Chapter Twenty-Four
twenty-four
AUGUST 2024
DAY 5 IN THE HOUSE
LUCILLE pulled into the parking lot of Reid’s office. It was late enough that the sky was darkening. When she went inside, the lights clicked on. No one was at the reception desk, so she headed straight to Reid’s office.
He stood to greet her. “Am I your last appointment?” Lucille looked around. “What’s keeping you here?”
Reid ran his fingers through his rumpled hair. “This really complicated will for a producer. I’m currently following up on eight NDAs. It’s like pulling teeth.”
“I assume you won’t tell me who it is.”
Reid gave her a cryptic smile. “You can probably google it.”
“It’s warm in here.”
“Yeah. They turn the AC off after seven.” He rolled up his sleeves.
“Can’t you pass this one off to an associate?”
“I told her to go home. I wanted to handle this. I know the producer’s family.”
Of course he would. Reid was Eugene Lyman’s son, after all. He had Eugene’s height and his smooth voice that could captivate the attention of a room. He could have been an actor, but instead he chose to parse out their legacies in fine print. I want to be a writer , he’d told her at that party. And yet he was here. What had happened? “Can I sit?”
He started. “Right. Come in.” As he guided Lucille toward the chair, his hand slipped to the small of her back and she glanced at him again. He sat back down on the other side of the desk. “So, what came up?”
Lucille sank into the chair. “This isn’t really related to the will… I just wanted to talk.” She exhaled. “To someone.”
“Lucy, are you okay? You seem shaken.”
That question. To be asked if she was okay was a sign of weakness. It meant that she must be visibly unraveling. To be fair, maybe she was. She was seeing flowers in books, seeing her sister in the mirrors, seeing walls filled with dirt, rippling as if it were alive. “I’m okay. I’m trying to make sense of what happened between my parents.” She reached into her tote and laid it all out in front of her: The screenplay. The divorce documents. The slip of paper. “I went through my mother’s things.” She lowered her voice. “They’d been fighting that summer. About money. And their careers. But I didn’t know how bad it was. And I didn’t know—” She swallowed. “Mā had tried to file for divorce that summer. And Dad recommended her to a psychiatric facility.”
She saw Reid’s eyes widen. She said slowly, “I know… they were happy sometimes. They took trips together. They went to film festivals together. They went to Cannes that summer. Dad brought home flowers for her all the time…” She flung her hand at the papers. “And yet all this still happened. I don’t know what to make of it.”
There was an unnerving silence. Reid reached across the desk and laid his hand on her arm. “I don’t mean to pry. So please stop me if I am. But was something going on with your mother that spring?”
Lucille looked up. “What do you mean?”
That spring . Lucille said, “I think she was… frustrated? She didn’t like Dad’s production company. And she wasn’t… getting many roles. I thought that was all it was.”
“I remember that, actually,” Reid said. “My dad talked about it. He’d been all set to cast your mother in a movie.”
“Right, I remember that. But at the last minute he picked someone else.”
“Because your dad talked him out of it.”
Lucille stiffened. “He did?”
Reid nodded. “He told my dad to reconsider. That she wouldn’t be a good fit for the role. Because her condition was… fragile.”
“What do you mean, fragile ?” Lucille asked sharply.
“I don’t know. Mentally unwell, it sounded like. I just remember overhearing at dinner.” Reid sounded almost apologetic. He didn’t quite meet her eyes.
“What else were your parents saying?”
“Well.” A shadow crossed his expression. “You know. My parents loved to speculate. My mom especially. They couldn’t face the fact that their own family was a mess. So they projected outward at other families.”
“And?”
“They said that something wasn’t quite right between your parents. My mom guessed some kind of jealousy, infidelity, maybe—” He met her eyes. “I don’t know. It was just my mom.”
“And then what? What else did they say?”
“That’s all I heard.” Reid’s shoulders sank. “I don’t know any more. I’m sorry.”
Lucille ground her jaw. There were two possibilities here why Dad had talked Eugene Lyman out of casting Mā. Either her mother’s mental condition really was unstable enough that she couldn’t act in movies. Or—
Dad had purposefully tried to sabotage Mā’s career.
Which one was it? Mā was angry that summer. Lucille had heard her scream over the terrace and then drive off one day. But that was the only incident she could think of. It didn’t seem like behavior that warranted a recommendation to a psychiatric facility.
Lucille considered the second possibility. Even she had sensed a subtle and mounting envy from Dad. He hadn’t seemed stable that summer either. He’d come home late sometimes, jittery, stomping too loudly around the kitchen. She had realized later in life that he was probably on coke. Other substances, maybe, too. After his overdose, she’d had to accept that there were things about him she didn’t know. He wasn’t the person she thought he was.
But would he have gone this far?
She tried to gather the papers together quickly, but there were too many. Her breaths came short and fast; she could feel the panic starting to take over.
“Lucille?” He jumped up and came around the desk, reaching out to steady her. “Hey, hey. You need water? I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to trigger all this—”
Her voice shook. She fought to control it. “All these things I wish I knew about my parents, and now there’s no way to find out.”
Reid knelt near her; his hand on hers. She could smell his cologne: wood and spices. Again, she felt this unbearable tenderness. She wondered if Reid would turn away like her ex-husband would and let her tend to her wounds in private. Lucille had always considered that detachment a mercy. Trained herself to think it. But still Reid looked upon her intently, and she felt the same familiar warmth rekindled in her from his gaze. It wasn’t questioning or critical. He looked upon her simply as if he wanted to carefully consider everything she said.
She asked faintly, “Did she hate me, do you think?”
Reid startled at this question. Lucille blinked hard. “I don’t know why I’m asking you this. It’s just that you’re the last person she talked to.”
“She didn’t,” Reid said gently. “I promise.”
“How would you know?”
“I asked.”
“About me?”
“When she told me to give the house away to the Dengs, I asked her. ‘ What about your daughters? ’?”
“And that was when she said this house would ruin us.” Lucille’s voice hardened. She kept coming back to that critical detail again. It was one of the last things her mother had definitively said, confirmed by a witness.
“But it didn’t—” He faltered. “She did say that. But she also said she wished it hadn’t come to that. She said that she had wanted to give you everything.”
“And what did that mean?”
“I don’t know. The conversation happened so quickly. I wish I’d followed up. I wish I’d reached out to you then. I was thinking about it, actually.”
“You should have.”
“Well, I didn’t exactly have a way of reaching you.”
She smiled through her tears. “You could have found me on the internet.”
“I could have,” he conceded. “But I didn’t know how you would feel about it. Me just calling you out of nowhere.”
She considered him plainly now. She remembered his shyness all those years ago. So flighty then, fiddling with his sleeve, glancing at her and then away. He had become much more still. His thick, wavy brown hair, streaked through with gray, now fell to his shoulders. The sharp curvature of his jaw was dusted with stubble. There were smile lines around his gentle eyes. She felt it then, intrigue that hummed into desire. “Better decades late than never.”
“What do you mean?”
Was he not going to acknowledge what happened after her party? There was his call the next day and the party later that night in Laurel Canyon, the night before her parents came back. There was the day she snuck out of the house the week after, when he picked her up and they spent the day at the beach outlook. She’d remembered him turning the music up in his car on their way back from the beach, pulling over to kiss in the back seat of his car, their lips rough with salt. It was the first time she’d been touched by someone, and it felt right with Reid. He’d called her and they’d talked in secret the next day, and the next. What could we be? she’d wondered in one of those late-night calls. I don’t know , he’d said. He’d sounded uncertain. They ended the call. She never heard anything from him again.
“I waited,” she said finally, “for you to call me. You’d just—stopped one day.” It surprised her now, how frank she could be about her own teenage yearning. She hated herself then, for sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring, the hours seeming like eternities. She’d felt pathetic. But it didn’t matter now. None of it did.
“But I did call.”
“What?”
Reid leaned against the desk. “Two hours later. I wanted to talk things through with you. Your mother answered. She told me you didn’t want to talk to me anymore. So I stopped.”
Lucille sat up. “That wasn’t me,” she said slowly. “That was— my mother wanted you to stop calling me.”
There was a long silence.
“I wish I’d tried to reach you, then,” Reid said. “I wanted to be there for you, but I didn’t know if you wanted me to. And then your family stopped speaking to mine. And—”
And then there was the rest of that summer.
“I thought I scared you off,” Lucille whispered. “I thought you didn’t care.”
Reid met her eyes, finally. “You don’t know how much I did. I thought it was me. I—I’d wanted to say, then, that I wasn’t sure what was happening with—you know, with me leaving for college after summer and all. But I did want to be with you. Really, Lucy, I did. I thought I ruined everything.”
Lucille was incredulous. “You didn’t . You said all the right things. You even humored my ridiculous aspirations.”
“What, about being president?” Reid gave her a small, fond smile. “It wasn’t ridiculous. You had this… certainty, Lucille. You still do. I’m sure you know that about yourself. I remember you looked—I don’t know if you remember that night we met, but at some point we were outside overlooking your garden and you were in this kind of magnificent golden light. I would have believed anything you said.”
Lucille was stilled by this immediate sincerity. He wanted her too. She was sure of it now. The desire now expanded and saturated the rest of her. She remembered what he’d said to her over the phone once. I want to know everything about you. “Spoken like a true writer.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t get my Pulitzer, either.”
“No?”
He crossed his arms. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
Had he tried? Given up? Now Lucille was desperate to know what had happened to him since that summer. They could have spoken on the phone. Stayed in contact all these years. There could have been a version of her that loved him all this time. But Lucille had changed beyond her own recognition. And it was impossible to work backward; to reach that night and the selves they were when their eyes first met over the dining room table.
Instead, she stood. “I should go.”
Reid stepped back. He nodded. “Here, I’ll walk out with you.”
He stood, gathered his briefcase. She straightened her jacket and slung her tote over her shoulder. In front of her, Reid flipped the light switch off, settling the room into darkness. She said, “Wait.”
He turned abruptly. “What?”
Lucille stepped toward him, tilted her head up and teased his lips with hers.
He stumbled back against the door, shutting it. Her tote dropped to the floor. He pulled her to him, and Lucille felt her thoughts dissolve. His once youthful, slim frame had broadened, and now she heard his low voice whisper, “You sure?”
She nodded. He deepened the kiss, and she felt his hands grip her hips, lifting her onto the desk. She sighed, with need and in relief. She was exhausted from having to hold herself and her family up through this brutal, unyielding week. She deserved this. She leaned back, pulling him with her, feeling him get hard. He reached his hand beneath her skirt and his thumb trailed down until it hovered over the peak of her desire. When he pressed down, she gasped at his touch. Her fingers deftly maneuvered the buttons on his shirt.
They were no longer seventeen and hesitant. She felt his teeth trace down her neck and his tongue on her collarbone. They remembered each other, and she reveled in the familiarity, in the heat of him. A moment ago she had felt lost and unmoored, gaping with pain, but here she was. Here was reprieve.