Chapter Eleven #2
You love her, her heart answered.
Cosima coughed. This was actually dire.
“There’s over a thousand unread messages in my text app, just since I arrived,” she said. “Twice that many in my inbox, and all of them carrying with them a certain amount of worry that I, personally, will end the world.”
“What?”
Cosima still was not looking at Edie, but she could hear her confusion. She trained her eyes on a marble ceiling goddess.
“I’m the person who selects the next head of Phoebe Frank Studios.
Because I wouldn’t ascend to my mother’s throne, I have to choose who sits there.
At a certain level in the movie business, money and power metamorphose into emotions.
Dark magic. Fortune-telling. It’s dangerous if there’s a vacuum.
Guys in suits start reading signs and wonders like an astrological chart, and I wouldn’t care, Edie.
I wouldn’t care at all, except there are good people, regular humans, who simply work at PFS.
They feed their families with paychecks that bear a facsimile of my mother’s signature. ”
“But you haven’t done it,” Edie said. “That’s not a dig. I probably wouldn’t have done it either. I’m having secondhand decision paralysis listening to you.”
Cosima risked a look at Edie, who smiled a small but kind smile that made Cosima feel as if a marble ceiling’s worth of psychic burden had been removed from her body.
“Yes. I should have done it. As soon as the funeral was over, I should have selected this person from an array of preapproved candidates, any of whom would fill the vacuum, but instead I got on a plane and came here. Duncan isn’t mentioning any of it.
He’s assuming I’m having a polite meltdown but that I will definitely return and do my job before any harm has been done. ”
“But what’s the harm? If you take the time you need to grieve your mother before you decide what’s next, why is that a problem?” Edie’s expression of distaste made her skepticism clear.
Cosima unbuttoned her jacket, welcoming the air on her neck, her sternum. “The longer I take, the lower the PFS stock price falls. I probably lost the company ten times more money this morning over breakfast than you borrowed and lost for Fauxmage.”
Edie put her hand on her shoulder and squeezed it, raising goose bumps on her skin. “Cosima.”
She had to look at the ceiling again, touching her throat, trying to believe she could breathe.
“And I already know what’s next. Of course that’s been decided.
When I was disappointing my mother by refusing to take the reins of her company, Duncan rescued us.
He reminded Phoebe that my passion was gardening—something I did with him, learned from him—and that I obviously wanted to make and grow something that was mine.
He suggested he and I star in a gardening series.
” She framed out the title in the air in front of her.
“An American Castle’s Garden. We start filming on the grounds at the Castle in a few weeks.
And when I say ‘we,’ I mean Cosmos, the film studio I’ve just started with PFS money.
My staff. My mother actually loved this idea.
It made her happy. It made Duncan happy.
I should be happy. Right now, I should be in LA, working on my show, reassuring the dozens of people that Duncan and I hired that they have work. ”
“I knew you were a gardener.” Edie smiled.
Cosima exhaled, shaky. “You did?”
“I put it together. I also put together you were dealing with something big. This happened around the time Morag was forcing her scary telepathic powers on you about whatever it was.” Edie picked up and squeezed Cosima’s hand.
“My only question, princess, is if you’re trying to run your points up in the game just because I pulled ahead with my tantrum in the church yesterday? ”
Edie had turned her body toward Cosima. Their eyes met fully, but Cosima couldn’t let herself stare into Edie Whitelock’s caring green eyes, so she studied a constellation of blond freckles under her eyebrow in the shape of Orion’s Belt.
“I will take my points,” she said, stiff enough to guard her feelings.
“We’re a pair, huh?” Edie asked. “It might be hard to believe, but if I don’t take my recipe technologist job at A Presto!
Pizza at the end of this month, the world will also end.
It’s true that I’m the only mouth that needs to be fed in my scenario, but I’m twenty-eight years old.
I am conscripted by capitalism to make money for another forty or fifty years so I can have nice things like shelter and transportation.
Save up to see the doctor. You know. Luxuries.
Like you, it’s all been decided already, and there’s something about a lack of choice that really has a way of breaking your heart, doesn’t it? ”
Cosima smiled in an attempt to hold her tears at bay but felt them race down the sides of her nose anyway. “Are you saying we’re rebelling?”
“Hmm. More like we’re putting on a show similar to my four-year-old niece’s when I start filling the bathtub.
Suddenly, the Bluey episode she’s seen seventy thousand times has depths she hasn’t mined that are vital to her continued existence.
Then she’s hungry. Then she has to poop.
Her free will demands encore after encore while reality gets more annoyed.
We’re in our encore era.” Edie looked around them at the magnificent staircase.
“You have to admit it’s pretty fucking good.
We really know how to stall, you and me. ”
Edie pulled one of her legs out from the knot she’d folded them in, bent it over both Cosima’s legs, and gathered her close for a hug.
Her forearms pressed against Cosima’s shoulder blades. Her cheek against Cosima’s ear.
The hug thawed her on the inside, leaving behind the mess of a garden in spring—unregulated, terrified, and so thrilled, it made her nauseated.
Edie started to pull away.
No.
Cosima dragged her hands up and around Edie’s body, and before she knew it she was crushing her. She had to fist one of her hands to keep it from palming the nape of Edie’s neck and pulling her face closer.
“Oof.” Edie squeezed back. “Easy, tiger.”
Cosima accepted this correction but could not make herself let go. “Sorry.”
Edie pulled her arms away and leaned back, holding on to Cosima’s forearms, which were nearly around Edie’s neck. Her face was inches away, her eyes too many different shades of green to name.
“I’m sorry. I know you must be using your giant brain to try to figure out how to fix your situation, or to feel more responsible about it than you should.
” Edie’s voice was low, almost whispering, probably because her face was so close.
Cosima’s body had gone simultaneously syrupy with desire and stony with restraint and hot with feelings.
“I am responsible, as it happens.” She sounded like she’d screamed all night at a concert and tried to talk the next day. Or screamed all night doing something else.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
Edie’s breath smelled like cinnamon toothpaste, which she would never forget, so precisely could she imagine sucking on Edie’s tongue.
“I don’t think your mom was fair to you.
” Edie took a deep breath. “I’ve thought this before, about the list she made.
Her bucket list. In principle, it sounds nice.
It sounds like the kind of story in one of those weepy internet videos your friend sends you in the middle of the night when they’re on their period.
But if I had to guess, Phoebe Frank gave you that list, all made out, without warning, and without any possibility of dissent? ”
Cosima looked at the wool rug covering the step beneath her. “She dictated it to me. She’d put a meeting on my shared calendar for the purpose.”
“Okay. Somewhat worse than I imagined, then. My point is, that kind of thing has to be mutual. It has to mean a great deal to both people. Otherwise, it’s your mom dictating the terms of her good-bye because she has enough power in your relationship to do that.
If she had this list for herself, to do for herself, and you chose to help her or join her”—Edie paused, and Cosima looked up—“do you see how that’s different? ”
Cosima did. She had seen it for a long time, but no one ever said it out loud.
Dictating the terms, avoiding anger or denial, preventing real communication—these moves were the core of how her mother managed her life with Cosima and Duncan.
“She loved me,” Cosima said. “But the way she knew how to love me was to keep me safe. Anger and hard conversations aren’t safe.”
“I believe she loved you,” Edie said softly. “My mom loves me, and in a different way she does the same thing. She tears down anything she thinks isn’t safe or will disappoint me, and sometimes that means tearing down me.”
“But you can’t believe what she says.” Cosima’s voice was still rough. “Why are you taking a job in a pizza crust factory when you want so much more?”
“I tried, Cosima. For once, I decided to believe in me. I had my big chance. It didn’t work.”
“No one gets just one chance, though.”
“And no one person is responsible for another person’s legacy. In fact, the only real legacy your mom has right now is a daughter who ran away and a widowed ‘companion’ she wouldn’t permit to be her partner or your father.”
Cosima sucked in a breath.
“I’m sorry.” Edie’s voice was gentle. “It’s just, I’m looking at this magnificent pile of a building, and it didn’t keep Gregory Gregory alive, did it?”
Cosima studied the ceiling, too, and noticed another bearded, robed marble god, holding up a scroll under the bright-blue false sky. “Just his name.”
Then they looked at each other, solemn, and Cosima lost track of the edges of her body again, dissolving into the space between the two of them.
Edie’s leg was still around hers on the step. They were still within hugging distance. The words finished settling between them, like snow in a globe, and she saw Edie so clearly.
Slowly, Cosima leaned forward. When she closed her eyes, she heard Edie inhale with surprise, which made her smile as she kissed her on her cheek.
Just one soft, smiling press of her lips against Edie’s skin, and then a moment when she lingered instead of pulling away—lingered so she could breathe in Edie’s scent, because this wasn’t a kiss for a friend.
But it wasn’t a kiss with a future, either.
Edie slid her hand around the back of Cosima’s neck just as she retreated a reluctant millimeter. “Wait. Let me—”
“Um. I basically need to use the stairs?”
They turned their heads together toward the voice. It belonged to a young person, a student, with faded purple hair shaved at the sides. The student wore a crop top that said PROTECT TRANS KIDS.
“Pardon us,” Cosima said. “We’re sorry.”
She wasn’t sorry.
“Don’t tell Goody Bidderscombe,” Edie said.
“What?” The student tipped her purple head like a bird.
“We were just figuring out where to go,” Edie explained.
“We have this set of clues, and the second one is here somewhere, but probably not obvious because the clues are from the seventies. It’s got to be something that’s been here for a long time, though, because the clues are so old, and whoever made them couldn’t know when someone would be searching.
Maybe it’s a statue. How many statues are there? ”
The student shrugged, unperturbed by this rapid stream of context-free speech. “If you’re looking for something that’s been here a long time, I’d try the library. Not the university library. Like, Gregory’s. They have a bunch of stuff he left behind in displays in there.”
The student bounced up the stairs.
The library.
“Get out Agatha’s map.” Cosima could hear her own frustration. She hadn’t gotten to find out what happened after Edie asked her not to move away, and she’d really, really wanted to.
“Already on it.” Edie’s voice didn’t sound regular, either. She unfolded her jacket and pulled the envelope with the map out of it, then opened it carefully. “Okay, so you and Tam worked out that the starting point on the map was here.”
“The manor.” Cosima put her finger on the sketch of the manor at the bottom left corner. “Yes, because underneath it, Agatha wrote ‘The game’s afoot,’ which is the epigraph from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that she put at the beginning of her first book.”
“And these other sketches are probably hints to the places we have to go in each country, but we don’t know the order to visit them. Presumably, something here will tell us where to go next, or one of these small drawings we already decided were part of the clues.”
“It has to be something that was here when Agatha was here. I think the student had a good idea.”
Edie stared at the map for several moments, her hair curtaining her face. “Cosima.”
“Yes?”
“I think so, too. You know why?”
“Why? Don’t be coy, it’s rude.”
Edie’s quick smile made dimples appear in both cheeks. “I don’t even know what coy looks like. Look at the decoration she sketched in the border around the manor illustration.”
Cosima looked. “It’s a ladder? With wheels?”
“Yes!”
“Follow me.”
This time, Cosima managed to make her voice sound the way she wanted it to, which was, as Edie liked to say, imperious.
She needed that little bit of distance between them again to survive.
Just a small space without a bridge so she could breathe without thinking about lemons and cut grass and small red mice.
“Anywhere,” Edie told her.
I wish we could follow each other anywhere. Everywhere.
She grimaced back at the god on the ceiling.