Page 67 of The Manor of Dreams

“And then what? What else did they say?”

“That’s all I heard.” Reid’s shoulders sank. “I don’t know any more. I’m sorry.”

Lucille ground her jaw. There were two possibilities here why Dad had talked Eugene Lyman out of casting Ma. Either her mother’s mental condition really was unstable enough that she couldn’t act in movies. Or—

Dad had purposefully tried to sabotage Ma’s career.

Which one was it? Ma was angry that summer. Lucille had heard her scream over the terrace and then drive off one day. But that was the only incident she could think of. It didn’t seem like behavior that warranted a recommendation to a psychiatric facility.

Lucille considered the second possibility. Even she had sensed a subtle and mounting envy from Dad. He hadn’t seemed stable that summer either. He’d come home late sometimes, jittery, stomping too loudly around the kitchen. She had realized later in life that he was probably on coke. Other substances, maybe, too. After his overdose, she’d had to accept that there were things about him she didn’t know. He wasn’t the person she thought he was.

But would he have gone this far?

She tried to gather the papers together quickly, but there were too many. Her breaths came short and fast; she could feel the panic starting to take over.

“Lucille?” He jumped up and came around the desk, reaching out to steady her. “Hey, hey. You need water? I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to trigger all this—”

Her voice shook. She fought to control it. “All these things I wish I knew about my parents, and now there’s no way to find out.”

Reid knelt near her; his hand on hers. She could smell his cologne: wood and spices. Again, she felt this unbearable tenderness. She wondered if Reid would turn away like her ex-husband would and let her tend to her wounds in private. Lucille had always considered that detachment a mercy. Trained herself to think it. But still Reid looked upon her intently, and she felt the same familiar warmth rekindled in her from his gaze. It wasn’t questioning or critical. He looked upon her simply as if he wanted to carefully consider everything she said.

She asked faintly, “Did she hate me, do you think?”

Reid startled at this question. Lucille blinked hard. “I don’t know why I’m asking you this. It’s just that you’re the last person she talked to.”

“She didn’t,” Reid said gently. “I promise.”

“How would you know?”

“I asked.”

“About me?”

“When she told me to give the house away to the Dengs, I asked her. ‘What about your daughters?’?”

“And that was when she said this house would ruin us.” Lucille’s voice hardened. She kept coming back to that critical detail again. It was one of the last things her mother had definitively said, confirmed by a witness.

“But it didn’t—” He faltered. “She did say that. But she also said she wished it hadn’t come to that. She said that she had wanted to give you everything.”

“And what did that mean?”

“I don’t know. The conversation happened so quickly. I wish I’dfollowed up. I wish I’d reached out to you then. I was thinking about it, actually.”

“You should have.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly have a way of reaching you.”

She smiled through her tears. “You could have found me on the internet.”

“I could have,” he conceded. “But I didn’t know how you would feel about it. Me just calling you out of nowhere.”

She considered him plainly now. She remembered his shyness all those years ago. So flighty then, fiddling with his sleeve, glancing at her and then away. He had become much more still. His thick, wavy brown hair, streaked through with gray, now fell to his shoulders. The sharp curvature of his jaw was dusted with stubble. There were smile lines around his gentle eyes. She felt it then, intrigue that hummed into desire. “Better decades late than never.”

“What do you mean?”

Was he not going to acknowledge what happened after her party? There was his call the next day and the party later that night in Laurel Canyon, the night before her parents came back. There was the day she snuck out of the house the week after, when he picked her up and they spent the day at the beach outlook. She’d remembered him turning the music up in his car on their way back from the beach, pulling over to kiss in the back seat of his car, their lips rough with salt. It was the first time she’d been touched by someone, and it felt right with Reid. He’d called her and they’d talked in secret the next day, and the next.What could we be?she’d wondered in one of those late-night calls.I don’t know, he’d said. He’d sounded uncertain. They ended the call. She never heard anything from him again.

“I waited,” she said finally, “for you to call me. You’d just—stopped one day.” It surprised her now, how frank she could be about her own teenage yearning. She hated herself then, for sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring, the hours seeming like eternities. She’d felt pathetic. But it didn’t matter now. None of it did.

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