Chapter 4 Eloise
Eloise
I think we all evolve over the course of our lives.
We are a child, an adult, a parent. We painstakingly remake ourselves from students into professionals.
We accumulate labels: daughter, wife, widow, orphan.
We become mirrors for some people, and magnets for others.
We get polished and sanded by our encounters with the world.
Nobody leaves this life the same way they started.
My own journey hasn’t been a linear one by any means.
But sometimes I wonder, had that path been straighter, would I still have wound up here, somehow?
If I hadn’t tried to kill myself, would I value my existence as much as I do?
If I’d never lost possession of my own mind, would I recognize the power in being able to speak my truth?
I have been so many women.
The Evangelical rebel. The grieving sister. The runaway.
The wide--eyed college student. The lover. The wife.
The terrified mother. The slave to a delusion. The victim of attempted suicide.
The liar. The truth teller.
The grandmother.
Eloise.
Georgia.
Right now, I am all of them at once.
When Evie opens the door, I see boxes behind her, stacked and taped and labeled. She looks pale and skittish. She looks like she has been expecting me, although it’s been almost a week since Molly told me what she revealed at their home.
She doesn’t say a word. Instead, after a moment, she leaves the door wide--open and walks inside, expecting me to follow.
“Where’s Adam?” I ask, and she flinches the tiniest bit.
“I don’t know,” Evie says. “We agreed that I’d move out by this weekend.”
I sit on the edge of a love seat. “Where are you going to go?”
She laughs mirthlessly. “Who knows. It’s not like I’ve ever had a family whose arms I could go running back to, is it?”
I watch her stack several books into a box. “You know, I thought of you like a sister.” I suddenly see us years ago, remembering the way she had hooked her pinkie finger into mine. Sisters before misters.
“But you lied to me, Evie.”
“You’re kidding, right? You lied first, Eloise. You and me against the world? Bullshit.”
I had not planned to fall in love with Adam; it had been a force I couldn’t resist. I let myself believe that justified the fallout. “I never meant to hurt you.”
She lifts her face to mine. “Then you should understand I never meant to hurt you, either.”
“I can forgive you for that,” I tell her.
“But I can’t forgive you for making me think the worst of myself.
” It was that falsely planted fact—-I tried to kill my child—-that convinced me Molly would be better off without me.
It was my best friend telling me I had nearly committed murder that drove me over a bridge, onto a bus, into hiding for a quarter of a century.
“I didn’t really have a choice,” Evie says. “Not when Adam was useless and you weren’t in your right mind. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“None of that justifies lying to me about trying to drown my own baby.”
She looks at me. “Is it a lie,” Evie asks, “if you so easily believed it was true?”
There is no such thing as the truth. There’s a narrative that a majority of people believe and agree upon. My truth, back then, was not Evie’s truth. My truth now is not hers, either.
I draw myself up from the love seat. “Goodbye, Evie,” I say, walking toward the front door.
Her voice stops me. “He loved me, you know.”
It was what she had always wanted, and even if it wasn’t intentional or deliberate, it was what she had finally gotten.
I do not look back as I reach the front door of a house that might have once been mine, and I firmly close that door behind me.
On the day I install the mosaic in Adie’s nursery, I set her in a baby bouncer seat to watch.
Her keen eyes track me as I spackle a bit of the wall with grout, just behind the changing table—-which I have dragged out of the way so that I can work.
“It’s really easy,” I tell the baby, who kicks her feet in agreement.
“First, you have to find the center point.”
Once I locate it, I place a dot on the wall with a pencil.
I have already measured out the span of the mosaic and sketched a vertical line with a level to keep it even.
I’ve mixed the thinset till it is thick as toothpaste.
Using the notched side of my trowel, I slather the adhesive onto the wall—-just enough for the first panel of the mosaic.
Then I run the trowel edge through it, creating the ridges that will help the tile adhere.
“You ready?” I ask, and Adie gurgles.
I lift the first section of the mosaic into place. It’s the trunk of the tree, with a bit of blue sky surrounding its sides. It is about a foot square, and remarkably heavy. Aligning it with the vertical line, I tap the piece into place with a grout float to make sure it’s flush to the wall.
“I know,” I tell Adie. “It’s not too impressive yet.”
She rattles the little toys attached to her bouncy chair as I install the other sheets of mosaic—-all fifteen of them—-using a damp sponge to wipe away the adhesive that oozes at their joints.
As I work, I hum, thinking of how I will teach Adie to sculpt with Play--Doh, to paint rocks we find in the garden, to build sandcastles, to master glass.
All the things I didn’t get to do with Molly.
It takes about an hour of working quickly to make sure the adhesive doesn’t start to set before I place the next section.
The last bit of mosaic I install is so close to the ceiling I need a step stool to reach it.
I am flattening my hands against the phoenix in flight, pressing her into permanence, when Molly enters.
“Wow,” she breathes. “That’s really, really beautiful. ”
It is. With the light striking it from the window across the room, the tail feathers of the birds are aflame; the green glass leaves seem to rustle.
“Thanks,” I say, climbing off the step stool and pressing my hands into the small of my back. “Oof. The last time I did this, I was much younger.” I watch Molly reach for Adie in her bouncy chair, plucking the baby into her arms. “How did it go?”
At my urging, she had gone to speak to Evie before she moved out of Adam’s house. Just because the relationship between me and Evie has been irrevocably fractured does not mean that the relationship between them should be.
“It was weird,” Molly says. “Hard.” She cuddles the baby closer. “I mean, most of my memories as a kid involve her. And they’re good ones, happy ones. But every time I think about what she did it feels like I’m pulling a loose thread and unraveling the whole sweater.” She looks up at me.
“There’s no doubt in my mind Evie has always loved you.”
“Maybe just a little too much,” Molly replies. “To protect me from an imaginary threat.”
“A potential threat,” I correct. “You can’t blame her for what she did.”
“Just the way she chose to do it.” Molly sighs. “Anyway, I said I needed time to process. And by process, I mean distract myself with work so I stop obsessing over this.”
Molly is going back to the office in a week.
She’s road--tested it—-a day here or there, sometimes helping out with an emergency that requires all hands on deck.
She has returned home each time with her eyes glowing and her arms reaching for Adie like an addict.
I imagine a career in public health and safety feels different when there is one member of the public you want to keep healthy and safe above all others.
She balances Adie on her hip and walks closer to the mosaic. “Is it finished?”
I look at the wall. You can see the little spaces between tiles, like gaps between teeth. “No. After the adhesive dries, I’ll grout it.”
“Oh. Well, it’s already impressive.”
I wipe my hands clean. “What do you think, Adie?” I ask, leaning closer to her and wiggling my eyebrows. “Do you like it . . . or is it for the birds?”
As if she can understand my very stupid joke, Adie looks at me . . . and laughs.
Molly gasps. “Did she just—-”
“Laugh? I think so!” This time I blow up my cheeks like a puffer fish, making silly popping noises with my lips. Adie giggles again.
“One more time,” Molly orders. I take Adie, lift her over my head, and rub my nose against her belly. She chortles, the peals of a tiny bell as Molly films her and texts the video to Jesse at work.
Adie’s been smiling for weeks now, but this is her first true responsive laugh. “Her spirit’s out in the world now,” I say softly.
“Come again?”
I look at my daughter, who still knows so little of my life. “Someone I loved once told me when a baby laughs for the first time, it is a really special moment. In fact, in his culture, the person who makes the baby laugh is supposed to throw a party for them.”
I let my mind spool backward to the woman I was when I let Kai past my defenses.
How his hair would catch the sun and swallow it whole.
How he gave me the grace to fail. Had things gone differently, I might have married him, releasing Eloise Ambrose like the booster of a rocket, emptied of fuel and purpose.
When I feel tears prick at my eyes, I turn away, staring instead at the mosaic.
Like all art, it evolved beneath my hands.
The tree is twisted at its roots, split down the middle, and twines together again at the top—-the way trees sometimes grow around barbed wire, absorbing the obstacle instead of being thwarted by it.
On a branch are two identical phoenixes, one smaller than the other.
The third bird, soaring above, looks to be fleeing.
But if you really focus on the feathers, on the whorls of blue--stoned wind surrounding the wings, you realize she is coming back.
And at the bottom, in a gnarled root, is a single square of red glass in the sea of browns—-the intentional flaw, the spirit line, so that my soul can take flight.
It is a work in progress, for now.