We wander the quaint streets of Savannah, past old stone buildings and Greek revival homes with porches stacked up three levels, live oaks sweeping low and draped in Spanish moss. It’s late, but we’re not alone. Pockets of revelers spill out of a redbrick bar on the corner, and a woman on the steps of a brownstone across the street smokes a cigarette while talking on the phone, the humidity muffling their voices, nature’s soundproofing.
“It’s almost like New York,” Hayden says. “Parts of it anyway.”
“Rich parts,” I say.
“True,” he muses.
“Do you think you’ll stay there forever?” I ask.
He blows out a breath. “I don’t know. I like it. A lot. But I grew up with a yard. With woods behind my house. If I had kids, I’d want that for them, I think.”
“Do you want to have kids?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” he says. “When I’m feeling optimistic.”
I bump sideways into him, the skin of our arms sticking slightly from the heat. “Does that happen often?”
He looks down his shoulder at me with a slight smirk. “Not often, no.”
“So the rest of the time,” I say, “when you’re not feeling optimistic, what do you think?”
“The rest of the time…” Another long exhale, his eyes straight ahead as we go back to ambling down the block. “The rest of the time, I think, what if the polar ice caps keep melting? What if medical care keeps getting more expensive, and social security runs out, and housing prices keep rising while minimum wage doesn’t, and what if they resent me for bringing them into all of this?
“What if they just hate me? Not because of the state of the world, but just because they hate me. Or what if they’re sick? What if they join a cult, and I can’t convince them to come home? What if they start a cult? What if they get into some heinous shit, and I can’t love them anymore—or worse, I keep loving them even though I can’t change anything?
“What if there’s another world war? Or what if…what if everything else goes right, but at the end of my life, they’re sitting in hospice with me…” His voice thickens uncharacteristically, wavering just the slightest bit. “And there are things they wish they could say to me, or hear from me, but I don’t remember who I am, let alone who they are. What if they have to care for me, for years, after I’ve stopped calling them by their nicknames or telling them I love them?”
I stop walking, a cold weight pressing against my chest, and he does too, but he doesn’t face me.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to do another book,” he says finally, his voice a rattle. “It’s hard, spending years with a person. Especially someone at the tail end of life. The same thing I love about this job is what I hate about it.”
“What’s that?”
“It feels like you’ve lived their whole life with them,” he says. “And I just can’t help but think, we’re not supposed to know how it all ends, this early. It’s too much of a burden.”
I slide my hand into his, his fingers rigid at first, then relaxing into my grip. “Is that all?” I say softly.
His eyes drop on a smile, then climb back to mine. “Yep, that’s it.”
I squeeze his hand, tight enough that I can feel his pulse, or maybe it’s just mine, amplified by the contact, the pressure, the heat. “Maybe,” I say slowly, “it’s a burden, but it’s also a gift.
“Life is so complicated. And I think it’s human nature to try to untangle those complications. We want everything to make sense. And that’s okay. It’s a worthy pursuit. But back when my sister wasn’t well, when every day felt uncertain…” I search for the words.
His forehead creases, his tone so hopeful it nearly breaks my heart. “You understood how much each one was worth?”
“I understood what really mattered,” I offer. “I understood my priorities. I understood what, in this life, was nonnegotiable for me. A lot of people don’t find that out until it’s too late. They wait to say things, and they don’t get the chance. So collecting other people’s stories, learning from their mistakes, it is a gift too. You are who you are right now in part because of what you did for Len and his family. You can’t control any of that other stuff you worry about, but you can control what you do.”
He gazes down at me, his expression vulnerable, his usually severe features somehow diffused in the streetlight. “I don’t know anyone like you,” he says.
“I don’t know anyone like you,” I tell him.
“I’m serious,” he says, voice hushed.
“So am I,” I reply.
He lifts our interlaced fingers between us, studying them with a divot between his brows. After a long pause, he lifts my hand higher, pressing his lips against the back of it. It’s such a tender gesture, so careful and light, but it makes my heart speed and my throat tighten.
When his eyes rise to mine, it feels like the world has tilted just slightly on its axis.
Like this is the first time I’ve ever felt the full weight of his gaze, and I can hardly breathe, and I want to say something or do something, but I’m not sure what I can say, can do, where the delicate invisible boundary between us lies.
So I do what he did. I bring his hand up to my lips, my eyes falling closed as I press a kiss to his skin, smell his almond soap, and taste the salt of his sweat on the tip of my tongue. I feel his forehead bow to press against my shoulder, his free hand coming up to gently cradle the back of my neck as we stand there together on the walk, in a puddle of light.
When I open my eyes and let go of his hand, he snakes it around my waist too, crushing me to his chest, my cheek to his collarbone, my arms winding tight around his hips: a hug that’s more than a hug, that stretches out indefinitely, our breathing heavy and our bodies hot everywhere they’re touching.
I think we must have both decided the same thing—that nothing else can happen between us—and I think that just makes both of us all the less willing to stop. I feel him growing hard, and an ache begins between my thighs, my nipples peaking against his chest. He lets out a soft hum against my ear, one of his hands running a trail up and down my spine as he buries his mouth softly in my neck, not a kiss, just an incidental touch of his parted lips to my skin.
Just his breath there, on that sensitive place between my throat and my shoulder, is enough to unspool something deep in me. I arch a little, and he squeezes me tighter, molds me to him.
I let my hands climb into his hair, twist my face into his neck the way he did to mine, taking every bit of him he’ll allow.
He touched my hair, so I touch his; he dragged his mouth along my throat, so I let mine trail over his.
He tries to pull me closer again, as if there’s any room at all left between us. There’s not, other than the one unbreachable divide: the job.
And I can’t help myself any longer. I take just a little more. The smallest bit. A flick of my tongue against his skin, and he groans into me, my body shivering with the sound. The ache in me deepens. I tell myself not to roll my hips against his, but it happens anyway, and his breath hisses at my neck, his hands clenching. “I have to stop,” he murmurs roughly.
“We’re not doing anything,” I whimper back. He grinds against me. Just for a second, but it’s enough to send sparks all through my body, flickers of color across my vision, a harsh gasp between my lips.
He grips my hips, pushing me slowly away from him, almost like we’re peeling apart, like there’s resistance there, trying to keep us close, the memory of that friction still hanging around me like an afterglow.
Stone-cold sober and he looks almost as drunk as I feel, his eyes abyss-dark and face fraught with unspent tension. “Can I walk you back to your car?” he says softly.
I nod, still too unsteady to speak.
Nothing happened, I’ll remind myself later while I’m lying awake, eyes turned up to the stucco ceiling. It was just a hug.
My body will tell a very different story. Yours, mine, and the truth.
I spend Friday morning back down on the beach, watching the sunrise and then wading into the water and floating on my back. Afterward I send pictures to the group text between Mom, Audrey, and Dad’s old number. Someday, I know, it will be reassigned to someone new and we’ll have to take him off the chat, but so far none of us has.
Audrey probably because she’s too busy to care about that kind of thing, but Mom’s a little bit more of a mystery. As much as she and Dad loved each other, I still would’ve assumed her no-nonsense attitude would preclude anything so sentimental as keeping her late husband on a text thread.
Then again, it’s just as likely that she doesn’t know how to remove it and can’t be bothered to start a new chain. She and Audrey are similar that way—not Luddites, exactly, but far from tech savvy.
I send them some shots of the sunrise earlier and the water now, the tourists teeming across the sand with babies in floppy sun hats and raucous preteens carting foam boogie boards behind them.
Not a bad office for the day, I say.
Mom chimes in quickly: lol. She’s at least savvy enough to use abbreviations that have been around for multiple decades, I’ll give her that.
She follows it up with another message: Must be nice.
I don’t think she means it as a dig. It feels like one.
Audrey replies with a selfie of her and a local farmer planting fruit trees in a community garden. Please take a nice long dip in my honor! Audrey writes.
We should come here on your next trip home, I say, and she writes that she’d love that. Then Mom asks how the garden is going, and the conversation moves on, and in a way it’s a relief, to not have to worry that Mom’s disappointment in me might bubble up any further, spill over from unsaid to said.
Audrey talks about work. Mom talks about her chickens. They both look forward to Christmas, the next time Audrey will be in Georgia for a few weeks, and I sit on my towel, the sand warming beneath it, and miss my father and the world when he was still in it.
When this conversation would have at least one other person who was, as Mom used to lovingly call him, fanciful. The beach pictures would have almost certainly elicited a reference to a song about nature’s beauty, maybe even a Cosmo Sinclair original, or else a shot of our composting outhouse with a caption about it being his office, most days. Potty humor, dad jokes, old music, and deep laughter. Those are the holes he left behind in our family unit.
The texts peter off, and I fish my notebook out of my bag, popping in my earbuds and queuing up the rest of yesterday’s recording. I’ll want to transcribe everything later, but for now, I just want to let Margaret’s story wash over me again, see what jumps out, and jot down time stamps.
This interview felt so different. Before, she’d been recounting her family’s oral history. Now we’ve reached the part where—as she put it—all of the characters were real to her. People she loved, people she’d fought with, people she’d lost.
She started with her father and mother’s friendship.
Freddy Ives had sent Doris “Bernie” Bernhardt a bouquet to celebrate her new contract with MGM, and they hadn’t spoken again until her first MGM film released.
He’d gone to see it, opening night. Sat by himself in the fourth row, dead center, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The following Monday she’d walked into her office to find another bouquet and a card.
Realism be damned. You’re going places.
X
F. Ives
She called Freddy to thank him—though she pretended to think his name was Fives, and he went along with it. They wound up on the phone for an hour and a half, mostly talking about the film, but a little about other things too. He updated her on Royal Pictures interoffice drama—who was sleeping with whom; who had found out about it; which A-list actor had most recently shown up to set, still wasted from the night before, and thrown up on a camera while it was filming.
She was surprised by his sense of humor, and when she told him as much, he became uncommonly serious. “You shouldn’t be,” he told her. “I was born into a life where I needn’t take anything seriously if I don’t want to.”
“But don’t you want to?” she asked, and then he had a turn at being surprised, because he found he did.
He took her seriously. He took her work seriously. By then, he’d seen all of her pictures a number of times, mostly from a position of curiosity: Now that he knew they’d been directed by a woman, would he be able to tell? Was it different?
He hadn’t come to a concrete conclusion, other than this: Every time he watched one of her films, he noticed something new.
And this made him better at his job, if only marginally.
The next week, he called her again. The same A-list star had knocked over a full wall in the studio while filming. “Most of his pay is going to his insurance by now,” he said.
They laughed about it together, but it wasn’t entirely funny. Bernie had been let go after over-performing. This man was knocking down walls and still under contract. He was the face, the reason people went to the movies. In Royal Pictures’ estimation, they needed him, whereas Bernie needed them.
Realism.
Freddy knew this, felt it in the long pause after their laughter died down, and wanted to say something about it but couldn’t seem to find the right words. So instead, he asked her if she’d like to go for a walk sometime, and she said yes, and it became a tradition.
A weekly walk.
He dated other women. She dated not at all.
They had hardly even touched, when finally, after eleven months of weekly walks and triweekly phone calls, he had stopped abruptly with an idea, a bolt of lightning, looked her in the eye, and said, “Bernie, I think we should get married.”
And she’d laughed because it was ridiculous, but eventually she realized he was serious.
“Why?” she said.
“Because you’re my favorite person in the world,” he said. “And talking to you three times a week isn’t enough. At least for me. So would you consider it?”
And she said, “Don’t you want to kiss me first?”
He said, “Of course I do, but I thought I’d better see whether you were amenable to the idea first, or you might slap me.”
She told him she would have. And then she stepped forward, set her hands on his face, and kissed him.
It wasn’t fireworks, according to either of them. It was more like slipping into a warm bath. They were engaged for a few months, with no real rush to the altar, until Bernie missed a period and it became obvious it was time to scramble.
The ceremony was small, just a few friends and family, all of them shocked the union had made it to the finish line. The derelict playboy and the shrewd lady director.
They made no sense to anyone except themselves, and later—once Bernie had gotten to know her a bit better—to Freddy’s sister, Francine. But it worked. Bernie moved into Freddy’s wing of the House of Ives. She attended his mother’s charity auctions, and she joined their awkward thrice-weekly family dinners. She played in the family’s expansive orange groves with her husband’s seven-year-old cousin, Ruth, and even came around to calling her LP, the Little Princess, like only family members did.
In 1938, their daughter came, screaming like a banshee, into the world—as was the Ives tradition—at a hospital whose entire upper floor had been cleared for the family.
They named her Margaret Grace Ives, after Bernie’s late mother, and by the time they left the hospital, Photoplay had already published her name. Normally, the fan magazine only concerned itself with actors, but Freddy was handsome and charismatic, and Bernie was something of a novelty, so they’d reached a certain level of celebrity, which their daughter inherited, along with everything else that came with being an Ives.
For the first two months of Margaret’s life, her father rarely left her or her mother’s side, but eventually he had to get back to work.
Bernie missed directing, missed being at the studio every single day. But she also missed her daughter every time she fell asleep. She wondered how she would survive having her soul split like that. She knew for certain she could never be fully contented again as long as she lived. Half of her would always be elsewhere.
Three years later, Laura Rose Ives was born, and she was Margaret’s polar opposite.
As a newborn, Margaret would wail and cry every time she wanted anything, and so she and Bernie quickly developed an unspoken language. At four months old, before Margaret could crawl, she was already trying to figure out how to stand up.
Laura was a quiet little blob. Watchful, curious, but not demanding. Margaret had her mother’s sandy hair and her father’s tan skin, whereas Laura had her father’s thick black waves and her mother’s creamy complexion.
As the girls grew, Laura was cautious, careful, a little shadow trailing down the long marble halls after her reckless older sister.
Bernie worried about her. She worried about both of them, for different reasons.
She waited until Margaret turned five and Laura was two before broaching the subject of going back to work, late one night as she and Freddy lay curled together beneath the deep blue and gold canopy of their bed, their reading lamps still on. He asked if she was sure. “Won’t you miss them?”
“Of course I will,” she said. “Don’t you?”
And that settled it. He knew he couldn’t keep her cooped up there, half of her nurtured while the other went bone dry.
It took several months for her to get a new contract. Freddy, of course, wanted her to come back to Royal, but she’d wound up at Universal instead. At first, they met for walks twice a week, but she was making up for lost time, which meant working more, working harder.
That was when the fighting between Margaret’s parents had begun. It was also where we left off for the day.
The recording ends and I pull my earbuds out, set my phone and notebook aside, watching a young family building a sandcastle just out of reach of the tide, digging a moat all around it so that when the water finally does rise, it won’t knock the whole thing over.
I mean, probably it will, but at least they’ll know they tried.
Once, years ago, when I was in college and taking an entry-level writing class, I “interviewed” my dad as part of an assignment.
He told me about growing up in Oklahoma, and about seeing the ocean for the first time when he moved out to California, where he and my mother had met when they were just out of college.
I wish I’d recorded that whole conversation. I didn’t. But I took notes, and I wrote the paper, and a couple of things stuck in my memory, clear and sharp.
When he saw the ocean for the first time, he said it terrified him. Made him dizzy and almost nauseated, and just truly, deeply afraid. That anything could be that big. That powerful. That natural and uncontrollable, something society couldn’t take credit for and could never fully tame either. He told me he’d only ever felt that way two other times in his life.
“When your sister was born,” he said, “and then you.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad. That’s great to hear,” I replied, and he grinned. He was a grinner, like me.
“You’re supposed to be learning to write nonfiction, right? I’ve got to tell you the truth. Those were the three times in my life I felt true wonder. And it was so much to take in, it felt like my body might spiderweb with cracks. Honestly. And then I was happy too, if I didn’t mention that.”
“You sure didn’t,” I said.
“I was getting to it,” he joked. “But it wasn’t the first feeling. The first feeling was Holy shit, this is a whole person. How is that even possible?”
He didn’t swear a lot, because Mom didn’t like swearing, but sometimes, when it was the two of us, he’d throw in a good shit or hell, for emphasis.
Why didn’t I record him? I think again, with a deep pulse of pain.
And just as fast, I feel a breeze ripple over my back, and it’s hard not to believe—or maybe just hope—that maybe I didn’t need to record it.
That maybe he’s here, his atoms redistributed, the ashes we sprinkled in the river near our house now mixed with the sand all around me, his love permanent and intractable as ever.
Love isn’t something you can cup in your hands, and I have to believe that means it’s something that can’t ever be lost.
I grab my phone again and open a text thread I’ve let sit empty for two years now. The one with just Dad’s number.
I want to say the perfect thing, in this missive to no one, but even with all the time in the world, I can’t find the words. The closest I get is a two-word message.
Thank you.
Right after I send it, my phone vibrates, and I almost choke on my tongue.
But—perhaps obviously—it’s not my dad texting me back.
It’s a one-word message, and for some reason, it really does feel like the perfect message.
Hello, Hayden writes.
Hello, I write back.
What are you doing tonight?
