Eliza hung up the phone the exact second she crested the last hill and the harbor opened up before her. She gasped the same way she always did. It was so beautiful, it really did take her breath away, the craggy shoreline, the stands of pine, the gray-blue water. To the right, she knew, just out of view, was the wharf, and off to the side, all of the lobster boats rocking on their moorings. If they were in for the night. Would they be in? She checked the clock on the dashboard: six thirty, yes, they’d all be in. She opened her window and took a deep, cleansing breath. Even the air felt different here: unadulterated and pure, like air from biblical times.
She pulled over, for just a minute, and got out of the car. When Eliza had first brought Rob to Little Harbor she’d stopped the car here and made him get out just like this and she’d said, “Breathe. Breathe.” Rob had breathed, and then he’d looked at Eliza like she was a teacher and he was a student afraid of getting the answer wrong, and then he’d said, “Yes!” although she never really knew if he was pretending or not. Not that she’d blame him if he were: Rob was from away, and there were certain things you just didn’t know if you were from away. Such as: what the sky looks like when the boats go steaming out at dawn, a bright white ball just above the waterline, and around it a yellow glow like a halo, the sky going from black to gray to orange in just a blink.
You didn’t know the way the town feels before the first set of the season, the whole place lit up from within. That Christmas Eve shiver, when you’re waiting to see what’s going to get brought to you. You didn’t know what a boat looks like setting out with a full load of traps stacked six high and six across; you didn’t know what it was like to see a little boy of seven or eight, sitting on top of a pile of his daddy’s traps, grinning like there was no tomorrow, wondering how long it would be before he’d grow into a big strong man too. You didn’t know the way you can look at a man who’s been out on the water his whole life and see nearly every trap he’s hauled and every line he’s tossed over just in the set of his eyes, the pleats in his face.
Of course, growing up here she couldn’t escape fast enough. If it had been possible to put wings on her shoes and fly up and out she would have done it. What were the chances that the motherless daughter of a lobsterman would get into an Ivy League school, would actually figure out how to go? She’d not only beaten the odds, she’d downright obliterated them. She’d had to take out student loans from here to eternity, but she’d done it: she’d gone.
At Brown, in her freshman composition course, Eliza had described her hometown as “a tight knot on the edge of the Atlantic—an angry little knuckle.” Beautiful! the teaching assistant had scribbled in the margins. So vivid! “An angry little knuckle,” indeed. What a pretentious college freshman she’d been. Luckily she’d abandoned the writing when she’d decided to go to medical school. Although she’d always thought she might have liked law school too.
She thought of Phineas Tarbox and shuddered.
Next to Eliza on the car’s seat was her Givenchy bag, and inside the bag was a letter her mother had written to her as she lay dying. She’d left it with Val with strict instructions to give it to Eliza on her sixteenth birthday. Val had been Eliza’s mother’s best friend: a BFF before BFFs existed. You might have thought them an unlikely pair: Val, native to the bone, and Joanie, a Main Line Philadelphia transplant who’d washed up on Little Harbor’s shores and never left. But it had worked.
When Eliza was home, Joanie’s letter lived in her nightstand drawer. But anytime she left the house for more than a night she took it with her. It was single-spaced, written on yellow legal paper, and the handwriting was terrible, but that didn’t stop Eliza from reading it over and over again.
Not that she needed to read it anymore; she’d long ago memorized every single word. In it, Joanie laid out four lessons. She’d meant to lay out ten (Val told Eliza) but she’d died somewhere between four and five. Sometimes when her heart ached and she felt lost Eliza wondered what the other lessons were.
My dearest, dearest Eliza, began the letter.
The first thing I need to tell you is that cancer sucks. Everyone knows that. But I didn’t really know it, not for real, not until it came for me. I never took it seriously, I thought it was a disease for other people.
The cancer itself sucks, and so does that awful heartbroken look in your dad’s eyes that he tries to hide but can’t, and the brave expression on Val’s face, and the well-meaning hospice volunteer who speaks to me in a way that makes me want to haul off and punch her.
If only I had the energy.
I am thirty-one years old, Eliza, and you are twelve, and I won’t be here when you turn thirteen and that, as they say, is the long and the short of it.
Thirty-one! I thought I would live twice as long, maybe even three times as long, and the fact that I won’t is just so incredibly surprising to me. Like it can’t be right. There must be some mistake! I want to call out every time I see a nurse, a doctor, anyone. Excuse me, ma’am? Sir? You have the wrong person, I’m only thirty-one and my daughter is only twelve. And she needs me.
But people die all the time, young and old, short and tall, black and white, parents of infants and toddlers and preteens and teenagers and adults. It’s the circle of life, it’s all perfectly natural.
I just never knew the circle would be so very small in my case.
I have to write this letter in little bits and pieces, Eliza, because I tire so easily. So don’t hold it against me if it reads as somewhat disjointed. I myself am disjointed now, and I expect I will be until the end. Whenever that may be.
I don’t want Val to give you this letter right away, my darling Eliza. I’m going to ask her to wait until you’re sixteen. Sixteen seems like the right age. You’ll have a lot of questions you’ll need answered when you’re sixteen.
When you die, Eliza, which I know you will do many many many happy years in the future, I strongly advise you to choose a different path. Heart attack. Stroke. Something quick. Slipping away blissfully in the night at the age of ninety-four. There are so many better options than this endless, useless, goddamn painful suffering, which takes so long and at the same time goes by so, so quickly.
There. I’ve finished complaining. I want you to remember me as strong and beautiful, not as ugly and suffering and whiny. Being beautiful has always been important to me, maybe more important than it should have been. (That, my mother, your grandmother, would say, is how I got myself in trouble in the first place. Never mind that what she considered “trouble” is what I considered “my life.”)
If I have to die young (thirty-one! I can’t stop repeating the age, as if repeating it will make whoever is in charge Up There reconsider), then I would like to die in a much prettier way, not wasted down like this, not with mouth sores and throat sores with my beautiful hair shorn close to my head.
Shorn! What a deliciously descriptive, awful word.
Do you know, Eliza, when I was a student at The Baldwin School (Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, a place you have never been and I suppose now you will never go) I won the prestigious Baldwin Creative Writing Award? Diane Douglas thought she had it all tied up, but in fact she did not.