Great Big Beautiful Life(36)

12




“The mystery illness,” I say. “I remember reading about that. Two years where Nina Gill couldn’t work. Right as talkies started coming out.”

“And she was in the news more than ever,” Margaret agrees. “I can guess what your Dove Franklin had to say about all of that in his so-called book.”

“Since when am I responsible for him?” I tease. “I’m not even the one who bought that book! Blame my parents. But yes, he had his theories about her time away.”

She flashes me a smile over the ceaseless movement of her hands among the glass shards. “Let me guess: She couldn’t hack it in the changing landscape of Hollywood. No one wanted her in the talkies and her star began to fall even faster than it had risen, leading to a two-year mental breakdown, the likes of which she never fully recovered from.”

I nod. “An actress at the height of her fame, taking a two-year hiatus and then spending the majority of that in and out of hospitals around the world—a mental breakdown seemed less far fetched to me than some of his other theories.”

Her hands still on her tools, and something passes across her face. “There are all kinds of reasons for a woman to want to disappear. Always have been.”

“Such as?” I say gently.

Margaret peels her gloves off her small but calloused hands. “Let’s walk back to the house. Jodi will certainly bring lunch here, but she won’t be happy about it. She doesn’t like waiting on me.”

“Is she paid to?” I ask, since, still, no information about their relationship has been provided to me.

Margaret’s head cocks prettily to one side. “No, I wouldn’t say that,” she settles on, as enigmatic of an answer as I would’ve expected from her.

I pack up my things, and we leave the workshop, the doors still ajar and unlocked, the ceiling fans still twirling.

We start down the path, in the opposite direction from which Jodi and I arrived, curving around the other side of the garden beds back toward the house. When I point this out, Margaret nods. “It’s all the same path. You just stay on it, and you’ll get where you’re going, eventually.”

“Like the labyrinth,” I say, clutching my recorder, still running, in one hand and my phone in the other.

“More or less,” she says. “I’ve thought about turning the whole thing into a mosaic, connecting it to the labyrinth. Probably don’t have that many years left of my life though. That’s a lot of work.”

“So it was on purpose?” I say. “The unicursal path.”

“I like taking away that element of decision, whenever I can.”

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“Because it gives me peace,” she says. “Remembering my decisions don’t make much of a difference in the end.”

I balk, even miss a step. “You really think that?”

Another sly, nearly coquettish smile, and at eighty-seven years old, she’s still pulling it off. “Think. Hope. Somewhere in between the two.”

The path curls down to walk along the marsh, and I see a fan boat docked among the reeds. “You use that much?” I ask.

“Not much,” she says. “But more often than I use the car.”

“That hardly tells me anything,” I point out.

“Now you’re catching on,” she teases.

But honestly, I’m not. When I let her talk, she’ll talk. But when I want a straight answer, she’s more evasive.

Which once again begs the question: What am I doing here?

“I’m curious about something,” I say.

“I’d describe you as curious about everything,” Margaret parries.

“Hazard of the trade,” I say, then admit, “or more realistically, I was just born this way.”

“Sounds like you’re on a unicursal path of your own,” she reasons.

She doesn’t invite me to ask my question, but I do anyway: “Why now?”

“What do you mean?” she says innocently. I give her a look, and she laughs. “Every once in a while, you’ve got some bite, Alice Scott. I like that.”

“Thank you. And I like when you answer the questions I ask.”

Another laugh. “I know I look great, but I’m old. If not now, when?”

“Right,” I agree. “But ‘never’ was an option. Something had to have convinced you to talk to me. And as great as I am, I don’t buy that it was my rambling voicemail.”

We pause at the back doors to Margaret’s house. “I made a promise to someone,” she says. “And then they died before I could tell them I took it back.”

“You’re not going to tell me who, are you?” I ask.

She smiles and opens the door. “Not today.”

As we step inside, from somewhere deeper in the house, Jodi grunts, “You’re back.”

“Nothing gets past you, does it?” Margaret leads me through a door into a bright, powder-blue kitchen, where Jodi’s slicing sandwiches into tiny triangles.

“Tuna salad?” Margaret asks, leaning over Jodi’s shoulder to look at the cutting board.

“Cucumber,” Jodi says, “and now that you’re back, you can take over.”