I sat in front of the computer and stared at Kelly’s photo, her head thrown back in laughter, sunlight full in her face. “Kelly laughs like a guy,” someone had said at a party in high school, and it shamed her. “Is it true?” she’d asked. “Do I laugh like a guy?”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I told her. “That you laugh loudly? Only men get to do that? What kind of asshole world is this, anyway?”
I’m not sure why, but we started saying that about everything: When she didn’t get a callback, when I got a B instead of an A on an algebra test, when we couldn’t find parking during the crazy summer months. What kind of asshole world is this, anyway? I’d forgotten that, but I wanted to say it to her now, about her possibly coming to Ten Chimneys, about how she was such an enormous absence and an enormous presence in my life, and I didn’t want her to be either. What kind of asshole world is this, anyway?
The interview was twenty random questions posted on a theater blog called Behind the Curtain.
Biggest regret?
All of them, she’d answered.
Typical breakfast?
Coffee, coffee, and more coffee.
I skim-read the rest—Favorite image of your mom growing up? Your dad? Favorite holiday?—until I got to number eighteen: Favorite name for a girl?
Jeez! That really is random. But it’s Lucy. It means “light.” How perfect is that? What child isn’t a light? Or maybe it’s Lily, which is my favorite flower.
I read the words again. Lily must have been Nick’s other daughter. Lucy’s sister. I felt as if I were capsizing.
Lucy.
It means “light.”
How perfect is that?
After Erik took the kids to school, I sat at my old dining room table in my office and read the other questions.
Go-to food when depressed:
Pizza. But do I have to be depressed? Can’t it be my go-to food for everything?
Favorite room in your house:
Kitchen. It’s my favorite room in any house. All the best conversations happen in kitchens.
Favorite color, favorite season, favorite role:
I know I’m supposed to say Danni from Widows, or maybe Belle—I loved being Belle!—but it was actually K. C. in Three Postcards. She’s so broken inside. I thought of her a lot when I started playing Danni—even when I played Belle. How we process grief—I think that’s what character is.
I stood, needing to move, trying to find a space to hold her words, but there was no room in me. My office was chilly despite the sunlight spilling into the windows we’d installed when we made the attic my workspace. We’d put in new floors, which creaked as I walked, and painted the walls a pale peach that turned orange in the late afternoon. I wanted to keep reading but needed to do it slowly, like a dehydrated person forcing herself to sip water rather than gulp it. Kelly is coming here, I’d think, and I’d try to let that thought settle, but it was too unwieldy, too heavy, or maybe my life wasn’t stable enough to support whatever Kelly is coming here might mean.
On the bureau, its drawers packed with odds and ends—fabric swatches, old postcards and letters, maps, X-rays, and blueprints—was a handful of framed photos: a young woman in front of the Eiffel tower, 1964 scrawled at the bottom; the bowed back of an old man kneeling in an empty church; sepia-toned sailors standing at attention on a freighter on one of the Great Lakes—and Lucy, pulling a floppy sun hat over one eye, squinting. “Are these people you know?” Annabelle asked the first time she came up here, lifting each picture and setting it down.
“I just liked the images,” I said. I didn’t know how else to display Lucy’s photograph except to include it with a bunch of other pictures. It’s what Kelly had done with the interview, I realized. In those random answers, she had tucked the truths she had needed to say. Lucy. It means “light.”
Perfect way to spend a morning:
Walking with a friend, people watching, making up stories for their lives. With coffee, of course!
The answer startled me. It’s what we used to do.
“Woman in green sweatshirt,” she’d say, “by the bandstand,” and I’d locate the woman.
“Oh, her,” I’d say. “Newly divorced; she and her ex came here every anniversary—”
“They got married on the beach,” Kelly would interrupt.
“Six years ago,” I’d jump back in. “But she left him.”
“And now she regrets it.”
“But she doesn’t want him back either.”
The entire length of the boardwalk, we’d spin the woman’s story, then find someone new and start again.
“You think people ever invent stories for us?” I asked her once.
“Oh, they’d probably imagine we were best friends since age five, and the gorgeous dark-haired one is destined to become a Broadway star and the sexy brown-haired one is going to marry her high school sweetheart and have a passel of kids.”
“A passel?” I said. “So, what happens when the gorgeous actress realizes she no longer has anything in common with her housewife friend?”
“Cut it out. Once the actress gets famous, she’ll need her friend more than ever to remind her of what is real.”
I emailed the interview to my mom, who phoned as I was sitting on the stairs, lacing up my running shoes. “She wanted you to see that,” she said when I picked up.
“What?” I paced into the kitchen. “Where do you get that?” Light bounced off the pots and pans hanging over the counter.
“Oh, Claire.” She sighed. “Mentioning Lucy, talking about how a person handles grief, making up lives for strangers, that’s all about you.”
“Then why put it in some obscure blog I’d never see?”
“Except you did.”
I closed my eyes. Had Kelly been reaching out to me? Did I even want that? Once, maybe, but now? “She’s coming here in August,” I said. “Or I think she is.” I explained the fellowship, how shocked we’d been. Light angled across the linoleum floor, and I bent to pick up a Cheerio.
“I’m sure the fellowship is very prestigious, but I’d say Ten Chimneys needs Kelly more than Kelly needs Ten Chimneys.” My mother paused. “Is it possible the real reason she’s coming is to see you, Claire?”
“No.” It wasn’t. The thought stopped me, though. Erik and I had just assumed Kelly’s coming here was purely coincidence. But finding me wouldn’t have been that difficult, would it? “Why wouldn’t she just reach out to me, then?”
“Oh, sweet girl,” my mother laughed. “Kelly would never contact you directly; she’d never risk being rejected.”
“But why now?”
“That one I can’t answer, but my guess would be that despite her incredible success, Kelly has a pretty big hole in her life.”
“She has a hole in her life?” I said thickly. “Jesus, Mom, she’s not the one who gave up her child!”
“I’m not talking about Lucy, sweetie; I’m talking about you.”