Zoe
Philadelphia, 2008
By the time she’d met Jordan, that night at the bar in West Philadelphia, had spent almost four years trying to make it, first with a band, then as a solo artist.
Then two things had happened, to hasten the end of her second attempt at stardom.
The first was that Jordan had called her, even before she’d gotten home, asking to see her again.
The second was that she’d opened the door to the Fishtown rowhouse to find her mother, wild-eyed and terrified-looking, standing just inside the door with Cherry in her arms, as if she’d been standing there, waiting, for hours.
“You have to go,”
Janice said, pushing Cherry toward .
Janice’s lips were white around the edges, and her expression was frightened and unhappy.
Cherry, for her part, looked delighted at being up so late.
“Hi, Momma!”
she said, waving.
“What?”
asked her mother.
“Go where? What happened?”
What happened, it turned out, was that, just before bedtime, Cherry had toddled over to Cassie’s piano, hoisted herself up onto the bench, pushed back the wooden lid, put her pudgy toddler fingers on the untouched keys, and started playing “Für Elise.”
Neither Janice nor had any idea where she’d even heard the song.
Nor did it matter.
“I can’t go through it again,”
Janice whispered.
did not need to inquire what it was.
She knew what Janice meant: that she could not live with another musical prodigy, and the sorrow that talent brought with it, the barbwire string tethered to the gaudy balloon.
“You need to find your own place,”
Janice said.
“It’s time.”
In the kitchen’s lights, her mother looked haggard, and haunted, and old.
She looked as if she’d seen a ghost ...
which, supposed, she had.
had taken stock of her options.
And her savings.
As a kid, she’d figured that anyone who was part of a band that was on MTV and had a number one album would be rich, and it was true that a single hit album and half a tour had left with a decent hunk of cash, even after she and Cassie had gifted their parents a generous sum.
When the record had been selling, had gotten royalties—her portion, plus Russell’s.
But hadn’t denied herself much during the Griffin Sisters’ heyday, which meant that instead of stocks and bonds, she had shoes and bags; instead of investments and property, she had jewelry and designer dresses—the accoutrements of another life—things that had started losing value the second she’d bought them and wouldn’t do her any good in Philadelphia.
By the time Janice told her it was time to go, she had a tidy nest egg, but no idea of how she’d earn any more.
She could have gone back to school and studied teaching, or nursing, but she’d never been a very good student or had an appetite for bodies and their frailties.
She could have found a job in fashion, maybe reconnecting with one of the stylists who’d dressed her for photo shoots or the band’s one video ...
except that would have meant a reckoning with her former life, acknowledging who she’d once been, and how far she had fallen.
She wasn’t ready for that.
What she wanted, decided that night, was security.
A big house, in a town with good schools for her daughter.
Money in the bank; enough so that she’d never have to worry.
What she had was her face.
Her body.
Her good-enough voice.
A little money, still.
The remnants of her fame.
did the math, balancing what she had to offer versus what she wanted, factoring in how many years she’d be likely to look this good, and how many men might be willing to take on a woman with a child.
The next morning, she returned Jordan’s call and told him she was free that Friday night.
He’d been thrilled.
“Where do you want to go?”
he’d asked.
“I’ll take you anywhere.”
“Just dinner is fine,”
she’d said, laughing.
And, at first, it had been lovely.
After years of bashing herself into the brick wall of not-quite-good-enough and a husband who—she could admit it now—had never wanted to marry her; after all of that, she’d met a man who looked at her like she was a goddess, some celestial creature who’d stepped down from the heavens and deigned to let him into her bed.
Jordan was thirty-seven, with a law degree from Penn.
He was older than and much more educated, but her former fame, the cachet that it gave her, seemed to make up for her working-class background and her lack of a college degree ...
although, wondered if her beauty alone wouldn’t have been enough for Jordan to overlook all the ways she was not his equal.
She knew what their life would be: A house in the suburbs.
Good schools.
Vacations.
More children, because she knew he wanted them, and decided that she was fine with that.
Jordan proposed after a year.
Six months after that, they were married, with just twenty-five guests; an intimate ceremony in one of the city’s small, historic gardens, underneath blooming magnolia trees.
Then she and Cherry moved across the river, to Haddonfield, where slipped into her new identity as if it were a dress that had been sewn to her measurements.
She could have been happy, living in that four-bedroom house, driving her Range Rover, spending summers at the shore, skiing out West each December and spring breaks in the Caribbean sun.
She could have been content, if it hadn’t been for Bix ...
and for Cherry.
Because Cherry, it seemed, had inherited both Cassie’s outsized talent and ’s single-minded intensity.
And Cherry, like her mother, wanted to be a star.
In third grade, Cherry had used her stepdad’s laptop to go online and find out about auditions for the new Mickey Mouse Club.
Cherry hadn’t seen the shudder that racked ’s body at those words when she held up the page she’d printed so her mother could see it.
“There’s an open casting call at the Cherry Hill Mall.
I just need a ride!”
told her no.
Cherry’s face, normally cheerful, had gotten thunderous.
“Why not?”
stuck with the most expedient answer.
“Because you’re not moving to California.”
She had hoped that would be the end of it.
It was not.
Cherry had wanted dance lessons, which she and Jordan had been happy to pay for, and guitar and voice lessons, which felt a little less thrilled about, but had agreed to, nevertheless.
When Cherry and her friends had formed a band, in sixth grade, assumed it would last a week or two.
She’d had a cold feeling in the pit of her belly, a coppery taste in her mouth, when Cherry had told her they were entering a talent show, but what could she do?
When Cherry had wanted to go to a performing-arts summer camp, Jordan had been all for it.
had been the one to say that she thought a regular kind of camp, with archery and swimming lessons, would be a better experience.
When Cherry had asked to enroll in a performing-arts high school, Jordan had said, “If this is what she wants, we should encourage her.”
had, again, argued that being well-rounded would set Cherry up better for a successful adulthood.
She’d given her husband David Epstein’s book that argued against early specialization, telling him, sweetly, that she wished her own parents had let her try more things before settling on music, and, again, Jordan had agreed.
But Cherry kept pushing, and the fights got worse.
When she was fourteen, there’d been a big blowup over whether she could miss a family trip to Disney World to stay home and play a gig with the School of Rock house band.
and Jordan had finally agreed to let her stay with a friend for the weekend of the show, then fly out to meet them ...
except Cherry had missed her flight.
“Accidentally,”
Cherry told them, but suspected that it hadn’t been an accident at all.
“And I can stay with Andi for the rest of the week.
Her parents say it’s fine.”
By fifteen, Cherry was spending more of her weekends out of the house than in it; staying with friends, or, suspected, her boyfriends; lying about where she was going and what she was doing.
started to notice money missing from her wallet, blank checks disappearing from her checkbook, charges she hadn’t made appearing on her credit card statements.
Cherry chopped off her beautiful, long light-brown hair and used Clorox to bleach the fuzz that remained a shocking white.
She wore black eyeliner, black lace bodysuits with ripped jeans, or petticoats layered on top of them and stack-heeled black Doc Marten boots underneath them.
The first time found a vape pen in Cherry’s pocket, and condoms in her dresser drawer, there’d been a fight.
By the fifth or sixth time, just sighed, replacing the offending items, telling herself that Cherry could be doing worse things than vaping, and that the condoms, at least, meant she was being careful.
Bix, too, was a challenge ...
but by the time he was fourteen, and ’s boys were toddlers, he’d been enrolled in (or, in ’s mind, banished to) boarding school.
He came home on vacations, and for a few weeks each summer, when he wasn’t in camp.
Despite her best efforts, never warmed to her stepson.
But neither Bix nor Cherry was her primary concern.
By then was busy with what she sometimes, guiltily, thought of as her real family.
doted on her boys.
She watched in dismay, then resignation, as Cherry’s grades and her behavior got worse.
It was clear Cherry was barely attending high school, and not paying attention when she was there ...
and she and were fighting whenever Cherry was home.
It made everyone in the house tense.
Schuyler would go to his room when his sister walked in the door.
Noah would cry as soon as the shouting began, and Jordan, suspected, would come home late even when it wasn’t strictly necessary, to avoid the misery that Cherry’s presence guaranteed.
When she found out Cherry had left, had been worried.
And, shamefully, she’d felt a not-inconsiderable amount of relief.
You’re a terrible mother, the Cassie who lived in her head whispered.
You’re as bad a mother as you were a musician.
would not disagree.
She’d never wanted Cherry.
She would have abandoned her completely, would have left her with Janice to raise, if Janice had allowed it.
And, as the weeks had gone on, and Cherry stayed missing, realized that she had no idea how to fix what had gone wrong between them, when—if—she saw her daughter again.
Back at home, after giving Jordan her ultimatum, sat at her desk in her beautiful kitchen.
She looked at the marble countertops, the flowers, the rugs, and the glossy floors, and wondered how long it would be hers.
Then she opened her laptop and began looking for flights.
When her phone rang with an unknown number, she’d ignored it.
But when it had rung again, she’d sighed, picked up the phone, and said, “Hello?”
And had almost fallen down on the kitchen floor when a voice she hadn’t heard in weeks said, “Hi, Mom!”