by Ruthie Knox
Chapter 24
Rosemary sat on a stool on the dining room side of the kitchen counter in Nancy Fredericks’s ranch home. On the kitchen side, her daughter and Nancy performed an elaborate dance of preparation for the arrival of an entire houseful of guests Rosemary hadn’t known were coming.
“T-minus four hours until they get here,” Nancy announced. “Where are we at on the hors d’oeuvres?”
“Baked beans are in the Crock-Pot,” Beatrice replied. “Goat cheese dipper wonton thingies are wrapped up in the fridge. Party dip is mixed and in Crock-Pot number two.”
This weekend would be Bill and Nancy Fredericks’s long-delayed fortieth anniversary party. Their children were on their way home with their significant others, which meant the arrival of Winston and Allie was imminent, as well as Nancy’s other daughter, May, and her boyfriend, Ben.
Rosemary had picked the worst possible time to crash back into Beatrice’s life—as Beatrice had made perfectly clear when Rosemary turned up on the doorstep.
Awkward didn’t begin to describe how Rosemary felt. Miserable unwanted hopeless wanker came closer to the mark.
“Beverages?” Nancy asked.
“Cans in the cooler in the garage, beer in the garage fridge, white wine in the kitchen fridge, red wine on the counter. Do we need hard stuff, too?”
“We’ve got hard stuff in the basement—I’m sure most of it will migrate upstairs before dinner. What am I forgetting?”
“Bill’s gone to the Woodman’s in Green Bay for the weirder groceries on Ben’s list, so I think we’ll be all set for dinner.” As Beatrice spoke, she unloaded the dishwasher, placing plates and bowls and drinking glasses in the correct cupboards without having to ask where anything went.
“Here, peel these for me.” Nancy handed Beatrice a bag of carrots. “I need them for the potato salad.”
“Diced or rounds?”
“Get the skins off and then dice them up small.”
“You got it.”
Rosemary knew she ought to contribute. Offer to peel the potatoes or run to the store for ice. She’d been sitting on her designated stool for half an hour while Kal glowered alone in the living room. They were not being adequate houseguests, not by any reasonable measure.
Beatrice had never unloaded Rosemary’s dishwasher without a grumble. She’d never cheerfully whirled around the kitchen, peeling potatoes and organizing plans for a party. At home in England, she would have been sullen and obstructive and made herself so unpleasant that Rosemary would eventually have snapped and sent her away.
“How’s the film coming along?” she asked.
“Since yesterday?” Beatrice said. “About the same.”
“You said you were going to edit the new footage.”
“I have.”
“How did it come out?”
“It’s perfect.”
“That sounds exciting.”
“I guess.”
“I thought the filming you did yesterday was very inspiring.” Rosemary hated how her voice sounded, stiff and proper, but she was Beatrice’s mum. Mum-voice developed whether one wanted it to or not. She’d rehearsed what she wanted to say to her daughter in the car this morning. Tell her you admire her. Be supportive and interested. “It made me proud to see you capturing a moment like that—a moment that has so much to say about women’s stories, what the world does to women.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’m going to go check in the garage, see if we have enough club soda for mixers,” Nancy said. “Watch that pot for me, will you?”
“Yep,” Beatrice replied.
Then it was the two of them, mother and daughter, if you didn’t count Kal on the other side of the wall. Which Rosemary couldn’t. He’d made that clear. He hadn’t even returned to the hotel room until after midnight, and he’d slept in the other bed, leaving her to toss and turn alone.
She tried again with her daughter. “After I left, I met with Yangchen and her cousin, and they told me stories about Everest I wish you could have filmed. There’s so much women have to say that we never get to hear. I wonder if you’d thought about that for your film? I mean, have you thought thematically about Nancy’s message for other women, who it might resonate with, or—”
“Mum.” Beatrice had stopped peeling. She was staring at Rosemary. Glaring, actually.
“Yes?”
“Maybe don’t tell me what my film is about, since you haven’t seen it?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“I get that you’re here to make friends with me. I guess it’s nice and everything, but also? Maybe ask me what my movie is about instead of telling me what you think it should be about? Because I actually do have a plan. Wrote it down and everything.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to presume.”
With a smooth, vicious movement, Beatrice dug an eye out of the potato in her hand with the sharp point of a paring knife.
Panic threatened to overwhelm Rosemary. She’d already lost Kal. She couldn’t lose her daughter as well, not like this, in this kitchen, where she felt so desolate. “Can’t we be friends?” she asked. “I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing. I know I’ve been traveling, but we could certainly text each other more. I’d like not to have to…guess at your life. Scrutinize your Instagram photos for clues.”
“I’d like to not have to guess whether you’re dead or alive in between your postcards from Base Camp.”
“Yes. Well, I’m here now. I’m trying. I’m willing to try harder, if you’d just—”
Beatrice dropped the vegetable peeler on the counter. “Do you know what I want? I want you to be my mum. I don’t want you to be my friend or my producer or a globe-trotting glamour celebrity who drops in unexpectedly and tries to, like, glom some feeling of intimate closeness in the three hours she can spare before she takes off again. You used to be my mum.”
“I haven’t stopped, Beatrice, I’ve—”
“You have. You started doing all this other stuff and didn’t leave any room for me. Do you know what it’s like to have your mother gearing up to climb the seven most dangerous mountains in the world? It’s the worst. The absolute worst. I know I’m supposed to be supportive and proud, and I try, but a lot of the time I just hate you for not being a proper mum who sends me packages and frets over whether my socks are clean.”
“I couldn’t—I can’t—”
“I know that, all right? I know you had to get away, I know you had some kind of midlife crisis, I just wish you hadn’t needed to get away from me. Why couldn’t you have rented some cottage nearby and, you know, gotten a job at an estate agent’s like every other mum?”
I was trying to find myself. I was trying to be a role model for the kind of woman I wanted you to be, the life I wanted you to reach for.
I was suffocating.
I was underwater, trying to figure out how not to drown.
They weren’t things she could say, even if they were true, and they couldn’t fix the fact that she’d left and her daughter hated her for it.
Children spent their whole lives getting ready to leave. They were born helpless, and every piece of competence they managed to attain took them one step closer to walking out the door forever. Rosemary had been watching her daughter leave for nineteen years, always trying to resist the impulse to keep her close, keep her helpless, keep her needing her mum so she wouldn’t ever really go.
No one told young women that being a mother meant constant, terrible heartbreak. No one ever said aloud that it meant doubting you were doing it right every single day, every time your child cried, every time she burned her finger or skinned her knee or ended up in hospital.
No one had told Rosemary that her failures would culminate, one stacked upon the other, until there was no way to get her daughter back.
The pasta pot on the stove boiled over with a wet, loud sizzle. Rosemary jumped to her feet.
“Fuck!” Beatrice opened and closed two drawers, wadd
ed a dishtowel in her hand to pull the pot off the heat. “Oh, motherfucking son of a bitch, ouch!”
“Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right, I burned my hand!” Beatrice adjusted the towel and yanked the pot off the stove, then dropped it to flail her fingers in the air, jumping up and down. “Ouch ouch ouch ouch.”
Rosemary moved to the tap and turned it to cold. “Here, run the water on it so it doesn’t blister.”
“I can’t, I have to check if this is done and sop up the stupid water—”
“I’ll take care of that. You take care of your hand.”
“I don’t want to take care of my hand. I want to fix this mess you made before Nancy gets back and sees it.”
“Bea—”
“Get out of my way.”
“Can’t you just let me do this one thing for you?”
“Oh, shit!” Beatrice zipped past her, and Rosemary turned to discover the dishtowel in flames. Beatrice picked it up by the corner and dropped it in the pasta pot. Overhead, the smoke alarm began blaring, and Rosemary covered her ears.
“Nancy’s going to have kittens.”
Rosemary stood, mute and useless, as Beatrice turned the flame off. Her daughter dragged a stool over and climbed it to silence the smoke alarm, dumped the pot with its burned towel in the sink, cleaned the cooktop. Finally, she stood with her back to Rosemary and let the cold water from the tap run over her injured hand.
Rosemary had never felt less like a mother or a friend.
She walked into the living room, where Kal sat with his phone in his palm. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“Give me the keys,” she said.
When he handed them to her, she picked up her purse and left the house. Started the engine. Drove away.
Chapter 25
Manitowoc, Wisconsin, didn’t have any mountains.
It didn’t even have proper hills. It was right on Lake Michigan, and the city was as flat as any town at sea level. Rosemary drove west, through farmland, small towns, forest, irrationally itching for something to climb.
She didn’t know if it was legal for her to drive in America. She didn’t care. There was no traffic to speak of on the back roads, and it wasn’t difficult to point the car in a straight line and stick to the speed limit. What was the worst thing that could happen?
What could be worse than what had already happened?
She drove through nothing, shot down the highway until finally the land started to undulate and she began to feel hopeful that she would find something to throw her body against.
A brown state park sign. She pulled off where it told her to, parked in the lot, shoved keys and mobile in her pockets, and pointed herself down the trail that seemed most likely to head uphill.
She hiked as fast as she could push herself, counting her footsteps, one after the next. Sweat beaded at her hairline and bloomed under the arms of the button-up blouse she’d purchased on her Manhattan shopping excursion. Mud caked the sides of her supple leather flats, ruining them, but it was all ruined, wasn’t it? It didn’t make a difference if she ruined it some more.
Finally, the trail acquired a mild slope. She pushed herself harder, willing her muscles to burn, seeking the ache, the pain, the fatigue that would wipe her blank and let her drop away inside her head.
She didn’t want to think. She wanted to erase herself in exertion. She wanted to count.
The hilltop came too quickly. There was a concrete pad, a bench, and a picnic table. She crossed to the scenic overlook, her pulse beating in her fingers, which swelled when she hiked and had always ached on Everest, even at Base Camp.
The view gave her nothing but rolling green pastureland. Nothing threatening or intense, nothing to test herself against. Her hands curled into fists.
She hated this.
Rosemary hated that she’d walked out on her daughter, that she’d fought with her and failed her and left her and disappointed her.
She hated that she and Kal had broken up. That they’d careened right into the fight she’d been trying to avoid and found themselves in a place as bleak and impossible as she’d feared.
Most of all, she hated that she’d flung her body up this bump of soil in an attempt to obliterate herself, because it made it all too obvious—too stupidly obvious—that this was what she’d been doing from the beginning. She’d never had a hope of finding herself on Everest. Not when she’d been trying so hard to erase herself completely. She’d given herself a plan to follow so she didn’t have to make any decisions.
Her marriage had controlled her. She’d left it only to replace one kind of control with another. Anything to keep from having to authentically live her life.
It had literally taken an avalanche to shake her out of her tracks.
Rosemary sat on the picnic table. A robin perched atop the signpost at the end of the trail, singing its robin song to the world at large. It looked bedraggled, as though it had recently molted or would soon. It wanted a mate.
She wanted her daughter back. And Kal.
God, she wanted Kal.
She extracted her mobile from her pocket and stared at the screen. She’d like to phone him, but she didn’t know what they could possibly say. She’d left him mute and angry, stolen his mother’s car, stranded him with people he didn’t know, to wait for her to return.
She wanted to speak with someone, though. She didn’t think she could work her way out of this mess alone. Rosemary opened the contacts app on her phone. Allie had put her number in, but Rosemary didn’t want to speak with Allie.
Whose number did she know?
The only one she could think of besides Winston’s was her ex-mother-in-law Evita’s.
Evita would be home. She lived in a mansion with an old-fashioned telephone in every room, and she always picked up. She considered it unforgivably rude to deliberately let a call go to the answering machine.
She’d also been at odds with Rosemary throughout the entirety of her marriage, never approved of her, and manipulated her son into making mistakes that nearly destroyed his relationship with his brother.
Rosemary’s feelings about Evita were a complicated mixture of respect, disappointment, and admiration—none of which suggested that she would make a good confidante.
On the other hand, Evita had always had a way with Beatrice. She’d been happily married to Richard for decades. And Rosemary had no one else to phone.
She tapped in the numbers.
Evita picked up on the third ring, her “Hello?” so familiar that Rosemary immediately started to cry.
“Evita? It’s Rosemary.”
“Rosemary! What an unexpected pleasure.”
She swiped at her cheekbone with the back of her hand. “Where are you answering?”
“Pardon?”
“What room are you in?” She sounded wobbly. Needy.
“I’m dressing for dinner.” Evita spoke with a hint of censure, as usual. “Why do you ask?”
“I wanted to be able to imagine you.” She could, now. She could see Evita at her vanity, the dressing gown she wore in the late afternoon, lifting her eyebrows so that she could apply her evening makeup perfectly.
“Are you in trouble? You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m having a difficult day.”
“Where are you phoning from?”
“Wisconsin.”
“You’re visiting Beatrice?”
“We had such an awful fight. And I’ve fallen in love with a man, only we’ve broken it off. Last night. I’m at my wit’s end, and I decided to phone you.”
“How’s Beatrice faring?”
“She seems happy here with her film project. You know about her film.”
“Richard and I are investors. Although I’m not sure ‘investment’ is the best way to describe our financial interest, since it’s difficult to believe we’ll ever see a return on our stake. Are you enjoying Wisconsin? We’ve been invited to visit, you know. Winston’s gir
lfriend, Allie, has suggested that Richard might enjoy seeing her collection of antiquities.”
Rosemary curled her body around the phone, her chin tucked. Tears dripped off her nose onto the seat of the picnic table. Evita’s blithe refusal to engage with her misery was somehow both frustrating and absolutely correct. “Wisconsin is horrible.”
“Perhaps that’s a hasty judgment,” Evita chided. “How long have you been visiting?”
“Can we…” Rosemary sucked in a breath. She’d forgotten about breathing. “Actually, I can’t do the polite chitchat thing. I think I really need you to get into the guts of something with me, because I’m so fucking confused, I’m going out of my mind.”
“Is the language necessary?”
“No. Yes, maybe. I think so. I just need to talk to somebody, and your number was the only one I knew by heart.”
“That’s flattering.”
“Sorry.”
“Never mind. Tell me what we’re getting into the guts of, darling. Transatlantic calls are expensive.”
“I’ve got bigger problems. I just figured out I wasted the last few years on a boneheaded plan because I was too afraid of what it might have felt like to actually live my life. I’ve ruined my relationship with Beatrice”—here, her voice broke—“driven away the man I love because I was selfish, and now I’m sitting on top of a picnic table on a hilltop in some unknown Wisconsin park, crying because I have no idea what’s next.”
“You’re sitting on top of a picnic table?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never seen you sit on top of a table.”
“I never would have let you see me sit on top of a table. You wouldn’t have liked it.”
“You were always so worried about what I liked,” Evita said dismissively. “How was I to know you wanted to sit atop tables? All those years you were married to Winston, I could never get you to tell me a single thing except what I wanted to hear. I’m glad you’re phoning me now you’re divorced. I’d like to get to know you a bit.”
It was such a disconcerting statement, Rosemary lifted her legs onto the table, spun, and laid down. “Evita?”
“Yes?”
“Was I a good mum?”
