Chapter Four #3
Cosima narrowed her eyes, and at that moment, lightning shot across the sky and lit her face up and made her pale irises seem like they were piercing Edie’s soul.
“You don’t scare me,” Edie said. It was a lie, but also, there was no particular reason why Cosima should scare Edie.
She was just a woman. A very hot, rich, prickly woman, but also, hedgehogs were prickly, with pointy little teeth, and all those quills and teeth were for one thing and one thing only.
To keep everything they were scared of away.
“I should scare you,” Cosima said. She made a sound in her throat.
“Did you growl at me?” Edie stepped to another lamp and turned it on to better peer at Cosima, whose face was stormier than the weather.
Cosima smacked the cover of the guest book. “I don’t fucking know! I have plenty of reasons to be angry. What of it?”
“You can growl because you’re angry,” Edie said, leaning in to study Cosima more minutely. “But I don’t think you are angry.”
“Because you’re so empathetic and went to therapy when you had insurance for ten minutes?”
Ha! Edie could not be insulted with her own confessions.
She was her worst enemy. Always had been.
“Because, because, princess, you haven’t left.
You’re still here, and you could have gone at any point—like, for instance, when I came down the stairs and we screamed, and I bothered you, you might have excused yourself to your rooms.”
“Room.”
“But you didn’t. You stayed here and crossed swords with me, and we shared a few things.
Now I know you’re at this inn because of your mom’s list, for starters.
But the list is just what got you here, not why you stayed.
There’s something you want from this place, or need, that you don’t have yet.
” Edie snatched at her pants before they could finish slithering to the floor.
“You know what I think? You want to play. You’re afraid I’m going to ruin your fun. ”
“Aren’t you?” Cosima was gripping the guest book so hard that her knuckles had turned white.
“I’m not. We’re going to get up, and we’re going to sneak, very quietly, to the dining room, and we’re going to spend this dark and stormy night looking at that guest book.
Maybe it will only be a bunch of names. Or maybe it will turn out to be where Morag writes down her spells, and we can disenchant this inn and find out it’s actually a clean, not-leaky, fucking painting of an English inn. Either way.”
“Will you still make the tea first? I want some now. This feels like a moment for tea and biscuits.”
Edie didn’t feel as brave as she had about that, now that she knew Morag slept in an apartment on the other side of the kitchen. But if she paid close enough attention, she could lift the kettle before it started to whistle. “Um. Yes.”
“And could I have two packets of Jammie Dodgers?”
“As long as you leave my bourbon creams alone, also yes.”
Cosima rose to her feet with the grace of an aristocratic virgin performing a Viennese waltz. “We have a deal.”
She passed the guest book to Edie. It weighed even more than she’d imagined, and it smelled like the antique mall off the interstate that she always badgered her mom to stop at on the way home from Appleton.
They snapped off the lights in the lounge and snuck into the dining room, only turning on a small fake candle in the middle of the table.
Edie made the tea, wincing at every noise, waiting in between noises to see if Morag’s snores were interrupted. She tiptoed back into the dining room with two mugs on saucers, the biscuits gripped to her side by her elbow. “You haven’t peeked?”
“No. I have integrity.”
Edie sat down next to Cosima and slid the book between them. The rain hadn’t let up, but the thunder seemed farther away, and the lightning only touched the outsides of the windows while the inside of the inn remained dark. “Are you ready?”
Cosima nodded. “Open it.”
She said it as solemnly as a girl swearing a blood oath on the playground. Edie felt her soul go still, charged with the gravity of this shared moment. They looked at each other for a breathless heartbeat. Then Cosima smiled.
Her smile wrinkled the bridge of her nose. Devastating.
Edie focused on the book.
The leather creaked when Cosima lifted the cover. The marble endpaper was olive and pink swirled together, and the first page had an illustrated picture frame, in the middle of which was a photograph of a beautiful square-jawed woman with dark braids, a straw hat, an apron, and a cigarette.
“Oh my god, that’s Morag,” Edie said.
Cosima gently pulled the photo from the slits in the paper that held it down and turned it over. In spidery and faded ink was the innkeeper’s name, Morag Tourmaline Beveridge, and a date.
“This was taken almost fifty years ago.” Cosima handed the picture to Edie. “Imagine doing the same thing for fifty years.”
Edie studied the picture. “That’s the goddamned dream, isn’t it? All that time to make something real, something that will outlast you. It’s not always the same, it’s fifty years of different things that add up to a legacy.”
Cosima turned in her chair. “You’re serious.”
“Cosima Frank, I opened a vegan cheese shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a city—and I’m just now realizing you might not know this—where tens of thousands of football fans wear foam cheese wedges on their heads.
And there wasn’t a single moment, until the end, that I didn’t believe in what I’d built and want it to still be there a hundred years after I was gone. ”
To her relief, Cosima didn’t laugh. Her eyebrows were pensive. “I do know something about legacy,” she said.
Right. That made sense. Edie gave her back the picture. “I imagine you must. And I also have to guess you might have different feelings about it than I do, because, after all, you’re here.”
Cosima nodded, her lips a tight line.
“Should we dig in?”
Cosima touched her finger to the range of dates on the page with the photograph. “If this guest book starts as long ago as this, my parents will be in here.”
“Then we have to dig in. It’s what Phoebe Frank wanted.”
“Stop calling her ‘Phoebe Frank.’” Cosima sounded distracted, trailing her finger down the edge of the paper.
She turned to the first page, revealing a long column of signatures on one side.
There were pairs of printed lines on the facing page for guests to write something to the proprietor or for future guests to read.
“Let’s find out why Phoebe thought this inn was magic.” Edie leaned in and moved the battery-operated candle closer, lighting up the page.
Her shoulder touched Cosima’s, and she didn’t move away.
She tried to resist the protective feeling that came over her with the lowering of Cosima’s walls, but it was useless. As her mother liked to say, Edie had to be Edie.
If Cosima needed to drop her guard to let a little magic in, Edie would keep her safe.
It wasn’t the smartest impulse to follow.
Edie was no longer able to deny that she had manifested an unfortunate crush on Phoebe Frank’s daughter, despite her best intentions.
But she could keep a lid on it. They could spend what was left of this dark and stormy night traveling through the pages of this guest book together. Cosima could play.
Edie would worry about her relentlessly optimistic heart in the morning.