Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

The next morning, Chess is waiting for me.

She’s wearing a bright red sundress over the striped bikini I’ve seen her wearing at the pool, and there’s a massive picnic basket on the kitchen table, a big gingham ribbon tied around the handle.

“What’s all this?” I ask her, and she comes forward, enveloping me in a hug.

“Please let me take you on a fabulous adventure today and assuage my guilt for being such a ‘See You Next Tuesday’ last night.”

This is another classic Chess move, the Extravagant Apology.

Thing is, I’m always susceptible to it, desperate to get back to “normal.” Although part of me is starting to realize—maybe this is just who we are with each other, who we’ve always been. Maybe this is our normal. We push each other, and, inevitably, we fight. Maybe I need to start remembering that.

“I like that you don’t use the C word anymore,” I tell her.

“It’s bad for the general image, but please know I use it in my head on the regular.”

I laugh again, then nod at the basket, which looks stuffed to the brim. “So, you’re taking me on a picnic?”

“It felt like the one big summer in Italy cliché we hadn’t checked off yet,” she says, and I can’t argue there.

It’s not long before we’re situated by the pond on a big blanket, Chess pulling out white plates with little strawberries on them, the sun shining down on us. We’re under one of the trees, so there’s a nice bit of shade, and I lean back on one elbow, looking out over the pond. The water is a dark, murky green, but it’s pretty to look at with its small dock, a decrepit rowboat tied to one post.

“In the spirit of honesty, this is yet another thing I didn’t actually make, just paid for,” Chess tells me as she starts unloading cured meats and wrapped cheeses onto the blanket, followed by two bottles of Orvieto wine.

After last night, I decide to pass on the wine, but I open a chilled bottle of mineral water and take a couple of pieces of bread.

For a long while, we just sit in silence, looking out over the water. It’s another perfect day in a perfect place, which makes it easy to forget last night’s ugliness. Soon we’re chatting like normal again, laughing and joking, back to being Em and Chess.

“How goes Swipe Right on Life?” I ask, and she tears off another hunk of bread, wrapping it around a little piece of mozzarella.

“It goes. It slowed down for a while there, but I’m finally feeling a little more inspired. It’s just that there’s only so many ways to say, ‘let go of your shit.’” She sighs, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head.

“Maybe that’s what you should call it instead,” I tell her. “‘Let Go of Your Shit.’ I’d buy that before ‘Swipe Right on Life.’”

She laughs, then gives me a sly look from the corner of her eye. “Speaking of ‘swiping right’…”

I look back out at the lake where something under the water sends up bubbles, ripples dimpling the glassy surface.

This is a conversation I’ve had before. With my friend Taylor, with my mom, hell, even with my hairstylist, but I don’t want to have it now.

“No.”

“Why such a hard no?”

I draw my legs up, wrapping my arms around my knees. “Once your husband has cheated on you while you were at your absolute lowest and then leaves you, it makes the idea of opening yourself up to any man, ever again, kind of lose its appeal.”

Chess is quiet, the only sound the twittering of birds and the wind through the trees for a few beats before she says, “You never really told me about all that. Matt cheating.”

“It’s not exactly my favorite subject,” I reply, but I wonder if it might feel good to actually talk about it.

“I never knew anything for sure,” I continue, my eyes still on the pond. “There wasn’t some big moment where I caught him in bed with someone, nothing that Lifetime movie. He just … started getting distant. And then his phone suddenly had a lock code on it, and … I don’t know. It’s like I could just sense someone else in the house, in our relationship, even when it was just the two of us.”

Those had been the worst days. Sick, my mind permanently fogged, certain there was another woman …

“Then I finally had the Love, Actually moment, and I knew,” I finish up, and Chess turns to face me, crossing her legs on the blanket.

“What does that mean?”

I laugh, even though the discovery was not remotely funny at the time. “Oh, you know. Found a piece of jewelry hidden away in his sock drawer. A bracelet. My birthday comes around, there’s a box, but it’s perfume, not a bracelet, and when I look again in his drawer, the bracelet is gone.”

“Oh fuck, Em.”

“Yup.”

A month ago, that memory would have lanced through me like a knife. Now it’s just a dull kind of ache, and I turn to face Chess.

“I was so mad at her, whoever she is, for so long. I kept conjuring up these imaginary women, or remembering some lady he worked with, even picturing the barista at the coffee shop he liked. But now I feel like I probably owe her a fruit basket, whoever she was.”

Chess shakes her head, sunlight glinting off her hair.

“Only you, Em,” she says. “Only you would say something like that.”

“I’m serious!” I insist. “If things hadn’t fallen apart with Matt, I wouldn’t be here now.”

I take her hand, squeezing it.

She squeezes back, then adds, “You also wouldn’t be a third of the way into a brand-new book that’s totally going to revitalize your career.”

I smile, but it’s tight and not exactly genuine. I’m willing to get over last night, but I still don’t like Chess bringing up the book, and I still wish she hadn’t read any of it.

“I don’t know about that,” I say now, settling back on the blanket. “I’m still not sure what it even is. Sometimes it feels like a memoir, sometimes it feels like a biography of Mari.” I shrug. “Maybe it’s just an experiment. Something I need to get out of my system.”

“No harm in that,” Chess says. And then she adds, “She actually came back here, you know.”

My head jerks around. “Mari?”

Chess nods. “You’re not the only one who knows how to google, Em. After I read your extremely very good pages and started thinking we could work on it together—which I totally get now is a no-go, don’t worry about it—I was curious.”

There’s a sour taste in my mouth, and my stomach knots thinking about Chess sitting there on the sofa, scrolling through articles about Mari. This is my thing, even though I know that sounds ridiculous. You can’t claim a person or a subject like that. I really should be flattered that my bestselling best friend is so interested in my work.

“When did Mari come back?” I ask, and Chess tilts her face toward the sky.

“In 1993.”

The year she died. Was that why she’d returned? For one final goodbye?

But why bother coming back to a place where something so terrible had happened to her?

Chess stretches out on the blanket, her hands behind her head. “Go on,” she says, indulgent. “I know you’re dying to run inside and get your research on.”

I am, but I make myself sit there for another ten minutes, sipping my water and eating cheese while Chess naps, and I don’t run back to the house.

I just walk very fast.

There’s not much online about Mari’s second visit to Villa Rosato, just a throwaway line in one article about the murder—yes, she came back here the summer before she died; no, she didn’t stay long, only for a week.

I close my laptop. Something tickles at the back of my brain, the same way it did that day in Orvieto with the well.

There’s a bit toward the end of Lilith Rising where Victoria hides her diary, right before she’s sent away, afraid it might be used against her.

I flip to that part of the book now.

There wasn’t much time, but Victoria knew she had to hide the diary. If she didn’t, if someone found it, it would damn her.

She knew she should burn it, but she couldn’t make herself destroy it. Instead, she tucked it away in a special spot.

Where even from far away, it would remain close to her.

That’s it. From there, Victoria is ushered away, and there’s no explicit reference to where she puts the diary, just that vague description that reads more like a riddle than anything else. How could it be close to her if she was far away?

But a thought occurs to me, electric enough that I jump to my feet.

It’s probably nothing,I keep telling myself as I walk upstairs. You’ve found connections between the book and the house, but that doesn’t mean everything is some kind of clue.

But just like before, there’s this sensation, almost like a hand guiding me, and I move toward the window seat.

The M etched in the glass seems to be watching me as I lift the cushion off the bench, feeling stupid even as my heart races and my palms sweat.

There’s just a flat wooden surface, and when I pull at the edge, nothing happens. I hadn’t really expected the entire seat to lift up, revealing a treasure trove, but I’m still a little disappointed.

But it was silly to think that Mari would’ve left anything here back in 1993. She probably just came for some kind of closure in her final days.

Except that I kept returning to that same thorny issue. This was the spot where her boyfriend had been horribly murdered—wasn’t that closure enough? Why revisit the scene of the crime, literally?

But after she died, several unpublished books—everything she had written since Lilith Rising—had been found hidden around her apartment.

So, maybe it wasn’t completely crazy to think Mari came back here to hide one last thing. Maybe I just misinterpreted the riddle.

That’s when I spot it.

The window seat isn’t completely flush with the wall, and at some point, someone had added a thin piece of wood to fill in the gap. It’s painted the same shade of white, so the seam is barely visible, but it’s there.

I grasp the end of the board and gently pull.

At first, it seems as solid as the rest of the seat, but then there’s a slight give, and suddenly there’s a thin piece of wood in my hand.

Gingerly, I slide my hand inside the gap between the wall and the bench, visions of something lurching out of the dark to bite my fingers, my heart pounding in my ears, but there’s no sharp sting, no pain.

There’s just the rustle of paper.

Mouth dry, I pull out a folded stack of yellow paper and when I open it, I see each line filled in a neat, economical scrawl.

And at the top, the words that make me lift a trembling hand to my mouth.

Mari—London, 1974.

MARI,1974—ORVIETO

The scream doesn’t just wake her.

It sends Mari hurtling into consciousness, her brain rattling in her skull. She’d always thought it was a cliché, that moment of someone sitting straight up in bed, heart pounding, but that’s where she is now, hand pressed to her chest as she searches the room for the source of that sound.

She’s sees almost immediately that it’s Pierce. They’d fallen asleep peacefully enough earlier, wrapped up in each other, sweat still drying on their skin, but now he’s out of bed, crouched naked in one corner of the room, his hands over his ears, his eyes wild.

And he’s still screaming, screaming and screaming, the sound so loud that Mari is forced to get out of bed and go to him, grabbing his wrists as she tries to wake him.

“Pierce!” she says, her voice sharp. “Pierce!”

She can hear footsteps in the hall, and then Lara’s voice at the door. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Mari calls back, even though Pierce is still whimpering at her feet, blinking like he’s trying to clear his head.

“Go back to bed!” Mari adds, and she kneels down in front of Pierce. He’s covered in sweat, almost glowing in the moonlight spilling through the window, and Mari brushes his hair back from his face.

The rain has returned and with it, the oppressiveness of the house, a feeling that seems to affect Pierce more than any of them, and Mari sometimes has the crazy thought that maybe they were the ones causing it, that all their tension and weird energy was spinning out and up into the sky.

“It’s all right, love,” Mari says, and she’s assailed by the memory of holding Billy as he burned like an ember against her chest, shushing him and speaking the same words into his damp hair.

It’s all right, love.

They’re not words anyone has ever said to her.

“I … I was dreaming,” Pierce gulps out, his hand shaking as he reaches up to grab Mari’s wrist. “But it was real, Mare, it was so … so fucking real.…”

She doesn’t bother reminding him that this is why they’d agreed that while booze is fine, he should lay off the drugs. They always mess with his mind like this, make him see things or hear things or have these horrible nightmares he can never shake. He’ll be ruined for days now, she knows. No music, no writing.

“What was in the dream?” she asks, trying to make her voice soothing and steady. He looks at her, his face somehow going even whiter in the moonlight.

“You,” he says, and then she shakes his head again, pulling his hand back from hers. “You were covered in blood. Reaching out. And it was … it was like you were so tall, and I was so small, I was crouching at your feet.”

Pierce breaks off then, putting his face in his hands. “It was so fucking wild. I was looking up at you and all that blood and thinking, she’s inevitable, she’s inevitable, like this fucking drumbeat.…”

Mari lifts his face again, looking into his eyes. “It was just a dream, Pierce. See? Look. No blood.” She holds up both her hands. “Just me.”

He gives another shuddering sigh, leaning forward to rest his head against her breasts, and she keeps stroking his hair, feeling his sweat and tears soaking through her nightgown.

When he seems calmer, she can’t stop herself from saying, “And, you know, Pierce, that line you said? ‘She’s inevitable’?”

Pulling back, Pierce blinks at her, and she goes on, her heartbeat speeding up. “That’s really good. It’s so cool and could be foreboding, but could also be romantic.…”

His brow furrows. “What are you getting at?”

“I just think it’s a line you should use. Like in a song.”

Pierce pushes her away, his hands on her arms, his movements shaky as he stands. “No way,” he says on a breathless kind of laugh. “I just want to forget that shit and go to bed.”

But Mari doesn’t want to forget it.

She’s still thinking about it long after Pierce goes back to sleep, breathing softly beside her, and when she can’t lie there anymore, she gets up, goes to her notebook and the little desk under the window.

Victoria’s story has been frozen in amber for weeks now, but suddenly Mari feels it coming back to life.

She’s inevitable.

Pierce’s vision of Mari covered in blood comes back to her as she starts to write.

She’s inevitable.

Victoria, covered in blood. Whose blood? It doesn’t matter, not yet. She’ll figure that out.

The well, the cave into hell. There’s something there, maybe. Something, too, in the shopkeeper’s story about a suicide in this house. Years and years ago, but everyone in the town still remembers.

Houses remember.

Now the line makes more sense to her, now she knows how to use it.

Not a love story at all.

Or yes, a love story, but there’s horror inside of it. There’s death and loss, blood and sweat. Just as there is in every love story, after all.

Mari’s pen moves faster and faster as the story starts taking shape.

By the time the sun rises, she knows the book she’s writing and she understands why she couldn’t write it before.

It needed Pierce’s dream to show her the path.

Pierce wakes up, eventually, presses a kiss to the top of her head, but thankfully doesn’t bother her, drifting out of the room with his guitar in hand.

After a moment, she hears him begin to play in another room, and that seems to make her write even faster. She likes it, this sense of them both creating at the same time, near each other, but not together. Her writing inspiring his playing, his playing inspiring her writing.

It’s the life she’s wanted for them since the moment she climbed out that window in North London three years ago.

Finally, her hand cramping and her shoulders aching, she pauses, stretches.

Pierce is still playing, but it’s not a song she’s heard from him before. It’s sweet and sour at the same time, the notes dancing, and it makes her get up from her desk and go in search of him.

But when she steps out into the hallway, she realizes the music is coming from behind Lara’s cracked bedroom door.

Pierce is with her.

Pierce is playing for her.

Mari makes herself cross the narrow hallway, pushing the door open.

Lara’s room is nearly identical to the one Mari shares with Pierce, just smaller and done in shades of green instead of blue. There’s the same window, the same small desk under it, and the bed is pushed against the same far wall.

But it’s only Lara sitting on that bed now, her guitar in her lap. Pierce is nowhere to be found. It takes Mari a moment to realize that it’s actually Lara who has been playing this entire time.

It was Lara’s music filling her head as she wrote, spurring her on, and Mari isn’t sure how to feel about that.

The song stops as Lara registers Mari in the door, and Mari can tell she’s been crying again. Her face is red and puffy, her eyes wet, and when Mari comes closer, she can see splattered teardrops on the sheet music Lara has been writing on.

“That was beautiful,” Mari tells her, and Lara lifts her chin, her gaze meeting Mari’s.

“I’ve been trying to tell you all that I’m good,” she says. “You just never listen.”

Lara is right. She hasn’t listened. Neither of them have listened to each other.

Mari has spent such a long time feeling wronged by Lara that it never occurred to her that Lara was being wronged, too.

Just in a different way.

She approaches the bed cautiously, the way you’d try to get close to a skittish animal, but Lara scoots over, making room for her, the strings of her guitar twanging softly as she adjusts it.

“Play me something else,” Mari says, and Lara looks at her for a long beat before nodding, her hands falling back to the guitar.

This song is sad, too, the melody in a minor key, and Lara hums as she plays, but doesn’t sing. Even with just that, Mari can tell her voice is pretty, that it suits the music she’s making.

Aestaswill eventually be heard everywhere. In other bedrooms, in cars. In the background at parties, and in quiet living rooms, in movies, in commercials. People will play it when they’re in a good mood, but it’s the heartbroken that it’s written for, and they’re the ones who’ll play it the most.

But the first time any songs from Aestas are played for an audience, it’s here in this small bedroom in Umbria, with two sisters—because they know in their hearts that’s what they are, no matter their parentage—finally beginning to understand each other.

When the last note fades out, Mari realizes she’s crying, her own tears joining Lara’s on the sheet music.

“I wrote that after Billy,” Lara says quietly, and Mari closes her eyes because somehow, she’d already known that. The sadness weeping out of the song was familiar to her even without words.

“I miss him, too,” Lara says, and for the first time Mari lets herself remember the good parts of it all, before her son got sick. When he was a sweet, rosy-cheeked baby there in their little flat, and she can see Lara holding him, dancing around the kitchen with him in her arms, his little face alight with joy and with love.

Lara had loved him. Lara had lost him. All this time, she’s been reaching out to Pierce, waiting for him to join her in her grief instead of wishing it away.

She should’ve reached out to Lara, too, but her hurt and her anger was too raw. It was justified, and she can’t feel guilty about it, but even at nineteen, she’s learned the world isn’t as cut-and-dried as all of that.

Mari entwines her fingers with Lara’s and rests her head on her sister’s shoulder.

“You’re the one who should be making an album here,” Mari tells her, and then squeezes their joined hands. “You’re the one who’s going to write an album here. And I’m going to write my book, and by this time next year, I’ll be a famous author, and you’ll be a star. Bigger than Carly Simon. Bigger than Joni Mitchell. You watch.”

She thinks Lara is chuckling at first, amused by Mari’s grandiose plans, but then Lara sucks in a watery breath, and Mari realizes she’s crying again.

“What is it?” she asks, lifting her head to look at Lara.

And that’s when Lara gives another wrenching sob and says, “Mare. I’m pregnant.”

“It would’ve been better not to love him,” I tell her through my tears./

But my sister’s a plain-speaker, voicing all my fears./

“Not better. Just easier.”/

The simplest words I’ve ever heard./

And they cut me to the quick like only she can./

“Not better. Just easier.”/

A silk glove on an iron hand.

—“Night Owl,” Lara Larchmont, from Aestas, 1977