Chapter Four #2
Cosima pulled the gels from underneath her eyes, then leaned back and looked out the window.
“‘Companion,’ everyone says, though they ought to say ‘fiancé.’ There was a press release after he gave her the engagement ring, a beautiful emerald, and she said yes. She wore it for years and years. But she didn’t marry him. ”
“Is that what he wanted?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it’s not what you wanted,” Edie guessed.
Cosima’s lack of response was an answer in itself. Edie knew a little something about yearning for a family even when everyone said you already had one.
“My Duncan’s name was Mike,” she offered. “He had a mustache that I thought was horrifying, but I would’ve cried if he shaved it off.”
Cosima didn’t look away from the window. Edie couldn’t tell if she wanted to hear more, but she was definitely the sort of person who’d stop Edie’s talking if it got to be too much.
“I was fourteen, which is the worst age to be alive,” Edie continued.
“I fought with my mom constantly. We’re way too much alike.
But Mike understood that I needed to be doing something all the time.
He’d take me to the garage where he worked and show me how to change the oil in a car, or the tire.
He taught me to drive manual transmission, even though I didn’t have a permit.
He piled up pillows on the driver’s seat and zip-tied a chunk of two-by-four to each of the pedals, and we’d bomb around the back roads.
He fostered animals with me from the shelter.
My mom and him never got married, but I wouldn’t have survived sophomore and junior year without Mike. ”
Cosima pulled her long, shiny legs underneath her, her forget-me-not eyes serious. “What happened to him?”
“My mom and him broke up when she met another guy at work. This was the same month I was graduating from high school. Mike tried to stay close, but he’d turned down an opportunity to manage a factory in Pennsylvania several years in a row so he could be there for us, and then he didn’t have to be.”
“He didn’t have to be.”
Edie could guess why Cosima picked at her fingernail when she repeated this phrase. She would be thinking of Duncan, who was not her father. She would be wondering whether it was only her mother he’d stayed around for.
Edie knew. She knew what it was like when a Mike walked away, and no matter how spiky and imperious Cosima was, she should get to keep her Mike. “What happened to your dad?” she asked.
“He died when I was three. Phoebe always said he was the love of her life, and maybe that’s true.
What I remember about him is that I was always a little …
scared isn’t the right word. Is there a word for feeling both anxious and exhilarated at the same time?
I remember he would pick me up and hold me up high above his head and spin around. ”
“Your body remembers him.”
“I suppose.” Cosima picked at a hole in the upholstery of the chair. “He’s why I’m here, in a way. My mom had a list. Things she wanted to do with me. She called it her ‘au revoir list.’ The only thing we didn’t do on her list was stay at Gregory Place. This inn is where my parents met.”
Phoebe Frank’s bucket list. That was why Cosima had come here.
On the surface, it made a nice fairy tale—the daughter helps a mother with a terrible diagnosis see her last dreams through—but Edie strongly felt that kind of thing was not really what daughters were for.
It had long been a point of contention with her own mom.
Edie only wanted to be loved and wildly approved of without qualification.
She wanted the freedom to love her mom in all of her own weathers.
She wanted to be able to shop for grown-up things with her mom, things like a car or a mattress, and also to stay at her mom’s house after a breakup and sleep in her bed while her mom played with her hair.
Tanya Hoberg loved her—Edie didn’t doubt it—but she did seem to feel that her children were there to take care of her, and watch out for and manage her moods.
It was impossible for a child to really know what their parent needed and to fulfill that need.
But that did not mean the child wouldn’t try.
“I’m sorry—” Edie began, her thoughts racing as she attempted to piece together a way to say this that met the bare minimum of courtesy.
“No.” Cosima laughed. “No, never mind. Obviously I’m trying to win your game again.”
“Good. Keeps me on my toes.” It was a banal thing to say, but she’d been caught off guard by Cosima’s quick reversal, and by hearing her laugh.
Her laugh wasn’t refined. It matched her wild hair and her mean little tricks, like walking too fast for Edie to keep up with.
Like changing the subject and claiming to be trying to win the game.
“I was coming down to make myself tea. Do you want some? A package of biscuits? I’m afraid to make anything more.
Morag will know, and then I’ll find a jar under my pillow filled with nails and crow beaks. ”
“Yes. I could go for some Jammie Dodgers.” Cosima lifted that one corner of her mouth again, almost smiling.
Edie tried not to oversubscribe her heart to that half smile. “Just the cookies? No tea?”
“Maybe a glass of water.”
Edie stood up. “I’m on it.”
Cosima stood, too, and made a slow circle.
She took in the piano heaped with figurines, the stacks of magazines and newspapers, the three pale-pink wing chairs and two mauve love seats and five small mirrored tables.
Her gaze stopped on the reception area. Edie watched her take note of the forbidden guest book—the one in olive-colored leather, as big as the surface of a school desk.
Before Edie could take in what was happening, Cosima crossed the room in four quick strides and grabbed the forbidden book with both hands.
“Cosima!” Edie yell-whispered.
She sat down with it in the wing chair Edie had just vacated. The heavily gilded book took up the entirety of her lap. “What?”
“You can’t have that. Morag says.” Edie shuffled back into the lounge and reached for the book.
“Morag isn’t here. She’s sleeping. When I was watching my movie earlier, I could hear her snoring, even though her apartment is all the way at the back of the kitchen. Also, right here, it says ‘GUEST BOOK.’ I’m a guest.”
Edie glanced toward the entrance to the kitchen. She tried to listen for the sound of Morag snoring, but she couldn’t hear over the rain and rumbles of thunder.
“Are you afraid you’ll get in trouble?” Cosima creaked open the front cover. Edie saw marbled paper. A black-and-white photograph. Her heart was racing.
“No! But am I afraid Morag will hex me? Yes. Yes, I am. She could live another three hundred years if she bound me to this place and drank my youthful blood.” She stepped closer to Cosima.
“Seriously, though, that guest book is important to her. She won’t say why, but before you and I met and decided to be best friends forever, I tried everything I could think of to get her to let me look at it.
I mean, it’s obvious I need this guest book.
I need to have a very cheap English Experience where I sit by a fire and thumb through the pages of the past. Otherwise, what memories do I have to take back with me to the factory floors of northeast Wisconsin? ”
“You didn’t try using me as your excuse. You might have suggested to Morag that we should look at it because it’s likely my mother’s stay is documented in this book. One might say I have a right to open it.”
Cosima raised one eyebrow and turned another page without glancing at it. She was making a compelling argument in favor of breaking Morag’s rule. Her point overruled the part of Edie’s moral compass that suggested Morag might have a good reason to keep the guest book private.
Edie peeked at the page Cosima opened to. She spotted something that looked like a poem.
She’d read a magazine article once about the Victorian scrapbooking craze, with girls trading their kid-leather-bound scrapbooks back and forth, painting watercolor floral arrangements onto rag paper to express sapphic longing in flower language.
That article had made Edie feel like she was born in the wrong century.
In the wrong country. To the wrong life.
She felt that way a lot.
“What does it say?” She swallowed.
“Do you want me to read it to you? Would that keep you safe from Morag, or is even knowing what’s inside enough to get you demerits? Maybe I should take it up to my room and peruse it privately. Remove the temptation.” Cosima laid her hand flat over the first page.
“Why is it that the only time you’ve come down to the lounge, it’s to be mean to me?” Edie sidled even closer to where Cosima was sitting.
“I came down because I couldn’t sleep and wanted to watch a movie.” Cosima turned another page, but she tipped up the cover so Edie couldn’t see.
Craning for a better view, Edie bonked her hip into the end table next to Cosima’s chair. “Fuck!” She rubbed the spot on her hip. “Listen, I have been exceedingly patient with your”—Edie waved her hand in a circle around Cosima—“needs, but—”
Cosima shut the guest book. “Needs? You’ve been patient with my needs?”
“I have. Look, I get that you are mourning your mom, but if you and I were the type of people to know what to do with our feelings, we wouldn’t be on an English vacation, here, in February. Maybe we can help each other.”
Cosima’s mouth firmed, and the architectural feathers of her brows furrowed. “Is that so.”
“That’s so, princess.”
Edie would not have guessed it was possible for Cosima to sit up even straighter, but she did. Her hands gripped the sides of the guest book as though she might lift it over her head and cudgel Edie with it. “You can’t call me that.”
“Princess?” She stepped closer. “Princess. Princess. Prin”—Edie pointed—“cess.”