Great Big Beautiful Life(99)

“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.