Eliza shrugged unapologetically and tilted her head toward the stage, where the curtain remained closed but of course could open at any moment. Zoe made slits out of her eyes and regarded her mother. Eliza regarded her right back and remembered when Zoe was a chubby, bald lump of pudding who dissolved into laughter anytime Eliza bent over her crib. Ancient history.
Then, as though she were reading her mother’s mind, Zoe allowed herself the freedom of a smile, a real smile, as wide and bright and forgiving as sunshine itself, and she looked suddenly the same way she’d looked at age six, the year she’d started losing teeth. She also looked, oddly, like Mary on the day Eliza had driven her to her appointment in Ellsworth and Mary had gotten out of the car and smiled at Eliza. Was that odd? It was, but also maybe it wasn’t. The two were not so far apart in age. And maybe all of the girls in the world were just different versions of all of the other girls in the world, with their universal femaleness, female problems and wisdom, challenges and triumphs, female perspectives. The great, universal sisterhood.
Eliza turned her eyes back to the curtain, which was a deep, delicious red, darker than cooked lobsters, more like the color of rubies and also of the lipstick Eliza remembered her mother wearing when she got dressed up. She felt little pinpricks of tears, and she blinked them back aggressively: this was neither the time nor the place to wax nostalgic. Eliza remembered the massive fund-raising that had gone into restoring this auditorium two years ago, and she took a moment to appreciate the golden proscenium arch, the better-than-Broadway seats, the plush carpet, the teardrops of lights suspended from the ceiling.
Then the curtain opened to reveal a white picket fence, a tilting farmhouse and barn, and everything else went out of Eliza’s mind. When Evie said her first line, from offstage—Where’s Papa going with that ax?—Zoe nudged her and she nudged Zoe and Rob took her hand with his uninjured one and squeezed and Eliza could see that Judith was beaming.
The play went on, Act One, Act Two, the farm, the pig, the spider, the county fair.
Normally Eliza would have known every line to this play, from practicing with Evie; she would have been reciting in her head along with the actors. But her dad’s illness had forced her to forgo many of the normallys, and as it turned out her memories of the story were hazy. Each scene contained a delightful revelation. When she stole another glance at Judith she thought she saw her lips moving along with Evie’s. Eliza was a little envious, but it was also sort of nice, to see Judith doing that. Fair enough, thought Eliza. Let her have this.
Then the funniest thing happened. Evie was saying one of her lines—an innocuous line: Scrub Wilbur up real good, Aunt Edith. He’s got to win that blue ribbon tomorrow—and there was something about the set of her jaw and the way she moved her hands that looked so much like Charlie that it seemed not just like a coincidence but like an actual homage, and again the pinpricks of tears threatened.
Eliza looked up at the gilded, gorgeous ceiling, and suddenly she felt like the luckiest person in the universe. She felt almost dizzy with the awareness of her luck, and also with the awareness that what she was feeling was more profound than luck. It was as if her soul and the souls of those around her were knitted together into a sum that was bigger than its parts: she and Rob and the girls and Judith and Charlie and, sure, throw Mary in there, throw in Val. (Not Christine Cabot, though—she wasn’t invited.) And how could Eliza ever have thought for a second that she didn’t belong here, that her place wasn’t right here?
Charlotte wrote the word humble in the web at the fair; Wilbur got the bronze medal; Fern rode the Ferris wheel with Henry Fussy; the circle of life, inevitably, heartbreakingly, claimed Charlotte.
One of the narrators had the saddest line of all:
Of the hundreds of people that had visited the fair, nobody knew that a gray spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.
That did it. Waterworks. Eliza thought she was being subtle enough, reaching into her bag for a tissue, but then she saw that Zoe was watching her in alarm, and she heard her whisper, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Eliza whispered back. “Good play, that’s all. So much emotion.” She swiped at her eyes with the tissue. No one was with her when she died.
She expected Zoe to roll her eyes and shift an inch away—tears plus the word emotion from her mother, of all people, in public—but she surprised Eliza by grabbing the hand Rob wasn’t holding and squeezing it tight, and Eliza noticed that Zoe’s fingers were now nearly as long as her own.
Then it was time for the bows, and Eliza knew Evie wouldn’t be able to pick her family out of the audience—the stage lights were that good, they’d raised extra for that during the renovations—but she waved and beamed anyway, and she watched Evie’s face, guileless and proud, searching, searching.
49
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Mary
Mary waited downstairs in the living room for ten minutes. Then she waited ten more minutes, and then she tiptoed back up the stairs. She pushed open the bedroom door, afraid of what she was going to find.
But all she saw was Charlie Sargent sleeping in his bed. He’d taken the photo of Joanie from beside him and had put it on his chest and he was holding on to it.
After a time, Charlie’s breathing became irregular; there would be long pauses where he wasn’t breathing, and Mary would think, This is it. And then he would draw a long breath. And then the same thing would happen again. That same thing happened many times in a row. Charlie’s mouth had fallen open, but his eyes remained closed. After a while, Mary pulled up a chair from the corner of the room and sat next to Charlie and held his hand. Once there was a really long pause between breaths, and Mary thought, This is definitely it. Then there was another breath. And then finally there came a breath that didn’t have anything after it although she waited and then she stood and moved the chair back and pressed the back of her free hand to her mouth and let out one sob—just one.
The strangest part, the part that Mary hadn’t anticipated, was how quickly Charlie Sargent’s body changed after that. It was pinkish, regular body colored, and then not five minutes later the pink was gone and his skin had turned a waxy yellow color all over. And that’s how Mary knew that it was done.
She touched her belly and wondered if somehow the baby knew something about what was happening.
Leaving Charlie’s house, Mary wasn’t looking around her to notice who might be seeing her or what was going on in the small road. She didn’t notice the clouds scudding by or the way the wind changed, sending the scent of the harbor right up through Charlie Sargent’s bedroom window. She just got in her car, and she gathered herself, and she put both of her hands on her belly for a moment before she put them on the steering wheel, and when she was ready she drove.
50
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza