29
HAYDEN AND I wander the long, manicured paths of the old Bonaventure Cemetery, iced tea and coffee in hand, sun warming the tops of our heads.
I’ve been here one other time, and it’s as beautiful as I remember, a gorgeous interplay of light and shadow cast by the hundreds of old trees dripping in Spanish moss.
“I’ve always liked cemeteries,” Hayden admits.
“Really?” I say. “What about them?”
“I guess just the permanence,” he says. At my look, he adds, “Not the bodies. I know those don’t last. Even the headstones wear down. But the idea of there being one place where you can find the people who came before you. And where you go back to them.”
He misses a step as we crest a hill and come into view of an active funeral, a group of people in black gathered around a grave with their heads
bowed.
Anguish splashes across his face.
“You okay?” I ask.
He glances down, pupils flaring at the sight of me, and takes my hand, tangling our fingers. “Sorry. The last time I was at one of those, it was for Len.”
I lean over to kiss his shoulder. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”
As we start walking, he studies me sidelong. “Was your last one for your dad?”
I nod, keep my eyes ahead. “It was kind of weird. He’d been a journalist when he was younger, and tons of people he’d worked with or written about
came.”
“That’s sweet,” Hayden says.
“It was,” I agree. “But I would’ve liked something a little more private,
I guess.”
“That makes sense.”
I think about Cosmo and Margaret running up the courthouse steps, half the world watching, and still those pictures feel intimate. I wish, for the hundredth time, that I could talk to Dad about it. About everything I spent the night transcribing and fact-checking. So far, I haven’t stumbled on any other lies or half-truths, not since we talked about Nicollet, but I can’t help feeling like Margaret’s still keeping major secrets, and wonder if Hayden’s having the same experience.
She and I have only three sessions left, and some of the very worst things to befall the Ives family are coming up.
The situation with Dr. David. The arrests. The court case. The accident.
I have no idea how Margaret has managed to move through life so isolated, carrying all of this on her shoulders, when I’m only three weeks into cataloging it and wishing desperately to share it with Hayden.
As if reading my mind, he stops walking and pulls me into an embrace, tucking me against his sun-warmed body, his chin resting atop my head.
And even though we’re not talking about it, it does feel like some of the
load shifts onto his shoulders.
“Did you see the picture,” he says.
I pull back to peer up into his face. It takes a beat for his meaning to set in. “I did. But I don’t know what it means.”
He nods curtly, his eyes narrow and mouth tense.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you need to,” he says, “before you agree to take this job.”
“So now I’m the one getting the job?” I say.
“You won me over,” he murmurs. “I have to assume you’ve won Margaret over too.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sleeping with Margaret,” I say.
“You’re not sleeping with me either,” he says.
“Yet,” I say. “And whose fault is that?”
He laughs, kisses me once, and then starts walking again, tugging me along by our linked hands. “A cemetery was a good idea.”
“Bright and crowded,” I say. “Or crowded enough, anyway.”
Back at my house after, we make dinner. Green tomato pie, fried okra, buttermilk biscuits—two-thirds of which he’s never had, and certainly never made.
“Your parents didn’t teach you how to cook at all?” I ask as we’re slicing tomatoes side by side.
He shakes his head. “My mom did all the cooking, and she had a weird thing about other people being in the kitchen while she was working.”
“And was that weird thing ‘Mom guilt’?” I ask.
“Maybe a little,” he allows. “But also she told me the kitchen was ‘her church,’ which was confusing since she and Dad also dragged us to First Presbyterian every single week.”
I laugh, go check on the biscuits. They could use a few more minutes.
“I think,” he says, “what she meant was, the kitchen was her nighttime.”
“Her nighttime?” I come back to stand beside him, his large hands still slowly, carefully slicing the plump tomatoes we grabbed from a farmers’ market in Savannah.
“Like how I used to wander, after everyone went to sleep,” he says.
“Looking back, I think she liked the privacy and the control.” He pauses for a beat. “I know my parents love each other, but I don’t think she was well suited to be a politician’s wife. No matter how small time.”
“What do you think she was meant for then?” I say, curious.
His shoulders lift. “I don’t know. When she was a teenager, she wanted to be a singer. But she had stage fright. Ended up on a stage anyway though.”
I think of the labyrinth on Margaret’s property, the path that winds all through her workshop. Unicursal. One beginning, one end. Or, depending how you look at it, no beginning and no end—just a journey.
“Do you think we have free will?” I ask.
He lets out a verifiable bark of laughter that lights me up from the inside. “You,” he says, “surprise me more than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“So I take that as a yes?” I say. “To free will?”
He sets his knife aside. “Without researching it?”
“Such a journalistic response.” I fight a smile. “Gut instinct, yes or no.”
“I think…” He raises his eyes to the ceiling, then settles them on my face. “I think there’s so much out of our control. Almost everything about how our lives go. But I think deciding that we’re all just on a track, that we never really had any say over our own decisions—it feels like the kind of thing someone with a lot of regrets would need to be true. Maybe I need
something different to be true.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“That we don’t have to end up with regrets,” he says. “That if we really care about something, we can decide to hold on to it.”
“I prefer that version of the world,” I say, smiling up at him. His arms ring my waist, his nose scraping along mine.
“You do?”
I nod, the movement gliding our lips briefly across each other.
“It’s yours,” he offers.
I laugh. “Oh? I can have the world?”
“Mine,” he says, “yeah. You can have mine.”
• • • “THAT FIRST YEAR of marriage was the best and worst that I’d lived thus far,” Margaret tells me. We’re side by side in her garden, the sky gray and overcast but the heat thicker than ever. My body feels like a swamp, my bangs plastered to my forehead as I dig out yet another bundle of weeds from the flower bed in front of me, my recording devices face up on the grass between us.
“At first, I tried to honor Laura’s request,” she goes on, still digging, huffing from the effort. “I waited a full month to write to her, and I waited a
full month after that for a reply that never came before writing again. Didn’t hear anything back, of course. Sometimes I was furious, other times I was devastated. Mostly I was worried. My parents had tried contacting her too.
Mom got one reply, asking for more space. Laura said something about how every time we crossed the boundary, it set her healing journey back and made it so she’d have to be away longer.”
“Did you know what she meant by ‘healing journey’?” I ask.
“Not at all!” she says. “I was reading ‘Dr. David’s’ books trying to make sense of things, but it honestly sounded like a whole lot of nothing.
He used big words, sentences so long you’d lose track of where they’d started, and everything was so vague. The main thing was, he thought the world was dying. He thought humanity had crossed a threshold and there was no coming back without drastic measures. Even when my sister had been back in the Ives bubble, she’d wrestled with anxiety, and the apocalyptic slant of his teachings spoke to her.”
“Is that what you think drew her to David Ryan Atwood? Existential dread?”
She sits back on her heels, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead.
“That and loneliness. She’d lost our grandfather, and our parents were busy, and I—I wasn’t as present as I could’ve been.”
“She told you to go out with Cosmo,” I remind her.
“I know, I know,” she says. “And I could never regret that. Believe me.
But the thing is, some people aren’t meant to be aimless. I was okay with just…just living, whatever that looked like, before I met Cosmo. And after that, I was mostly okay with just loving him, being loved by him. Laura was so smart. She should’ve been in a graduate program, or doing surgery, maybe, I don’t know. Working for NASA! But having everything at her fingertips, every single door open to her, I think it made it hard for her to find any kind of purpose. I think she was taken in by that man because he saw her. And so few people did.
“I read some of his first letters to her, you know? Way later. He told her she was brilliant, which was true. He told her she could help heal the world, which mattered to her. And he told her she was suffocating inside our
family, inside her life, and that wasn’t wrong either. The problem is, he told
her all that stuff for a reason.”
“To manipulate her?” I ask.
She nods somberly, freeing another weed with long, tangly roots.
“She was brilliant, and compassionate, and stifled,” Margaret says. “But she was also from one of the richest and most powerful families. We didn’t know until later that she’d been sending him money for weeks before he convinced her to come out to his ‘center.’ She probably funded the whole thing, honestly.”
“Did you keep writing to her? After your mom got the letter?” I say.
“I was too scared to,” she says. “She made it sound like there was a set amount of time she’d need to be away from me, and I was only making that window grow every time I reached out. So I tried just being patient. After about five more months, my parents, Cosmo, and I decided to hire a private detective. He went out to New Mexico for a couple of weeks, and he came back with all these big black-and-white photographs. And there she was.
My sister, with Dr. David and another woman, who looked a few years
older than her.”
“How did she look?” I ask.
Something flashes across her face, dark and lightning fast, akin to shame. “She’d lost more weight. Now that I know how things ended up, I realize I should’ve paid more attention to that. But at the time…The thing is, she was smiling.” She looks at me dead on, her pale blue eyes filling with tears, even now, sixty years after the fact.
She blinks them away and goes back to digging. “Laughing. Smiling.
She looked happy. Sometimes she was holding his hand. I remember one where her hair was blowing out behind her as they walked down the street with all these bags of produce. In every single picture, she looked happy. It was a relief. And a dagger to my heart.
“After that, I promised myself I wouldn’t write to her anymore. Or I guess I still wrote, but I didn’t mail the letters. Every time I had something I wanted to say to her—which was all the time—I’d write it down and tuck it into a drawer. Pretty soon I had dozens, hundreds maybe, stored all over my
family’s home, and Cosmo’s place in Nashville, and our house in Beverly Hills.
“Just seeing her happy like that…it gave me a lot of mileage.
Sometimes I was happy too, almost unbearably happy, for weeks at a time.
And then something would happen, and I’d think of my sister, remember I no longer had her, and I’d barely be able to drag myself out of bed.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s terrible.”
“Cosmo had to go back on tour, and I started out with him, but I hated it. Really hated it. I loved traveling with my husband, but it was hard sharing him like that. It got lonely. Half the time all I could think was, I wonder if Laura’s written back yet. So finally, I went home.”
“Then what?” I say.
“The press noticed,” she says with a wry smile. “Every day it was something different. Articles suggesting we were splitting up. Photographs of him and every beautiful woman he so much as spoke to while we were apart, along with plenty of implications that speaking was the least of what he was doing.
“The worst part is, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to find out anything that could ruin our marriage, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to lie. I knew he loved me, and I focused on that. He’d call me every single day, sometimes twice, and a couple of times, I flew in to surprise him at shows. He was always thrilled. If there were other women waiting in his dressing room, they were always gone by the time he and I got back there.
“Sometimes we’d talk about having kids, but the first time we had a pregnancy scare…I’d never felt that kind of terror. I couldn’t have even told you why. Cosmo was great about comforting me. I more or less sobbed for six hours, until my period started, and once the relief set in, we had a fight.
“We almost never fought. It just wasn’t a part of our relationship, for good or bad. I never felt like we needed to agree on things, and he never pushed me to do anything I didn’t want to. But he was upset by my reaction, that I wasn’t sure if I wanted children.”
She shoots me a meaningful glance. “Probably would’ve been a more important question to ask before we got married than ‘What’s your middle
name?’ ”
“What would you have said?” I say. “If he’d asked that?”
She blew out a breath. “I would’ve said I don’t know. Because I didn’t.
And after that fight, I felt even less sure. In a moment of weakness, I wrote another letter to my sister, and this time I sent it. I told her everything she’d missed. I told her about the baby that didn’t exist, and how conflicted I felt about bringing anyone new into this world. I even tried to butter her up by asking if Dr. David had any wisdom on the matter. She didn’t reply, of course, but after that letter, I felt like I found some peace with the situation.
It never got easier being without her, but I got used to how it felt to carry that pain with me. I learned to put it on a shelf and live my life.
“We threw parties and hosted lavish dinners. We went to galas and award ceremonies and charity fundraisers. We fought and made up, fucked and made love. And he wrote me ballads so sweet that the first note could make your heart break.”
A bittersweet smile sweeps across her face, even as her eyes stay trained on the garden bed. “On Sundays, when we were in Los Angeles, we had family dinners with my parents and Roy at the house, and whenever my dad was in one of his divorced phases, Cosmo and I would stay there for weeks at a time. My grandmother had passed away, and my great-aunt Gigi had moved to Paris, so he needed the company.
“We packed a whole life into those short years together. Cosmo’s schedule had slowed down since the Beatles set foot in America, in February of 1964, but the paparazzi seemed keener than ever to catch him doing something scandalous or me doing something horrible. We did our best to shut it out, but I could see how it grated on him, the way his world had shrunk so hard and fast. Writers who’d fawned over him five years earlier were mocking him now. ‘The Boy Wonder of Rock ’n’ Roll’ was looking older by the minute.
“The more time went on, the less we talked about Laura. It was too painful, and Dad, as he got older, leaned more into his anger. Probably easier that way. To rage against how she’d turned her back on us instead of
mourning that she was out of reach.”
“And your mother?” I ask.
“Eventually she admitted to me that she’d kept that private investigator,” she says. “Dad wouldn’t fund it anymore. He was too hurt and angry. So she couldn’t get as many check-ins as she would’ve liked, but every six months or so, she’d get a new envelope of pictures delivered to her. And then one Sunday night, after dinner, my father set his silverware down and stood up and said, ‘Bernie, Margaret, I need to speak with you in the drawing room.’ A family meeting.”
“Roy and Cosmo weren’t included,” I note.
“Dad had always welcomed Cosmo into the family, and to a lesser extent Roy,” she says. “So I knew this had to be something delicate. We went into the library while Roy and Cosmo had dessert. I remember there was a fire roaring in there, even though it was the dead of summer in California. But that was Dad. He had his routines.
“He had us sit down then and blurted it out, without any kind of preamble. He just said it: ‘We’re being extorted.’
“Mom nearly fell out of her chair. ‘By whom?’ I remember her asking.
‘For what?’ But something about the look on my father’s face broadcast the answer loud and clear to me. I just knew. Then he pulled the letter out of his dinner jacket and handed it to us.
“The funny thing is—well, not funny, but you know, peculiar—is that I didn’t even care about what Dad had said once I saw that handwriting. All that mattered to me was that Laura was okay. That she was finally writing to us.”
