Chapter 33 The Big Picture
The Big Picture
Dusk is falling, the world lilac-tinged and furtive.
Dusk is the time things disappear, her mother used to say when cautioning her to be careful crossing streets in the evening.
Frankie thinks of Fiona, can practically hear her urging her to act, to do something.
Her mother was no stranger to mistakes, but she lived life fully. Fear never factored into her decisions.
Jack keeps a spare key under a pot near the back fence, but on her way to Venice, Frankie realizes he might have removed it.
Maybe he didn’t want to risk her dropping in.
Then she thinks of the quake, of the damage the house might have endured since it’s closer to Long Beach.
She didn’t think any of this through, but she tightens her grip on the steering wheel all the same, determined to keep going.
Venice High School has been destroyed, and the ruins look almost Greek or Roman, with only columns and statues left standing.
Already, there is a tent city for classrooms, and Frankie pauses to let two teachers cross the street, textbooks in their hands.
Elsewhere, the damage is sporadic: a row of hotels with signs that hang askew and a bank of windows boarded up, while a block over, a stretch of houses looks untouched.
When she reaches Menotti’s, the market, she thinks about a night Jack wore a hat and glasses, and together they went through Cesar Menotti’s trapdoor by the crates of apples and down into a secret speakeasy—not to drink but to be a part of pulse-spiking fun.
No one recognized him, or maybe no one cared, and he and Frankie sat in a corner together with a script on the table should they need to pretend the visit was work-related.
The one time they were out, just the two of them.
He’d asked the waiter about his accent and ended up getting the man’s life story, including the fact that his mother just died and he was working to afford the trip back to Sorrento.
When they left, Jack slid a tip under the menu that was more than enough for the journey home.
Oil rigs are off to the right, an ominous sight.
Then, through the window, there’s the scent of still water and algae and sea, a murky green comfort.
At the end of the street is the Abbott Kinney Pier, which Jack has told her is crucial in moving liquor from three miles out—just past the territorial waters of the United Sates—and into Venice.
There is a small alley behind the cottage, and a narrow garage. Inside it, her car’s headlights catch on spiderwebs, shining intricacies. So, she’s not the only one who hasn’t been here, she sees. Maybe it was too much for him as well, this physical reminder of an easier time.
The backyard is no bigger than a postage stamp, but neat and tidy.
She tips back the third clay pot by the fence and holds her breath.
The key is there. A relief. The windows are dark, and when she jiggles the knob and opens the back door, there’s the scent of old wood and pipe tobacco.
She flips on the light, surveying the kitchen.
There are chipped mixing bowls in the corner, ones they used to mix pancake batter in the middle of the night.
Pot holders, still hanging from a hook on the wall, stained red from a day when Frankie made cherry pie and the filling boiled over.
And on the counter are dog-eared cookbooks, just waiting for hungry hands.
Holding them in place is an orange enamel pitcher that’s weighted down with sand.
And then she sees the trash can and the glimmer of broken glass. Someone has been here. Her heart races as she thinks of Nico, one of the few who knows about this house. Could he be here? Waiting?
“Frankie.”
She startles. There, looking as though he’s just woken up, is Jack. In one second, without thought or worry, she’s in his arms, her cheek against the cotton of his shirt. “You’re all right,” he says.
“I didn’t see your car.”
“I didn’t tell you? A tree branch got it. I’ve been either borrowing O’Shea’s or he’s driving me in his. But he said you were coming here and you needed me, so I had him drop me off.”
She feels his fingers trace a circle on her back, and closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Well, really, you should be sorry you didn’t ask me to use those details in the movie, because you’re not entitled to my life, but I’m sorry I didn’t read the script before getting mad.”
She feels a laugh build in his chest. “I am sorry,” he says. “I told you I’d have them reshoot if you want. I mean it.”
“No. I might like it the way it is.”
He pulls back to look her in the eye. “You too, you know. You’re not entitled to my life. I know it’s your job to fix things, but if it’s my mess and I want to fix it, you have to let me. I can’t be with someone who doesn’t trust me with my own life.”
“Agreed.”
He raises a brow, surprised. “Good.”
“Though it’s not really my job either. Not anymore.”
A pause as he takes this in. He pulls out a chair for her, from the kitchen table, and then takes a seat.
When Jack hears that without a doubt he did not cause June’s death, his relief is enormous but temporary, because Frankie continues and tells him the rest. The house grows quiet, the kitchen light throwing shadows.
Any solace he must have felt is gone, because he gets up, pacing and frustrated, until she tells him her plan.
Close to nine p.m., there’s a knock on the front door. Jack peers behind the curtain and then signals to Frankie that it’s okay. Though Frankie wasn’t sure that Magda would come, she had a hunch that the promise of learning about that night would be too great a lure.
Jack opens the door, motioning to the living room as Magda steps inside, her eyes wide at the sight of him. Frankie, sitting in an old armchair with a plate of spaghetti, stands to greet her.
“Spaghetti?” Frankie asks as she sets the plate on the coffee table.
Magda just shakes her head, surveying the room. “Whose house is this?”
Jack raises his hand, and Magda turns, taking in the pile of scripts, a fishing pole leaned in the corner of the room, the brown tweed coat and hat that he uses when he tries to leave the house with a slight disguise, and a NuGrape soda bottle on the coffee table.
“Of course,” she repeats a few times as if everyone has a secret house that is them, a place like an essence that’s left behind after everything unnecessary is boiled away.
Now she must register that Frankie’s barefoot and comfortable. She looks to Jack, also barefoot and comfortable. “Well, you two are full of secrets.”
Frankie smiles. “You have no idea.”
Jack’s already looking for wine. “I’m going to say you might need a beverage for this. I’m sticking to soda from here on out, but I’ve got a bottle hidden somewhere.”
So as Magda takes sips that soon increase in speed, Frankie tells her the version that she and Jack agreed upon, which involves the truth about the studio and its pressures, its vise grip on those under contract, as well as June and her problems, the doctor who gave her “medicine” that helped her meet deadlines and obligations but hurt her health, the secret baby she lost, the one she couldn’t have with the man she loved, the truth about her and Tank, and of course the truth about Frankie and Jack.
“Good Lord,” Magda says.
And then Frankie tells her about the call June made to Nico before she swallowed a bottle of pills.
In the pause, Frankie waits for Magda to make the connection.
“But she was shot,” Magda says, refilling her glass. And then her hand shakes, and she spills. She sets the bottle down.
Frankie nods. “Right.”
“He shot her.”
“Only when she was already dead.” That, Frankie will stick to.
Medically, she’s murky on what really happened, and fairly convinced that at this point no one could ever learn the truth, but the bottom line is Magda knowing what Nico did could only put her in danger.
“He did it to save her reputation. He knew people would still love her if she was a victim.”
“I need air.”
“There are chairs out back,” Jack says.
Outside, Frankie takes a seat in one of the wicker rockers, and Magda sits heavily beside her, head lowered.
The moon is partially shaded but so clear that the curvature is obvious in a way it’s normally not.
With the dimension, it feels real, and for the first time, Frankie grasps just the edge of life’s enormity, that she is one little person, on one little planet.
And whereas, any other day, that might make her feel small and insignificant, now it is a comfort, because it means she belongs to something bigger, something she could never fully see.
But just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.
She thinks of her mother. Of all the signs she’s asked for, all the times she’s craved to hear her mother’s voice or feel her presence, anything to prove that something so monumental as a life hasn’t completely disappeared.
Could the signs have been there the whole time, unseen?
She thinks of the man at the gas station.
The colors in the sky. The woman who let her take her place in line.
The list could go on, she realizes. So many moments like the grasp of a hand that helped her up.
And maybe it’s all just coincidence and luck, existence a tangled and beautiful confusion, but she wants to believe that it’s true: Her mother has been here the whole time.
This, she thinks, looking up, is what they are all a part of. A stunningly vast and endless fabric, limitless and constant and full of possibilities. A big picture that is composed of all that is small, and all those who worry they won’t matter.
Magda still has her head lowered, trying to take deep breaths. “Keep going.”
Frankie looks away from the moon. “I thought I was helping. Spelling it out like tonight makes it seem black and white. But it wasn’t. At least it didn’t feel like it was. I think I was afraid to see the parts that were wrong; I guess that’s the bottom line.”
Head still lowered, Magda nods. “You and me both.” At last, she looks up. She touches the corner of her eye as if to press a tear in place. “And you didn’t mind losing him?”
At first Frankie thinks she means Nico. Then she sees that she’s glancing back at the window, where Jack stands at the sink, washing the plates. “I told myself I couldn’t lose what I didn’t have.”
“You didn’t believe he loved you.”
“I didn’t believe I was worth loving.”
Neither says anything more, the steady pulse of crickets and frogs the only sound. Then Magda leans back in the chair, tilting her head to take in the moon. “I’m familiar with that song and dance too, by the way. But the matter at hand. I’m assuming you have a plan?”
Frankie nods. “There are two problems. The first one is June. Because I hate to admit it, but Nico was right: We reveal she did this to herself, and it hurts her all over again. It destroys her reputation, needlessly. And she’s not here to defend herself.
I don’t want to victimize her again. But there might be a way we can honor her by exposing the studio, just enough that maybe something changes. ”
“I’m all ears.”
“But the second problem is Nico. We push him too far, and he pushes back—and he will push harder. What he did by having Dottie leak this alibi rumor, that was a message.”
“I figured.”
“He can frame Jack. Easily. But if we get ahead of it, if we’re fast, we have the element of surprise. We can take what he put out there and spin it.”
“Even though he’s got the necklace? And the cops in his pocket?”
“Yes.”
Magda laughs. “He’s got all the evidence. What exactly do we have?”
“We have you. The power of the press.”