Chapter 47
Chapter
Forty-Seven
Idid not move to Sugarberry Island. I want to be clear about that, because the version of me who arrived in June would have, and would have done it as she did everything — all at once, no exit, the apartment sold and the bridges burned and the whole life torched for a fresh start she could be a martyr to.
That woman loved a grand irreversible gesture.
It was the same disease as the cart. Burn it down, scale it up: both of them are just ways of refusing to live in the un-dramatic middle, where actual lives are kept.
So I did the thing that was, for me, far braver than burning anything. I kept both.
I kept the apartment in Atlanta. I kept the consulting, some of it, the parts I could do from anywhere with a laptop and a phone and the particular ruthlessness clients pay for, because it turns out I am genuinely good at it, and a thing you are good at is not a thing you have to be ashamed of, only a thing you have to keep on a leash.
And I kept Sugarberry — a rented house with a porch, a tab at the parlor, a standing argument with a captain, a town that knew my name and had decided, against the evidence, to keep me.
I went back and forth across the causeway like a woman who had finally understood that you do not have to choose between the self that can do things and the self that can want them.
You just have to stop letting the first one bully the second one out of the room.
It looks, from the outside, faintly ridiculous, and I have made my peace with that too.
I keep a good blazer at the Atlanta apartment and a pair of rubber boots by the Sugarberry door, and I am, depending on the week, a woman who can make a private-equity associate cry in a conference room or a woman who has learned, badly, to back a boat trailer down a ramp while a captain declines to laugh at her out loud.
The drive between the two is four hours and a whole change of person, and somewhere on the causeway every time, at the place where the marsh opens up and the cell signal dies, I feel the Atlanta one loosen her grip and the other one — the one from the lake chair, the one Sophie swore she didn’t make up — sit up and look out the window.
I used to think a person had to pick. I had picked, at twenty-one, and called it maturity, and spent eighteen years being very good at the half of myself I’d chosen and quietly starving the other half in a back room.
It turns out you can just drive back and forth.
Nobody tells you that. Nobody tells you a great many of the true things, because the true things don’t sell a program or close a deal or fit on a slide; they just sit there, free, in the place where the causeway meets the marsh, waiting for you to run out of plan long enough to notice them.
There is no spreadsheet that arrives at it, because it does not optimize; it only works.
It is not a plan. A plan has a destination. This is just a life, kept in two places by a woman who intends to die in neither in any particular hurry, and it is the first arrangement of my adult existence that I did not build to outrun something.
Whit called in October, civil as ever, to sort out a tax thing, and to tell me — with the faint, almost put-out bafflement he’d carried since the divorce — that I “seemed different.”
“I’m dating a fisherman,” I said, “who owns one boat and no plan, and I’m keeping a tab at an ice cream parlor, and I let a hurricane throw my second location into a marsh, and I left it there.
” There was a silence on the line in which I could hear my ex-husband recalibrating twenty years of a woman he’d thought he’d known.
“I’m great, Whit. Genuinely. I hope the Pilates is going well. ”
“It’s — yes. It’s good.” A pause. “You really sound happy.”
“I really am.” And the strange thing, the thing I’d never have predicted, was that I meant it without one drop of triumph.
I did not need him to know I’d won. I’d spent the marriage keeping a private scoreboard, and somewhere in a salt marsh I had thrown the scoreboard out with the cart.
“Take care of yourself. Tell your mother I said the casserole was a nice thought.” I hung up, and felt nothing I had to manage, which is the only kind of closure I have ever found that actually closes.
Sophie came back down in October, on the front of fall, and made good on her threat from the summer: she put me on a towel and made me do nothing, and this time I was almost passable at it.
We lay on the cool beach in our sweatshirts with the season gone quiet around us, and she watched me sidelong for the tell, the reach for the phone, the email composing itself behind my eyes — and after a while she said, “Huh,” in a voice I’d waited her whole life to hear and never once earned until then.
“What.”
“You’re actually doing it. The nothing.” She propped up on an elbow, genuinely studying me, my devastating child, the same surveillance turned around again, but soft this time.
“I came down in July to find out if it was good-different or a bigger place to hide. And I couldn’t tell yet.
You were so far in I couldn’t get a reading.
” She lay back down. “I can get a reading now. It’s good-different.
You went and got a whole self while I wasn’t looking, Mom.
It’s so weird. It’s like visiting a house you grew up in, and the lady who lives there now has finally fixed the thing that was always broken. ”
I did not manage the moment. That was the entire victory of my year, and I want it on the record that I, who managed weather, lay on a towel and let my daughter say a true, tender thing without reaching for one single instrument to improve it.
“I don’t need you to be okay anymore,” I told the sky.
“I mean — I’m glad you are. But I stopped needing it.
I just like you. I’d drive four hundred miles to lie on a freezing beach and like you for a weekend. ”
“Yeah,” Sophie said, and I heard the smile go all the way through her. “That’s the good-different. That right there. Welcome to it. Took you long enough.”
Hollis and I did not define it, which was the entire point, and which drove Cam to the brink of a documented psychiatric event.
“You have to call it something,” she said, the night I told her — Cam, who had flown down for a weekend the second the bridge road cleared, who had taken one look at Hollis across the parlor and said “oh, honey, yes” loud enough that he heard it.
“Boyfriend. Partner. Gentleman caller. I cannot tell people my best friend is ‘seeing where it goes,’ Brooke, you’re thirty-nine, you’ve never seen where anything goes, you have a five-year plan for your dishwasher. ”
“I had a five-year plan for my dishwasher,” I agreed. “I don’t anymore. That’s sort of the headline.”
“You’re impossible.”
“I’m in love, and I don’t have a spreadsheet for it.
” I had not said the word out loud before, not even to him, and it came out easily, in my best friend’s appalled company, the way the truest things sometimes choose the moment themselves.
“I don’t know what it is, Cam. I know I’d rather stand on a dock and not talk to that man than do almost anything else on earth.
I know he’s never once asked me for a single thing, and I’ve spent my whole life being loved for what I could do, and I would like, before I die, to find out what it’s like to just be — picked.
I’m finding out. Slowly. With no projections.
It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and it looks, from the outside, exactly like a grown woman doing nothing. ”
Cam was quiet for a second, which for Cam is a tribute. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said,” she said. “And you said it about nothing.”
“I said it about wanting,” I said. “Turns out they were the same thing the whole time, and I needed a hurricane to find out. Now help me with these dishes. There’s no plan for them either. We’re just going to wash them and see where it goes.”