Chapter Thirty-Eight
Saoirse grabbed another glass of champagne from a passing tray. She wasn’t of legal drinking age yet, but hell, it was her party, and no one was going to tell her that she couldn’t enjoy herself.
She waved across the room at one of her old school friends from Choate.
In her alcohol-induced haze, she couldn’t remember the girl’s name, but they had been on the equestrian team together, and once, the girl had shared her cherry lip balm with her when it was cold and Saoirse’s lips were chapped.
The intimacy of the gesture had struck Saoirse at the time, as she had pressed the slick balm to her lips and then handed it back, and the girl had, without hesitating or thinking twice about it, applied it to her own lips and then slipped it back into her coat pocket.
“Don’t worry,” Jacqueline said, appearing by her side, her red dress noticeably speckled with raindrops, “we have the tents in the garage. We can have them up in no time.”
“No, no, I already told you we don’t need the tents,” Saoirse said.
Jacqueline had tried to set up the tents before the party started as a preventative measure, but Saoirse had argued to have them taken down.
The tents were ugly. You couldn’t see the stars through them.
Besides, Saoirse couldn’t help but feel that putting up the tents was unlucky, as if the gesture would manifest the rain.
“Okay, but the storm—” Jacqueline said, clearly confused.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Saoirse said. “It’s only misting.”
Saoirse took a swig of her champagne. She felt gloriously warm and elated, buoyed up. It was her birthday, and everything was—would be—perfect. The mist would stop soon, and they would all go out and enjoy the fireworks.
“So that’s a no to the tents, then—you’re sure?” Jacqueline asked, sounding concerned.
“Yes,” Saoirse said happily. “No tents!”
“All right, dear, it’s your birthday,” Jacqueline said resignedly before wandering off.
No sooner had Jacqueline left her than Bass was at her side, leaning forward to give her a kiss on the cheek. She could smell the brandy on his breath, sweet and nutty.
“Happy birthday, my dear,” Bass said cheerfully.
“Yes,” Saoirse said, raising her glass to toast herself. “Happy fucking birthday to me!”
She took a swig.
“I didn’t care for how we left things the other day,” Bass said.
For a moment, Saoirse didn’t know what he was talking about, and then she remembered—the financial plan that Bass and Ransom had drawn up, the one that she had unceremoniously deposited in the trash can.
“Oh, that,” Saoirse said. She didn’t want to think about that now. It was her birthday. She wanted to think only about happy things.
“I believe it was a misunderstanding, on both of our parts,” Bass said. “I think, if we could just sit down, the two of us, and talk—”
“Yes, but not now,” Saoirse said, trying hard not to slur her words. Her mind was warm and fuzzy; she couldn’t think straight. “This is a party.” She gestured to the room around them. “Let’s drink. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”
She raised her glass a little too heartily, and champagne sloshed over the edges and onto the floor.
Bass didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, yes, of course,” Bass said. “You’re right. Actually, I just came over here to give you your gift.”
He fumbled in his suit jacket, and the anticipation rose in Saoirse’s chest. Bass was great at giving gifts.
Masterful, even. For her thirteenth birthday, he had taken her to Studio 54, and she had seen Bianca Jagger ride a white horse across the dance floor in an off-the-shoulder red evening gown.
For another birthday, he had gotten her a navy blue Hermès bag in crocodile skin, just like the one Grace Kelly owned.
Of course, Saoirse couldn’t bring herself to use the bag anymore, but she also couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it.
It sat on the shelf in her closet like a prized art exhibit, its beauty bringing her joy anytime she saw it.
Bass pulled out a thin, long box and opened the lid. Inside was a bracelet with a delicate gold chain, and from it hung several charms: a sun, a moon, and a dozen stars.
“I wanted to give you something to go with your necklace,” he said.
Saoirse’s hand went subconsciously to the pendant at the base of her neck, the one she always wore. Its inscription was emblazoned in her mind—the celestial bodies named there, echoed now in the charms of the bracelet Bass presented her with: the sun, the moon, the stars.
“Mother gave me this,” Saoirse said. “For my fourteenth birthday.”
A lump rose in her throat at the memory.
“It’s from an E. E. Cummings poem,” Bass said.
“Yes, I know,” Saoirse said. “Mother’s favorite poet. She kept a book of his poems on her bedside table.”
“Yes,” Bass said, nodding. He looked like he was somewhere far away in the past in that moment, in a time when her mother was flesh and blood, rather than just a memory.
“You know it?” Saoirse asked.
“Of course I know it,” Bass said. “I was the one who gave her that book, for her fortieth birthday.”
Something cut through Saoirse’s champagne-induced haze—a needling feeling underneath her rib cage.
She shook her head to clear it. Bass’s words didn’t make any sense.
She recalled the hand-scrawled inscription on the inside title page of the poetry book that her mother kept on her nightstand: Love defies reason.
It was unsigned, but it had always been obvious to Saoirse who had gifted her mother the book, who had written that inscription. It was a book of love poems, after all.
“Daddy gave her that,” Saoirse said.
“Charles?” Bass said, breaking from his reverie. He laughed. “No, Charles was always more of a Keats man. Or Tennyson. He always said Cummings was too esoteric, too idiosyncratic, to be to his liking.”
Saoirse instinctively took a step back.
It didn’t make any sense, what he was telling her.
Or perhaps the problem was that it did make sense, a great deal of sense—it was more that Saoirse didn’t want it to.
The pieces were falling into place against her will.
Every memory like a puzzle piece fastening itself together, forming a picture she didn’t want to see.
Bass at every birthday party, every Christmas, every family vacation.
The way he rested his arm on the back of her mother’s chair when they were at dinner.
One time, while stepping off the boat onto the pier, Saoirse’s mother had lost her footing and fallen back into the boat, and Bass had cried out, as if he had been the one to fall.
He’d jumped down into the boat after her to make sure she was all right.
“You’re lying,” Saoirse said. “You’re a liar.”
Only then did Bass seem to realize that something was wrong. He reached out and grabbed Saoirse’s forearm to steady her.
“My dear, are you all right?” he asked.
Saoirse’s throat was constricting. She couldn’t breathe.
The next realization was cold and sharp, like a knife cutting through her: of course her mother hadn’t given her that necklace, the one she always wore, the one that proclaimed how her mother really felt about her.
It had been Bass all along. Bass, the master of gifts.
Which meant that Saoirse had never misunderstood her mother’s resentment.
Her dislike, her lack of regard—which had always shown so plainly in her mother’s actions toward her—was probably exactly how she had really felt.
Saoirse groped for the chain around her neck.
It wasn’t tight, but still, it felt like it was choking her; she had to get it off.
She grasped at it and pulled hard—one sharp yank, then two.
She felt the clasp give; there was a sharp pain at the back of her neck.
She pulled the chain off her, and she felt the pendant slide off and fall into the neckline of her dress, but she barely noticed.
She clasped the chain so hard that the sharp stars that jutted out cut into the flesh of her palm, and the pain was a welcome, if insufficient, distraction from her thoughts.
“Saoirse—what?” Bass started, alarmed, but she cut him off.
“Did Daddy know?” she asked. She could barely get the words out.
Out of everyone in her family, her relationship with her father had been the only one that hadn’t been riddled with complications. He had loved her without strings. That had been the one pure thing in her life.
And it wasn’t even real.
Bass looked confused at first and then panicked. He removed his hand from her arm and looked away from her.
“I don’t . . . I’m not sure what you think—”
“Tell me the truth, for once,” Saoirse said, her voice loud.
The people closest to them stopped talking, turned to look.
Bass stuttered, red in the face, but he wouldn’t give her an answer.
Saoirse felt a lump rise into her throat.
Maybe her father had died thinking she was still his little girl. But if there was a heaven, if there was an afterlife, maybe now he knew the truth: that she didn’t belong to him. That the one thing that had been good about her life was actually a lie.
Saoirse ardently wished there weren’t a heaven or a hell, or any sentience or omniscience granted to us after death. She wished for oblivion. Blinding and numbing oblivion. That way, at least, things would never change between them. They’d go on, just as they had been, until she died.
Saoirse dropped the chain of her necklace at Bass’s feet.
“I don’t know how you live with yourself,” she said.
Desperate, Bass grabbed Saoirse, hard, by the elbow. “Saoirse, please—” he said, but Saoirse ripped her arm out of his grasp.
“Don’t touch me,” she shouted, and several more people turned to look.
Saoirse felt someone next to her then, a man, but she was too disoriented to notice who it was. She was dizzy. She thought she might pass out. She reached out to steady herself, and the man took her arm, wrapped it in his.
“There you are, Meerkat,” the man said, as if he’d been looking for her.