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“I can’t understand this, Mom. This island? In the middle of Michigan? You were the one who always said as Californians, we don’t need to go anywhere else.”
Penny stabbed her foot on the brake just in time as they staggered through Los Angeles traffic. Her blond hair stuck to sweaty patches across her arms and neck, and she glanced anxiously toward Elise. Penny probably thought her mother was going through some sort of nervous breakdown in the wake of her own mother’s death.
And maybe that was true. Perhaps this all really was an elaborate nervous breakdown.
“Maybe I’ve seen enough of California for now,” Elise told her daughter. No matter how many years had passed since that first driver’s license, her heart still pattered anxiously when Penny drove. It had been kind of her to offer to drive her to the airport, so kind that Elise hadn’t found it possible to refuse. Still, she wished she had just hired a taxi.
“You’re only going to be gone a week, right?” Penny’s eyebrow arched.
“I’m going to feel it out,” Elise told her. “I’ll make up my mind as I go.”
“Mom. I don’t like to hear that,” Penny replied, heaving a sigh. “You’re too old to run away from home, you know.”
“Now you’re just being melodramatic. I’d like to think we’re never too old to do anything,” Elise said with a mischievous grin.
“All right. All right.” Penny’s palms stretched over the top of the steering wheel as they paused in traffic yet again. “To be honest, I wish I was headed out there with you. This audition is freaking me out, especially since classes are about to gear up again.”
“You couldn’t pay me to go back to college,” Elise stated. “The stress was impossible.”
“Gee. Thanks.” Penny chuckled. “Just tell me. Why did you choose this island again? Is it really all because of that movie we watched?”
Elise hadn’t told Penny about the gritty details of her mother’s diary, her tumultuous past, or the fact that, assuredly, her grandfather lurked somewhere in the Midwest, potentially without knowledge of Elise or Penny or Bradley at all.
“It looks beautiful. And you know I’m in the middle of writer’s block. Isn’t this what writers are supposed to do? Get away from it all? Get some inspiration?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m an actress. Actresses like to be in the middle of it all,” Penny said.
“Good point.”
Penny left the car buzzing beside them as they hugged goodbye one final time outside of the terminal at LAX.
“Why do I feel like you’re my daughter, and I’m worried about you instead of the other way around?” Penny demanded.
“I don’t know. That sounds like something we should work out in therapy,” Elise said teasingly.
“Mom. No joking around here. You’ll tell me if you need anything, right?”
“Of course, I will. You too, okay?”
“No matter what.”
After making her way through security, Elise inspected herself in the airport bathroom, adding a dash of mascara and a layer of lipstick. A woman shot into the bathroom behind her and made eye contact in the mirror. Embarrassed, Elise shoved her makeup in her bag and headed into the hallway. It was like the woman had peered into her soul and seen just exactly what Elise was up to.
She was on a silly mission. It probably wouldn’t amount to anything.
And she had put far too much stock in it.
After that first night with the film and the diary, Elise had investigated the staging company that Somewhere in Time had hired from, the one based in Chicago. There was no record of the staging company in operation after 1983, which meant that whoever this Dean person was no longer worked there. Elise had hunted for a list of possible staging workers, but the internet revealed almost nothing.
Dean. Dean was the only name she had to go on. Dean and any details she could glean from the 1979 diary. Since that first night, Elise had found it almost too difficult to open it again as though the binding itself was made of fire.
“One secret at a time,” she muttered to herself as she slipped into line to grab yet another coffee before the plane.
As she sipped the hot liquid and nibbled on a scone, her eyes scanned the tarmac outside. The planes caught the blaze of the California sun and reflected it back. Again, she stirred in a panic, demanding of herself why her mother had found it necessary to lie to her only daughter for all these years.
Was it because whatever lurked out in the Midwest would be too difficult for Elise to uncover?
Was it because Allison just hadn’t wanted her to know? Or was it something else?
But a girl deserved to know her father, didn’t she? And if this wasn’t possible—if he was dead or a jerk or something—then Elise felt she deserved to know this as well. She was a storyteller, after all. It was her job in this life to uncover these stories, to tell them back to herself and to others in a way that made sense, both beautifully and romantically. My mother, Allison Darby, fell in love with a man named Dean on a gorgeous island in the Straits of Mackinac. I’m the result of a wild affair. One they never spoke of again.
She wanted to know enough to fill in the blanks.
Elise boarded the plane and placed her carry-on in the overhead compartment. She then settled in next to an adorable older woman who announced almost immediately that she was headed to Chicago to see her son for the first time in over two years.
“My gosh! That’s wonderful for you,” Elise said as she buckled her seat belt.
“It’s been too long,” the woman continued, her eyes growing glossy. “We got into some stupid fight two years ago. I don’t think I liked his girlfriend. She wasn’t very nice to him. Maybe he told me too much and then decided to push me out of his life after that. In any case...” She grabbed a tissue and dotted it beneath her eye.
“You’ll have a beautiful reunion,” Elise whispered, flashing the lady a genuine smile. “The kind you deserve. Nobody should live in resentment for the rest of their lives.”
“You’re right,” the woman replied. After another sniffle, she said, “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why you’re headed away from our sunny California?”
“How can you tell I’m a California girl?”
“You’re like me. You’ve got the look,” the woman said.
Elise chuckled. “I’m headed out to Michigan to uncover a mystery.”
“Sounds exciting. Do you have any clues?”
Elise winced. “To be honest with you, I don’t. Only a diary and some lost memories. My mother just died a bit ago, and I guess... well, my daughter thinks I’m having a nervous breakdown.”
“Everyone deserves a nervous breakdown every now and again,” the woman said, smiling. “When I had mine, I nearly married a man I had only just met and moved to Jamaica.”
“Why didn’t you?” Elise asked.
“I wonder that almost every single day,” the woman said, tilting her head. “Imagine me now. I could be on a beach somewhere, drinking something out of a coconut. Maybe I would have been happier.”
“But you wouldn’t be you, I guess,” Elise affirmed.
“No. I suppose not. What a pleasure that would be,” the woman said.
This time, both of them laughed uproariously, so much so that the woman suggested they grab drinks together when they got up into the air. Elise was grateful to have found a friend in the midst of all her panic.
When they ordered vodka tonics, they clinked their cups together as the woman, whose name was Janice, said, “Here is to uncovering secrets.”
“To having no regrets,” Elise returned.
Elise felt a little light-headed from the alcohol when the plane whipped down toward the Chicago skyline and rushed down the airstrip. Janice had given her multiple secrets of her own life—including the fact that her son had nearly died in childbirth. Elise had offered her own stories.
“That Sean guy sounds like he’s miserable,” Janice said, her brow furrowed. “Living in Silver Lake with a younger woman? I mean, can you imagine how difficult that must be to keep up? He’s probably reading style blogs every day and trying to catch up with all the younger lingo about the newest famous directors.”
Elise guffawed with laughter. “The thing about Sean is he always wanted to be much cooler than he was. I bet you’re exactly right.”
“No matter how much time goes by, ex-husbands still affect us so much,” Janice said. Her eyes turned toward the window as a ding cut through the cabin to let them know they could now unbuckle their seat belts and grab their overhead items. “You can’t get rid of them so easily.”
“I guess you’re right,” Elise agreed.
“People affect people,” Janice said, rising up from her chair onto rickety legs. “It’s the best part about being alive. We influence each other. We change one another’s lives like that.” She snapped her fingers and grinned even wider. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Elise and Janice waited for their luggage together. When Janice missed her suitcase, Elise rushed forward and grasped the handle with more strength and agility than an Olympian. Janice laughed and gripped her stomach.
“I’ve never seen anyone work that hard for me before,” she said. “Are you an angel?”
Elise beamed and hugged her newest, dear friend. “Is your son picking you up?”
“He’s supposed to,” Janice said. She turned her phone off airplane mode, donned some reading glasses, and blinked at the screen. “Ah. Yep. He says he’s waiting.” When she turned her eyes back up, she said, “Would you like a ride somewhere?”
“I still don’t know where I’m staying,” Elise said. “I’m not going to make the drive until tomorrow.”
“My son will have a recommendation,” Janice said. “Let him drop you off somewhere. Have you been to Chicago before? Maybe you can even check out some of the sights before you go.”
Elise had never been to Chicago. Heck, she had hardly been anywhere. Taking Janice up on her offer, she sat in the back of Janice’s son’s Mercedes, listening to her and her son catch up. She blinked out the window at the changing scenery, a world that seemed so foreign to Los Angeles that it might as well have been a different country.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been to Chicago, Elise,” Janice’s son, Bob, stated from the front seat.
“I was a bit busy my whole life, I guess,” Elise said with an ironic laugh. “College, then a husband, then babies, with a ton of career mixed in there.”
“As a woman, everything kind of happens at once,” Janice affirmed. “But now, you can take this time for yourself. Based on everything you told me on the plane, you’re due for an adventure.”
Bob dropped Elise off at one of the bigger hotels in downtown Chicago, just a block away from Millennium Park and the famous Art Institute. He pointed every which way, describing the general landscape of the place as Janice hugged her a final time and slipped a piece of paper in her hand. “Call us if you need anything at all,” she said.
“Thank you,” Elise whispered. Her voice caught with emotion. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
Elise took the early evening to wander through downtown Chicago, browse stores, sip a glass of wine on a rooftop bar, and jot various ideas down in her journal. It surprised her to feel something quivering around back there: writing ideas that actually seemed to have legs. She had worked on the same screenplay for years, the one that had ultimately failed. Now, with an adventure and a ton of free time before her, the words seemed to flow freely.
Chicago.
It was a brief stopover, a quick sightseeing expedition before she sought out that mystery island her mother had worked on so long ago. By the time she fell into her crisp, clean sheets that night, she heaved a sigh of recognition. She now knew what all the fuss was about. Chicago was really something special.