The second, and more important, was that it had made my mother famous.
Not the stone itself, but my mother’s painting of it. The painting that began the stratospheric rise of her career.
Her painting of Bobbi.
Bobbi Vanderhoof had been my mother’s best friend since early childhood. They’d grown up together, attended high school together, then gone off to college at Vassar together. After college, they’d traveled for several months, and when they returned from their round-the-world trip, Bobbi had the stone. I never learned where it had come from, or how she had acquired it. I only knew that when they got back, Bobbi had it with her, and they went up to my mother’s studio, which was then in the attic of her parents’ house, and Bobbi posed for the painting.
Then Bobbi went off to California, taking the stone with her for luck. She got a few jobs doing commercials, then a small part in a soap opera. She got married to a producer named Gene and they had a son, Carter. Eventually Bobbi landed a role on the TV showWishville, about a family of witches in a small New England town. She played the mother and Witch Queen, Tamsen. It attracted enough attention to help Bobbi get the role that was going to change her career: the lead in a feature film about a psychic detective. But she was killed before filming even began.
I was six when Bobbi died, so my memories of her alive were fuzzy. I remembered watching her on TV with my mother, videotapes ofWishvillethat we viewed so often we could recite the dialogue. And when she came to visit, I felt like I knew her from her show, like she was actually a witch named Tamsen and not my mother’s childhood friend. Fact and fiction blurred. This I was sure of: when Bobbi came to visit, my mother was happy. My father too. The three of them would stay up late drinking and talking and laughing. They’d sit out on the back patio, mixingpitchers of gin and tonics, playing cards, telling stories that made them laugh so hard my mother once actually fell out of her chair. Bobbi and Gene had separated, then divorced, so he never accompanied her on these visits—it was just her and sometimes her son. Bobbi would try to talk my parents into moving to California. She promised that with her connections, she could get them both work in the industry—they could be stylists or set designers.
“You belong in Hollywood,” Bobbi would coo, wrapping her hand around my mother’s arm. And my father would laugh, shake his head, tell her Woodstock suited them better.
My father, who wasn’t a drinker, would often pass out long before my mother and Bobbi, leaving the two women to stay up until dawn sometimes, whispering to each other, finishing the last of the gin and sharing cigarettes (which my mother only smoked when Bobbi was visiting).
Bobbi’s son, Carter, was older than Ben and me. He was a lanky kid with pale blond hair and dark circles under his eyes like he never slept. He was always daring us to do stuff we shouldn’t—he came to visit with his pockets full of dangerous things: cigarettes, firecrackers, butterfly knives. He spun crazy tales of his life in California: the parties, the famous people, all the girlfriends he had. “You ever even kissed a girl, Benji?” he’d asked my brother once when he was only in third or fourth grade. Ben just shrugged, which made Carter laugh and tease him, promise that if he got his sorry little scrawny ass to California, he’d find him a girlfriend of his own, and if he was lucky maybe she’d even go all the way with him.
Carter said his dad had a house in the hills where there were parties every weekend, and he went on to list the celebrities who’d come, swum in his pool, done coke in his dad’s kitchen. I never recognized the names of the people he mentioned, but my brother did (or pretended to) and said, “No way!” over and over.
“Way, dude,” Carter would say, grinning at him, then grab him in a friendly headlock and give him a noogie.
Bobbi and my mother spoke on the phone at least once a week, oftenmore. I’d try to eavesdrop sometimes, but my mother always took the calls in her bedroom, sitting on her antique four-poster bed. Sometimes the calls were loud and celebratory with lots of laughter. Sometimes I’d press my ear against the door and hear my mother speaking quietly to her friend, whispering even. Sometimes I was sure I heard her cry.
And then came the accident. I remember (or think I remember) my mother getting the call. How Bobbi had been in an awful car crash. How my mother said, “Oh my God,” over and over, then rushed to the airport to get on the next flight to LA. She was by Bobbi’s side in the hospital when she died a day later. My mother stayed out there for a week, helping Bobbi’s family go through her things, plan the funeral. When she flew back to New York, she had a box of photographs and the tourmalinated quartz: Bobbi’s good-luck stone.
The stone went on my mother’s dresser, and I’d hear her talking to it sometimes. Sobbing as she spoke. Sometimes she’d argue with it, or beg it to give her Bobbi back, as if Bobbi were somehow trapped inside and would emerge in a puff of dust or smoke, like a genie in a bottle.
My mother’s old painting of Bobbi had hung in her studio throughout my childhood, but after Bobbi’s death it was moved to our living room, where it hung on the wall just to the left of the television. Bobbi as Tamsen the Witch Queen would flit across the television screen as my mother played and replayed the videos, and Bobbi as a young woman just out of college would gaze at us from the living room wall, her whole future before her and a stone for a heart.
The painting was done on a large canvas: two feet by four feet. In it, Bobbi was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt, opened to reveal a cavity, a little box in her chest where her heart should be. But in place of a heart was the heart-shaped stone—clear and streaked with black. It seemed to shimmer and glow, and the image of Bobbi herself glowed too; she wore a halo of light that radiated out from her chest. Her eyes seemed to follow me wherever I went, to watch everything I did.
When my mother returned from California after Bobbi’s funeral, shetook a photo of the painting and shared it with Bobbi’s agent and some of her actor friends fromWishville, whom she’d met at the funeral. A copy of it ended up being published in a newsletter for fans ofWishville. Bobbi’s devotees loved it. My mother had prints made. Then T-shirts. Offers to buy the original painting began pouring in, as did bids to show her work in galleries.
Over the years, my mother did many paintings featuring the stone—a few more of Bobbi holding it or sitting next to it, some of it alone, and the most unsettling: my mother and Bobbi sitting side by side, both of their chests opened up, the stone between them attached with arteries and veins, a single heart they shared, keeping them both alive.
OLIVIA HELD THEstone up, running her fingers over it, and I braced myself, expecting my mother to reprimand her. I was ready to jump in, to protect and defend my daughter.
But my mother only smiled at her.
“It’s very pretty,” Olivia said.
“It is, isn’t it?” my mother said.
“Where would you like it to go?” Olivia asked.
“Oh, I think right here on the bedside table. So I can see it all the time.”
Olivia set it down beside the lamp, in front of the fresh flowers in the vase. It seemed to glow when the sunlight streaming in the window caught it, to pulsate and throb like something alive.
“Where did it come from?” Olivia asked.
“It belonged to my very best friend. Having it close makes me feel like she’s right here, close to me. Do you have a best friend, Olivia?”
“Yes! Her name is Sophie. She dances with me. Well, she used to. She moved up to level two, so we’re not in the same classes anymore, but we have rehearsal together. She’s the best dancer in level two. She has a lot of roles inThe Nutcracker! She plays Fritz, Clara’s little brother. She hasto wear boys’ clothes, but she doesn’t mind because it’s a good role. She’s also a soldier and a snowflake and a tea dancer.”
“And what about you? What are you playing?”
“Me?” Olivia shrugged her shoulders, looked down at the ground. “I’m just a mouse.”
