Monstrous Beauty by Elizabeth Fama

raised Nellie alone. He got on his feet again. Soon, he realized that Nellie needed a mother. Later, he admitted to himself that he was lonely. He longed for a lover—not the memory of a lover, but a person of flesh and blood to greet him with warm arms when he arrived home every night. He needed someone to laugh with, someone to pursue his dreams with, someone to wake up in bed with, and to grow old with.
    Lucy’s epitaph was extensive and adoring because Lucy was the one who had lived a long life with him. Lucy was the one Nellie grew up loving as her mother, and running to when she skinned her knee or had her feelings crushed. Lucy was the person at Bartholomew’s side for business functions, at church, at dinners and dances. Lucy was the woman who grew old and respected, and was mourned by friends and family and townsfolk when she died. Marijn’s epitaph, by contrast, was perfunctory and already distant. She was almost no one: a blip in Eleanor’s life, a mystery to her daughter, Nellie, and a fleeting blaze of fire early in Bartholomew’s plodding ninety-two years.
    Hester reached the stairs leading down to School Street, with the old church looming at her side. She held on tightly to the iron railing, teetering at the top. She felt mentally buffeted, as if the secrets of that headstone, locked up and neglected for so long, were finally liberated and hurling themselves at her. Marijn had been practically her age when she had died. So young, with her entire life ahead of her. Everything she might have done or become was lost to the world. Because of Marijn’s death, Bartholomew’s passion never had a chance to evolve into a deeply comforting love—like the bond Hester saw between Malcolm and Nancy after their fifteen years together. Nellie had never been held by Marijn as a little girl, had never grown irritated by her as a teen, had never returned to her for guidance as a young woman.
    Hester’s own biological mother, Susan, was the same mystery to her: she was merely stories from other people’s memories. She was the same handful of photographs that never moved or laughed. She was wistful looks in other people’s eyes.
    Hester sat down on the top step. Susan had died knowing this—knowing that she would be only a phantom limb in Hester’s life; knowing that Hester would run to another woman’s arms when she stumbled. In the most recent generation of her family’s mysterious series of deaths, Nancy had played the role of Lucy. Nancy had been by Malcolm’s side as he worked his way up from a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole, to staff scientist, to the head of the Ocean Life Institute. Nancy had taken Hester to ballet class, and then soccer practice, and then fencing lessons, until finally Hester had discovered her real hobby—and her passion for history—as an interpreter at Plimoth Plantation, where Nancy drove her every weekend during the school year and every day of the summer until she got her driver’s license. Nancy had comforted her and buoyed her when she got her period at age ten, too young to understand, while Susan —lovely, pitiful Susan—was ashes, scattered from a Captain Dave boat in a private ceremony, indistinguishable from the sand and the algae at the bottom of the ocean.
    Hester began to cry. She cried for Nellie, because she never knew Marijn. She cried for Marijn, because she never knew Nellie. She cried for Malcolm and her grandfather for losing Susan, for Susan for losing her entire future, and for Nancy, who filled another woman’s shoes with such grace. And finally she cried for herself—for all that she had missed with her mother, and for all that she would miss in her own future.
    She could no longer deny that she wanted a deep love of her own, with marriage someday, and children, and a lifetime together—like what Malcolm and Nancy had right now, and what Bartholomew and Lucy had over a hundred years ago. But in her world, Hester could never play the role of a