The Starfish Sisters: A Novel(63)

Before that she’d often stayed with me, in her old bedroom. It was comforting, and safe, and nobody bothered her here because the town didn’t suffer paparazzi.

I was utterly furious when she bought the house. Our house. She swooped in and dropped more money than it was worth, paying off developers and pouring a ton of cash into the restoration. Which it needed, absolutely, but I’d already figured out a path for that—my plan had been to turn it into a museum/gallery, restoring the Wright-school details and then housing a collection I planned to build from local artists.

But why was that better than what happened? I can build a museum elsewhere if I want to, and it really wasn’t a great location, out of the way, up the hill. My grandmother pointed that out at the time, but I didn’t want to listen.

It felt like she’d usurped me. It bewildered her, and she offered to involve me in the restoration and then seeing after the house itself when it was restored. I swallowed my anger, where it joined a million other things, large and small, and lived there until that fight at my grandmother’s funeral.

It feels, suddenly, like a long time ago.

In this soft mood, washed by the clean ocean air, watching her with my beloved granddaughter, I can see the pair of us as children, not much older than Jasmine. Her hair sweeping the sand, her awful dresses. She swept into my lonely, friendless life like a princess in a movie, and no matter what I did, she loved me. Still loves me, although I’ve given her a lot of reasons to walk away.

On this beach where we met, where we spent endless hours talking and walking and lying side by side in the sand, dreaming about the future, I feel my love for her as the power it is. I’ve loved her all my life and I love her now. It’s oddly piercing, and I don’t know why.

“What have you found?” I ask, joining them.

“Shells,” Jasmine says, holding out broken bits. “And look how many sea stars there are!”

She points to a shallow tide pool around the base of the rocks. A half dozen purple and pink stars cling to the rocks, looking plump and cheerful. “That’s great.” I knew they were still suffering from a wasting disease that had attacked them from Baja to British Columbia in the 2010s. This is a good sign. Maybe the plague would move on.

As all plagues eventually do.

We peer into the tide pools for a while, and then Suze suggests we walk. Jasmine runs ahead, stopping like a puppy to check something out, then trotting along ahead of us.

“My agent called this morning,” Suze says, conversationally. “They’re going to replace me with Morgan Millstone on the show.”

“What? She doesn’t even look like you!”

“That’s what I said.”

“Are you furious?”

She takes a breath, lets it go. “Honestly, I should be, but I don’t care.” She looks at me. “Is that weird?”

“Do you think you might just need more time to heal?”

“Maybe, but they’re starting the new season and they want to get things moving. I’m not ready to go back.”

“You shouldn’t.” Water ripples over my bare toes, and it’s shockingly cold. “I worry that you’re still in danger.”

“I can hire people if it comes to that, but I just want to be here for a while.”

Something in her voice makes me look at her. “What’s on your mind?”

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been carrying around this giant bag of shit for most of my life. Dragging it behind me when I was tired, sitting on it when I was wiped out, asking porters to carry it when I was busy, but always keeping it.”

I laugh. “Good visual!”

“I want to let it go. And I don’t really know how.”

“You could walk away.”

She gives me a side-eye. “Yeah, gosh, why didn’t I think of that?”

“Touché. Sorry.”

Her sweater ripples in the wind. “I think I have to be here to work it all out. My dad, that summer.” A pause. “The baby.”

The baby she gave up for adoption. My heart squeezes with painful memory. I nod slowly. “Do you want to talk it out?”

“Not right now.”

“Is your dad even still alive?”

“I don’t know. Even though they didn’t charge him with child abuse—”

“Assholes.”

“The good thing is, I don’t think he’d get away with it now.” She shrugs. “Different times.”

“Sorry, I interrupted. You don’t know where he is?”

“Nope. And do not care. People hated him even if he didn’t get charged. And thanks to Joel there was no church left.”

I press my lips together, thinking of his hectic appearance when he brought a letter for me to give Suze. Which I truly intended to do.

And never did.

It was the letter, his distraught appearance at my grandmother’s door, that confirmed what I’d suspected all along. He was in love with her. My guilt is as heavy as an anchor, and I shut the door on it quickly. It can’t help right now.

“He was one cruel motherfucker,” I say with feeling.

Suze laughs, and I feel justified in keeping my secrets for another day. “Those words out of your mouth! Oh my God.”

I glance at her, the wind catching her hair and tossing it in her eyes. The face that is as familiar to me as my own, and in that moment, I’m so glad she’s back. When she’s with me, I am freer to be myself.