Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(37)

But remembering this now, it frightened me. I thought: Did my mother have a vision? And I thought, No, she was only jealous of how much I loved my daughters. But maybe she had had a vision. And I was not the mother I thought I had been.



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—

How will I ever know?

I think some people know. But I will never know.



* * *





But I missed them. Oh dear God did I miss those girls. I asked William when we could drive to Connecticut again and see them, and I said that Estelle and Bridget could drive over from Larchmont, and he said maybe one of these days, but not right now. So I let it go.

I had a memory of us standing in that driveway, and how we then sat around the pool, and it had been awkward. And as time went by, the idea of seeing the girls that way again was almost as bad as not seeing them at all.



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—

But I also wondered why they did not offer to come up and see us. Both girls and Michael had already had the virus, surely they could drive up and see us, safe-distancing. When I mentioned to people how much I missed my girls, sometimes a person would say, Why can’t they come up and see you? And I did not dare say: Because apparently they don’t want to. And I was not going to ask them to come. That is not the kind of mother I am, that much I know.





iv


William was finding a new calling.

Lois’s nephew—her brother Dave’s son, called Joe—ran the Trask potato farm these days with his father. The potato farm had had trouble with parasites. William got very interested. He told me that the first time he called Lois’s nephew, Joe referred to him as “Dr. Gerhardt.” Joe spoke at great length with William about the University of Maine at Presque Isle, which had a program that was trying to help with this stuff. William spent a lot of time on the phone with Joe—who William said sounded like “a great fellow”—and he also spent time on the phone with other parasitologists he had worked with over the years who knew more about these particular parasites than William did. And William also researched. At dinner he would tell me about these parasites and what he was doing to help; he would go on and on, and to be truthful I was often made tired by this. But I was glad he was so involved in something. He seemed younger to me.

I felt older every day.



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—

My mother—my real mother, not the nice mother I had made up—once said, “Everyone needs to feel important.” And I thought of this as I listened to William go on about the potato parasites.



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There was one night when Bob and Margaret invited us to a small gathering with one other couple at a place on the coast that was doing takeout. And so we went, and it was fine. Their friends were really nice, it seemed to me, and we had—I had—a pleasant enough time. But this is not the point.



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—

The point is this: That as we drove home, we went through a part of town where I had not been. There were houses, intermittently through the outer town area, there were trees in front of them, and the houses were blue or gray or white, and as we drove by them it all seemed very quiet—it was a small town—and as we drove by these houses, it suddenly came to me with a terrible force: These were houses not unlike those I had driven past in my childhood. I would sometimes go to the neighboring towns of Hanston or Carlisle, Illinois, and—in my mind I was with my father—we would drive by these kinds of houses, and I remembered how once I saw a young couple by a house, they were all dressed up and their parents were out front taking photos of them, and I asked my father, Was it a wedding? And he said no, it was a school prom, and he added, “All foolishness. Total rubbish,” he had said. And that night as William and I drove home from a perfectly pleasant evening, my insides collapsed and I felt that old, old desolation, because these were houses where people lived and did normal things, this is how I had seen it as a child and it is how I saw it now, and I said to William, “My whole childhood was a lockdown. I never saw anyone or went anywhere.” And the truth of this hit me straight into the bowels, and William just looked at me and said, “I know, Lucy.” He said it as a reflex, without thinking about what I had said, is what I thought.



* * *



—

But I was so sad that evening: I understood—as I have understood at different points in my life—that the childhood isolation of fear and loneliness would never leave me.

My childhood had been a lockdown.





v


And then—that same night came my terrific panic attack.



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—

It came to me as I tried to fall asleep—it was warm in my little bedroom, and I could hear the ocean through my skylight, which was now open, and also the window, but I did not really hear it, because I was panicking. The panic started as I pictured my apartment in New York, and it seemed to me as I thought about it that I really did not want to see it again. I could picture its emptiness; David would never again come through the door, and whenever I got back there I would have to walk into that apartment alone. The thought of this felt unbearable.