5 EVIE
E VIE
A while later, having abandoned plans for sleep, I’m back in the den, pondering my thoughts and the whispers of ghosts when I hear Lainey’s door open and she appears in the doorway.
Still wearing her father’s sweatshirt along with pajama pants, she pulls the sleeves down over her hands.
Her hair is topped in a messy bun, tousled from the pillow.
“Mom? What are you still doing up? Everything all right?” She squints in the dim light.
“I couldn’t sleep, I guess. What about you?”
She shakes her head. I think she’s going to leave and return to bed, but to my pleasant surprise, instead she joins me, curling up on the sofa with her legs beneath her.
“Sorry we forgot to clean up. We’ll get it tomorrow.” She leans down and collects a few of the things into a small pile next to her feet.
“Oh, don’t worry about it.” I’m holding Stuffy on my lap. “Sometimes it’s good to get things out and have a look.”
She smiles, taking the stuffed animal into pale, delicate hands that are younger versions of mine, but she seems preoccupied.
I know she’s busy with work, and her dad’s funeral has come at a difficult time.
Not that they ever come at a good time, of course.
But after a six-month illness, Steve dying came as no surprise, with a gradual mourning that had started weeks before we all had our final goodbye.
“I feel like we’ve barely had a chance to talk since you’ve been home. How are things? How’s work?” I ask, and she tells me it’s fine. Good. Busy.
She works as an associate film producer, funny enough.
It makes me happy that her creative mind found its home in a career that she loves.
One that I once wished for, as well, albeit briefly.
When she announced she would be going into that business, she’d given me a sheepish and proud smile. Maybe I got some things right.
“Everything okay with Rick?” I venture to ask.
She glances over at me. “I guess.”
I know they’re struggling. I can feel her restless unhappiness and hope that she’ll tell me what it is, though I know she won’t. At least not until she’s ready. I allow the silence to continue, giving her space to speak if she’d like.
She pulls at Stuffy’s frayed ear. “It’s not him, it’s .
..” She grows quiet. “He’s a lot like you.
And Dad. He’d be content, I don’t know, eating lasagna at home for three days, I guess.
He’s so set and settled. But I’m still trying to figure out who I am and can’t seem to do it.
Sometimes I feel like ... like my life should be different in some way.
Bigger. Wider. Or ... something. I don’t know, just different. ” She looks so sad as she says this.
It’s the most she’s spoken to me about a subject of any depth in a long time, and my heart swells and breaks a little at the same time. I want to tell her that I understand. I want to tell her ...
“I know you must think that sounds crazy. Forget it. I’m fine,” she adds a moment later and moves to stand. “’Night, Mom.”
“No, wait, sweetie,” I say. “I was just thinking that it doesn’t sound crazy at all.” Her intuition is shouting to her that something is off, and I can’t deny her this. “I understand more than you think.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
If only you’d known me in a different time. A different place, I want to say.
“But you made it work, right? You and Dad. You were happy here in your life? In this house?” she asks, sitting again. “Mostly?”
It’s a complicated question.
“We were.” I nod. “Or ... we did our best, anyway.”
Children don’t know who their parents are, really.
Don’t know the secrets and dreams that lie deep within their hearts.
They know the faces of the parents who raised them, but not the struggles and demons and things that make their hearts sing.
My kids know my mannerisms. Where I keep my reading glasses.
They know how I like my coffee and that I’m afraid of heights and that inconsiderate people drive me crazy.
They know the familiar scent of my perfume, left over at the end of the day when I used to read them bedtime stories, and what I usually have in the grocery cart.
The markings of a human life that are known by the ones with whom we share our time.
Something about this brings me comfort. But it’s a little sad, to not really be known by the ones we’ve loved. They know only half of my story.
I made a promise to Steve years ago not to tell our kids the secrets we’d kept. And to be fair, I also have my own reasons for keeping them locked away. But as I look at my daughter’s face, I know that Kate’s right. She needs the real story. The truth. Even if it means that I might lose her.
It’s okay. It’s time. It’ll be okay.
I feel his voice with me again. Maybe it’s my imagination; maybe it’s not. I don’t ask anymore.
I’m right here with you, love.
Thinking she’s changing the subject, Lainey picks up the magazine that she and the boys were looking at earlier and holds it out to me.
There are signs everywhere, Ev, he used to tell me. You just have to pay attention.
She points. “We were kind of laughing earlier because the girl in this photo has a bracelet like yours.” I glance at my wrist where the silver bangle normally sits.
“She even reminds me of you.” She picks up another.
“See? Here it is again. It does kind of have a haunting look to it.” She seems a bit captivated by the image.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this photo,” I tell her after a long moment.
It’s a dark, grainy image—a scene of a band in a recording studio dotted with candles.
Two people are in profile at the front, while the rest of the band is in the background.
A young woman with long dark-brown hair hanging in thick layers down her back is wearing torn jeans and black boots.
An oversize sweater hangs slightly off one delicate shoulder.
From her seat on a stool, she’s gazing upward in profile as the lead singer looks down at her while singing into a microphone, their fingers entwined and their faces just inches apart, as if about to kiss.
Shot by famed music and celebrity photographer Derek d’Orsay, the photo was taken from behind, with the couple largely silhouetted by the lights of the studio and the woman’s profile in shadow.
The “mystery girl in the studio,” they called her.
The photo had become somewhat famous over the years—appearing in coffee-table books on music photography and such things.
There was an intimacy and romance to it that captured the imagination of the world.
It was one of the most iconic photographs from the 1990s, and even now, thirty years later, among famed celebrity photos.
The photographer never revealed the name of the girl in the photo, despite its significance.
“Did you collect these? Music magazines?” Lainey seems amused. “Doesn’t really seem very like you.”
“Just these few, really,” I reply quietly.
“Big Mayluna fan in secret?” she jokes, referencing the band in the photos.
Lainey sees then, the look on my face. “Mom?”
“What are you guys doing?” Lucas has appeared, and my son-in-law behind him, both shuffling toward us in sweatpants and T-shirts, faces puffy from sleep.
“It’s nice having you all here sleeping under the same roof,” I say, mostly to myself, smiling. “I think the last time was that Christmas when you were still in school.” It occurs to me to wonder when I might get an opportunity like this again. And then I’ve decided.
I take a deep breath, releasing it slowly.
“You okay, Mom?” Lainey asks again.
I return my gaze to the image of the couple. “That’s his sweater she’s wearing,” I say eventually. “The girl in the photo.”
“You think?” Lainey asks.
“I know .”
“But—”
Then, in one small gesture that takes all my courage, I point to a spot on the photo and wait.
Lainey peers closer at it, and her eyes widen.
Realization dawns as she sees the small birthmark on the girl’s wrist, and the matching one on mine, alongside the bracelet she recognizes. Then Lucas takes it from her hand.
“It is you?” he asks, and I nod, my heart racing.
Lainey’s mouth drops, trying to reconcile the young woman in the photo with the mother beside her. I can see that she doesn’t believe it, though why would she? “You knew Carter Wills?”
“Yes. I did. And besides you and the people in this recording studio that day, barely anyone ever knew it was me in this picture. But yes. I much more than knew him. All of them.” My voice cracks.
“They were like my family. Once upon a time.” I run a fingertip over the members of the band in the studio so long ago.
Unassuming young musicians at the start of their career.
I feel like I was just in that room with them on that night with candles burning alongside the music, wondering how time could go by so quickly.
“Okay, that seems kind of impossible, I won’t lie,” Lucas says, and I smile at the little boy I can still see in the handsome husband and father my son has grown up to be. “Carter Wills,” he says again, clearly impressed and excited by this new development.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?” Lainey asks. The million-dollar question.
“It’s a long story. There were a lot of reasons. But mostly, I made a promise to your dad while he was alive. And I kept it.”
“But why would Dad care?” They look at each other, confused.
I’m trembling, and I close my eyes again briefly.
I’m right here. You’re not alone.
I flip to the cover. Inside the Mind of Carter Wills: Tales from the dark side and a look at rock’s most mysterious god, it reads. I take a deep breath at the sight of him, tracing the image, where an intricate Fibonacci-spiral tattoo fell in delicate lines across his lean back.
“I remember so clearly the day I bought this one.” It was a whole new beginning. “Years later. I had stopped at the grocery store with you after school, Lainey.” I think of googly-eyed dinosaurs on construction paper and two little kids who had a mom who played with them in the backyard.
Before everything changed.
Lainey reaches out and picks up yet another clipping of an article from an older magazine.
It’s a bit tattered, paper-clipped in two sections and dotted with a smiley face.
Alongside is a scattering of stars and clouds doodled in black pen.
Stargazing with Mayluna, the title says. By: Cameron Leigh.
“Carter doodled that.” I smile widely, tears pricking my eyes.
Something about the sight of her holding it in her hand makes my insides come alive.
Okay, you’re right. It’s time. I want to say it out loud, though of course I don’t.
They would never fully understand that part of the story, I suspect. The connection.
“Who’s Cameron Leigh?” Lainey asks, noting the heart drawn next to the name.
“I am.”
She and Lucas look at each other and then back at me. “You’re not making any sense. I don’t understand,” Lainey says.
“I know,” I say with a wan smile. “But you will.”
If, as I said, my life was bookmarked into two sections—“Before and After I Liked Autumn”—I suppose there would be one more part.
There was summer, and I was twenty-five years old.
I remember that the air was heavy with the perfumed scent of mulch and pine and the faintest hint of salty air drifting from a few miles away.