Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
Evelyn
August 1973
The night Joseph and Jane’s plane is scheduled to land, I pace the foyer, sweltering in the August heat, checking the windows obsessively in search of a taxicab as guests pass through, oblivious to my agony. I keep vigil at the door, so resolute in my focus that the sudden crunch of the tires along the driveway startles me.
The cab stops at the edge of the walk, and the back door swings open. Joseph steps out with his leather suitcase. I wait for Jane to sidle out and join him in the thick and humid summer night, in the darkness made alive by buzzing cicadas, but nothing happens. The car hums, the waves crash in the distance, the air and trees stand still. Joseph shuts his door behind him and the cab backs up, disappears into the shadows, the steady crunch fading as it maneuvers down the driveway, and is gone.
My stomach lurches. I have seen him look that way once before, coming out of a car alone. Last time, I rushed to meet him, under the bluest summer sky. Last time, I threw my arms around him. Last time, it broke me.
Joseph remains a statue in the driveway, his grip on his suitcase limp. He doesn’t search the windows for me, or glance back at the retreating taxi, doesn’t seem to register he has arrived at all. He stands, shoulders stooped, staring at the shattered oyster shells beneath his feet. I press my palms against the cool metal screen, wanting to open it, to run to him, but I’m not sure he would see me if I did, not sure he would recognize my arms around his neck. So, I wait, frozen.
When he raises his gaze and meets mine, his face gives away nothing. He begins a labored march up the walkway, the rusted springs creak as I move to let him in. He enters the house the way a breeze sweeps through an open door, aimless and empty, a chill in its wake.
He disappears upstairs, and I find him perched on the edge of our bed, his suitcase untouched by his feet. I linger in the doorway, afraid to make my presence known. He leans down to untie his shoes, slips them off. Each movement arduous and painful. He looks older, worn and battered.
The silence pounds in my chest. He seems to be unaware of it entirely, as if he moves underwater. “Joseph,” I whisper, afraid to make noise, to startle him. “What happened?”
He looks at me as if noticing my presence for the first time. He drops his gaze and lines his shoes together, toe to toe and heel to heel, before he speaks.
“She’s doing drugs. Hard drugs. Heroin.”
A punch that levels me. My breath quickens.
My body weakens as he tells me what he saw. The shabby apartment. The mattress on the floor, drugs and debris littered the counters, the yells of the neighbors and the smell of rot and filth. How Jane was nearly unrecognizable. The man who brought her to California, his eyes bloodshot and his sickly smile. The raw and red needle pricks in the hollows of her elbows.
“And I couldn’t do anything.” He tears at his hair. “I couldn’t get her to come home.”
My limbs feel like they are made of bricks as I cross the room to sit beside him. I stroke his back, faking a sense of calm even as my stomach wrings. “This is not your fault. She isn’t a child...we can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to...even if we wish we could.”
He wrenches away from me, his voice ice. “You didn’t see this place. You didn’t see her. This isn’t about her being an adult. We fucked up, we lost her, she’s never coming back.”
It feels like I have been slapped. “You don’t blame me, do you?”
He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t answer.
I stammer, losing control. “Please tell me you don’t think this is my fault, because I already feel responsible and I couldn’t live with myself if you thought that. I couldn’t.”
He concedes, slamming his knuckles together between his knees. “It’s not your fault.”
I jolt to my feet, buoyed by my shame. “Yes, it is. I could have done more, I should’ve tried to fix things before she moved out, or while she was still in Boston. Should I go? I’ll go by myself. I’ll go right now.”
He shakes his head. “It won’t do any good... I’m her father. I’m supposed to protect her. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Well, it’s someone’s fault. Jane’s gone, okay? She’s never coming home, and she lives with some bastard who can’t support anything but a drug habit.” His voice is hoarse, like he had cried on the plane. I feel it rise again, acid in my throat. He coughs, wrung out. “The way she looked at me... You wouldn’t recognize her.”
I don’t know what to say, my mind a minefield of blame and imagined scenes of Jane, twiggy and strung out with a needle in her arm. I can’t make sense of it. Her face is a blur, a combination of people I have known, my daughter but not my daughter, the way in dreams faces never match the person they are supposed to be.
“She thinks you cheated on me.”
“What?” A jolt in my sternum, a knife pressed to my throat in the dark.
“With Sam, that summer.”
“What?”
“She heard you two together, after her birthday.”
I almost laugh, it’s so absurd. “What does she think she heard?”
“She heard him ask you to run away together to Paris, to travel, drink wine and make love .” His voice is twisted and bitter when he says it. My gut churns at the memory. Sam’s hand on my knee, the summer air thick with alcohol and smoke from the fire.
“Did she happen to hear what I said back?” I am haughty with the truth, the claims an impeachment I never saw coming.
“No. But I told her nothing happened.”
“Do you think I cheated on you?” The simmering tension between us since Jane left hits me with force. A wall of heat I step into, barely able to breathe, questions answered with a cock of this gun, my racing heart. “ Oh my god . You’ve been thinking this for years, haven’t you?”
“No. I haven’t.” His voice is quiet, firm.
“I didn’t. I would never.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
My voice raises an octave, incredulous. “Because it was so ridiculous! I told him he was completely off base, that it was incredibly inappropriate, that I was happily married, that he was a kid. It was a non-event.”
“But why did he think he could ask?” I can hear his hurt now, the question he held back.
A rock in my throat. “I don’t know.”
“He must have thought there was a chance.”
“There was no chance.”
“But there must have been something he picked up on.” His face is creased, pained. “I felt it, you know.”
“Felt what?” My face is hot with this, the real accusation.
“Something between you.”
I feel sick, something buried clawing to the surface. “This is why I never said anything. I didn’t want you to read into something that wasn’t there. I was so afraid it would create doubt...that it would make you question everything.”
“You should have told me.”
“I see that now.” I touch his elbow, and he doesn’t react, as though I am making a peace offering to the bed frame.
“What was it, then, between you?”
“Nothing—” I insist.
“Don’t insult me, please.”
“It wasn’t anything romantic, Joseph. I swear.” I fumble, trying to make sense of the escapist summer I suppressed so effectively it was nearly forgotten. “It was...god, this is so humiliating.”
He says nothing, eyes on his shoes.
“He thought I was somebody . Interesting. He talked to me about travel, and music, and it was... I don’t know, nice, to pretend I was something other than a mother. More than an innkeeper. He made me feel like it wasn’t too late.”
“I think you’re interesting. I could talk to you about that stuff.” His voice is gruff.
“I can’t explain it.” I don’t know how to make him see, without insulting him, without digging a deeper trench between us that will bury me alive. “I was different, around him. I liked who I was, or I was pretending to be someone I wished I was. I don’t know. But it was never more than that.” I inhale, gathering steam. “Sam completely misread the situation. Leaving you was so far from the realm of possibility that I never told you, because telling you made it probable, somehow. Something I invited in.” I backpedal, wanting to get it right. “Which, maybe I did, but I didn’t mean to. I was so horrified and embarrassed that he thought he could come on to me. I kept going over every interaction and analyzing what I did, how I should’ve acted differently. I’m so, so sorry. I should’ve told you. I didn’t want to make something out of nothing. But you’re right. You deserved to know.” The humiliation rises again, a metronome of shame, ticking away the years since I last spoke to my daughter. “God, Jane really thinks I cheated on you? All this time. Jesus .”
“I think it’s only a part of the bigger issue we’re dealing with here.”
“What can I do?” My nose prickles, tears threatening.
“I don’t know.”
I feel so drained, the silence stretching between us like the miles he has traveled to land home in defeat, the years we have shared while he carried this secret. “I’m so sorry, Joseph. I hope you can find a way to forgive me.”
“Nothing happened,” he says, without warmth. “There’s nothing to forgive.”
“But I should’ve told you, you shouldn’t have had to question something like that.”
“I’m sorry I don’t make you feel interesting...” An apology that feels like an end of a rope, a wounded man with nothing left to lose.
“No, no, no. Don’t twist this around.” I shake my head, stammering, “Yell at me, slam the door, tell me to sleep on the couch tonight. Do something.”
“I’m not angry with you, Evelyn.” His words a sigh, no fight left.
“You should be. I’m angry with me.”
“It was so many years ago.”
Hot tears fall down my cheeks. “I’m so ashamed...you actually thought I could be with someone else? That I’d ever consider it?”
“I wanted you to have a choice, an out, if you wanted it.”
My chin quivers, trying to stifle everything. “I’m so sorry.”
“I wish I could’ve fulfilled that need in you, I don’t know, maybe we could’ve—”
“What? Sold the inn?”
His silence is an answer. “I’m sorry too.”
There is nothing left to say. We sit in the half dark, not touching. Eventually we force ourselves into bed, exhausted with regret and shame, but neither of us sleep.
November 1975
I fold bleached towels, making a mental checklist of everything we need for Thanksgiving. Most guests are in town to visit family so we don’t offer a full dinner, but I bake pumpkin bread for breakfast, butter spread across its crumbly surface, and set out hot spiced cider with orange slices in the foyer each evening. We have a small celebration, with my mother and Violet and Thomas, Thomas home only for the day, and Violet on holiday break from Tufts University.
I am desperate for their visit. Since Thomas started his job in Manhattan we barely see him, and although Violet is a junior in college I still expect to see her in her room, ankles crossed as she lies on her stomach on her bed, flipping through a magazine. It was easier to begin thinking of it as Violet’s room, instead of their room, and sometimes in my mind’s eye I can convince myself there is only one bed, instead of the pair of twins that sit empty and perfectly made, like tombs before me. The letters we’ve sent, money, phone messages, all unanswered. The nights we’ve sobbed until we’re spent, clawing at this new reality, this nightmare we want to rescue Jane from, but can’t. Sometimes it’s the only way I can pass by their room at all. It is too hard to grieve her every day, to know that at any moment we could get a call that would bring us to our knees.
Joseph sits at the kitchen table going over the books and double-checking reservations when the phone rings. He glances at my lap full of linens and reluctantly reaches for the phone beside him. “Thanks for calling the Oyster Shell Inn, how may I help you?”
There is a pause.
“Jane?”
Joseph sits upright, the reservation calendar falls into his lap.
I drop the towel and gape at him in disbelief. After two years of silence since Joseph traveled to California—could it really be?
His voice cracks. “Of course you can, sweetheart. Of course you can...” Another pause. “No, no, don’t worry, we’ll book it, we’ll take care of everything.” Jane’s muffled voice on the other end. “Okay. Talk to you soon. We love you.”
He places the phone back on the receiver, and stares at it, as if he heard from a ghost. His eyes brim with tears when they meet mine, his lips parted in shock.
“Jane’s coming home.” He leaps to his feet, tips his chair over in his haste, and I jump up, scattering the laundry to the floor. He grabs me, wraps me in a hug as the strength goes out of my legs.
“Are you sure?” I grip him back, unable to believe it can be true.
“Yes. She’s coming home.” His embrace fills me. For two years, since he returned from California, since we talked about Sam, he has been a gust of wind. Silent except for the sounds he made by rustling through the leaves of the house. Coffee brewing. Shower running. Newspaper crinkling. Keys jingling. Staircase creaking. Car starting. Nothing I could say or do, no attempts at comforting conversation, gentle touch, giving him space, brought him back. But now he lifts me off the ground, spins me in dizzying circles. “Jane’s coming home!”
“She said seven fifteen, right?” I pick at the skin around my nails, an ugly stress habit that’s manifested since Jane left. I glance at the clock. It’s not even six and we are nearly there.
“Seven fifteen.” Joseph releases his grip on the steering wheel to clutch my hand, not as much to comfort me as to prevent me from tearing my cuticles. “Stop. It will be fine.”
I nod but my throat is dry. Nothing about this is fine.
Outside it’s so dark it could be midnight. The November sun sets earlier each day, signaling the slow creep of winter’s chill that will linger long into spring. I button my wool coat—the heater on the passenger side is broken, the vent blows cool air until I slide it closed. Joseph said he would fix it but he has been so distracted; he must have forgotten. I don’t bring it up. “Desperado” by the Eagles plays on the radio, and the lyrics are so apt a lump forms in my throat. Joseph doesn’t pay attention to lyrics, music wafts through his eardrums to his passive enjoyment, so the irony is mine alone to weather until the song is over.
We pass a sign for Bradley Airport and Joseph gets into the right lane, anticipating the exit. I tuck my fingers under my thighs as much to stop my nervous tic as for warmth. It’s been so long since he has held my hand in a moment of affection. Been so long since he drew me in for a long, spontaneous kiss or wrapped his arms around me, nuzzling my neck from behind as I washed up from dinner. It’s as though he never came back from California, and only his shadow, an empty body with his likeness, returned.
We circle the parking lot until we find a spot, an hour early. We left the house long before we needed to, the afternoon spent puttering and pacing. Balls of nervous energy, anxious to get there, to see Jane. Now that we’re here, planes gliding onto the tarmac, I’m terrified. What if she hasn’t forgiven me for all those years we spent in silence? What if she blames me for how her life has turned out? Then a thought shames me as it flits across my mind, her skin, pockmarked and raw— what if she isn’t clean? As we walk toward the terminal, I pick at my cuticles again. Joseph reaches for my hand, interlocks his fingers with mine. This time, he rubs my knuckles with his thumbs, and my breathing slows.
We stand under a sign labeled Arrivals and wait, as the minutes creep by. Joseph puts his arm around me and I lean against him, grateful. With every crowd that appears and dissipates my heart races, but each time it is a sea of strangers. I glance at Joseph’s watch. Seven twenty-five. Another throng presses through the gates. Businessmen. A family in matching T-shirts, California glittering loudly over the Golden Gate Bridge. Flight attendants dressed in blue uniforms. And then in the distance, behind swathes of jostling limbs, there she is.
Jane has a tattered bag slung over her shoulder. The Vietnam War is over, but she looks like she walked straight out of a protest. Her hair is long and wild, T-shirt and jeans worn, and Joseph was right. She is skinnier than I’ve ever seen, her arms and legs toothpicks. I prepare myself for Jane to greet Joseph first, for her to be reserved or even cold to me. She scans the crowd but doesn’t see us yet, her head swivels anxiously. We rush toward her and Joseph calls her name. She turns at the sound and spots us, elbowing our way toward her. As we approach, my breath catches. There, holding her hand, hidden from view behind her knees, emerges a little girl.
When Jane sees us, she heaves the girl onto her hip and barrels toward me, gripping me tight, this child— Jane’s child? —wedged helplessly between us.
“Mom... I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry,” she sobs, her shoulders heave.
I stroke her hair, my heart bursting and throat thick with tears, and say, “I’m sorry too. I’m sorry.” She doesn’t smell like cigarettes or alcohol or pot or grime, just faintly of sweat and unfamiliar scents I can’t name, wisps of her old life I’ll never know. The little girl unmistakably Jane’s, the spitting image of the toddler I carried on my own hip a lifetime ago, an impossibility I know to be true. I embrace them both, too stunned to speak.
Jane pulls back, composing herself. “Mom, Dad, meet Rain. Your granddaughter.”
The little girl peeks at us from behind a curtain of curls, her face pressed into Jane’s shoulder. Granddaughter. Rain. How big she is, my granddaughter ... I have a granddaughter.
“Jane, oh my god, Jane.” Joseph, tears in his eyes, reaches a gentle hand out for a high five. Rain tentatively swats at his hand, smiles.
“Jane, I...” Every conversation I had rehearsed null and void in the light of her, Jane’s baby girl. Except this. “We are...so glad you’re home.”
We usher them to the car, and on the drive my fear resurfaces. We got what we prayed for, our daughter returned to us, alive, safe. And more than we ever imagined, a granddaughter, all of fourteen months old, a miracle, a gift, perhaps even a reason for all of it.
But I have no idea where we go from here.