The apartment is your typical overpriced San Franciscan fare. Oliver looked it up last night and saw that the rent starts at twenty-five hundred for a studio, which this one is. That’s a lot of money to spend on a secret apartment that looks like it was primarily used as . . . storage? There’s a floor mattress, the sight of which triggers a whole-body shudder running through Oliver, because he can just about imagine what Marshall was using it for, but aside from that there are no other pieces of furniture, merely boxes stacked on top of one another. It doesn’t look at all like a place that anyone lived in.
Oliver goes to the far end of the studio and opens a window to let some of the stink of stale smoke out. He looks at the boxes, dreading to find out what’s inside them. Taking a deep breath, he reaches out for the nearest cardboard box and opens the top.
Huh.
O-kaaay.
Inside is not a stash of wrapped bricks of cocaine or stacks of counterfeit money or anything that he’d expected but a sculpture about four feet tall. It’s a model of a U-shaped spaceship, its surface carved with extremely elaborate minute detail. Oliver lifts it very, very carefully, because it’s obvious even to him, someone who knows nothing about sculptures, that this is a true work of art. The amount of detail that has gone into this spaceship is staggering; you can even see people inside the tiny carved windows. He places it on the floor before stepping back and staring at it, dumbfounded.
A piece of art, a beautiful one at that. Why does Marshall have it? Oliver feels like he shouldn’t be handling this delicate piece of art with bare hands, but he hadn’t thought of bringing gloves here, and he needs answers, so he lifts the piece gingerly and peers at the bottom of its base.
Sure enough, there are words carved into it.
F. Martinez. Failure to Launch.
Oliver sets the piece back down, his mind racing. Failure to Launch is obviously the title of the piece, and F. Martinez presumably the sculptor. Fleetingly, he wonders about the possibility of it being filled with drugs—maybe Marshall was smuggling drugs? But no, he dismisses the thought as soon as it surfaces. This is true artwork, not a front for some drug-running business.
He opens the next box. This one is filled with prints of beautiful photographs of waterfalls and forests, each one so vivid that Oliver can practically hear the rush of the rivers in the pictures. In the lower left-hand corner is a signature he can’t make out. By now, Oliver has no freaking clue what is happening, so he opens more boxes, and the more he finds, the less he understands.
Before long, the studio looks like a tiny art gallery, albeit one owned by the most eclectic collector. There are oil paintings, and jumbled yarn pieces strung together with bits of broken glass and feathers, and cartoon drawings, and more sculptures. Some of the pieces are lone ones; others come in a set. They’ve all been made by different artists.
Oliver is absorbed by the bizarre discovery, his mind racing ahead—or rather, backward, into the past, digging frantically to figure out just what the hell Marshall was up to, but still he can’t make any sense out of it.
“Oh, Marshall,” he says, his voice heavy with sorrow and regret. “What have you done?”
NINETEEN
JULIA
Cooking has never been one of Julia’s strong suits. Marshall confirmed that many times over, but over the course of their married life, she tried very hard to improve, first consulting cooking websites and blogs, then moving on to YouTube videos, and finally learning through TikTok. Unfortunately, despite all the hard work, Julia still never quite got the hang of it. At best, her food is passable, but it can never be accused of being anything that might cause cravings, unless the craving is for the meal to be over. Yet another thing marking her down as an incompetent housewife and human in general.
But one thing she does excel at is charcuterie boards. Well, she used to call them cheeseboards, up until the term “charcuterie board” took over the Internet. Her charcuterie boards absolutely slay. It’s too bad that Marshall never liked cheese or cured meats or any of her boards, even the dessert ones; otherwise it would have been charcuterie boards every day.
It feels weird having thoughts like these when Marshall is dead. They seem so petty, to be remembering him this way. Shouldn’t she be mourning him more? This morning, she received a call from the medical examiner telling her that the examination is over and that she can now make funeral arrangements. In a daze, she’d opted to have him cremated because that was the cheaper option, and no service because—well, she just wasn’t sure if anyone would turn up. It had made her feel like the world’s worst wife. But now she’s trying to focus on anything but that. Focus on the charcuterie board, she tells herself.
She’s having a good time making one with Emma, which feels wrong; she probably shouldn’t be having fun putting together a charcuterie board so soon after Marshall’s death. But Emma is having a great time smearing her little fingers with fig jam and then licking them off and then dipping the fingers back into the jam pot, and Julia is telling her off but also laughing, and maybe everything will be okay? There is no way that their savings can last beyond next month’s mortgage payment, so Julia has no idea what she’s going to do then, but for now, she’s making a charcuterie board with her daughter and she doesn’t have to worry about Marshall telling her that it’s shit. Things could be worse.
Emma’s just fussing over the charcuterie board, putting grapes down here and there with fierce concentration, the tip of her tongue sticking out of her mouth, when the doorbell goes off.
“That’ll be Uncle Ollie,” Julia says, and for a second, Emma looks scared. “Are you gonna be okay?” It’s strange, asking Emma this, when in the past, they didn’t have a choice but to be okay with any visitors, because Marshall thought asking Emma stuff like this is “pandering” to her and encouraging her to be difficult.
Emma looks at her, then down at the charcuterie board, which admittedly isn’t one of Julia’s best because a lot of the deli meats and cheese have splodges of little jam fingerprints on them. “Will Uncle Ollie like this?”
Julia doesn’t even think twice before saying, “Of course.” Only after she says those words does it hit her how true they are, because Ollie has always liked what she liked.
Emma nods solemnly. “Then Emma is okay.” Her little jam-smeared face looks so brave that Julia crouches down and gives her a tight hug. How did she end up with such a special girl?
Emma chooses to stay in the living room while Julia opens the door; she’s still not a fan of greeting people at the door.
“Hey,” Oliver says with a smile and hands her a paper bag. “I got you some cookies. They’re whole-grain?”
Julia laughs at the uncertainty in his voice. “You didn’t have to. Come on in.”
They walk inside the house and find Emma hiding behind the sofa. Anxiety churns in Julia’s belly. This is one of the many things Emma does that irritated Marshall to no end. It’s so embarrassing, he’d say. Can’t she just be fucking normal? Other kids her age are always running up to people and saying hi, but she’s gotta hide like some creepy kid. You’re just enabling her, Jules.