She wasn’t ready for anything but the next time she could kiss Edie and the next clue on the map.
“I don’t think a teleconference is possible.” Cosima tried to relax her shoulders, her lower back, searching for a path to a deep breath. Anything to loosen the sickening knot in her middle that told her that a teleconference wouldn’t be a big deal, and she should just go ahead and arrange it. The knot was so certain that a fifty-year-old company would implode unlessshe, Cosima Frank, was pleasant to Duncan and deferential to the wishes of its board.
It wouldn’t, though. It reallywouldn’t. Cosima knew for a fact that her mother had left the board in a spitting fit more than once while she did what she needed or wanted to do. It had been enough, always, that she didn’t want to.
Well. Cosima didn’t want to.
“Ican’t,” she told Duncan, this time with princessly authority. “I will, of course, do what needs to be done, but I’ve earned the right to take my time to decide what that is and to remind the board I’m not fourteen or their secretary.”
“What’s the matter, love?” She could hear the creak of Duncan’s leather desk chair as he sat down. She imagined him removing his reading glasses and reaching for his tea, which had probably gotten cold as he worked. It was the end of the day in California, a day in which Duncan had gone to an unscheduled emergency board meeting, likely after putting out fires forAn American Castle’s Gardenand making excuses for her, and then been unable to prevent the board from passing this resolution that obligated him to call her. A long and difficult day. He sounded tired.
Cosima couldn’t answer his question, and she was surprised to realize it was because here, right where she was, there wasn’t anything wrong.
There always had been, before.
“I don’t have an excuse,” she said. “I don’t believe I need one.”
Duncan went quiet again. Twice in the same call, he’d let what she said stand without trying to say it back to her a slightly different way. He cleared his throat. “Since you’ve been gone—actually even before you left—I’ve felt increasingly ashamed that I didn’t speak to you about your mother. Her illness. Her.You. Us. We should have talked with honesty a long time ago, or at least talked about what was actually happening instead of what I dearly wished was happening. I must sound to you like I’m not making any sense at all.”
Cosima wondered if the kiss she’d given Edie on the cheek was enchanted, and it was opening every previously closed box that held feelings. Her heart. Her sexual awareness. The real story of her family. Edie’s insights.
Her mother had said Gregory Place was magic, but she had not said what kind.
“Duncan.”
“No, please listen. I did try, Cosima. I tried not to enable Phoebe. Her habits. I encouraged her to get help.”
Cosima studied the wood beneath her fingertips. She could hear Edie laughing with the docent, and she wished she were in the sunlight beside her. “Did you?”
“Several times over the years. Probably not as many as I should have, although I’ve joined a group, a support group, online, and I’ve learned it’s common for the family and friends of someone with a problem like your mother’s to assign blame to themselves.”
Cosima let go of the post and crossed to where the light slanted across the covered walkway. She stepped into it so she could look out into the courtyard at Edie in her green jacket, her hair shining. From the hotel shop, Edie had picked out a black T-shirt with an image of Joan of Arc above the wordNORMANDIEin old-fashioned lettering.
When Cosima talked to Edie, she never had to translate. Edie had witnessed so many of heremotions, which meant Cosima had the experience of her emotions being generously received instead of shushed. Redirected. Oppressed.
Shelikedfeeling. She liked knowing she was safe to expressherself. It meant she was expressing herself more, and reacquainting herself with the girl she’d been before she had grown old enough to step into the role of her mother’s silent everything.
Whatever happened between them, her time with Edie would be the most generous gift anyone had given her in her very privileged life.
“Al-Anon? Is that your support group?”
“It is. Have you found them as well? I have to say that there’s nothing like having your completely unique, secret, and impossible problem turn out to be the same problem thirty other people in your group have been going through. Humbling.”
“A friend told me there’s a lot to get into there. So maybe, since we’re working on this, let’s call what we’re talking about ‘Phoebe’s alcoholism.’” Cosima couldn’t spend the rest of her lifenotsaying it while it stabbed her in the stomach. “You asked her to get help with heralcoholism, and she refused. You tried not to enable her drinking, but you weren’t even able to join a group to get help for yourself until she was gone, which means she wouldn’t let you when she was alive. She wouldn’t permit anyone to help her. She wouldn’t admit to the doctors or the nurses at the hospital that the problem with her liver was the consequence of her drinking. That was the secret she made us keep.”
“Yes.” Duncan’s agreement came much more quickly than Cosima might have expected. He’d probably believed that she was as unwilling to break the seal of silence as he was.
“Her list, with the museum sleepover and the skydiving?” Cosima asked. “She was trying to show me the mother she would’ve been if she hadn’t drank. She was trying to fit everything in before she died.”
“Yes,” Duncan said again.
“If she’d asked me, I would have told her she didn’t have to do that. I loved the mother I had. I still love her. I love you.” Cosima took a deep breath. “The father you are to me.”
“I love you, too.” Duncan was not holding it together. Neither was she. “And I hope you know I have always loved you as my daughter.”
“I do know. Mom—” Cosima stopped. She hadn’t ever called Phoebe “mom.” Not because Phoebe hadn’t wanted her to, but because even when she was young, Cosima had known that “mom” was a term of endearment, and there was always a part of her too angry with Phoebe to call hermom. “Part of the reasonMomloved you is because she loved me so much, she wanted me to have a dad.”
“I think so. Yes.”
