Jade
My phone rings on a Thursday afternoon while I'm in the middle of a sentence.
I've been writing for three hours straight, the good kind where the words come faster than I can type them. I'm two pages from the end. My tea is cold. I haven't eaten since this morning. The cursor is blinking mid-sentence when the phone lights up on the table beside me.
James Dupree.
I stare at it for a full five seconds. Three rings. My hand doesn't move.
On the fifth ring I pick up.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
That's all either of us says for a moment. I get up from the table and walk to the kitchen counter and lean against it, my back to the manuscript, looking at the window above the sink. Outside the afternoon is clear and bright, the kind of California day that makes Boston feel like another life.
"I got your letter," he says.
"I figured."
"I thought about writing back." A pause. "I kept starting and stopping. Couldn't get it right on paper."
"So, you called?”
"Yes" Another pause. It’s shorter this time. "Is that okay?"
I look at the window. The light outside. A bird lands on the sill for a second and takes off again.
"Yes," I say.
We feel our way through it carefully, both of us. He doesn't explain himself again. He did that in the garden and we both know it and neither of us wants to go back there today. I don't tell him I forgive him because I don't, not fully, not yet, and he's not asking me to.
He asks about the manuscript instead.
"Are you still writing it?"
"I'm two pages from the end," I say. "I was literally mid-sentence when you called."
A beat of silence. "Should I call back?"
"No." I mean it. "It'll keep."
"What happened to it?" he asks. "You said once it was stuck."
"It was. For a long time." I think about how to explain it. "I was writing around the real thing instead of at it. Once I stopped doing that it started moving."
"What was the real thing?"
I look at my hands on the counter. "This," I say. "All of this. The family and what I chose and what it costs. I kept trying to write a fantasy novel and it kept turning into something else."
"Did you let it?"
"Eventually."
He's quiet for a moment. I can hear him breathing on the other end of the line. He sounds like he’s thinking before saying anything.
"Is it good?" he asks.
"Olive thinks so. She had notes."
He laughs at that. It's a short sound, genuine, surprised out of him. "Of course she did."
I lean against the counter and look at the ceiling and let myself be in this for a moment — talking to my father on a Thursday afternoon in my kitchen in Malibu about the book I’ve been trying to write for two years.
None of this was in the plan when I flew here from Boston with a one-way ticket and no idea what I was walking into.
"Is it going where you wanted it to go?" he asks.
“Actually, somewhere better," I say. "Somewhere I didn't plan."
"That's how the good ones work," he says. "At least that's what I've heard. I don't read much fiction."
"I'll send you a copy when it's done."
"I'd like that."
We're both quiet for a moment. But it’s not the uncomfortable kind.
“Your mother grew peonies,” he says after a moment.
I stop.
"Did she ever tell you that?" He says it carefully, like he's handing me something fragile.
"She used to grow peonies. Big pink ones.
She had them at her place when we were together.
I remember them because I asked her why peonies specifically and she just shrugged.
Said she liked the way they smelled." He pauses for a moment, looking up wistfully. "It stuck with me. I don't know why."
I don't say anything.
I'm standing at the kitchen counter in Malibu thinking about peonies. Sydney raised me on practicality. Beauty was fine but it didn't pay the rent. And then I remember.
The fire escape outside the kitchen window.
Third floor, west-facing, the one that got the afternoon light.
Sydney kept things out there. I remember now, pink flowers in terracotta pots that appeared every spring and disappeared by July.
I was maybe seven the first time I noticed them.
I asked her what they were and she said flowers, Jade in the tone that meant the question was over, and I never asked again.
Peonies. They were peonies and I didn't know that until right now.
"She did grow them," I say. "On the fire escape. She never told me what they were called.”
"They were just hers."
We're both quiet.
I think about a seven-year-old asking what the pink flowers were and accepting her non-answer.
"Thank you," I say.
"I remember other things about her," he says. "Small things. Things she probably never mentioned to you." A pause. "I'd like to tell you them. If you'll let me."
I stand at the counter for a moment and look out the window and not really wanting to talk about my mom anymore.
"Tell me another one," I lie.
He tells me about her laugh.
Not the polite one, or the social one she used at work and with strangers. The real one, the one that came out when something caught her off guard. James describes it as half-laugh half-exhale, like she hadn't meant to find it funny.
I know exactly the sound he means. I've heard it my entire life. I just never had words for it until now.
By the time we hang up I'm sitting with my cold tea and my book still open on my laptop two pages from the end.
I set the phone down.
I sit there for a long time, not writing, not moving, just sitting with the specific weight of what just happened. I think about what Sydney keeps to herself. How much of her I know and how much is still filed away somewhere.
But my thoughts turn to my manuscript. I pull the laptop toward me and find my place. I finish the sentence I started three hours ago and then I write the next one and the one after that. Two pages later I type the last line and I sit back in my chair and look at what I've done.
The book is finished and I think about the peonies again. That’s not nothing.
Before closing my laptop, I send the book to Olive.