I still walked, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. The old man who sat on his front steps smoking—Tom—we became friendlier. A bush by the steps was tilting toward his head as he sat there one day. “Tom,” I said, “how are you?” And he said, “Doin’ okay, de-ah. How about you?” There was not much to talk about, and so we talked about how there was not much to talk about. Then he said, “How’re you liking the Winterbourne house?” And I said it was fine. His eyes went to the side for a moment, and when he looked back at me he said, “Well, I’m glad you’re there.” And then I suddenly understood that Bob Burgess might have been right about Tom putting that sign on our car months earlier, because of how Tom had specifically mentioned the Winterbourne place and the way his eyes had looked away for a moment. But I just said, “Well, thank you, Tom, that makes me glad.”
As I turned to walk away, Tom said to me, squinting his eyes against his cigarette smoke, “It makes my day to see you, de-ah. It always does.”
I told him it was the very same for me.
v
And then this happened:
Toward the end of June, Becka got the virus.
Chrissy called to tell me this; it was midafternoon, and I was just getting ready for my walk. William was out looking at the guard tower. Chrissy said: “Mom, listen and don’t freak out. Please.”
I said, “I won’t freak out, but tell me.”
And she told me that Becka had the virus; she had gotten it from Trey. Becka had gone back to Brooklyn to see him and they had sex. He said he had no idea that he had the virus, but he became sick the next day, and Becka became sick five days later.
I said, “Chrissy. I can’t believe this!”
And Chrissy said, “I know.”
When I hung up, I sat for a long while at the table, and then I called William, who was out for his walk. “I’ll be home in five minutes,” he said.
When he came through the door, he looked old to me, and I felt angry with Becka then. For just a few very brief moments, I felt angry with her. And then it passed. “You call her,” I said, and William did. He was careful as he spoke to her. I heard her begin to cry, but she answered his questions. Her fever was not very high, she had no sense of taste or smell, and her lungs felt “spongey” as she took a shower. William reported this to me after he hung up. He also said she had asked, “Is Mom mad at me?” And that hurt my heart. He had told her no, that we were both just concerned. But William looked defeated as he sat there, his shoulders were slumped and his eyes were far away.
It’s a funny thing. I was not as concerned about her having the virus as I was about the state of her marriage. What I mean is, I somehow felt right away that she was young and that she would be okay—and she was—but I was worried about her being back with Trey. And I also felt a sense of great weariness. William and I sat together silently for a long while. Through the window the bright green of the new leaves was picked up by the sun, you could almost see through the leaves, they were that fresh.
* * *
Becka called me the next day. She was calling from the bathroom and her voice was sort of muffled. “Mom, I’m so embarrassed, I’m so— Oh Mom,” she said.
I listened to her as I walked around the little green lawn area by the house. She told me that Trey had been calling her and that she had missed him, and that she wanted to get back with him. “But I didn’t want to tell you.” I said I understood. She said that Trey had told her it had ended—supposedly—with the other woman. “She’s a poet too, Mom. God.” I kept listening. But when Becka got back to their apartment, the reality of Trey wasn’t what she had pictured. “Mom, he’s gross. But we had sex, Mom. I don’t know why—but we had sex, and it sort of seemed right then, but not really— Oh Mom.”
I let her go on until she ran down, and then I told her it was not a new story, these things happened all the time between couples who were trying to decide what to do.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Oh, seriously,” I said. I did not say that her father and I had played this out similarly—in our own way—when we were splitting up.
I just let her continue to talk, and she talked until she got tired, but it was a long time before she hung up.
* * *
—
After Trey got better—he got better faster than Becka did—he moved into some apartment on the Lower East Side. And Becka stayed in their apartment. William had bought it for them when they got married. “I want to sell it,” Becka said, and William told her to slash the price and get out of there. As soon as Becka got better—it took her more than three weeks—she put the place on the market and went back to Connecticut to live in the guesthouse near Michael and Chrissy.
vi
For some reason that I did not understand, it continued to bother me to think of my apartment in New York. I kept thinking: Go away. I felt that it tugged on my heart almost constantly, but not in a good way, and I saw that more and more time would go by before I would be there, and when I pictured finally walking back into the place—and when would that be?—it filled me with a kind of despair. David would not be there. But he had not been there for a year before this whole pandemic. I did not know what to do. And there was nothing to do anyway. Mom, I cried silently to the nice mother I had made up, Mom, I am so confused! And the nice mother I had made up said, I know you are, Lucy. But it will work out. You just hang tight, honey, that’s all you need to do.
* * *
Not long after Becka returned to Connecticut, she called me with excitement in her voice. She had met a friend of Michael’s, he had also already had the virus, and so they had seen each other a number of times. “I think he likes me,” Becka said.
“Of course he likes you,” I said. Then I asked, “What does he do?”
“He’s a screenwriter,” Becka said. “He does documentaries.”
And I thought: Oh dear God. He will break her heart because this is so often what happens in first relationships after a separation or divorce. But I did not tell her that.
vii
Chrissy lost her baby.
She had gone out for a short run and developed cramps and then when she got home she was bleeding so badly that Michael drove her to the emergency room. She spent the day there; they’d managed to stop the bleeding and she was home now.
Becka was the one who called and told me, and she said, “Don’t feel bad, but she can’t talk to you right now.” I said I understood. But I thought: Chrissy! Oh dear Chrissy! “But how is she?” I asked this quietly. And Becka paused and then said, “Well, she’s how you would expect, Mom. She’s really upset.”
“Of course,” I said.
We spoke for a few more minutes; I asked her to have Michael call me when he could, and Becka said she would do that. And then we hung up.
I sat at the round dining room table, stupefied. Again and again I thought, Oh Chrissy, Chrissy.
Chrissy.
* * *
—
When William got back to the house, I told him. He sat across from me at the table and he didn’t say anything. We just sat there for a very long time, not speaking. Finally I said, “Why would she go for a run?”
William opened his hand that was on the table and said, “The doctor told her she could keep running.”
“He did?” I asked. “Why?”
William only shook his head.
“But how do you know the doctor said that?” I persisted.
“She told me one day. She told me the doctor had said she could keep up with her exercise for now.” William stood up and walked over to the living room window, then came back and sat down across from me again.
* * *
—
And then I remembered that when I was young, my mother had said—about some woman in our town who had adopted a child, and the child had not turned out all right—my mother had said, “When a woman can’t have a baby, there’s a reason.” She meant because the woman would not be a good mother.
And it horrified me as I recalled this, because I had sort of believed it.
But Chrissy would be a wonderful mother. When I spoke of it to William, he rolled his eyes and said, “Your mother was an absolute whack job. God, Lucy.”
I thought about this.
My mother, because she was my mother, had great gravity in my young life. In my whole life. I did not know who she was, and I did not like who she had been. But she was my mother, and so some part of me had continued to believe things she had said.
* * *
The days went by, but I do not really remember how. The silence from Chrissy made me feel numb with awfulness. Michael finally called, and he sounded very serious. He said, “She’s hurting.” And I said, Of course.