Chapter Nine #2
“Everyone,” Cosima said. “You know, my mother wrote me a letter that she left here for me to find. I’m staying at Gregory Place because she put it on a list we were working our way through before she died, and of course, when I came here, she had something for me to do.
Find this letter and read it. Maybe she thought I would learn where I came from. Or what I was for.”
“A director in more ways than one.”
“I don’t remember that my mother ever, not even once, made a rule. Not a curfew, not a single reminder not to run through the halls. I wasn’t grounded. She never yelled.”
“But there were rules, I’m guessing.”
Cosima closed her eyes. “I have never, ever not known what Phoebe Frank wanted me to do. In any given moment of my life. Even this moment. After she’s died.”
Tam shifted his body in the chair, making it creak. “Baby.”
“Baby?” Cosima was mostly certain Tam hadn’t addressed her by a pet name, but not entirely.
“My great big tuxedo tom. Oh, he was the worst. Fat as a steer at market, but agile enough to cause trouble. He’d leave me a row of headless mice at my doorstep every night like a ghoul, then settle down in my lap in front of the fire as sweet as any creature could possibly be.
He slept curled up at my feet. If I moved even a little, his needle teeth would sink into my toes.
He hissed at children. Swiped at dogs. The vet fixed him, but somehow he got my neighbor’s prize Persian pregnant. That was a right mess.”
Tam’s grin was more of a grimace. His voice had been getting rougher as he told her this, making her heart beat fast.
“The day he died, in my arms, at the old vet’s, I wept so long, his fur was sopping.
I carried him home in a blanket, and I didn’t sleep until I had made him a resting place.
It was spring. I lined the hole with tulips and hyacinth, and placed him in.
Took me ages to cover him over with earth, because then it would be final, you see?
I’d never be able to hold him again. I’d never feel his fat full stone of weight on my lap or hear him thundering down the stairs.
There’s been a Baby-shaped hole in my life ever since.
I closed the pub for a week and couldn’t leave the house. Lost my voice from crying.”
“Tam.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He leaned forward. “Wasn’t a year later my dad died.
I was with him when he went, taking a shift for my sister.
He had mostly slept for days, had already refused to eat, would have only small sips of water.
Told us he saw our mum, and I believe he did, even if I never saw him do more than give my mum orders from behind the bar and glare at her when he thought she was too slow getting food out.
My mum would’ve come if my dying dad wanted her to, because he was good about them unspoken rules, as well. ”
“Oh.” Cosima understood this. People so powerful they could summon a ghost to do their bidding.
“My mum begged me not to tell him I was gay,” Tam said.
“But I was in love. I guess I thought, or wished, that he loved me enough to accept one thing in his life he didn’t understand.
Funny, because ninety-five percent of my life looked exactly like his.
I’d just be going about one thing different.
And not even that different! I loved Killian, and my dad had six children with my mum, so I figured he must know something about love. ”
“He didn’t understand.” Cosima’s cheeks and ears felt too hot, but her stomach was a little lighter, less painful. She tried to trust it.
“I don’t know if he did.” Tam ran his finger along the lip of his glass. “He didn’t say one word about it. I told him, he turned around and pulled a bitter and put it on the bar for me to take to a table. Message received.”
Cosima shook her head, thinking about wordless messages and how much power they’d had in her own life.
She grabbed the map off the table and held it up.
“Phoebe was like this. She gave me a map showing every place I was supposed to go and what I was supposed to do once I got there. But what I’m realizing is that there was no destination.
She wrote to me in that letter about how she had fallen in love with my father, how she loved him so much, it was overdetermined that I would someday exist. But did it never occur to her to tell me, once I was here, where I was going?
Was I simply supposed to follow her so that she could see every option up ahead and choose for me? ”
“What do you think?”
Cosima cut off a big bite of her sticky toffee pudding.
It was perfect sweetness. The perfect foil to this horrible, amazing, confusing day.
“I think maybe when my father died, she changed. She was happy to tackle the risks and pitfalls of Hollywood and come out on top, but once she’d loved and lost, that was her limit.
I think every time she came close to any kind of risk with Duncan or me, she pulled back.
More silence took over, and less was said. ”
“You’re describing someone incredibly powerful.”
“Incredibly complicated.”
He sighed. “That’s why I told you about Baby and my dad.
When Baby died, oh, but it was pure, pitch-black grief.
I knew what he was, I knew every bit, so I knew what I had lost, and I knew what part of my heart I’d lost with him.
When my dad died, duck, well. Do you know how surprised I was when there was so much I didn’t lose, but gained?
Acceptance, just to start. I felt so much better without him.
That’s complicated. Relief, the freedom of an open life, but the ability to still imagine everything we might have said and didn’t?
I would have rather pitched myself off a cliff.
I’d have rather felt ten times the grief of when Baby died.
It would have meant the love was pure, wouldn’t it?
The hurt and pain would have come from something I understood, instead of a hundred things I had to learn in the years he’s been gone. ”
“So what the fuck, Tam?” Cosima had another bite of pudding. “I’ve got more than an English pub’s worth of a legacy to tend to, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“You’ll find yourself stopped short, again and again, with having to figure something out. You’ll make something up, and it will work, or it won’t. Either way, you’ll learn something about yourself. It’s just that.” Tam finished the bourbon.
Cosima poured custard over the pudding she had left, and she and Tam let their conversation settle over them while she thought of nothing but rich sponge and vanilla custard.
“You know I’ve never had a romantic relationship?” Cosima drew her fork through custard and crumbs. “And you’d think, after everything we’ve just talked about, the reason would be that Phoebe didn’t want me to. But that wasn’t it. I’m not sure she noticed, actually.”
Tam laughed. “You did start this conversation talking about Edie.” He lifted his huge, bushy brows, but Cosima ignored the knowing look.
“It wasn’t about Phoebe, for a change. There was simply a moment when I realized I didn’t want to.
I’ve always loved romantic movies and books and music, but there has been this empty space I didn’t understand when it came to me and romance.
Me and sex.” She glanced at Tam. He didn’t seem embarrassed by the intimacy of her confession.
“There was never anything I needed or wanted from anyone I ever met.”
“Folks know more about that now. The ace spectrum, it’s called. You find it?”
Cosima made a design in the custard with the tines of her fork. “Yes. But identifying myself on that spectrum has been the only thing I’ve been able to do. There’s never been a hard click. With anything or anyone.”
“And I say again, you started us here with Edie.”
“I did.” Cosima put her hand on her stomach. It didn’t twist. It didn’t tighten.
“Any clicks?”
“Here’s my problem. If there are clicks, what could be done?
There could be a castanet band of clicking, but”—Cosima put her fingers in her ears—“la-la-la-la. I live in LA. Edie lives in Wisconsin. Our time here is limited. I don’t know how much Edie told you about what she’s been through, but she’s dealing with a lot.
I am also dealing with a lot, and I’ll have more to deal with the moment I touch down at home.
Years’ worth of more. And, of course, she has given me no indication whatsoever that there is even a teeny, tiny click for her.
In fact, we spend a lot of our time together arguing. Bickering.” Their charming banter.
Tam folded his hands on the scarred table. “So it begins. The great Cosima Frank experiment.”
“But I don’t want to experiment with Edie. She should have something big. Something no one else would give her.”
Tam lifted the map from the table with a raised eyebrow.
“Yes. That. But the treasure is the least of what she should have—no, what she should expect someone to give her. If a world existed where she could be mine, I’d spend the rest of my life raising her expectations.”
Tam’s face said it all, but he wisely didn’t do more than nod.
Cosima adjusted her posture to create a bit of distance between herself and that confession.
“She was so excited. I saw it in her face, before she counted herself out. She wants to go where the map tells her to go and find what it asks her to find.” She pulled it back across the table toward herself and ran her finger along the soft edge of the paper.
“Personally? I’m not looking for instructions from the past life of some Welsh novelist. But wherever this could take Edie, I’d like to go along. ”
“Interesting that you see this”—Tam tapped the map—“as simply going along and not something that could change your own direction.”
“That’s enough therapy for tonight, Tam.
” Cosima softened her stern tone with a smile.
“But if I could ask you for one more thing, could you take a look at the map and tell me everything that you notice? I’m hoping a local might see a few things that we”—Cosima shot a look at Tam, whose knowing grin was entirely too self-satisfied—“might otherwise miss.”
“Will do. And, look, the rain’s let up. I’ll have a peek at this and call Killian.
He’s upstairs settled in with reality TV and his chocolate, I’m certain, but I’d like to have him drive you back to Gregory Place.
It will take him a bit to get shoes on and come down, so I’ll have a moment to study this while we wait. ”
Cosima let herself lean back into the upholstery.
Her gaze caught Edie’s jacket. She brushed her hand over the soft fabric, imagining she could smell the grass-and-lemon smell of Pears soap mixed up with the old incense and candle wax of the church, the apple blossoms that had been everywhere today, and just a little bit of sheep.
She had no doubt she could convince Edie Whitelock to find this treasure with her. The thought made it easy for Cosima to understand why, when she was on the plane over the Atlantic Ocean, she’d felt like there was absolutely nothing under her feet and she was hurtling unmoored through space.
Because she was.