Winter Solstice (Winter #4)(43)
Margaret tried to compensate with Ava and the boys by being the Disneyland parent. She spared no expense in taking the kids on lavish trips during her limited vacations, and in buying them whatever they wanted.
She lived with guilt, night and day.
One night during the holidays, when the kids were teenagers, Margaret called the inn from the back of the car; it was after a broadcast and Raoul was delivering Margaret to her apartment. The kids were decorating the Christmas tree, hanging ornaments, eating popcorn, and drinking hot cider in front of the fire. That they sounded so happy only made Margaret feel more lonely and miserable. It was Kevin, her sensitive child, who noticed something melancholy in Margaret’s tone, because he dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “The cider Mitzi made is really terrible, Mom. I’m only drinking it to be polite.”
Margaret stares into the camera. She wants to somehow convey that her career has not been all glory. It has entailed an equal amount of heartbreak. Margaret is a broadcasting icon now, but she is also a person—one who made choices, one who made mistakes. She wants Darcy and every other Millennial woman out there watching—many of whom idolize Margaret and think of her as a pioneer who broke through very thick, very real glass ceilings—to know that success always comes with a price and that greatness often doesn’t allow for balance.
In the end Margaret defaults to her trademark qualities: she is calm, she is reserved, and most of all, she is professional. To nail the landing here doesn’t require a display of emotional fireworks. It requires only gratitude and grace.
“It has been my privilege to bring you the news each evening. Thank you for allowing me into your homes and into your lives. Over the past sixteen years, I have visited faraway places. I have dined with presidents and princes. I have seen unspeakable horrors—those inflicted by nature, and those inflicted by man. But I have been buoyed and inspired by the people of this diverse and magnificent country, and by the indomitable strength of the human spirit. God bless each and every one of you. For the CBS Evening News, I’m Margaret Quinn. Good night.”
The montage plays, but Margaret can’t watch. She tells everyone that if she sees photographs of herself from sixteen, twelve, even five years ago, she’ll bemoan how much she has aged, but the truth is that the magnitude of what she is leaving behind will make her cry. After the montage ends, the screen goes black. A second later one sentence appears, written in white type: THANK YOU, MARGARET QUINN.
“And… we’re out,” Mickey says.
There is silence, during which Margaret stares at her desk.
Then Darcy gives a resounding whoop, and the studio bursts into a round of applause.
It’s over.
BART
It takes him three days to come to his senses. He doesn’t call Allegra and doesn’t text her, although her name starts with A and is right there at the top of his contacts.
He knows he’s being stubborn, stupid, and rude. When he dropped Allegra off at her house on Lily Street after his birthday party Tuesday night, following some pretty serious kissing in the front seat, he said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.” By “tomorrow” he meant Wednesday. But Wednesday came and went and Bart didn’t call, and then Thursday came and went.
What was his problem? Was he being a typical male, playing games? Was he enjoying the thought of Allegra Pancik wondering what had happened, checking her phone in anticipation, possibly even pining for him?
No! Not at all! It was something else; it was the same old thing, his neuroses, his mind sickness. He didn’t call Allegra because he didn’t feel he deserved to be happy. If the eighteen fallen Marines couldn’t feel the sweet sensation of a woman’s lips meeting theirs, then Bart didn’t deserve to feel it either.
Centaur. He kept thinking of Centaur.
Bart’s very best friend in his platoon—his brother, for all intents and purposes—had been Centaur, baptized Charles Buford Duke. Centaur was born and raised in Cosby, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. He was a huge Volunteers fan; he bled orange and white, he said, and he told Bart about the boats that would line both sides of the Tennessee River on game days. You could walk a mile at least, going bow to stern on those boats, and be enthusiastically offered a cold Budweiser on each one. Centaur didn’t have the temperament or the grades for college himself, but when Centaur and Bart met at basic training, Centaur had a girlfriend named Ruby Taylor, who was a freshman at UT, rushing Chi Omega.
How many hours did Bart listen to Centaur talk about Ruby Taylor—how pretty she was, how sweet, how devoted? Centaur had fallen in love with Ruby in third grade at Cosby Elementary. She had kicked him during recess and left a dark-purple bruise, and that was that. Bart had never known a person as blindly besotted as Centaur. Bart saw Ruby’s picture. She was no beauty; she had red hair, as expected, but her skin was pasty, her eyes sunken a bit too far in her face, like raisins pushed into dough, her smile too wide, her hips a little wide as well. But that, somehow, made Bart admire Centaur’s devotion even more. When they were running around Munich hooking up with buxom blond fr?uleins right before they deployed to Sangin, Centaur remained true to Ruby Taylor. It wasn’t a hardship to resist temptation, he said, when you were in love—and he hoped that someday Bart knew what that felt like.
Centaur was intending to marry Ruby Taylor as soon as he got home. Even in the darkest days of their capture, even on Centaur’s final day, he was talking about marrying Ruby, buying land, building a house, having kids. He wanted five: four boys and a girl, in that order.