I was too wound up to go straight home, and so I drove the long way, past Kopp’s. I wanted to savor the encounter with Kelly, hold in my head that image of Lucy. My daughter. My beautiful daughter.
Beyond the darkened fields, a radio tower blinked, and an airplane pulsed across the sky like a heartbeat. I thought again of the anniversary the day after next. I’d been mystified when I looked at September 11 in Spencer’s History of Weather calendar to find no mention of those perfect blue skies. Hadn’t the gorgeous autumn weather been a part of what happened that day? Why was it only the damage caused by storms and lightning strikes, record-breaking days of rainfall or gale-force winds, hurricanes or droughts, that counted as history? Why not the cloudless skies, the gentle breezes, the bright September sun that had made it an ideal day for flying?
Kopp’s was packed. Shadowy bands of people floated in the glare of headlights. I was tempted to get a custard, and if Erik were with me, we probably would have. Maybe tomorrow, I thought, and felt something in me release. We had a ton to work out—we’d both said awful things—but Kopp’s had always been a good place for us, at least a place to start.
Kopp’s had become one of the kids’ favorite places too, where we celebrated report cards and losing a tooth, first and last days of school. Spencer couldn’t eat the custard, but we brought him dessert from home, and the girls loved hearing the story of our first “date,” especially the part about how it almost didn’t happen. How even as Erik was suggesting we grab a frozen custard, his heart wasn’t in it—he was avoiding going home to his empty house. And following him in my car, I regretted saying yes. I was tired, and now I would have to talk to this strange man.
We keep embellishing the story: how we were drenched in sweat (“She had BO,” Erik loves to stage-whisper), how Erik was wearing his black “dad” socks with his gym shorts, how we were both in foul moods (“I didn’t want to go to Kopp’s with this skinny lady, even if she was pretty! I wanted to be with you guys, but it was past your bedtime!”).
“But then you fell in love!” the girls exclaim. That’s our refrain. It’s also the part of the story where Spencer announces he’s never falling in love because “kissing is disgusting.” Phoebe has decided she’ll fall in love a lot, “probably every month or so.” When we ask why, she rolls her eyes: Everyone knows when you’re falling in love, you buy lots of new clothes! Hazel’s going to fall in love with either an astronaut or a man who drives an ice cream truck.
“Astronaut and ice cream man?” Erik laughs later when we’re alone. “You think it’s the white uniform?”
“That’s what you’re worried about? Not the one who wants to fall in love every month?”
Already in the rearview mirror, Kopp’s was just a patch of pale light in the dark fields. It struck me that my own dreams had been just as outlandish when I met Erik. What if he was the person who could somehow, impossibly, understand who I was? What if he could believe I was more than what I had done? More than what I had lost? A thousand what-ifs, each as unlikely as marrying an astronaut. And yet, he was that man. Or at least he was trying to be.
But I wasn’t that woman anymore, that wounded, frightened woman who had been desperate not just to be loved but to be rescued. Had I understood the difference? I’m not sure I had. That woman would have never insisted on attending the play that night, and she certainly wouldn’t have defied a PFA order to do so. I knew this was a good thing—I was learning to stand up for myself, and because of that, I’d talked to Kelly: She knows you loved her. And yet, my throat suddenly felt thick with tears.
Why?
I didn’t understand until I passed the darkened strip mall with the ballet studio where all those years ago Annabelle and I used to watch the girls take classes. They’d looked like little sumo wrestlers in their bunched-up tights and leotards. I’d loved being her friend, I thought. When I met Erik, I wasn’t sure I could love a child again, and she had made it easy. So many exes wouldn’t have. Whatever else her faults, for six years she had openheartedly shared her children with me. She, more than Erik, more than my own mom, hadn’t just taught me how to be a mother; she’d let me be one.
At our house, I sat in the car, listening to the engine ticking down, our street quiet, the sky filled with a thousand ancient stars. Everything was dark but for the yellow porch light and that full, bright moon overhead. It might as well have been a stage set. In a few minutes I’d go inside, flip on the hall light, and slip out of my heels. In the kitchen, where Hazel’s purple rabbit foot was still on the counter, I’d boil water for hot chocolate, then sit at the table to call my mom.
In the morning, Eva and Gabe would drive to Door County, where they would gently unravel their marriage, and the following week, the kids would start staying with us again. No big reconciliation, no fanfare, just Annabelle phoning in tears. “You win,” she would sob, hiccupping and choking. It would fill me with a bottomless sorrow. How could she think we had won anything?
“It’s not like that, Annabelle,” I would say, but she’d only cry harder.
“I ruin everything. My whole life.”
I’d want to tell her that wasn’t true, want to tell her our friendship wasn’t over, but I couldn’t know this yet. Erik and I were too raw, and I was still too hurt. So was she. And maybe too we were both scared. Something else we had in common: We both understood how easy it is to damage what you most love.
My life would be so much quieter that fall. Eva would move to Philly to play Isabel in Tennessee Williams’s Christmas play Period of Adjustment, which a friend of Kelly’s was producing, and though Annabelle and I would resume talking, for a long time, it would only be about the kids. Still, there was a kindness to the exchanges. She’d email a recipe that Spencer and I might try, and I’d send him home with a sample of whatever we made. Or she’d offer to pick up the kids from school for me when it snowed. She never came in, but she’d beep the horn and wave. I would miss her. I would miss her insane questions and grand plans and how deeply she felt everything. Mostly, I would miss how hard she had tried to be happy, to make us happy. A few times, I’d see her car at the diner when I finished a run, and I’d want so much to go in, plunk down opposite her at our old booth, and ask how she was. But I didn’t feel ready.
In January, I would drive to Rehoboth with Eva, who was moving to the East Coast for good. Erik would come the next time, but I needed to make the first trip without him. I would drive by the house where I’d grown up, sit in my dad’s restaurant, and shop in Browseabout. I’d look for Lucy everywhere and think I saw her a dozen times, though, of course, it was never her. Why would she be at the beach in January? Wherever she was, she’d be in school, her junior year. I wondered if she’d started thinking about college yet, if she was still dating Trevor. My mom and I would talk constantly, walking the empty frigid boardwalk, turning backward against the wind, our eyes tearing from the cold. I told her how sorry I was for all she had given up so that I could have the life I did.
“Oh, sweet girl.” She would cup her frozen hands to my face. “Who do you think I learned that from?”
On Lucy’s seventeenth birthday, I’d finally go to the house on Fourth Street where I’d lived with Nick. The weather would abruptly turn overnight into one of those impossibly warm January days that are completely out of season, the air almost balmy, as if the weather itself were offering forgiveness. Nothing looked the same. The house was painted an odd mint green with lavender shutters that made me smile. Nick would have hated it. But seeing the house also made me ache. I could remember so clearly the day I brought her home, still wearing the plastic hospital bracelet with her name, Lucy Kelly Jarrell. I had felt like the luckiest woman in the world. I had been her mother. I still was. The tears would come then, and I would cry and cry and cry as I’d never had the chance to, as I’d never understood I had the right to.
It would feel like a kind of grace.
And not until months later—the rainy morning I showed up at Annabelle’s for the first time in almost a year with a peanut butter mochaccino for her and a latte for me, and she pulled open the door, eyes welling, and said, “Get in here,” and then again, the blustery afternoon when I put the finishing touches on Weathering—would it occur to me that theater itself, so much a part of our lives, so much a part of our own season of perfect happiness, had begun with weather. Long before the word theater existed, primitive man, terrified by winter, afraid he had done something to displease the gods and so was being punished, offered sacrifices to induce fertility in the spring and enacted dramatic rituals, complete with masks and costumes, to ensure the return of summer.
Theater as a kind of prayer. Like friendship. Like a marriage.
Of course I knew none of this the night of the play as I sat in our driveway, inhaling the smell of Kelly’s cigarettes and staring up at the moon. But I think I sensed it: As soon as I got out of the car and unlocked our front door and walked inside, it would almost be like the opening night of a whole new play.