Chapter Twenty-Nine

The second-floor office had become Elise’s least favorite room in the house. The furniture—desk, file cabinet, Eames chair—seemed to mock her. She couldn’t even take pleasure in the paintings on the walls, vibrant fields of poppies by a Cape Cod artist named Anne Salas. She and Fern had found such joy in collecting them, but now they seemed like relics from a long-ago time—a time before disappointment and loss.

The room was not supposed to still be an office. It was supposed to have been their nursery.

Now, a baby had finally arrived, and the only infant-friendly item in the room was the bassinet Elise had borrowed from Amelia.

The nesting instinct had kicked in one night when she couldn’t sleep. She’d slipped out of bed, brought her laptop downstairs to the couch, sat in the dark, and shopped online until her eyelids finally grew heavy.

Today, the boxes were waiting for her on the doorstep when she arrived home from work. It was like Christmas morning—she couldn’t wait to open every one of them.

The only obstacle to getting Mira’s room fixed up was, well, Mira. She looked alert after her feeding, with no yawns or the contented coos she’d started to make that suggested a nap might be imminent. Elise needed an extra set of hands to free hers to do some decorating.

She knocked on the door to the den that had become Olivia’s bedroom.

“Come in,” Olivia called. She was sitting on the couch, tapping on her phone.

“Hey, sorry to bother you. I need help with something and I was wondering if you had a little time.”

Olivia looked at the baby, then at Elise, with a deer-in-the-headlights expression. Clearly, she did have time. But she wasn’t eager to volunteer it. “Um, sure,” she said.

“I just need a half hour or so to get a few things done in her room. Do you think you could take her out for a walk? I’ll put her in the stroller—all you need to do is push it up and down the street. She’ll probably drift off.”

“Okay,” Olivia said, looking nervous. “But I can’t lift her. My back…”

“You don’t have to take her out of the stroller. I’ll do everything.”

Reluctantly, Olivia followed her into the mudroom behind the kitchen. Elise gave Mira one final burp, then secured her in the stroller and kissed her on the forehead. The baby’s small hands fluttered up to her mouth.

“Her eyes are really dark,” said Olivia. “I thought all babies had blue eyes.”

“They were gray and now they’re turning darker,” said Elise. “Please keep this hooded part adjusted so the sun is off her. Thanks so much. Oh, let me put my number in your phone in case you need me.”

She felt a pang letting Mira go but told herself she would be fine. Olivia was a responsible adult. Still, she watched until the stroller was out of sight.

The boxes.

Elise wondered, looking at the stack on the dining-room table, if she’d gone a little overboard. But, really, it was all necessary. Okay, maybe not the four plush blue dolphins. Or the yellow-and-cornflower-blue blanket with Mira’s name hand-stitched in navy-blue Monterey Script lettering. But certainly the marine-themed mobile, with its felt seahorse, whale, octopus, and starfish, was essential. This was a developmental tool as much as decoration. And of course, Mira needed clothes.

Elise opened the box from Baby Gap first and unfolded the onesies in yellow and pink and white, some with cute sayings on them like FUN IN THE SUN and MAMA’S GIRL, and others with hearts and flowers. She’d also bought half a dozen lightweight dresses with little matching bloomers and sun hats.

Elise put the clothes in the laundry and carried the remaining boxes up to the office.

When Elise and Fern had first embarked on their attempt at motherhood, they’d sat in bed planning their dream nursery. The walls would be painted a soft, pale yellow. The crib would be classic white wood with a matching changing table and dresser. In the corner, there’d be a cushioned rocking chair. Their vision was completely a shared one.

They had always been so in sync over everything—their taste in art, architecture, food. Where to live, how to live. Everything—until they had problems conceiving.

Relationships—strong, enduring relationships—were in some ways one long negotiation. Elise and Fern had always found a way to meet in the middle even if they did not agree entirely about a course of action, the distribution of labor, the spending of money, or whatever issue was at hand. They talked directly and honestly. This was the case when they began the process of IVF. Fern was entirely on board for parenthood on the condition that she was not the one to carry the child.

“I have zero interest in experiencing pregnancy,” she’d told Elise. “I’m just missing that gene.”

This was not a problem for Elise. She wanted to become pregnant, couldn’t wait to experience a life growing inside of her. When the time came to sign all the consent forms, they had done so indicating that either mother could carry the baby. Neither one of them believed that the option of Fern trying to conceive would ever be necessary. Until it became clear that Elise was not physically capable of carrying a pregnancy to term, and it was time to renegotiate.

“You won’t even consider it?” Elise said. She knew it was a lot to ask, maybe too much. But the alternative—giving up—was just unthinkable to her. They still had two perfectly good embryos.

“I can’t. I’m sorry,” Fern said. “The technical circumstances have changed, but my feelings haven’t.”

She had been so maddeningly businesslike about it, as if they’d been debating how much to bid on a house.

Elise tried not to feel resentful. She told herself that if she’d been straight and married to a man, it wouldn’t even be an option to ask her partner to become pregnant.

Another road would have been surrogacy. But by the time Elise floated the idea, Fern had had enough. She framed it as an issue of the health of their relationship, and Elise had backed down.

Sometimes, Elise lay awake at night thinking of their two remaining frozen embryos sitting in a tank somewhere in Boston.

Elise shook all of these thoughts away now, not wanting to cloud the moment with negativity. She pulled the stuffed dolphins out of their plastic wrap and set them in a row on the floating shelf above the dresser. The mobile would take a bit more work. When she opened the package, she saw that the sea creatures needed to be attached to the round circular top from which they’d hang. And then, of course, the entire thing had to be attached to the ceiling.

“Elise, you home?” Fern called from downstairs.

Surprised, Elise set down the mini-octopus in her hand. She hadn’t been expecting Fern for another hour or two.

“I’m in the office,” she called back, suddenly tense.

She heard Fern’s footsteps on the stairs. “Hey,” Fern said, appearing in the doorway. “I see Marco has the kelp rigged up out back. It looks half dry already. Maybe tomorrow we can find time to start experimenting with blends?”

“Sure,” Elise said.

Fern noticed the mobile pieces in Elise’s hands. “What are you doing?”

“I ordered some things for Mira,” she said.

“Why?” Fern said.

“What do you mean, why? Because she needs some things.”

Fern looked around the room, took in the shelf of stuffed dolphins. She shook her head. “See,” she said. “This is exactly what I was afraid of.”

“What?” Elise said, irritated.

“You’re acting like this is a done deal. You’re too emotionally invested in this baby that is not yours.”

“She’s not ours. Ours. Have you forgotten that a family is something we have been trying to create together? I might be too emotionally invested, but I wish you were a little more invested. I wish you had been all along.” Her eyes filled with tears.

“Elise,” Fern said, her expression softening. “I wanted a baby too.”

Elise shook her head. “As soon as it got hard, something in you just shut down. You didn’t want it like I wanted it.”

“I didn’t want it if it was going to destroy our relationship in the process, no. You’re right. I wanted a baby, but I wanted you more. I am invested—in you. In us.”

Last year, Elise had chosen being a wife over being a mother. A week ago, if anyone had asked, she would have sworn that she’d made the right choice. Now, left to decide between eating dinner with Fern and putting the mobile together, she wasn’t so sure.

“I’m invested in us too,” Elise said. “But I shouldn’t have to choose.”

“You need to send some of this stuff back. It’s not helping anything to have all of this here.”

Elise felt she could choke on her frustration. “I don’t understand how you can be so removed!”

Fern stepped closer, reaching for her hand. “I’m not being removed. I’m being practical. Frankly, one of us has to be. Come on—don’t be angry. Let me take you out to dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” Elise said quietly.

  

The perfume and toiletry shop Good Scents on Commercial was one of the cutest stores on the block, with its red-barn facade, white window frames, and black-and-white awning. The shelves of the small space were filled with lotions, perfumes, candles, and soaps. It was a toy store for people who loved small luxuries. Ruth walked in looking for inspiration, some ideas for what to create next. Now that she’d started with the soap, she had the bug. There was no turning back.

And yet, even as she sampled a citrus-scented lotion, she could not stop thinking about her offer to let her ex-husband stay at the house.

In the moment, it had seemed logical. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Although what was the big deal? They had long been on amicable terms. The initial sting of the divorce had mellowed into something much more manageable over the decades, even though at first, it had felt like a tectonic shift that she would never recover from.

One of the benefits of being older was that you could look back and see that every moment that had felt intractable and awful was just temporary. It was impossible to get a young person to believe that “this too shall pass.” It was something that had to be experienced. Yes, some of the pain lingered. Yes, regret was an inevitable part of life. Every choice had repercussions. Did she ever think twice about her decision to end her marriage? Of course. Had it been the right thing to do at the time? Absolutely.

Ruth carried her purchases to the counter—some candles, a bar of lemongrass soap, a perfume, and a few bottles of essential oil.

“That will be two hundred and twenty dollars,” the man behind the register said. She startled at the price. Even though she had not had to worry about the cost of things for a long time, she still felt a reflexive jolt when something was expensive, a sort of muscle memory from the time when every dollar counted. She had worked hard to never again be in the vulnerable position she was in when her father went bankrupt.

It had happened the first week of her senior year in college. Ruth stood in a long line to register for her classes, but when it was her turn to fill out forms, the student managing the paperwork told her, “You need to report to the bursar’s office.”

Ruth was in a sweat by the time she reached the administration building, where a secretary told her coldly that her tuition had not been paid for the semester so she was not eligible for registration.

“There must be some mistake,” Ruth said.

Ruth called her mother, who had no idea what was going on but also insisted it had to be a mistake. “I’ll take care of it,” her mother said. Ruth expected her mother to call back within the hour and tell her it had been a mix-up, a check lost in the mail. Instead, it was close to dinner when her mother called back and said, “I think you need to come home for a few days.”

Ruth never returned to Northwestern.

Later, while Ben was in med school, she considered taking the classes she needed to complete her BA. But by then she was already working at the cosmetics manufacturing company; it would have been a burden for both of them to be in school at the same time. She knew she would have to figure out an unconventional career path. And she had.

The man behind the shop counter asked if she wanted anything gift-wrapped. She told him just the candles, and he placed them in white paper bags with purple tissue paper and wrapped the twine handles together with a matching ribbon.

The candles were for Amelia. Ruth had been so caught up in trying to get settled in the house and get a foothold in her life in Provincetown, she’d not properly acknowledged the woman’s kindness to her from the very first day she arrived. Ruth felt bad about dropping out of the mosaic class, her starfish abandoned in the sketch phase.

Outside, she inhaled the fresh air. The sidewalk and streets were crowded, and a truck rumbling by halted the foot traffic while it passed. Ruth headed toward the Beach Rose Inn, thinking about the soap she’d made and considering mixing up a little something else to go along with it before giving it to Elise. She could make a protective lotion, a diaper-rash cream, with the bentonite clay. And then, she caught sight of something that made her look twice: Olivia pushing a baby carriage.

It was a scenario she had imagined at one time or another, her daughter with a baby of her own; Ruth, the doting grandmother. This reality, of course, was far from that fantasy. Still, the visual stirred her on some primal level. “Hi, hon,” Ruth said cheerily, ignoring the rush of sentimentality. “I’m surprised to see you on babysitting duty.”

Olivia’s light hair was pulled back in a messy knot. She wore a V-neck T-shirt and green cargo pants and flip-flops. Ruth never did understand this generation’s willingness to walk around in flimsy shoes.

“Yes, well, no more surprised than I am. Elise needed to unpack boxes or something. But I’m taking Mira home now.” She peeked under the car seat’s hood. “It looks like she fell asleep.”

“I’ll walk back with you,” Ruth said, figuring her gift delivery could wait one more day.

Olivia didn’t seem put out by her company, and Ruth felt encouraged by this. “Did your father confirm he’s coming?” she said.

“Yeah. Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? “Oh, that’s soon. I didn’t realize…”

Olivia turned to Ruth. “Thanks for letting him stay at the house.”

“No problem,” Ruth said, though again she was not so sure. She didn’t mind the idea of him coming, but she anticipated some awkwardness; seeing him in the kitchen first thing in the morning, for example. Although it couldn’t be any more awkward than the last time she’d seen him, about a year ago in Philadelphia. She was having dinner at Scarpetta, on a date—maybe her second or third with a guy she could barely remember now—and Ben had walked in with an attractive woman about their own age. He spotted her at the same moment she’d noticed him, and their eye contact had been jolting in its intimacy. But the wall went back up, the polite veil; he stopped by the table to say hello, and cursory introductions were made. The brief encounter had been enough to throw off the rhythm of her entire evening.

The next afternoon, she was surprised to get a phone call from Ben.

“I was taken aback running into you last night,” he’d said. “And obviously it wasn’t the best time to talk. But I have been thinking of you, hoping you’re well.”

She couldn’t remember the rest of the conversation, but every time she recalled it, she felt the inexplicable happiness that had followed. She had thought about making a similar call over the years but she had never gone through with it. Most recently, she had wanted his counsel about the sale of the business. As per their divorce settlement, he was entitled to a percentage of the profits. He had no say in the management, but still, she would have valued his opinion. It was a huge step that had made her feel very alone.

“Is your father seeing anyone?” Ruth said.

Olivia narrowed her eyes, squinting with a distinct Why do you care? expression. “No. Not at the moment.”

She was so protective of him! Ruth couldn’t understand why Olivia’s empathy was for her father only.

They passed the tea shop, and she looked up the stairs and saw the CLOSED sign on the front door. She wondered if Elise and Fern were both back at the house. She was getting used to having people underfoot constantly, but she still craved privacy and didn’t want her time with Olivia to be interrupted. Ruth could see Olivia using Elise and Fern as buffers sometimes, avoiding too much conversation alone.

“I’m starving,” Olivia said, pausing outside of Spindler’s.

“Well, let’s eat. Mira’s asleep. I’ll text Elise we’re here—I doubt she’ll mind.”

The maître d’ standing sentry in front of the restaurant consulted a reservation book before seating them outside on the front patio. Olivia eased slowly into her chair, one hand on her lower back, wincing. Sitting was worse than walking.

“Still no improvement?”

“Maybe a little,” Olivia said.

A waiter, young and beautiful with dark skin and bright green eyes, handed them menus and asked if they wanted flat or sparkling water.

Olivia situated the stroller so it was out of people’s way. She took one more peek at Mira, then pulled the hood over her. The sight of Olivia being even a little maternal warmed Ruth’s heart.

“You’re good with her,” Ruth said.

Olivia shook her head. “Don’t get any ideas.”

“What? You don’t want children someday?”

“No,” Olivia said. “What I want is to get my career back on track.”

“You can have both.”

“Oh, like you did?”

“Yes, like I did.” Why did every conversation have to degenerate into an indictment of her?

“I’m sorry. But I don’t believe you can have it all.”

Ruth wasn’t about to get pulled into a feminist debate. “Well, you seem very comfortable with the baby. I hope you won’t entirely rule out the idea of motherhood.”

They both looked at the stroller. Olivia moved the hood again. Mira’s head was turned to one side, her cheeks pink with sleep. One arm was raised with her little hand curled next to her shoulder. “She is cute. But I’m still unclear—who does she belong to?”

Ruth hesitated. The mysterious provenance of the baby had nagged at her. She could remember the bewildered expression on Elise’s face when she’d admitted, I don’t know whose baby this is.

Mira had been left on the doorstep intentionally—that much was clear. Ruth had thought that Elise would take a day or two and then hand the baby over to the authorities. When that didn’t happen, she thought Elise was maybe trying to figure out who had left the baby, to handle it privately. Now Elise was telling everyone they were in the process of trying to adopt. Clearly, they were dealing with it through some legal channel she wasn’t privy to. With all of this in mind, she had kept her word about not mentioning it to anyone, and yet she suddenly felt the weight of the truth. She didn’t want to lie to Olivia. She also, selfishly, wanted a way to bond with her.

“If I tell you something, can you promise to keep it to yourself?”

Olivia nodded, looking at Ruth with interest. “Sure.”

“No one knows who Mira belongs to. I found her on the doorstep of the house the morning after I moved in.”

“What?”

“Yes. I know. Elise swore me to secrecy and I assume they are handling it but I really don’t know what’s going on.”

Olivia sat back in her chair, reached out one arm, and pulled the stroller closer. She looked at Mira. “That’s crazy,” she said quietly.

“It’s odd. But these things do happen.”

“I know people abandon babies, but the fact that they’re just keeping it—do you think they notified anyone?”

“At first, no. Elise had this we-take-care-of-our-own mind-set and didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. But she said they are in the process of trying to adopt.”

Olivia seemed to consider this. Then she laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Just…the irony. You came out here to, what, retire? Be alone? I mean, you chose a pretty remote place. And then someone leaves a baby at your house. I mean, you didn’t even want to take care of your own—”

“Olivia, please. Let’s not turn this conversation into yet another referendum on my parenting. Okay?”

“Okay,” Olivia said. “But you have to admit, it is pretty funny. I wish I could have seen the look on your face.”

Ruth laughed. “I was not happy, I can tell you that.”

She didn’t know who’d left Mira or why. But in that moment, she was thankful for the mystery baby that had given her a reason to share a laugh with her baby. Still, she feared that this small moment of bonding was coming too late. Tomorrow, her ex-husband would arrive, and his appearance would remind Olivia of her long-held belief that Ruth was the bad guy.

Her phone vibrated with a text.

Tomorrow still good for a sail? Boatyard at 10 a.m.?

It was Tito Barros. Ruth had forgotten about their talk of a boat outing. She felt certain it had just been polite conversation, maybe a mild flirtation, no firm plans. And yet she did not want to be sitting around the house when her ex-husband arrived. It was best to do something to root herself firmly in the present. The past was the past.

Yes, sounds good. See you tomorrow.

When she looked up, Olivia was observing her.

“Everything okay?” she said.

“Great,” Ruth replied. “Let’s order.”