The house we’re renting this August in Deer Isle really is round. It’s a gray wooden structure, sitting up high on stilts, and it has windows all around facing the ocean. Besides that, the first thing I notice is the deck with a wide-open railing that wraps all the way around the house. Right away I can imagine Eva walking right through it and falling into the bushes below.
“Back in the car,” says Roy. We’ve just driven nine hours to the very end of this long dirt road that juts way out into the ocean. But before going any further, we have to do something about the big, gaping deck.
We get back into the car, and drive straight to the hardware store. We know just where to go because we came to Deer Isle last August, too, but last year we’d stayed in a different house that we shared part of the time with another family. Slamming the car door in the Burnt Cove parking lot, I yell out to Roy, “Let’s pick up some eggs, milk, and juice while we’re here!” But Roy says, “No, for now let’s just go to the hardware store.” He just wants to get the problem solved. We find some bright yellow rope and buy all three packages that are on the shelf, and then lug them back to the car. “Now can we go home to our round house?” asks Eli. The kids can’t stand being in the car anymore, and who can blame them. Back we go, out to the very end of the long dirt road again, back to our house.
Armed with our bright yellow rope, this time we open the door of our new home and look around. There’s a nice, open kitchen with bright blue countertops. And the living room looks out onto the far-reaching water. Right in the center of the house is a spiral staircase that leads down to the bedrooms. I envision more dangerous tumbles to the ground.
Roy unwinds the yellow rope, and together we weave it and tie it all the way around the deck railing, making a bright web of prevention that looks like a construction site. When that’s finished, we use the remaining piece of rope inside on the spiral staircase, zigzagging it back and forth through the spokes and around the banister.
Where I am prone to being fearful and ready to plunge into the past, Roy is practical and very much in the here and now. He jokes about my always needing to have a good supply of toilet paper, dishwashing soap, olive oil, and mustard. “We live in a city,” he says. “We don’t need to have a storeroom. We can buy things when we need them.” It’s the same when I want to have tools on hand, and nails, screws, and scotch tape in case something breaks. “That’s why we have a super,” he says. “That’s why we live in an apartment building.” It’s taken me years to understand that Roy doesn’t need to prepare for all kinds of material eventualities. The fact is that he’s already taken care of the larger issues, like life insurance policies and health care plans, and he’s basically confident about the world. When the railing needs to be fixed, he’s rational about figuring out how to do it. He doesn’t get held up thinking about what might go wrong.
When I first met Roy’s family, I was impressed to discover that his mother always carried a measuring tape in her pocket book, ready to calculate the dimensions of any table or chair she might want to buy at a flea market, or to accurately judge whether a particular pot or pan would fit properly on a shelf. Roy’s whole family is like that, very keyed into the details. They’re all good at reading floor plans for apartments, something I can never really fathom until the actual space is in front of me and fully arranged with furniture.
The plan is for me and the kids to be out here for the whole month. Roy’s set aside these couple of days to help us settle into the house before he drives back to New York. Tomorrow we’ll pick up a rental car in Bangor for us to use until Roy returns again. August is when things start to get busy for him at work, so he can’t take that much time off. He’s spent his whole career as a lawyer dedicated to educational policy. Now he works in a university system, so there’s a lot of administrative planning and politics to handle before the school year begins. But he’ll get back up here for at least a week at the end of the month.
This month in Deer Isle is the refuge I’ve been waiting for. It’s the big break from the everyday confusion of work and the kids’ school and babysitting schedules. I’ve spent weeks getting organized, tying up loose ends in my office, paying all the bills ahead of time, gathering all the things we’ll need up here—sunscreen and insect repellant, organic fruit snacks for Eli’s camp lunches, and birthday presents for Eva, who will be turning two in just a couple of weeks. Maybe now that we’re finally here I’ll have the time to really think about my mother.
We’ve made the kids’ beds, unpacked our clothes into the drawers, and put some food in the cabinets, and now it’s time to take a walk to the beach. Down the rickety steps we go. The round granite rocks crunch under our sandals as we make our way to the water. A big dragonfly lands on Eli’s arm. “Mom, what do I do?” he shrieks.
“Just brush it off,” I shout back, laughing a little to myself at how my city kids need to adjust to life in the wilds. But at the same time I’m wondering how I’ll ever manage here by myself without the trappings of my everyday city routine.
The first night that Roy’s gone, I’m quaking in the silent darkness. There are rustling noises coming from the woods in the back, and I ask myself whether there might be animals or people out there. For some reason, animals seem less frightening because I don’t think they’ll come inside. I remind myself that I’m the mother, that I’m the one watching over my children who are sleeping peacefully in the room next to mine.
Morning is a big relief. Not only is the night over, but it’s a beautiful day. And it’s Eli’s first day of camp. The three of us get into the car, and I follow the directions on the brochure that tells us where we’re going. From the parking lot, there’s a dirt path into the woods. Eli bounds ahead, first to the arts and crafts shed and then down to the waterfront and boating house. Eli is one of the youngest, but he seems to be making a friend right away, so I quickly say goodbye, thinking he’ll be fine in this lovely old-fashioned world. Eva and I return to the house to meet up with the babysitter, the sister of the girl who helped out with the kids last summer. I’m impressed that the babysitter has brought her own books to read to Eva, and I leave the two of them reading Madeline on the front steps and wave goodbye.
This is my life in Maine, I tell myself. Monday is dump day, so I begin by taking the garbage to the dump. Next I set out to try to find a vegetable stand that I vaguely remember from last summer. It’s a couple of towns over, and like everything else here it’s a twenty or thirty minute drive away. As I navigate the road and try to recall which turn is the right one, it comes back to me that when I first found this stand last August, I had been sitting in the car with my mother. It was when my parents were visiting us for a few days in Maine. Remarkably I again find the stand, just a small wooden structure by the side of the road with a farm in the back. I pick out a few great-looking, ripe tomatoes and a nice bag of green beans, and get back in the car feeling like I’ve accomplished something. There I am, driving home alone at last with my vegetables beside me on the seat. All of the tension lets loose and I cry all the way back to the round house.
We develop our routine. I get Eli to camp on time in the morning, leave Eva to play with the babysitter so that I can do work—make phone calls and answer the mail that’s been forwarded from my office to the local post office—and then I move on to my errands. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, after taking the garbage to the dump, I head for the grocery store. Friday is the Deer Isle Farmers’ Market. Sometimes I check out a gallery, or see if there’s a new pair of earrings at the jewelry store in Deer Isle Center, which is really no more than a crossroads. If there’s enough time and it’s a warm enough day, I try to go for a swim in the Lily Pond. In the late afternoon, Eva and I pick up Eli at camp, and usually we all go back to the pond again to swim. Actually, they play in the water and I watch them. In the evening, I get the grill lit, bathe the kids while the charcoals are getting hot, get the chicken or hotdogs cooking (I’ve given up encouraging them to eat fish even though we’re in Maine), and try to keep an eye on the grill while also watching to be sure Eva doesn’t run down to the water by herself. The kids bicker over who gets the blue washcloth and who gets the green one. And at dinner they both want to sit on the same side of the table as me. “You have to learn to take turns,” I tell them an uncountable number of times. I bribe them. “If everyone cooperates, we all get to eat our dessert on the beach.” And then we go out to the rocks with our ice cream sandwiches.
It’s an intense little world we dwell in. And part of what fortifies us is that we’re in it together, just me and Eli and Eva in a phenomenally beautiful environment. Once it’s dark and they’re completely asleep downstairs in their bedroom at the bottom of the spiral staircase, I quietly make my way back upstairs. I lean back into the pillows of the living room couch and marvel as I look around. The big, curved window that looks out on the water is actually a series of panes. With the lights on inside, and the darkness outside, each pane reflects the moon, so it looks like there are eight moons, each shining on a piece of illuminated water.
As the days pass I have more time to swim and dry off in the sun, and even gain enough attention to read a few chapters of a book. Slowly, the air, the trees, and the gentle beauty begin to slip under my skin. And even deeper than that, I can feel my muscles start to relax. I watch Eli and Eva scamper around on the deck. Eva runs inside to change into different bathing suits, returning back to model them, and Eli makes guns out of sticks. Maybe soon my mind will clear, and I’ll have the time to really think about what it means that my mother has died.
On the day of her second birthday, Eva wakes up at 5:30 a.m. I bring her into bed with me, to try to get her to go back to sleep. It was right around this time two years ago when I was having early labor pains and she was about to be born. She hugs me and sings snippets of different rhyming songs. And eventually she falls back asleep. I get out of bed to do the sun salutations that I try to do most mornings, something I started doing a few months after Eva was born. Then I get back into bed and doze off beside Eva before the day begins.
When she wakes up the second time, she’s ready to celebrate. She loves her presents—blow-up toys for the water, and a new bathing suit. We take Eli to camp, and come home to make her cake. In the afternoon the two of us sit by the water and play with stones on the beach, just holding them, turning them over in our hands and feeling their warmth. We throw our stones into the water and watch the splashes they make. At night we all sing “Happy Birthday, and Eva blows out the candles.
When Roy returns to spend the last week with us, immediately I sleep more peacefully. The broken dreams that I’ve been having about my mother and Danny stop right away. The one about Danny is a variation on a recurring theme—he’s still alive and he’s only been wandering around for years, never really dead. He tells me about his journeys and beckons me to come with him, but then drifts away again and I wake up feeling tortured by the reality.
A couple of nights ago, I had a beautiful dream about my mother. I was lost on the way to school in the first grade. I was walking on a street in a town very unlike my own, cold, with brick buildings reminiscent of small, austere towns in upstate New York. The name of the town was “Hydro.” I roamed past an old, brick power plant. I turned a corner and walked up the stairs to my house and rang the bell. A woman who was my mother answered the door wearing a diaphanous dress in a pale shade of greenish blue. Apparently she and I lived there alone. In my dream, I kept waking up and knowing that the woman wasn’t really my mother, but then I’d keep on going back to sleep again so I could be with her.
My father pays us a visit, and here in this beautiful setting, he seems especially sad. His dark eyes look sunken into his nicely shaped bald head that’s covered with faded freckles. Insistent on shielding himself from the sun, he sometimes even wears his baseball cap inside. His skin looks a little gray, not the healthy kind of tan color he usually is this time of year.
Last year, when my father and mother came together to visit us in Deer Isle, he ran around with Eli teaching him how to fly a kite. And my mother made pies with the Maine blueberries. My father says he’s been keeping active, playing tennis and riding his bike sometimes. He tells me he’s even gone out on a couple of dates. He’s especially impressed by one woman who’s recently learned to play the cello. “Maybe I could try to learn to play a musical instrument, too,” he says. “Maybe the violin.” He briefly mentions a woman named Judith Taylor. I’ve heard of her before. She and her husband used to play duplicate bridge sometimes with my parents, and I know that Judith’s husband had died right around the same time as my mother. My father says they’ve gone out to dinner a couple of times and once to see a movie. “Really?” I ask. “Is she nice?” But he doesn’t appear to be interested in my question. It seems difficult for him to stay focused on anything. It’s as though all of his senses are dulled, not just his hearing. He’s forgotten to bring his bathing suit, so he can’t go swimming. And he didn’t remember his sunscreen. When I offer him mine, he says it’s not a high enough SPF number. It won’t protect him enough.
Most striking is his loss of capacity to play with Eli and Eva.
“Come into the water with me, Papa Joel,” says Eli, taking off his sandals at the edge of the Lily Pond.
“No, I can’t,” says my father, his shoes tied, his dark socks pulled up to his calves.
“He forgot his bathing suit,” I say. “He’ll watch you from the blanket.”
“Come on, Papa Joel,” says Eli.
My father doesn’t even walk down to the water.
“I’ll come in with you,” says Roy, who’s usually not very interested in playing in the water.
I wonder whether my father will now be sad forever. After Danny died, his dreams were completely shattered. Maybe my mother’s death on top of that will be more than he can take.
“Danny’s gone,” were my father’s words that night when he called to tell me that Danny had died. For a moment, I didn’t understand what he was trying to say. Was he saying that Danny had left on a trip? But then immediately I knew. “How did he do it?” I asked. I don’t think he could have possibly answered me. I don’t remember exactly who told me how Danny had killed himself, that he had cut his abdomen with a kitchen knife in the restaurant where he worked.
I screamed when I heard what happened, and must have woken up my apartment mate, someone I hardly knew. But she didn’t come into my room. I’d moved into that apartment a couple of months before when I’d left my job at the auction house. I was now relying on the small income I could get from freelance work before starting my new job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house in the fall, and I couldn’t afford my own place anymore. “What are you doing in there?” my new roommate would periodically open the door of my bedroom and try to engage me in conversation or try to share a bowl of the popcorn that she made with her special air popper that didn’t use any fat. “Why are you always reading?” she’d ask. She thought all the books I’d unpacked into the living room shelves made the place look messy. My bedroom was where I’d sit doing my freelance copyediting jobs and commenting on manuscripts for movie companies, trying to make enough money to pay the rent. Occasionally I’d leave to go out to the park to run around the reservoir, something I hated, but forced myself to do anyway so I could get some exercise.
Something very terrible was brewing during those months before Danny died. I barely ate, and would burst into tears if I passed a homeless person on the street. Something as slight as a person walking away from me at a party because they said they wanted to get a drink would make me cry. There had been that succession of phone calls from Danny.
“That woman is a horror,” he said about his boss who ran the restaurant where he worked in the kitchen. I couldn’t understand it, but he really seemed to abhor that woman. “She really despises me,” he’d say. “There must be something I can do to get back at her.” He spoke with a kind of venom that made me nervous.
The last time he’d visited me the summer before he died we’d gotten into a screaming fight. It was the weekend of a big march against nuclear weapons, and Danny had come to New York for the protest. We had all walked together in the long procession, chanting, “No nukes!” Danny with me and my friends. There was music playing everywhere and Danny would periodically drift over to the side and dance by himself, sometimes closing his eyes. I worried that he seemed really alienated, but also I couldn’t stand him. By then he was perpetually berating me for seeing the world wrong, and for the way I treated him. “You don’t ever see me for who I am!” he’d accuse me. “I’m not a little kid. You can’t even treat me like a real person.” And he was right that I still thought of him more as my adorable brother. And that wasn’t who he was anymore, not at all. The person he had become was exhausting. He didn’t smell good, and his patchy beard made him look unappealing. He taunted me to the point that I physically tried to push him out of the apartment. That’s how that last visit ended, I kicked him out.
In September, he called to say he’d be in New York for a Grateful Dead concert. Could he stay with me? he wanted to know. I’d barely spoken to him since that last miserable visit, and I was so thankful that I would see him again. He said he’d arrive sometime before dinner, but he never showed up. “Aren’t you angry at him?” my roommate tried to commiserate as I cleared the table, including Danny’s unused plate. But angry was the last thing I was. And when I burst into tears, my roommate stopped asking questions. A couple of days later, Danny called to say he’d decided not to stay that night, but had gone straight back to Providence.
One small part of me was a little relieved after Danny died. I was always frightened that the worst thing imaginable was going to happen, and then it did. The morning of the funeral, I remembered to call my therapist from my parents’ house, to tell him I couldn’t make it to our session because my brother had committed suicide. Like usual, he didn’t say much back to me, but maybe this time it was because he was shocked. “Now that Danny is dead, I may not be coming back to therapy,” I told him. “The worst is now over.” In my state, I must have thought that Danny’s death could be neatly consumed. Even though I couldn’t have been more wrong about that, in some ways I was right about the worth of the therapy. I kept on seeing that therapist for another couple of years, but really I was too bereft to make any kind of progress.
Danny was in Providence when he died on October 13th. It was Wednesday night. He’d been brought to the hospital in an ambulance, and the police tried to reach Ted to tell him because that was the number they found first. When Ted wasn’t home, the police found my father’s phone number, and he was the one who called to tell me. My aunt Cecile called to say I should pack a bag. She and Stu were coming from Queens to pick me up, and we’d drive straight to Andover. “What else is there to do?” Cecile said. The sun was coming up as we got off the exit and turned onto Main Street. We were almost there, closer to the truth, closer to where Danny was. Maybe once I was there, I would know more.
Roy takes Eli down to the water, splashes him, and throws him in the air. Eva slaps around in the mud by their feet. Roy’s eyes are the sparkly pale blue they get in the summer when he’s a little tanned and near the water. His hair is light brown, and I can imagine it with blond streaks when he was little, just like Eva has. He’s not tall, shorter than my side of the family, but not diminutive either. It’s impossible not to be in the present with Roy’s matter-of-fact personality. He’s almost the opposite of my father, who often seems to be living in riddles. Roy doesn’t understand my father’s logic, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. He knows how to joke around with him in a way that I can’t.
By the end of the month, I know we’ve all been softened by our time in Maine. It hasn’t been the great opening up I’d imagined, more of a passing of time. I think we’ll come back to Deer Isle again next summer, to this same round house so perfectly perched on the water. Maybe Roy will have less work, and he’ll be able to spend more time with us. But first there is still a year to come in between. Eli will start kindergarten and Eva will begin her first year of preschool, and our schedules will take over. From this quiet spot in Maine, it doesn’t seem too daunting.