Love Anthony (31 page)

She starts a fire in the fireplace and pops a bag of popcorn in the microwave. The girls are still watching trailers, undecided. Beth grabs a blanket and tries to get settled on the couch next to Grover, but she’s feeling inexplicably restless. She stands up and looks out the kitchen window. It looks cold and dark and entirely uninviting, yet, for some reason, she needs to get outside. She grabs her coat, hat, scarf, gloves, and a flashlight.

“I’m going for a walk. I won’t be long. Don’t start the movie without me.”

“Okay!” says Gracie.

Hypnotized by the TV, Sophie and Jessica don’t even acknowledge that their mother has said anything. Gracie can tell them where she is if they ever wonder.

It’s a dark night with no moon, but the stars are amazing, and it’s not as cold as she expected. She points her flashlight in front of her and walks, not conscious at first of a destination, but after a couple of minutes she has one. Fat Ladies Beach. It’s a bit farther than she’d planned, but she’ll walk fast.

She’s walking on the dirt road, focused on the uneven ground within the beam of light in front of her, the visible puffs of her breath, the tempo of her breathing coordinated with her pace. She can’t see anything to either side of her, but she knows her surroundings well, the flat, grassy, uncultivated, and mostly treeless landscape that looks like African savanna. It feels good to walk, to move. She spends most of her days, her entire life really, sitting—at the kitchen table, in her car, in her seat at the library. Sedentary. Stuck.

Her exposed nose and cheeks are freezing cold, and her eyes are watering from the wind on her face, but otherwise, she’s bundled well. She feels her heart beating hard, the muscles in her legs burning. She’s both hot and cold, holding two opposing energies at once, sparking something within her that feels unfamiliar but exciting.

She reaches the beach, which feels far enough without walking along it, but before turning straight around, she stops for a minute to simply take it all in. She turns off her flashlight and listens to the waves, which sound to her like the earth itself breathing. She tips her chin up and stares at the starry sky, at its vast, complicated, unfathomable enormity but also at its simple, accessible beauty, its existence explained by the logical laws of physics and, at the same time, ultimately, utterly unexplainable.

She’s the only person here. She’s completely alone, yet she
feels strangely and beautifully connected to everything. Two opposing energies, held within her, sparking something.

It’s time to go home, to blankets and popcorn and a movie with her daughters. She’s off the beach and back on the dirt road when her flashlight catches two glowing white lights, like two fallen stars hovering just above the earth, and she stops fast in her tracks. It’s a deer, an adolescent, positioned directly in her path only a few feet in front of her. They both stand still, face-to-face, breathing and bearing witness to each other for at least a full minute. Beth observes its black nose, its perky ears, its long, erect neck and wonders what the deer sees of her. And then, without warning, it takes off into the dark and wild Nantucket savanna.

Back at home, the girls had grown equally annoyed and worried by Beth’s absence. They’re ready now. They’ve been waiting. But first, Beth makes root-beer floats for them and a mudslide for herself. Then they all settle into the couches under blankets and watch
Marley & Me,
a movie they already own and have all seen at least three times.

It’s late when the movie ends, and Beth goes to bed shortly after she tucks her girls in. It normally takes her a while to fall asleep, at least a half hour of tossing, the day replaying, tomorrow already tugging at her sleeve, but tonight, the walk and fresh air must’ve tuckered her out because she falls straight to sleep.

An hour later though, her eyes pop open. She’s fully awake, her heart pounding, demanding something of her. She gets out of bed. She finds a sheet of paper and a pen. She draws a cross, creating four squares, and writes. She can barely write fast enough. Words she didn’t know she had within her pour out.

When she finishes, she looks over the four squares. She reads the entire sheet three times. There it is, her homework assignment completed. Her answer. She reads it one more time and knows what she needs to do.

WHAT I NEED TO FEEL WANTED

Choose to spend time with me (instead of sleeping late, smoking cigars outside alone, staying out past closing, sleeping with other women)

Be happy to see me

Compliment me every now and then, something more specific than “you look nice”

Never cheat on me again

WHAT I NEED TO FEEL HAPPY

My girls

My friends

My writing

For you to see and appreciate the love and care I give to our family/household

A neat house

Spending time off this island, in a big city or near mountains

Believing I deserve to be

WHAT I NEED TO FEEL SAFE

Knowing my girls are okay

Not going into debt ever again and always being able to pay the bills

You never seeing Angela again

Believing you would never cheat on me again

WHAT I NEED TO FEEL LOVED

Hugs and kisses

Hearing you say the words “I love you”

CHAPTER 32

O
livia stands over the kitchen counter where two dozen glass jars filled with hot, homemade cranberry jelly are cooling in pans of water. She’s been in busy motion for two weeks, ostensibly preparing for winter. She stored the deck furniture and the grill in the shed. She raked the yard and turned off the water to the outdoor shower. She ordered a dozen books and a case of her favorite merlot. And she’s been cooking.

She’s made old favorites—pasta fagioli, clam chowder, butternut squash risotto, and black bean soup—and she’s tried new recipes, Pad Thai and lobster macaroni and cheese, insane quantities of food for a woman who lives alone and never has company. She’s been cooking every day, creating gallons of savory dinners that are barely tasted before being aliquoted into plastic containers and stacked neatly in the freezer. Once the freezer was full, she turned her attention to cranberries—cranberry-walnut bread, orange-cranberry muffins, and now cranberry jelly.

She tells herself that all this cooking is good planning. If it’s a harsh winter, if it’s a season of nor’easters, if she gets snowed
in (she still only owns that one, small sand shovel), she won’t need to leave the house for food. But this is just what she tells herself. In truth, the cooking has been necessary for other reasons.

She started cooking right after she read the letter from David. The first recipe she turned to was the pasta fagioli, the one she knows by heart, the soup her mother used to make on Saturdays. Her eyes burned as she chopped the onions, and she welcomed the stinging tears. She cried while she chopped the garlic and the celery and the tomatoes. She sobbed while she stirred in the broth and the beans, then she stopped when the soup was done. She did the same thing while making the black bean soup, the tomato bisque, and the meatballs, but when she got to the onions for the butternut squash risotto, she ran them under cold water, wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeve, and finished the recipe without weeping.

She’s done crying, emptied out, but she keeps cooking. It seems the only thing to do to keep herself sane. Fill a pot, fill the void. She keeps her hands moving, stirring, chopping, pouring. Her hands move through the steps for making cranberry jelly, and she can think about David and his letter without becoming leveled by it. She’s read through it, dissected it, and cried over it so many times now, she knows it as well as her mother’s recipe for pasta fagioli.

Dear Liv,

I wanted to write you rather than call. It seems somehow more proper, and I wanted you to hear this news from me before anyone else. I’m getting married. Her name is Julie. She’s a math teacher. I met her here in Chicago. I know it’s fast, but it feels right. I feel ready.

I wish I could’ve gotten back to this place with you, Liv. I’m sorry that I didn’t. I know I didn’t give my best self to you and Anthony. I guess I got a bit lost in all that
we went through. I forgot how to be happy. I think we both forgot.

I hope this news doesn’t hurt you, but I know it probably will. That isn’t my intention. It never has been. I wish every day that you’re okay, that you find happiness again, too. Call me if you want.

Love,
David

Now that the initial shock of the letter has worn off and onions no longer trigger hours of soul-scrubbing tears, other, less explosive feelings have been taking their due turns. Where she’d felt content to be alone the minute before she opened David’s letter, she now feels abandoned in her solitude. She checks to see if the jelly lids have sealed, and she feels scared of being alone forever.

A math teacher named Julie. She sounds young. And pretty. And for some reason, blond. Olivia removes the jars one at a time from their water bath and wipes each one dry against her apron with her jealous hands.

They’ll probably have children. She pictures David holding a baby swaddled in his arms, a house full of kids who belong to him and not her, a big family. These pictures in her mind, vivid and achingly beautiful, punch the air right out of her, as they always do, and she wishes she could somehow stop imagining them. She holds on to the edge of the kitchen counter and waits to either breathe or cry. Today, she breathes.

She reads the letter in her mind again, and it’s the sound of David’s voice she hears. His voice is light and happy. He’s happy, and he’s found a woman named Julie he can share his happiness with.

He’s right. She forgot about happiness. At first, it wasn’t a priority. Anthony had autism, and every ounce of energy went into saving him. Her happiness was irrelevant. Then it
didn’t seem appropriate. How could she be happy when they were living a tragedy? And then, just when she was starting to realize that happiness and autism could coexist in the same room, in the same sentence, in her heart, Anthony died, and happiness was no longer a concept she could fathom.

He died, and for a long time after that worst of all mornings, she replayed his death in her mind, unleashing the massive sorrow that still clings to those images, consuming her in a tsunami of devastated grief every day. She thought she would do this forever, that she should do this forever. Her grief was her daily duty, her misery a humble tribute to her son.

But reading her journals has helped her to remember more than that morning. There was more to Anthony’s life than his death. And there was more to Anthony than his autism. So much more. She can think about Anthony now and not be consumed by autism or grief.

But not being consumed with grief is a far cry from being happy. She stacks the jars of jelly on a shelf in the pantry but keeps one on the counter. She pictures David now, and he’s smiling. The image changes from David to Anthony. They have the same mouth, the same dimpled cheeks. Anthony smiling. It’s an easy picture to sustain, an accessible memory, real. For all his frustration and aggression and inability to communicate, Anthony was mostly happy. It was his nature. Given time, it’s David’s nature, too.

She cuts a large slice of bread, slathers the jelly on it, and pours a glass of merlot. She gets comfortable in the chair in the living room in front of a glowing fire and takes a bite of the bread. Her homemade jelly is sweet and tangy, scrumptious.

She listens to David reading his letter in her head while she looks at Anthony’s picture on the wall and decides she’s done cooking. After two weeks of chopping and dicing and sautéing and sobbing, she’s finally done with it all. She’s done and left
with a freezer stocked full of comfort food and a vague yet real feeling of hope.

If David can find happiness and begin again, maybe she can, too. Happiness. Shared happiness. Maybe it’s human nature. And all she has to do is invite it in.

As she eats her bread and jelly and considers this new outlook, she gazes up at her photograph of Anthony on the wall. She drinks her wine and admires her collection of white rocks in the glass bowl on the coffee table in front of her—Anthony’s rocks, plus the rocks she’s collected here on Nantucket and the one Beth’s daughter gave to her. She leans over, chooses a rock from the top of the pile, and holds it in her hand. It feels unexpectedly warm in her palm, as if someone had already been holding it.

Oh, my beautiful Anthony, why were you here?

The penetrating, hollow ache that usually follows this question doesn’t come. Instead, a calm energy fills her heart with the assurance of a truth already known, more an intangible feeling, though, than a fact that can be verbalized. She sits still and listens but not with her ears.