Page 111 of Count the Ways

“That’s close enough,” she’d call out. Toby, in particular, was always pushing the limits.

They’d stand together on the stone arch bridge—two hundred years old, built without mortar, the stones held in place by simple tension, one rock against another—and sometimes they threw pebbles in and sometimes a penny, making a wish.

“I wish nobody ever had to die,” Alison said one time.

“I wish my dolls could talk to me.” This was Ursula.

Toby wanted to fly. That, and talk to God, or Mr. T.

Over all those years of trips to the waterfall—even holding tightly to their hands as she always did—Eleanor had to fight the terror of seeing a child of hers standing there by the edge. The pictures that came to mind could drive you crazy, the pictures of what could happen.

You had to let your children venture out in the world. You couldn’t always find the Barbie shoe. Children had to know pain, or how would they ever know what to do when they encountered it? Trouble would come, no matter what. The best you could do was to raise your children in such a way that when trouble found them—as it would—they’d be able to survive it.

Teach your children well.

Here was what Eleanor had learned, over the years since she’d wept over a chicken pox scab on her daughter’s scalp and the bald spot it left there, believing that event qualified as a heartbreak:

The worst things, the ones that actually got you, were almost never the ones you spent your time worrying about. In all those years, nobody ever fell over the edge of the waterfall onto the rocks. That never happened, but plenty more did. So much else fell apart. So much floated away. So much had been broken.

Her son had incurred a brain injury in eight inches of water. Her best friend was murdered while filling up her gas tank. One daughter had stopped speaking to her—and that was the easy daughter, the one she could least imagine shutting her mother out of her life, the most considerate, the sweetest. At the time, Eleanor had not believed she could survive it when Al had spoken the words that day inthe car—“We’ll never forgive you. We’ll hate you for the rest of our lives.” Then Ursula: “You aren’t welcome in my child’s life.”

I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

A person can survive a lot, it turned out. Those things change you. But you carry on. Toby had not become a violinist, or a geologist, or a swimmer of the English Channel, or a notorious diamond thief. He practiced yoga and took care of chickens and goats. Coco, the onetime queen of cartwheels, whose mother used to worry she’d tear a ligament on the uneven parallel bars, walked with a cane now, thanks to a collision on the highway between Timmy Pouliot’s Harley and an eighteen-wheeler. The farm Eleanor had believed she would live on for the rest of her days was Cam’s now. The house she’d loved, rubble.

Now here they were, just the two of them again. They had swum naked in this place once. They had conceived a baby here. Here was the place they’d launched their boats. Here was where Eleanor first met Timmy Pouliot, with a freshly caught trout in his cooler, and Darla. Here was where Eleanor had witnessed the sight of her husband locked in an embrace with their babysitter.

Cam walked very slowly now, almost as slowly as their children had when taking their first steps. Now he reached for her hand.

“I’ve got cancer,” he told her. “It’s not good.”

The news hit her like a punch.

She turned her face to the racing water. Even now, in midsummer, it crashed over the rocks, but somewhere, a mile beyond this place, or three miles, or five—beyond the old people sitting in their cars listening to the radio, beyond the men with their fishing poles, conferring among themselves on whether the Red Sox had a chance in the playoffs, and the young couples kissing or smoking weed, and the mothers nursing babies; beyond the teenagers daring each other to jump off the rocks, and the ones, like Eleanor and Cam, just standing there taking it all in—all those human beings, figuring out howto live their lives the best they knew; count the ways—the brook would keep on running. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but the water never stopped moving. It flowed all the way to the dam in town, and beyond that to the river, which flowed to the ocean, which reached far as the horizon, and even farther than that.

Somewhere along this stretch of water, in among the rocks and weeds, so deep under you’d never see them, slept the cork people.

“I could take care of you,” Eleanor said to the man who used to be her husband. “That might be a good idea.”

They headed up the hill then. No house there anymore, but home.