The One In My Heart

I went back to the kitchen and wiped away my tears before I returned to the living room. “Don’t discount that victory,” I told her as I sat down.

“Oh, darling,” she said after a minute, “every day without snogging random strangers is a victory.”

I almost chuckled. She’d told me that when she was eighteen, in a fit of mania, she’d kissed three different boys at a pub one night, and had to be dragged home by her girlfriends.

Yet the mania, for all its evils, made Zelda feel great—confident, energetic, practically invincible. Depression, on the other hand, turned her into a husk filled with nothing but despair and self-loathing.

Depression scared me.

When I was in fifth grade, a classmate’s older brother committed suicide—he’d been suffering from a crushing depression and one day he couldn’t take it anymore. I had nightmares for weeks. I never wanted to believe Zelda would give up. But whenever her illness reawakened, the same old fear would sink its claws into my spine. And I’d once more turn into the little girl who was petrified that something terrible would happen to her wonderful new mother.

Zelda was staring at the laundry basket again. This time she did not pull anything out.

Tears came back into my eyes. I sped up and finished sorting everything. “All done. I’ll go put them up.”

“Darling,” she murmured as I reached the hallway.

I poked my head back into the living room. “Yes?”

She sat with her profile to me, the lines at the corners of her eyes deeply etched. “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time.’”

What Frodo had said when he found out that the One Ring had come to him.

I first heard Zelda speak those words not long after my classmate’s brother committed suicide. I’d gone to my room, closed the door, and sat on the floor for a long time, shaking. Then I flipped through The Fellowship of the Ring until I found the line, lugged the book downstairs, and read Gandalf’s response to her.

After that, it became something of a ritual between us.

I put aside the clothes I was carrying, went back to her, and took her hands in mine. “‘So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”


I RETURNED MOST OF ZELDA’S clothes to her closet, and put the rest in her chest of drawers.

The top of the chest of drawers was thick with framed photographs. Zelda and I in the first picture we ever took together, at Central Park Zoo, my arms around a resigned-looking small white goat. Zelda holding aloft her Grammy for songwriting, surrounded by her musician friends. Zelda and I at the New Zealand premiere of The Return of the King, both of us laughing uproariously. Zelda with her cousins, hiking the southwest coast of England. Zelda and Mrs. Asquith, her godmother, the two of them holding up floral teacups with wildly exaggerated expressions of primness and decorum.

I loved looking through this pictorial record of Zelda’s existence, of her living a full life despite all the obstacles that had been thrown her way. But today my attention was immediately drawn to a photo at the very back, the biggest and most elaborately framed of them all.

The one I’d told Bennett about: of me in a ball gown and a diamond tiara.

My father, Hoyt Canterbury, was born to old money, but that money ran out before he could do anything about it. My mother was the product of a quiet, unexceptional suburb, but she had a moment in the late disco era when she became an “it” girl, a fixture on the Manhattan social circuit, her style copied, her pictures splashed across glossy magazines.

The one who had the most family connections, however, was Zelda, whose bloodline was mingled with those of half a dozen aristocratic families. But the way she explained it, she’d never been more than a poor relation—not that some of the earls and viscounts she was related to weren’t just as impoverished.

Pater—from paterfamilias, Latin for “father of the family,” because he refused to be called anything as pedestrian as “Dad”—had been a highly respected art dealer, but had always looked down on himself for having a profession, for being what he considered a glorified shopkeeper. What he had truly wanted was the life of a proper gentleman of leisure, to serve on the board of directors of major museums and civic organizations, and rule fashionable society with a velvet-gloved iron fist.