Fullepub 
Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
I don’t expect to hear from Chess again for a while.
That’s always been her style. Okay, to be fair, it’s always been our style. We were in each other’s pockets every day for such a long time, all the way through our years together at UNC, but after college, that changed. It happens, right? Lives go in different directions, you make new friends, new connections. Chess had moved to Charleston with Stefanie, both of them working at some fancy restaurant while Stefanie worked on getting the website off the ground, and I’d come back to Asheville with a B.A. in English, and not much else. Chess had invited me to move to Charleston with her, had even insisted she could get me a job at the same restaurant, but I missed home, and my parents thought it would be smart for me to save some money by moving back in with them. Dad was still holding on to his dream that I’d go to law school, but I hadn’t been ready to commit to another expensive degree, and had ended up substitute teaching and occasionally answering phones at Dad’s accounting firm.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been a little bit jealous, watching Chess’s life unfold through social media. I mean, sure, she was just waitressing then, but she was living somewhere new, meeting new people, and I felt like maybe I’d somehow fallen back in time, still sleeping in my childhood bedroom under a poster of Justin Timberlake.
It had all worked out for the best, obviously. If Chess hadn’t been living with Stefanie, she wouldn’t have started writing for Stefanie’s site, and if I hadn’t been so depressed staying at home and contemplating law school, I never would’ve randomly picked up a cozy mystery I saw at the library, drawn in by its colorful cover and silly title, wouldn’t have read dozens more just like it and then, finally, started writing my own. Petal Bloom owes her whole existence—and I owe my whole career—to the fact that my life had diverged from Chess’s.
Even if we are ships in the night most of the time, she is still my oldest and best friend. Which these days means we text when we can, call hardly ever, and see each other once a year if we’re lucky.
So, I’m surprised when I get a notification from her the day after our lunch.
I have a crazy thought.
With Chess, that can mean pretty much anything. She might be thinking of marrying a stranger or it could just mean she’s thinking about reintroducing carbs to her diet. Hard to say.
I leave it on read, telling myself that it’s only because I’m supposed to be working right now. My phone technically shouldn’t even be in my office—that’s usually a strict rule of mine. It stays in the kitchen, sitting on the counter until I’m through with my work for the day.
But I’ve been slacking lately, spending more time looking at my phone or dicking around on Twitter than I do actually writing. That must be why my intrepid heroine, Petal Bloom, is still stuck in chapter five of A Gruesome Garden, caught by her private investigator not-quite-a-boyfriend, Dex Shanahan, as she hangs out of the window of the murder scene.
I read the last sentence I wrote again.
Of course it was Dex.
The readers will like this, Dex showing up again. I’d kept him way in the background in the last book, and had the angry emails to prove just how popular a choice that had been. I should be excited about writing him again, about getting Petal and Dex back together.
Instead, I kept thinking that maybe Petal should turn out to be the murderer in this book. Maybe she’s the one who couldn’t deal with Mrs. Harrison, queen of the garden club, found dead with a pair of hedge trimmers in her back?
That was a detail I was pretty sure my editor was going to make me cut—you can get away with some violence in a cozy mystery, but for the most part readers want their victims very cleanly dead. No blood, no mess, certainly no horror or pain. A quiet, picturesque death by poison, and not one of the ones that made you vomit or, god forbid, shit yourself. Just enough for you to give a dramatic croak at the Christmas party or the cider pressing or the spring wedding, whatever festive occasion required an untimely death for my plucky heroine to solve.
In the previous book, Mrs. Harrison had been a real bitch to Petal. Maybe this was her revenge, and Petal’s pluckiness was actually just a deep well of rage against the town of Blossom Bay and the Mrs. Harrisons of the world. Maybe Dex, who always thought he knew better than Petal, had finally reached the end of his rope.
I let myself type it out for thirty minutes. Thirty glorious minutes, and over a thousand words of Petal Bloom hauling herself through that window and doing away with the frustratingly noncommittal Mr. Shanahan before revealing her big plan to wreak vengeance all over Blossom Bay.
It is fun.
It is bloody.
It is the most I’d written in three months.
And when I’m finished, I sit back, read it over, and then, sensibly, delete every single word.
No one reads my books for chaos and bloodshed. They want small-town atmospherics and familiar plot beats. They want Petal Bloom to save the day while Dex looks on indulgently.
And that’s what I’ll give them.
But I spend another thirty minutes trying to start a new chapter, one where Petal lets Dex pull her up through the window, and of course there’s a moment when they almost kiss, but oh no! What’s that? A sound from outside! They must go investigate!
At the end of that thirty minutes, I have 282 words, all of which I hate.
I never should have made Dex so much like Matt. In the early days of our relationship, it had felt … inspired. Cute, at the very least. Taking this guy I was crazy for and crafting a fictional version of him, who adored the fictional version of me that I’d created. Dex is definitely better looking than Matt—how many times have readers written to me, wondering why a man like Dex didn’t exist in the real world?—but there are many other similarities. He has Matt’s love of Talisker whisky. He has a battered brown leather jacket he cares for more than a human baby. He doesn’t have a dog, but he wants to pet every single one he sees.
All of those things are Matt, and when I was first writing Dex, it made me so happy, spending time with this version of him even as I fell in love with the real one.
But Dex hadn’t left Petal when she got sick. Hadn’t cheated on her with some unknown woman, hadn’t deleted every picture of her from his social media.
Dex was still out there, being the Good Guy, the one our heroine could depend on. Meanwhile, my own Good Guy was actually an asshole who had bought a condo in Myrtle Beach and was, according to Instagram, suddenly getting very into craft beer.
Also, Dex would never have tried to take Petal’s hard-earned money.
That was one detail I hadn’t mentioned when Chess had asked how things were—that my ex-husband has decided to go for the jugular.
It started with the divorce negotiations. Matt claimed he was entitled to a bigger cut of the Petal Bloom book royalties than I’d been prepared to give. The books have sold well, and I’ve made a decent living, but I wasn’t rolling around in money. I drove a car that was six years old, still shopped at the cheaper grocery store, and honestly, Matt’s paycheck had been floating us once I got sick and started missing deadlines.
I’d thought maybe that’s why he was going for a bigger share—the health care costs he’d covered while I was on his fancy insurance. But when he and his lawyer doubled down, I quickly understood that it was more than that.
It wasn’t about money, it seemed. It was about ownership. Because I’d talked out my plots with Matt, because he’d made some suggestions when I was stuck and because, stupidly, I’d once said in an interview with Mystery and Suspense that “the Petal Bloom books wouldn’t exist without my husband, Matt,” he now argued that he was entitled to a lot more than a couple of dedications and a mention in the acknowledgments. He wanted a cut of my earnings—not only of what I’d already made, but anything else I might make in the future from Petal. Apparently, I only had a career because of him.
I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised he felt this way, though. I’d written the first few Petal Bloom books before we’d gotten married, so they were under my maiden name, Emily McCrae. I’d planned on keeping that name for professional use even as I took Matt’s last name, Sheridan, personally, but apparently it hadn’t even occurred to Matt that I wouldn’t use Sheridan on my books. It had bothered him enough that I’d relented, insisting on the change even though my publisher had been less than thrilled about it.
So yeah, I probably should have seen this coming, but I’d thought it was just a ridiculous money grab, that any judge would laugh it out of court.
So far, no one is laughing.
Just last week, I had to turn over the past five years of contracts, check stubs, and royalty statements to his attorneys, and at night, I lie awake wondering what it will feel like if he actually wins.
If every time I sit down to write, for the rest of my life, I’ll be putting money in the pocket of a man who left me the second that things got hard.
I’m so busy feeling sorry for myself that I realize I’ve missed two texts from Chess.
HELLO!!
SERIOUSLY EM I HAVE A—PLAN—
That makes me smile in spite of myself.
Chess was always big on plans, only about a third of which actually came to fruition, and that’s me being generous. There was the costume party she wanted to make our entire dorm participate in (she dropped it after she couldn’t find a costume she liked). The scavenger hunt senior year (she forgot to actually make a list of things to find). A trip to Cabo for my bachelorette party (straight up never happened).
And of course, there was always the Book.
That’s how we used to talk about it, the Book that we were going to write together, the searing exposé of girlhood and sex and academia that was going to make us both literary darlings. That plan had almost gotten off the ground. I think we got about ten thousand words in before Chess lost interest. There had been a new guy, someone she’d met at some random bar, and with him had come an entirely new set of friends to hang out with and impress. I had gotten used to it by then, how when Chess dated someone new, she seemed to become an entirely new person. I’d just assumed she’d get tired of him and his crowd like she always did, and then we’d get back to the book.
The guy had eventually—inevitably—gone away, but she never mentioned working on the book again.
I sigh, getting up from my desk. Outside, it’s already getting dark, and I realize I’ve wasted another day, working and yet somehow getting nowhere. Across the street, the Millers have already turned on their porch light, and I can hear the sound of kids laughing, bicycle tires bumping from street to sidewalk and back again.
Matt and I bought this house six years ago, firmly ensconced in Family Territory, because we thought we’d be one of them soon enough. We were planning on having kids soon, living that suburban dream, but then I’d gotten busy with the books, and just as that had slowed down, I’d gotten sick, and now here I was, the one single lady stuck in a two-story, four-bedroom house that didn’t feel like mine at all.
I take my phone into the kitchen, opening the fridge and seeing if I have anything that isn’t completely depressing to heat up for dinner. There’s a pot of soup from the other night, so I grab that, sitting it on the stove before studying the few bottles of wine left in my wine rack, the reds that Matt didn’t bother taking.
I think about all those orange bottles still in my medicine cabinet.
Antibiotics. Those were the first things the doctor prescribed when I started getting sick, just over two years ago. I was nauseous all the time, prickly sweat beading my upper lip and the small of my back.
Matt had been sure I was pregnant, but the tests were always negative, and when I’d finally gone in to see my gynecologist, she suggested I might actually have gotten a really bad case of food poisoning, something my body couldn’t fight off on its own. I left with a prescription for these big horse pills that made my arms and feet break out in an itchy rash, but didn’t do a thing to curtail the nausea. If anything, it seemed to get worse, accompanied by a fuzzy feeling in my head, an inability to focus on anything.
That had led to CT scans, to ENTs, to a different kind of antibiotic and then, finally, when no one could find anything wrong with me, a prescription for intense motion sickness pills.
Those had at least kept me from throwing up, but the brain fog only worsened. My thoughts felt scattered and slow, and by afternoon, my eyes were drooping with drowsiness.
And then, a few weeks after Matt moved out, I woke up one morning and realized that I felt more like myself again. It’s still hard for me to trust this run of good health—even though some of the pills have technically expired, I’ve been reluctant to throw them away, afraid that I’ll need them again. But it’s been months since I’ve been nauseous, my brain foggy, thoughts thick, months since I’ve spent the day curled in a ball in front of the toilet.
Months since I’ve trusted myself to have a glass of wine.
Maybe that one naturopathic doctor friend of Matt’s was right—it was just stress, my body trying to make me slow down, or at least give it more attention. Or maybe I was just allergic to Matt, and now that he’s gone, my body is slowly healing. The thought simultaneously makes me want to laugh and sob.
Regardless, I’m tired of tiptoeing through my life. “Fuck it,” I mutter, and I open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Glass of wine in hand, I settle on the couch and rather than text Chess back, I call her.
“Okay, this is a direct violation of the Bestie Code,” she says when she picks up, and I smile.
“What, calling instead of texting back?”
“Yes. I’ll have you know I’ve broken up with men for less.”
“Well, since you can’t break up with me,” I tell her, settling deeper into the couch, “I decided to risk it. Besides, I know you. Whatever plan you’ve cooked up, it’ll sound better if you just say it rather than text it.”
“Right, because in a text, you’ll have time to poke holes in it and tell me just how crazy it is,” she counters, but I can hear the smile in her voice.
“Exactly,” I reply. “I’m saving you from yourself.”
She heaves a dramatic sigh. “God, I hate having someone who knows me this well. But I’m actually glad you called because you’re right. You need to hear it. Are you ready to hear it?”
“Ready and waiting.”
“What if,” she starts, drawing the words out, “you. Me. Italy.”
“Italy,” I repeat, and I can practically hear her roll her eyes.
“Don’t say it like it’s a death sentence, Em. Italy! Italy!”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” I tell her, taking another sip of wine. “I just don’t know exactly what you mean. You want us to go to Italy? When?”
“Next week.”
I almost laugh. How … completely, typically Chess.
And she must hear that in my silence, because she goes on. “I’ve already got a place. This amazing villa outside of Orvieto called Villa Aestas. You will absolutely die when you see it, Em. And I was planning on writing the whole time I was there, but you could write, too. I mean, you’re healthy again, and I haven’t seen you in forever, and when we had lunch the other day, I was like, ‘Why am I not moving heaven and earth to spend more time with one Miss Emily Sheridan?’”
She’s drunk, I think. Not too drunk, but definitely a few cocktails in. Chess always gets chatty and grandiose when she drinks.
“Admit that this is the most genius plan you’ve ever heard in your whole life,” she finishes, and now I do laugh.
“It’s pretty fucking genius, yes.”
But something is holding me back from saying yes.
For one, it’s a little embarrassing to freeload so openly off of Chess’s newfound wealth. Am I that friend, the one she’ll tell people about later?
Oh, poor Emily, you know, we’ve been friends forever, and she was going through a divorce, so I wanted to do something to cheer her up.
Thinking about that makes my stomach lurch, but then I think about Italy. Sitting in the sun, soaking up new surroundings, new people, a new language. Plus, pasta.
“It’s six weeks, Em,” Chess goes on. “Almost the whole summer. Or the good parts of summer, let’s be real. There’s a pool, there’s a gorgeous cathedral nearby.…”
It isn’t really the perks that suddenly make my heart speed up. It’s the time. Six weeks. Six entire weeks out of this house, out of this life. Six weeks to try to get my career back on track and reignite my sense of purpose.
And, let’s be honest: six weeks of glamorous photos to post on Instagram and Facebook, where Matt still follows me.
“Okay, I’m in,” I tell her, closing my eyes as I say it, and on the other end of the line, Chess cheers.
“Yes! I knew you would be. I’m gonna send you all the information about the house, and then I’ll book your ticket.”
“I can get my ticket,” I say, and I can, although it’s definitely going to push one of my credit cards to its max. But if Chess is renting us an entire house for six weeks, I don’t want her to also buy my plane ticket. I have some pride, after all.
And Chess, thank god, doesn’t fight me on it. Maybe she knows better.
“Perfect. I’m leaving in two days, so don’t make me wait too long by myself, okay?”
I don’t point out that she could’ve invited me earlier. Instead, I promise her that I’ll find a flight soon, and when I hang up the phone, my face is almost aching from how much I’m smiling.
A summer in Italy with Chess.
A chance for a hard reset, something I desperately need. Something I want.
Something I deserve.
Fwd: Reservation for Villa Aestas June 6–July 29
From: [email protected]
Here you go! You won’t need to print out the parking pass they attached, I’ll deal with all that. But LOOK AT THIS HOUSE, EM!! You can google it and get even more pictures, it’s completely insane.
From: [email protected]
Buongiorno, Chess! Your stay at the luxurious Villa Aestas is all set! Thank you again for trusting me to set up the PERFECT summer vacation for you. I think you’re absolutely going to be delighted with Villa Aestas and the entire Orvieto area. Here’s a bit from the website:
Nestled in the hills around Orvieto in Umbria, Villa Aestas is an oasis of calm and serenity, full of historical charm while still catering to the sophisticated twenty-first-century traveler. While many of the home’s original furnishings from the 1800s have been preserved, the kitchen is fully modern, and the property’s three bathrooms have recently been remodeled. Only a fifteen-minute drive from the city center, Villa Aestas provides privacy and convenience, and for an added fee, a daily maid and chef service is available. Enjoy your stay in one of Umbria’s hidden gems!
From: [email protected]
Chess, you neglected to mention that this is a Murder House.
From: [email protected]
Does one murder a Murder House make? Besides, it was a bunch of rock star types in the seventies—honestly if murder hadn’t happened, it would be more of a surprise.
From: [email protected]
I do think one murder makes a Murder House, as a matter of fact! There’s a podcast about it! If some guy in an ironic graphic tee and stupid hat has spent ten hours narrating the terrible thing that happened in the house, it is a verified Murder House!
(But you’re right, this house is also gorgeous and I’m excited, and I promise to only mention the murder five times AT MOST.)
From: [email protected]
There’s my girl.
I see you in my dreams, he says to me as we lay together/Girl, you haunt me every night.
But he haunts my days, every waking moment/when he’s with her, there in the light.
And I wish I could hate her/wish I could hate him/wish I could set myself free.
But we three are tied together/a golden chain unbroken/and I think it’s strangling me.
“Golden Chain,” Lara Larchmont, from the album Aestas (1977)
MARI, 1974—LONDON
It’s raining again.
But then it’s always raining, the rainiest summer Mari can remember, and as she sits at the kitchen window of her more-than-slightly shabby flat, she leans her forehead against the glass, watching the water run down the wavy glass, the people on the street rushing by in a mass of black umbrellas.
The smog mixes with the rain, the sky more of a noxious yellow than gray, and she suddenly longs to be anywhere but London. Back to Scotland, maybe, where she’d spent a year when she was thirteen, living with friends of her father. The air had been clear there, cold and crisp, and she thinks air like that might be the only thing that can clear her head, that can sweep away the pain of this disastrous year.
In the other room, she hears Pierce laugh, and she knows she needs to get up from this hiding spot, to go talk to the various people gathered in their living room, and play the part of Pierce’s loving girlfriend. It’s what she’s been doing for the past year, after all, ever since they moved to this flat.
It’s too quiet here,he’d said, and had proceeded to fill the place with noise at every opportunity.
Mari understood that he thrived with an audience and didn’t blame him for it, but she’d wanted to write today—he knew she’d wanted to write today—which is why she’s holed up at the kitchen table they’ve squeezed into this tiny corner of their tiny kitchen, a notebook open and only two words written across the top of the page.
Houses remember.
She has no idea where she’s going with that thought, but it had popped into her brain this morning, and she’d written it down, sure it was the beginning of … something. Something big, some story just sitting coiled inside of her, ready to spring out fully formed.
Mari used to have these moments more often. When she was a kid, scribbling in her journal on her bed, the words had poured out of her, fragments of stories that never managed to materialize into anything as formal as a book, but still. Everything she read, she wanted to write. When she got into her stepmother’s collection of Victoria Holts, she wrote Gothic melodramas. When her father’s history books caught her eye, suddenly her journal was full of Napoleonic battles and tragedy on the high seas. Mari felt she could write anything, everything, and she had. She had reams and reams of paper stuffed in her tiny bedroom, peeping out of drawers, crumpled between books on her shelves, stacked up on her desk in messy piles.
She’d thought the words would always be that easy, that free.
That’s what life with Pierce was supposed to be about, after all. Both of them pursuing their art: Pierce through his music, Mari through her writing.
A lovely idea. An idyllic one.
The only issue was that it didn’t bloody work.
It was hard for two people to be artists when the rugs needed hoovering, and food needed to be purchased, dishes washed. And somehow, those things kept falling on her.
She might have had a perfect line in her head this morning, but when she’d gotten up, she’d discovered they were out of milk, out of bread, and, most important, out of wine, and Pierce was already strumming his guitar on the sofa, so she’d been the one to go to the shops.
And then of course there had been the rain, of course her shopping bag had broken, sending her items tumbling to the wet pavement, of course the milk bottle had shattered at her feet, so another run to the shop, another four p she didn’t really want to part with.
And by the time she’d returned home, there had been people in the flat, a record playing loudly, blue smoke drifting up from cigarettes and joints, and that slightly sour-sweet odor of too many bodies in too small a space on too warm a day.
It was a sight—and a scent—she was used to. Her childhood home had been like this, too, friends of her father’s always stopping by, taking up all the space in their semidetached in Camden. And there had been so little space to begin with, or so it had always seemed to Mari. When it had just been her and her father, it hadn’t been so bad, but then her father had met Jane Larchmont, a single woman with a daughter Mari’s age. Jane had heard there was a handsome widower living just down the street, and once she realized that said widower was also the semi-famous writer William Godwick, she had set her cap even more firmly. Soon she’d been at the door every day with tea, with cake, with a book she thought William might like, and before Mari had known it, Jane was living in her house, and her daughter, Lara, was sharing Mari’s room.
One of the reasons Mari had left was to escape that cramped, claustrophobic feeling, but apparently it was going to follow her forever.
From the living room, she hears the thunk of heavy glass hitting the rug, a high, shrill laugh, and she sighs, knowing that was an ashtray tipped over, knowing she’ll be hoovering up ash out of that rug tonight.
She’d just bought the bloody thing, too. She’d liked its bright green pattern, hoped it would make the flat a little less gray.
She turns back to her journal as there’s an abrupt shriek from the record player, the song cutting off to be replaced with Pierce’s guitar and his soft, deep voice.
Houses remember.
It was a good line, but where was it leading? What kind of story followed that?
And did she even believe it, that houses had memories? Did the little house near St. Pancras hold on to Mari’s past? Did it see her mother leaving for the hospital one August morning, never to return? Did it see Mari’s father coming in the door, face ravaged with grief, the tiny, screaming bundle that was Mari herself in his arms?
Did it see her slipping out the front door in the middle of the night, just three years ago, her heart pounding, her smile giddy, as Pierce took her hand and led her away?
It’s a romantic sentiment,she thinks to herself, tapping her pen on the paper. But it could also be a sinister one, if the memories are bad. What if the house holds the bad memories inside with the good? What does that mean for whoever lives there?
Her pen scratches across the paper, but before she even finishes the sentence—Mr. Wells says that to her the first day—the music shifts from the living room, and Pierce launches into another song, this one even louder and more raucous, eliciting cheers from his friends. Mari’s next thought skitters right out of her head, like something sliding down a drain.
She puts her pen down.
Pierce is sitting on the arm of the sofa in the living room when she walks in, his head bent over his guitar, his bare foot tapping out the rhythm as he plays, and he’s smiling. This is the smile that first made her fall in love, when she walked into the cramped but cozy front room of their house on that quiet street in Camden, to see her father holding forth with a group of university students. It wasn’t an unusual sight. Mari’s father had been a noted intellectual and writer in the forties, and while a good deal of his glamour had faded—and his literary production had all but stopped—his open-door policy and his love of a good debate meant that there were always some shaggy-haired young men sitting on the sofas: artists, or poets, or musicians.
Pierce was among them that September afternoon, and Mari had felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Only sixteen, she’d never felt anything like that before, hadn’t even known that feeling existed.
Pierce had come back to the house the next day, and then the day after that, and by the time she kissed him in her back garden on an autumn night, the smell of wood smoke and the damp wool of his jumper all around her, she was completely gone.
She’d known that he was married, but it hadn’t made any difference. She was never not going to belong to Pierce, and he was never not going to belong to her.
Mari had known that as well as she’d known anything.
She moves into the room, scooting in close so she can watch Pierce play. There aren’t quite as many people in the flat as she’d thought, just two of Pierce’s old university friends, a couple of girls she recognizes from the pub down the road, and a third woman she’s never seen before, one with long dark hair who shoots Mari a look she’s gotten very used to.
But she ignores it, just like she ignores the girl in the flat across the way who always seems to be coming down the stairs just as Pierce is going up. It’s the price of being with him, and it’s not really even his fault. He can’t help the way people look at him, can’t help that he’s the sort of person people are naturally drawn to.
It’s what will one day make him a star.
That, and his natural talent. Mari’s been listening to him play for years now, in bars and clubs and smaller music festivals. Pierce Sheldon is a name people are starting to know, and if he’s not quite there yet, it’s coming. She can feel it, this whole new life waiting right around the bend for them. If they could just get that big break …
They’d been close last year. Pierce had been the opening act for this American acid-folk band that was touring England, the Faire. They’d had a couple of top-twenty hits, and the shows were the biggest Pierce had ever played. It was a whirlwind of crowded vans and tiny rooms over pubs and late nights, but Pierce was the happiest she’d ever seen him, and every time he stepped onstage, it seemed like there were more people there just to hear him.
She still remembers standing in a field on a cool September evening, her baby in her arms, asleep despite the noise, swaying as people in the crowd sang along with Pierce’s lyrics. Lyrics he’d written for her, songs that had seemed so personal and private now on the lips of strangers.
It had felt like magic. A spell Pierce had conjured up spreading through the crowd, and even after all the awfulness that had followed, the memory of that night—it still gets to her.
Hestill gets to her.
And now, when he looks over at her and winks, she still feels that little thrill rush through her.
He’s mine.
No matter what, he was hers. And she was his.
The door to the flat opens, and Pierce lifts his eyes.
Mari doesn’t have to turn around to see who it is. She can tell from the way Pierce’s face seems to light up.
Lara.
Her stepsister lives with them, crashing on the very sofa Pierce is sitting on, and when Mari does turn to look at her, Lara is grinning, her dark eyes wide as she waves for Mari to follow her into the kitchen.
Mari untangles herself as Pierce keeps playing, stepping over his friend Hobbes, ignoring the way the man’s hand briefly touches her ankle, his touch hot and slightly oily on her bare skin.
Pierce has told her she ought to sleep with Hobbes.
“He’s fuckin’ mad about you, Mari, and you know you’re free to do what you like.”
She does, and she is, but what she doesn’t like is Hobbes, or the voice in her head that sometimes wonders if Pierce occasionally tosses her at his friends so that he doesn’t feel guilty about his own indiscretions. But then that feels unfair. Pierce has always emphasized the importance of freedom, how just because they choose to be together, that doesn’t mean he owns her or has any say in what—or who—she chooses to do. It’s been that way since the very beginning.
Lara is waiting for her at the counter, a lit cigarette in one hand, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. Her dark hair is damp from the rain, curling over her shoulders, and her mascara is smudged, but she’s still pretty in that way Mari thinks of as uniquely Lara. Maybe her nose is a bit too narrow, maybe her chin is a little too sharp, but she’s always just so damn excited about everything, and that gives her face a glow even in the dingy kitchen.
Pierce’s song finishes, and now a record is playing again, somehow even louder this time. It’s George Harrison, Mari’s favorite Beatle, but she’s still casting glances at her journal, wishing for a little quiet again. But now that Lara’s here, she knows there’s no chance of that happening. This has the makings of one of Pierce’s all-night parties, the kind that end with strangers sleeping on her floor, in her bathtub.
She already feels tired thinking about it, and wonders how exactly someone gets to be this tired at nineteen fucking years old.
And now there’s Lara to deal with.
“Okay, obviously something has you all jazzed up,” Mari says, reaching around her stepsister to pull a lukewarm beer out of the sink. The ice Pierce had put in earlier has already mostly melted, and the bottle drips water onto the floor as Mari opens it.
“Let’s go to Italy,” Lara says without preamble.
Mari pauses. “What?”
“Italy,” Lara repeats, blowing out a stream of smoke as she props a hip on the counter, her free arm folded around her waist. Mari realizes Lara is wearing her top, the blue one with the flowers that she just bought a week ago. There’s already a tiny stain there on Lara’s right breast, and Mari bites back a familiar irritation.
“We did Italy, remember?” she nearly shouts. Has the music somehow gotten even louder? “It wasn’t that great of a time.”
When Mari had run away with Pierce three years ago, Lara had begged to be included, and even though the idea of taking her stepsister with them had ruined Mari’s vision of a romantic escape, Pierce hadn’t been able to tell Lara no.
And Mari couldn’t tell Pierce no.
So, off the three of them had gone, leaving Mari’s father’s house in the middle of the night, a note hastily scrawled left behind on the kitchen table. Italy had been their second stop after France, and it’s still something of a blur.
Cramped rooms, cramped cars, the smell of her own sweat, the heat that had felt invigorating at first and then slowly grew more oppressive, making her nauseous nearly all the time. Of course, she hadn’t known yet about the baby—about Billy—and later, all her discomfort would make more sense, but at the time, she’d been certain it was some kind of cosmic punishment. Out of money, slinking back to England with nothing to show for their grand adventure except sunburns and a newfound antipathy for one another.
And now Lara wants to go back there?
Lara rolls her dark eyes, standing up straight as she flicks ash into a nearly empty wineglass.
“That’s because we were skint and on our own,” she says. “This time, it’ll be different.”
The cigarette sizzles as Lara drops it into the glass, and she reaches out, taking Mari’s hands. “At a villa, Mare. With”—she drops her voice, leaning so close that her forehead touches Mari’s—“Noel Gordon.”
Mari rears back at that, eyes going wide. “Wait, as in—”
“No, the Noel Gordon who works at the chip shop,” Lara says, laughing before she swats at Mari’s midsection. “Of course, ‘as in.’ As in Glasgow Noel Gordon. When She Goes Noel Gordon.”
When She Goesis Mari’s favorite album, one she actually had to buy a second copy of when fucking Hobbes scratched the first a few months back. She even had pictures of him up on her wall, when he was in his first group, the Rovers, back before he’d gone solo.
But now, Noel Gordon is famous. Properly famous, a rock star, an idol that Pierce respects and envies all at once.
“How do you even know him?” she asks Lara, and Lara giggles, turning in a little half circle as she flutters her eyelashes.
“Fate,” she says, popping the “t” sound in a way that makes Mari grit her teeth. “I was standing outside this pub in Soho, with Bonnie. You know Bonnie, right?”
Mari doesn’t, but she nods anyway because if she doesn’t, Lara will get distracted and launch into a half-hour soliloquy about her new best mate, Bonnie. Lara makes and loses friends with such speed that Mari rarely bothers to learn their names.
“Anyway, we were chatting and smoking, and then all of a sudden I hear this … voice ask, ‘Either of you lovely creatures happen to have a light?’ And I look up and it’s him. Bloody Noel Gordon, and he is so handsome, Mari. The pictures don’t even capture it, hand to god. And then we started talking, and he invited me to this party, and now he wants us to go to Italy with him.”
“Okay, but after one party, why would he—” Mari starts to say, but then she looks at Lara’s pink cheeks, the way her tongue is poking her cheek, and she understands.
“Of course,” she says, and she hates that she’s a little impressed. “You’re shagging him.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” Lara says immediately, but Mari knows she’s only saying it because she thinks it’s the thing to say when you’re having sex with a very famous married man. Knowing Lara, Mari is sure her stepsister would love nothing more than to march through Piccadilly with a sandwich board announcing the fact.
And what a coup for her stepsister. Mari may have her own musician—Pierce’s reputation is growing steadily in the bars and nightclubs of London, after all—but Noel Gordon is in a whole other stratosphere.
That’s probably why Lara slept with him in the first place.
Ever since Jane married Mari’s dad, when both girls were twelve, they’ve been locked in this unspoken competition. If Mari got good marks in school, Lara’s needed to be better. If Mari bought a new 45, Lara would have two the next day.
Mari hadn’t even been all that surprised that Lara had tagged along when they’d left England, and that she had stayed with them when they’d returned. Lara claimed it was because there was nowhere else for her to go, but Jane would’ve convinced Mari’s dad to take her back, Mari is sure of it. It was Mari who’d run off with the married man, Mari who had committed the unforgivable sin. Lara was just being a good sister.
It’s been on the tip of her tongue for months now to suggest this to Lara, but something keeps holding her back. Strange as it seems, given how often Lara irks her, Mari still wants someone else with her on this adventure, someone familiar. A person she can talk to who isn’t Pierce.
“Gotta say, Lara,” Mari says drily as she puts her beer on the counter, “if we spend a summer with him in Italy, I feel people will probably suss out what’s going on between you.”
Lara snorts, waving one hand. “People will think he invited us because he heard about Pierce’s music. Or maybe because of you. He’s very impressed with your mum and dad.”
Mari fights back that familiar, uncomfortable feeling whenever she hears someone gush about her parents. It’s not exactly pride, not exactly apprehension, just a strange brew of both. She admires them, too, of course, has idolized her mother her entire life, but she wonders about these people, people like Noel—hell, people like Pierce—who paint a picture of her parents that probably isn’t all that accurate. And she always worries when they meet her, are they thinking of her mother? Are they thinking about what Mari’s very existence took from the world?
But it doesn’t surprise her that Noel Gordon would be a fan. Her parents were rebels, after all. Not musicians, but writers, philosophers, bohemians. A rare marriage of intellectual equals, a love story of iconoclasts. And Mari’s mother dying early had only burnished the mythology. So tragic, so romantic, all of that tripe.
Of course, her father had not been all that unconventional in the end. When he’d learned his daughter was having an affair with a married man, a married man William had welcomed into his home and thought of as a friend, he’d been apoplectic, and she’d gotten the full “never darken my door again” kind of treatment. Running away had seemed like the only option.
But that’s all in the past now, and the future is this: spending the summer in Italy at a fancy villa with a bona fide rock star. Who could say no to that?
“What are you two doing, hiding away in here?”
Pierce comes into the kitchen, his shirt half unbuttoned, his hair sticking to his face with sweat, and he gathers Mari up to him, nuzzling her neck.
“We’re plotting adventures,” Lara tells him, reaching out to stroke his arm even as he pulls Mari closer.
She’s always doing that, Lara. Touching him.
Pierce is not faithful, Mari knows that, and she also knows she can’t reasonably expect him to be, given that he still has a wife. Sweet, noble Frances, out in some village in Surrey, pining away for him, hoping he’ll come to his senses and come back to her.
But he swears it was just one time with Lara, and it was after Billy had died, when Mari had felt lost in her grief, wondering how she was supposed to get out of bed when someone she loved so much was gone forever. Wondering if her baby dying was the universe’s way of settling the score, since Mari’s birth had killed her mother.
They were dark thoughts, awful thoughts. The chasm she’d fallen into where even Pierce couldn’t reach her.
Mari had left them alone in their pain, Pierce had tried to explain, him and Lara. They had only turned to each other because they were both hurting, because they missed her.
Mari has tried to believe it, forgive them, but still.
She wonders.
And as she listens to Lara tell Pierce about the trip, watches him scoop Lara up into his arms, spinning her in that tiny kitchen so that the heels of her boots hit the cabinets, scuffing the paint, Mari lets herself hope that this trip will be what they need. That in Italy, there might actually be space to breathe.
And maybe, she thinks, looking at her journal, there will be space for her own dreams.
Mari Godwick was born famous.
Her father was the noted writer and bohemian William Godwick, and her mother, Marianne Wolsely, had soared to even greater heights as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches from Seville had captured the attention of a nation, and her one piece of fiction, a short story collection called Heart’s Blood and Other Tales, sold quite well, but it was her unconventional choices in love that had made her something of a scandal.
Her first notable lover was the painter Rosa Harris, and Marianne’s refusal to hide this liaison from the world was seen as bold and uncompromising. After that liaison ended, she was rumored to have had affairs with Hemingway, Prince George, Duke of Kent, and the wife of a prominent MP. Lately, more nuanced scholarship about her life has noted that many of these entanglements have been exaggerated if not invented completely, something that has also been suggested about her daughter Mari and her relationships with what became known as the “Soho Set.”
But the most notable connection between Marianne and her daughter was that the day Mari was born, her mother died.
Preeclampsia, a fairly misunderstood condition in 1955, the year of Mari’s birth, was the culprit, and later, Mari would say she felt as though they’d been two souls, intertwined for nearly a year in her mother’s body, only for one to pass out of being as the other forced her way in.
It was a guilt that Mari would carry all her life. When her only child, a son named William who was fathered by musician Pierce Sheldon, died of a chest infection in 1973, Mari told friends that it was what she had deserved. This was the kind of self-recrimination she tended toward, especially later in life, and, some say, the reason why she only published one book in her lifetime. Lilith Rising was a sensation, and it certainly made Mari comfortable for the rest of her days, but there was always a sense that her success was bittersweet, coming, as it did, on the heels of such a massive personal tragedy.
After she passed away in 1993, several manuscripts were found hidden in her apartment, all completed between 1979 and 1992, all of which would go on to be published posthumously.
Her longtime literary agent, Jeremy Thompson, was as puzzled as anyone else as to why she’d chosen to hide the manuscripts rather than submit them but, as he said to The Times, “She was an odd duck, Mari. I knew her for nearly twenty years, but I never felt I actually knew her. I’m not sure anyone did.”
—Shadow on the Stair: The Haunted Life and Loves of Mari Godwick, Caroline Leeman, 2015
THE ROVERS WILL NO MORE GO A’ROVING
On the heels of a sold-out tour of America, the rock group the Rovers shock the music industry and the world by announcing a “prolonged hiatus” while band members focus on “other personal projects.” While drummer Sam Collins has already appeared on albums from artists such as Cream and the Byrds, and bassist John Keating performed onstage with the Rolling Stones just last year, all eyes are naturally on front man Noel Gordon and what he might do next.
The youngest son of the Earl of Rochdale, Mr. Gordon has always cut a glamourous (some would say outrageous) figure, frequently compared to Jim Morrison of the Doors and Roger Daltrey of the Who. His velvety baritone and esoteric lyrics have made him a musical superstar, but it’s his matinee idol face and frequent high-profile romances that have made him a fixture in newspapers both here in the UK and also across the world.
Currently on his honeymoon on Mustique with the heiress Lady Arabella Wentworth, Mr. Gordon could not be reached for comment, but sources tell us that a solo album is definitely in the works, and one wonders just how much higher Noel Gordon’s star might rise.
—Pop Beats Magazine, June 1969
