In the midst of the baby drama, Elise had forgotten about date night.
They had tickets to a Twenty Summers event. Award-winning novelist Julia Glass and others had founded the arts program to honor the legacy of Provincetown’s arts colony and restore the historic Hawthorne Barn, where that legacy had begun more than a hundred years ago. The organization hosted concerts and readings and art exhibits at the barn, and tonight, Fern and Elise were going to see Isaac Mizrahi in conversation with Alan Cumming. They had been looking forward to it for weeks, but now the evening had arrived and they were barely speaking.
The only positive development was that Amelia offered to watch the baby. When Elise told Amelia how badly the conversation had gone with Fern, Amelia had insisted that Elise spend the night trying to find some middle ground with her wife. It showed Elise that she wasn’t alone in this; she had Amelia’s support. Others would pitch in too. She and Fern would find a way to make it work.
But as they walked silently to the barn, all of this remained unsaid. If Elise didn’t speak up soon, they would sit grimly through the evening and then go to bed angry, something they both tried to avoid at all costs. There were times when Fern had been the one to reach out and bridge the divide. Elise knew that tonight, it was her turn.
And she had no idea how to go about it.
They reached a tree-lined white-gravel path, and the shingled brown barn came into view. Elise stopped walking and said, “Fern, I’m sorry for not doing what you wanted, but I’m not sorry for the choice I made. In my heart, I know this is right.”
Fern looked at her and put her hands on her hips. She glanced up at the building in the distance, as if considering just continuing on without her, but ultimately she turned back to Elise, shaking her head. “Don’t start again with what Amelia said about how things are handled in this town. We’ve been here five years, so it’s easy to exist in a bubble. But this goes beyond that.”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What if someone intended for us to have this baby?”
A small, bubbly group passed them, laughing and quoting one of Alan Cumming’s lines from Cabaret.
Fern moved to the side, closer to the trees. “I don’t want to go around in circles again,” she said. “There’s no way for us to know.”
Elise bit her lip, searching for a counterargument. And then Fern said, “Even if someone did want us to have this baby, we’d still need to go through legal channels.”
It was the first sign Fern was even remotely considering keeping the baby. “Fern,” she said, her voice quivering. “The whole time we were trying to start a family, you kept saying, ‘If it’s meant to be, it will be.’ Well, it happened. Not in the way we expected, but it has happened. The rest is just details.”
“Yes, and what about those details? They’re not insignificant.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
Fern shook her head. “I don’t want you getting attached to this baby. I bet you’ve already named her.”
Elise smiled sheepishly. “I’ve been calling her Mira. Short for Miracle. Which she is.”
Fern sighed. “Elise. What happens when her mother—or father—comes back? Or what if we try to make this official and find that legally we can’t?”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take.”
Fern continued down the path, joining what was now a steady stream of people. Elise trotted after her.
“That’s it? You’re done talking?” Elise called out.
Fern turned back to face her. “I think you’re playing with fire. But I also know that you feel I took away your chance to have a baby once before, when I refused to keep trying to have a baby of our own. Our relationship barely survived it. I don’t want to be the bad guy again.”
“Let’s just give it a few weeks. That’s all I’m asking.”
“We never discussed adopting, Elise.”
“Maybe now is the time.”
“I’m not ready to have that conversation.”
“Why not? Why do you get to decide, unilaterally, when the time is right?”
Fern rubbed her brow. When she looked at Elise, she seemed very tired. “I’m giving this another week, long enough for whoever dropped her off to change her mind and not get in trouble. And if she doesn’t show up by then, I’m going to report what’s going on. If—if—we decide we want to try to adopt her, we have to go through the Department of Children and Families.”
“That could take months. And they might not let us. I mean, it’s a state agency. Who knows what kind of biases they operate under? We’re a same-sex couple, there aren’t a lot of school options nearby—”
“Elise, one step at a time. No matter what the hurdles are, we need to do things the right way. Can we at least agree on that?”
Elise nodded.
Fern glanced ahead at the barn. “If we’re going to this thing, we have to go now.”
Elise stood for a moment, then started walking.
A week was enough time for Fern to come around. Elise knew that although her wife was practical and tough-minded, she had a big heart. A little time with the baby, and Fern would fall in love too.
And when they were both in love, anything was possible.
Ruth sat on one of the white benches in the front yard of Shell Haven holding a glass of wine. She had sat down to watch the sunset, but now it was getting late. Still, she felt no desire to move. An identical bench was positioned across from her own, one of the house’s many design touches that suggested the home was a place for company, for a life shared.
She turned sideways to face the street. The town offered great people-watching everywhere; she tried to get lost in the parade of happy strangers.
She glanced, for the thousandth time, at her phone. Still no call back from Olivia. Not even a text. This wasn’t unusual or surprising, but for the first time in a long while, it was unacceptable. Ruth didn’t know if it was the recent long stretches of solitude, the change in scenery, or the baby she’d held in her arms that morning, but she felt an intense, desperate need to hear her daughter’s voice. It was as if the baby had had a chemical effect on her, had unleashed some long-dormant maternal longing that she had buried under years of nonstop motion.
Ruth’s chilly relationship with her daughter had been the subject of endless analysis with Dr. Bellow, who’d told Ruth that Olivia no doubt felt abandoned by her mother. Ruth knew this, of course, and suffered immense guilt accordingly.
Olivia had taken the divorce very hard. She’d been a preteen, arguably the worst time to experience a parental separation. In the beginning, for the first year or so, Ruth and Ben had tried to maintain fifty-fifty shared custody, with Ruth as the primary custodial parent. Ben moved out of the house and into a nearby apartment. But it quickly became clear that Ruth’s long workdays, unpredictable schedule, and frequent traveling made it unfair for her to hold on to primary physical custody. She moved out of the house, Ben moved back in, and life went on.
It took Ruth years with Dr. Bellow to forgive herself and accept that she had done the best she could do, and this self-forgiveness had been a relatively recent breakthrough.
Now all she needed was Olivia’s forgiveness.
She dialed again, prepared to leave a much stronger message, something to make certain her daughter returned her call. What that would be, she had no idea. And then:
“Hello, Mother.”
The tone of her daughter’s voice was markedly cooler than Ruth would have liked, but at least she had answered. “Olivia! How are you?”
“I’m fine. But this isn’t a great time.”
“Well, I’m sorry to intrude, but…” But what? And then Ruth realized she did not just want to hear her daughter’s voice; she wanted to see her. Yes, this…whatever it was between them had gone on long enough. It had taken her a few decades to build a successful business. If she applied the same focus and energy, surely she could rebuild her relationship with her daughter in whatever time she had left on the planet. “But I need to see you.”
“Why? Is something wrong?” Olivia said.
“Not exactly.”
“Okay, well, I’ll e-mail you some dates and we’ll get it on the calendar,” Olivia said.
“I was thinking next weekend.”
“Mother, I can’t drive down to Philly on a summer-holiday weekend. Traffic on the Jersey Turnpike is going to be brutal.”
“Actually, I’m not in Philadelphia. I’m in Provincetown.”
“Where?”
“Provincetown. Cape Cod. I’ve moved here.”
Silence. Then: “Why?” Her voice was thick with irritation, as if she’d felt forced to ask the question but really couldn’t care less.
It was then that Ruth realized there was no way Olivia was coming to visit her. Not that weekend. Not ever—at least, not until there was an urgency. Ruth hesitated just a few beats before saying, “I’m getting my affairs in order.” Well, it was technically the truth. Looking for a house to buy was part of her affairs, just as selling her business had been part of her affairs. She was getting her life on track for the next phase, whatever that might look like.
More silence. Finally, Olivia spoke.
“Can I call you back?”