Great Big Beautiful Life(103)
They’d be mentioned in articles for months afterward, written about in books for years longer. But Laura—Laura would be at the center of everything.
She wasn’t there to receive the shipment. She was back at the center, on the other side of town, with David and three other women he considered his wives.
Federal agents swarmed them too. But David and the women barricaded themselves in a bathroom. It took seven hours to get them out.
There was nothing illicit, in that room or on the center’s grounds. Dr. David’s name wasn’t associated with the warehouse full of weapons and schematics, and in-depth plans for the assassination of several high-ranking government officials.
With Laura’s testimony, it wouldn’t matter. She could connect all the dots. The problem was, she was a wreck when they found her. Underweight, sleep deprived, strung out on a mix of stimulants and depressants.
“He kept Laura Ives and several other women in a highly suggestible state,” a doctor would testify after David’s lawyers tried to pin everything on Laura.
If Margaret thought Laura’s state at the diner was bad, it was nothing compared to Laura in the aftermath of the raid.
She jumped easily, barely slept, got sick when she tried to eat—David had had her on a diet of mostly liquids and fruit, juices and sugary sodas he called her “medicine.” They were supposed to cleanse her of something or another. She suffered from terrible nightmares and she didn’t trust doctors, though logically she now knew David Ryan Atwood wasn’t a real doctor.
Her mind was at war with itself. She didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. He’d distorted her view of reality so thoroughly that she didn’t trust her instincts.
For the first few weeks, she’d stayed back at the family home, rereading Lawrence’s old journals again, their familiarity a balm to her. Most nights, Margaret and Cosmo stayed in the next room over, but when they couldn’t, Bernie and Roy took their place.
Margaret wanted nothing but to hold her sister close and promise everything would be all right, but Laura had spent the last several years being told that her family was watching her, controlling her, and she still flinched when Margaret reached for her.
Margaret would pace the halls at night, listening to Laura whimpering through her bedroom door, until Cosmo woke up to find his wife missing and went to her. Sometimes they’d sit in the hall together until she drifted off in his lap.
The press was unending, right up until the trial and well beyond it. Laura’s already destroyed self-esteem only got worse.
She felt stupid, she felt worthless. She felt angry, she felt hopeless. She felt trapped.
It was Cosmo’s idea to bring Laura with them to Nashville, where the glare of the spotlight wouldn’t be quite so harsh. Margaret had never loved him more than in that moment.
“Are you sure?” she asked him as they lay in her old bedroom together late one night.
He smoothed her hair away from her face and tipped his head up so he could kiss hers where it lay on his chest. “Your heart’s broken without her, Peggy,” he said, “and mine can’t be whole until yours is.”
The three of them left two days later, Bernie, Roy, and Freddy seeing them off at the airport with pained hugs and sturdy handshakes.
Margaret knew her parents’ own hearts must be breaking to let Laura go again, but they did what they thought was best for her, and she’d never loved them more either.
When they got to the Nashville house, Margaret grabbed her bag and ran ahead to Laura’s room to set things up. The tent from their childhood playroom was only half strung up by the time Laura and Cosmo made it upstairs, but seeing it half draped over Margaret’s head, Laura let out a laugh that thawed something that had been frozen over in Margaret’s heart for years.
“So you can sleep somewhere a little…cozier,” she explained, because Laura had been sleeping in her own closet until then, the only place she felt safe in the House of Ives.
“Thank you.” Laura reached out to take Margaret’s hand, and she smiled. It was brief, and it was beautiful.
It took time. Months. But it started to feel as if they were making their way out of the woods. As if the sun were slowly rising after an interminable night.
Laura even began to see a doctor friend of Cosmo’s regularly. Very, very gradually, she began to trust him.
She wasn’t well, but she was better, and Margaret could be okay with that.
Cosmo toured, for older crowds and less money. Margaret stayed home with her sister. The media had largely stopped searching for weak points in their marriage, and instead devoted itself fully to questioning whether Cosmo had lost all of his bite and his talent when he signed a deal with the devil that was the Ives family—or if he’d just aged out of rock music.
The reviews for his new album were worse than biting—they were middling. Nothing about him scandalized the American public anymore. They were simply tired of him.
“I don’t understand how they could go from loving me to hating me when I haven’t changed one bit,” he said one night, and Margaret’s heart sank as she tried, from her own vast experience, to explain it.
“Because they never loved you,” she said. “And they don’t hate you now either. They don’t know you, Cosmo.”
It didn’t make sense to him. He’d always been so thoroughly a part of the world that he saw these people—the writers, the photographers, the anchors, the reviewers—as peers, acquaintances.