I walked out of the closet and to the basins. There were several boxes on the floor with labels on them that said “vanity.” I bent to them, ripped them open and pulled things out. Putting some on the floor, some on the countertop. I did this until, in box two, I found it.
My perfume.
“Every woman should have a signature scent,” my mother had told me.
Mine was Chanel No 5. I loved it. It was everything a woman should be.
But I had this niggling feeling it wasn’t all that was me.
I had this feeling because sometimes I felt more flowery.
And sometimes I felt more musky.
Then there were times I felt more summery.
I’d been taught that was wrong. You were what you were, only what you were, and you stuck with that.
As for me, I was the daughter of J.P. and Felicia Hathaway, which meant I was a Hathaway. Upper class. Moneyed. Well-educated. Appropriately dressed. Conservative. Mannered. Superior. Aloof. Privileged. Elite.
That was what I was and I was given no choice to be anything else.
So that was what I became.
And thus I buried the fact that sometimes I wanted just to go with the Amelia of the Day, whoever she might be, and grab whatever scent that defined her that day.
Then the next, I could be something different.
Whatever I wanted to be.
Not what she wanted me to be. Not what they demanded I be.
I glanced in the mirror but immediately looked away and walked out, through the bedroom, down the hall, the steps. I turned right into the large, open kitchen that looked down to the sunken living room, across to the cozy landing, all with views to the frothy sea. Calmly, I tore open boxes until I found them.
My dishes. Stoneware that was very pretty but cost forty dollars a plate.
My mother had picked it. She did it in a way that seemed she was encouraging me to pick it. But in reality, she picked it.
Suddenly, I had the nearly overwhelming urge to scoot the entire box out to the deck and, piece by piece, throw it into the sea.
I didn’t.
That would be a waste and those dishes could be put to good use.
I was starting anew. I didn’t need to do it being wasteful.
I was going to do something else with those plates.
I was going to do something else with all my stuff.
I was going to make it worth something. Something real.
Because that was what I was going to be. I was going to stop being what I was, the Felicia Hathaway mini-me all grown up.
I was going to be me.
I had absolutely no idea what that me would turn out to be.
I just knew whoever she was, for the first time in her life, she’d be real.
Chapter One
They’d See
By that weekend, the weekend the kids would normally fly out to California to spend a day and a half with me, they were instead coming to their new home.
I’d been in Magdalene for three days.
In that time, thankfully, I had not seen Mickey.
In that time, I’d also been through every box, mostly repacking things and lugging them to walls, stacking them up.
I had a plan.
But first, I had to start reparation work with my children.
I could say that due to my activities since Conrad and I separated—when joint custody turned to every other weekend, which then turned to the judge awarding Conrad custody of the children as he moved across the country, allowing me one weekend a month—along the way the visitations with my kids had deteriorated.
In the beginning I had cause. It was just. My neurosurgeon husband had cheated on me with a nurse at his hospital, a woman fifteen years younger than me. He then left our family in order to divorce me so they could be married.
Conrad and I signed our divorce papers on a Wednesday.
Conrad and Martine had a massive beach wedding that next Saturday, where my son was his father’s best man and my daughter was a junior bridesmaid.
Then, as the months passed into years, the extremity of my antics increasing, my cause was no longer just.
No, and not only because the extremity of my antics was extreme, but because I’d done what no mother should do.
I’d dragged my children right along with me.
I didn’t involve them, oh no. Never that.
But I didn’t hide it from them.
Therefore, that first Friday in Magdalene with the kids imminently arriving, I was a nervous wreck.
Auden, my sixteen-year-old son, drove. A month after his sixteenth birthday, his father and stepmother bought him a car. It was used. It was okay, not great. Through stilted reports from my boy, I learned what it was and knew that it ran (which was all he needed) and was relatively trendy (which was all he wanted).
I would have bought him his heart’s desire, even if that were a Porsche or a Mercedes.
Conrad would have attempted to educate me about the fact that if we gave everything to our children, they would become spoiled and wouldn’t know how to work for things themselves.
Conrad would have been right.
I still would have bought Auden the car he wanted, brand new with all the bells and whistles. And if Conrad and I had still been married, I’d have done it without thought, without discussion, giving it to Auden so Conrad would have had two choices: be the bad guy and take it away or give in and let him have it.
Now that I didn’t have that say in my son’s life, at three thirty on that Friday, that car drove up and parked in my drive.
A red Honda Civic.
I stood in my open front door and watched my children alight from it.
They didn’t look at the house. They didn’t look at me.
Auden and Olympia Moss just grabbed small bags from the trunk of the car and trudged up to the house like they were walking into a classroom at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning to take their SATs.
I watched them approach me.
Auden looked like his dad, tall with a straight nose, light brown eyes and rich brown hair that had a subtle reddish cast to it. My son was bulkier than his father, maybe an inch or two shorter, but he was still growing.
As if our lives were golden and the fates shined their smiles on us and gave us the perfect family, Auden got his looks from his father, but Olympia was just like me, petite but slightly curvy (or in Pippa’s case, her curves were filling out). Brunette hair that was several shades darker than her brother’s and father’s, with no reddish cast, but it had a natural shine that said someone up there liked my baby girl and me. She also had my hazel eyes that popped due to the darkness of our hair.
My boy was already handsome, like Conrad.
My girl was far, far prettier than me.
When they got close, my throat feeling clogged, I forced out, “Hey, honeys.”
Auden looked up. My beautiful boy who got all I loved from his dad (and then some), his eyes on me emotionless, my throat completely closed.
My fourteen-year-old daughter, Pippa, flinched at the sound of my voice.
That slashed through me.
I took that cut and it sliced deep as I moved out of their way and they walked by me, Auden averting his eyes, Pippa never even looking at me.
I followed them in and closed the door, seeing they’d stopped and were taking in the view.