Intermission begins: The audience leaves their seats to buy drinks, chat with acquaintances in the lobby, compare notes. Fifteen minutes later, the house lights blink, and the curtain rises. Years have passed.
Two years after Erik and I were married, Ten Chimneys opened to the public. May 26, 2003. The governor of Wisconsin declared it to be “Ten Chimneys Day.” It would have been the Lunts’ eighty-first wedding anniversary.
In the years that followed, the estate was featured in the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, showcased on CBS’s Sunday Morning and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Tour buses from Chicago and Minneapolis regularly appeared on our narrow farm roads, their dark shapes floating past acres of corn or soybean. Stretch limousines with tinted windows waited in the gravel lot behind the Genesee Depot diner, and it wasn’t unusual to see an Emmy or Tony Award–winning actor in one of the booths: Hal Holbrook, David Hyde Pierce, Bernadette Peters, the guy who played George on Seinfeld.
I thought of Kelly often in those years when Ten Chimneys was in the spotlight. She would have loved the Lunts’ home. Sometimes I even wondered if she was part of why I loved it, maybe part of why I’d ended up with Erik. Because of all the people I could have married, what were the chances it would be a man so intricately involved in the world she had loved? I thought of our first night at Kopp’s, when Erik mentioned Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. I’d recognized those names, and a little piece of my past, a past I had never stopped grieving, had come back to me.
By then, Kelly had become a celebrity in her own right, starring in a hugely popular TV drama about a group of widows whose firefighter husbands died on 9/11. It seemed fitting that this was how she reappeared in my life, because on 9/11, when everyone kept asking, “Do you know anyone in New York?” I kept saying, “My best friend growing up.”
I realized that day that although Kelly and I would probably never reconcile, I needed to know she was okay, that she was out there in the world, acting, falling in love, spoiling Lucy. In the years after 9/11, I would watch her show religiously, and on the night she won her first Emmy, I phoned my mom, who was crying and laughing. “Can you believe it?” she wept. “That she beat Glenn Close? Our Kelly!”
Our.
After the second Emmy, the name Kelly Jarrell was familiar. The press called her “KJ.” She hosted Saturday Night Live and was profiled in People magazine, interviewed on the Today show: How, reporters kept asking, was she able to portray grief so well?
I ran my first, and last, marathon a few months after Ten Chimneys opened. Erik and the kids, Eva and Gabe, and Annabelle and Scott spread out along the route, cheering me on. That part was fun, if you can call running a marathon fun, but after mile twenty, I tumbled into a dark place in my head. I was weeping when I finished. I’ve heard this isn’t unusual, the body physically and emotionally depleted, but for me it triggered something deeper: the pain and loneliness of those weeks in the hospital when I finally understood what I’d done. For days after the race, I couldn’t stop crying. It scared me and Erik both, but I was also angry at myself, because running had always soothed something jagged in me, and I felt like I’d ruined it by pushing too hard, not being satisfied. Why wasn’t six or eight or ten miles enough? Why did I need twenty-six? I was myself again after a week, but the experience felt like a cautionary tale I promised to heed. I have so much, I told myself. Don’t ask for more.
The next year, Scott and Annabelle got married. Mine and Erik’s wedding had been small—we had the ceremony at Ten Chimneys—but Scott had never been married, so they did it all: tuxedo, gown and veil, bridesmaids (Eva and me), groomsmen (Scott’s bandmates). The twins were flower girls, and Spencer walked his mom down the aisle, all of us laughing when he stopped midway to turn and wave as if he were in a parade.
The day was a blur of music, dancing, and laughter, Annabelle and Scott smashing cake into each other’s faces, the guests hooting and cheering. I can still picture Annabelle dancing with Spencer to “Twist and Shout,” her wedding dress a froth of cream tulle shimmering around her like a cloud, sweat beading on her neck, and Spencer swinging his arms and laughing that exuberant, infectious laugh of his.
Happiness like an eclipse. So bright it hurt to look at.
It spilled into our homes and into our lives, which were busy and chaotic and ordinary and amazing in the way most lives usually are. Erik became executive director of Ten Chimneys, Annabelle joined the board, and Eva volunteered as a docent, all of us caught in the Ten Chimneys orbit. We attended dinners and fundraising events, met actors and theater historians, and invoked the names of the Lunts so often, they felt like part of our circle.
A gallery in Chicago now represented my work, selling the collages for sums that still surprised me. This had allowed me to leave the graphic design firm, and shortly after that, Erik and I decided we wanted the kids with us half-time. The custody arrangement had always been fifty-fifty, though we never felt the need to enforce it when the kids were younger. Until the girls were in first grade, we’d had them only on weekends. But one Sunday, when it was time to go back to Annabelle and Scott’s, Phoebe fell apart, begging to stay with us. Why couldn’t she? she demanded. It wasn’t fair! Though Erik said all the right things—Your mommy’s waiting for you, and She’d miss you so much, and I have to work all day, but I’ll visit you tomorrow as soon as I’m finished—Phoebe was having none of it. “Claire doesn’t work!” she sobbed. “She can pick us up, and why don’t you miss us? Why can’t this be my home too?”
“How can she think I don’t miss her?” Erik said after we dropped them off. “Jesus. I never wanted to be a weekend dad.” He slowed the car at the end of Annabelle’s street, as if reluctant to make the turn toward home. “I want fifty-fifty,” he said after a minute. “It’s time.”
“I’d love nothing better,” I told him, “but it will kill Annabelle, Erik. I can’t even imagine.” Except I could. She would feel we were taking her kids from her, and I knew exactly how that felt.
I wasn’t wrong. When Erik and I sat down with her and Scott a few nights later to talk about an arrangement whereby the kids stayed one week with us, one week with them—which would give Spencer time to adjust to the different households—Annabelle lost it. We’d been sitting at their picnic table on the back deck, the kids in bed, sharing a bottle of wine, and she immediately pushed her glass away and stood. “Absolutely not” was her first response, followed by fury—why would we even consider bringing that kind of upheaval into the kids’ lives? It was selfish, it was all about what we wanted, it would be disastrous for Spencer. And it’s not like we couldn’t see the kids any time we wanted. “Have I ever ever said no when you’ve wanted to drop by?” she wept.
“You’ve been great,” Erik told her. “But I don’t want to ask permission to see my kids.”
She refused to even have the conversation. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she said, crying so hard she was choking. She ended up going inside and leaving us all sitting there, Scott looking miserable, Erik and I feeling like jerks.
I went to see her the next morning. She was in her kitchen, eyes puffy, surrounded by plastic storage tubs. “I was just going through this,” she said without looking up. The tubs were filled with stuffed animals the kids had outgrown, baby clothes, board books. “This was the receiving blanket they wrapped Spencer in when I brought him home.” She set it on the table, then held up a pair of knitted booties. “I can’t believe he was ever this small.” Her voice broke.
“You’re not losing him, Annabelle,” I said.
She fingered the lace edge of a sunbonnet. “It feels like it, though.”
“You know you can spend as much time at our house as you want, right? And just think, the weeks they’re with us, you can go to Hattie’s to hear Scott, which he’d love, and you’ve been wanting to join a book club, and maybe…maybe you can take care of yourself a little?” I reached for her hand. “You’re so good at taking care of everyone else. All those years with your mom and then the kids…”
“They’re all I have, Claire.” Tears spilled down her face. “I’m nothing without them. I don’t even know how I’d spend the days.”
“But that’s what you’ll find out, and it might not be so bad.”
“That’s what Scott said.” She sniffled. “And I want them to spend more time with Erik; I know it’s healthy. Plus, there’s no one on this planet I trust with my kids more than you. Not even Scott. It’s just…” She started crying so hard she was hiccupping. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
My heart wrenched at her words. “I won’t let you miss anything, Annabelle. I promise.” And I did my best to honor that. If one of the girls got a one hundred on a spelling quiz, we called Annabelle to tell her. If Spencer and I tried a new cookie recipe—he loved loved loved to cook—we invited her over to try them with us. Eventually, I think she came to appreciate the arrangement. She took on more clients at the PR firm, spent hours in the warmer months tending her flower garden.
Which meant that finally, Erik got to be the dad he’d always wanted to be, leaving work early every Monday to take Spencer to chess club, learning how to French braid his daughters’ hair for school, packing their lunch boxes. The best part of the day, he said, was pulling into our driveway, the house blazing with light and all of us inside waiting for him.
And as much as Erik loved being a dad, I loved being a stepmom, meeting the girls’ bus after school, the two of them, now almost eight years old, flying down the steps with their socks around their ankles, clutching papers and art projects. The three of us would get a snack in the diner, the lunch crowd long gone. Annabelle often met us, ordering her usual peanut butter mochaccino, the girls sneaking spoonfuls of whipped cream that she pretended not to notice. We’d ask about their days, trying not to smile as the girls regaled us with stories of elementary school melodrama. And then Spencer’s bus would pull into the lot out back, the girls waving and rapping on the glass to get his attention.
Twelve years old, Spencer was now as tall as I, a sweet skinny boy with rosy cheeks and long eyelashes. Although he didn’t like us to touch him, he wanted to be close, sitting in the booth so that his shoulder brushed mine or Annabelle’s, positioning his hand on the table so his fingers grazed ours.
After the diner, it was home and homework and getting dinner ready. When Erik walked in, the kids bombarded him with hugs and complaints and news. And then the whirlwind of dinner–TV–bath–bedtime stories, our house loud and chaotic. Sometimes, it wasn’t until Erik and I were brushing our teeth, the dishwasher humming below in the darkened kitchen, that he would look at me in the mirror and say, “Hey, don’t I know you?”
“You do look familiar,” I’d say.
By then, I couldn’t imagine my life without Annabelle, who in many ways reminded me of Kelly. Always, people had vied for Kelly’s attention, competing to be her friend, to be noticed by her. Annabelle had that same effect. At Ten Chimneys events, in a crowd of flamboyant theater people, it was Annabelle’s voice ringing out from across the room, and when you looked over, she’d be holding court, telling bawdy jokes and making outrageous statements.
I liked her best—and knew her best—when she wasn’t putting on her one-woman show. At Hattie’s, watching Scott sing, her face incandescent with pride. Or in the diner, combing the girls’ hair with her fingers as they talked about school or leaning forward eagerly as Spencer regaled us with details about whatever he’d learned that day: Did you know if you put an avocado next to a banana it will ripen faster? Can we try it, Claire? Other than Erik, I spent more time with Annabelle than with anyone. We talked every day, even if was just her phoning to ask, “Hey, did you get Spencer’s Adderall renewed?” or me asking, “Did Hazel leave her reading book there?” I kept her Diet Coke in our fridge, and she always had vanilla creamer for me. I folded her laundry; she emptied my dishwasher. We cleaned each other’s houses, between which we were constantly ferrying shoes and jackets and homework assignments. We went to recitals and games and Spencer’s IEP meetings. “This is Spence’s other mom,” she introduced me the first time. I loved her for that. I always will.
Spence’s other mom.
On the weeks we had the kids, Annabelle and Scott popped by our house to see them; we did the same on their weeks. At first, I’d been annoyed when they showed up unannounced (couldn’t they phone first?), but we’d just started the week-on, week-off custody arrangement, and Annabelle was raw and needed a lot of reassurance. And then on our weeks without them, I saw it was just as difficult for us. Maybe it always had been. But we wanted to see Hazel’s new eyeglasses the day she got them, wanted to check out Phoebe’s tooth before the Tooth Fairy claimed it, hear Spencer recite some new fact from his Everything About the Weather book when it was still exciting. “Cirrus clouds come from ice crystals! Even in the summer! Cirrus clouds form so high up, the sky is only ice!” His shy grin; his exuberance.
I learned to love this give-and-take, love how permeable our homes and lives became to each other. I’d always been so private, which I know now was really about fear: Don’t let anyone get too close. I often thought of Margaret in those years, who’d moved home to Minneapolis after 9/11, her pilot ending things for good. Our friendship had been easy and unentangled and it was exactly what I’d needed, but now? I couldn’t fathom not hearing Annabelle’s “Hey, guys!” echoing from our foyer as we were finishing dinner. Or the way she’d saunter into my kitchen midday, plunk down the “essential oil–based” detergent she insisted we use for the kids’ clothes, and say, “Here. This way you have no excuses.” Or Gabe calling, “We come bearing gifts!” which meant ice cream. And how many nights had we been the ones stopping by Annabelle and Scott’s unannounced? Erik would wander out back to find Spencer on his trampoline while I followed the girls’ shrieks to the bathroom, where Annabelle was combing their wet tangled hair. “Oh, thank God in heaven,” she’d say, and hand me the hairbrush. “They’re all yours.”
By this time, Annabelle and I had become friends separate from the kids. She took the train with me to Chicago to visit my gallery, accompanied me to thrift stores and yard sales, where we scavenged for things to use in my collages. We did a Zumba class together, which we both hated—she didn’t have the breath (all those cigarettes), I didn’t have the coordination, but we had the best time making fun of ourselves and the instructor, who was everything we weren’t: cute, perky, and younger than us by a decade. “Fuck Zumba,” Annabelle would laugh as we drove home. On the mornings she worked at the PR firm, while the kids were in school, she’d often show up at my house afterward, still in her suit and heels, and call up to me in my studio that she was here whenever I was ready for a break. I’d come downstairs to find her reheating samosas from the Indian place downtown or setting out a plate of stuffed grape leaves from the Greek takeout.
There was an openness to our lives that I cherished, a sense that we had nothing to hide. I know how ironic that sounds, but I believed—and despite everything, I still do—that we knew each other in the ways that mattered: In our love for our kids, our spouses, each other. Our belief in art, music, theater.
I think of all those nights when Erik was at a fundraiser and Scott at a gig, and I’d go to Annabelle’s if she had the kids or she’d come to our house if I did. We’d sit out back and watch the huge Midwestern sky while she stole puffs of her cigarette and the kids cavorted around the yard, their voices seeming to echo more as night fell. Now and then she’d ask me a typical Annabelle question: What was your favorite thing about your mom growing up? What’s the nicest thing you ever did for a stranger? How come you never wanted kids of your own? She asked that one more than once, and I always told her, “It’s not that I didn’t want my own, just that Erik already came with three who were wonderful….”
The truth, and yet not.
Most of the time I was okay with that truth. Erik and I had decided before we got married that we wouldn’t tell anyone about Lucy. He didn’t think Annabelle would understand, and I didn’t want to take that chance. It wasn’t even a discussion, really. A few times, I’d be doing something with one of the kids, and Annabelle would see in my face the grief I didn’t know I was showing, and she’d touch my arm and ask, “You okay?” I’d want so badly to tell her about Lucy then, but something always stopped me. I never thought I was being false so much as I thought I was being private. I didn’t talk about the intricacies of my marriage with her either, and she never told me about the terrible final weeks of her mother’s life. We all have these things, I told myself. As long as I could talk to my mom about Lucy. As long as I could talk to Erik.
But it wasn’t that simple either. Even when days flashed by and I didn’t think of Lucy, she was never not there. Like living near the ocean. You feel it nearby even when you can’t see it. Naïvely, I’d thought that the more time I spent with our kids—and I thought of them as ours—the more I’d be able to relinquish my grief over Lucy. But if anything, it was the opposite: singing “Happy Birthday” and watching the twins blow out their candles; shopping for Christmas presents or teaching Spencer how to bake bread; getting the girls ready for the first day of kindergarten, the first day of elementary school—all I could think was, I never watched Lucy blow out candles. I never bought Lucy a first-day-of-school outfit.
I felt in those moments as if I’d replaced my daughter with these children. I kept hearing Kelly screaming How dare you?, a question I asked myself often: How dare I do any of these things—read bedtime stories, walk the girls to the bus stop, help Spencer study what different emotions looked like (When someone is surprised, their mouth might make an O shape!)—when I’d never done any of this with Lucy?
Other days, I felt grateful for this chance to love a child again. Oh, the grief was there—it always would be—and the regret and the anger, but there was forgiveness now too. I’d remember my mother’s terrible rage in those weeks before and after I relinquished my rights. She was furious at Nick and Andrea for advocating it; furious at my lawyer, who felt I was mentally competent enough to make the choice (my mother didn’t); furious at my dad for supporting me; furious mostly at me—for my inability to believe, as she did, that I wouldn’t always be the way I was then. She had been right, and I was grateful for this too.