The Threadbare Heart: Chapter 1

LILY

Love was the one thing Lily always thought she did better than her mother. She believed that she knew exactly what love took, what it cost, and what it meant, and she thought of her long marriage to Tom as proof of it. But in the short period of time between Christmas and the start of fire season, everything she understood about love unraveled, the way jeans do at the hem, the way tweed does so that it reveals the intricate relationship of the warp and the weft, and she realized how very little she knew about the way love worked. People naturally assumed, after everything that happened, that it was a bitter revelation, but they were wrong.

“Would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” her mother, Eleanor, asked. Eleanor was, at that moment, seventy-five years old, about to be married again herself, and hoping that this time she might get it right.

“In a heartbeat,” Lily said—not only because she believed it, but because she knew it was what her mother needed to hear.

It had started, simply enough, in December of 2007 in a bookstore in Burlington, Vermont. She and Tom still had a few weeks of classes left to teach before the end of the semester—he in biology, she in math—and they had come into town to meet some old friends for dinner. Church Street was at its most charming—lights in the trees, snow dusted on the ground, the shops warm and welcoming. Even though they were wearing gloves, they held hands as they walked home.

“I didn’t get you a Christmas gift,” Tom said. “Again.”

Lily smiled. After twenty-six years of marriage, what was there to get each other? She had recently brought home Tom’s favorite cinnamon bread from the bakery because she knew how much he liked to toast it for breakfast, and he had replaced the broken birdfeeder that hung from the big elm tree outside the kitchen window because he knew how much it delighted Lily when the jays came, and the woodpeckers, and the cardinals. These small gestures gave them as much surprise and indulgence as they needed. “Then we’re even,” she said.

“And we’ll have less to haul out to California.”

“I don’t have anything yet to give to Brooke,” Lily said. “It’s as if I never had a two-year-old. I can’t remember what two-year-olds like.”

“Cardboard boxes,” Tom said. “Don’t you remember the way Luke used to pile all his pillows in boxes, and sleep in there? And how Ryan made that castle in the basement?”

She laughed. “I’d forgotten that.”

“We could get her a book,” Tom said. They were coming upon the Burlington Bookshop. There were pine boughs encircling the window and the sound of jingle bells as someone came out the door.

“A book would be good,” Lily said. She stopped in front of the shop, Tom held the door for her, and they went in. They each meandered through the tables and the stacks, drawn in by titles and covers as if by a magnetic field. Lily got pulled toward a table where the cookbooks were displayed. She loved the idea of cooking—and the fact that there could be an entire cookbook featuring nothing but tacos or mushrooms or cupcakes—but she wasn’t much of a cook herself. She made soups and stews, salads and sandwiches. When the boys were home, she would roast a chicken with herbs from Tom’s garden, but she didn’t need a recipe for that. She wandered over to a section of art books, and picked up one on master quilters. She sat in a chair, and lost herself in the photos of intricately made quilts that looked like pointillist paintings, and abstract murals, and in the words of the artists who spoke about layering fabric and layering time.

The owner of the shop came quietly up to her. “Can I bring you a cup of hot chocolate?” he asked.

Lily looked up, surprised to find herself in a bookstore and not in an art gallery.

“It’s Lake Champlain,” the man said, referring to the brand of artisianal chocolate. “Aztec spice.”

“Sure,” Lily said. “Thank you. That would be nice.”

But chocolate was, in fact, a dangerous thing. She had been struck with debilitating headaches when she got pregnant with Ryan, at age twenty-six and they had never gone away. Over the years, in an effort at self-preservation, she had figured out exactly what triggered them: the glare of lights from oncoming traffic, chocolate, strawberries, bananas, aspartame, sleeplessness, and red wine. She learned the combinations that would cause the most damage, the inherent risks of every offending food or situation, and then she set out systematically to avoid them. She politely declined strawberry daiquiris and walnut brownies, late-night parties and late-start movies, night driving, and aged cheese. Far from feeling deprived, she felt that she had become master of her migraines, and she had a strange affection for the strict logic of it, and the power she wielded.

That night, however, she’d already had two glasses of sauvignon blanc at dinner. She felt happy—so much a part of the holiday, and the warmth of the store, and the charm of the town where she and Tom had lived for so long—that she couldn’t imagine anything going wrong. She couldn’t imagine a headache. What harm could a bit of chocolate do? She accepted the mug gratefully, and took a sip.

A few minutes later, Tom caught site of Lily across the store—his wife, curled up in a soft chair like a child, a book in her lap, her brow knit together in concentration—and he was overcome with a rush of love. He had picked out some books for their granddaughter, and he approached Lily to show her his discoveries. When he got up closer, he smelled the chocolate and the hot spice of the drink Lily held in her hand. He bent down next to her chair.

“What are you doing?” he whispered—his voice a quiet demand.

“Reading about quilts,” she said, turning the book so that he could see what she was seeing, “Look at these colors.”

“But you’re drinking hot chocolate.” He knew what would happen if Lily got a migraine: she would turn inward toward the pain, hold her head in her hands, lie down in the dark, and hope that if she lay perfectly still, she could keep the pain at bay. An hour later, or three, or maybe in the middle of the night, she would be crouched on the bathroom floor, crying out in pain, begging for mercy, begging for him to help. And he would help, because that’s what Tom did. He would hold her. He would get her ice. He would remind her to breathe.

“I’ll be okay,” she said.

“You don’t know that, Lily,”

“Tom,” she whispered. “Please. I’ll be okay.”

“I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Then I’ll deal with the consequences.”

“No,” he said, standing up and speaking too loud now for a bookstore, “I’ll deal with the consequences. I will. Your headache will be my problem.”

She stared up at him. He had never spoken to her like this before. “Can we talk about this later?” she whispered. “Outside?”

“I’m not going to stand here and watch you drink that,” he said.

She clenched her teeth and took a deep breath through her nose. It smelled of dark chocolate and chili, but in that breath she also sensed vulnerability—her body’s vulnerability in its fifty-first year, and the vulnerability that came from loving another human being. She was bound to Tom, beholden to him, and there were good things that came from that, and compromises, too. She wordlessly set the hot chocolate down on the table.

“I found something for Brooke,” Tom said. “A collection of Richard Scarry books. Isn’t that perfect?”

“Well,” Lily said, “it was perfect for the boys, but for a girl? I don’t know.” She remembered how Ryan and Luke would pore over the pages of their Richard Scarry books, naming each truck and airplane, each job undertaken by one of the enterprising townsfolk, but she wasn’t sure whether the books would have the same appeal to a little girl. Ryan and Olivia had moved to California when Brooke was just three months old. Lily had missed Brooke’s first steps, her first teeth, her first words, and because she had missed those milestone, she wanted to give a gift that Brooke would adore.

“Everyone loves Mr. Fix-It and Sergeant Murphy,” Tom said.

It was true; they did. But the whole thing made her suddenly tired—the whole business of being a wife, a grandmother, a daughter about to go home for the holidays. She wanted to get out of the shop and go home. “Okay,” she said. “Fine.” She figured that she would have enough time to sew something for Brooke, maybe a little flannel blanket for her bear. She’d pieced together a quilt when Brooke was born—nine log cabin blocks in a riot of colors and patterns sewn in a square. Perhaps she would make a dress or a pillow from some of the floral prints she had in her stash.

“You’re right,” she said. “Let’s get the Richard Scarry books. And I’m going to get this quilt book. It can be my Christmas present.”

He smiled. “I’m going to get this gardening book,” he said. “It can be mine.”

When they were back out in the cold, Tom began to talk about the book he had just purchased. It was a treatise on the importance of preserving heirloom seeds. The author was arguing for the beauty and integrity of food grown without intervention. Lily listened, and agreed that it was a timely and necessary argument, but she was waiting for a pause in the story, a chance to make a different point. When Tom seemed finished talking, she said, “What did you mean when you said, ‘Your headache will be my problem’?”

“Just what it sounds like,” Tom said. “You can be cavalier about chocolate or wine or whatever, but I’m the one who has to deal with it.”

“I’m the one who’ll have the headache.”

Tom shifted his feet on the snowy ground. He looked off into the dark night. “You think it’s been easy for me all these years?” he asked. “To stand by watching?”

“Well, no,” she said. “Of course not.” None of it was easy—watching someone have doubt or have the flu, watching them lose their nerve or lose their parents. Even just watching Tom’s hair turn gray, or watching his skin become more susceptible to the cold, dry air, or watching his knee become stiffer by degrees. It was all hard. All of it.

“You think I enjoy hearing you beg for the pain to stop, hearing you moan about wanting to die?” Tom said.

She stopped. She could see her breath forming in the cold air in front of her face. She had had only a few migraines a year these past several years. She had begun to think, in fact, that maybe she was becoming immune to headaches, that maybe this was something that got better as she got older. She had begun to think that she could risk a hot mug of hot chocolate. Tom’s display of doubt rubbed up against her hard-won hope and caught her off guard. “I didn’t know how much it was bothering you,” she said.

Tom laughed—a kind of snort that meant, How on earth could you not know?

“I don’t get this sudden concern, Tom,” she said. “What’s going on?”

He shrugged. They were older now. Their boys were grown and gone now. Things that used to flit past Tom like clouds or birds bothered him now. Things he used to handle without much thought now seemed insurmountable. Lily’s headaches were something he had handled for years without complaint. But the last few times, they had grabbed hold of him in a way that frightened him. He had imagined Lily spiraling farther down into pain than she had ever gone before, spiraling so far away that she was out of reach. It made him think about her dying and his being alone. That wasn’t something he felt like he could endure.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m sorry I said anything. Let’s get out of the cold.”

But Lily knew that it wasn’t nothing. She had lived with Tom for a long time. As they moved through December, through their classes and departmental parties, through final exams and holiday cheer, she had a feeling of unease. She thought, for a while, that it was the fact that they were going through their first holiday season with no children in the house. Things were so quiet, and so strange without the boys, and she noticed that Tom was taking extra long treks in the snow by himself, and coming back to the house pensive instead of exhilarated. Perhaps he missed the kids more than she knew. Later, she thought that the unease was due to the fact that when she and Tom came back from vacation neither of them would be teaching a full course load. She had won a grant to update her textbook and he had been tapped to help the university write a plan for transitioning to an integrated science curriculum. Maybe they were both just feeling a little untethered.

When she looked back at it all, however, and tried to figure out when everything began to unravel, she would go back to that moment in the bookstore when her sense of contentedness was so quickly replaced by a feeling of unease. One minute she was sipping hot chocolate like any holiday reveler, reading about fabric and design, knowing that her husband was happily wandering the bookstore aisles, and the next moment, she felt the full weight of the ordinary dangers of the world—chocolate, a holiday in her mother’s house, marriage itself.