden leaves underfoot signaling our last fall, which will bring our last winter and final spring. Eight months to memorize the wrinkles around Evelyn’s knuckles like counting rings of an oak tree, to watch Rain’s swelling belly and await the kicks from my great-grandchild beneath her stretched skin, to smell the brine-soaked wind coming off the ocean as I cover the youngest plants with burlap to protect them from frost; eight months to immerse myself in this life, the only way I know how to prepare to die.
Evelyn wakes, eyes on the trees as we pass. I tap her thigh to get her attention, and say, “When we get back, you should see if Jane wants to come by and practice.”
She doesn’t turn toward me. “Practice? What for?”
My stomach plummets. “You don’t remember?”
“I remember.” She whips around, insulted. “But look at me, Joseph. Look around. It feels so silly.”
“It’s not silly.”
“I’m an old woman.”
I laugh at the claim, an identity she would not own except to win an argument. “And I’m an old man. So what?”
“No, I mean...” She fumbles for her words, frustrated. “Everything is so much bigger. I’ve lived a great life.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“It’s selfish. Everything... I’m selfish.” The news cycle a steady source of shame—loved ones desperate for closure, pleading for answers in the rubble, searching for meaning in the devastation, while Evelyn and I walk willingly into death.
“Giving up on your dream, what would that solve?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
I pause, prodding gently. “Do you still want to go through with it...with everything?”
She is quiet. “I don’t know.”
I offer, “We can wait and see how you feel.”
Her voice sharpens. “It would be too late by then.”
“We don’t have to decide now.”
She is silent. I press one final time, leaning dangerously over a precipice. “Either way, giving up the symphony doesn’t honor those families.”
“But choosing it. Deciding to do it. Isn’t it worse?” she asks, sounding strained.
I pause. “We can change our minds. We don’t have to do this.”
“ You don’t.”
“Neither do you.” A lame retort, our scales visibly uneven, both playing a losing game.
“All those people...they had no warning, no final year to live out their dreams. No time to call their families, to say goodbye. And here we are, dying at will. It’s not fair.”
“Nothing about this is fair,” I say, emotion creeping into my throat.
We pass two massive oaks marking the entrance, their leaves blazing reddish orange, and pull into a parking spot. Her fingers tremble on her thigh, although I can’t tell if it’s from her nerves or Parkinson’s; her fear of heights has stopped me from planning anything too daring before.
She has been on a plane before, big commercial aircrafts, but nothing like this. After retirement we booked a few trips for us, even a family vacation to Disney when the grandkids were young. Evelyn had always wanted to see California, the sunshine and waves of the Pacific calling her since Maelynn moved away, so we went one year, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge by bicycle, dipped our toes in the Pacific Ocean, swirled wine in glistening glasses in Sonoma, buttery and heady, or tasting of citrus, flowers, earth. California held a different memory for me, but for Evelyn, who had dreamed of seeing it, I went back. Before then, her feet had never left the ground and touched down somewhere completely new, she never watched the earth get smaller and smaller as she rose, weightless. She gripped my hand during takeoff, but once we were in the air, she pressed her palms against the glass, awed to be above the clouds.
The pilot guides us onto the tarmac, and hands out two leather aviator hats and goggles. Evelyn ties her long silver hair back and slips it on, flaps over her ears. I follow suit, and we both help guide her onto the stepstool, over the wing and into the seat behind the cockpit.
I scoot in close to her and grab her knee. “My love, if the hat is any indication, you’d have made an excellent pilot.”
She laughs. “Missed my calling,” and pulls the goggles over her eyes as the pilot starts the engine, the rumbling cutting off any further conversation, vibrating through my body. We give thumbs-up to indicate our readiness, and he begins to drive along the runway. Evelyn’s excitement and fear thrum in my own chest, her hand in mine, the tightest grip as we ease off the ground. We are bundled in heavy coats, grateful for the layers as we begin to climb, the air whipping past us a deafening static, like a radio between stations turned all the way up. Evelyn raises her arms above her, stretching to the sky, her mouth open in a laugh, the sound carried off in the wind.
We leave behind stretches of copper trees, follow an arc of gulls, the pilot pointing out inlets and secret coves, The Thimble Islands a craggy constellation in the distance. The clouds a sheet of cotton above, the sea a cerulean expanse below, and us, hand in hand, suspended between. When we land, our legs jelly and shaking, I feel like I could whoop, beat my chest, fly us back up only to dive out of that very plane, guide a parachute back safely to land, the thrill of it, of being alive. I see it in her too. The wild-eyed girl I knew from the beach, treading below, daring me to jump.
The girl who always wanted to fly away to Boston, to California. I’ve always been afraid to lose her, of what she would find, who she would become. Evelyn wants to fly away again one last time. And I’ll let her, because I know this time I can go with her, and together we can soar into the light.
A few nights later, we plan to have the family over for Thomas’s birthday. The morning of, we almost call off the celebration. Evelyn is irritable, her body aches, her tremor roaring. After lunch she gets some sleep, and she seems enough like herself when the children arrive that the evening feels as though it could be a normal night, in a normal year. We enjoy a delicious and simple dinner, a beef roast with mashed potatoes and green beans. Thomas didn’t want anything extravagant for his final birthday with us, as I don’t want anything extravagant in our final year. Just time with our family.
Violet digs out boxes of old photos, ones I hadn’t seen in ages, and we all crowd around the kitchen table, carrying bowls of warm apple crumble heaped with scoops of vanilla ice cream, already melting around the edges. We went to an apple orchard yesterday, picked a bushel of Macouns that we shined on our shirts and sampled as we strolled, so sweet and tart and perfectly crisp. Decades of taking our children and grandchildren there, climbing trees and racing down the rows, their grins at the crunch, sinking their teeth into the first satisfying bite, wiping their mouths on their sleeves.
“Jane, your hair!” Violet giggles as she slips a picture from the stack. “I forgot how big it used to be.”
“My hair?” Jane laughs. “What about your outfit?”
Patrick, the only one of Violet’s kids around to poke fun since the others are back at school, grabs the picture from Jane. “Mom. This is seriously embarrassing.”
Violet shrugs. “It was the sixties, sweetie. That was in, believe it or not.”
Evelyn meets my eyes and laughs. “I’m lucky we didn’t take many photos when we were young. Though Grandpa could tell you all kinds of stories. I was more the ugly duckling than the beautiful swan when I was little.”
“You were never the ugly duckling. But the swan was hiding a bit behind all the dirt and overalls.” I chuckle at the stack of black and whites. “Look at this. How young we all were.” I slide it over to Evelyn. It is one of the first photos we ever took together. Tommy, always the star, stood between us, his arms around us both. I was about thirteen, and already a head taller than Tommy, and although the image has faded, I could tell we were suntanned, our grins wide and genuine, not merely posed for the photograph.
I can’t help wonder what it would be like if he were still here, reminiscing and cracking jokes beside Evelyn. Losing him was realizing that a day went by when I didn’t think of him, and being racked with shame. How could I forget? Gradually, that day became two, and then three, and soon I could string together a week that wasn’t marked by the dull ache I carried. Missing him became the dust covering every surface, that floated in the air, unnoticeable unless I caught it in the right light, then it burst and refracted, glittering into view. A simple moment, like the first time Jane learned how to dive off the dock, shallow to the surface with her toes pointed, a shared glance between Evelyn and me— Tommy would’ve loved to see that . The infinite things he missed.
What a life we have built since; we never could have imagined it then. So much has changed; new stores and neighborhoods have popped up where I remember only fields and dirt roads. Like Hayes Farm, where we’d steal fistfuls of wild blackberries and cut through the pasture on our bikes to get to school, where now a coffee shop and pizza place stand. It shouldn’t surprise me, the land was sold many years ago, but every so often when I turn the corner I expect it to be there, somehow. That version of Stonybrook is so vivid, yet I can’t remember the color of the paint on the barn or if the blackberries were tart or sweet. I can almost hear Tommy’s whooping call from below at Captain’s Rock, and feel the hardened soles of my summertime feet, and somehow in this moment, Stonybrook is the same, as if it is only the two of us who have changed.
Jane riffles through the stack, then stops, her eyes softening. “Wow...look at this. Rain, Tony, here’s your future.”
Tony places a kiss on Rain’s shoulder, beaming, and peers at the photo. “I’ve never seen a picture of Rain as a baby before. Jane, you look so young.”
“I was so young. Nearly a baby myself.”
“Let me see.” Evelyn gestures for him to hand it over. A chubby two-year-old Rain, a dark mop of curls, wrapped in the skinniest arms. Jane back from California, her wild mane of hair filled half the frame, her eyes fixed on her daughter, whose little fists were blurred in motion.
“Well, I’m calling dibs on any old clothes. You guys had style.” Rain giggles, flipping through a stack until Jane swats her away from the photos.
“Who is this?” Connor asks, sliding a photo across the table to me, a young man in his twenties behind the front desk, an easy grin on his face, as he lounged in my chair. Sam. An unexpected tug of bitterness in my gut. The first and last time we hired a stranger to work with us, a face I had almost forgotten.
“Just an old employee.” I avoid Jane’s eyes, find another in the pile, a distraction. “I love this one.” I pass it around to Ann. “Thomas and his planes.”
Ann leans into Thomas and teases, “Seems like you took them very seriously.”
He squints closely at the photo. “That’s the Bell X-5 fighter jet. I loved building that thing. I wonder where it is now.”
Evelyn shrugs. “Probably in the attic along with the rest of the stuff from you kids. You’ll have to go through it all together, see what you want to keep.”
“Don’t say stuff like that, Mom,” Jane says, her eyes on the photos.
Thomas clears his throat. “I understand now, you know.” His face is solemn, gaze landing on Evelyn and me. “I didn’t before—I’m still not condoning it—but—” he grips Ann’s hand “—when I thought I lost you...god, I can’t imagine...” He looks at her, his eyes welling. “For a moment, I knew what it felt like...to lose the person you love more than life itself.”
My throat tightens, and all I can manage is, “Thank you, Thomas.”
A hush falls over the room, a seriousness I was hoping would not find us that evening. We don’t fight it, though. It is a part of our choice.
“I love this one,” Violet whispers, her eyes brimming with tears. Across from her, Connor visibly stiffens at her emotion and makes himself busy with another pile. It is a photo from our wedding; I run my fingers over the glossy finish. I can see the deep purple of the violets in Evelyn’s bouquet even though the image is black-and-white.
The night goes on that way, passing photographs and trading stories, the need to be together tangible. An entire history spoken in a glance between siblings, a laugh, as though recognizing ourselves in each other makes it all real, preserves the parts we fear losing. A pregnant Evelyn, no date inscribed on the back, the group trying to determine which child she carried. Photos of Mrs. Saunders, her signature tight-lipped smile and taut bun, first a grandmother and then a great-grandmother. There is one grainy picture of my parents, standing on the inn’s front stoop, my mother in her apron and my father looming above her, his arm over her shoulder. Violet and Connor’s wedding, Thomas and Ann’s... Violet pregnant in many of the pictures, with one child or another. All five grandchildren making a pyramid on the beach. Evelyn and I dancing at Rain and Tony’s wedding, our first grandchild and the only one we will see marry. Evelyn and I caught with our mouths open as we entered a restaurant, a surprise fiftieth wedding anniversary party the children threw. Fifty-six anniversaries in all, but most were never frozen for us in a photo. They were days spent marking the day in little moments between us, a touch, a kiss, a can you believe it , and how did we get so lucky , and wondering how another year passed without our permission.