Chapter 58
THREE YEARS AGO, NEW YEAR’S EVE
It should have been a time for celebrating. Peace on Earth, mirth, festivity. Instead, just before Christmas, Didion got the news that her father had died.
Didion and Sammie’s father was a smart, hardworking man.
He wasn’t a vulnerable person, not silly or teasing.
He didn’t joke, didn’t need music or art in his life.
Or maybe he did, but didn’t know it. He never played with his daughters or ruffled their hair.
His relationship with them was almost formal, professional.
He would ground them or discuss work ethic with them if need be, but he wasn’t a man with much personality.
He had rigid beliefs that seemed inherited and never questioned. Old-fashioned.
When Babe had met him, he was very handsome, which did a lot of heavy lifting, making his quiet indifference seem like stoicism. Didion had once asked her mother why they’d been together, and Babe had said:
“When I first met your father, he seemed like someone on the brink of something interesting. He was right there, on the precipice, but then he never jumped. And he spent the rest of his life backing away from the edge.”
They had divorced the way they had married. Efficiently, without much fuss. And then, because he was the type of man to be married, he found a new wife quickly.
Didion hadn’t liked or disliked her father. He did not elicit any strong feelings as he seemed incapable of holding them himself. Sammie could sometimes get a laugh out of him, but mostly, he was as dry as could be.
The thing he was, and had always been, was responsible.
He never missed a payment on a bill, he had all the savings accounts one is supposed to have, he made appointments for the dentist and yearly checkups like clockwork.
His consistency, his stability, was something that had drawn Babe to him to begin with.
It was something she had lacked growing up, and wanted to make sure she gave to her children.
It was hard to grieve a man like that. Didion didn’t know how to feel. Losing a father felt like such a big, horrible moment. Losing him, losing Wyatt Bennett, felt like losing a grandfather she hardly knew. In fact, when she did lose her distant grandparents, it hadn’t felt much different.
Which made it all the stranger when the planning of his funeral landed on Didion’s lap.
She hadn’t been out of school for very long.
She still felt like a kid, or like she ought to feel like a kid, but suddenly she was fielding calls from his lawyer and her uncle and having to figure out, quickly, how to get a body cremated.
How to put on a funeral, write an obituary, order flowers, handle a death certificate—and how to use his money to pay for it.
He had, of course, as a responsible man, created a will and a fund for such an event, and luckily his lawyer made things pretty straightforward, but …
the point was, it was the very last thing Didion felt capable of dealing with.
And all because his wife was a shriveling, benzo’d-out mess who hadn’t been able to do anything herself.
She was a shell of a woman, her knobby, bony knuckles clutching a tissue at all times.
Her emotion rising to the surface if anyone so much as hinted at the fact that she could pick up some of the slack.
The funeral was going to be held in a church in Charleston—because his wife didn’t have the ability to help, but she did have demands—and there would be a small reception afterward at his house.
Didion had arranged everything, would be cooking the food herself (food for guests had been the one thing her father hadn’t thought of) and had gotten a horrible black dress and sensible shoes for the occasion.
Her father’s house was empty, with his widow evidently holding grief court at her sister’s.
So Didion spent two weeks in the vacant home, completely alone over the holidays.
Eventually, she was desperate to get out, and so she went to Birdsong.
Where she always wanted to go when the world felt cruel.
She hadn’t told her mother she was coming. She never needed to, but as soon as she arrived, she wished she had.
She found her mother and her sister sitting on the side porch, drinking wine and eating olives, playing cards and listening to Duran Duran. Both of them in sweaters and matching slipper-socks due to the misty chill in the air of Mercy Island in December.
Her sister’s face fell when she saw her.
“So this is why you’re too busy to help with Dad’s funeral?” Didion said, letting her duffel bag fall to the floor. “This is what you’re doing because you can’t handle it?”
“Didion … I’m sorry.” She put down her hand of cards. “I didn’t know what to do, so I came to Mom.”
Babe stood up and went over to Didion. “Honey, how are you holding up? How’s the planning going?”
Didion let Babe hug her, but didn’t embrace her back.
There was something so infuriating about seeing the two of them sitting here playing Fried Green Tomatoes after she’d spent the last fourteen days on the phone with banks, lawyers, churches, and every other famously heartless entity.
It didn’t help that her sister was responding infrequently and with limp apologies.
She had asked can I help? but in a way that made it impossible for Didion to say yes, because she was so knee-deep in everything, that it would actually be harder to explain than to just do it herself.
And Didion knew, logically, that Babe didn’t technically need to take care of it, but how come it didn’t fall to her instead of to Didion?
The only person who had been remotely helping was Matt, despite how busy he was. He translated a few legal documents for her, clarified language, etc. But that was it. Only him.
Babe released Didion, and asked, “Wine?”
Didion sat down at the table, across from Sammie, who was in a bikini top and jean shorts. Didion couldn’t help but let her eyes fall down her sister’s body to the large, jagged scar on her sister’s rib cage.
“Sure, wine sounds good,” said Didion.
Sammie tucked her legs up to hide the scar, feeling her sister’s gaze.
It had been like this a lot lately. Hard to talk to her. Hard to get her to talk back. And Didion was pretty sure she knew why.
It was always like this whenever she got back with goddamn Johnny Hart.
You’d have thought that the incident with Austin, the motorcycle, and the baby would have deterred her, but in fact, Sammie had still spent an unacceptable amount of the last seven years falling in and out of what she incorrectly referred to as love with him.
It made Didion so, so angry. She couldn’t understand it.
The reasons to hate Johnny were endless, but the most offensive of them all was the fact that Sammie and Johnny had recently moved to LA together completely on her earnings from her last job, and once they got there, he made excuse after excuse for not getting his own job before he eventually sold the car.
The car being … Didion’s Jeep. The one her sister had borrowed for the move. The one Didion wasn’t using much, so she’d loaned to Sammie, with the intention of flying out and driving it back. She never got the chance, because Johnny sold it without asking.
The car Didion had scrimped and saved for. The first thing that meant freedom to her. Gone.
He had apologized, clearly with Sammie holding a gun to his head, but Didion could tell he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong.
Babe put the glass in front of Didion, and then topped up her own.
“So, are you driving back with me on Tuesday?” asked Didion.
Sammie looked at her mother, then back to Didion. “For his funeral?”
“Yes…?”
“Oh, um … I actually…”
Didion prickled. “You are actually joking. He’s our father, Sammie.”
She shook her head. “I want to grieve him in my own way, and … I don’t know, I just don’t want…”
“This is insane. Are you coming?” Didion asked her mother.
Babe gave her a sad look. “Honey, I don’t think so.”
It wasn’t like it was some retirement party she’d planned and they weren’t going. It was his funeral. She’d spent every ounce of energy she had on making this event happen, and the only remaining people in her entire family were not even going to go.
If not for him, then for her.
But she didn’t want to have to ask. She didn’t want them to go because she made them. If they weren’t going, she had all the information she needed.
“This is absolutely crazy,” Didion stood.
“Where are you going?” asked Sammie. “Please, Didion, don’t leave.”
She stormed away, into the kitchen, and then came back, planting her hands on either side of the doorjamb.
“Are you still with him?” she demanded.
Sammie looked away.
“What is wrong with you?”
This question she directed at Babe, who raised her eyebrows, holding her hands up. Don’t shoot. “I can’t make Sammie do anything she doesn’t want to do.”
“Yeah, but you could try, right?” Didion’s tone was snotty, a translation of her anger. “Never seemed to have a problem trying to make me do things I didn’t want to do.”
Neither of them said anything. And it was like she could see the ending writing itself. This had been a long time coming.
“Fuck this.” Didion picked up her bag and flew out of the house, all the way to her father’s sensible Camry—the one she had to return to his wife after the funeral, and had to borrow since Johnny had sold her Jeep.
She tore out of the driveway, kicking up gravel under the tires as she went, and opened up her phone. Before she knew it, her thumb was hovering over Austin’s contact, huffs of steaming breath coming out of her mouth and hanging in the chilly air.
They hadn’t talked in years. After his injury, he’d grown distant, that confident stoicism that used to set her alight being perverted to keep her shut out, his firm jaw ever clenched and grating, his brow always furrowed in pained contemplation.
Whenever she tried to discuss it—his career, their relationship, any of it—she could barely get him to look her in the eye.
She missed those eyes. He was terse, he was distracted, he was absent.
It had been so long since she’d heard him laugh.
And, she one day realized, so long since she’d felt loved.
She started to wonder if that was because, maybe, she wasn’t anymore.
She’d held on for as long as she could, but she was in college, and it wasn’t any better to feel unloved long-distance than it was up close.
She gave him every opportunity to show her that she was wrong, that he didn’t want to lose her.
Every opportunity. She wanted him to fight for her.
It would have been easy. But when, one windy night on the beach, she sat next to him on the lifeguard stand and confessed from beneath her collegiate hoodie that she needed something to change or she couldn’t do it anymore, he’d seemed almost relieved.
“I think that’s probably been a long time comin’, Red.”
It was like one of his fastballs to her gut.
He’d told her it was for the best. That he couldn’t be what she needed, and that what he needed was to train, to do his PT and try to climb back up to the place he’d fallen from. He had lost, according to him, the “only thing that mattered.”
“You know what I mean,” he’d weakly added.
But Didion had heard enough. She left him there and then, half tempted to take his car and leave him stranded on the beach. Deciding that would be probably a bit too cruel, even considering everything, she simply walked home.
And cried. A lot.
And blocked him absolutely everywhere. Even his email address.
And they hadn’t spoken since.
So why, then, would she call him now? As she drove away from Birdsong, her heart ached for someone who would just … care for her. Someone who could catch her if she fell. She felt an awful lot like falling.
But that wasn’t who Austin was anymore, was it? He’d proven that. How on earth had she forgotten that, even for a moment? The last thing she needed right now was to give some boy the opportunity to let her down.
No. If nobody was going to be around to catch her, then she simply wouldn’t fall.
She’d take care of herself, like always. Only this time, she’d take care of just herself.
And she’d fucking leave.
To hell with all of them, to hell with Birdsong, and to hell with Mercy Island.
It was time for her to move on. To move into a life that was truly her own. Her dad was gone. The people of her past were dead to her too.
The next number she dialed was her friend Lane.
The one who had a two-bedroom apartment in New York and no roommate.
Lane was a friend from school, a silver-spoon rich kid who’d had a job in commercial real estate lined up for her as soon as she went through the motions of an undergrad degree.
She’d been begging Didion to come visit. She hadn’t thought she would.
But the day after her father’s funeral, Lane was about to become the first step on Didion’s path toward a new life. One that led away from the ghosts of her past. Away from Birdsong.
Away from them.