Dawn #2
How could he have told me everything he knew? When the one thing he knew was like a grenade, shouldn’t there have been some sort of triage afterward?
“Okay.” I nodded, then said reluctantly, “Thanks, Mason.”
He nodded and went back to the kitchen. The diner suddenly came back to life around me, as if it had gone silent for the few time-out-of-mind minutes I’d spoken to Mason.
The car felt freezing after the swampy diner and burning hot outside, and I shivered as I turned to Audrey to report what I’d found out.
“Winifred?” Audrey practically shrieked with glee. “Your dead aunt?”
“Not so dead, it would appear.” I felt totally disembodied, like I was watching another version of myself talking to my best friend.
“I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Yeah, neither was I.” I leaned back in the passenger seat and let Alfie climb into my lap. His warm body and soft hair started to ground me, to bring me back into my body, which felt mostly numb. “You know what this means, right? My mom has been lying to me about Winnie my whole life.”
“Oh shit. Yeah, she has. But why?”
“I have no idea.”
Alfie licked my cheek, and I hugged him to me—maybe too close, because he whined and I loosened my arms. “I’m also disappointed it wasn’t my dad,” I said. “There was something about that possibility that felt…important.”
“You know…” Audrey said. “I bet your aunt knows some things about your dad.”
I locked eyes with Audrey. “We have to find her.”
Holding my gaze and leaning forward to cover my hands with hers, she said, “One hundred percent. We are going to find her.”
After a squeeze, she let go of my hands, and Alfie lay down in my lap with a dramatic sigh.
I checked my phone again for a text from my mom.
Nothing.
“Are you going to ask your mom if she knows where Winnie is?”
“I know that looks like the obvious next thing to do,” I replied, “but I feel a strong resistance to asking her.”
“Your intuition. You should always listen to that.”
“Maybe she doesn’t even know Winnie is alive.”
“Like Winnie faked her own death? That’s so Days of Our Lives.”
“No, you’re right, that sounds too outlandish, but…I don’t know. I don’t want to think Mom’s been lying to me my whole life. It makes our whole thing, our Hartley Girls schtick, feel untrue.”
“But why? Can’t it be true that you two are the Hartley Girls and that she kept this from you?”
“Maybe? I’m not ready for that question yet.”
“That’s fair. And your intuition is telling you you’re not ready to hear the truth from her.”
“Or I’m not ready to ask her. I feel like I want her to read the book already, see what I see, then tell me herself. Like somehow it will mean more that way? I don’t know.”
“Hey, if you’re not ready, you’re not ready.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Did Mason say who the other person was that he was allowed to tell?”
“Nope.”
“Of course not,” Audrey muttered, “or he wouldn’t be Mason. Anything about where Winnie is?”
I shook my head, but then something occurred to me that brought me fully back into my body. “Oh my god, Audrey—E. Lang! Winnie’s middle name is Elizabeth, and Lang is probably short for my grandmother’s maiden name, Langley.”
“Woah, yeah, that does seem right.”
My heart sprinted at that revelation.
“We’ll have to do some brainstorming after the meeting about what to do next.” Audrey checked her watch, then added, “Which starts in less than an hour. We need to hustle.”
I’d forgotten all about the meeting. For Pete’s sake, that was the last thing I wanted to do right now.
Audrey put the car in reverse and got back onto the 10, and I dashed off a text to Mom:
Have you read the book yet?
“You know how weird the whole Mason thing is, right?” I said. Alfie got up and went into the back seat, where he could spread out more.
“I know how weird it seems to you.”
“It doesn’t to you?”
“Not anymore. I once went to a meeting on Perry Street in New York looking for a director who’d given me his name at a party, and instead, I met Jed, who was looking for a costar for Athens.
Another time, I was on a jog in Venice Beach, where I never run, except I woke up one morning and was like, I feel like running on Venice Beach.
So I did, and afterward I went to this coffee shop on Abbot Kinney, and I started chatting with this amazing woman named Judith, who turned out to be a world-renowned ceramist, and she offered to give me a few lessons in her studio a few miles off the beach.
She and pottery showed up exactly when I needed them to, when I’d just started going to meetings again and was trying to figure out how to live a different kind of life. ”
“Was she sober, too?”
Audrey snorted. “God, no. Her studio was skunked out, and there were bongs everywhere. But she never did anything around me when I told her I was trying not to drink or smoke.”
“That was nice of her.”
“People are nice, I’ve found.”
“You were more cynical in college. Didn’t you used to say that everyone was a user?”
“I did. But that was because I was a user, too. I learned the hard way that what you put out comes back to you.”
What am I putting out?
Fear.
Desperation.
Anxiety.
And also…
Curiosity.
Friendship.
Hope. Just maybe. Because it occurred to me that Mason, this quest, the family mystery I was unraveling—this was a story worth telling.
Was it a story I could tell through sets and actors and directing and all the many moving parts of the medium I admired so much?
I tried to pay attention to where I felt anxiety when I played with this idea, and it wasn’t in assembling the enormous team I’d need to tell the story.
No, my fear lit up when I thought about telling the story at all.
“Oh, I love this one!” Audrey turned up the volume again as the unmistakable drum line to George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” filled the car.
Another dorm-room favorite. Dorm hall, actually.
One night, Audrey flung open the door to our room with her stereo blasting this song, and she’d strutted down the hallway singing into her hairbrush.
Soon, all the other girls had joined in and there were probably ten of us waving our hands in the air and singing ourselves hoarse.
All we have to do now / Is take these lies and make them true somehow…
Who would want to make their lies into the truth? Except, I didn’t think that was what he meant. I think he meant something more like taking lies and erasing them with the truth.
All we have to do.
Sure, right. Like it was that easy.
My own unspoken truth pulsed through me with the beat of the song.
I’d tried to moderate my drinking so many times, and it never worked.
I snuck drinks between the drinks people saw me drink.
There were far too many conversations I didn’t remember having.
Something was very wrong with the way I drank and the way I felt after I drank too much, which was too often.
If Mom had been lying about Winnie and she came clean, I’d have to, too. And telling Mom—or anyone other than Audrey, for that matter—that I had a drinking problem would make it very, very real. If I told Mom, then I’d really have to quit.
For good.
That was what I wasn’t ready to do. That was the story I wasn’t ready to tell.
But I joined my friend in singing my heart out along to the song. I sang like the words and the rhythm could clear the way for me to finally speak my truth somehow.