In San Francisco, she got high on ecstasy and picked up a guy on New Year’s Eve with luscious rock-star hair who told her he’d enlisted in the marines. She woke up in an apartment in Oakland, and it was 1994. When he suggested dim sum, she rubbed bar soap along her eyelids to remove smeared mascara then slipped back into the sparkly dress she’d gone out in the night before. “Wok of shame,” she’d joked. In the daylight and sober, she knew for certain he wasn’t going into the marines, but that was okay. She’d told him she was an accountant and that her name was Summer. They got Chinese food. It was easier to pretend they weren’t both liars. He walked her to the BART station, and she kissed him on the cheek.
“Keep your head low, Marine.”
“Good luck with the numbers, Summer.”
She taped her fortune into her journal.
Your deeds today will be your memories tomorrow.
She’d written about her fear that her body gave her away, that anyone could tell she’d carried a baby and would wonder where that baby had gone. Alone, she would stare at it in the mirror, from the front and side, remember the way her waist disappeared, how her breasts had colonized the rest of her. Now, her stomach was flat, though her hips remained wider, a door jammed open. She’d managed to empty herself out and that had been satisfying, like she’d decluttered a hoarder’s squalid house. She wondered how her face had changed, what strangers might see there, whether her family or Leo would even recognize her. Nola Wren wouldn’t remember her at all.
In Santa Monica, that emptiness started to take a new shape. She wrote less about herself and more about Nola Wren and what she must be like now, notes from brief phone calls that helped Molly glean a picture of her baby, her little girl. She would see kids at the beach and imagine Nola Wren building sandcastles. She wrote her thoughts down, careful not to fantasize too much, to be practical. She wrote down something Yarrow said to her when she left the hippie house. “One day happiness will sneak up on you, Molly. Don’t be surprised.”
Her last night there, she’d stood alone on the pier at the end of a long shift serving umbrella drinks at a beach bar. She’d been in Southern California only a few months and marveled how every day seemed the same. Endless summer. The roller coaster was still, the night wind off the ocean lifted sand into swirls around her. She could not get much further away from her past unless she dove off the pier into the Pacific. She could remember a time when she might have welcomed that, but not anymore. She’d grown tired of following a sinking sun.
She went down to the beach, sat in the sand facing west, and thought about sunrise over the Atlantic. At first light, she stripped to her underwear and swam out into the surf. She was alive. She had survived her own self, and that was enough for now. When she left the beach, she’d felt a shift, like that headwind she’d been facing down for so long could be at her back. It was time to turn around. On the sidewalk,a beach bum, shirtless and shoeless, sat on a surfboard that had seen better days. His hair was twisted into salted locs. “Hey, babe,” he said. “I dig that jacket. Used to have one just like it.” He smiled at Molly, hand out. Molly reached into the pocket where she’d shoved bills from the tip jar the night before. “You know what, man? Here,” she said, taking the jacket off her back. “Why don’t you take this? I don’t need it anymore.”
With that weight off her, it had been a breeze to finally pawn the last piece of her broken past that she’d clung to: Sideny’s flawless diamond bracelet. She was done shouldering blame for what Charlie Grant did to her. She was more than her flaws.
It took her a while, but once she’d made it to Birmingham, Camille pressured her to come up to the lake. “You’re super close. We’ll smoke weed and watch the Perseids.”
She caught a train to Charlotte and the bus to Asheville, where Camille and her husband, Floyd, picked her up.
After dinner—Camille made her own cheesy lasagna now—they’d carried blankets down to the dock. Rimmed with dark pines and darker hills, the slick lake twinkled like star soup, as if it were the source of the light and some great hand had dipped a ladle in, flung galaxies across a black bowl hung upside down. Molly tilted her head, plotting where she ended and the world began. Constellation lines became animated, and Molly saw her own—the place she left behind, her stops along the way, a sail on a heeling boat.
Floyd spread the blankets, and the three of them had lain side-by-side on their backs. The air around them fizzed and crackled as meteors ripped the atmosphere. “Holy shit,” Molly gasped. She felt Camille’s hand cup hers. She gripped it in alliance as they shouted, “There!” and “There!” each time a star shot past.
“I get letters from Henry. We’re buds,” Camille whispered. “He and Leo are in Boston now. They work for the same law firm.”
Molly turned her head. They were almost mouth-to-mouth. She missed her friend, missed knowing someone by their breath.
“He deserves to know, Moll. You never even gave him a chance. He didn’t do anything wrong. You said it yourself. You can’t keep running.”
After midnight, they went back to the house. Floyd had made up the pull-out sofa, and Molly collapsed face-first into it, then rolled over. Camille sat on the edge.
“I’m glad you’re here. You can stay as long as you want. Floyd doesn’t care.”
“When I was a teenager, my grandfather died, and the last thing he said to me was, ‘Go and love.’ I was so mad at him for dying. I mean, I was mad at everything. He was always quoting Yeats—it drove my mom nuts. I didn’t know that was from a Yeats poem until recently.”
“The go and love thing?”
“Yeah. Something about a brown penny. ‘I am too young. I am too old.’ Something like that,” Molly said. “Go and love is way different from love and go. I got so twisted up.”
The living room ceiling was popcorned and sprinkled with glitter. Molly blurred her eyes. “I feel like I’m covered in stardust.”
“Joni Mitchell said we’re all stardust,” Camille said.
Molly remembered that night when she was little, when she and Maeve lit sparklers with their mom. For weeks and weeks after she pushed Conor O’Kane over the railing, she’d scrubbed her hands raw, trying to get the feeling of him off her. She’d grabbed the sparkler that night, after it had burned out, seared it into her hand. She’d told her mother that she had seen the ghosts and they scared her, and her mother promised that she’d sent them away and that they wouldn’t bother her anymore.
But that was never true. Not for Molly. It didn’t matter whether it made sense. Right or wrong, fair or not. She’d never let herself forget. She was beginning to understand that it was in her nature somehow to inflict wounds on herself. She had to untwist herself, set things right.
“I might need to get myself back home,” she said. “You know, go and love.”
Camille had pressed a piece of paper into her hand then.
As the train pulled into South Station, Molly grazed her finger one last time over the toothy edges where she’d taped that paper down. She could close the journal. She’d stared at the number enough to know it by heart.
Molly checked out of her motel room early, left her bags in a locker at the train station, and made her way to the Public Garden to scope out the post on the bridge where he said they could meet, near the George Washington statue. To kill time, she fell in with a group of tourists and wandered paths through manicured flower beds and dripping willows, past the brass duck family she remembered from a children’s book. Another thing she’d missed. She’d never once read to Nola Wren.
