Sometimes, she felt that her mother was closer to her than even Fred was. This was difficult to explain to herself.
Because of Shannon’s urging, Arietta hired various nurses to come to the house daily to tend to Fred’s needs. By day three, Shannon and Arietta were accustomed to having the nurses around. Sometimes the nurses ate lunch with them, telling them about their children, husbands and plans for the weekend.Arietta found she was relieved not to have the full weight of Fred’s care on her shoulders. It allowed her to spend long hours writing. It allowed her to think about herself as separate from Fred, as an intellectual woman with a future.
It was beginning to occur to her that Fred didn’t have a future. This, beyond anything, beyond even the affair he had with some stranger at Yale, broke her apart.
At the end of June, Isabella and Felicity came for a visit. They walked on eggshells around Arietta and Shannon, as though they knew about the blackmailers. Arietta decided not to ask Shannon if she’d told them. It was Shannon’s right to talk to her sisters about their mother’s health and wellness. Arietta had done the same when her mother was sick.
Oh, but she hated to think of herself the way she’d thought of her own mother. This was the cycle of life.
Sometimes, when the sky dimmed to twilight, Arietta caught glimpses of the life she’d hopefully share with her daughters when things calmed down. They drank wine and chatted about dating, about clothes, about vacations they wanted to take, and about memories they still adored—many of which included their father. Isabelle and Felicity weren’t as used to their father’s state as Shannon was, and they still seemed wistful and vaguely sure that their father would get better at some point.
They could still indulge those fantasies, while Arietta and Shannon had had to put them to bed weeks ago.
“I think his color’s up today,” Isabelle said over lunch one afternoon, not long before she and Felicity were headed back home.
“He’s looking better!” Felicity agreed.
Arietta and Shannon didn’t say anything, although Arietta remembered the first few weeks after the stroke, when she’d had similar thoughts.
Nobody brought up the blackmailers. Arietta was wondering if that had all been a nightmare; if maybe she’d imagined it.
Maybe everything could go back to the way it had been.
After Felicity and Isabella went back to the apartment they shared in their college town, Arietta spent all night editing the final draft of her article, then asked Shannon to read it at the breakfast table. Shannon did. For more than an hour, Shannon focused on the article, making little notes to herself in the notebook beside her. Then she scratched all the notes out with her pen and raised her eyes to Arietta.
Arietta realized she hadn’t breathed properly for that entire hour. She’d been terrified that Shannon would point out how off the article was. How inaccurate. How unacademic.
“I think it’s perfect,” Shannon said.
Arietta laughed. “It can’t be perfect. You had things to say.” She gestured toward the notes Shannon had scrubbed and crossed out.
“As I was reading, I wasn’t sure about a few of the points you were making,” Shannon explained. “But you cleared everything up a few paragraphs later. The logic of the article is there. It’s all expertly laid out.”
Arietta felt a sob rise in her throat. She’d never felt like an expert at anything. Shannon, by contrast, was a scientific genius. “Thank you, honey,” Arietta said, her voice small. “It means a lot.”
That afternoon, Arietta sent the article to Jasper, then put on her swimsuit and swam out into the waves in front of their house. Out there, she turned around and looked at the summer house. She could see Shannon on the veranda, reading her book as wind fluttered through her hair. She could see the nurse, flitting past the window of Fred’s bedroom as she tended to things. Arietta filled her lungs with air, then plunged down intothe depths, until the water was frigid around her. The pressure of the water strengthened against her eardrums.
Down there, beneath the surface, she dared ask herself: Can I find a life after Fred Peters?
She didn’t have an answer.
When she swam back to shore, she toweled off, then checked her phone. Stella from the Salt Sisters had called, saying that she, Rose, Hilary, and Nora were out and about; would Arietta like to join them? Rather than text back, Arietta called Stella and invited her over to the house. “I want you to meet my daughter,” she said, smiling.
Hilary, Stella, Rose, and Nora arrived ten minutes later. They brought gifts: wine and chocolate and cheese and fresh bread, and they arranged a spontaneous feast across the picnic table and talked about silly things, like the tremendous traffic in town and the upcoming sailing race on the Fourth of July. Even back in Boston, Arietta hadn’t had friends who just stopped by like this. Spontaneity hadn’t been in the cards.
She found that she rather liked it.
Of course, the Salt Sisters adored Shannon.
“You’re the neuroscientist!” Nora cried. “You’re famous.”
Shannon laughed and rolled her eyes over to Arietta.
“I can’t stop talking about you,” Arietta said. “You know that.”
Shannon blushed, while the other Salt Sisters peppered her with questions about her research and what she planned to do with her master's degree when she got it.
“The plan is to work in a lab,” Shannon said, “and research ways of ending Alzheimer’s. It took my grandmother, and yeah. My grandmother was the most sensational and funny and brilliant woman I ever knew. You know, the story is, she went to California to become a comedian, but she fell in love with my grandfather instead.”