ChapterFive
Of everyone, Ella was the most surprised that Stevie Franklin had agreed to come to the Copperfield House.Knowing she was on the road somewhere across the continent, her foot on the pedal and her heart in some sorry state, Ella threw herself into preparing a room for Stevie in the artist residency.As snow fluttered down outside, she stretched clean sheets over the mattress and dusted the shelves and tried to have a conversation with Stevie in her head.It’d been twenty-five years since she’d last seen Stevie, twenty-five years since Stevie’s surprise pregnancy and subsequent withdrawal from Ella’s life.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”Ella muttered, fluffing the pillows and stepping back.She tried to imagine what Stevie might say.But all she could picture was twenty-year-old Stevie, dancing to music in the burger restaurant where they’d both worked, her eyes curious and alive.
They’d known so little back then.
There was a sound in the hallway, and Ella spun to find the current painter-in-residence, Mark, who had a smear of magenta oil paint on his cheek and a mysterious look in his eye.Had he been watching her?Or just walking by?
“Is someone new coming?”he asked.It was customary for the artists to come and go from the Copperfield House in groups, to have a welcome dinner and a goodbye dinner, and to link up like family.Stevie would be an outlier.
“A friend of mine is going to stay here for a little while,” she said.“She’s a musician.”
“Does she have any songs I’d know?”
In Ella’s inner mind, she allowed herself to hear Stevie’s raspy and filled-with-pain voice.She allowed herself to drop into the density of emotion that Stevie was always so capable of supplying her audience.It was a voice she hadn’t heard live in years.The truth was, as far as Ella knew, Stevie hadn’t produced any new music since the dawn of the twenty-first century.
To Mark, the painter, Ella lied and said, “She took a hiatus to raise her daughter.But she’s working on a new album.That’s the thing with mothers.They often put off their ‘art’ for years and years before coming back to it.I see it here at the residency over and over.”
Mark looked mildly curious.With his left hand, he scratched at the oil paint on his cheek.But before he could say anything more, Ella’s phone buzzed in her pocket, and she answered it, mouthing an apology as she turned her back to Mark.It was her daughter, Laura.
“Hi, honey!”Ella’s voice was like the sun.“How are you feeling?”
Laura’s tone was somber, reticent.“Fine.Where are you?”
“I came to the Copperfield House to prep Stevie’s room,” Ella explained, imagining her daughter in the bedroom they’d decided was hers when she came home.She imagined Laura opening the curtains to see the freshly fallen snow.“Are you hungry?There are bagels downstairs.There are cereal, fruit, and yogurt.Eat whatever you want.”
“I don’t know if I can eat anything,” Laura confessed.“I, um, couldn’t sleep very well.I stalked Vinny online.”
Ella’s heart sank.In her opinion, the worst thing about modern breakups was the internet.When a young woman like Laura ached with a broken heart, all she had to do was click a few buttons to find out what the man she missed was up to and how much it seemed he wasn’t thinking about her.The fact that Laura still refused to call Vinny and tell him about the pregnancy was a point of contention that Ella knew better than to bring up now.
“Oh, honey,” Ella whispered, searching her mind for what to do.“Sit tight.I’m coming back home.”
“You’ve done enough, Mom,” Laura said, although Ella knew that as Laura’s mother, she could never do enough.She would never stop.
A few minutes later, Ella was in her car, driving down the long, empty, and wintry road to the house she and Will had purchased on Nantucket.After living in city apartments for decades, she often felt that the house was vacuous, more like a palace than a residence.It felt incredible that people needed so much space to eat, sleep, watch television, and read.She’d mentioned this to Alana once, who’d reminded her (lovingly) that most everyone on Nantucket had a much bigger house than Ella did.Did that make them more important?Ella laughed to herself.
Ella wondered if, now that she and Will were raking in “big bucks” from Grayson Harris, Will would want to move to get a house that helped them “keep up with the Joneses,” as the expression went.Ella hoped not.She had no interest in a life of keeping up with status, with a moneyed reputation.She wanted to be there for her family.She wanted to love and be loved.And she wanted to make music.She didn’t need a thousand rooms for that.
Laura was at the kitchen table with her father, sipping a mug of tea.Will was extra-animated, showing her the recent cut he’d done of Ella and Will’s song, the song for Grayson Harris.He clicked the spacebar on his laptop and played the opening bars, watching his eldest’s face.“Can you imagine it?The opening bars, then images of sweeping oceans and coastlines?That’s what Grayson’s suggesting for the first commercial.But there could be many more.”
As Will spoke, Laura’s cheeks grew progressively paler and paler, until she finally raised her first finger, got up, and hurried off to the bathroom.Her tea and bagel remained mostly untouched.Ella entered the kitchen, pressed a kiss to Will’s forehead, and stuck a bagel into the toaster for herself.They knew Laura was getting sick.This was her morning ritual.They both felt terrible about it.
“Grayson called late last night,” Will confessed, trying to distract them both from their daughter’s morning sickness.“He listened to the new tracks I sent him.”
Ella glanced back at Will, surprised that he’d allowed that mega-wealthy man to listen to the secret tracks of their heart, tracks that they hadn’t even let their agent listen to.Ella wasn’t even sure if those particular tracks were “done” in the way they usually liked them to be.
“I know,” Will said, blushing, “but during dinner the other night, we got carried away, talking about music.He’s really in tune with what’s going on, with what’s happened.He’s got an encyclopedic mind for music.”
Ella’s bagel popped from the toaster, and she fetched it and smeared it with cream cheese.She sat beside her husband, where she studied her daughter’s empty chair, praying she’d come back to them soon.It remained strange to have Laura in the house; strange to stop thinking of her as a grad student and a soon-to-be professor.Now, she was going to be a single mother with an unfinished graduate degree.Ella reminded herself not to think of Laura’s life in those terms.But it was difficult not to feel disappointed, especially when it was so clear that Laura was disappointed in herself.
“He wants to meet you,” Will added, taking a bite of yogurt and smiling.“He said he may have met us back in the early 2000s, but that we wouldn’t remember him.”
“He must be nostalgic for his Manhattan years,” Ella said.
“Who isn’t?”Will pressed a kiss onto first Ella’s cheek, then her lips.“Have you heard from Stevie?”
“I know she left Thursday afternoon,” Ella said, checking her phone for the thousandth time.Anxiety splintered her ribs.“I can’t help but imagine her at the top of the Rocky Mountains, in some rickety car, searching for a signal, lost and alone.”
