32
“I WOKE UP in an ambulance,” Margaret says. “But it was a short trip. We were only two blocks from the hospital when it happened.”
Her voice barely wavers. I wonder how many thousands of times she’s played out this monologue in her head, maybe even practiced saying it aloud. I’ve read hundreds of accounts myself, but hearing it from her lips is different. Excruciating. I’ve known where all of this was heading from the beginning, but the closer I’ve gotten to Margaret, the more I’ve dreaded today.
“I kept trying to ask for Cosmo,” she rasps. “No one would tell me where he was.
“They got me into the ER, but I was more or less fine. Scraped and bruised, but that’s it. I remember begging them to call Laura. For some reason, I was sure she could fix everything. I don’t know why.
“Dr. Willoughby met me there,” she says. “Cecil had become a close friend of ours since he testified at the People’s Moment trial. He was the only one Cosmo trusted to take me to when he found me that day, in pain.
“He told me Cosmo was in surgery. He had a collapsed lung and swelling on his brain. All I had was a case of appendicitis. That was what had caused the fever and the pain. They put me under for the operation, and when I woke up…” Finally, a crack in her voice. “My parents were in the hospital room, and Cecil was too, but…”
Her eyes glaze over. She looks distant. Less like she’s deep in the memory and more like she’s holding it back, behind a pane of glass, where
it can’t hurt her.
“My husband was already gone.” Her watery eyes cut to me. “He was the love of my life and all we had was four years. My parents couldn’t bear to tell me. So Cecil did.”
“What about Laura?” I can barely get the words out.
“She wasn’t there.” Her voice wobbles, a mix of anger and heartbreak.
“My sister didn’t come.”
The silence extends between us for several seconds, then she swallows hard and says, “She was too afraid. To be back in the thick of everything.
And I couldn’t forgive her for it. So we stopped speaking.”
“For how long?”
She swallows but doesn’t answer.
Tears prick my eyes. In a whisper, I ask, “Do you regret it?”
She laughs harshly. “Of course I fucking regret it. I regret all of it. I regret almost every decision I ever made in my life and how they all got me here. And I’m still angry with her too. But even when I was a ball of rage, I never stopped hoping…I hoped…” She shuts her eyes, one tear loosing from her dark lashes to curve down her cheek. “I hoped she was happy.”
She takes a moment to pull herself together, like she has so many times before, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin. “My father had paid for us to have complete privacy to mourn. For four days, people gathered outside the hospital to pray for my husband, not knowing he was already gone. When the time came, we called a press conference and Cecil broke the news while we left through a side door. My parents tried to convince me to come back to California, but all that was left of Cosmo—it was all in our home. I couldn’t leave it behind.
“My mother stayed with me in Nashville for several weeks. Every time we left, there was the press, without any qualms about how their presence might make me feel. They were kinder at first, would bring trinkets and bouquets and teddy bears, gifts and apologies that meant nothing. They didn’t know him. They couldn’t miss him. I did. Every moment of every day.
“I wanted to punish them, honestly, but I couldn’t figure out any way to do it. The best I could come up with was giving them more spectacle, feeding their unquenchable thirst for drama. They wanted a madwoman, and that’s what I was. I ripped up our gardens and left all the flowers in trash cans at the gate. I left the house barefoot, and chopped off my hair with a pair of kitchen scissors. I wore the same dress I’d worn to our wedding to the burial, and I relished every headline about my deranged behavior, because at least it seemed like proof that I had some control over who they said I was. After a couple of weeks, that stopped soothing the ache and all I wanted was to be alone. To feel my pain completely, without interruption. I sent my mother home, paid the staff, and let them go. Then I shut myself away. For two years, the only person I saw with any kind of regularity was Cecil.
“He’d come to check in every week or so that first year. After that, he went back to Switzerland, to Laura. He’d call to check in on me sometimes.
I wondered if it was at my sister’s request, but I never asked. He was my last connection to her, and deep down, I think I wanted to hold on to that.
“Two years after my husband’s death, my father urged me to move back to the House of Ives. I obliged but I couldn’t stand to be in the wing of the house where Laura and I had grown up together, and where Cosmo and I had spent so many nights, so instead I settled into Gerald’s old rooms.
“When my parents told me that Cecil and Laura were getting married, I almost broke and called her. They’d fallen in love slowly, over years of friendship. His kindness and patience were exactly what my sister needed.
But any happiness I felt for her always turned into more pain after a minute or two. My parents and Roy went overseas to witness the private ceremony, in their home. I stayed behind, alone in my empty mansion.
“The worst part was the day I found out my sister had given birth to a baby girl. And I’d missed it. The pregnancy, the delivery, the whole thing.”
Surprise whizzes through me like a dozen bottle rockets. “She had a daughter? You’re not the last Ives?”
“I am,” she says firmly. “When I go, the name goes with me. Laura’s made sure of that, in every way she could. She and Cecil changed their
surnames, and they raised their daughter in Europe, far away from us. Away from the Cosmo fans and the media circus. They stayed in touch with my parents, but at a distance. It was the only safe way. Sometimes, when my mother and Roy came for dinner, she’d ask when I was going to forgive my sister, but the truth was, it wasn’t a lack of forgiveness keeping me away anymore.”
I shake my head, not understanding. “Then what?”
She thinks for a minute. Then she heaves herself out of her chair.
“Come with me, Alice.”
I follow her inside and down the hallway, to a shut door. She opens it to reveal a sparse office, with a desk, a computer, two chairs, and a thriving potted plant. In the corner, she opens the closet door, then steps back, gesturing toward a brown box on the top shelf.
“Oh. Sure.” I step forward and pull it down, handing it over. She places it on the desk and, with shaking hands, lifts the lid off.
“What is it?” I ask.
She waves toward it, inviting me to look. Nervously, I lean over, without one single guess at what I’ll find.
“Go on,” she says.
I carefully lift the stack of yellowed newspaper clippings out of the box and begin to skim them. All of them about her, some from before Cosmo’s death and some from after, but all of them damning.
THE IVES CURSE CLAIMS COSMO
“I BLAME PEG,” COSMO’S CHILDHOOD FRIEND SAYS
THE LIES OF IVES: HOW PEG TRAPPED COSMO
There are dozens more. They call her Pushy Peggy and Me-Me-Me Margaret. They label her stuck up, sneaky, manipulative, catty. They accuse her of hating to share the spotlight with her husband. She’s never photographed leaving, but instead storming out. She doesn’t wear anything, but instead shows it off. They write about feuds with other beloved women
in Hollywood, and in one especially sickening tabloid piece, an anonymous source says Cosmo was on the verge of leaving Margaret when he died. The headline reads: If I Can’t Have Him, No One Will.
My stomach turns. I stuff them back into the box. “Margaret,” I say gently. “You know all of this is bullshit, don’t you?”
“Says who?” she replies evenly.
“Stuck up? Manipulative? Come on,” I say. “These are all just old stereotypes about women. They might as well be calling you a Jezebel.”
“It’s just a story,” she says bluntly, lowering herself into one of the chairs. “That’s what I used to tell Cosmo. And I believed it. But after I lost him, and Laura…When you don’t have the people who love you around, reminding you who you are, that story feels bigger and realer than anything else. You lose yourself inside the character with your name and face.”
I want to reach out and touch her hand, or hug her, but I’m not sure she’d appreciate it.
I don’t belong to you, I imagine her saying. And she’s right. I’m just another person sitting here trying to collect her likeness and hammer it into something digestible for the masses.
“That’s why I couldn’t face my sister,” she explains. “Because everything they said started to feel true. Like I was cursed. Like everything I touched was ruined. I was so damned ashamed. Laura hadn’t come to see me after the accident because she knew she’d be in the blast zone. And as angry as I was with her for so, so many years, I couldn’t stand the thought of taking the blast zone to her doorstep. So I stayed away. I spent my parents’ twilight years with them. I buried my father, and then my stepfather, and then finally, several years later, my mother.
“And then, in 1985, I tried to disappear.”
“Wait—you…what?” Nineteen eighty-five was two decades before she vanished.
“I booked a one-way ticket to London,” she says. “It took about four days for coverage of Cosmo’s Widow Abroad to make newsstands. From there, I flew to Miami. Same thing happened. After that, I made it two weeks in Providence, Rhode Island.”
“Your jet-setting era?” I say in disbelief. Dove Franklin had thought she was just bored of mourning and thus burning through her money to pass the time. I’d thought those days were a sign of her healing.
“Ill-advised escape plan after escape plan,” she confirms. “See, it was one thing when I was a socialite. But my husband, he was the stuff of legend. Following me around was the closest people could get to having a piece of him again, I guess. Eventually, I had to accept it was never going to end. So I went back to California and spent twenty more years in that house, locked away with my family’s ghosts and their letters and their journals.
“Then one day, in spring of 2003, a woman shows up at my gate.
Buzzes it again and again until I answer. Tells me she’s my niece and she needs to talk to me.
“I tried to send her off, but she kept coming back. It’s strange…she’s a lot more like me than she is like Laura. Stubborn, obstinate. But Jodi’s compassionate—just like my sister.”
“Jodi,” I breathe, the realization reverberating through me.
Margaret hardly seems to hear me. She goes on: “Eventually, I let her inside on the condition that once I heard her out, she’d leave me alone for good. She agreed. And then she told me that…” She pauses. “That my sister was sick.”
She stops there, and I catch myself leaning forward, my breath held.
“What’d you do?”
“I sent her away,” she wheezes.
My heart twists, a rag having every last drop squeezed from it.
“I sent her away, and then, then I took all those journals and letters— Lawrence’s and my father’s and my own—and I put them in the grate, and I burned them. Like that might cut my ties to my family. Like it might finally make me into an island. Untouchable. Safe. Incapable of hurting anyone.”
My heart cramps. Not just for all that lost history, those details gone up in smoke, but for the unbearable loneliness that now hangs around Margaret like a cloak.
“Jodi left a card behind, but I didn’t touch it,” she continues. “It had a phone number and her address scribbled on it. On some tiny island in Georgia. And I couldn’t make myself burn it. The past? Sure. But some part of me, I suppose, kept holding on to the possibility of a future, no matter how hard I tried to stop. I’d just stare at that card on the console table every so often, until it was so thickly covered in dust I couldn’t read it. But by then it was engraved in my memory.”
I glance down at my notebook and damply ask, “So, that’s why you wanted to disappear? Because if Margaret Ives stopped existing…you could have your sister back?”
“I already told you.” Her knees creak as she stands. “The only person who gets that story is the one who writes this book.”
Just like that, we’re finished, and I have more questions than ever.
• • • I DON’T SEE Hayden Thursday night. He’s shut up in his hotel room finishing his proposal for tomorrow, and I’ve got my own to think about for Saturday.
As I drive home from Margaret’s house, her story plays on a loop in my head. All those years alone, the foiled escape plans. And Jodi.
The way she and Margaret bicker makes more sense now—it’s got a distinctly familial flavor—but her absence lately seems a little stranger, given the context. I’m dying for the rest of the story, and if I’m going to earn the right to hear it, I need sustenance, because I’ve got a long night of researching and writing ahead of me.
I stop by the grocery store and grab a frozen pizza for dinner, along with a jug of green tea, some Marcona almonds, a premade salad, and a bar of dark chocolate.
I drop the snacks and tea outside Hayden’s hotel room, then scurry back to my car, texting him as I go: Something’s at your door.
I get into my car and watch his door open, see him step out—shirtless, it should be said—look left and right, then grab the bags and head inside,
head bowed over his phone.
This is sweet, he says, but I was hoping it was you.
We wouldn’t have gotten anything done, I reply.
We would’ve made good use of the time, he counters.
Tomorrow, I tell him, and drive back to the bungalow in the woods.
At the kitchen table, I pour myself a glass of wine and listen to the printer in the other room churning out page after page of my notes while I sip. I always work better with something physical in front of me.
When the printer has finished, I carry the stack of pages back to the kitchen and sit, pen in hand, colorful highlighters at my elbow, to get to work. It’s not like I’m starting from scratch. I have a pretty good idea of how I want to handle the proposal itself already.
The big thing is the sample pages. I should’ve been working on them all along, but I wanted to choose the strongest part of the story, and to do that, I felt like I needed as complete of a picture as possible.
But what I’ve got is riddled with holes.
There’s so much material but very little that’s fully fleshed out. I’m second-guessing my process now, but it’s too late to do anything differently.
I pull out the notes on a handful of my favorite anecdotes and set them aside. I highlight Margaret’s word choice in places, draw question marks around the things that interest me.
Then I shove aside my impostor syndrome and start writing.
Aside from a quick break to heat up the pizza, and several trips to the bathroom once my bladder is already full to bursting, I do nothing but write, read, rewrite, and edit until four in the morning.
I didn’t mean to stay up so late, but I’ve got multiple usable writing samples now that I can revisit in the morning. Scratch that: in the afternoon.
It’s morning already, and it’s time for me to sleep.
I scrub my face and brush my teeth, then collapse into bed, shooting off a good luck text to Hayden.
He responds immediately, because of course he’s somehow already
awake: Sleep well.
And I do.
I dream I’m riding in a dark blue 1958 Spyder, the top down, Hayden in the seat beside me, our hands tangled up. The road curves back and forth along the cliffs, and the sun shines down on us. He lifts our hands to kiss the back of mine, his pale brown eyes warm on me.
Alice all the time, he murmurs, and then I wake up.
• • • HAYDEN SHOWS UP at my door on Friday night with champagne in hand.
“Shouldn’t I be the one giving that to you?” I say. “You’re the one who did his pitch today.”
He kisses my cheek as I take the bottle from him. “You can bring the champagne tomorrow,” he promises, following me inside.
I pour us each a glass, and we clink them together and drink. The light sweetness fizzes down my throat, my stomach warming immediately.
“How did it go?” I ask him.
He lifts one shoulder. “It went.”
“That’s all I get?” I ask.
He puts his glass on the counter and takes my waist in his hands, drawing me to stand right in front of him. “How’s it been going here?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say, then amend my answer. “Good, I think. I feel like I’ve done everything I can at this point, so it’s either enough or it’s not.”
“It’ll be enough,” he says, smiling faintly.
I roll my eyes, but the truth is, his vote of confidence glides down between my ribs, warmer, fizzier, and more delicious than champagne. I lock my arms behind his neck. “You know what I think sounds nice?”
“I can guess,” he teases, voice low.
I smile. “A walk.”
He gives one hoarse laugh. “A walk,” he says, “sounds perfect.”
We wander along the trail for a while, then stop to have a drink on the patio at Rum Room. One drink turns into two, and then we need dinner to
soak up the alcohol. We order every appetizer on the menu and share them between us.
By the time we’re trekking home, the moon is high and silvery. This time, when we get to the place where the path runs behind my rental house and he kisses me—like he did that first time—neither of us pulls away. We crash into each other, hands greedy for bare skin and hair, tongues and teeth and lips eager.
I try to tell myself that no matter what happens tomorrow, this thing between us won’t change, but I can feel the panic thrumming through our bodies, the fear that we’re racing against a ticking clock.
I pull back, catching my breath, our foreheads pressed against each other in the dark. “What if,” I whisper, “we did it together?”
“Did what?” he hums, his thumb running up and down along the small of my back, beneath my shirt.
“The book,” I say. “What if we did it together?”
He tenses in my arms.
“It was just an idea,” I say, trying to talk myself out of taking his reaction personally. It’s not wrong for him to have a preference for how he works. It doesn’t mean anything about how he sees me…does it?
“No,” he says, the word a heavy stone in the pit of my stomach.
“Okay,” I say.
“No, I mean, I already asked her,” he says. “A week ago, I asked if that was something she’d be open to. She’s not.”
“Why not?” I ask, my brow furrowing.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But it’s okay. You deserve this job, all on your own.”
“Stop being so nice,” I say. “You’re allowed to want it too.”
“I do want it,” he admits. “I just want other things more.”
He kisses me again, slow and purposeful. A kiss that feels like a promise. And then I take him inside and try to find every way I can to make
my own promises.
And I keep an existing one.
Every time I almost tell him I love him, I drag the words back into myself, hold them tight. One more night. One more night and then I can say it, the whole wonderful truth.
