Count the Ways Read online

  Dedication

  For A., C., and W., who continue to instruct me well in the occasional heartbreak and lifelong joy of being a mother.

  And for C. and S. The next generation.

  Epigraph

  I’m sorry.

  I love you.

  Thank you.

  Please forgive me.

  —Ho‘oponopono prayer, phrases spoken in any order, for reconciliation and forgiveness

  And how can you not forgive?

  You make a feast in honor of what

  was lost, and take from its place the finest

  garment, which you saved for an occasion

  you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

  to know that you were not abandoned,

  that happiness saved its most extreme form

  for you alone.

  —Jane Kenyon, “Happiness”

  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part 1

  1. A Familiar Road

  2. Intimate Strangers

  3. Some Tree

  4. Fixer-Upper

  5. Where the Happy People Lived

  6. Who Should We Call?

  7. One Small Step for Man

  8. Like Someone Just Ran You Over with a Truck

  9. A Blue-Eyed Boy and a Good Dog

  10. Wish I Had a River

  11. A Red-Headed Man

  12. The Money Part

  13. Here’s Your Daughter

  14. Second Fiddle

  15. Ships in the Night

  16. A First Baseman’s Wife

  17. Black Ice

  18. People You Care About Start Dying

  19. A Web-Footed Boy

  20. This Was Her Artwork

  21. Over the Coals

  22. My Body Keeps Wanting to Be Bad

  23. A Non-Comic Strip

  24. The Wieniawski Polonaise

  25. Sex in the Air

  26. The Amazing Catch

  27. Hawaii Ho

  28. The No-Cry Pledge

  29. Sometimes Even Breast Milk Isn’t Enough

  30. Barbie Shoe

  31. A Career in Dry-Cleaning

  32. Bûche de Noël

  33. He Got Hold of the Reddi-Wip

  34. You Have to Make Compromises

  35. Family Values

  36. Female Party Guest Number Four

  37. No More Cork People

  38. Old Wonderful Life

  39. Pocket of Stones

  40. That Moment Has Passed

  41. We Are the Children

  42. Ball. Egg. Dinosaur.

  43. Bad Things, Good People

  44. Call Me Al

  45. Happy Anniversary

  46. Nothing Matters Anymore

  47. Shavasana

  48. Riding Without a Helmet

  49. Zero Gravity

  50. A Million Pieces

  51. A Marriage Not Long Enough to Bear Peaches

  Part 2

  52. Faulty O-Ring

  53. Beyond Valentines

  54. Why Would You Blow Up Our Life?

  55. A New Mattress

  56. I Will Always Love You

  57. Crazyland Dead Ahead

  58. Code of Silence

  59. A Waterbed

  60. Never a Good Time

  61. Just Like in The Sound of Music

  62. Dream Girl

  63. Mr. Fun

  64. Goodbye Goodnight Moon

  65. You Don’t Live There Anymore

  66. A New Human Being

  67. The Last Bath

  68. Not Their Half Brother

  69. No More Onions in the Bed

  70. The Reason for Every Single Bad Thing

  71. I Want to Go Home

  72. My Mother Just Hit Me

  73. Perfect Christmas

  74. The Three Amigos

  75. The Advantages of Forgetting

  76. The Last Cubs Fan

  77. Reply Hazy, Try Again

  78. Like Dating Your Own Children

  79. What It Meant to Be Real

  80. The Cork People

  81. Can You Forgive Him?

  82. Crazies Out There

  83. I Would Have Taken Good Care of You

  84. Car Wreck in Paris

  85. The Life of Some Whole Other Person

  86. The Red Carpet

  87. I Won’t Be Coming Home

  88. Happy, or Close Enough

  89. No Big Drama, No Sleepless Nights

  90. I Met Somebody

  91. A Teenager in the House

  92. Another Mother Moves Out

  93. She Doesn’t Count to Ten

  94. Even Better Than You Thought It Would Be

  95. The White House in His Sights

  96. Crash

  97. Invitation to a Wedding

  98. Together Again, Whatever That Means

  99. One of the Great Things About Rocks

  100. You Who Are on the Road

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Joyce Maynard

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  When a writer chooses, as the basis of her novel, elements that resemble experiences in her own life, it’s not surprising for readers to imagine that the book in their hands may not be a work of fiction so much as a fictionalized account of real-life experiences. The better a writer may do her job, the more a reader is apt to suppose that the events unfolding on the pages of a book may have actually occurred.

  The characters whose story I chose to tell here are people who emerged from a place I love: my imagination. What is real are the themes I’ve returned to many times over the course of my long career: home, the making of a family, the costly experience—for children, and for their parents—of divorce and its aftermath.

  A writer is apt to tell many stories over the years, but it may well be that her themes change very little, if at all. Long ago, in a novel I wrote called Where Love Goes, I explored a marriage and a divorce, as I have done once again in these pages. In a few instances, actual scenes that take place in that early novel appear, in somewhat different form, in this new piece of work.

  I didn’t know I was revisiting those scenes until a reader of a draft of this novel pointed out a certain resemblance to that earlier one. I was surprised, myself, when I learned that I’d returned to such apparently similar territory. What differs most profoundly between that work—written when I was just past age forty—and this one, written more than a quarter century later, are not simply the characters and events, but the author who created them. Same person. Altered perspective.

  My central character this time around, like the author who chose to bring her to life on the page, is a woman who finally—not without struggle—comes to understand the meaning of letting go of old grievances and bitterness. At the end of the day, this is a novel about the importance of asking forgiveness, and offering it. It’s a lesson that comes with age, perhaps—an invaluable lesson no matter when it is acquired.

  Prologue

  Toby was just a baby—Alison four years old, Ursula not yet three—the first time they launched the cork people. After that it became their annual tradition.

  Eleanor had always loved how, when the snow melted every spring, the water in the brook down the road would race so fast you could hear it from their house, crashing over the rocks at the waterfall. A person could stand there for an hour—and in the old days before children, when she would come to this pl
ace alone, she had done that—staring into the water, studying the patterns it made as the brook narrowed and widened again, the way it washed over the smaller stones and splashed against the large ones. If you felt like it, you might trace the course of a single stick or leaf, some remnant of last summer, as it made its way downstream, tossed along by the current.

  One time she and the children had spotted a child’s sneaker caught up in the racing water. Another time Alison had tossed a pine cone in the brook and the four of them—Eleanor, Alison, Ursula, and baby Toby—had watched it bob along, disappearing into a culvert but showing up again, miraculously, on the other side. They had followed that pine cone along the edges of the brook until it disappeared around a bend.

  “If only we had a boat,” Alison said, looking out at the racing water, “we could float down the stream.” She was thinking about the song Eleanor used to sing to them in the car.

  “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” she sang now, in her sweet, high voice.

  Life is but a dream.

  When they got home, she was still talking about it, so Eleanor suggested that they make a miniature boat and launch it just below the falls. With little passengers along for the ride.

  “We could make them out of Popsicle sticks,” she said. “Or corks.”

  Cork, because it floated. Cork people.

  Every year after that, usually on the first warm weekend in March, Eleanor laid out the craft supplies on the kitchen table—pipe cleaners, glue gun, string, pushpins, Magic Markers, and corks saved from a year’s worth of wine, which wasn’t all that much in those days.

  They constructed their boats out of balsa wood, with sails attached made from scraps of outgrown pajama bottoms and dresses. For Alison, the future engineer, it was the boats that occupied her attention more than the passengers. But Ursula took the greatest care drawing faces on the corks, gluing on hair and hats. Even Toby, young as he was, participated. Every cork person got a name.

  One was Crystal—Ursula’s suggestion. She had wanted a sister with the name but, failing that, gave it to a cork person. One was Rufus—not a cork person, in fact, but a cork dog. They named one Walt, after their neighbor, and another was named after the daughter of a man on their father’s softball team, who got cancer and died just before they went back to school.

  When they were done making their cork people and the vessels to carry them, the children and Eleanor carried them down to a spot they’d staked out, flat enough for all four of them to stand, and one by one, they would lower their boats and the passengers they carried, attached with rubber bands, into the fast-moving waters.

  Goodbye, Crystal. Bye, Rufus. See you later, Walt.

  They were on their own now, and there was nothing anyone could do to assist them in the perilous journey ahead.

  It was like parenthood, Eleanor thought, watching the little line of bobbing vessels taking off through the fast-moving waters. You made these precious people. You hovered over them closely, your only goal impossible: to keep them out of harm’s way. But sooner or later you had to let the cork people set off without you, and once you did there would be nothing for it but to stand on the shore or run along the edge yelling encouragement, praying they’d make it.

  The boats took off bobbing and dancing. Eleanor and the children ran along the mossy bank, following their progress. They ran hard to keep up, Eleanor holding tight to Toby’s hand. Toby, the one who could get away and into trouble faster than anyone.

  The journey wasn’t easy for the cork people. Some of the boats in which the children had placed them got stuck along the way in the tall grass along the side of the brook. Some disappeared without a trace. If a boat capsized, bearing one of her precious cork people, Ursula (the dramatic one) was likely to let out a piercing cry.

  “Oh, Jimmy!” she called out. “Oh, Crystal!” “Evelyn, where are you?” “Be careful, Walt!”

  Some cork people never made it through the culvert. Some fell off the vessel that was carrying them on a wild stretch of rapids farther along. Once an entire boatload of cork people capsized right before the stretch of slow, gentle water where, typically, the children retrieved them.

  One time, as they stood on the shore watching for their boats to come dancing down the brook, they had spotted a cork person from the year before—bobbing along, hatless, boatless, naked, but somehow still afloat.

  Toby, four years old at the time, had leaned into the shallows (holding Eleanor’s hand, though reluctantly) to retrieve the remains of a bedraggled cork person, and studied its face.

  “It’s Bob,” he said. Named for one of Cam’s teammates on his softball team, the Yellow Jackets.

  Ursula pronounced this a miracle, though to Toby there seemed nothing particularly surprising about the unexpected return of an old familiar character.

  Cork people went away. Cork people came back. Or didn’t.

  “People die sometimes,” Toby pointed out to Ursula (older than him by a year and a half, but less inclined to confront the darker side). Not only people whose songs you listened to on the radio and people you heard about on the news, and a princess whose wedding you watched on TV, and a whole space shuttle filled with astronauts, and a mop-topped rock and roll singer whose songs you danced to in the kitchen, but people you knew, too. A neighbor from down the road who showed you a gypsy moth cocoon, and a guy who came to your parents’ Labor Day party and did an imitation of a rooster, and a best friend who took you to a water park one time. And dogs would die, and grandparents, a child to whom you once offered your last mozzarella stick at your father’s softball game, even. And even when those things didn’t happen, other terrible things did. You had to get used to it.

  But here was one story you could count on, one that never changed. Spring, summer, fall, winter, the water flowed on. These rocks would be here forever—rocks, among the things in the world Toby loved best, and as much as Toby had considered the losses around him, the thought that he and the people he loved best would ever cease to exist was beyond his imagining.

  In Toby’s mind, their family would always stay together, always loving each other, and what else really mattered more than that? This was the world as they knew it. This was how it seemed to them then, and maybe even Eleanor believed as much, once.

  Part 1

  1.

  A Familiar Road

  The sound reached them all the way down to the field where the chairs were set up—so loud that if Eleanor hadn’t been holding Louise as tightly as she had, she might have dropped her. A few people screamed, and someone yelled, “Oh, shit!” Eleanor could hear the voice of one of the assembled guests begin to pray, in Spanish. Louise, observing the scene, burst into tears and called for her mother.

  The noise was like nothing she’d ever heard. A crash, followed by a low, awful groaning. Then silence.

  “Oh, God,” someone cried out. “Dios mío.” Someone else.

  “We’ll find your mama,” Eleanor told Louise, scanning the assembled guests for her daughter, Louise’s mother, Ursula. Eleanor herself took in the event—whatever it was—with a certain unexpected calm. Worse things had happened than whatever was going on now, she knew that much. And though the piece of land on which she now stood had once represented, for her, the spot where she’d live forever and the one where she would die, this place was no longer her home, and hadn’t been for fifteen years.

  It was impossible to know, at first, where the sound came from, or what had caused it. Earthquake? Plane crash? Terrorist attack? Her mind went—crazily—to a movie she’d seen about a tsunami, a woman whose entire family had been wiped out by one vast, awful wave.

  But Eleanor’s family was safe. Now she could see them all around her—dazed, confused, but unhurt. All she really needed to do at a moment like this was to make sure that Louise was all right. Her precious only granddaughter, three years old.

  At the moment they heard the crash, Louise had been studying Eleanor’s necklace, a very small golden bird on a
chain. “You’re okay,” Eleanor whispered into her ear, when they heard the big boom. All around them, the guests in wedding attire were running with no particular sense of a destination, calling out words nobody could hear.

  “Everybody’s fine,” Eleanor said. “Let’s go see your mother.”

  Cam’s farm—she was accustomed now to calling it that—lay a little over an hour’s drive north of her condo in Brookline. She had made the trip to bear witness to the marriage of her firstborn child, Ursula’s older sibling, at the home where she once lived.

  After all these years, she still knew this place so well that she could have made her way down the long driveway in the dark without benefit of headlights. She knew every knot in the floorboards of the house, the windowsill where Toby used to line up his favorite specimens from his rock collection, the places glitter got stuck deep in the cracks from their valentine-making projects, the uneven counter where she rolled out cookie dough and packed lunches for school, or (on snow days) fixed popcorn and cocoa for the three of them when they came in from sledding. She knew what the walls looked like inside the closet where she’d retreat, holding the phone she’d outfitted with an extra-long cord, in a time long before cell phones, when she’d needed to conduct a business conversation without the sounds of her children’s voices distracting her.

  And more: The bathroom where her son once played his miniature violin. The pantry, shelves lined with the jam and spaghetti sauce she canned every summer. The record player spinning while the five of them danced to the Beatles, or Chuck Berry, or Free to Be . . . You and Me. The mantel where they’d hung their stockings and the patch of rug, in front of the fireplace, where she spread ashes to suggest the footprints of a visitor who’d come down the chimney in the night.

  Eleanor knew where the wild blueberries grew, and the lady’s slippers, and where the rock was, down the road, where they’d launched their cork people every March when the snow thawed and the brook ran fast under the stone bridge. The pear tree she and Cam had planted, after the birth of their first child. The place in the field where cornflowers came up in late June. Just now starting to bloom. A shade of blue like no other.

  And here she was, attending the wedding of that same child. In another lifetime, they’d named that baby Alison. They called him Al now.