Chapter One #2
Cosima had her own memories of that trip.
She’d been four years old, just beginning to understand that there was a difference between her mother when she was being her mother and her mother when she was being “Phoebe Frank.” Cosima had liked it when her mother took her into the cold sea, holding her hand.
She’d liked this tall man with his fascinating Scottish accent.
He found a gold coin behind her ear and gave it to her, and he said it was real gold.
She could still remember the way he crouched down, putting his kind eyes right at her level.
He buckled her into a bright pink life jacket he’d bought for her in a beachside shop.
It pressed underneath her chin when she sat down on his boat.
Duncan set his phone on the arm of the chair and removed his glasses. “Maybe we can reconvene in the morning. You’ve already had a long day putting out fires.”
Cosima looked out the window of her mother’s study at the sprawling landscape of native plants and quiet, flower-filled paths to the pool.
The gardens had been Duncan’s intervention.
A casual gardener in the way many Europeans were, Duncan had decided to cultivate plants and flowers as a way to cultivate his relationship with Cosima.
The first time Cosima and Duncan’s gardens had been photographed for a magazine, she was sixteen.
There had been several more features over the years, the product of writers and editors charmed by the duo and the oasis of California native plants they’d created.
At the height of Cosima and Phoebe’s arguments about the future of PFS, Duncan had used the garden to broker a ceasefire.
He’d suggested to Phoebe that Cosima’s desire to build something of her own was equal to Phoebe’s but not identical.
Perhaps a few calls could be made to support Cosima’s passions.
Audiences might be interested in a new kind of gardening show, a stylish one filmed at the Castle.
Many an empire began with a single audience, as Phoebe well knew.
Cosima simply needed her own audience. If this grew into a younger, leaner sister studio to PFS? Well. It wouldn’t be surprising.
And so, the blow to Phoebe thus softened, Cosima came to be in charge of two projects.
First, she was to handle the peaceful transition of power and the initiation of a new era for PFS so that everything might be done just the way Phoebe would want.
Then, a few weeks from now, she would begin filming the pilot of An American Castle’s Garden.
PFS had already inked multiple streaming contracts and a global distribution deal for the new gardening show, somewhat losing sight of the “leaner” sister studio that had initially been imagined. Cosima’s studio now employed dozens of people who depended on her new passion and vision.
She missed gardening. It would have been nice to be out there, her knees and hands in the dirt, alone with her feelings.
“I’m fine, Duncan. Truly,” she said. “I do need to find a paper, since we’re here in Mother’s office.” She rose to her feet. Her arches hurt. “One of our producers wants it, something she said Mother put aside for her in her desk. A note from Scorsese he wrote after he saw Ship of the Cosmos.”
Her mother’s desk was a disaster, though Phoebe had always claimed to have a “system.” No one had been permitted to touch the teetering piles on top of it—not even Cosima.
She didn’t know where to find a note from Scorsese, even if she’d had the urge to search for it.
She trailed her fingers across the stacks of paper and wished it were the end of the day so she could take off her shoes and curl up in her bed like a small, soft animal.
Instead, she started taking apart the piles, flipping each item over, one by one. There were papers falling off the desk, sliding under it, drifting onto her mother’s desk chair. Duncan rose to his feet. “I’ll just give you a hand.”
“I’ve got it.” She reached out to steady a stack before it collapsed but miscalculated, sending it tumbling to the floor. “Shit.”
A sheet of her mother’s canary-yellow stationery fluttered to the carpet between her feet. Cosima crouched down to retrieve it, her arches throbbing.
Her hand stilled over the paper.
“What is it?” Duncan asked.
It was a list. One she’d written down for her mother, who dictated the items to her when the doctors made it clear Phoebe was intractably ill despite her efforts to hide it.
“Mother’s au revoir list.” She tried to keep her voice neutral as she picked the paper up. If she sounded distressed, Duncan would try to help. If Duncan tried to help, Cosima would end up with one more thing to do.
This list of her mother’s was the reason why Cosima had stayed the night at the Getty, curled up in a sleeping bag in the dark beside Phoebe with a laughing Rembrandt looking down at them.
Why she’d skydived, buckled to an instructor who smelled like cold air, the wind impossibly loud in her ears.
They’d met a “nose” in Paris, who bottled a scent for the two of them.
One by one, they’d drawn a line through each of the items, until the time came when her mother needed to rest and be taken care of.
Because it was Phoebe’s list, it also included her wish for the Castle to be converted from their private home to a center for the performing arts.
Who could deny her such a generous bequest?
The Castle, of course, had never been for Cosima or Duncan.
It was a decadent showpiece, Phoebe’s homage to Hollywood. Phoebe’s.
Cosima was surprised to see an item left on the list. She’d forgotten about it.
Stay at Gregory Place, it said.
An inn, located in a tiny village in England.
A long time ago, in the 1980s, it was where Phoebe met and fell in love with Cosima’s father, a dashing Formula One driver who died in a race when Cosima was in preschool.
Phoebe had wanted to have the “full-circle experience” of visiting the inn together with Cosima. She’d said Gregory Place was “magic.”
Duncan cleared his throat. “It was such a lovely thing for the two of you to share.”
Was it? Cosima bit back the comment, feeling awful for even having the thought.
Duncan read the list over her shoulder. “Ah. A trip over the pond would be a pleasant escape for you once you’ve made your announcement to the stockholders and we’ve wrapped up filming season one.
I was already planning on opening my estate in Dundee for a visit.
You could tick this off the list, then come up and breathe clean Scottish air and put pen to paper for ideas for season two. ”
“Yep.” Cosima rubbed her thumb over the paper. Her lungs were too tight. Her stomach roared into her throat. “Good idea.”
“Are you all right, darling?”
She closed her eyes, annoyed she’d let her tone be short. “Yes, I’m sorry. The day was too long for these shoes. You’re hearing my arches and pinky toe, not me.” She gave him a practiced smile.
But she wasn’t half the actress her mother had been.
When Duncan quickly turned his head toward the dark window, she witnessed his mask slip, his mouth bracketing with grief.
All at once, her vision telescoped, framing Duncan’s face at the pinpoint end of a long black tunnel.
Cosima shook her head, trying to make the tunnel disappear, but his faraway face didn’t change.
From here, she could hear the water in the elephant fountain.
She could smell the familiar pompelmo fragrance her mother liked to infuse into the air.
She had never known any other home but the Castle.
Cosima didn’t know why it was still so important—always and forever the most important thing—to make her mother happy.
Her mother was dead.
Duncan turned toward her again. His fond smile had been restored. “We’re both knackered.” He started out of the office, but before he went through the doorway, he squeezed her shoulders. “Breakfast at Lulu’s?”
She nodded, or she didn’t. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
Eventually, with a final pat, he left.
Cosima came back into her body enough to notice her feet hurt too much to stand.
In that, at least, she had been truthful with Duncan.
She collapsed onto the Eames ottoman, staring at the mess she’d made of her mother’s desk.
Her phone and tablet buzzed and chimed with notifications while her eyes started to burn with the tears she would not shed.
When her stomach cramped, hard, taking her breath away so completely she couldn’t even gasp, she dropped the list in her lap and picked up her phone. She watched one notification after another slide up the screen while her hand vibrated.
She opened the phone’s browser.
With a fingertip, she filled the boxes with the required information at each step.
Her payment confirmed with another notification.
Shucked-off heels in hand, she walked barefoot past the elephant fountain, up two flights of stairs, and came back down with luggage she’d packed in the dark, her heart alternately pounding and freezing in place, her stomach so tight it felt numb.
The last thing she did was strike through the final item on her mother’s list and set the paper down on Duncan’s chair.
Then she ran from the Castle. Escaped, really—a princess dashing through the pouring rain into the night.
Not to find magic. Magic didn’t exist anymore.