Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Evelyn
May 1970
I don’t know how it all got so far with Jane, so tense. There wasn’t one incident I can point to, an argument that crossed the line, no cruel lash of a tongue I could apologize for. There was a fight about her graduation back in the spring, but that wasn’t what unraveled us. It wasn’t because she blasted the Rolling Stones or grew her hair to her waist or came home after curfew with red eyes or hung with a questionable crowd, although that’s probably what she thought. I trusted her to grow out of it, to experiment and make mistakes on the way to finding her own path. I had a mother who didn’t agree with my choices. I know what it’s like to be misunderstood, cast off, because I didn’t fit the mold of the daughter she wanted. It wasn’t because she was desperate to leave home as soon as she turned eighteen; I’ve also been young, trapped, bursting to be free. It was more subtle, more insidious, harder to name.
I don’t even think Joseph understands. I’ve never been able to articulate it; he recognized the tension but tread lightly on the surface, chose to see the best of us both, to tiptoe between our camps negotiating peace. She didn’t treat him like she treated me; he wasn’t the target of her scorn. He didn’t rise to her judgment and overact, as I did, further cementing our fissures. He was safe, impossible to provoke, and he never pretended to be what he was not.
It was our constant clashes that uncovered my deepest insecurities. It was the way she began to see the world, focused on its darkness, on war, on corruption and scandal. Her curiosity edged toward obsession, her discontentment spiraled into outrage and, somehow, I was at the center of it all, a suburban mother who sold out, who gave up on my aspirations, who ran a bed-and-breakfast in a seaside town, completely removed from the tragedies she saw plastered on the front-page news. I was the embodiment of the problem, the one who could turn it all off by switching the channel, who buried myself in domestic pursuits so as not to feel anything.
I grew flustered beneath the weight of her judgment, wounded when she looked at me with disapproval, when she told me I didn’t understand, I didn’t care, that I was just like everyone else. She peeled me open and I was left raw and pulsing and ashamed, so I dug my claws into the only power I had. The ability to make rules, to punish, to forbid, and each time she slammed the door and I caught myself in the mirror I looked ugly and haggard and on the brink of madness. But to agree with her, to admit I was exactly as she saw me, was to disappear completely. So I flexed my talons and she tore at the walls until she could escape. And when she was gone, so was a part of me.
Jane moved to Boston nearly a year ago, right after her eighteenth birthday, and has had little contact with us since. We try to visit, but she always makes up excuses about why we can’t. She skipped Thanksgiving entirely, claiming she had to work. We haven’t seen her since Christmas. When she came home, she was skinnier than when she had left, her hair nearly to her waist. She was distant and strange, barely eating, ignoring me, and she disappeared as soon as dinner was over to catch an early train.
Since she moved out, Joseph and I have been two gears out of line, jamming and stalling, getting nowhere. All that’s unsaid is palpable in our deliberate movements, two ships giving each other wide berths as we pass—he rushes to brush his teeth so he can leave the bathroom before I enter it, I stumble through making coffee before he wakes and leave him to sip it alone in the kitchen—and I don’t know how to fix something not quite broken.
Since last summer, since Sam, even as I hate myself for it, my unrest keeps surfacing, tap-tapping against the glass encasing our model marriage, a diorama of a good life. I can’t explain why, and now, with Jane not speaking to us, the raps are louder still, stirring old longings for something new. Baiting me to hound Joseph, baring their teeth. We lie in bed, another night when we barely touch, our bodies exhausted and our conversations strained. I turn away after we click off our lamps, and can’t help but mutter, “We keep saying we’re going to plan something, and then the inn gets booked up, and we never do.”
He rolls onto his back, eyes on the ceiling, his patience worn thin. “If you want to travel, go for it. I can’t have this conversation anymore.”
“I hate when you do this. Pretend like I can just get up and go anytime, like that’s a real option.”
“I’ve never stopped you.”
“I’m just saying, our lives could be over in an instant...and how have we spent them?” A conversation he never understands, the ticking clock only I hear. In two months I’ll be forty-five, and it seems impossible to be halfway through this entire life, when I feel like I’ve barely begun. I imagine fifty years, then sixty and seventy, and the overwhelming feeling that anything worth doing should already have been done creeps thick into my throat.
Joseph clicks his lamp back on, sitting up. “What do you want from me? You say you want to see the world. I tell you to book a trip somewhere, and it’s not enough.”
I toy with the edge of the quilt. “I don’t want to just take a vacation. That’s not it.”
“What is it, then?”
“I want to have lived.”
Joseph laughs cruelly, slamming himself back down on the pillow. “Well, I must be a fool because I think we have a pretty great life here.”
I whisper, “It is a good life.”
He raises his voice. “Oh, god damn it, Evelyn. Maybe it’s me you don’t want then, huh? Maybe it’s me that’s not enough for you?”
An opening, my chance now, to assure him. To say, last summer we were all in a fog, we weren’t ourselves, I certainly wasn’t. To tell him I’m relieved it’s over, relieved Sam is gone, but I can’t seem to shake the guilt from that night, the things I should tell him but don’t. The explanation would create a bigger chasm, leaving a rippling of unrest and uncertainty in its wake.
I burrow into my pillow, cowering from this, the sliver he is prying out, a truth that isn’t quite one. “Don’t say that.”
He takes a deep breath, clearly trying to calm himself. “We have responsibilities. We have the inn, the kids.”
“I know.” I soften.
“I’m trying to give you what you want.” A nice sentiment, the delivery barbed.
“I know. What do you want?” I inch toward him, imploring him to confess something new, desperate not to be the only one with my eyes on the horizon, sending up flares for rescue.
“You know what I want.” He stiffens at the question. My wishes a personal affront to him, an insult to the life we’ve built.
His predictability incenses me, flint striking steel. “You always say that. But deep down, you must want more?”
“Our little life here with you, raising our family, that’s my dream. It’s boring to you, I know. I’m boring, loving you.” He fumes. “You’re so obsessed with wanting more, you can’t see what’s right in front of you.”
I tuck my arms tight beneath me, away from the cold space between us, no way to make him understand. This stalemate between us, the parts of me I wish he found charming, sexy, admirable, instead of my biggest flaw, the barrier to my contentment. The first time I can’t see a way through. The coast we built our lives along has become our battleground. It’s never been Joseph I wanted to leave, but I can’t stand being his second wife, the mistress to his inn, shackled by his inheritance, the ghosts of his parents, his duty disguised as a promised land.
I’m forty-five today, and all I can do is stare at the empty chair where Jane should be, my lips in a tight line. With no explanation, no call, she doesn’t show, and it feels like a fire-tipped arrow shot into our castle, intended to hurt me, to prove how little she cares, standing back in the distance, eyeing the flames. After the dishes are cleared, my mother makes a few comments about how she is “not surprised” Jane did not come and how we should have “nipped her behavior in the bud.” I take the deepest breath and exhale purposefully, eyes sharpened on my mother. She sees herself out, and Violet and Thomas make themselves busy in their rooms. I’m silent the rest of the night, scrubbing pots and swatting Joseph away when he tries to help.
“Please, Joseph.” I rub a soapy wrist over my forehead, brushing the hair out of my eyes. “Leave me alone.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“I know. But I can’t control how I lash out right now, so I am asking you to go away and when I come to bed, I swear I’ll be fine.”
He leaves me at the sink to take my frustrations out on a casserole dish with stubborn cheese residue. From the window I watch him hose down the pile of beach chairs left outside by the family from Jersey before retiring for the night. I come to bed a while later, calmer but bleary, my steps weighted. I can’t focus, my toothpaste falls off my brush and into the sink twice before I give up, throw it in the drawer and crawl into bed beside Joseph, sheets kicked to his feet in the thick summer air.
My thoughts race as I stare at the ceiling fan, surprising myself with the question that emerges, the insecurity that sifts to the surface as a riddle, a test. “Joseph, why do you love me?”
“You know why I love you.” His answer is quick, dismissive.
“No, I don’t.” I exhale, slow and controlled, concentrating on keeping still, composed. A tear escapes down my cheek. “I really don’t understand.” I turn toward him, miserable and selfish and unlovable. A mother on the verge of losing her own daughter, as though a daughter is a thing that can be lost, like a set of keys, when all I wanted, all I tried, was to be the kind of mother I had always craved.
He stumbles through an answer, caught off guard. “I love you because you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved, the only woman I’ll ever love.”
“That doesn’t answer the question. It doesn’t tell me why.” I’m pathetic now, a dog begging to be petted, to be told I am a good girl, worthy of all of the chances he’s given me. But I need to hear it, need to know I didn’t trick him somehow into chasing after me, for waiting me out, for his endless patience and confidence in this selfish person that’s proven herself unworthy of his love. As though my life in Stonybrook was an opening act to all that still lay ahead, merely biding time until my true potential would be discovered, an excavated jewel. A story folks would tell one day, the tale of the woman who once ran that inn, right there, who went on to do so much more. Not the story that projects itself in my mind, a sad old wretch, rocking alone on this very porch, who chased away the only good and true things she had ever known.
“There are so many reasons I love you, I could probably list them, but the truth is I can’t help it. I never could. I love you because you have this light in you...” I begin to cry, and he strokes my hair. “People are drawn to you, I have always been, you’re a magnetic force. You’re a dreamer and a fighter with more heart than anyone I have ever met.”
I can’t take it in, even though I pleaded for it, this gushing affection I need to plug with something thorned. “Then why do I have a daughter who hates me?”
He slides closer, putting an arm around me. “She doesn’t hate you, she’s a teenager, trying to find her way.”
“But I am an adult. I shouldn’t have let her leave without saying goodbye, like my mother... I hate myself for that. I shouldn’t have let our stupid arguments turn into something bigger. I want to visit, but she won’t talk to me, she just hangs up. What am I supposed to do?”
“Why don’t I go see her this weekend? Maybe she’ll talk to me. I’ll tell her you need to work things out, that she can’t ignore you. She may be an adult now, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t our daughter.”
I nod, my cheek wet on his chest. “And tell her I love her, okay? Tell her I want her in my life. She’s my first baby for god’s sake. How can she not know how much I love her?”
How much I love you too. I want to say. I’m sorry, to you too. But I don’t, Jane the only territory I can breach while balancing this tightrope between us.
“I’ll tell her. I’ll tell her,” he says and pulls me close like hushing an upset child, muttering words of comfort and assurances, prayers to false gods to keep her safe.
Joseph
I drive up to Boston, Jane’s address in my pocket. I haven’t been to the place before, but Jane wrote it down and left it on our dresser in lieu of a goodbye. Part of me is afraid of what I’ll find, my stomach a knot when I arrive at her apartment in Brighton, on the outskirts of Boston. The thick stench of pot seeps out to the creaky front steps, unnerving me.
I knock on the door, and a muffled voice calls out, “Come in.”
I turn the knob and feel dizzy, the room hazy with smoke. A girl I don’t recognize sits on the sagging couch, braless in a tank top and underwear.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” I mutter, averting my gaze. “I think I have the wrong place. I’m looking for my daughter Jane.”
The girl squints at me, disturbed by the daylight streaming through the open door. “No, you’re not wrong, man. Jane lives here. She’s working. I think. She should be back anytime now. Sit. You can hang and wait for her.” She slides over on the couch, making no move to cover herself up.
“No. It’s okay,” I protest, turning to go. “Tell her that her dad stopped by.” I shut the door behind me, short of breath. Defeated, I make my way down the steps to head back to my car and nearly bump into Jane, startling us both. I reach for her elbow, paranoid by what I found, filled with an irrational fear she will run from the sight of me.
“What the hell, Dad?” She wrenches away.
“I saw your roommate in there. I saw the drugs. You’re coming home.”
She laughs, and it sounds strange. “Relax. That’s Sheri. She’s not my roommate. She’s a friend, crashing with us for a little. But don’t worry. I’m working, see?” She points to her outfit, tiny shorts and a low-cut top. I give a blank stare. “Bartending.”
I drop my voice, trying to calm down. “I am not comfortable with this, Jane.”
“Oh okay , you can live with Mom,” she mocks. “But this you’re not comfortable with.”
“This thing, between you and you mother—”
“She never told you, did she?” She cocks her head, daring me. “Go home, go ahead, ask her what happened on my birthday.”
I never knew what happened after I went to bed that night. Evelyn never brought it up, Sam left. In my mind, that strange summer had been exorcized with the changing leaves. The conscious decision I made, no matter how it hurt, to trust her. To let her go. To let her choose me. To prove our life together was what she really wanted. Her presence in our bed later that night was my answer, her thighs cool against mine as she slipped beneath the sheets, smelling of smoke from the fire, careful not to wake me as I feigned sleep.
“What are you talking about?”
“I saw them together, okay?” Her eyes are shiny with tears, but her jaw is set, furious.
I keep my voice even. Evelyn would have told me if anything happened. I am sure of it. “What did you think you saw?”
“ Think I saw? I was standing right there.” She’s crying now, angry tears she bats away. “Sam asked her to run away to Paris with him. He had his hand on her knee, and they were leaning in close, and he said they could go, and they could drink wine, and play music and make love .” She spits the last part out, a bitter poison.
Her words a sheet of ice. I can’t speak, can’t respond. It couldn’t be. Evelyn would have told me. She didn’t leave, she came to bed, there must be something Jane didn’t understand, didn’t see, but I can’t grasp any of this, can’t believe Evelyn would have kept this from me, unless, unless...a part of her wanted to go.
“You knew, didn’t you? You knew, and you stayed...” She backs away, horrified.
I can’t explain, can’t find the words to tell her I did know, in a way. Not about Sam’s proposition, or any of the details, but the energy I felt between them when I was near. She steps into her apartment, her eyes dark. “Then you’re just as bad as she is.” And closes the door.
Evelyn
July 1973
Food has always been my favorite part of any celebration, the only piece that isn’t ruined by loss. When the room is quiet because everyone is eating, it’s harder to tell there are voices missing. Joseph tries desperately to get the conversation started, my birthday dinner soundtrack currently the scrape of forks. “Thomas, how are your classes?”
Thomas has opted to stay in New York and take summer classes to graduate on time, juggling a double major in business and finance. He replies, “Challenging.” A nonanswer.
I gaze at him, my only son. How unlike his namesake he seems, although it strikes me that Thomas is about the age Tommy was when we said goodbye at the train station the last time. Thomas sits at the table like a breath of air, necessary, steady, but nothing that draws attention. He cuts his steak with precision into bite-size pieces, places it smoothly into his mouth. His etiquette was not taught. It is discipline, masked by politeness. Tommy used to hold his steak knife like a saw, he’d tear through the meat and toss it into his mouth between boisterous laughs, wiping his chin with the back of his wrist. Then, he’d smile or wink, food tucked into the side of his cheek, and any faux pas was forgiven.
Tommy didn’t grow older with us in my mind, but the image I have of him still seems older than me, somehow. Even as I’ve lived far past any age he had ever been. Frozen in our last moments together, at nineteen, he seems older than I feel, tonight, at forty-eight. Missing my brother became a low hum vibrating below the surface. I could hear it if I listened close, but mostly the throbs were masked by my heartbeat. I began to lose the image of his face first, the exactness of it, the sharpness of the details. Was his freckle on the left side of his chin, or the right? Were his eyes more gray or blue?
Then, it was the things I remembered him saying. Had he ever said them at all? One evening when the kids were little and catching fireflies as the sun faded low in the sky, Male fireflies each have their own light pattern, you know , echoed in my mind. But who had said it so many years ago? Was it Joseph? Tommy? The three of us were kids ourselves then, sitting on the dock, the air cooling around us, when fireflies began to flicker across the dunes. Something about the way the males attract the females, I couldn’t remember. Male fireflies each have their own light pattern, you know. So silly, so insignificant, but I wanted to remember. I wanted to put a voice to the words in my head. I heard it in Tommy’s first, then Joseph’s, but neither sounded right. Had I been the one to say it? Was it something I had known on my own?
“Are you enjoying them?” Joseph tries again.
Thomas shrugs. “I’m paying for them to be challenging.”
Poor Joseph—no amount of prodding is going to open Thomas up these days. Becoming a pilot was the only thing we could get him to talk about before; he was obsessed with learning what kept jets in flight, how they were put together, who tested new designs. We can’t get him to talk about much of anything anymore. Not since the doctors found the murmur in his heart . The air force denied his application; he would never be able to serve.
After his physical I found the posters from his room, plastered with jets and helicopters, as I tossed out the trash. They were viciously ripped and torn; it was so unlike Thomas, destroyed so violently it unnerved me. All I wanted was to collect them in my arms, unfurl them and flatten them under the heaviest books, tape the pieces back in place and press them onto his walls. Put his dreams back together, make them real once more. But I couldn’t. And he wouldn’t talk about it, no matter how we tried. Instead he retreated into his room, pushed himself to a breaking point. Get into college. Study harder. Outwork everyone. Outwork himself. He slipped farther away, applied to NYU and left a few months later.
Joseph sighs. “Well, then, I guess you’re getting your money’s worth.”
I miss baby Thomas waving his pudgy fists so I could wipe them, those round cheeks and big eyes. He needed me for everything when he was a toddler. Now he needs me for nothing. He is only here tonight because he knows it would hurt me if he missed it; he has seen what Jane not coming home has done to us all. He is not cruel, although it is hard to know how he feels most of the time. I understand what the heart murmur meant for him, for his future, for his life, but he found his own way, a new path in New York. Still, I can’t get him to talk without asking a question; I can’t get him to laugh with anything more than politeness.
Joseph tries Violet, her yellow dress a glaring contrast to her mood tonight, uncharacteristically subdued, verging on somber. “And who are we going on a date with this weekend?”
“Funny, Dad.” Violet wrinkles her nose at him. She’s seventeen now, and completely unaware of how stunning she’s become. Joseph says she takes after me, and physically, maybe, we have similar frames and hair. But she is comfortable in her skin in ways I never was, and her personality is all Joseph; both kinder and more giving than I have ever been.
“I didn’t mean for it to be funny. I want to get to know these young men. The only one I ever really met was...what was his name? David?”
“Ugh, David?” She stabs at her potatoes, agitated. “Just because we went on a few dates doesn’t mean he was The One.”
Violet is never shy about her affection for the boys she likes, although they try to steal their kisses under cover of the front porch. Giddiness pours out of her with each, she’ll lean her head against their shoulders, trace her fingertips along their arms. Then she finds some fatal flaw and won’t see them again. Soon, a new boy knocks on our door. Joseph worries about how often they come and go. I tell him we should be glad she isn’t too serious with anyone at her age. Maybe we can protect her longer, from mourning her first love, from feeling taken advantage of. But I worry too. What is she searching for?
Thomas sneers as he glances up from his plate. “Vi, you need to realize the world is not waiting around to hand you a fairy tale.”
“Oh yeah, and how many girlfriends have you had?”
Thomas glares at her and takes a bite of steak.
I raise my eyebrows. “Your brother has a point. It’s great to have high standards, honey, and you have all the time in the world to figure it out, but we want to be sure what you’re looking for is...real.”
Violet pouts. “Dad gave you the fairy tale.”
I nearly laugh. Joseph, who works late on projects around the Oyster Shell to avoid me, his dinner plate wrapped in plastic wrap and left in the refrigerator, reheated after Violet and I eat. Coming upstairs after dark, exhausted and falling asleep without saying much more than good night. My body more used to the space between us than the warmth of his touch, our conversations limited to updates and logistics, guests checking in early, towels that need bleaching, items to add to the grocery list. He wakes before dawn and fumbles in the dark to get dressed, and I’m left under the covers, pretending to sleep, wondering how we got so off track.
I point my fork at her to get her attention. “There was a lot more to it than the fairy-tale parts, and we were lucky to find each other so young and last through all we did.” The false assurances in my voice, wanting to show her the way, but not worry her, our hopeless romantic daughter not privy to the ways we’ve come undone. “It’s not always easy.”
Thomas, who has clearly had enough of this conversation, changes the subject. “Has anyone heard from Jane?”
We haven’t seen Jane in three years. The last we heard was a letter with a return address in San Francisco, letting us know she moved from Boston to California. It feels so strange; her absence from the table is as striking as her presence. Celebrations feel pretend without her, performances of a happy family. I shake my head.
“Sorry, Mom,” Violet murmurs.
“It’s alright, sweetheart.”
But it’s not. I can’t stop staring at Jane’s empty chair. I miss my daughter. I know she is trying to find her way in this world, but I don’t know why that means pushing us out of it. Pushing me out of it. I don’t know if the path she has taken will be clear enough for her to trace home, but I don’t want to talk about it, don’t think I could speak without wondering aloud about her. What is she doing? Is she safe? Has she eaten? Is she working? Does she have enough money? When will I see her again? A primal panic, like when I placed my wrist near her newborn mouth, compulsively checking her breath.
Joseph went to visit her once, when she still lived in Boston. He was short with me when he got home, relayed only the barest information: she lived with roommates, worked in a bar, she seemed fine. But his shoulders hunched with worry, he shrugged me off when I pressed for details. It stung, how I couldn’t scratch below the surface, sure he blamed me for Jane leaving on such bad terms. And ever since, he’s been strange. Both of us avoiding conversations to avoid fights, burrs that dig in, carried through our day.
Thomas heads out tomorrow morning by train, back to New York. Violet has only this last summer home before she leaves for college, a summer of dates and stolen front-porch kisses. Soon they will both be out of the house. I don’t know if Jane’s absence will sting less or more when it is only Joseph and me again. The inn, full of strangers and still so empty.
After dinner, Thomas will stay in his childhood room once more. Violet hugs Joseph and me before retreating for the night. I wonder if Thomas will consider his blank walls and remember what used to cover them. I wonder if tonight he will dream of fighter jets and parachutes, or if the siren’s song of the train to Manhattan will be the lullaby that rocks him to sleep.