“It doesn’t make any difference to me, but whoever takes her needs to go early, and I mean early early. Like four thirty or five. Don’t you think? It would be best if you didn’t see them at all, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“But there’s Nicky to think of. He won’t be awake then, will he?” June said.
Melanie thought for a moment. “Could he sleep over here? Just tonight? I could bring him over after you get back from…you know. Palm Springs.”
“Well…I guess I could make him a little bed on the floor by me,” June said. “Okay, then. That’s what we will do. Now, no more worrying about this. The griddle is hot and ready. Let’s eat.”
“But what if…what if those men know what else I did? What if…” Eva’s voice trailed away, as though the words that would’ve completed the sentence were too awful to say.
“For heaven’s sake, stop asking ‘what if,’ Eva,” Melanie said. “Nobody ever feels better asking what-if questions. They only feel worse. And I don’t want to know what else you did. Keep it to yourself and leave me out of it.”
“And it’s Christmas,” June said. “Time for pancakes.”
After their brunch and a time of gift sharing, June put a Mario Lanza Christmas album on the hi-fi and they sipped hot cocoa while Nicky played.
Melanie couldn’t stop thinking how good it felt to be sitting in a cozy living room in ordinary clothes instead of gold lamé, sipping a hot chocolate instead of a Manhattan, and watching her nephew enjoy his new toys instead of nursing a hangover.
She hadn’t missed her family in the last five years as much as she did just then, and she was suddenly overcome with gladness that she had those airline tickets. In five days she would be home. Home. And her parents would meet their grandson.
She’d be going there as Melanie Kolander, the girl who once had a dream. And yet she wasn’t the same girl who had left five years earlier. She was also Melanie Cole now.
She was both somehow.
“What are you thinking about, Melanie?” June asked her, breaking into her reverie. “You look like you’re a million miles away.”
Melanie looked across the room to where June sat with her own mug.
“I was thinking about what it will be like to take Nicky home to Omaha and to be there myself again, I guess. I never thought I’d be so eager to go back there.”
“Home was not a good place for you?” The envy in Eva’s words was slight but unmistakable.You have a home to return to. You have parents…
Melanie considered the question and the underlying tone for a moment. “I’d gotten it into my head that I was someone different now. That Melanie Cole isn’t Melanie Kolander, that they are two different people. But they’re not. And there is no ‘they.’ This stage name Irving gave me is just that. It’s just throwing together a few letters of the alphabet that sound like the name that is really mine. But I’m still me. I am still Melanie Kolander from Omaha. I hadn’t understood that until just these last few days. This thing with the blacklist isn’t fair, and none of it is true, but it’s still real. It’s realand because it’s real it’s part of who I am now and who I will always be. I need to find a way to make peace with that. To somehow own it without it owning me.”
June looked at her thoughtfully. “I wish that Elwood could have heard you say that. That accident took everything from him and he never figured out how to live without the things it took. That accident owned him. And oh, how I wish I had known he’d grown so weary of being possessed like that…”
June’s voice trailed away.
“Elwood made his own choices, June,” Melanie said. “And nobody can know another person’s thoughts if they choose to hide them. You didn’t know. If I’ve learned anything from these months on the blacklist, it’s that it does no good to wish you could change the past. Or the future. It’s impossible.”
June smiled softly. “I used to imagine the closet in the little one-room shack my mother and I lived in was a time machine. When she would leave me to fend for myself I’d go inside it and pretend to travel forward to the moment when she’d come back. I hated being alone like that. Especially at night.”
“Your mother left you alone at night?” Eva asked.
“She had way too much faith in my ability to handle that much independence.”
Melanie cocked her head. “How old were you?”
“Seven and eight. Nine, too, but I was used to it by then. It’s funny. Now I wish I could go backward in time rather than forward.” She sighed. “I wish it all the time.”
“So do I,” Eva said.
“All the time?” Melanie asked. “Allthe time?”
June took a sip from her mug and then set it down on the coffee table. “Don’t you?”
“Notallthe time. I wouldn’t go back and not make the movie with Carson just so that I wouldn’t have met him.”
