29

Dr. French’s office, uptown

Dr. French greeted me warmly from his desk when his secretary showed me in, and ushered me to my usual armchair. He’d acquired a touch of a tan over the summer. When I asked, he spoke briefly of his wife convincing him to follow along to Mallorca before winding his desk timer and fixing me with the scrutinizing gaze I didn’t realize I had missed until then.

“Enough about me,” Dr. French said mildly, the tip of his pen poised over his notebook. He gave me a quick, professional smile. “How was your summer, Mrs. Shoard?”

I started from the beginning, as far as I could recall it: the caravan, the emptiness, the motels, the boredom, the hard right turn of reassuming my role, the ache of it all. I left out any implicating details of Kline, or Jesse, but I did mention Haas. I told Dr. French about our arrangement, the three of us, but not about the drugs. Or any of what came after.

Dr. French watched me, occasionally jotting down a note.

“You seem reluctant,” he said finally, speaking up for the first time in the middle of a brief silence. I had just told him about sitting down across from the mirror after the dress rehearsal in Sumner, terrified to even remove my makeup lest I release the Lady permanently from my body.

“In what regard?” I asked.

“In letting yourself believe that you taking these…creative steps, to forge closeness with yourself again—and your husband, too, by the sound of it—was a good thing.”

Creative steps; a very tidy way of putting it. The truly good thing for me had been taking back what was mine with the mean end of a knife that didn’t belong to me.

I turned that over in my head—I was a murderer.

Play the part.

“There are—people,” I said haltingly, staring at a blank spot on the carpet. “There have been people, who tried to…put me in a box they built. Make me into what they wanted. And I followed them, I’ve been so ready to just…follow them. Every time.”

Dr. French’s brow was drawn with curiosity. He jotted quickly on his page. “And is your husband one of those people?”

“No, I think Wesley is the only person who’s ever cared enough to stand back and let me decide for myself.”

Another silence came, a thinking sort. Dr. French let it play out—I was steering this conversation.

It’s your show, Jack.

“I don’t think I knew how to be happy before I met him,” I said very quietly.

To change is to remain.

I was free.

“Does that scare you?”

Dr. French watched me keenly across the finely woven Persian rug between us. I took a moment to interrogate this foreign clarity, my feelings in rare order where they sat inside me.

“It doesn’t scare me,” I said gently. “It makes me sad, that I’ve been…starved of my own peace for so long, without even realizing it.”

The desk timer chimed. Dr. French made several lines of quick notes, flipped back through a few pages, and looked up at me. “How are you on the amphetamine prescription? Was it helpful while you were away?”

I looked down at my hands and spun my wedding band idly around my finger. “I’ve been going without it since we came back to the city,” I admitted.

Dr. French’s fine white eyebrows went up. “Nothing at all? Complete cessation?”

“Why, is that dangerous?”

Dr. French removed his glasses and buffed them gently on the lapel of his sport coat. “Withdrawals can be somewhat concerning, if not managed properly.”

“I want to know I can get along without help.”

“There is a risk, Mrs. Shoard, that you can’t.”

I nearly bit back against that—I’d survived overindulgence just fine, I could weather my way easily through temperance—but I stopped. I re-crossed my legs and pointed my gaze avoidantly through the office window looking out over uptown’s tidy splendor.

Dr. French sighed through his nose. “Would you be disappointed in yourself for using a crutch if you had a broken leg?” he asked.

“This is different.”

“How?”

“It makes me feel weak.” The idea of taking more medicine made me think of Haas, and I couldn’t bear to let him remain even in memory.

“Needing help is human nature, Mrs. Shoard. We aren’t made to go at it all alone.”

Dr. French stood up and neatened a stack of papers beside his desk lamp. “The simple fact is that you were left in the lurch for a very long time and got too used to blaming yourself for getting stuck there. Your inability to believe you could continue living was not entirely your fault. You picked up the glass, but it takes immense pressure and time to get someone to that point.”

I considered that.

“What you do now is entirely within your control,” Dr. French said. He scribbled a fresh prescription onto his pad. “Let yourself be helped. I’m putting you on a graduated dosage. Mild. You’ll be off it by Christmas.”

He held the slip of paper out to me. I stared at it.

“Will it always feel like so much at once?” I asked.

“Will what?”

“Living.”

Dr. French squinted at the middle distance of his coffee table.

“Happiness,” he said with the air of speaking as the words came to him, “is not a thing you can point to and understand as an object. It’s a unique state of being made from the individual drams of small, achievable joys. It isn’t so glamorous as making a cocktail, but we owe it to ourselves to learn how to brew our necessary remedies if we can’t find it anywhere else. Everyone needs to be their own medicine. Some of us just need a little help.”

He watched me evenly, calmly, a studious and careful gaze. I stared at the delicate shapes of the molding trim at the base of the wall.

I would be alright, wouldn’t I? I could learn.

A silence hung between me and Dr. French like a hawk lingering back on its keeper’s arm, afraid of the wilderness.

“The majority of life is rarely an ecstasy,” Dr. French said gently, “and often confounding. But people aren’t good wine meant to be kept in cellars. When the rubber meets the road, we’re all cheap stuff, better in the company of others.”

Dr. French gestured at me with the prescription as though insisting to pay for something I was trying to give him for free.

I took it.

Before I made for the bus back across town, I shut myself in the phone booth on the corner.

I dug into my purse for the torn-off corner of a Playbill for Judy Garland’s September premiere Wesley had left on the kitchen counter, on which I’d scrawled a Texas number that Ezra had left with our answering service last night.

“Alpine Construction,” Jesse answered, chipper as anything.

“Hello, this is Margaret Shoard, calling for twelve cords of lumber?”

A single, bright rap of a chuckle cracked down the phone line. “Shit, Ezra owes me a hundred bucks. Didn’t think you’d actually call.”

“How are you?”

“Oh, same as ever. Living the dream. Got to go kick up some rabble down in Terlingua couple weeks ago, can’t complain.”

“Do you think you’ll be stopping by New York any time soon?”

“And why might I do that?” he asked. I could hear the sideways smile in his voice.

“For the theater, of course.”

“Of course! The bastion of American arts, paved by only the dirtiest Rockefeller dollars.”

“I’d like to meet,” I said, staring at my toes, scuffing one idly against the piss-stained edge of the call box. “If you have the time, of course. I take it you’ll be busy.”

“I’ve got nothing but time for you, Cherokee Park. What needs doing?”

“Just a chat. I want to make sure we’re square.”

Jesse made a considering sound. “You know, Ezra said he’s putting together Hamlet next.”

“Is he.”

“By Gis and by Saint Charity, alack and fie for shame,” Jesse sang to himself in blithe falsetto as Ophelia, “Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t, by Cock, they are to blame.” Without skipping a beat, Jesse snapped back to his own voice. “You know Minnie’s?”

I blinked. “The burlesque bar?”

“I prefer ‘girly club,’ doesn’t sound so full of itself, but technically, yes. The burlesque bar,” he said, chewing pointedly on the consonants, “just off Forty-Second.”

“I know it.” Lisette still had friends there.

“Good! I’m due in town sometime next month. I’ll be in touch when I’m in spitting distance,” Jesse said, all cheek, and hung up.

I stared at the handset tolling monotony.

I missed the cradle the first time I tried to hang up before hurrying to the curb and flailing for the first cab I saw. I needed to talk to Edie.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

I took the stairs two at a time on the last flight up. I knocked briskly on Edie’s door, tried the latch, and found it open.

“It’s me,” I called as I stepped inside, but froze—my greeting rang baldly through the apartment, and it took me several seconds stopped stock-still in her foyer to realize it was because the walls were bare.

“Hello?” I called out, and heard my voice echo again with a strange, museum-like nakedness.

“Margaret.” It came from deeper in the apartment, with a keen note of surprise as though I’d caught her off guard. Edie was never off guard. Her footsteps rapped stiff against the bare floor where she was supposed to have several rugs arranged in the piano room.

She stopped at the end of the front hall, and I looked at her awash in a bath of daylight shot through with stray motes. I had never seen Edie look anything besides put together. In all the years I had known her, she was the very picture of grace in even her lowest moments—ripped drunk, or spitting mad at a bad review, or simply ego-bruised by someone saying the wrong thing. In every case, she had still been Edie, poised and perfect and holier-than-thou without even having to try.

Standing in her strangely bare apartment, for the first time, Edie looked small and afraid and very, very lost.

“What’s going on?” I asked, barely making enough air to speak. The door hung partially open behind me.

Edie huffed a tight sigh and drew a hand over her brow. Her hair was tied back with a lopsided scarf, and she was in a pair of Capri pants with a men’s golf shirt tucked messily into the waist. “I have to go back to Melbourne for a little while,” she said haltingly to the floor.

The air left me as though I’d been kicked in the gut. “What’s happened?”

Edie shook her head and came to stand across from me, her hands on her hips. “My mother. She’s been off for a while, but it’s—worse, now. I knew it was bound to happen, I just wish she wouldn’t have taken her bloody time and done this before the fall season picked up.” She paused and shut her eyes to draw a breath, hold it, and blow it out again. “Well. She never did do anything for anyone’s convenience but her own, why start now after ninety-odd years?”

She gave her usual piquant smile, but the sparkle was gone. I stared at her in quiet shock, until Edie’s wherewithal caught up to her.

“My God, your hair.”

“Edie.”

“When did you do this? It looks marvelous.”

“Edie.”

She stopped plucking at my head and sighed before reaching out to draw her hand down my arm, stopping at my wrist to curl my fingertips up in her palm.

“I was going to go down and tell you both when I had my head on straight again,” she said. “But I’ve had to figure this whole mess so quickly, and I only…well. It’s a lot. I’m sorry if all the packing has been making a racket.”

I hadn’t even noticed anything amiss through the ceiling. I’d been so absorbed lately in the process of being truly aware of the days happening around me, that even inconveniences like a few extra bumps and rumbles felt miraculous in their mundanity.

“No,” I blurted, scrambling, shaking my head quickly. “No, it’s—obviously, you have to go. You have to see her. Right? You’re her daughter.”

I tried to keep it in, I really did. But no matter how many dirty jokes Ezra made about her being my mother, or what kinds of rumors flew around about us, Edie had filled the gap I’d made by leaving home and raised me into the person I was now.

It was as though I’d been plunged into cold water and left to figure out how to kick my way back to the surface. I didn’t even realize I’d begun getting emotional until Edie clicked her tongue tenderly at me and kissed my knuckles.

“For better or for worse,” she murmured.

I would be shattered to lose her. But if I could weather what happened in Sumner, I could weather anything.

It would be alright. This was change, and to change was to remain.

I would live.

Edie held her arms out and bundled me close. I accepted the embrace immediately, squeezing tightly around her middle.

“I have to tell you,” she said, her chest buzzing gently at my ear, “and I hope you take this as the compliment it’s meant to be, but I don’t feel any doubt leaving you here for a little while. I might have before, but right now, Margaret, you’re the sharpest I’ve seen you since we met.”

In lieu of saying anything, unable to really speak at all, I nodded. She was right.

“Do you remember that Midsummer performance, early days?” she asked, with the hint of a smile in it.

“I fucking hate Midsummer,” I muttered into her shirt.

Edie laughed. “Oh, I know. Remember how nervous you were?” She stepped back and held both my shoulders to take me in. Edie shook her head again in happy disbelief and pursed her mouth for a moment as it buckled with her own emotion. “You could face the entire world now, darling. Really face it, truly. You could. And you will, won’t you?”

I hesitated before nodding again. Edie gave me another one of her most earnest smiles, the kind that reached through her whole face, and leaned in to kiss me on the corner of my mouth.

“Jesus.” I swiped at both my clammy cheeks and gave a wet, miserable huff. “I’m gonna miss you.”

“I’ll keep in touch. Cross my heart. And you aren’t rid of me for good; the subletter is an old friend. We’ll get a drink together before I go, introduce you and all.”

She looked at me for a moment before pressing another kiss to my forehead. I shut my eyes and memorized her warmth.

“If you knew the whole truth of what happened out there,” I said before she pulled back, so I didn’t have to look her in the eye as I admitted it, “I think you’d be really proud of me.”

Edie remained with her mouth against my skin for a long, considering silence.

“When I was a girl,” she murmured without moving away, “the bush started directly off our porch. I always stayed up later than I should have, and I’d hear the wild dogs scrapping sometimes after dark. There was a real mess of it one night, so I went out to try and catch sight of them—I stood there with a torch in my little hand and watched a female tear out the throat of whatever mangy cur had been trying to mount her.”

I swallowed around the thick fist of feeling closing up around my throat, and held tight to Edie’s wrists.

“It was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen. You’re extraordinary, Margot. Look at you.” She leaned back and appraised me. “Lit right up from the inside out. You’ll be just fine.”

“Ezra is doing Hamlet next,” I said, remembering suddenly why I’d come up here in the first place. “I want to go for Ophelia.”

Edie smiled and pretended to catch sight of an old friend at the back of my gaze. “There she is.”