Chapter Three
THREE
I BITE THE INSIDE OF my lip until it bleeds.
Oozing copper spills against my tongue, and I lick it away as I weave through the barrage of grim-faced guests.
The citizens of Earnest have flocked to Willow Estate like flies to cow shit.
Everyone wants a piece of ol’ Ms. Harper.
And I don’t care if it’s selfish of me, but I don’t want to share.
Not my memories. Not my grief. Not her award-winning banana pudding recipe.
I don’t want to hear what a great person my grandmother was or how she’ll be missed. I want to climb into bed and close my eyes because in my dreams she’s still alive, and maybe when I wake up, this’ll all just be one long, elaborate nightmare.
My mother stands in the corner, her face twisted into a grimace as people come up and give their condolences.
By the end she was just as much Gigi’s child as I was.
Whether she liked it or not. But more than that, she is the stand-in for my father.
The generational bridge between Gigi and me.
What do you say when people apologize to you for the loss of the mother you never wanted?
In the absence of the man who broke your heart?
Mom and Dad didn’t meet in Earnest. They met halfway between Buncombe and Loudon in the Great Smoky Mountains, high on mushrooms and tripping through some now-defunct Appalachian hippie festival. I guess this was before grief stole all her whimsy.
In the end I only have two memories of him. The first is from my fourth birthday, a few months before he left. It’s only a snapshot. Him lifting me into the air and spinning me around. I’m doing one of those big belly laughs, and he’s smiling at me like I’m the best thing that ever happened to him.
The second is just of his voice, weeks later on one of our last weekend visits to Earnest, so deep it rumbled through my chest even as I lay across the room. It was well past my bedtime and long after Gigi’s story had drifted to a stop. She thought I was asleep.
I wasn’t.
They were talking quietly in the doorway.
“If they know about her, why do you insist on us bringing her back here? Wouldn’t it be safer if we kept her away?” He sounded irritated.
“You can’t keep her away, this land is a part of her. She needs to be here, to grow up here, to understand this place the way I do, the way Grannie did.” Their voices were hushed, and I stretched my ears to hear them despite the lull of sleep making me heavy.
The door let out a low moan as it began to close.
The last thing I heard before the click was, “She needs to be here when she comes into it. It’s her legacy.”
This is the memory I play most, turning it over in my head, comparing it to everything else I know about Gigi and Earnest. It’s the first thing I thought of when I finally had a chance to sit down and process what happened at Dawson’s.
It’s like I have all these pieces of something, but I don’t know how or why I should put them together.
And the only people I could ask are gone.
I tried once to bring it up to my mother.
But it was the only time I would ever broach the subject with her.
A nurse and a scientist, Ellie Taylor-Scott finds nothing more abhorrent than someone who chooses to ignore fact for fiction.
Besides, she thinks that if it weren’t for Gigi, my dad wouldn’t have left.
Gigi thought he was coming back. “Xavier,” she mumbled on her deathbed, an echo of this conviction surfacing amidst her delirium.
My mom thinks Gigi’s magical woo-woo nonsense got into his head and caused some kind of psychological break. She says that way of thinking is dangerous. That believing in things as ridiculous as magic just opens your mind up to delusion.
And that’s as bananas as Gigi’s denial that he’s gone and never coming back.
Neither ever acknowledged the note he left.
I’m sorry. But this is the only way to save her.
I can picture the blue ink, smudged as the side of his left hand ran across the freshly scribbled words.
I used to sneak into my mom’s room while she worked nights.
I’d push the bench at the end of her bed against the opening of the closet and pull down the old Adidas box filled with pictures of our family before, with a black velvet case holding the engagement ring she never got to pair with a wedding band, and the note, alongside a bronze compass with a faded engraving, the letters blurring in the distance of my memory.
Despite the mounting evidence, neither wanted to accept the truth.
Because the truth is, he just didn’t love us enough to stay. It’s not unique, or special, it’s not magic or mental illness or anything that could explain away the pain. It’s just a man sucking ass. A tale as old as time.
I stop at my mother’s side, resting my hand against her elbow so as not to startle her.
She’s speaking to a tall, robust woman with a shock of sky-high hair the color of storm clouds and a long cerulean caftan that floats to the ground.
She smells of incense and faintly of earth.
When she wraps her arms around my mother, her eyes finally meet mine, and a bright-red smile spreads across her face.
“Darling!” she says, reaching out and pulling me into the hug with them. “You look beautiful. Just like her, I swear.”
Maureen Vale was my grandmother’s best friend.
They were closer than sisters and sweeter than friends, though it never really occurred to me to ask about the exact nature of their relationship.
Maureen is the owner-operator of Gemstone Pick ’N’ Mix.
She claims the right crystal can cure even the worse ailment or find your true love, but everyone says she’s just like that because acid turned her brain sour in the sixties.
That never mattered though; whoever my grandmother loved, I loved, too.
“Hi, Maureen,” I say into her rock-hard, Aqua Netted hair.
“Oh, honey,” she murmurs, pulling away from us and adjusting the gaudy purple necklace at her throat.
“I’m not gonna get all sad because that isn’t what she would want.
” She sniffs, her eyes betraying her. Her voice drips in honeyed layers, her vowels long and drawn out.
“But I’d like to thank y’all for allowing me to lead this ceremony today.
We’re not here to cry, we’re here to celebrate her life and usher her to the other side. ”
My mother stiffens beside me.
“We can’t thank you enough, Maureen, truly,” I say, interrupting the discomforting silence.
Maureen’s eyes linger on my face a bit too long, and I shift under her gaze.
“You know, your grandmother always told me that you were going to be something special, and I never doubted her. You are absolutely glowing, despite it all. You have a very powerful essence about you.”
She looks at me like she can see straight to my soul. Like she knows I’m hiding something. And the hairs on the back of my neck begin to lift.
“Say, if you’re gonna be sticking around town a while, you should come by and see me sometime. There are some things we should probably talk about.”
I’m lost in the intensity of her gaze, my heart slamming against my ribs as my mother’s hand wraps too tightly around my bicep.
“Okay,” my mother says, and I try to shrug out of her grip, but she doesn’t let go. “We’ll see you out there, Maureen. Thank you again for doing this.”
She steers us toward the card tables situated at the back of the room, mumbling under her breath as we go, “This town is full of crazy people, I swear.”
When I glance over my shoulder, I find Maureen still watching us as we retreat, and a chill rolls down my spine.