When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (21 page)

Unlike most of her peers, Piper looked at Yale more as an experience than a competition. Sure, she applied herself, but not in the same crazy way she saw other students did, as if good grades were the Holy Grail, the ticket to happiness and immortality. It was college, four years of her life, and probably the most fun and irresponsible ones.

Who plans to fall in love? Certainly not Piper, who thought planning for love could easily be called distasteful. She had dated here and there, but found the boys she met and kissed, and sometimes even went to bed with, were either too immature or too serious. But at one of those obnoxiously loud fraternity parties, the ones where she thought everyone was trying just a little to hard to have a good time, Piper met Will and everything changed. He was sexy, charming, witty, and approachable, somehow without being the slightest bit pretentious or obvious. Will, whose parents were both Japanese, was a thoroughly Canadian boy who had cultivated an ironic Asian mystique for himself. Even though he had grown up on a different coast (in Ottawa), their joint nationality seemed like more than mere coincidence to her.

He had looked at her across the room from under his glossy black hair and winked at her like a dorky rock star. Piper was captivated. All that night they circled each other, a look here, a smile there. Piper had been talking to someone, a girl from one of her classes. When the girl (whose name for the life of her Piper could not recall later) left to get another drink, Will made his move. One minute she was alone, and the next he was right beside her.

Piper flushed to think back on those years. Such passion, such abandon. She loved him desperately. She truly did, and she knew there were moments when she simply lost herself in him, as if he had devoured her whole. For a while, she was content to live inside of him without really caring about the direction her own life was going. Will hated those times, when she no longer resembled the strong, fiercely independent woman he fell in love with. He would pull away, and then, shamed and contrite, Piper would get her sense of self back. They would begin again, but from a different place.

He was unique, amazing, beautiful, and naturally gifted at anything he tried. In the beginning she was just so afraid she would lose him somehow that she held on too tightly, she loved him too much, giving him little space to give his own love in return. But when the novelty wore off, when they found that they sometimes were too tired and slept instead of making love, as happens with every other couple, Piper found her footing. She expected to marry him, expected to stay with him forever. She called it Scout Love: she was prepared for anything, and knew that whatever happened, it would not destroy her.

Will, for his part, was more practical about it. He had seen her, wanted her, gotten her, fallen in love with her, and was willing to wait out the dizzying passion to see what kind of companions they would make. But somehow he had always known Piper was the woman for him. Will graduated a year ahead of Piper and went on to law school in British Columbia. Piper finished her degree, flying across the continent to see Will on vacations. She was glad, in a way, of the year they spent apart, as she sensed that after it was over she would begin life in the plural. When she graduated, she moved into Will’s cramped studio apartment. After she started working, managing a children’s section in a small bookstore, they moved to a one bedroom in the same building. They were small steps, leading to inevitability.

Each night, Piper retired to their bedroom, to an ancient drafting board she had picked up in a used furniture store. She began the slow process of working through her first book. Will, up to his ears in torts and trademarks, sat at a desk in the living room writing papers on an electric typewriter that would hum and purr under his fingers. It was comfortable, predictable even. But at night, their bodies would find each other on the soft sheets donated from various family members, smooth and worn in from years of use. Sometimes he would move on top of her with a kind of gentle precision that made her eyes pull to the back of her head. Other times, they would simply sleep, but always touching, hands on shoulders, feet on feet.

On Piper’s birthday, a year before Will was due to finish law school, he took her camping an hour north of town. They set up camp and devoured a dinner cooked over the open fire and then they walked on a westward trail, following the sun’s descent. At an open clearing, with a spectacular view of the river running below them, Will dropped to one knee and proposed. It had been coming for years, so Piper had envisioned the moment to be tempered with relief more than anything else. But she was overcome, and she had that same feeling that she had had back at the party where they first met. She felt special; maybe she wasn’t the only woman in the world, but surely the only one chosen.

It was an autumn wedding, held outside under the changing leaves of a hundred-year-old maple. When Piper looked at the pictures later, she saw them both as young and untouched, fragile. She felt for them, those two ghosts, when she looked at herself. They had had no idea. She was ashamed, as if they could see her from beyond the paper, see what had become of her and what the future really did hold, so unlike the fairy tale they believed in.

There had been no question about moving back to Avening. Piper insisted, but she didn’t even need to insist; Will was enchanted by the eccentric town. When he passed the bar, they packed up their small apartment and headed home. It only took him a couple of months to satisfy the regional requirements and start his own small law firm, at which point Will and Piper both knew he had, in a sense, taken on another wife. Piper was prepared to let him go, knowing that he wanted to be his own boss and build a career on his own terms. Piper was lonely, but she used that opportunity to flush out the other man in her life: Dexter Sagebrush.

Dexter came to her suddenly, without warning, like Will. One day he was just there. He wrote himself into her life, an eccentric wizard offering magical cures to common childhood behavioral problems.
Sagebrush Moves In
, her first book, was outlandish, imaginative, and humorous, sentimental without being cheesy. It surprised her how easy it was to get published. She had heard the stories of scores of suffering unpublished writers, but in this as with other things in Piper’s charmed life the stars aligned and there it was. The book was an instant success and Piper, having conquered the world of children’s literature, decided it was time to tackle having a child of her own.

To Piper, being pregnant was like doing hard time. She disliked every minute of it. She would wake up in the middle of the night, huge and heavy, to paddle down the hallway to empty her ever-shrinking bladder. She would look in the mirror and wonder who the person was staring back at her. She was a woman taken over, no longer given the opportunity to choose when she slept, when she ate, or how to handle her pendulum-like mood swings. During those months, she rarely socialized, not only because she did not have the tolerance to deal with her female friends, who annoyingly went on about how great it was to be pregnant, but also because she knew that soon she would not ever be alone again. Her solitude became a sacred thing, and she would spend hours in the garden, lying still in a hammock stretched between two oaks, imagining what it would be like to become secondary in her own life.

Sylvie was born on a Tuesday morning, the day before Halloween. For all the hours that Piper had spent contemplating what it would be like to be a mother, the reality was nothing like her assumptions. She had loved her parents, her husband, her friends, but that love had come from outside, had been delivered to her from someplace else. The love she had for Sylvie welled up from the very same place that her daughter had begun in. It was organic, running through every cell, every tissue, every single pore of her being. It began inside, and she kept it close.

Piper wasn’t sure if she was a “natural” mother, because she found motherhood itself to be a difficult task. It wasn’t just the emotional toll (the paranoia, the worry, the anxiousness) but the physical toll as well. She was constantly running after her daughter, who took life at full speed. Sylvie was a firecracker. Piper loved her daughter’s exuberance, her happy and joyous nature; she even admired her defiance, which she knew mirrored her own.

As Sylvie grew into a young girl, it became obvious that she took after her mother. Sylvie could pass for almost anything: Asian, Latin, Eastern European. Like Autumn Avening, she looked like she could be from anywhere and everywhere. Piper didn’t think that she herself was truly beautiful, yet even though she saw her own features on her daughter, Sylvie was the most striking child she had ever seen.

They waited five years, and then started again. But after Siobhan was born, Piper fixed it so that she would never have to endure another pregnancy. Siobhan, her baby, her angel, seemed to sense that Sylvie belonged to Piper, and as she grew, there could be no doubt that she had found her place as Daddy’s girl. She looked far more like Will, and acted like him too. She was quieter, more unaffected, but had that same aura of coolness, the same magnetism. She too was a beautiful child, and Piper thought once again: This is too easy, too good. There have been too many blessings, this luck can’t go on forever. And she was right.

It began with exhaustion. The kind of tired that Piper hadn’t felt since being pregnant. She tried homeopathy, she tried changing her diet, she tried sleeping more, but nothing helped. Then they found the first tumor in her right breast. She and Will only called it what it was in hushed whispers, never right out loud. She believed she would get better, and after treatment and surgery she did for a while. Then it spread to her lymphatic system, but she eventually went into remission again after a difficult round of therapy.

She knew instinctively, though, that she was buying time. She knew her suffering was an offering to the disease, an offering she made so that she could be a mother and wife just a little longer. Somewhere inside her she knew from the beginning that it would take her. The tumor in her brain was its last call. It was inoperable and inescapable. She had maybe six months.

Though her children were her life and her immortality, in her darkest hours she wished they had never been born. It was a selfish thought, one as ugly as the disease itself, but it would have just been so much easier on her if she hadn’t had to prepare herself for leaving them. She supposed if she had lived an empty, meaningless life, maybe she wouldn’t have minded giving it up. But her girls were so good, so happy, and so remarkable; the thought of dying, of leaving them to face the world motherless, was a burden that she did not feel she could bear.

It was the small things that took her breath away. When Sylvie laid her head on Piper’s almost fleshless shoulder while watching TV, or when Siobhan brought juice to her in the morning. It wasn’t simply that she cried; her body broke apart in a thousand tiny fragments, and then reassembled, but never wholly. Each time this happened, she moved further and further away from who she was before.

Piper had to blame someone, had to have a place to throw her anger. At first it was at herself. She despised her own body, hated the yellowing softness of her skin. She had a total loathing for her organs, her immune system, her inefficient constitution. But when she looked at her daughters, who were, after all, half her, she realized that she could not blame or hate herself. She wasn’t overly weak; she was simply human. Humans die. So she turned on God, with vicious intensity. Why her? She had been a basically decent person, if an overly blessed one. Why not give such an evil disease to someone who deserved it, like a child molester or a serial killer? She knew everything happened for a reason, but that excuse became just that, an excuse.

Then one day, as she was sitting outside, she looked all around her. She noticed one season overtaking the next. She saw the flowers budding, the plants stretching to move closer to the sun, the birds flying wing-to-wing below the sculpted clouds. Everything seemed to exist at once in perfect balance, and she suddenly realized that what was happening to her wasn’t God’s fault, or even part of God’s plan. It just was. She didn’t have to accept it, or look forward to it, or be brave about it. Just as her body knew instinctively how to push her girls into the world, it would know in the same way how to die. She didn’t have to do anything but hold on as long as she could.