Eleanor did not pay a visit to the Hallinans that Christmas, preferring to spend the holiday alone with Charlie.
That winter, the snow was so deep it covered most of the downstairs windows, and even with the furnace going—also the woodstove—it was so cold she slept with a hot water bottle. Days went by, sometimes, when she wouldn’t make it down the driveway to pick up her mail, though when she did she could usually count on at least one letter, forwarded from her publisher, from a child who’d read one of her books.
“I love how brave Bodie is,” one girl wrote to her. “I wish I was brave like that. I get scared just asking for a hall pass at school.”
“I never told anyone this before,” another child wrote. “But my dad hits me a lot. Sometimes I like to pretend I could be Bodie, and just go away someplace by myself and have adventures like she does, with nobody yelling at me or saying I’m stupid or taking out their belt.”
When Eleanor got letters from children about her books, she always wrote back.
Months passed, marked by days at her desk, late-afternoon walks with Charlie to Hopewell Falls. She saw Timmy Pouliot now and then, fishing with his brother at the falls or riding his dirt bike through town. If he recognized her, he showed no sign.
10.
Wish I Had a River
Eleanor had been living on the farm for two years now. Days went by sometimes in which she barely spoke, except to her agent or her editor or her dog, and occasionally Walt and Edith, on her daily walk to the waterfall.
There was a woman Eleanor observed sometimes at the swimming hole. She had a little girl, and the two of them would sit on a flat stone by the edge of the swimming hole and dangle their feet in the water to cool off. The woman didn’t swim and the little girl didn’t go in the water, either. She’d stay for about as long as it took to smoke a cigarette, then pick up her daughter, gather her toys in a bag, and head back to her car, an old Chevy so rusted Eleanor wondered how it ever passed inspection. Something about this woman—sitting on the rock, staring out at the water—made Eleanor want to be her friend.
One time, the woman looked so upset that Eleanor had spoken to her. “Are you okay? Anything I can do to help?”
“No big deal,” the woman said. “It’s just my husband. I should leave the jerk. But it’s not like I’ve got anyplace to go.”
Her name was Darla. Her daughter was called Kimmie. “Why don’t you come over for tea?” Eleanor said.
Darla showed up with a six-pack.
“No offense,” she told Eleanor, “but I never understood this whole tea thing. Sitting around drinking hot water with a bag of crumbled-up leaves.”
They sat in the living room with their Budweisers. Darla took it all in: the vases of cut flowers, the Matisse reproduction tacked to the wall, the plate of Brie, the record albums. She spotted a box of books on the table, newly arrived from Eleanor’s publisher. With Eleanor’s name on the front.
“Hey, that’s you,” she said, studying the picture on the back.
“You should take one for your little girl,” Eleanor told her.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Darla said. “Wild guess.”
Darla wasn’t, either, it turned out. She came from northern Maine. Potato country.
“We were a mill family,” she said. “You know what that means? Payday’s Friday. You can count on your dad being drunk through Sunday night, hungover Monday.”
Darla’s father had a habit of slapping her mother around when he was drinking. “I guess with five kids and no job of her own, she figured there wasn’t much she could do about that.”
To look at her, you might have thought Darla was closing in on forty, but she was twenty-eight. She had met her husband, Bobby, at a motorcycle rally in Loudon. Not too many women came to the track at Loudon on their own bike—as opposed to riding on the back of some man’s—but Darla did. A Suzuki 350.
Eleanor didn’t know anything about motorcycles.
“For your information,” Darla said. “A three fifty isn’t the kind of bike a person takes to Loudon. But I was just happy having any bike. Bought with my own damn money.”
“I never won anything in my life,” Darla told her. “But I used to buy a lottery ticket every Friday, and one week they pulled my number. Two thousand dollars. That’s how I ended up with the Suzuki.”
She went to motorcycle school and everything. “I wasn’t going to be like my mother, with a houseful of kids and a drunk husband by the time she was thirty, sweeping the floor at a beauty parlor for three dollars an hour,” Darla said. “I had this plan to ride my bike to California, camping along the way. Not that I knew what I’d do when I got there but it was 1967, you know? Summer of Love.”
Then came Bobby. For a good ten minutes she thought the love might be right there, at the Loudon track. “He was sweet to me that time,” she said. “He had this shirt on that said, ‘If you’re gonna do it, do it on a Harley.’
“First thing he said, when he came up to me at the rally, was ‘You actually ride this thing? Or is it, like, an accessory?’
“That’s Bobby for you. Master of the putdown,” Darla said. But at the time it hadn’t bothered her. That’s how her dad always was, until he ran off with his second cousin. And Bobby was funny. Used to be, anyway.
He told her she didn’t need a bike of her own. She could have a seat on the back of his. He’d take her to California.
“Big talk,” Darla said. “Bobby’s whole family comes from Akersville. Grandparents, stepdad, half sisters, you name it. The guy’s never been farther than Salisbury Beach. He just said those things to get in my pants.”
The biggest mistake of her life was selling the Suzuki, she said. They used the money for a down payment on their trailer. Three months later, what do you know, there’s a baby on the way.
Robert Junior was born with a hole in his heart. (“Took after his father,” Darla said. “Bad joke.”) He lived seven months.
“I could’ve still got out at that point. Nothing keeping me besides the damn mobile home. But you know what happened? After I lost Robert Junior, all I wanted was another baby. That was Kimmie.”
She was four years old now. “Light of my life, I’m telling you,” Darla said. “One thing’s for sure, no way she’s ending up in a double-wide with a guy that stays up all night watching TV.”
They didn’t even ride together anymore, Darla told Eleanor. She could, but there was Kimmie to consider. “If it was just me out on the road, going ninety up Route 89, I’d take my chances. But I’m not going to leave my kid without a mom, you know?
“You’ve got the right idea,” she said to Eleanor, looking out the porch screen at the field below the house, where Eleanor and Walt had planted her vegetable garden. “No man telling you what to do. Nothing holding you down except the dog, and all he’s going to do is lick your hand and wag his tail. Right, Charlie?”
He thumped his tail on the floor.
After that it got to be a regular thing. The two of them would sit in Eleanor’s kitchen while Kimmie played with the Monopoly pieces or colored with Eleanor’s pencils and Darla told Eleanor stories from her life or offered her observations of the world beyond Akersville that she’d never gotten to explore.