Page 13 of Lost Memories (Secrets of Mackinac Island 1)

“I guess I’ll have to go off with you as you become famous and take over the world,” Elise offered.

“Maybe. But in actuality, you’ll be famous in your own right with your scripts,” Penny affirmed.

“It’s nice to dream, isn’t it?” Elise said sadly, drawing her teeth over her bottom lip.

Penny cast a strange glance toward Brad, who was the only one of the twins who knew the story of Rex and the failed script. Still, that whole failed deal felt like a mere shadow compared to the devastation of everything else.

They managed to weave to other topics. Elise marveled at how conversationalist her children now were, as though they’d leaped into adulthood in previous months and built up new and exciting personas. Brad spoke a bit more about his girlfriend, who Elise was painfully curious about—and Penny mentioned that she’d considered seeing someone in the theater department.

“But you know how actors are,” she said with a flip of her long blonde tresses.

“Yes. I guess I do,” Elise said with a playful laugh.

“I watched Grandma’s movie last night in my apartment,” Penny said.

“Which one?”

“The one with the three boys. Middling reviews, but her performance was stellar,” Penny affirmed.

“I know. I used to be on set with her, running lines in her trailer,” Elise said.

“Wow. You know, I looked it up later. Her reviews were incredible. Everyone spoke about her as the next up-and-coming actress, in her age bracket, at least,” Penny continued. “But it seems like her offerings were pathetic after that. Like Hollywood built her up as this idea and then threw her away.”

“Welcome to Hollywood,” Brad said with an ironic laugh.

At this, two of the baristas who worked at the coffeeshop cast them dark looks. It seemed obvious that they had their own showbusiness visions. Everyone in Los Angeles seemed to.

Elise, Brad, and Penny returned to the funeral home and streamed in with the other guests. Several of her mother’s friends reached out and touched her arm and whispered their condolences. This was something else Elise had noticed about losing her mother; people tended to speak to her as though she was a delicate child, now—as though she was on the verge of a break.

As Elise had been Allison’s one and only, her greatest love and the woman who held Allison’s memory tightly—like a beacon—Elise had decided, perhaps stupidly, to speak for most of the ceremony. At the beginning, she rose and read one of her mother’s favorite poems; her voice rasped into the microphone strangely. When she blinked up, she found herself gazing out across two-hundred faces, some of them men and women who’d known her mother since she’d been a girl.

“Thank you for coming today,” Elise said, falling away from the poem. Her heart thudded. “My mother was many things. She was a writer and an actress, a dramatic spirit, a joker. She knew how to illuminate a room, make it brighter and more alive. Her laugh was contagious. This was something everyone told me growing up—almost to the point of annoyance. Everyone said that I would be just as funny as she was. You know what? I never became as funny, and I don’t even know if I appreciated every joke as much as I should have.

“My mother had a full and vibrant life. Nobody could say differently. She lived every day to the fullest, reached for her dreams, and kept working as an actress even after she had me. She taught me everything I know about the world, and the only thing I can really say is; now that she’s gone, the world seems a little darker. I know that I’ll always be a little less likely to laugh. The world has lost a singular talent, the woman I loved most in the world, and my very best friend. There’s so much I wish I could have asked her before she left us. But I suppose, as she liked to say—whatever will be will be. And now, we must go forward without her, trusting only ourselves and the people we became because we knew her so well.”

**

AFTER THE SERVICE,Elise and her children stood near the casket to greet the guests. Her mother’s cousins approached and kissed all their cheeks and announced they would be at Elise’s house by the end of the hour. “We’ve packed several dishes for you,” one of them said brightly, as though Elise and her children had some sort of outrageous appetite in the wake of her mother’s death. “So don’t you worry about anything.”

One of her mother’s old friends from high school gripped Elise’s hands and said, “You know, I always felt like your mother should have been so much more famous than she was.”

Elise’s stomach clenched at the thought. “I don’t know. I think she had precisely the kind of life she always wanted to have.”

Of course, it was easier to say this now.

“She was just spectacular!” the high school friend continued. She squeezed Elise’s hands still harder and turned her eyes toward Penny, who continued to nod ferociously. “When she played Annie from Annie Get Your Gun in high school, she brought down the house. I’ve never seen anyone so spectacular. Everyone said that she would be this mighty force in Hollywood.”

“She played some good parts...” Elise affirmed, dropping her mother’s old friend’s hands with distaste.

Still, this woman wasn’t the only one with similar sentiments.

“She was such a stunner,” one older man said. “I wanted to marry her, but she always told me that she wasn’t keen on the idea of marriage.”

Elise guffawed. “When was that?”

“I guess around the time she left Los Angeles for a bit,” he said.

Elise arched her brow. “She left LA?”

---