The Threadbare Heart

ELEANOR’S plane touched down at the Santa Barbara airport a few minutes after ten. Ryan was there to meet her. He was sitting at an outside bench drinking Heineken and watching the strange glow of the lights in the smoky sky. When he saw his grandmother step onto the tarmac, he stood up. He was almost two feet taller than she was.

“Hey, Nana,” he said, leaning down to embrace her. His eyes were red, his face heavy. “How was your flight?”

He shrugged. “It’s hard to believe any of it is real.” He took her suitcase and wheeled it along, and led her out to the car.

Eleanor wanted to say, “Believe it, child,” because she had lived long enough to know that everything can change in an instant, that people are always dying when you least expect it. “I know,” she said, “I know.”

RYAN put the suitcase in the trunk of the car, and held the door for his grandmother. When he got into the driver’s seat, she looked over at him. “He was doing exactly what he wanted,” she said. “At least there’s that.”

A feeling of guilt flashed across Eleanor’s consciousness like a meteor. It was my fault, she thought. It was my fault that they were living in the foothills of Santa Barbara in the sixth year of a drought, on a piece of property that was primed to burn. Were it not for me, they would be back in Vermont, awaiting the spring. She felt her stomach clench, and grew slightly faint.

ELEANOR dropped her purse by the front door and headed directly to the third-floor guest room, where she found Lily with a notepad perched on her knees.

“Oh, my sweet girl,” Eleanor said, sweeping into the room. She threw her arms around Lily’s neck, and kissed her on the cheek, and clutched her hand as if she would never let go.

“He’s dead,” Lily said, and even though her body did not move, her face screwed up, and tears spilled from her eyes. “And it’s all because of me.”

“No, no,” Eleanor said, but she didn’t say, You’re wrong, it was all because of me. “No, Lily. It was an accident, an act of nature.”

“I can’t live without him,” Lily said, looking straight into her mother’s eyes in order to make her point as clear as possible. “I can’t.”

“You can and you will,” Eleanor said. “I will see to it.” But even as she spoke the words, she knew that there were limits to what one person could do for another. She knew that there was always a space you couldn’t cross—a great divide. She had never bridged it with any of her husbands or lovers. She had never bridged it with Lily. She had come the closest with Gracie, who was dying alone in her beautiful apartment in New York City. But she was Lily’s mother and she would do whatever it took to help her daughter recover from this blow.

“What about some Thai soup?” Eleanor said, recalling how that had worked with Gordon on the night of Judy’s funeral. “Coconut lime soup?”

Eleanor felt panic rise in her like a fever. She wasn’t good at doing nothing. “What are you writing?” she asked, nodding at the notepad, and thinking about the piece of yellow legal paper that Gordon had shown her just twenty-four hours before.

Lily tipped the pad so that her mother could see it. At the top of the page was the word “Kitchen.” Underneath it was a list:

Walnut cookie jar
2 ceramic mugs from Maine
12 Blueberry Hill dinner plates
10 Blueberry Hill salad plates
9 Blueberry Hill bowls
Cast-iron skillet
Green-handled ice cream scoop
New dish drainer
New garbage can

Eleanor nodded, and brushed Lily’s dark hair behind her ears. “You have us,” she said, and even as she said it, she felt another jolt of guilt. She had wanted this: to have her family near, to have a role to play. She had asked for it. She had orchestrated it. This tragedy was, in many ways, completely her fault.

ELEANOR got up early the next morning and went to her office on the first floor. There were dozens of phone messages on Lily’s cell phone—friends and neighbors and relatives calling from all over the country to see if the fires had affected her, to see if she was okay; and people from town—old friends from high school, people from the avocado warehouse. On Eleanor’s home phone, there were dozens more. The last one had been from Gordon.

She answered all the other calls first. She had learned a thing or two about sudden and public tragedy, and so she knew just what to do: she told everyone about her son-in-law’s death, that Lily’s house had burned to the ground, and that in lieu of flowers they should send money to the Santa Barbara Fire Department.

Ryan was up early, too. He sat in the office where his grandmother worked the phones—nrst her home phone, then Lily’s cell phone—and looked up information on how to file insurance claims on a house that no longer stood. In between calls, he looked up at his grandmother. “Nana,” he said. “What the hell’s wrong with flowers?”

Eleanor wondered if Gordon had eaten anything besides bagels since she left. She wondered if he had sent his clothes to the cleaners. He was a lonely old man, used to having people around to look after him, cook for him, give a sense of purpose to his days. He no longer worked, was no longer married, no longer mattered in his children’s lives. “No, you don’t,” Eleanor said. “You miss Judy”

“I miss her desperately,” he said. “I do. But I also think she was right. What’s the point of being alone, when we could be together? You’re out there dealing with this terrible thing all alone. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Her daughter was locked in the guest room. Her grandson was brooding in her office. There was going to be a memorial party in five days, and she needed to get the gardener to come out and prune the rosebushes on the patio and take the dead leaves off the palm trees. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, and hung up.

After the phone call, Ryan spoke again. “My dad loved flowers,” he said. “He grew these huge sunflowers and he’d cut off the heads and leave them out on the deck for the chipmunks. He planted tulips every year along the stone wall at the edge of the property, even though the deer were the only ones who really got to see them.”

Eleanor looked at her grandson. She’d visited Lily’s home in Vermont every couple of years for Thanksgiving, and occasionally in July when the garden was in full flower. She often gave Tom things related to the garden for gifts—gardening books that had been written about in the Times, a beautiful trowel from Smith & Hawken.

ELEANOR left the house and went to Vons. She got a cart, and flew through the store, selecting butter, sugar, a box of yellow cake mix, and a bottle of Mount Gay Rum. When she got back to the house and started mixing the ingredients in a bowl, Luke came and stared. “You bake?” he asked.

“This is for Tom?” she asked. “The cake is for Tom?” Eleanor could see a thousand emotions flicker across Lily’s face, and she wasn’t sure whether Lily was going to wail or scream or laugh or burst out in an angry tirade.

Lily didn’t speak. She walked directly over to her mother, and collapsed into Eleanor’s body like a flower falling off its stem.

Eleanor was not used to her daughter’s body in her arms. She was not used to the weight, to the smell, to the look of her graying hair, to the feeling of her shoulders shaking. She put her arms around Lily, first one, then the other, as if she were trying to feel her way.