Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Of everyone, Ella was the most surprised that Stevie Franklin had agreed to come to the Copperfield House.
Knowing she was on the road somewhere across the continent, her foot on the pedal and her heart in some sorry state, Ella threw herself into preparing a room for Stevie in the artist residency.
As snow fluttered down outside, she stretched clean sheets over the mattress and dusted the shelves and tried to have a conversation with Stevie in her head.
It’d been twenty-five years since she’d last seen Stevie, twenty-five years since Stevie’s surprise pregnancy and subsequent withdrawal from Ella’s life.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ella muttered, fluffing the pillows and stepping back. She tried to imagine what Stevie might say. But all she could picture was twenty-year-old Stevie, dancing to music in the burger restaurant where they’d both worked, her eyes curious and alive.
They’d known so little back then.
There was a sound in the hallway, and Ella spun to find the current painter-in-residence, Mark, who had a smear of magenta oil paint on his cheek and a mysterious look in his eye. Had he been watching her? Or just walking by?
“Is someone new coming?” he asked. It was customary for the artists to come and go from the Copperfield House in groups, to have a welcome dinner and a goodbye dinner, and to link up like family. Stevie would be an outlier.
“A friend of mine is going to stay here for a little while,” she said. “She’s a musician.”
“Does she have any songs I’d know?”
In Ella’s inner mind, she allowed herself to hear Stevie’s raspy and filled-with-pain voice.
She allowed herself to drop into the density of emotion that Stevie was always so capable of supplying her audience.
It was a voice she hadn’t heard live in years.
The truth was, as far as Ella knew, Stevie hadn’t produced any new music since the dawn of the twenty-first century.
To Mark, the painter, Ella lied and said, “She took a hiatus to raise her daughter. But she’s working on a new album. That’s the thing with mothers. They often put off their ‘art’ for years and years before coming back to it. I see it here at the residency over and over.”
Mark looked mildly curious. With his left hand, he scratched at the oil paint on his cheek. But before he could say anything more, Ella’s phone buzzed in her pocket, and she answered it, mouthing an apology as she turned her back to Mark. It was her daughter, Laura.
“Hi, honey!” Ella’s voice was like the sun. “How are you feeling?”
Laura’s tone was somber, reticent. “Fine. Where are you?”
“I came to the Copperfield House to prep Stevie’s room,” Ella explained, imagining her daughter in the bedroom they’d decided was hers when she came home.
She imagined Laura opening the curtains to see the freshly fallen snow.
“Are you hungry? There are bagels downstairs. There are cereal, fruit, and yogurt. Eat whatever you want.”
“I don’t know if I can eat anything,” Laura confessed. “I, um, couldn’t sleep very well. I stalked Vinny online.”
Ella’s heart sank. In her opinion, the worst thing about modern breakups was the internet.
When a young woman like Laura ached with a broken heart, all she had to do was click a few buttons to find out what the man she missed was up to and how much it seemed he wasn’t thinking about her.
The fact that Laura still refused to call Vinny and tell him about the pregnancy was a point of contention that Ella knew better than to bring up now.
“Oh, honey,” Ella whispered, searching her mind for what to do. “Sit tight. I’m coming back home.”
“You’ve done enough, Mom,” Laura said, although Ella knew that as Laura’s mother, she could never do enough. She would never stop.
A few minutes later, Ella was in her car, driving down the long, empty, and wintry road to the house she and Will had purchased on Nantucket.
After living in city apartments for decades, she often felt that the house was vacuous, more like a palace than a residence.
It felt incredible that people needed so much space to eat, sleep, watch television, and read.
She’d mentioned this to Alana once, who’d reminded her (lovingly) that most everyone on Nantucket had a much bigger house than Ella did.
Did that make them more important? Ella laughed to herself.
Ella wondered if, now that she and Will were raking in “big bucks” from Grayson Harris, Will would want to move to get a house that helped them “keep up with the Joneses,” as the expression went.
Ella hoped not. She had no interest in a life of keeping up with status, with a moneyed reputation.
She wanted to be there for her family. She wanted to love and be loved.
And she wanted to make music. She didn’t need a thousand rooms for that.
Laura was at the kitchen table with her father, sipping a mug of tea.
Will was extra-animated, showing her the recent cut he’d done of Ella and Will’s song, the song for Grayson Harris.
He clicked the spacebar on his laptop and played the opening bars, watching his eldest’s face.
“Can you imagine it? The opening bars, then images of sweeping oceans and coastlines? That’s what Grayson’s suggesting for the first commercial. But there could be many more.”
As Will spoke, Laura’s cheeks grew progressively paler and paler, until she finally raised her first finger, got up, and hurried off to the bathroom.
Her tea and bagel remained mostly untouched.
Ella entered the kitchen, pressed a kiss to Will’s forehead, and stuck a bagel into the toaster for herself.
They knew Laura was getting sick. This was her morning ritual. They both felt terrible about it.
“Grayson called late last night,” Will confessed, trying to distract them both from their daughter’s morning sickness. “He listened to the new tracks I sent him.”
Ella glanced back at Will, surprised that he’d allowed that mega-wealthy man to listen to the secret tracks of their heart, tracks that they hadn’t even let their agent listen to. Ella wasn’t even sure if those particular tracks were “done” in the way they usually liked them to be.
“I know,” Will said, blushing, “but during dinner the other night, we got carried away, talking about music. He’s really in tune with what’s going on, with what’s happened. He’s got an encyclopedic mind for music.”
Ella’s bagel popped from the toaster, and she fetched it and smeared it with cream cheese.
She sat beside her husband, where she studied her daughter’s empty chair, praying she’d come back to them soon.
It remained strange to have Laura in the house; strange to stop thinking of her as a grad student and a soon-to-be professor.
Now, she was going to be a single mother with an unfinished graduate degree.
Ella reminded herself not to think of Laura’s life in those terms. But it was difficult not to feel disappointed, especially when it was so clear that Laura was disappointed in herself.
“He wants to meet you,” Will added, taking a bite of yogurt and smiling. “He said he may have met us back in the early 2000s, but that we wouldn’t remember him.”
“He must be nostalgic for his Manhattan years,” Ella said.
“Who isn’t?” Will pressed a kiss onto first Ella’s cheek, then her lips. “Have you heard from Stevie?”
“I know she left Thursday afternoon,” Ella said, checking her phone for the thousandth time. Anxiety splintered her ribs. “I can’t help but imagine her at the top of the Rocky Mountains, in some rickety car, searching for a signal, lost and alone.”
Will laughed. “Our Stevie Franklin was always more capable than that. She’ll make it here before we know it. And if I know her like I think I do, she’ll have a bunch of hilarious stories to fill in the gaps between now and when we last saw her.”
Ella smiled nervously. “I hope you’re right.”
* * *
By three that afternoon, Laura’s morning sickness had cleared, and she was fresh-faced and funny, sitting in the kitchen of the Copperfield House, helping Ella, Alana, Julia, and her Grandma Greta with the upcoming Christmas party.
She had a notepad out and was scribbling notes, making sure nothing was forgotten.
The party was already less than two weeks away. Things were falling into place.
Although Greta planned to make most of the food, a catering company had been hired to fill in the gaps.
A few hotels down the beach, all of which were empty for the season, had set aside rooms to accommodate all the guests who couldn’t stay at the Copperfield House post-party.
Most RSVPs had been received, with an acceptance rate higher than Greta had expected—82 percent.
“People don’t have grand Christmas parties anymore,” Greta said, smiling to herself. As though it were an afterthought, she got up and began to slice vegetables and fruits, all of which she slid into a blender.
“Mom, what are you doing?” Alana asked, cocking her head. “Are you juicing?”
Greta cackled. “Juicing is a modern-day thing. Nothing about me is modern.”
“You’re a modern woman,” Julia said. “Anyone who reads your books knows that.”
“Okay, sure. Maybe my ideas were always somewhere north of modern. Maybe the rest of the world has finally caught up,” Greta agreed.
“But the fact is, what’s been good for pregnant women since the dawn of time is still good for pregnant women.
And here my granddaughter sits, working her tail off for my Christmas party, getting more and more pregnant by the day.
I’m going to make sure she has all the nutrients she needs. ”
Laura’s cheeks were inflamed. “Grandma, you don’t need to do that.”
“Let her do it,” Alana said. “You know there’s no stopping Greta Copperfield when she has her mind set on something.”
“You should have seen me trying to delete one of her chapters last week,” Julia joked. “I thought Mom was going to bite my head off.”
In an act of either bravery or idiocy, Julia was the editor for both of their parents’ manuscripts, helping to secure both Bernard’s and Greta’s places in literary history.
But Ella guessed that their parents weren’t always so kind about Julia’s ideas.
She guessed it was a struggle. The fact that everyone was still talking (after everything that had happened in their family!) was proof of their great love for each other.
They weren’t willing to give up.
Suddenly, Greta clapped her hands. “I have a wonderful idea.”
“Uh-oh,” Alana joked.
“Alana, you’d better quit it with that attitude,” Greta teased, her eyes flashing.
“What I want to happen is this. Laura, I want you to drink up your nutrients. And then, I want to make a single batch of Christmas cookies. Maybe lemon bars? Peanut butter blossoms? After that, I want us to get cozy under blankets, turn on a Christmas movie, and forget about all this party nonsense for the time being. Your father and the others can figure out their own dinners tonight.”
Ella watched her daughter’s face transform.
Greta smacked the fruit and vegetable smoothie in front of her, gestured for her to drink, and Laura did, wrinkling her nose till it was finished.
By then, Alana and Julia had dug all the fuzzy blankets from the closet and created a cozy universe of sofas and chairs in the living room.
A fire crackled in the fireplace, glinting orange and red against the logs.
The big-screen television was prepped with the first Christmas movie of the season: The Holiday, starring Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black, and Cameron Diaz.
Laura collapsed on the sofa, pulled a blanket up to her chin, and flickered her eyes to let Ella know she wanted her to sit beside her. It was a language only a mother and daughter fully knew. Ella did so, crossing her legs beneath her.
Greta bustled in to announce that the cookies were in the oven. “The timer’s set! Let’s get the movie started! I’m ready!”
Alana raised the remote and pressed Play.
And as the six Copperfield women nestled deeper into their blankets, watching a gorgeous story unfold before them, more and more snow piled up on the roof and filled the walkways and coated the sandy beach outside.
The island was blanketed in white. The sky was quiet.