Love Anthony Part 5

She had inherited a little money from her mother, enough for her to rent a cottage with three friends for the summer and attend graduate school in the fall. She'd been accepted into Boston University's MFA program in creative writing. Other than that, there was no plan. She didn't plan on meeting Jimmy and falling in love with him. And she certainly didn't plan on marrying him and starting a family instead of going back to school.

But this is exactly what she did. On Labor Day, when her friends got on a plane and flew back to the real world, Beth stayed. A year later, she and Jimmy got married, and a year after that, Sophie was born.

She's often wondered what her mother would've thought of Jimmy. She probably wouldn't have liked him. She certainly wouldn't be a fan of his right now. Her mother never had a high opinion of men. She and her father divorced when Beth was three, and they never saw him again after Beth turned four. She doesn't remember her mother ever dating. She was entirely devoted to making a living and raising her daughter, her only child.

Beth digs through the tub, now looking for a specific picture. She knows it's in here. She finds it at the bottom of everything, the only picture she has of her father. He's wearing a men's white undershirt and black-rimmed gla.s.ses. His light brown hair is receding. He's smiling. His arms look strong. He's holding Beth in his lap. Her blond hair is in pigtails, and she's wearing a pink party dress. It's her second birthday. She's also smiling. They look happy together. She has no memory of this man or of herself as this little girl, but she believes that it's them. The writing on the back of the picture, her mother's writing, reads Denny & Beth, 10273. She breathes a dense sigh and discards the photograph back to the bottom of the bin.

She presses the stack of birthday cards from her mother against her chest. She misses her, especially now. She smiles and dabs her wet eyes with her sleeve, lost in a bittersweet thought about her own daughters. Her mother may not have cared for Jimmy, but she would've loved her grandchildren.

Beth returns the cards to the tub and pulls out a paperback book. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. The book that made her believe she could be a writer someday. Why is this book in here and not on her bookshelf in the living room or on her bedside table?

When she first moved here, she wrote event pieces for Yesterday's Island, nothing earth-shattering, but she was writing and getting paid for it. After she had Jessica, she landed a better job as a staff writer for the Inquirer and Mirror, but after she had Gracie, she found working and raising three young girls too much to juggle, and she quit the paper. But still, for a while, she kept her pen active.

She finds her essays, poems, and short stories. She finds her notebooks-ordinary, spiral notebooks, floppy and worn, every inch jammed with blue ink-writing exercises, ideas for short stories, vignettes, her imagination, her thoughts and emotions, her tender, naked insides laid out on the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, college-ruled pages. She flips through them and becomes absorbed in reading one in particular, a short story about a peculiar boy who lives strictly within the confines of a bizarre yet beautiful imaginary world. She remembers when she wrote that story. It was about six or seven years ago after a morning on the beach with the girls, inspired by a little boy she saw there playing with rocks by the sh.o.r.e. She used to find inspiration in her everyday life here, and she used to write about it. When did she stop writing? When did her life become uninspiring?

One of the notebooks she finds is brand-new, untouched. She holds this notebook in her hands, makes a promise to herself, and sets it aside.

Next she comes to the clothes-the faux-leopard-print coat that was her mother's; leather pants (rock-star black); her Goldie Hawn, pink-and-orange, geometric mod dress. She used to love that dress. She wore it everywhere-parties, dance clubs, weddings, first dates. Her first real date with Jimmy.

She carefully strips out of her nubby pajamas and slides the dress on over her head without hitting the ceiling. Miraculously, it fits! She doesn't need the mirror in her bedroom to see if it looks cute. She knows.

She finds piles of cheap jewelry-huge silver-hoop earrings, chunky and colorful plastic bangle bracelets, lots of rhinestones, a bunch of tangled necklaces, all very Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan. She slides a moonstone ring onto the middle finger of her right hand and admires it, wondering why she ever packed it away.

She wonders why she packed any of this away. Some of it has to do with moving from New York to Nantucket and wanting to fit in here. Year-rounders on Nantucket wear oversized L.L.Bean fleece jackets and hip waders, not Goldie Hawn dresses and mood rings. And some of it has to do with the swelling and weight gain that comes with being pregnant three times. Those skintight, leather rock-star pants haven't been humanly possible in years. But leather pants aside, these things, the notebooks and clothes and photos and cards, are pieces of herself, her history, her sense of adventure and style, her dreams for her future.

This is me, she thinks, staring into the bin.

She and Jimmy used to throw impromptu parties with nothing in the house but a bag of potato chips, a six-pack of beer, and a cheap bottle of wine. Everyone would bring something, and they always had plenty. They always had fun. She and Jimmy haven't thrown a party in a long time. The parties somehow changed, no longer arising spontaneously from the quick and playful thought, Hey, why don't we invite some friends over tonight? Instead they required planning and cooking and cleaning the house. Everything had to be just so. They became work, and she doesn't remember the fun, only the fights between Jimmy and her ignited over some stressful aspect of getting ready, her anger and resentment sticking to her ribs long after the last guest went home.

She used to wear blues and greens and orange. She used to have moxie. She used to skinny-dip at Fat Ladies Beach and dance to the music she liked. Now she always wears a loose and large cover-up over her bathing suit at the beach, and she only listens to whatever the girls want to hear, usually Britney Spears or some Bambi-eyed teenage girl from the Disney Channel.

She used to write.

She can't believe she stuffed so much of herself into a box, banished to the attic for so many years. At least she didn't donate herself to Goodwill or, worse, throw herself out. She continues to dig through the box, skipping down memory lane with each item until she picks up the locket, the first gift Jimmy ever gave to her. She opens the smooth, tarnished silver heart and holds it in the palm of her hand. She and Jimmy kissing. She and Jimmy in love. She studies this picture of herself and Jimmy, and it's as if she were seeing two other people, as if they were old friends she was so fond of once, friends she's long lost touch with and who have moved far away. Her heart sinks. She wore that locket every day for years and loved it. Then, at some point, she doesn't remember exactly when, the silver heart began to tarnish, and what once looked new and romantic and sophisticated to her suddenly felt old and boring and childish. She grew tired of wearing it and packed it away.

Careful not to stand up straight or step too far to the side, Beth drags her bin to the top of the stairs, then carries it down and into her bedroom. Balancing the bin on her hip, she slides the closet door open and plops the bin on the floor of Jimmy's side. She gathers Writing Down the Bones, her old notebooks, including the one that's blank, and sets them on her night table. She nods. Then she clasps the locket around her neck, rubs the silver heart between her fingers, and turns to check herself out in the mirror on the door.

There I am.

Ready for Salt.

CHAPTER 8.

It's the hour before sunset on Fat Ladies Beach, and Olivia is walking with her camera in hand. She's been walking this beach every evening and has come to appreciate why photographers call this time of day the magic hour. Lighting this patch of earth for the last minutes of the day from across the horizon rather than from directly overhead, the sun coats everything in a soft, diffuse glow. Colors look more saturated, golden, romantic. Magical.

Olivia had been walking without her camera, uninspired, all spring. Everything everywhere was gray. But then the pervasive gray seemed to lift and vanish for good this weekend, as if it finally became warm enough for Nantucket to unzip and peel off its gray winter coat, revealing the remarkable beauty of this place, especially at this hour. The astonishing blues of the sky melting into the ocean, the crisp, apple-green blades of beach gra.s.s, the glittering sand, and soon the showstopping sunset, an intensifying blood-orange sun sinking out of view, trading places with a sky increasingly drenched in hot pink and lavender, unbelievably more magnificent than it was just seconds before. It all begs to be photographed.

Olivia loves the feel of her Nikon in her hands. She admits that the teeny, deck-of-cards-size pocket cameras would be more convenient to carry, and technically they can do most of what she wants from a camera, but they feel like cheap toys. She prefers her bulky Nikon, the responsive click of the b.u.t.ton beneath her index finger, the dialing action of the manual focus, its overall heft.

It reminds her of how she used to love the feel of one of her new books hot off the press, the culmination of years of writing by the author and months of editing by her, its smooth and shiny new cover, maybe with embossed lettering, and the satisfying weight of it in her hands. She still loves the feel of a new book. While she appreciates the convenience of those thin, slick e-readers, they don't give her the three-dimensional sensory experience that comes with a real book.

She walks along the water's edge, stopping now and then to snap a wide shot of the horizon, a macro of a seash.e.l.l, a sandpiper, the silhouette of a woman walking her dog in the distance. Unlike the previous months when she could walk here for as long as she wanted in complete and almost guaranteed solitude, other people are always on the beach now. The island is coming to life, and as Olivia walks, she realizes how out of step she is with the world around her. The pervasive gray surrounding her hasn't lifted; it's still winter in her heart. She feels that she's witnessing her life more than she's actually living it, this woman who lives on Nantucket, drinks coffee, reads her journals, goes for walks, and takes pictures, as if she were watching a movie, a boring movie about a boring woman where nothing much happens, a movie she'd like to shut off or change to a different channel, but for some reason, she's glued to the screen. If she keeps watching, something will happen.

In one respect, something does have to happen soon. She needs to find a job here. Even with her meager existence, there are the expenses of daily living. David agreed to pay for her first six months, which means she only has a little longer left on his dole. Either she'll need to make a living here, or she'll have to sell the house and move, probably back to Georgia to be near her mother and sister, Maria, and her family. Or maybe she'll sell the house and run away to somewhere even more remote, some island in the South Pacific where she can disappear.

She's thought about it, about really disappearing. Several suicides on Nantucket have been reported in the paper since she moved here. Counselors and psychologists weighed in as to why suicides are more common on Nantucket than elsewhere, pointing fingers at depression and seasonal affective disorder layered onto the extreme abyss of winter on this isolated speck of land. She's imagined her own name in print, the star subject of a similar newspaper article. She gets it. An almost unbearable emptiness unfolds before her every morning. And then come the questions.

Why?

Why was Anthony here?

What was the purpose of his short life?

No answer.

Why am I here?

Why?

No answer. There are never any answers, not in her prayers or dreams, not so far in her journals or in the faith she used to have in G.o.d and the church, not in the magic of a sunset on Fat Ladies Beach. A part of her has accepted that these questions will never find their answers, that there is no point to this life, but another part of her continues the search, asking these questions over and over, with the deepest sincerity, repeating this inquisitive loop many times a day, perseverating.

Like someone with autism.

The silence that follows the last Why? of the day always hangs in the air, echoing for a long moment before floating off into infinite nothingness, leaving her so utterly and painfully alone that she often wishes she could dissolve right there and disappear with her question into that nothingness. But something deep inside her insists on holding on, enduring. Witnessing and waiting. And soon, finding a job. But a job doing what? What can she do here?

Why am I here?

Why?

She squats down low, looks through her viewfinder, adjusts her focus, and clicks a photo of the sh.o.r.e, the white foam, the wet, metallic sand, the layers of liquid blue. She looks up and sees the slick, black head of a seal in the surf. She zooms in and clicks. Still zoomed in, she can clearly see the seal's round, black eyes, and it appears to be looking directly at her. She lowers her camera, and they hold each other's gaze for a long moment before the seal dips below the water's surface, disappearing, leaving her alone.

Behind her, a bunch of voices tumble onto the beach. She turns and looks. Two boys are running toward the ocean, toward her, laughing. Their mother, weighed down by a large beach bag on one shoulder and a toddler on her hip, unable to give chase, yells after them, warning them not to go in the water. The father walks beside her at first, then begins to run. They're all barefoot and wearing matching light blue shirts and khaki pants.

The father catches the older two boys, scoops them up in his arms, one in each, just before their toes. .h.i.t the surf. The boys scream with laughter. The father spins them all dizzy and falls to the ground, and the three play-wrestle in the sand.

"Are you Rebecca?"

"Sorry?" asks Olivia, not because she didn't hear the mother's question, but because she can't quite process it, so unaccustomed to any human voice directed at her on this beach, to anyone penetrating the gray layer that is wrapped so tightly around her skin.

"Are you the photographer?" the mother asks, nodding down to Olivia's Nikon.

"Me? No."

"Sorry. I thought you were her." The mother looks back over her shoulder at the parking lot and sighs, hoisting her toddler, who is aiming to get down, higher on her hip. "I don't know how long I can keep all three clean and dry. Max! No!"

Max is the middle boy, Olivia's guessing around five, and he's now chasing a seagull down the beach. He's fast, ignoring his mother. The father goes after him.

The oldest boy, around eight, wanders over to his mother, no longer interested in the cold water without a brother to race. He stands by her side and holds her free hand.

All three of these boys are familiar and foreign to Olivia, two sides of the same sword, each equally capable of carving her in two. They are the size and shape of Anthony-his feet when he was two, his legs when he was five, his eight-year-old hands.

Max, the boy running down the beach not heeding his parents' calls to stop, is just like Anthony. And yet, he's nothing like Anthony. This boy leaps up and takes off with a glint in his eye and the devil in his smile. He's playing, and he's involving his parents in the game. Chase me! And he'll delight in being caught.

When Anthony ran on the beach, he ran to feel the impact of the solid ground compressing his joints, to feel the cool wind on his skin, to feel the hot, granular sand between his toes, to get to the water he loved more than anything else. He ran and didn't listen to her or David's calls to stop, but it was never a game that included them in his world.

The photographer arrives, the father returns with the middle boy, carrying him tucked under his arm like a football, and the mother gathers them all together, encouraging the boys to smile.

"Look at me," says the photographer, and unexpected chills tremble through Olivia's center.

Look at me.

How many hundreds of thousands of times did she hear those three words, spoken by her, by David, by doctors, by a series of applied-behavioral-a.n.a.lysis and speech therapists.

Anthony, look at me, while she held a Pringle to her nose.

Anthony, look at me, while she held her breath.

Anthony, look at me, while he did not.

The toddler is throwing his head back and stiffening his limbs, crying, his face puffed and red, his eyes squeezed shut. The mother hands him over to the father. She pulls a toy still inside its packaging from her beach bag and hands it to the photographer. It's a truck. A bribe. She's smart.

"Look at the truck."

It works. The toddler's attention is drawn to the truck, which the photographer has strategically placed on the top of her head. The toddler stops crying and points. The toddler points and says, "Mine."

Until that moment, Olivia wondered if he were on the spectrum. She'd already decided that the other two were neurotypical, but she wasn't sure about the toddler on his mother's hip. After Anthony's diagnosis, every boy she saw-preschoolers and teenagers, sons of women she knew and sons of strangers, boys sitting in front of her in church and boys playing on the playground-she observed for signs of autism. Even now she can't look at a boy and simply see a boy. She has to see or not see autism, too. Like looking at the letters of a word and reading the word, she has to do both. They are inextricably linked.

And where she feels an unspoken bond, a compa.s.sionate kinship, with mothers of children on the spectrum, she often feels all sorts of unflattering emotions toward the parents of typical boys and girls. Jealousy, irritation, hatred, rage, grief. Their normal, blessed, easy, unappreciated lives flaunted right there in front of her.

Look at them, she'd usually think, jealousy, irritation, hatred, rage, and grief consuming her, poisoning her.

But today, quite unexpectedly, she feels none of this. Instead she feels relieved and hopeful that this mother will get at least one decent picture with her whole family smiling and looking at the camera. The toddler continues to point at the truck while sitting on his mother's hip, his older brothers are yelling, "Cheeeeeese," and the father has his arm around his wife, his other hand on the shoulder of the oldest boy while the photographer clicks away, still saying, "Look at me."

Olivia pulls her Nikon up to her eye and looks at this family through the viewfinder. It's almost sunset now. The light on their faces is warm and flattering. Click. Click. Click. She looks down at her LCD, at the last image she captured. She sees the saturation, the brightness and contrast, the composition, and approves. It's a good picture. Then something shifts, maybe some of the gray surrounding her lifts, and she forgets the technical aspects of the photograph. She looks at the image on her LCD, and she sees joy, intimacy, family, love. Magic captured.

I could do this.

CHAPTER 9.

Beth and Petra meet up with Jill, who is waiting for them, always early, in front of Salt. Courtney's not coming because she's teaching two yoga cla.s.ses tonight, and Georgia can't come because she's overseeing a wedding down the street at the Blue Oyster. But with Petra and Jill by her side, Beth has more than enough girl power in her corner, and she's feeling confident and ready in her Goldie Hawn dress. But as Petra walks up the steps, leading the way, Beth realizes that her heart is beating way too fast, urging her body to spring into some kind of large physical action to match her racing pulse. Run! She focuses on the back of Petra's neck, on the clasp of her turquoise necklace, the one Beth asked to borrow but didn't wear, as she forces each forward step, walking behind her friend, slowly, deliberately, against her heart's instinct, into the lion's den.

"Hi, welcome to Salt."

Before Beth can notice anything else, there she is, smiling at Petra. Salt's Sat.u.r.day-night hostess. Angela.

She's younger than Beth, possibly in her late twenties. Her hair is long, curly, and dark brown. She's wearing a plain, boring black top, but on her it's tight and has a plunging V neckline. That and a small gold cross at the end of a long gold chain draw Beth's eyes, and probably everyone else's, to her big, exciting b.o.o.bs. Of course. Twentysomething and big b.o.o.bs.

Beth rounds her shoulders and folds her arms over her own chest, already neatly covered by the thick polyester blend of her Goldie Hawn dress. Even pushed up and in to the best of her Victoria's Secret bra's ability, even before pregnancy stretched them and breast-feeding sucked the bounce out of them, her b.o.o.bs never looked like that. Angela's eyes, big and black and unnervingly beautiful, are still smiling as they move to include Jill, but then they stumble when they see Beth.

She already knows who I am.

Angela clears her throat and pulls her fake, professional welcome smile back on. "Table for three?"

"No, thanks," says Petra. "We're going to sit at the bar."

We are? Beth wants to correct Petra, to say that they'd prefer a table, please, one facing the street and not the bar actually, but a sour-tasting panic has risen at the back of Beth's throat, and she can only manage to swallow. Like a lamb being led to slaughter, she follows Petra and Jill to the bar and takes the empty seat between them. And there's Jimmy.

He at first greets them with a neutral cheerfulness, the way he might acknowledge any three women who sit down at his bar, clearly without really seeing them. But then it registers. His smile softens on Beth, becoming genuine, but only for the slightest moment before it's replaced by a tensed grin, holding surprise and uncertainty between his teeth, and then finally his jaw clenches tight to keep him from saying what he's probably thinking. Oh, s.h.i.t.

"Ladies."

"Jimmy," says Petra.

"Beth," says Jimmy.

"Hi," says Beth.

"So what are you ladies up to tonight?"

"This," says Petra. "We're here to spy on you."

Jimmy laughs and shakes the martini he's making with noticeably extra vigor. Beth wipes her hands on the lap of her dress. She didn't know her hands could sweat.

"Not exactly subtle, are you, Petra?" he asks.

"Never," says Petra.

Direct and fearless, Petra would never tap a nail gently a hundred times with a rubber mallet when she could whack it once with a sledgehammer and get the job done. While Beth admires this quality in Petra, Beth has never been comfortable with the trait herself. She's too afraid of missing the nail head altogether, of creating a huge and ugly hole in the wall next to her intention.

"What can I get for you?" he asks.

"What do you recommend?" asks Petra.