Golden Girl(19)

“Vivi was hit by a car this morning at the end of her road.” Lorna pauses. “Pigeon, she’s dead.”

Amy opens her mouth. She knows Lorna isn’t kidding and might not even be wrong, but sorry, hold on a second. Vivi is dead? Vivi is dead. Vivi was hit by a car, and she’s dead. Vivi is dead.

Amy sits for a minute in complete stillness. She feels…she feels…her stomach…a horror…yes, she feels a thick, black, tar-like horror filling her insides. She wants to scream. Vivi is dead. JP called…hours ago. Said it was urgent. Because his ex-wife is dead.

The kids. The poor kids.

Lorna is watching her.

“I’m not going to sing out ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead,’ if that’s what you’re thinking,” Amy says. Her eyes fill with tears.

Lorna reaches out a hand. “I know you’re not, honey. This must be…confusing for you?”

“A woman is dead. There’s nothing confusing about that. It’s tragic.”

Lorna squeezes her hand.

“And, yes, confusing.” Amy has to get her phone. She heads into the air-conditioned cool of the salon, but it’s as if the salon has completely changed. Vivi is dead.

Her phone is clogged with texts from JP.

Call me ASAP

Urgent!!!

Amy, call me

Something terrible has happened

They won’t put me through at the salon



There are also sixteen missed calls. Then more texts.

I’m at the house with the kids. Please come.

Don’t come. I’ll meet you at home.

Would you cancel our reservations at the Straight Wharf, please? I’ll be home later. I can’t leave the kids right now.

Text me when you get these messages but don’t come to Vivi’s. I’ll meet you at home.



It’s the last three texts that cut razor-thin lines into Amy’s heart. JP doesn’t want her at Vivi’s. He’s with his kids; the four of them are mourning together. Amy would be an interloper. She’s self-aware enough to realize this.

Amy climbs into her car and closes her eyes. For ten years, Amy has told herself that what happened between JP and Vivi had nothing to do with her, but the stark truth is that Amy could have said no to JP, and by turning him down, she might have propelled him back to his family. She feels a monstrous guilt about her ungenerous thoughts and all the catty and awful comments she made to JP, to Lorna, and, on a few ill-advised occasions, to Vivi’s own kids.

I’m sorry, Vivi, she thinks. I was jealous. Insecure. You cast a long shadow. Your only flaw was that I couldn’t compete. You were pretty and fun-loving and hardworking and magnetic, and I was jealous of you. I ate that jealousy (and a lot of doughnuts) for breakfast each day.

But you should know I admired you, though I was never confident enough to say it.

Amy turns the key in the ignition. She’ll call Straight Wharf in a minute. First, she’s going to Hatch’s for a bottle of wine, or maybe tequila, maybe the Casa Dragones that was Vivi’s favorite. She will go home alone and drink with her demons.





Leo




Leo can’t eat; he may never eat again. When Carson says she has a pill, an Ativan, he asks her for two and she brings them with a glass of his mother’s fresh-brewed iced tea with mint. A little while later, the world slows down and grows softer at the edges.

Leo’s father shows up; he’s normally an even-keeled, glass-half-full kind of guy but now he looks the way that Leo feels—like his heart has been firebombed, his spirit razed. JP starts out with a statement that he must have composed in his head on the ride over. “We’re going to figure this out, you aren’t alone, I’m here for all of you,” JP says.

“I’m not your mother, of course,” he adds, and then he starts to cry so hard that Willa leads him over to the sofa.

He loved her, Leo thinks. He really loved her despite hating her also, which Leo understands a little better after last night.

Last night. Marissa. Cruz. Leo was so drunk that there are blank spots, but there are also indelible images, things he wishes were from a dream but that he knows really happened. Leo isn’t sure how he got home, but he does remember pulling his mother’s bottle of tequila off the shelf and doing a couple of shots once he was safely in his own kitchen. He wanted what happened at Fortieth Pole to go away. He wanted the tequila to erase it.

For the rest of his life, he will be haunted by the pounding on his door this morning and Cruz shouting, “Wake up, man! Wake up!” Leo had thought Cruz wanted to talk about the night before. It took him whole seconds to process what Cruz was saying: “Your mom went to the hospital. She’s hurt, man. Hurt bad.”

Leo called Willa right away, thinking she would know what to do; she was their mother’s second in command. Leo’s call woke her up; she didn’t know anything about an accident. Cruz was insistent, damn near bawling. He saw Vivi lying on Kingsley, he’d called the paramedics, Vivi was taken away in an ambulance, and they all had to get to the hospital now. Right now! Leo woke up Carson, and they’d picked up Willa on the way.

Cruz drove his own car, and Leo was glad about that.

At the hospital, an unfamiliar doctor told them that Vivi hadn’t made it. She didn’t make it was too gentle a phrase because it sounded like Vivi hadn’t made it this time but could maybe try again.