“Discouraged about what?” I asked, my eyes narrowing into a baffled squint.
“About her marriage, being a good wife to Steve, being a good mother.”
“Mom, that’s crazy. Lindsey is the best mother ever. She’s Martha Stewart and Florence Nightingale in the body of a Victoria’s Secret model.”
My mother turned to me. “That’s an unrealistic combination.” Her next words came slowly and methodically. “No person like that exists.”
“But,” I began, still feeling blindsided, “she’s always seemed so satisfied and together, like her life is totally . . . perfect.” I mumbled the last word.
“No one’s life is perfect, Abigail,” my mother offered as she loaded breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. “Your sister was very lucky the situation turned out the way it did.” She paused thoughtfully then returned to the breakfast bar. “And I think with what she and Steve learned from the separation, their relationship is even stronger now. She’s much more content, genuinely happy.”
My mother placed two fluffy pancakes on my plate then pushed it across the table to me.
I stared down at them. No appetite. “Why didn’t Lindsey tell me?” I wondered aloud as. my hands gripped the edge of the table. “Why, when she was going through such a devastating time in her life, didn’t she confide in me, her own sister?”
Mom leaned against the counter, watching me in silence.
“Why didn’t she tell what was happening and how she was feeling? Maybe I could’ve helped. At the very least I could’ve listened. She should have talked to me.”
That was when reality hit like a ton of bricks. Lindsey hadn’t shared with me, just like I hadn’t shared with her. Last year, I’d chosen to slip into an emotional coma to deal with our brother’s death, while my sister’s solution burned her out, trying to make everything perfect, and then giving up. We both failed, hurting those we love along the way, without meaning to, without realizing it at the time.
My chin dropped to my chest. Tears for my sister, whom I loved more than my own life, gushed from my eyes like a deluge. I cupped my face, sobbing over my uneaten seconds.
“Mom?” I choked out. When I looked at her, at her face, I saw what the last year and a half had done to her. After Christian died, I’d cut my parents out of my life because I had been too selfish to think of anything but my own guilt.Making it, in a way, as if they’d lost two children.
“Mom?” I repeated. It was a cry for help that time.
In an instant, she was in the chair next to me.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I sobbed. “I’m sorry I cut out like that. It was terrible, selfish. I’m so sorry!”
“Oh, honey.” Mom’s voice was soothing. “I know, I know. We each fell apart in our own ways.” Her long, slender fingers curled around my wrist. “But it’s going to be okay.” I could smell her scented hand lotion.
“We’re going to stick together from now on. Aren’t we?”
My tears were still flowing, but I also nodded.
“And I think,” Mom continued as she scooted her chair closer, “after all we’ve gone through, each of us will be stronger, ready to handle choices in the future. You think?”
When I couldn’t answer, her fingers found my face between my hands. She gently lifted my chin like I was a little girl again. “This life is a learning process, my precious, most precious Abigail. And the trick is . . .” She paused, tiny teardrops clinging to the corners of her blue eyes. “The most important thing . . . is to love each other, and ourselves, and find what makes us truly happy.”
I sniffled and nodded, wanting all of those more than anything.
“Maybe that’s music for you,” she added, “or maybe not.” She smiled as a single tear trickled down her cheek. “But once you find your happiness, don’t let it go.”
{chapter 28}
“SHE’S LEAVING HOME”
“How’s the old salt mine? Another day another dollar?”
I couldn’t help laughing at how my father always treated my career like any other. His same questions might have been asked of a lawyer or a waitress. I curled my feet underneath me, sinking deeper into the comfy leather armchair.
“Busy,” I said, offering him my flat, routine answer.
Dad glanced up from the foldout instruction booklet he was reading and eyed me.
“Well, honestly, it’s been pretty miserable the past few months.” I offered a weak chuckle, like the misery was simply par for the course. “I practically had to sign my name in blood to come see you for twenty-four hours on a weekend.”
My father’s study had looked the same since I was a kid. He’d designed the room himself when he and Mom built the house. He loved the dark, wooden paneling of all four walls, the plush, coffee-colored carpeting, with the rich mahogany and leather furniture. We all referred to his room as “the cave,” because it got so dark and spooky with the heavy brown curtains pulled over the windows, blocking out the relentless Arizona sun, even now, in late October.
I took a sip from the warm mug of chamomile tea I was cradling between my hands and watched my dad working to install his new speakers.
“Do you need some help?” I asked, knowing full well that my involvement would inevitably make matters worse.
“I’ll get it,” Dad insisted as he carefully dumped the contents of a white box onto his desk. “Your uncle Richard promised these are the simplest things to mount.” Methodically he sifted through a pile of plugs and wires. “Aha!” he exclaimed. “This goes here.”
Despite his crippling inability to read a roadmap, Dad was sharp as a tack, and it wasn’t long before he was adjusting the volume on his new sound system. I was very proud of my father. He worked so hard to provide a comfortable life for his family. A few years ago, when I got the first of my really big paychecks, I offered to buy my parents a new house in Los Angeles so they could be closer to Christian and me. I wondered why, at the time, but neither of them was interested. Dad claimed he was much too young to retire from his marketing agency, and Mom had her little group of lady friends, plus her job at the museum.
But as I sat there, sinking deeper and deeper into the cozy armchair in “the cave,” smelling meatloaf baking in the oven, seeing the framed family portrait from ten years ago hanging on the wall behind Dad’s desk, I perfectly understood why they never desired to leave the comfort and warmth of home for some fancy dwelling in Orange County.
And suddenly, my life under its current regime felt horribly irrelevant.
“Wait,” I requested, leaning forward, “go back to that last one.”
Dad turned to me with a smile. “You know Sinatra?” He pushed the button to skip back a track on the CD he was scanning through. “When did this transformation take place? I thought you were solely interested in that Charlie McCarthy kid and his Slug Bugs.”
I forced a polite laugh at the old family joke at my expense. “It’s Paul McCartney, Dad,” I corrected warmly. “The Beatles? Ever heard of them?”
Dad chuckled and adjusted the volume of the music spilling through his new speakers. I rested my head against the back of the chair, closed my eyes, and listened. The song had become familiar to me the previous summer, and it was painting a picture in my head, allowing memories to roll out like a movie.
After a while, the nerve endings in my face informed my brain that I was smiling, although I couldn’t believe such a thing was remotely possible, given the circumstances—the circumstances of my listening to the favorite song of a person I was attempting not to think about every two seconds.
Deal with it, Abby. Deal. Deal. Deal . . .
“He first recorded this in nineteen forty-nine,” I said as I opened my eyes.
My father was leaning back in his chair, his feet propped up on his desk.
“Then again when he was in his sixties. Of course, the vocals are superior in the early version, but I prefer the later cut. He’d lived longer, and the lyrics meant more then. He was emoting.”
“Spoken like a true Sinatraphyte.” Dad smiled. “I’m impressed.” He took a sip from his own steaming mug. “Surprised, but impressed. Where did this new appreciation come from?”
I shrugged evasively, nervous and a little reluctant to dive into the subject. Dad was watching me, however, waiting for an answer to the simple question.
“For four months I hung around someone who worships the Rat Pack,” I said, willing my croaky voice to sound non-croaky. “I guess some of it rubbed off.”
Dad didn’t miss a beat. “Linz told us about him.”
My heart started to thud, but Dad’s kind eyes were gazing at me from across the room.
“Todd,” he said, as if he were speaking any other name. “Right?”
I felt myself nod. Then I let the words slide off my tongue with zero obstruction. “Todd Camford.” Speaking his name aloud made something inside me tickle, just like that June morning before I’d pedaled Lindsey’s big, stupid bike into Seaside. “Sinatra’s his favorite,” I added a moment later, my voice hopelessly thick. “Dino,” I said, clearing my throat, “post–Jerry Lewis runs a close second.”
“He has excellent taste,” Dad confirmed. “Care to tell me what happened back in September?”
Wow. Not even a preamble.
I exhaled, my gaze leaving him to study the texture of the brown curtains. They were moving a little from an overhead vent, making them look like a fountain of cascading dark chocolate. “I’m still not sure,” I admitted, shifting in my seat. “He and Max had this major blow out one night, and then he left. Something happened that made him stop loving me.”
I coughed and my hands suddenly felt freezing cold, even though they were curled around a warm mug.
“That’s not the story I heard.”
I looked at Dad, feeling my face scrunch in confusion.
“Lindsey.” He lifted an eyebrow. “You know how she likes to talk. She made it sound like you chose your career over him.” He took a drink from his cup. “Didn’t sound like he stopped loving you at all. Sounds like he left because he loves you, but he couldn’t help you. Was that it?”
“Lindsey’s worse than a paparazzo,” I muttered, but I couldn’t stop myself from crawling way back into the part of my brain behind the yellow caution tape, pulling forward more memories. I shivered. My whole body ached like I had the flu.
“The press sure loved him,” my father’s chipper voice went on, pulling me away from my thoughts.
My skin felt so cold that I didn’t realize my palms were sweating. The mug slipped between my hands.
“Your mother and I read more about him than about you a few months back. They say he’s from Portugal. Is that accurate?”
I took a deep breath and faced him. “He’s American, Dad. I warned you never to believe what’s printed in that trash. And since when do you and Mom read the tabloids?”
“We’ve always kept tabs on you. Of course, we’ve had to work harder at it without your brother.”
After he said this, I waited to see his expected reaction, but there wasn’t one glint of blame or judgment behind his light eyes, which surprised me.
“He kept us up to date on everything. Where you were, where you’d be, when you’d be on television. He was our personal Abigail Kelly PR machine.” His tender expression never wavered. His eyes moved up to the ceiling and then to the old family portrait behind his desk. “He sure loved his time with you.”
My throat was closing up, that old strangling serpent. “You don’t have to say that, Dad,” I whispered, as another feeling quickly moved in. I recognized that the Niagara Falls of tears was coming. “Christian,” I managed to choke out, “should’ve stayed at his job instead of dropping his career, his law degree, his entire life to ride around in some lame tour bus with me so I wouldn’t be lonely.” I exhaled, forcing out all the air from my lungs. “He’d probably be a partner by now, and maybe married with a family of his own.”
I closed my eyes, pinching back the oncoming torrent, one last vain attempt at false bravado. When I opened them a moment later, my father was shaking his head.
“Your brother didn’t give up anything, Abby. He absolutely loved it; he was so proud of you. He told us so, every time we spoke.”
My trembling fingers curled tighter around the mug in my hands, its cloudy liquid splashing over the rim and onto my jeans.
“Dad.” I inhaled with a gasp. “I’m so sorry for what happened. I’m so sorry I took Christian.” I hung my head, finally saying to him what I needed to say. Burning tears seeped through my pinched eyelids.
“Oh, honey.” I heard Dad stand up from his chair and walk around the desk to me. “We’re all sorry. We all miss him. It was the worst kind of tragedy a parent could imagine.” He sat on the arm of my chair. “But not for a minute, not for a split second, did we ever, ever blame you.”
I felt his hand on my shoulder. He held it there for a moment and then softly shook me. “None of it was your fault. It wasn’t his fault, either. It just happened. Abby.” He shook my shoulder again, and I sobbed even harder. “It wasn’t your fault. You loved him.” His next words came succinctly. “It. Wasn’t. Your. Fault.”
From the very beginning, Lindsey had said those same words to me, over and over. So had Molly and Hal, and Todd even, all of my friends who cared about me. Probably my parents would have, too, if I’d given them the chance back then. They’d all begged me to believe them, but I just couldn’t consider the concept. I had been too wrapped up in my own selfish suffering.
Until now.
Somewhere deep inside, I knew it was true. Christian’s dying had not been my fault. He had been taken from us—taken—and there had been absolutely nothing I could have done to stop it. My mind already knew this, but it felt brand new to my heart, and I was finally able to grab hold of it.
Tears were coming faster, pouring down my cheeks, down my throat, soaking into the neck of my shirt.
“I love you, Abby,” the tender voice of my father said as he patted my shoulder. “And I know it’s been the hardest for you. But it’s time to let it go, baby.”
Sniffling, nodding, I fought to reply. My mouth was open, but only strange, incoherent noises were coming out. Through soggy lashes, I looked up at him. “I know,” I finally managed to articulate between fits of sobs. “This is me, Dad. Letting it go.”
Dad pressed his lips together, smiling approvingly. “That’s been stuck inside of you for a long time, hasn’t it?”
“I’ve screwed up so many things,” I whimpered after I calmed down. “I just . . . I wish I could get a do-over on my life, change everything. I wish I could go back.”
“No,” Dad said, the tone of his voice reminding me of all the times he had offered me advice over the years. “You can’t go back to fix what’s wrong today. You can only go forward.” He leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Go forward, Abby.”
—FROM THE BRITISH SUN—
ABBY CAUGHT IN SEXY LOVE SCANDAL!
What on earth is up with Abigail Kelly these days? We’re so glad you asked. Sources say when she was on holiday in Miami last month, current boy-toy T.C. was nowhere to be seen. Have they finally split?
Surely you jest!
When asked about the conspicuous absence of the hunky American, sources close to Abby implied she was sick to the back teeth of his boring, laid-back style.
“We’re just two different kinds of people,” Abby disclosed to a close friend. “Sometimes a girl just needs a bit of a break from it all.”
Miss Mustang was spotted at all the hottest clubs in South Beach, getting down and dirty with the local lads. Something’s fishy, methinks. Time to get your feet on the ground, princess.
{chapter 29}
“ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE”
After reading the same paragraph four times, I reached for my homemade bookmark, the long, thin piece of paper with my growing bucket list running down the center. Checkmarks, underlines, asterisks, and exclamation points highlig
hted various items. After replacing it, I closed the book, drumming my fingers over its brown-and-white cover. Dad had lent me his copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People when I was visiting. I’d read it twice in three days, taking special notice of the passages he highlighted and the notes he had written in the margins. My favorite chapters were the ones about finding a proper balance in life and how to become proactive—two habits I desired yet was currently lacking.
I slid the book into my bag, noticing that my phone was blinking with a new message. Molly. I sighed, smiling. She was only one room away. After I read it, I turned off my phone and pulled a small yellow tube out of an inside pocket of my purse.
“What are you doing a week from Tuesday?” I asked as I applied the sweet mentholated balm, making a complete circle three times and smacking my lips. “We have the morning off.”
Hal looked up from the magazine on his lap. “Sleeping in, of course.”
“Think you could possibly roll out of bed and be at Club Le Deux by ten? They’re opening early for me.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“Memorial.” I smiled, allowing my gaze to drift off into the middle distance. “For Christian. You know, since I missed his last one.” I felt Hal’s hand on my arm. “We got a really bad Neil Diamond impersonator to perform.”
When I looked at Hal, he was smiling, too.
“It’s gonna be a rockin’ party. Will you come?”
“Hells yeah.” He kicked the side of my chair. “Wouldn’t miss it, duchess.”
I exhaled, mentally checking off another item on my list. After a few minutes passed in silence, I asked, “Have you written anything lately?”
Framed portraits of the stars from this TV network’s past and current sit-coms plastered the walls. Between them were flat screens showing the live feed of the late-night talk show we were about to perform on.
Hal hesitated at first, his eyes moving from me to the closed door behind us. Yes, we were alone in the greenroom, but not for long. “I write every day, duchess,” he finally said. “Pretty soon I’ll need to add another wing onto the house to hold all my notebooks.”
Abby Road Page 27
