Maisie sighs. “I can’t think about this right now.”
The back door opens and Joe is there looking so worn out I wonder if he got any sleep at all. Joe pretty much never comes back to the house in the morning once he’s gone out. Hazel raises her head and issues a single bark of acknowledgment.
“We’re taking the day off,” he says, jingling the keys in his pocket. “We’re going to the beach.”
We stare at him like he’s someone we’ve never met. “We can’t go to the beach,” Maisie says. “There’s too much work.”
“There’s always too much work and I’ve decided we aren’t doing it today. I’ve already sent Emily home to get her suit.”
We continue to sit. Nell pours milk in her coffee to cool it.
“Go on.” He stands there like a teacher who’s just announced Class dismissed. This is the part where we’re supposed to fly out the door.
“Let’s pick for a while,” I say, looking for the middle path. “Then we’ll knock off early and go to the beach.”
Joe shakes his head. “We never knock off early, in case you haven’t noticed. That’s why we have to do this in the morning, first thing. Go.”
“It’s Tuesday,” I say. “Since when are we off on Tuesday?”
“It’s Thursday,” he says.
Thursday? I wonder if this could be true.
“Are you going to the beach?” Nell asks her father. She tests the coffee. Still too hot.
“I’m going to go check on a couple of things and then I’ll come down.”
“So we’ll work until you’re finished then we’ll all go together.” I meant it to be helpful, Joe can’t do everything by himself, but my suggestion flies all over him.
“Could someone in this family listen to me for a change? I just went through this with Emily. She’s crying. She’s useless. All of you are tired and useless and I want you to go and have some goddamn fun.”
“？‘Some goddamn fun’？” Maisie says. “Oh, well, when you put it like that. I’ll go kill the kittens and then meet you at the beach.”
“Kittens?” Joe asks.
“We’ll go,” I say to him.
He turns around to look out the window above the sink. “Do it now. I don’t want Emily down there by herself.”
This is the fire that ignites us because none of us wants Emily to be at the beach by herself. We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands. I head upstairs for my swimsuit, towel, and hat. When I come back down Joe’s gone and the girls tell me to go.
“We’ll clean up and make the sandwiches,” Nell calls as I am out the door. “We’re right behind you.”
I take the two--track away from the orchard and towards the woods until I find the smallest break in the trees, a path I know to look for only because I’ve come this way a thousand times. It’s like stepping into a book, one turn and everything changes: cool instead of hot, dark instead of light. Instead of cherry trees, eighty--foot hemlocks and red oaks and white pines, and between those hemlocks and oaks and pines are giant rocks dressed up in mossy sweaters. The girls loved nothing more than to lie on those rocks when they were little, press their faces into the cool, shaggy green and pretend they were mermaids flung from the sea by a towering wave. They squeezed their legs together and flopped them like sad tails. A century ago these very rocks must have been in the orchard, and those ancestors who are buried up the hill beneath the daisies must have dug them up and dragged them here. They had already cut down all the oaks and pines, planed them into boards and sent them out into the world to be reassembled into houses and ships. Tired as they were, the ancestors took the time to pull the stumps and burn them. Then they planted the fields with cherry trees. Maybe they had left the half mile of woods that stands between the orchard and the beach because they’d lost the strength to cut it down. Maybe the men lived to be fifty before a rock or a tree or a horse tipped over and crushed them. Maybe the women died at forty--five giving birth to their eighth or ninth or tenth child. Maybe they never went to the beach in the summer, not even once. Maybe picking cherries really is the least of it.
At the edge of our woods is the shore of Grand Traverse Bay, our corner of the choppy, gray--blue behemoth that is Lake Michigan—-the dark stand of woods, and then a dozen feet of pebbly, sandy beach, and then the water that stretches out forever; the trees and then our eldest daughter alone on the beach, hugging her knees. I sit beside her and she tips herself into me, her head on my shoulder, her glorious hair falling across my chest, and for what feels like a very long time we watch the cormorants skim the water.
“Everything should stay like this,” she says.
I tell her that I wish it could, even though I know she means the temperature of the lake and I mean this summer, everyone home and together. As sad as I am for the suffering of the world, I wish to keep this exact moment, Emily on the beach in my arms.
“We didn’t mean to tell you last night. I’m not even sure we were going to tell you at all. Lots of people don’t have children, you know. I could have just waited until I went through menopause and then said I’d forgotten.”
“You never know.” I try to make my voice neutral. “You might change your minds later on.”
I feel her head move sadly against my neck. “It’s bad enough having to worry about what’s going to happen to the farm. I can’t imagine worrying about what would happen to our kids.”
“Every generation believes the world is going to end.”
She raises her head. “Is that true? Did you and Dad think it was all going up in a fiery ball?”
She is so close to me. I can see the faintest remnants of long--ago freckles on her forehead. “No. I said it to make you feel better.” Joe and I thought about the plays we wanted to get tickets for, the price of rent, whether or not we should go out to dinner, how soon we could afford to have a baby. We didn’t think anything would end, any of it, ever.
Emily returns her head to its comfortable spot. “I know it seems like I’m upset that Benny and I aren’t going to have children, but I don’t even know what that means, really. I want to marry Benny but if I have a biological clock it hasn’t kicked in. Maybe women don’t have biological clocks anymore.”
“It’s not like humanity’s stopped having children, you know. It’s still going on.”
“That’s because humanity doesn’t live with Benny Holzapfel, and if I didn’t live with him it wouldn’t be any less true, I just wouldn’t have to think about it.”
“We couldn’t begin to list all the depressing things we’re not thinking about—-all the things that have happened in the world, the things that are happening right now here in Michigan, the things that are going to happen in the future—-no one can hold it all.”
“Emily died in childbirth,” my daughter says.
“What?”
“She died giving birth. I remember thinking about that when we read the play in high school, like it was a bad omen.”