“She’s different. For me.”
Cosima wasn’t an actress. She couldn’t do what her mother could with her expression or her eyes when she said a simple line from a script that made an audience weep. But shecouldhear what her heart meant when she said those four words out loud to Tam.She’s different. For me.
Tam held his chin, looking away. He had a small gold hoop in his ear, and a charm with the letterKdangled from it. She wondered what name the initial stood for. The name of his husband? She watched the charm wink in the low light of the pub and realized she would do the same. If she had someone who was hers, she would wear their initial, their picture in a locket, their name tattooed on her thigh.
She had never had a thought like that in her life.
“Let me narrow this down,” Tam said. “Different from—”
“Everyone,” Cosima said. “You know, my mother wrote me a letter that she left here for me to find. I’m staying at Gregory Place because she put it on a list we were working our way through before she died, and of course, when I came here, she had somethingfor me to do. Find this letter and read it. Maybe she thought I would learn where I came from. Or what I was for.”
“A director in more ways than one.”
“I don’t remember that my mother ever, not even once, made a rule. Not a curfew, not a single reminder not to run through the halls. I wasn’t grounded. She never yelled.”
“But therewererules, I’m guessing.”
Cosima closed her eyes. “I have never, evernotknown what Phoebe Frank wanted me to do. In any given moment of my life. Even this moment. After she’s died.”
Tam shifted his body in the chair, making it creak. “Baby.”
“Baby?” Cosima wasmostlycertain Tam hadn’t addressed her by a pet name, but not entirely.
“My great big tuxedo tom. Oh, he was the worst. Fat as a steer at market, but agile enough to cause trouble. He’d leave me a row of headless mice at my doorstep every night like a ghoul, then settle down in my lap in front of the fire as sweet as any creature could possibly be. He slept curled up at my feet. If I moved even a little, his needle teeth would sink into my toes. He hissed at children. Swiped at dogs. The vet fixed him, but somehow he got my neighbor’s prize Persian pregnant. That was a right mess.”
Tam’s grin was more of a grimace. His voice had been getting rougher as he told her this, making her heart beat fast.
“The day he died, in my arms, at the old vet’s, I wept so long, his fur was sopping. I carried him home in a blanket, and I didn’t sleep until I had made him a resting place. It was spring. I lined the hole with tulips and hyacinth, and placed him in. Took me ages to cover him over with earth, because then it would be final, you see? I’d never be able to hold him again. I’d never feel his fat full stone of weight on my lap or hear him thundering down the stairs. There’s been a Baby-shaped hole inmy life ever since. I closed the pub for a week and couldn’t leave the house. Lost my voice from crying.”
“Tam.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He leaned forward. “Wasn’t a year later my dad died. I was with him when he went, taking a shift for my sister. He had mostly slept for days, had already refused to eat, would have only small sips of water. Told us he saw our mum, and I believe he did, even if I never saw him do more than give my mum orders from behind the bar and glare at her when he thought she was too slow getting food out. My mum would’ve come if my dying dad wanted her to, because he was good about them unspoken rules, as well.”
“Oh.” Cosima understood this. People so powerful they could summon a ghost to do their bidding.
“My mum begged me not to tell him I was gay,” Tam said. “But I was in love. I guess I thought, or wished, that he loved me enough to accept one thing in his life he didn’t understand. Funny, because ninety-five percent of my life looked exactly like his. I’d just be going aboutonething different. And not even that different! I loved Killian, and my dad had six children with my mum, so I figured he must know something about love.”
“He didn’t understand.” Cosima’s cheeks and ears felt too hot, but her stomach was a little lighter, less painful. She tried to trust it.
“I don’t know if he did.” Tam ran his finger along the lip of his glass. “He didn’t say one word about it. I told him, he turned around and pulled a bitter and put it on the bar for me to take to a table. Message received.”
Cosima shook her head, thinking about wordless messages and how much power they’d had in her own life. She grabbed the map off the table and held it up. “Phoebe was like this. She gave me a map showing every place I was supposed to go andwhat I was supposed to do once I got there. But what I’m realizing is that there was no destination. She wrote to me in that letter about how she had fallen in love with my father, how she loved him so much, it was overdetermined that I would someday exist. But did it never occur to her to tell me, once I was here, where I was going? Was I simply supposed to follow her so that she could see every option up ahead and choose for me?”
“What do you think?”
Cosima cut off a big bite of her sticky toffee pudding. It was perfect sweetness. The perfect foil to this horrible, amazing, confusing day. “I think maybe when my father died, she changed. She was happy to tackle the risks and pitfalls of Hollywood and come out on top, but once she’d loved and lost, that was her limit. I think every time she came close to any kind of risk with Duncan or me, she pulled back. More silence took over, and less was said.”
“You’re describing someone incredibly powerful.”
“Incredibly complicated.”
He sighed. “That’s why I told you about Baby and my dad. When Baby died, oh, but it was pure, pitch-black grief. I knew what he was, I knew every bit, so I knew what I had lost, and I knew what part of my heart I’d lost with him. When my dad died, duck, well. Do you know how surprised I was when there was so much Ididn’tlose, but gained? Acceptance, just to start. I felt so much better without him. That’s complicated. Relief, the freedom of an open life, but the ability to still imagine everything we might have said and didn’t? I would have rather pitched myself off a cliff. I’d have rather felt ten times the grief of when Baby died. It would have meant the love was pure, wouldn’t it? The hurt and pain would have come from something I understood, instead of a hundred things I had to learn in the years he’s been gone.”
“So what the fuck, Tam?” Cosima had another bite of pudding. “I’ve got more than an English pub’s worth of a legacy to tend to, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“You’ll find yourself stopped short, again and again, with having to figure something out. You’ll make something up, and it will work, or it won’t. Either way, you’ll learn something about yourself. It’s just that.” Tam finished the bourbon.
Cosima poured custard over the pudding she had left, and she and Tam let their conversation settle over them while she thought of nothing but rich sponge and vanilla custard.
