Chapter 25
When we first arrived in Phoenix, it felt like we’d crash-landed on an alien planet, with the red Mars soil and rock formations, the agave with their spiked tentacles, the shops selling crystals glinting with energy.
And it was this strange backdrop, this separation from everything we’d known before, that had allowed us to build a new life together over the past six years.
That afternoon, Micah and I sat at our kitchen island while I showed him the teaser my partner had cut for our latest documentary. Micah paused it on a clip of a woman walking rows of heirloom corn, her dexterous fingers smoothing back the silks and running over the purple kernels.
“I like this, but I think we need a better sense of the setting—this is agriculture in the middle of the desert. Life in a place thought to be lifeless,” he said, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear.
I let the rest of the video play through, nodding. “You’re totally right. I’ll let Mike know.”
After a few years exploring in college, I’d finally declared history as my major.
Not because of an inherent love for the subject, but for the courses that blew everything I thought I knew about a topic apart, that challenged me to scrape beneath the surface and find the truth.
I was addicted to that kind of obliteration.
It was in my final year that I met Mike, a film major, and we put together our first documentary as a joint thesis project.
After graduation, instead of taking a low-paying job, hoping one day someone would let me do what I actually loved, I started a production company with my mother’s money and began doing what I wanted right away, no permission required.
Mike and I had made a handful of documentaries on subjects that interested us, getting better each time, and this latest was set to be something special—a profile on a chef in Arizona who was using local indigenous ingredients to return us to a lost way of life.
Micah was showing me his latest blown-glass piece—from a series of creatures inspired by the desert vegetation—when my phone rang. It was Hess.
Without saying hello, as if all she could muster were three words, she whispered, “Martha is gone.”
Martha had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. It took her quick, and in some ways it seemed like a kindness. Once her ability to play music went, life wasn’t worth living for her.
The funeral was a big Nashville affair—not the type you might see for a star, but everyone in the industry was there.
I saw Hess from afar fielding visitors and playing the good hostess as usual.
Micah and I gave her quick hugs, and though her words were warm, she avoided meeting my eye.
I tried to ask how she was doing, but then she was pulled aside by another mourner, and I moved along.
I had seen Hess many times over the last six years. She had apologized to me and Micah, and she was always especially nice to him, as if perpetually making up for the past. She called frequently and sent us Christmas gifts, and on the surface, we kept in touch.
But she and I had never gotten back to where we were that summer.
I had forgiven her, of course; I could see now that her intentions had been good.
And yet, there was still this wall between us, and I didn’t know how to bring it down.
She was the closest I’d ever come to having something resembling family besides Micah—and I couldn’t help feeling I’d ruined it.
During the service, as people recounted stories of Martha guiding their careers as young musicians, I remembered how Martha had made me feel like a person worthy of respect over the years, especially when it felt like no one else did, and at the thought, my eyes welled.
I realized this was true mourning, like I’d never been able to feel for my parents.
Holding the singular beauty of someone in your mind and realizing you would never witness it again.
The reception was held at Tima’s house, where Micah and I mostly kept to ourselves in the corner, eating the Southern foods that only tasted this way in Nashville. We lingered after everyone left, and Tima asked me to take a plate to Hess upstairs where she’d gone to freshen up.
I didn’t find her in any of the second-floor rooms, and so I searched the rest of the house, the paper plate going limp in my hand. I finally found her in the garage, curled up in the backseat of Martha’s black Gran Torino with her face pressed into the leather.
I opened the door and got in next to her, but she didn’t stir.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to the thick, hot air of the garage, and I wasn’t just talking about Martha.
She turned over and faced me, and I saw most of her makeup had rubbed off, leaving her face gray and drawn. “Oh, honey. Don’t be.”
God, I felt so ashamed. “I’m sorry, this isn’t about me. This is about Martha.”
She smiled tearily. “I think Martha would have loved for us to have a real talk.” She heaved herself up and leaned back against the seat.
“I know it’s been years, but I feel like there’s still this distance between us. And I don’t know what to do about it. I know it’s my fault.”
“No, honey, it’s not.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I wanted to respect your boundaries like you asked, but I think I went a little overboard.” She patted my leg. “I’ve been thinking about how Martha wanted me to be honest with you that summer, and I didn’t listen to her.”
I gestured for her to go on.
She folded her hands in her lap. “I didn’t talk to you about your father back then because I didn’t want to color your perception of him, or make you think badly of Lou.
Part of me blames him for a lot of things I shouldn’t.
” She paused for a long moment, then continued, “Tate got Lou into drugs when they first met—she was on them when she wrote The Cursed Woman and throughout the time she spent with him, until the end when they both got clean. And I blamed him for bringing that kind of suffering into her life—still do, in a way, if I’m honest. It’s hard to let go of. ”
The beautiful dope-fiend version of my mother I’d crafted as a child reappeared in my mind like the memory of an old enemy. “So there was some truth to what my aunt told me after all.”
Hess’s eyes hardened, and I tensed against the soft leather seat. “Every word that woman ever told you about your mother was a lie. Do you understand me?”
I nodded, afraid to say anything more, and Hess softened. “I’m sorry, honey. I just… I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about her.”
“Is that why you and mom had the falling out? Over the drugs?”
“No, it happened before that. But we didn’t become friends again until she was sober.”
Something else popped into my mind then—the image of my mother with bloodshot eyes and chapped lips from my mushroom vision. I had never asked Hess about it, partly because it seemed too strange to articulate, but now it was cast in a new light.
“Did my mom have a cabin when I was little? I think I might have a memory of us going to a cabin and her being scared and wanting to tell me something important.”
Hess’s face paled for a moment, then righted. “That was probably my cabin. She used to bring you to visit quite a bit, though I’m not sure of the time you’re talking about. What do you remember?”
I told her, and she nodded absently, looking off into the distance. “Could she have been on drugs then?” I asked. There had clearly been something off about her in the memory.
Hess’s brow furrowed. “No, she stayed clean once she had you.” For a moment it seemed she wanted to say more, but then she stopped.
I waited, but she remained quiet, and I was lost to my own thoughts.
I remember thinking, At least there was a cabin.
Perhaps it wasn’t just a fever dream, but a fragment of something larger, filtered through a child’s perception.
“Micah seems like a wonderful person,” Hess said to fill the silence.
“He’s the best person I know,” I said, and Hess smiled.
“Thank the Lord for that.”
There was another beat of silence, and I noticed Martha’s signature aviators still clipped to the visor up front. “This car is so cool.”
“Martha left it to you in her will.”
I looked over at Hess, shocked, and she smiled again and caressed the door. “It used to be your mother’s. Your father actually gave it to her for Christmas one year. He taught her how to drive.”
I studied the interior with new interest, as if there might be clues hiding in the black leather. I imagined my parents riding in it together, golden with ’70s glamour, my mother’s bare feet propped on the dash.
Hess and I really talked then, about my marriage to Micah and how I’d stopped worrying about him leaving me.
Hess told me about a new album she’d been writing, inspired by her experience with menopause, though of course, she couldn’t say it outright. She had to use metaphors so that only the women who understood would get it.
We heard a guitar kick up inside the house, and the voices of Phoebe and Tima calling for us. At the sound, I saw Hess’s face suddenly wilt, and tears finally make their appearance. “I don’t want to sing without Martha,” she rasped, and I took her hand in mine and let her ride the wave.
When she calmed, we walked inside to Tima’s son playing guitar while Tima sang and Phoebe danced around the living room with Micah and her granddaughter.
I left Hess there to join in, and I went to the kitchen to help clean up, preferring to be out of the fray. Tima’s daughter, her husband, and their two children were already there, and I watched as they washed and dried dishes together among the retro wood panels.
The children were young—maybe eight and nine—and as they helped their parents wipe the plates, the family seemed to move in concert. They made strange inside jokes with one another as if they were speaking their own language, and when they laughed, the sounds of their joy blended in harmony.
It was such a specific world they’d created—a small glowing bubble of a world that fit them completely. There was something familiar about it that I couldn’t place.
I wondered what it would have been like if my mom were still alive, and I had grown up in her world.
It was hard to imagine her as a mother—she had spent so much of her life chasing her dream and making music that I couldn’t see her tied down, sequestered to a warm bubble.
And perhaps it wasn’t something she had wanted, and she had made the best of it.
But when I looked over at Micah dancing with Phoebe’s tiny granddaughter in the living room, I knew I wanted to share the world we’d created, built on love and respect and joy and truth, with children of our own.
And in the next moment, a voice inside me whispered, What do you know about being a mother?
But as we traveled back to Arizona, the desire only grew stronger.
For days after we returned, I hid from myself and focused on work.
Then at some point, as I stared into the blue light of my computer screen, I realized I had been my own mother all these years. And I wouldn’t be raising a child by myself. I had Micah.
But I was nervous about what he would say.
We’d never talked about children—it was one of the only things we’d failed to discuss that year we fell in love.
We were so young back then that the possibility had seemed remote.
And the specter of his brother loomed there, telling me to be quiet.
I wondered if Micah had decided never to put himself in the position of his parents and risk the kind of loss that had destroyed him and his family.
Then one night while we ate dinner, I was suddenly seized by the need to tell him. I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“I want to have a baby.”
Micah stopped shoveling lentil soup into his mouth and set his spoon down. I couldn’t see his face at first, but when he finally lifted it toward me, his eyes were shining like the glass sculptures that took up every surface of our home.
“I want one, too.”
“Really? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t want to force it on you. I’m not the one who has to carry it. I thought I’d sound like a dick if I said, ‘Rhea, let’s put a baby in there!’ ”
I laughed. The relief was intoxicating.
I got up and sat in his lap. I put my forehead to his, and I felt that restoring energy, our cells regenerating.
Then he fucked me with hearty purpose, right there on the cold clay of the kitchen floor.