I doubt that very much, but I say dutifully, “Thanks. Send me the scripts. I’ll take a look.”
Yul Brynner senses my mood and jumps into my lap, his tail waving beneath my nose, tickling me. “Silly cat,” I say, laughing, but that’s why I have him. A dog will only build your ego, but cats have a sense of humor. At my feet, Maui barks. “Sorry, I didn’t mean you.”
On the beach below, the sun is breaking through. I impulsively text Phoebe. Headed to the beach with Maui if you want to meet me there.
See you in 15 minutes!
Another ding lets me know I have an important email. Edwina has already sent the material. Six scripts. Some of them will be terrible and one or two might be interesting. I’ll give them a look.
Later.
“C’mon, Maui. Let’s go for a walk.”
Chapter Seventeen
Phoebe
Suze and Maui are already on the beach when we arrive. Jasmine runs toward her like she hasn’t seen her in a year, arms out, palms high. Her body makes a joyful X against the landscape, and the artist part of my brain files away the contrasts—sea and sky and rock, flesh and bones and hair. I wish I could bottle her essence right now, bottle all the essences of the girls and women she will be through her life. I wish I could witness all of them, participate.
I’m sloshing with happiness today. At odd moments, I flash on the feeling of Ben’s naked body against mine, the gusto he brought to bed, to kissing, to pure, animal enjoyment. It freed something in me, something careful and withholding. I could be myself with him, utterly and completely, because over the months our friendship grew, I learned to trust him. I still do.
It’s the strangest feeling.
And today, I’m wide open. Open to the sunlight, to the almost painfully huge love I feel for this child in this moment, to the startling sensation of Suze, walking there in her long white sweater, her hair in a messy bun that leaves artful tendrils falling around her face. Again I notice that she looks a couple of decades older than she did the last time I saw her.
As she bends to admire the shell Jasmine is showing her, I see the slight stiffness of her hips, the fact of age lying on her, and I wonder why I got so very angry with her at my grandmother’s funeral.
The fight had been building for ages, probably decades, built block by block, a resentment here, a slight there, some mortar of jealousy (both directions), pebbles of misunderstandings. It killed me when she got to live with Beryl, when all I’d ever wanted was to come to Blue Cove and stay here with the woman I loved most in the world. I knew why Amma offered shelter to my best friend, and I also knew it was a saving grace for her, but that didn’t halt my jealousy.
Suze had been mad at me—ever so slightly, but definitely—ever since I dropped out of school to marry Derek. I was envious of her big life, and she envied my child, a fact I understood. Thinking of the baby she gave away gives me shame and sorrow in equal measures, but in those days, I envied her freedom and she envied my connections.
We loved each other, too, of course. It was a rare month that we didn’t have at least an email exchange, and every few months, there was a long phone call. A few times, we traveled together—I met her in Paris a couple of times, and I visited her in LA, and she came home to Blue Cove often, especially after she bought the Wright house. A house she bought when I was trying to save it from developers.
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.