The kids were racing, and it made Maria nervous. Mimi was first, clambering up on the trail like a goat, which is what she looked like: she had long face and wide, long nose of a goat but the calming brown eyes of a doe. George was more like a cat. He wasn't like a mountain lion, which also would have been fitting; he was more the house cat, strolling to a place on the trail that pleased him to stand on it, looking. It was hard to tell if he was bored or not. Their speed was what unnerved her: she was fine with clambering and looking, but the thought that they might get in some high-altitude trouble while no one was watching them kept poking at her. It was obnoxious.
Beth came up behind her. She was sprightly herself, which explained the trip up to the mountain they were currently hiking on. Beth's idea of a family gathering always involved exercise of some kind. Beth thought she went a little far with it: thereat been canoeing, a sock-hop that the kids' school was hosting, a full eighteen-hole round of sweaty and fruitless golf that Maria had finished with her daughter and grandchildren to prove that she was open to learning sports. To Beth's credit, the kids had been hot and crampy from using the clubs for so long but they'd recovered quickly at the cafe and didn't speak of the game once during lunch. When Beth was younger she would have complained for a week, holding her wrist or pressing her back for emphasis once Maria's sympathies had run thin- and now she was sprightly. Maria blamed the girl's college's physical activities prerequisite. Beth hadn't been the same since she'd taken karate her freshman year. She had thought about admitting how well she felt afterward, an as-advertised energy and clarity barging into her day; she'd decided against it. But she stopped complaining. Occasionally she told Beth that the trip or match or swim or whatever was a good idea.
"Did they-" Beth started, still walking, her Mom-eyes focused at a point past a bend in the path as if she could see through rock.
"They were fine-" Maria said to Beth's back. Beth was brisk but not hurried and so Maria decided not to be unsettled. The kids were old enough to know not to walk out on any precipice that was off-limits, and they were wearing insanely electric colors so that they could be spotted quickly if lost; also she'd watched Beth layer the kids in sunscreen while they were still in the parking lot. She made herself imagine the kids caught on a picturesque bluff, waving at the rescue helicopter's pilot in their gaudy safety colors, skins unblemished by heat rash. It soothed her.
The night before, at Beth and Jemali's house, Beth had told Maria that she and Jemali were having some problems. Maria had asked "what problems?" and Beth had sighed and responded without a bit of the impatience that sometimes crept into her tone when she spoke with her mother. (Maria was impatient with Beth's impatience; however, after she'd been swapping an escalating snipe with her daughter for a month she'd realised that this was simply a tradition: she'd used it with her own mom, whom she'd heard being pert with her grandmother and etcetera. The Tone was more ceremonial than active.) So she was a little surprised when Beth was tone-free in her response. "We can't get along." Then Beth expelled some air- relieved, Maria correctly surmised- and waited.
"Is he here now?" she asked, and Beth turned her head to either side, slowly.
"He's at Amy's now. That's what he's told me. Amy called me to tell me he was all right, which was decent of her."
It was. Amy wasn't normally decent, to Maria's mind. Suddenly she was filled, in an obligatory way, with memories of her own husband and the times that they couldn't get along. It had felt like the end of the literal world at the time. He'd done something or said something and Maria was sure that it must have been despicable, because she'd thrown the man out of the house and refused to let him come back for two years. Maria had no idea what they'd been fighting about- none. She remembered what seemed like every single day he was gone, though. The absent couple of years was funny to her now- what on earth were they so worked up about? What had he done- was it something he had done, or something that he'd said, some principle about which they disagreed? It was really tickling her, but she looked at Beth and saw that she'd not been sleeping, because her cheeks were flat and her eyes looked as if she'd been blinking away grit. Maria wanted to just bray out some nervous laughter, something to sluice away the alarm she felt.
Instead, she listened: Jemali had, indeed, said something horrible, and when confronted with the horribleness did not recant. No, he had simply paraphrased himself, repeating his complete lack of manners and compassion, Beth reported. The horrible phrase had been a pointed re-telling of something they'd struggled with, something that they both felt had left them feeling raw and abandoned despite the discussions with a family therapist and various neighbor friends. Beth only looked exhausted as she told Maria her story. She felt the flutter of a laugh as she listened, and took that as her cue to clamp down: this was it, she thought. This is the last time that my girl will be so open to me... Maria gathered herself. I have to leave her with something, but it has to be small- I have to make it seem that I'm just suggesting things rather than gifting her with my best advice, my finale advice. She collected that moment and pinned it, wings outstretched, onto a rectangle of framed cobalt velvet.
Beth had looked at her mother and slowly taken a breath to speak again. Maria interrupted:
"Elizabeth. That sounds so insurmountable, I know, he leaves and you just get to stay with the kids, which is so unfair, right?" Beth nodded her head up then down, slowly. "Once Brian came back- you remember he was gone for two years, that was while you were still an undergrad- once he came back, it was amazing how fast I forgot what the hell we were fighting about. And I felt like I had no part of him that I loved any more-it felt like being a survivor of some shipwreck and there you are, treading in water, with nothing to grab and float on."
"That's exactly..." Beth didn't finish her thought. Maria breathed in through her nose and out her mouth, a practiced meditator now.
"That's what I think marriage is about. You get to talk about all the dreams you're supposed to build and the amount of decorating you can afford and all, but really the thing that glues you together like you were welded that way are the parts when you don't see any relief but you still stay in it."
"Impossible. I don't think that's possible, Mom."
"That's the place, then. I don't like to see you hurt, love-" Maria put her arms up and Beth walked into them, fast and tearing up. "But it will help to keep talking. You have to for the kids anyway, so you should just stay treading water and I'll sit them, and I can bring desserts. I can watch movies with them or take them to movies. The kids are covered." Maria was not convinced she'd said enough, but she was tired too, and the one of the most valuable things she'd learned from being married so long was when to shut it.
Maria stood up from the rock she'd been sitting on and walked further up the path to join her family. Around the bend there was a wider spot in the path, a shelf of cliff that you could take pictures from. Beth found them clustered in front of the rock wall. "I need a picture of this!" she called, and Beth instinctively took Mimi and George by their shoulders to move them into a more photogenic togetherness. Maria smiled at them through the digital display, taking longer than was needed to press the camera icon, unable to stop herself from being happy. Her daughter was separated from her son-in-law; her daughter was in despair; the future of her grandchildren's contentment was more unsure than it normally was. The display showed them as glowing and present, glad of the fresh air, and Maria looked up to check that it wasn't the camera's distortion. It wasn't. There was glowing and gladness. She stepped back and pressed the icon.
Immediately there was a whoosh sound and then she was falling backward. looking at the sunshine and roaring with surprise. She saw Beth's face above her, sideways, with a confused expression, shouting something. "MOM-" Beth shouted. "MOM-" and it looked like more but Maria couldn't hear the words. For some reason this struck her as funny, and she switched from roaring to laughing. Beth's face was too far away to make out, so Maria's cartwheeling brain provided a picture: Beth at thirteen, at some aunt's house, taking a third roll while she crossed her eyes at her mother from across the table.
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