75 EVIE
E VIE
As I talked that night in the den, Lucas had grown quiet, sitting nearby and allowing it all to unfold.
In the end, he gave me a long hug before walking out of the room wordlessly.
I’ve rarely seen my son at a loss for words, so I know it will take him some time to process things. But I also know he will come around.
All the while, my daughter sat, originally rapt with attention, circulating through a range of emotions, flush with anger one minute, then tearful at the next, around and around. She asked so many questions as I’d talked that the hours had gone into the early-morning sunrise on a cloudy day.
Finally, with nothing left to tell, Lainey sits in front of me, shaking and with eyes swollen with tears.
I watch her breathing and silent, with all her questions answered and a million more she will have over time.
I can barely take the pain I know she is feeling, and part of me wonders if I have made a huge mistake.
Maybe she was better off never knowing. But no.
I know better than that now. She deserved to know.
“Sweetie, I—”
“No.” She recoils when I reach my hand out to her. My heart splinters.
“Okay. Just please know that—”
“You don’t get to comfort me. Not right now.” She shakes her head, barely looking at me. “You don’t get to fix this. You can’t fix this. What you’ve done. What you both did.”
I let out a long breath, my eyes stinging. “I know. I’m so sorry.”
She looks around at the images of the man she’s learned was her father, the box of mementos that we’d opened throughout the night, scattered alongside.
Happy Valentine’s Day, love. Today and always.
Xo—C. A faded florist’s note that once accompanied a dozen peonies.
Backstage passes. Lyrics scratched on napkins.
The dried piece of grass he’d once fashioned into a ring, carefully folded in tissue paper.
Everything I kept hidden. She picks up the front page of a newspaper, the one that announced the details of the crash.
“You were just a shell of a person.”
“What?” I ask.
“It’s not just about him. About all of this.
It’s about you.” She looks up at me pointedly.
“You were a completely different person after that. I felt like the mom we’d had disappeared, and you just became this shell of a person, and I never knew why.
You should’ve told me why.” She chokes back tears.
“Lainey, I—”
“I was only nine years old, and I didn’t understand.
I thought I’d done something wrong. I have all these memories of this beautiful life we had, this incredible mom who played and cuddled and was there for me.
And then you guys were separated, and then we were at Dad’s all the time.
I thought you didn’t want any of us anymore.
Lucas was young enough that he got through it better.
But I missed you so much. Did you realize that? ”
“Oh, Lainey.” My eyes fill.
“Until finally”—she shrugs—“I guess I stopped.”
“I did try, sweetie. Please know that. And we did manage to find our way back together, your dad and I. Our family. We had happy times, too, later. Right?” But by then she was a few years older. Into adolescence, which is such a delicate time even in the best of circumstances.
“It was never the same again, though. You were never the same again.”
She’s right, of course. After his death, I couldn’t recover.
It was like all the trauma of my whole life suddenly built up and crushed me with its weight, and it finally broke me.
Eventually, I managed to find my way again, to feel some semblance of wholeness again.
But just as she said, I was never the same.
“At least now I know why,” she says.
I reach out again to touch her hand, but she takes it away.
“You never talked to us about your childhood. About this whole other life you had with these people, and a man who was my father. You just pretended you had this perfect, content little suburban life. Meanwhile ... was any of it even real? You should’ve told me. About all of it. About him.”
“So your heart could’ve been broken too?” I ask gently.
She looks at me then, fighting back tears laced with anger.
“So I could’ve at least understood.”
We try so hard to be a good example for our kids. But maybe what they really need is to see us as human.
Eventually, she stands, looking once again at the photos of the man she never got to know scattered on the floor.
As she walks to the door, she turns. “It would’ve been different if he was a bad person.
Some awful guy who didn’t want a part of either of us.
But he was this extraordinary, loving person.
And I never knew him.” She pauses. “That plane didn’t take him from me. ” Her eyes bore into mine. “You did.”
She packs her bags that morning and is gone within the hour. And then I am left alone once again, while we both mourn the loss of not just one of the men who called himself her father but two.
In the time that follows, I pick up the phone what feels like a million times, desperate to make things right. But then I remind myself, she is like him—she needs time alone to process things. And it’s the least I can give her.
It takes weeks before she eventually speaks to me, and there are times when I’m not sure if I will hear from her again.
But I do.
One day I pick up the phone, and there she is.
My daughter. Ready to talk to me once again.
Finally, she visits one day a few months later, showing up at the door with only a day’s notice.
And then our conversations about Carter begin to turn into conversations about life and, eventually, with all the secrets and shadows gone, we form a new kind of closeness that will endure the years. And the healing begins. For both of us.
“I’ll never know him,” she says to me one day, the two of us staying up all hours of the night talking.
There’s no anger left in her, just a wistful sort of longing that I recognize.
“What am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to process the fact that I’ll never know him?
I won’t know him any more than the rest of the world. ”
I’ll never be able to heal the hole that will forever remain in her life. But there is something I can do to bring her a little closer to him.
The closet of the den is always packed, as such closets become in a family of four. But in a corner at the back, mostly unnoticed by the other members of the household, there is a small space beneath the attic, from which I pull a dusty box.
When I open it and she sees what it contains, her eyes go wide.
“In all, we filmed more than seventy-five hours of footage during the time we were together,” I tell her, “of them on the road and in the studio. Not only the film planned for the documentary but some of it just for fun. Just us living our lives together. They’re all here, plus the tapes from Tommy’s collection, going back to Carter as a teenager.
I promise you’ll get to know him through this footage.
You’ll see who we were together. The love between us that created you.
You’ll meet the real version of him, not the fictional icon he became.
I’m so sorry it’s all I have to give you, but I hope it helps. ”
In the weeks after I left them in New York all those years ago, I knew I would never be able to continue work on the documentary.
It was one of the hardest decisions I’d ever made, but I knew it needed to be in better, more impartial hands.
Rather than send all the footage to the label, giving them control of it, I’d shipped it to Tommy.
I imagined they would bring someone else in to do the final editing, but they never did, and Tommy had instead kept the footage in storage.
With the success they’d found soon after, apparently the label never pushed the issue, and the project was shelved.
A few weeks after the crash, I received a box from Tommy’s wife.
Evie—these belong to you, and it’s time they find their way back home to where they should have been all along. He loved you. They all did. Be well.
—Haley.
Since that time, they’ve gone untouched.
Lainey and I source all the equipment we’ll need to watch the old footage, and that night, with her by my side, I watch them walk back into my life on that screen.
“And in honor of our girl, we give you the man himself!” Tommy calls, dripping with salt water and tequila in a youthful mess of blond hair at the beach house as Neil Diamond’s “America” begins to blare from the stereo system inside the house.
They were so full of life. Carter and me laughing as he and Tommy serenade me.
“Get that thing out of my face,” Alex grumbles at another point, pushing a hand at me. “Ev, seriously, I will steal you in your sleep and throw you off this bus if you don’t move.”
“What? This? This camera here?” I tease.
In a scuffle, Alex wrestles me to the floor as the camera lies on its side, capturing him holding me down as I erupt into a fit of giggles.
He snags the camera, turning it on me as I laugh with eyes so full of youth and happiness, I can hardly believe it’s me, long hair pooled around me as I cover my face.
“Ohh, see how it feels? You like this?” Alex teases back, and somewhere inside, I bloom, hearing his voice.
In another scene, Tommy sneaks up to us. “Aww, look how sweet.” Carter and I are curled together like puppies and sleeping peacefully in a bunk on the bus, his head in the nape of my neck.
“We should draw on them. Someone get me a Sharpie.” We wake disoriented just as Alex takes the camera and Tommy begins to draw.
“Look at that girl. You see her? I’m gonna marry that girl one day.” Carter leans into the camera, pointing at me in the background.
I find myself laughing through the tears, and as the scenes play, I realize Lainey is watching me. “My god, Mom, you’re a different person.” She gestures to the screen. “You’re ... you’re so beautiful. You’re glowing.”
I swallow, nodding. “We were very happy.”
There are also quiet moments, just Carter and a guitar in silhouette.
“He’s nothing like I imagined. He’s ... funny and silly and ... he’s remarkable,” she says.
That he was.
“You remind me of him sometimes, you know,” I tell her.
“People need to see this,” she says. “The world should see this.”
Which I suppose is how the idea first came about. And in that, a new project is born—one that was more than thirty years in the making.