Chapter Fifteen
“I can hear you.” Cosima pressed the cool glass of her phone against her ear and stepped back into the long, stony passage of A?tre Saint-Maclou to stand in front of a pair of wooden doors. The interpretive signage said the doors led to the original chapel.
She could really use some divine intervention right now.
“Excellent. As I said, I’ve been reluctant to interfere with your vacation, but there’s a bit of friction we should discuss.”
Vacation. A bit of friction. Duncan’s tone didn’t hold recrimination or passive aggression, but Cosima nonetheless had to squeeze her eyes shut against the pain of the knives, twisting around the plate of pastries she’d devoured from Patisserie Julliene.
They’d had a delicious breakfast at the concierge’s recommendation.
Edie had surprised Cosima by asking the counter server a few questions about the bread in a slow but serviceable hybrid of culinary French and English, which drew one of the bakers out of the kitchen.
By the time they left, Edie and the baker had exchanged vegan pastry recipes, and Cosima had been replete with sweetness of every kind.
Whatever she had thought it would be to make love to Edie, she hadn’t understood it would involve every cell of her body and all of her feelings.
She hadn’t known it would balance her life on the edge of heartbreak, and that she wouldn’t care.
She’d been trying to hang on to the morning since she saw Duncan’s name on the screen of her phone, but she could feel it slipping away.
A bit of friction—it wasn’t what Duncan meant. She settled in to translate from Duncan to English what level of crisis had precipitated his calling her. She knew it had to be a crisis, because he would have avoided reaching out otherwise. He wouldn’t want her to have feelings.
“Friction?”
“Indeed. It’s been requested by the board that you appoint an interim CEO.
They’ve voted on this request, I should say.
Keep in mind, there was a majority of only one vote.
Nearly half the board isn’t as anxious to see the matter resolved.
There may be some room for finesse. Options they would be willing to consider. ”
Cosima unbuttoned her coat, feeling constricted by its fit over the sweater she’d purchased in the hotel shop.
She translated Duncan to mean that half the board was angry and wanted an interim CEO appointed.
The other half was angry and couldn’t agree enough on what to do about it to form the coalition required for a majority vote.
“Options?”
“Of course, I’m not sure. It may be easier to suss out the resolution they’d settle for if you had a short window to return. No more than forty-eight hours. Your office could make the arrangements.”
Like a spike between her eyes, she had a sudden vision of the PFS studio building in Burbank with the California sun bouncing off its mirrored windows and heating the concrete pathways to its ultra-modern lobby.
Here, now, the wood she laid her palm against was nearly black with age. She could hear Edie talking to a docent, his French-accented English amused with whatever Edie was telling him.
She couldn’t do Burbank. She couldn’t. She had to claw back, wherever she could. Here was where the messy hit the road. “I’m not able to return to LA.”
Duncan was quiet.
Cosima watched her finger trace the wood carvings, softened to indistinct shapes with time. Her stomach cramped, forcing her to silently suck in a breath.
“Perhaps we could arrange a teleconference?”
His voice was so familiar, so easy and reasonable.
He’d been patient with her. His diplomacy was legendary.
He’d doubtless covered for her generously, such that the board members had no choice but to believe that Cosima’s departure had been planned, her trip providing time away for her to recover and return ready to work.
She wasn’t ready for anything but the next time she could kiss Edie and the next clue on the map.
“I don’t think a teleconference is possible.
” Cosima tried to relax her shoulders, her lower back, searching for a path to a deep breath.
Anything to loosen the sickening knot in her middle that told her that a teleconference wouldn’t be a big deal, and she should just go ahead and arrange it.
The knot was so certain that a fifty-year-old company would implode unless she, Cosima Frank, was pleasant to Duncan and deferential to the wishes of its board.
It wouldn’t, though. It really wouldn’t. Cosima knew for a fact that her mother had left the board in a spitting fit more than once while she did what she needed or wanted to do. It had been enough, always, that she didn’t want to.
Well. Cosima didn’t want to.
“I can’t,” she told Duncan, this time with princessly authority. “I will, of course, do what needs to be done, but I’ve earned the right to take my time to decide what that is and to remind the board I’m not fourteen or their secretary.”
“What’s the matter, love?” She could hear the creak of Duncan’s leather desk chair as he sat down.
She imagined him removing his reading glasses and reaching for his tea, which had probably gotten cold as he worked.
It was the end of the day in California, a day in which Duncan had gone to an unscheduled emergency board meeting, likely after putting out fires for An American Castle’s Garden and making excuses for her, and then been unable to prevent the board from passing this resolution that obligated him to call her.
A long and difficult day. He sounded tired.
Cosima couldn’t answer his question, and she was surprised to realize it was because here, right where she was, there wasn’t anything wrong.
There always had been, before.
“I don’t have an excuse,” she said. “I don’t believe I need one.”
Duncan went quiet again. Twice in the same call, he’d let what she said stand without trying to say it back to her a slightly different way.
He cleared his throat. “Since you’ve been gone—actually even before you left—I’ve felt increasingly ashamed that I didn’t speak to you about your mother.
Her illness. Her. You. Us. We should have talked with honesty a long time ago, or at least talked about what was actually happening instead of what I dearly wished was happening.
I must sound to you like I’m not making any sense at all. ”
Cosima wondered if the kiss she’d given Edie on the cheek was enchanted, and it was opening every previously closed box that held feelings. Her heart. Her sexual awareness. The real story of her family. Edie’s insights.
Her mother had said Gregory Place was magic, but she had not said what kind.
“Duncan.”
“No, please listen. I did try, Cosima. I tried not to enable Phoebe. Her habits. I encouraged her to get help.”
Cosima studied the wood beneath her fingertips. She could hear Edie laughing with the docent, and she wished she were in the sunlight beside her. “Did you?”
“Several times over the years. Probably not as many as I should have, although I’ve joined a group, a support group, online, and I’ve learned it’s common for the family and friends of someone with a problem like your mother’s to assign blame to themselves.”
Cosima let go of the post and crossed to where the light slanted across the covered walkway.
She stepped into it so she could look out into the courtyard at Edie in her green jacket, her hair shining.
From the hotel shop, Edie had picked out a black T-shirt with an image of Joan of Arc above the word NORMANDIE in old-fashioned lettering.
When Cosima talked to Edie, she never had to translate. Edie had witnessed so many of her emotions, which meant Cosima had the experience of her emotions being generously received instead of shushed. Redirected. Oppressed.
She liked feeling. She liked knowing she was safe to express herself. It meant she was expressing herself more, and reacquainting herself with the girl she’d been before she had grown old enough to step into the role of her mother’s silent everything.
Whatever happened between them, her time with Edie would be the most generous gift anyone had given her in her very privileged life.
“Al-Anon? Is that your support group?”
“It is. Have you found them as well? I have to say that there’s nothing like having your completely unique, secret, and impossible problem turn out to be the same problem thirty other people in your group have been going through. Humbling.”
“A friend told me there’s a lot to get into there.
So maybe, since we’re working on this, let’s call what we’re talking about ‘Phoebe’s alcoholism.
’” Cosima couldn’t spend the rest of her life not saying it while it stabbed her in the stomach.
“You asked her to get help with her alcoholism, and she refused. You tried not to enable her drinking, but you weren’t even able to join a group to get help for yourself until she was gone, which means she wouldn’t let you when she was alive.
She wouldn’t permit anyone to help her. She wouldn’t admit to the doctors or the nurses at the hospital that the problem with her liver was the consequence of her drinking. That was the secret she made us keep.”
“Yes.” Duncan’s agreement came much more quickly than Cosima might have expected. He’d probably believed that she was as unwilling to break the seal of silence as he was.
“Her list, with the museum sleepover and the skydiving?” Cosima asked. “She was trying to show me the mother she would’ve been if she hadn’t drank. She was trying to fit everything in before she died.”
“Yes,” Duncan said again.
“If she’d asked me, I would have told her she didn’t have to do that. I loved the mother I had. I still love her. I love you.” Cosima took a deep breath. “The father you are to me.”
“I love you, too.” Duncan was not holding it together. Neither was she. “And I hope you know I have always loved you as my daughter.”