“Hello?” I whispered.
“Hi, my love.”
I swallowed. “Today was hard.”
“I know, Pretty Girl, but you were perfect.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You are.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I miss you,” I finally mumbled.
“I know,” she replied. Then she continued to hum quietly. This time, I found it comforting.
One day, about a week later, I got home from school, and the house phone was ringing. It had been raining, so I was all wet. I tried to kick off my shoes and drop my umbrella in the foyer and run to grab the call in the kitchen, but the voicemail picked it up. Mom liked to keep the volume loud, so her happy voice filled the apartment. “Hi there,” she sang. “I’m so sorry you missed us! There’s anushere now since my beautiful daughter moved back in—so if you’re hoping to leave a message for Birdie—”
“—or Melody—” I interjected.
“You can do so at the—” she announced, and then the voicemail filled in a longbeep.
It was a solicitor.
I ripped the telephone out of the wall socket and began to cry.
The next day, I cut off service to the house phone. I packed up the old cordless unit and put it in the back of my closet.
Evan came to Forest Hills to check on me, which was a big deal for him because, in his words, “Queens isnotmy jam.” He met me at the Tower Diner one Saturday for brunch a few weeks later. I told him about an ominous “guy” in Aruba and how the whole thing with my mom went down, but it was an abbreviated version, because the wound was still very raw. I wasn’t myself. I knew it, and he knew it. He asked what he could do for me as my friend, and I told him just showing up was more than enough. Then he asked what he could do for me as my agent, and I said, “Please, just put everything and everyone on hold. Right now, I just need to focus on getting out of bed every day, going to work, managing this new day-to-day rhythm without her.”
“Of course,” he promised.
“If anyone needs me, they can wait. I’ll write when I’m ready.”
“Absolutely, Mel. What about people who reach out to me through your website? What should I tell them?”
“If they don’t know enough about me to know what I’m going through, don’t even bother responding. The people who matter to me are aware that I’ve been through a life-changing event, and they wouldn’t be contacting me via my website.” I sighed. “And if it has anything to do with subrights, they should be directing those inquiries to you anyway.”
“So, off the grid. Roger that.”
I started having nightmares and began taking melatonin to help my body sleep. When that didn’t help, I downloaded books about grief onto my Kindle. One of them said something that I decided to hold as a mantra of sorts.
Grief is the manifestation of the soul healing itself.
Some time passed, and when I couldn’t get the nightmares to subside, I decided to go to therapy. It was less about the grief and more about the guilt, since things with Beckett felt entirely unresolved. My therapist, a nice lady named Lucy, took little time in identifying the fact that I wasn’t only mourning the loss of my mother but the loss of Beckett as well.
She told me I should write about it.
So I did.
Holiday Islandwas my attempt to write about the best week of my life and spin it into a romantic comedy with a happy ending. My characters, Skye and Nash, met on vacation in Curaçao. Skye was there with her mom, who was healthy as a horse in my version. Nash was there for a destination wedding and decided to extend his stay a few extra days. It was light and fluffy. They had dinners together, sure, and, yes, Nash won a bunch of money at the casino. There were three sex scenes, all open door, and they mirrored the ones that had happened on my trip. It felt good to remember Beckett through my writing, felt good to remember how happy we’d been, even if it was only for a week. So I wrapped it up with a nice, neat little bow: instead of staying the night, Skye went back to her hotel room after the bungalow sex with Nash. The next morning, he overslept and missed his flight, and the act three business was them trying to find each other once they were both back in the States. Which they did, successfully, in the last chapter.
Now that I’ve read Beckett’s book, I can see how readers would be upset, especially considering his is so gut wrenching, and mine is just a typical, spunky rom-com. But that’s what Cabaret expected of me, so I tried to stay in my lane.
Fiction is just the truth, hiding in plain sight.
But the same truth can look very different from one author to the next.
Chapter 35
