But Melanie’s attitude toward June—and Eva, too—had tempered in the last few days since she’d learned the truth, not just about Elwood and what June had done about it.
She’d come to realize her own stubbornness had complicated matters for herself; it was not just what both June and Eva had done. If Melanie had listened to Elwood and gone home to Nebraska like he’d first suggested, Nicky would surely already be with his grandparents, because she wouldn’t have been in Malibu when Alex showed up out of the blue. He would’ve had to bring Nickyto her in Omaha. And if she’d simply said no, thanks, to Carson’s money as compensation for keeping quiet, she wouldn’t have spent the last five months living in a house he was paying for and having it look like that was exactly what she was doing: getting paid to keep her mouth shut.
And if she’d gone home to Nebraska back when Elwood told her to, she wouldn’t now be part of this insane scheme to make it seem like he’d wandered into the desert to end his life rather than having done so at home in his own bed.
She couldn’t fault June and Eva entirely for the pickle she was in. Part of it was her own fault.
“You don’t have to worry about me saying anything to anybody about where Elwood is,” Melanie said to June. “I’m not taking back anything I said I would do for you if I’m called upon to do it. And I’m still grateful for the offer to stay with you. I might even take you up on it after a few weeks at my parents’ if you’re still here, regardless of what Carson does or doesn’t do.”
“So,” June said carefully, “you’re not exactly with him anymore?”
Melanie laughed ruefully. “Was I ever? I knew it was all pretend, before the blacklist and even after. It was all for show. His show. Irving says he’s heard Carson is in Florida for the holidays. And he’s not alone.”
“Oh, Melanie, I am sorry.”
“I’m not. You know, I can see much better what kind of man Carson is when he’s not here, if that makes any sense. For a while there, it seemed like he was my only friend. It…it doesn’t feel so much like that anymore.”
When she’d said this, Melanie realized with a start that she’d felt like she’d been in the company of friends the last two weeks with Eva and June, strange as that was, and that it had been a long time since she’d felt that way.
A long time.
The three of them were unlikely companions with hardly anything in common, yet Melanie had felt an alliance between them based on the one thing they did share: their desire to recover that exquisite feeling of knowing you are right where you belong, and that you can rest there because no one is trying to take it from you. There had been a time once when all three of them knew what it was like to own a happy little corner of paradise. They’d each found it before without a map, and she had to believe they could all find it again the same way. Because there is no map to paradise. There is only the dream that such a place exists, as does the desire to possess it, and the determination to find it again when it’s been lost.
And she knew now that the people she’d meet along the way would either walk alongside her as companions or they would hold her back as competitors. Moving forward to recapture her bliss was really just a simple matter of figuring out who was who in her life.
Melanie turned over in bed to look at her sleeping nephew with his thumb half in his mouth and his curly hair tousled about his face.
Devotion to Nicky was already replacing the churning fear of being responsible for him. She brushed a tangly lock off his forehead. How had Alex been able to leave him with her like this? How had he been able to be gone for a week already and not even phone her to talk with his son, tell him he missed him, that he’d see him soon?
But then again, Alex didn’t have her phone number.
Still, he could’ve written. Sent a toy or two in the mail for his boy. It was Christmas morning, for God’s sake.
And it was going to be a different kind of Christmas Day, that was for sure. Last year, she had slept in until noon, had eggs Benedict and champagne for breakfast, exchanged gifts with Nadineand Corinne, and then gone from swanky party to swanky party with Carson. She’d worn a lamé sheath that hugged every curve in her body and emerald earrings and shiny Italian stilettos. She’d tasted caviar and drunk expensive French wine and sung Christmas carols while someone with amazing piano skills played an ebony baby grand in a living room with a twenty-foot-high ceiling. The other guests at that party had clapped and told her her voice was beautiful and they couldn’t wait to see her new movie. She and Carson had stayed over at the house of a friend of Carson’s in Beverly Hills, in a beautiful cabana by the pool that was as big as her grandmother’s house in Lincoln.
This Christmas was going to be nothing like that.
Instead, she was having Christmas brunch with a nephew she hadn’t known she had, a displaced Russian maid, and a widow who’d buried her brother-in-law in her backyard.
This made her giggle, and Nicky opened his eyes.
“Did Santa come?” he said, at once awake.
“I think he did.”
“Are there presents?”
“Shall we go see?”
The boy bounded out of bed.
Eva arrived breathless at the top of Paradise Circle just as Melanie and Nicky were about to ring June’s doorbell.
She looked as if she’d run the whole way up from the bus stop.
“Hey. It’s not like we would’ve started eating without you,” Melanie called out as she pressed the button, but as soon as Eva had closed the distance to her, she could tell Eva wasn’t worried about arriving late.
She was afraid.
