* * *
• • •
Returning to Shadow Garden after Edward’s funeral fills me with dread. If I can at all help it, my days here are numbered. I have plans but I haven’t told anyone yet. I have to fight every single day to remain in good spirits and it’s becoming increasingly difficult. I can go on all day but when daylight fades and time begins to slow, it all sloshes over me. I lose my rhythm and there is not enough oxygen in the room.
The car hits a pothole, raising my body temporarily off the seat. The driver lifts his hand to apologize. After a while, I nod off and when I open my eyes, my aspirations have returned. I wake with a vision: Shadow Garden behind me, the sun rising up ahead, beating down on my face. That vision tells me what I need to know—that I have to take control of my future.
A state of panic overcomes me. It begins unequivocally with a stumble of my heart, a gentle flutter. Then it throbs, speeds up, unwilling to surrender to its prior steady beat. I calm myself by imaging my new life.
I envision California. A thirties bungalow with a sloping roof and eaves with exposed rafters. A cozy atmosphere, nothing too formal, those days are over. A simple living room one enters directly from the front door—no parlor or sitting room—and a small kitchen. There’ll be redwood beams and an attic under the sloping roof. I worry about the ceiling height. I get claustrophobic at times. From what I hear, bungalow ceilings are lower than Shadow Garden’s Victorian architecture, still lower than Tudors, but I’ll manage.
I imagine a lot of white. White walls. A white kitchen. White tiled floor. Old Hollywood style. I imagine a classic antique bar cart in brass finish and a gold jigger, a cocktail strainer, an ornate gold ice bucket, a corkscrew, and gold mixing spoons. I focus on this cart, I’m not sure why, but I imagine this polished vintage-style look on wheels, perfectly suited to tote around beverage necessities. Glasses for every occasion, I will even stoop to stemless wineglasses. They are a thing now.
California is expensive but I wouldn’t mind listening to the waves all day. I’m thinking Berkeley maybe, or even close to the beach. They say the sound of water has a drowsing effect. From the pitter-patter of rain on shingles at Shadow Garden to the crash of ocean waves, that’s a nice thought. Imagine it and it will come true. I’m so steeped in this moment, so deeply entrenched in the vision that I hear myself speak out loud. “Where is the sign? The Hollywood sign?”
My voice alerts the driver. There’s a pause, a long look at me in the rearview mirror. He makes eye contact and then cracks a smile.
“This is not LA, Mrs. Pryor. We’re not in California.”
“Don’t be silly,” I say and keep my voice steady. “I knew that.” A deep sigh, a smoothing of my black skirt. “I had a moment, is all.”
He nods.
A cardboard box rests on the seat beside me. When I fastened my seat belt I almost reached around and buckled the box in, but then thought otherwise. That would have been silly.
Inside the box, underneath packing peanuts and balled-up brown paper, sits a handblown urn. I had it specially made for Edward, the glass shining in all colors of the rainbow. I spoke with the company over the phone and we deliberated colors.
“We roll raw molten glass in pigmented glass like you would roll an ice cream cone in sprinkles. Then the pigmented glass is heated on the ball of raw glass, merging them in a completely random pattern. We then blow and roll it into shape. It’s not until then that the true color coverage will expose itself.”
I was partial to purple at first, the color of blooming crape myrtles Edward loved so much, but then I thought otherwise. Rainbow colors will be more fitting on my California bungalow mantel. Edward’s patent royalties and the sale of Hawthorne Court, even after all the damage he did, will support me for decades to come. Of course there will be an appropriate time of mourning and then I will have a talk with Marleen. I will offer her to accompany me to California. Her loyalty is second to none and maybe she’ll take the leap with me.
I think about the letters often, by now discarded in a foul-smelling heap on the edge of the city. I want to think it was a sign, the fact Marleen threw them out, never to see the light of day. I am saddened by their loss, at the same time I have felt the pressure ease. No one needs to know what our family went through. Once you have been torn down and reinvented yourself, it’s easier the next go-around. The beads are linked by the string, by time, but who am I to know what comes next?
64
The boxes had arrived the previous night and hours before opening, booksellers and store employees in every bookstore around the country displayed Vera Olmsted’s book stacked up high on tables, and in special store presentations. Entire windows displayed the book, making for an eerie but beautiful picture. Published posthumously and to great fanfare, it was on every bestseller list even before publication, the preorder numbers so high it wasn’t going to be outdone, not even by a presidential memoir.
Vera Olmsted’s life had rendered more than anyone could imagine: a pragmatic childhood (the book Maypole told of the day she found her brother dangling off the rafters on her family’s farm in Norrtälje) and the investigation which resulted in the conviction of their neighbor, a man she had called Uncle Ludvig all her life. Her decades-long friendship with an iconic fashion designer who rose to fame as they were rumored to be a couple. Her attendance at every super-elite literary salon from Paris to New York since the late fifties, the first woman to be nominated and reject the position of goodwill ambassador of the Council of Europe. Her affair with a Canadian politician and the media frenzy that ensued; two failed marriages, and her seclusion in an unknown location as she worked on multiple short story collections, a book of essays, and a highly anticipated novel. The last years of her life were shrouded in mystery.
Details were scarce and early critics were tight-lipped but what booksellers unpacked on publication day was nothing short of a surprise to the publishing world and the reading public: a novel about an affluent couple and their daughter who plunged to her death in the family’s mansion. The novel drew significant parallels between Donna Pryor and her daughter, Penelope, who fell to her death in their home in an elite community. No one was prepared for the frenzy that ensued on publication day, when Vera Olmsted named Donna Pryor’s late daughter, Penelope, as the hit-and-run driver who was responsible for the death of a woman at White Rock Lake Park, a case that had gone cold years ago and had prompted documentaries, conspiracy theories, and YouTube videos.
Vera Olmsted and Donna Pryor spent a year living as neighbors at Shadow Garden, a luxury estate that was home to over one hundred men and women living with dementia. Vera Olmsted blended in so well because she played the part of a patient, even going through the other tenants’ trash occasionally. Depending on the severity of the disease, residents enjoy almost completely independent lives or assisted living with caretakers. The entire staff are trained geriatric nurses who do everything from cooking meals to supervising activities at the sprawling forty-acre estate.