Chapter 29 Undoing This Is Not an Option
Undoing This Is Not an Option
It’s not a lie when Frankie calls in sick. It feels as though a ruthless hand is pressing on her stomach and her heart can’t settle on a pace. She can’t eat. She can’t think. There’s no getting around it: She was a part of what killed June.
“I felt queasy yesterday,” Betty says when Frankie calls to let them know she’s staying home. A laugh. “Not that that’s stopping me from making Nico bring me back a French dip from lunch today. He’s gonna be furious if it gets all over his car, but c’est la vie.”
Back in bed, restless with anxiety and tired from lack of sleep, Frankie pulls the covers on before kicking them off again right as Susan pops her head in.
She eyes the boxes along the wall. In days, Frankie is supposed to be gone, but the new girl, they told her, is no longer coming.
The earthquake was enough to wreck her Hollywood dreams.
“Do you need soup?” Susan asks, pulling on her coat.
The house. This apartment. Her car. Everything belongs to the studio.
“I’m good,” Frankie manages, and Susan tells her about the muffins she hid in the oven so Virginia wouldn’t find them.
Jack. Frankie wants to go to him, to ask him what to do.
She wants to curl against him, his hand tracing circles on her back.
Somehow, she needs to tell him he had nothing to do with June’s death without getting into details that would surely send him over the edge.
She needs to find a way to get him out of this, not further involve him, and she needs to do right by him and by June and by herself, though she no longer knows what any of that entails.
Everything she’s done feels like a mistake.
After ten minutes of lying in the dark, Frankie gets up and grabs her car keys.
Within the hour, she’s pulling into Hollywood Memorial Park and parking beside a boy who’s got a makeshift flower stand.
Mason jars of various sizes are all filled with blooms, clusters that look as though they were snapped from someone’s yard only moments prior.
She hands the kid a nickel for a jam jar of yellow daffodils, and sets out toward June’s mausoleum.
The grass is wet with dew, and the pond holds the slate sky’s reflection, a white cloud drifting toward the edge of the water.
On the ground, there are traces of rose petals, as if several bouquets have recently been removed.
A simple twig wreath with white and yellow daisies rests against the mausoleum door.
Frankie smiles. That’s the one June would love.
June’s name, carved in stone. A name. After everything, that’s all that’s left, mere letters.
And yet Fiona doesn’t have even that. In the distance, dark mountain peaks bleed into the sky like ink.
She wishes for a sign from June, and waits.
Somewhere a dog barks, and Frankie feels her eyes stinging with tears.
She looks back at June’s name. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”
A shadow moves against the white stone. Frankie turns.
Ida. Blouse and trousers ironed, hat on at the perfect angle.
She takes in the clothes Frankie’s wearing—the shirt and pants she fell asleep in last night—and her unbrushed hair.
“No one taught you to dress for a cemetery? You should show respect.” Ida doesn’t smile, doesn’t hug Frankie, just turns around. “Come on, then. Let’s walk.”
They leave June as if preferring not to talk with her there. The truth of her death weighs on Frankie, and suddenly she wants to stop and hide and let Ida keep going. Because she needs to tell Ida what actually happened, but what will that do? Mystery solved; regrets unleashed.
They cut across the grass toward the ribbon of road, the hems of their pants dampening. Still, Ida says nothing. Just squints into the morning sun.
“You visit her often?” Frankie finally asks, for something to say.
“Every day. You’re not the only one who’s sorry.” A pause. “They won’t solve this, will they?”
Wordlessly, Frankie shakes her head.
Ida stops walking and faces her. “I don’t want to know.”
“You don’t?”
It appears as if Ida’s weighing her words, searching for ones that will land right. Eventually, she keeps walking, slow and defeated. “The truth won’t bring her back.”
Frankie folds her arms around herself, suddenly cold.
“I never hated her, you know,” Ida says.
“Of course I know that.”
“It was hard not to resent her, though. Our parents did everything for her. Everything. She was the hope. The one with the pretty eyes.”
Frankie wants to tell Ida no, that her eyes are pretty too—but it’s true, they don’t compare to June’s. Though she’s looking straight ahead, Ida smiles as if reading her thoughts. Then she loses her smile.
“There was somebody I loved, you know. His wife died after their son was born. I didn’t think I ever wanted children, but this kid was .
. .” She stops talking and looks up again at the sun as if needing the toughening burn.
“I won’t get into what happened, but it was the one time I thought I could have something good for myself.
I asked for June’s help, and she fell asleep on the job.
Actually fell asleep.” Casually, almost too casually, she turns her head to observe Frankie, perhaps checking whether this information is familiar.
The police report from Nico’s safe. “The boy who drowned.”
Ida nods. “It was my fault. Ultimately. I shouldn’t have asked her to watch him.
They didn’t wrap till late the night before, or early that morning, I don’t remember.
But I shouldn’t have asked.” She starts walking again, aimlessly, watching the grass.
“When we got home that day, she was asleep. And then we found him. Nico took care of things, as Nico does. And my name went onto the police report, to keep her out of it.” She stops at a grave where a vase with dried flowers lies on its side.
Righting it, she nestles it against the headstone.
“Understandably, the man, the father, never spoke to me again. Grief, of course, but I chose her over the truth.”
In a burning building, you save who you can; you don’t stop to figure out who set the fire. Yes, the truth is important, but if you have someone you can save, you save them. “Putting her on the report wouldn’t have brought him back.”
“That’s what I told myself. I’ll never be sorry I protected her. But she paid; she built a prison in her mind.”
Frankie stops walking. When Ida notices, she stops as well, turning hesitantly, braced.
“You didn’t need to explain any of this,” Frankie says. “I know you love her.”
Now Ida smiles. “I’m not explaining it so you know I loved her. I’m saying that I lost a lot, for her sake and for her reputation. I think I’ve earned what’s coming to me. And I don’t want that to change because of the public’s change of heart, so to speak.”
Frankie tries to digest this. That Ida might suspect the truth but wants it kept from the public. At last, all she says is “I wish we’d done things differently.”
To that, Ida laughs. “The story of our lives would always be better with a rewrite.”
Along the road, a car has pulled up. A man and a woman, each carefully holding several mason jars of flowers. They must’ve bought the kid out.
“I should’ve let her elope,” Ida says. “That’s what I should’ve done.”
Trying not to betray surprise, Frankie nods and then says, leadingly, “Let her elope with . . .”
But Ida doesn’t seem to hear. Her gaze has drifted to the couple, to the woman who is now lowering herself to lie on the grass alongside a small headstone.
Nearby, the man stands, watching as a sparrow lands on the grave marker closest to them.
His face widens in a smile, before he quickly looks down at his feet.
Everybody, Frankie thinks, can’t help but search for the signs they need.
Continuing, Ida finally says, “Telling Nico that was her plan will always be my cross to bear. I knew she was unhappy with acting lately. I just thought we could fix that. I thought there’d be time. I guess that’s what we all think.”
The fixes. Ida thought her sister was about to make a mistake and tried to fix it.
Nico heard June was unwed and with child and tried to fix it.
Jack wanted out of a marriage and lied about his past and let the studio fix it.
So many fixes for what Frankie is now seeing is simply life.
Messy and untamed and inconvenient. But just because something entails struggle and needs work doesn’t mean it’s broken.
Betty and her French dip sandwich. Frankie knows exactly where Nico’s having lunch, and drives straight to Cole’s.
Outside the Pacific Electric building, she leans down to look through one of the low windows into the restaurant on the bottom floor.
The lunch rush is over. The booths empty. But then there’s Nico in a corner.
When she slides across from him, he looks up, surprised, and smiles before seeing the state of her appearance.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“If you say so.” He opens his wallet. “Betty needed the French dip hot, and I ordered too late. So you’re in luck. Looks like I’ve got time for whatever this is.”
“She wanted to elope. And you stopped them.”
Though only one couple remains at the bar, he still glances around, cautious. “Who’d you talk to? Ida, I’m assuming. No one else knew. She was about to throw away her whole life, everything she’d worked for.”
“To be with the person she wanted to be with. The father? You told me it was a one-night stand. You told me the man didn’t care an iota.”
Nico unfolds a five-dollar bill and sets it on the table near his glass of water.
“Because he didn’t. And because I hate all of this.
She’s gone, and I hate saying things bad about her.
So I told you it was a one-night thing because I didn’t want to get into it.
And all you need to know is that the guy didn’t want anything to do with her, or the kid, until she convinced him or whatever happened that took him from have a nice life to I’ll meet you at the courthouse.
So, of course, I put an end to it. Wouldn’t you?
You trust that about-face? Because I don’t.
A split-second decision, an impulse, and her career would’ve been over.
America’s sweetheart pregnant by someone who wasn’t her long-term boyfriend? ”
“But if she wanted—”
“What she wanted changed from minute to minute. But if she eloped with a guy who changed his mind about her the next day, then she blew up her life for what? A whim that it would be nice to play house with the—” He stops talking as the waiter approaches.
Frankie lifts her hand. “Apple pie with vanilla sauce, please. Add it to his check.”
Nico waits for the man to disappear into the kitchen.
When he leans forward, his voice is a whisper, and the gold of his wristwatch flashes in the low light.
“Undoing this is not an option. The pills aren’t even a part of the report.
I said, Value her privacy when you do this, and they did, so there’s no Pandora’s box of secrets, nothing that gets us or her in trouble.
Because, believe me, the powers that be will take us down with them if they have to.
Don’t think for a second they won’t hurl us out the window just so they have a softer landing.
And June? She’s gonna be Hollywood lore.
Forever loved. You want to take that from her?
Jack’s safe. They will never be able to prove anything.
Not if I’m watching out for him. So why destroy her? ”
“Safe? Until this is solved, he can’t do what he loves. Does it matter if he’s safe?”
“You’re not thinking logically. An engagement announcement followed by a breakup announcement a week later? The marriage was good for them.”
She studies him. “The marriage? You said they could’ve gotten out of the engagement, that they just needed to get through the premiere.”
He’s nodding. “Right. Honestly, a couple weeks more, and they could’ve done what they wanted.”
Never lead with the word honestly. I’ll always know you’re lying.
“You were going to make them get married. You weren’t letting them out of it. She knew that, didn’t she?”
When he says nothing, Frankie understands. June knew.
He takes a sip of his water, then sits back.
“Hollywood is the land of dreams, and people need the dream. They need the idea of happiness and success, and to think they can rise up from the ashes into something great. You tell them June hated her life and couldn’t get through a day without pills, and who does that help?
Not the people who need to believe it’s possible.
Because if June didn’t like her life, what does that say about everyone else? ”
In the kitchen, plates crash and someone curses. Frankie knows she should just agree so she can decide later what to do.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Nico asks.
This could be over if she just looks the other way. She could go back to her job, her life. “You know something, Nico? It does makes sense.”
“Good.” He nods. “Good. Glad you understand.”
“Really, I do,” she says, once again thankful no one can tell when she’s lying.