Great Big Beautiful Life(111)

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.