Part V
After spending the winter apart, the male and female ospreys return to their breeding ground, to the nest they built. The male arrives first, claiming their home, rebuilding and adding material. When the female appears, he courts her again, sky-dancing, fishing, feeding her after her long journey.
They become reacquainted, preparing, together, for a new summer, for new life.
The couple’s grown offspring are on their own, staying near the equator for another year, eventually flying north, perhaps to find their own mates, to build their own nests, on another island, at the edge of another lake.
—
I never got the answers I wanted.
I know James has not remarried. I know he is still a partner at the hedge fund in Nolita. I know he travels a lot. I know that he sees the kids for occasional dinners, tennis matches, and Rangers games. I know he is kind and loving with them, while sticking to his initial decision about co- parenting—there have been no overnights, vacations, or holidays since the day he left.
I don’t know how long he stayed with the woman with the alliterative name, or if she is still in his life. I don’t know if he cheated throughout our marriage or if she was his first and only affair. I don’t know if he made the decision to leave suddenly after being caught, or if he’d carefully planned his exit for years. I don’t know what role the pandemic played. I don’t know how much of it was about money. I don’t know how much of it was about me.
I don’t know why he left. I don’t think I ever will.
I still think, maybe, there will be a final act in the play, an end to the story, when I am given my answer. But the years go by without one. There is only silence.
—
In early October of 2023, I was walking with a friend, passing the subway station near the Brooklyn Bridge, the exit James and I had used on our first date. It was late morning. It was warm, nearly seventy degrees, with rain threatening.
I heard my name, yelled loudly, “Belle, Belle!”
I looked around, unable to locate the source. Then I saw a man across the street, on a narrow strip of sidewalk separating the road from the pedestrian entrance to the bridge. He was tall, handsome, dressed in a black sweater, tan corduroys, orange sneakers, his hair a mix of blond and gray.
He was smiling widely and waving his arm high, back and forth, like a long-lost friend. It was James.
I slowed my pace. I smiled. I waved. I said, “Hi.”
Then I turned from him, resuming my path forward, rejoining my friend who was a few steps ahead. I could see from the corner of my eye that he was still standing there, his arm raised, watching me walk away.
When I think of James now, I think of that man waving. He is not a villain. He is a man with his own wounds. He is my children’s father, the source of many years of love and happiness. He is someone who made decisions about his own life, his own future. He is someone I can survive without. He is someone I don’t know. He is someone who doesn’t know me.
—
My daughters still crawl into bed with me, even at sixteen and nineteen.
They still wear monkey-print pajamas. They still wake up with their hair tousled from sleep. Carrie looks like my mother and has her fierceness, her drive. Evie has my grandmother’s frame and a lot of Susan’s personality.
They also look like James’s side of the family. They are a mix of all the
women who came before them. Finn now looks like a combination of his father and my father, and some of me, his own legacy. If I have grandchildren, they will be a mix too, of James and me, and all that came before.
One summer morning, the girls and I lay in my bed, the same one I had such trouble getting out of in the spring of 2020 and the summer of 2021.
Finn sat in the blue upholstered chair in the corner of the room. Our dog, still sweet and still difficult, lay at his feet, gnawing on a stuffed reindeer
we’d given him for Christmas.
Carrie said, “I miss us as a family.”
I answered, “Me too.” I paused. “But we are good now too, don’t you think?”
Evie lay her head on my shoulder. She said, “Yes. We are good.”
Carrie said, “I guess. I just wish…I wish I was little again.”
I kissed the back of her head. I said, “I know.”
As my children lay around me, I felt their steady growth to adulthood, to womanhood and manhood, an unstoppable force. I think a lot about the relationships ahead of them, about their eventual choice of life partners.
Will they repeat patterns because of what is ingrained in their biology?
Because of what they saw? Will they attract partners who betray them, like me, my mother, my grandmother? Will they leave their marriages in middle age, failing to warn or explain? Or, maybe, because I talked about it, because I wrote about it, because I didn’t pretend it was okay, I have stopped something?
Maybe this is what my grandmother was whispering in my ear.
Be brave. Claim it. Say it. Break the cycle.
I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partner deeply, on being known deeply.
I hope they will talk to their partners about money, about what will happen if the partnership ends. I hope that as they build trust in their relationships, they never lose sight of their own authority, their own voice, their own intuition. I hope they will move toward people who are in pain, rather than away. I hope they will understand that every person has experiences that
make them who they are. I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father. I hope they will know, from watching me, that if everything falls apart, they can get up and piece together something new.
—
The summer my divorce was final, the osprey pole began to tilt under the nest’s weight, leaning slightly to the left, toward the house. The birds were still in it, perhaps oblivious to the danger. It looked like the pole could come crashing down at any moment or, more likely, fall slowly, imperceptibly, into the marsh.
After the ospreys left in the fall, the osprey experts righted the pole and added reinforcing planks to its base. They used a chain saw to cut the nest, removing more than three feet of height. The nest was now flat and tidy, no longer decorated with haphazard twigs, with strands of colored string.
I worried the couple would never return to the nest in its new state. It was too stripped down. They would find a different home. I would have to wait for another pair to adopt the nest, to adopt us.
But a year later, I saw the birds’ silhouettes in the nest. I walked through the woods, down the paths covered with leaves, over Carrie’s rock, past the log carved with Evie’s initials, and out to the end of the boardwalk.
I crossed the beach named for Finn and stepped into the marsh, my sneakers sinking in the soft ground, coming closer to the pole. I looked up at the ospreys and waved. With a full voice, I said, “Welcome home.”
