The One In My Heart

I did have a number of commitments: several STEM presentations that Lara and I were participating in at middle schools around the city, a grad student’s mock defense that I’d agreed to attend, plus a conference in Montreal. But by far the most important appointment on my calendar was to take place after the conference.

The Vermont farmer lived in the Northeast Kingdom. The farm had been and still was a dairy operation, but now there was also a B and B. I was booked for a one-night stay, to break my return journey from Montreal.

I left Montreal late and didn’t reach the farm until after midnight. It was difficult to see anything in the dark. Even the B and B, which according to the website was a white-clapboard, picture-perfect restored farmhouse, was nothing but bulk and shadows.

When I came out of the car, the cold night air was piercingly clear, and carried with it a whiff of manure. I inhaled deeply and could almost smell spring, the loamy scent that comes when soil wakes up after the long freeze of winter.

The innkeeper had gone to bed. I let myself in with a key that had been left in a digital lockbox outside the front door. My room was on the top floor, snuggled beneath a slanting roof. The walls were a thick, creamy white, the floor light planks of ash. On the wrought-iron bed was a contemporary quilt that resembled a pixelated forest.

I shook my head. The place was more chic than my own and bore little resemblance to my impression of the farm from more than twenty years ago. And I could see no trace of my mother. It had been a generation since she’d died—not to mention that she’d moved out of the farm even before that.

Deep down, I always knew that the origin of my fear was not Zelda’s illness, but my mother’s abrupt disappearance from my life. I couldn’t remember her or those days when I must have cried for her after she was gone. But she was the reason I’d clung to Zelda from the very beginning, long before her first episode in Manhattan.

I hadn’t wanted to lose another mother.

And now I was here, at last, in the one place that was inextricably bound up with her. Her home, her refuge, the rustic backdrop against which I’d spun the first great escapist fantasy of my life.

I took a picture of my room and sent it to Bennett. I thought abandonment issues usually don’t look so pretty up close.

It must be the crack of dawn in England, but he replied only minutes later. No, they always look so pretty up close.

The image that accompanied his text was a scanned photograph of a beautiful young man sitting on a set of wide, shallow steps—I recognized the back of Mrs. Asquith’s house. His shirt was rumpled, his hand covered his eyes, and in the slump of his shoulders there was so much fatigue and despair that my heart trembled.

23? I asked.

Thereabout.

As I thought. Not long after the breakup with Moira.

In his other hand was a lit cigarette and at his feet an ashtray stuffed with cigarette butts. I wasn’t sure why, but I tapped, Are you smoking again, btw?

This time his answer took a while. But eventually it came. Yes.


IN THE MORNING I WENT down to breakfast and took a seat by the window. The dining room overlooked a small lake, its water rippling in the light of the rising sun. Mother had sent some photographs of herself and her husband in rowboats. Had that been on this lake?

“Evangeline?”

I looked up. A man in a Fair Isle sweater and brown corduroys stood by my table. He was in his fifties and looked like a member of a local council. “Yes?”

He extended his hand. “Doug Tipton. Nice to meet you at last.”

Mother’s husband. I scrambled to my feet and shook his hand. “Hi. I didn’t recognize you without the beard.”

He laughed. “Haven’t had it for at least ten years. But I guess that’s what I looked like in all the pictures your mother used to send you. Mind if I join you?”

“No, not at all. Please.”

He sat down. “When I came across your name on the reservation list, I thought to myself, Is that possible? But as soon as I saw you, I knew it. You look just like your mother.”

Not something I heard every day, since most people I knew had never met my mother.

“I’m glad you recognized me. I’d have passed you right by.”

For the rest of breakfast, we chatted about our lives, filling each other in on the twenty-plus years since Mother died. At the end of the meal, he asked whether I had any particular plans, and when I said no, he offered to give me a tour of the farm.

Half an hour later we found ourselves standing in a pasture that still had thin scabs of snow, looking toward a line of purple hills in the distance.

“To think, this is where you might have grown up, had things been different,” said Doug.