Using the laptop, she made a list of names she had in her head.
Simone Knox, her mother, her sister. Reed Quartermaine. Chaz Bergman. Michael, Lisa, and Brady Foster. Mi-Hi Jung.
She’d follow up with all of them, even if it had to be on her own time.
She noted down the names of the shooters. She intended to dig out everything she could on them, on their families, their teachers, their friends, employers, if any. She wanted to know them.
She typed out the numbers—current—of dead, of wounded. Added names when she had them. She’d get the rest.
She’d been doing her job, she thought as she watched, as she ate, as she worked. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t personal.
*
CiCi Lennon lived life by her own rules. Two of the top rules—Try Not to Hurt Anybody, and Have the Balls to Say What You Think—often clashed, but the results blended with her Be An Asshole When Necessary rule, so it worked for her.
She’d been raised by sober Methodist, traditional Republican parents in Rockpoint, an upper-class suburban haven of Portland, Maine. Her father, a financial executive, and her mother, a housewife (self-proclaimed and proudly), had belonged to the country club, attended church every Sunday, and hosted dinner parties. Her father had bought a new Cadillac every three years, played golf on Saturday mornings and tennis (doubles with his wife) on Sunday afternoons, and collected stamps.
Her mother had had her hair done on Mondays, played bridge on Wednesdays, and belonged to the garden club. Deborah (never Deb or Debbie) Lennon had kept her pin money inside a white glove in her top dresser drawer, had never in her life written a check or otherwise paid a bill, and greeted her husband with freshened makeup after his day of work. She had mixed his evening drink—a dry gin martini, one olive, except during the summer season, when he switched to gin and tonic with a twist of lime—so he could unwind until dinner.
The Lennons had employed a daily housekeeper, a weekly groundskeeper, and—in the season—a pool boy. They had owned a vacation home in Kennebunkport and were considered, by themselves and others, pillars of the community.
Naturally, CiCi rebelled against everything they were and stood for.
What was a child of the sixties to do but appall her conservative parents with her passionate embrace of the counterculture? She denounced the patriarchal structure of the church—and their lifestyle—railed against the government, actively protested the war in Vietnam, and literally burned her bra.
At seventeen, CiCi packed a bag and hitchhiked to Washington to march. From there, along with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, she traveled. She spent springtime in New Orleans sharing a ramshackle house with a group of artists and musicians. She painted for tourists—she’d been born with the talent.
She rode to Woodstock in a van she helped paint into psychedelic wonder. Sometime during the rain-soaked bliss of that weekend in August, she conceived a child.
When she realized she was pregnant, she cut out the drugs and alcohol, adjusted her vegetarian diet (as she would do countless times for countless reasons over the decades), and joined a commune in California.
She painted, learned to weave, planted and harvested vegetables, tried and failed at a lesbian relationship—but she tried.
She gave birth to her daughter on a cot in a dilapidated farmhouse on a pretty spring afternoon as Janis Joplin rocked it out on the record player and tulips swayed in the breeze outside the open window.
When Tulip Joplin Lennon was six months old, CiCi, missing the green of the East Coast, caught a ride with a group of musicians. Along the way she hooked up briefly with another musician/songwriter who, stoned, offered her three thousand to paint him.
She did, with him wearing only his Fender Stratocaster and a pair of shitkicker boots.
CiCi moved on, the subject of her painting got a record deal and used her painting for the album cover. As luck would have it, he had a major Top 40 hit with the single, “Farewell, CiCi,” and the album went gold.
Two years later, while CiCi and Tulip lived in a group house in Nantucket, the songwriter OD’d. The painting went on the auction block, sold for three million dollars.
And CiCi’s career as an artist truly launched.
Seven years after she’d hitchhiked to D.C., CiCi’s father contracted pancreatic cancer. Though she’d sent postcards and mailed photos of their granddaughter, called them two or three times a year, communications had remained scattered and tense.
But her mother breaking down over the phone had CiCi following another of her rules: Help When You Can.
She packed up her daughter, her art supplies, and her bike in a thirdhand beater of a station wagon and went home.
She learned a few things. She learned her parents loved each other, deeply. And that deep love didn’t mean her mother could handle the dirty work. She learned the house where she grew up would never be her home again, but she could live there as long as she served a purpose.
She learned her father wanted to die at home and because she loved him—surprise—she would damn well make sure he got his wish. While she drew the line at her mother’s strong suggestion of private school, she enrolled Tulip in the local public elementary. While she drove her father to chemo, to his doctor’s appointments, cleaned up puke, her mother happily tended to Tulip.
CiCi hired a male nurse whose compassion, kindness, and love of rock made them lifelong friends.
For twenty-one months she helped nurse her dying father and ran the household accounts, while her mother clung to denial and spoiled Tulip.
Her father died at home with the wife who loved him curled beside him in their bed, and his daughter holding his hand.
Over the next few months she accepted that her mother would never become independent, would never learn how to balance a checkbook or fix her own leaky faucet.
And accepted she would go raving mad if she stayed in suburbia in a not-so-mini mansion with a woman who could barely figure out how to change a light bulb.
As her father had left her mother more than financially secure, CiCi hired a business manager, an on-call handyman, and an eager young housekeeper, as the other had retired, who would also stand as a companion.
When she learned, during those twenty-one months, her father had changed his will and left her a million dollars—after taxes—her first reaction was rage. She didn’t need or want his conservative right-wing establishment money. She could—and was—supporting herself and her daughter through her art.
The rage faded when she took Tulip for a ferry ride to Tranquility Island and saw the house. She loved the ramble of it, the wide terraces—on the first and second levels. The views of the water, its narrow little strip of beach, that curve of rocky coastline.
She could paint forever.
The FOR SALE sign was just that to CiCi. A sign.
Only a forty-minute ferry ride from Portland—far enough (thank God!) from her mother, but close enough to assuage any guilt. A village with a cheerful artists community an easy bike ride away.
She bought it—after a hard-eyed negotiation—for cash, and began the next chapter of her life.
Now she was back in upper-class suburbia—briefly, she hoped—in the home of a daughter who’d always been more like her grandmother than the mother who’d tried to give her a sense of adventure, independence, and freedom.
Because Help When You Can was still a rule. And she loved her grandchildren beyond measure.
She made breakfast for her daughter and Ward in their sleekly modern kitchen. She’d unplugged the phones, closed the curtains and drapes as reporters gathered outside.
She’d listened to the news on the guest-room TV, and heard the replay of Simone’s nine-one-one call. It had chilled her to the bone. Someone had leaked not only the call but Simone’s name.
She sat with Ward and Tulip in the breakfast nook of the kitchen, made her pitch.
“Let me take Simone to the island, at least until school starts.”