Visiting Day at Isabelle’s camp was the last weekend of July. In the early years, Daniel and I would go together, a forced show of solidarity. But eventually that ended. And now I handled drop-off and Parents’ Weekend, and he did the pickup. The arrangement seemed to work best for all parties.
My parents made the trip with me in Daniel’s absence. We’d drive up together from Cambridge and stay in a quaint B&B not more than an hour from the camp, each time exploring some hitherto unchartered territory. Strolling in Ogunquit, scouting small galleries in Portland. It was the one time I felt most like a daughter, when all the other labels and the weight of them seemed to fade. I welcomed it.
On that Saturday, we spent a leisurely afternoon in Boothbay Harbor. Following a fish-and-chips lunch, we popped into a very local gallery and just as quickly popped out.
“Beh,” my father grunted in that very French way of his. “Blown glass and lighthouses.”
After thirty-six years in Harvard’s art history department, my dad was almost as much of an institution as the department itself. He had opinions on such things. He’d met my mother when they were both students at the école du Louvre in Paris, the two sharing an intense love of art. He: European modern and contemporary. She: American. In the late sixties they’d arrived in New York, where he earned his Ph.D. at Columbia before they eventually settled in Cambridge. There was much they embraced about the U.S., but they were never going to not be French.
“We’re in a tiny little seaside town, Dad. What were you hoping to find?” I asked. “Koons?”
“What I am always hoping to find,” he said, stroking his once-roguish beard. “Someone who goes against the grain. Who doesn’t seem to care what everyone else thinks.”
“Ha!” I said. This from the man who did not speak to me for a week when I chose Brown over Harvard. Who cried actual tears when I moved to the West Coast. And who, in the three years since the end of my marriage, had to repeatedly stop himself from saying “I told you so.”
“He thinks you are beautiful and he thinks you are smart,” he’d surmised about Daniel, that first weekend I’d brought him to Boston, when we had been dating for seven months. “But he has no real appreciation for what you are passionate about, who you are on the inside.”
It had angered me when he said it, but much of it turned out to be true.
“Your father is full of contradictions in his dotage,” my mom contributed, clutching his arm. “C’est vrai, Jér?me?”
“I always said this, ‘not to care.’ But I also said, ‘Be respectful.’ Yes?” He angled his head in toward my mom, and she stood on her toes to kiss his brow. All these years later, they were still in love.
“The best artists, they are like this. You don’t shock just to shock. You create beauty, you create art. You don’t do it for attention.”
I made note of that as we negotiated the narrow sidewalk. My father and his digestible morsels of art critique.
As we approached the intersection at the corner, a family of five made their way in our direction. The youngest, a girl of about nine, caught my eye immediately. There was no missing her August Moon shirt.
My heart was audible in my chest. I had made great efforts not to think about him constantly, and yet here he was coming toward me via some tween’s printed jersey. Hayes’s face plastered over where her left breast would one day be.
“Do you know that girl?” my mom asked when we’d passed them in the crosswalk.
“No.”
“Tu en fais, une tête!” she said. Rough translation: That’s an odd face you’re making.
“Sorry,” I said. “It happens.”
“Sometimes, you give away everything on your face.” She frowned. “It is when you are least French.”
This, from my mother, was not a compliment.
*
I had made the decision that I would tell Isabelle about Hayes that weekend. Not everything in its entirety, but—as the experts suggested when teaching one’s child about sex—just as much as she needed to know.
It was after lunch, and we were winding our way down toward the lake, surrounded by mature maples and pines, the smell of summer in New England. My parents had wandered up to the stables to see the horses, and for the first time that day it was just the two of us. Isabelle had been so excited to show us all that she’d mastered in her short time there (zip-lining, waterskiing, tennis), that I’d had to wait for her to settle a bit before bringing it up.
“So,” I said, as casually as I could muster, “wanna hear something really cool?”
“Did you meet someone?” she asked. We were approaching the boathouse, and only a handful of other campers and their parents were in sight.
“Did I meet someone?”
“Yeah, like a guy, a boyfriend. I was hoping that’s what you were going to say.”
I stopped. I could feel my face flushing. Oh, that she was so close. And that this was what she wanted for me. Although certainly not with him. “No. No boyfriend. Something you’ll think is much cooler. Guess who my new client is?”
Her eyes grew wide. “Taylor Swift? Zac Efron?”
“Cooler than that.”
“Cooler than Zac Efron?” She looked at me, doubtful, and then: “Oh my God, oh my God…”
I waited for it to register.
“Barack Obama?!”
“Yes,” I laughed. “He called and said he needed something special for the Oval Office. No, not Barack Obama. In what world would that happen?”
“Ours,” she said, “because we shouldn’t put limits on ourselves. Remember?”
I smiled at her then. It was something I had said often. I was pleased to see it had stuck.
“Hmm.” She was twirling her new ring around her middle finger. The gift from Eva was a thin Jennifer Meyer creation. Gold with emeralds in a circle pavé setting. Delicate, simple … easily five hundred dollars.
“Is it? Is it…?” Isabelle’s voice grew very tiny, as if saying it any louder would kill the possibility. “August Moon?”
I smiled, nodding. My gift to her. “Hayes Campbell.”
Isabelle’s entire body seemed to alight from within. She had Daniel’s blue eyes. But my hair, my nose, my mouth … “Oh my God! You saw him? He came to the gallery?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Did he remember you? Did he remember us? Did you remind him that we’d met?”
“Yes,” I laughed. “He remembered us. He remembered you. He sends his regards.”
“Oh my God—”
“Stop with the ‘Oh my Gods’—”
“Sorry. I love him. Did you tell him I love him? No, you wouldn’t do that. Did you?”
“No,” I said, uneasy. We’d begun walking again, the pine needles crunching beneath our feet. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Are you going to see him again? Do you think he’ll come back to the gallery?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. This was a lie. I’d already made tentative plans to see him the following weekend. I did not like lying to her. It was time to change the subject.
“So how’s the sailing going?”
“Good. Really good. I can take the Sunfish out by myself now.”
“That’s great, Izz.”
“Yeah. Even better, I can get it back in,” she laughed, referencing a mishap from the previous summer. It was a great big belly laugh: happy, unaffected, carefree. The laugh of a girl on the brink of all things good.
Dear God, what kind of animal was I?