Golden Girl(10)

Concerns about Brett Caspian (somewhat) quelled, Vivi was excited about her new book. This was Vivi’s best shot at finally hitting the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Number one. It sparkled for Vivi like the star on top of a Christmas tree. Her last book, Main Street Gossip, debuted at number three on the hardcover list and number two on the combined list. So close! She was poised—maybe?—to get to number one this time.

Vivi realizes that the powers that be aren’t likely to let her return to her life on Earth so that she can move the All-Clad pan off the walk, pay her landscaper, or even promote her new novel.

But what about her most important responsibility?

Biggest: Caring for her children. Leo is eighteen, technically an adult, but he’s still a mama’s boy. He loves Vivi’s cooking and often wakes up asking what she’s making for dinner; he let Vivi take him to Murray’s to buy clothes for his senior banquet and graduation (and he trusted her opinion, which both the girls summarily ignored). The winter before, when Vivi was knocked flat with a sinus infection, Leo binged the first three seasons of The Crown with her, and hadn’t that been the thing that made her feel better—her big, strong son snuggled up at her side?

Earlier this spring, when Leo said he couldn’t decide between the College of Charleston and the University of Colorado, he and Vivi made a list of pros and cons that was evenly split. He asked Vivi what she thought he should do. Selfishly, Vivi wanted Charleston (there was a direct flight from Boston and, hello, it was Charleston) but her gut told her Charleston might not be that different from Nantucket and she thought Leo would thrive someplace completely new—like a big school in the Rocky Mountains.

“Boulder,” she said.

He’d exhaled and said, “That’s my choice too, but I thought you’d be sad if I was so far away.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “I will be sad, you’re my baby. But part of being a parent is wanting what’s best for you.”

Vivi had planned to drive Leo out to Colorado herself. It was going to be a proper road trip with carefully curated stops at diners and kitschy motels, scenic overlooks, and historical monuments. She was going to let Leo play his music no matter how badly it hurt her ears and she was hoping that when it was just the two of them in the car with nothing but open road ahead, they could really talk. And then, once Vivi had dropped him off (with the laminated card she’d make of laundry instructions), she would climb back in her car and have a good, loud cry. Her last child, her baby boy, launched.

Vivi can’t miss taking Leo to college. And she has a grandchild on the way. Everyone would agree it’s patently unfair for her to die without ever holding her first grandchild. Then there’s Carson, who seems to need a mother now more than ever. Vivi can’t leave her kids down there by themselves. They’re her kids. She’s their mother.

Dying isn’t an option, sorry.



Vivi is up in the clouds now, though she can still make out her body lying on Kingsley. There’s a white Jeep next to her. It’s Cruz’s Jeep; he bolts out and runs to her. “Vivi!” He whips out his phone, and she hears him saying he needs an ambulance at Kingsley and Madaket. “My mom is hurt, it looks like she was hit, she’s on the ground. She needs help!”

Cruz crouches beside her, his shoulders heaving. He takes her hand. “Stay with me, Vivi, you’re not going anywhere. I need you. We all need you.”

They all need me! she thinks. Then she thinks, He called me his mom.

Vivi hears a siren in the distance. She can’t look; her poor body, and poor Cruz! Vivi turns her head away—and comes face to face with a middle-aged woman with sensibly cut ash-blond hair wearing a flowing white muumuu and a silk scarf expertly knotted around her neck.

“Hello?” Vivi says. The woman standing before her appears to be flesh and blood, and she’s holding a clipboard, like someone organizing a literary luncheon. Vivi feels like she’s about to be given her table number.

The woman is wearing reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. Whereas the scarf is elegant and looks expensive—Vivi studies the elaborate animal print in the signature shade of orange and determines it’s (excuse me!) an Hermès scarf—the glasses are of the drugstore variety. “Hello, Vivian,” the woman says. “Welcome to the Beyond. I’m Martha.”

Martha looks familiar. She reminds Vivi vaguely of…

“Of your first reader, Maribeth,” Martha says. “Yes, she’s my younger sister.”

“You have got to be joking! You’re Maribeth Schumacher’s sister?” When Vivi’s first novel, The Dune Daughters, came out, Maribeth Schumacher bought twenty copies and gave them to all her influential friends. These friends then told their friends and neighbors and sisters-in-law and so on and so on and so on—just like the infamous Fabergé shampoo commercial. In this way, Vivi’s devoted readership was born.

“I was,” Martha says. “She sent me all your books right up until I died, two summers ago. I lived in Memphis, so it was nice to read about the beach.”

Memphis; Vivi went there on tour, but she stayed out by the University of Memphis and all she remembers is Central BBQ and the gated community where she went running. She didn’t make it downtown to see Beale Street or the ducks at the Peabody Hotel. She’d told herself she’d do that next time.