Their version: Pulitzer-winning biographer Hayden Anderson teams up with celebrity journalist Alice Scott on salacious new Margaret Ives biography From the Far Side of the World.
Our version: It’s a love story. Like everything I write, that’s what it comes down to. That’s what always matters most to me, about any interview subject: Whom do you love? What makes your heart beat? For whom would you unmake the world, and how would you build a new one?
We tell the truth, mostly.
Nicollet, though, is a casualty. It’s the only way.
Hayden’s mother doesn’t want to be known, not in that way. But she’s open to knowing her biological mother. Open, if not eager.
There’s a path forward, and it will end wherever it ends. All they can do is walk it at their own pace.
Margaret’s moving slower these days, moving less. She can’t tend to her own garden, but Mom and I drive down to work in it often. Hayden comes up from the city to meet us. Sometimes we take the airboat out and collect trash, bring it home and watch Margaret fit all these broken pieces together into something beautiful.
As much as I love my mosaic, I give it back to Margaret, and it sits in a place of honor on her mantel, until, one day, it doesn’t.
“What happened to it?” I ask her while I’m dusting her bookshelves.
“Sent it off with a letter,” she says.
I don’t press her. She’ll tell me more when she wants to, or maybe she won’t.
She’s being brave where it counts.
The book is a hit. The message boards go wild. Some of them are onto something, though just far enough off the mark to not figure out the truth.
Cosmo Sinclair is still alive, I SWEAR, you can just FEEL it in the way M.I. talks about him, one conspiracy theorist writes, and hundreds more upvote the comment.
In a way, he is. His memory will never be lost now. It was passed on to his grandson.
It will be passed on to our daughter.
We didn’t expect it, but almost overnight, Hayden becomes the kind of man who sings to my pregnant belly, who sends dozens of “what about this name” texts over the course of the day, sometimes when we’re working in our separate offices, four feet apart in our new home.
We don’t settle on one until we’re driving to the hospital, my contractions getting closer and closer.
In the hospital waiting room, my mother and Hayden’s take turns pacing. Every thirty seconds, Jodi or Margaret or Cecil or Audrey or Priya or Bianca or Cillian or Hayden’s brother, Louis, texts us some variation of Is she here yet?!
Until, finally, she is.
Laura Grace Anderson-Scott is born at 11:53 p.m. She slips in, just under the wire, on a Tuesday.
Half him. Half me. Entirely her own.
Hayden holds her against his chest with tears in his eyes—our whole world, packed into this tiny, impossible thing, and I’ve never felt anything like the love that spreads through my heart.
Like I swallowed the sun. Like it’s breaking up every bit of darkness inside me.
I know I would do anything to protect her, anything to make the world better for her.
In that moment, I feel closer to my parents, both of them, than I ever have in my life.
And strangely, I find myself thinking about the meandering path of broken glass around Margaret’s workshop. About the unicursal labyrinth.
I find myself thinking that maybe every bit of heartbreak in life can be rearranged and used for something beautiful. That it doesn’t really matter whether I chose this path or I was born onto it, so long as I stop and appreciate the path itself.
Four months after Laura’s born, once she finally starts sleeping better, I sit down with the notes I’ve spent years compiling with my mother and a blank document on my computer, a freshly brewed cup of coffee sitting at my elbow, where Hayden left it for me.
I crack my knuckles, and then I start to write.
Everything I want to tell her someday.
Not just the headlines, but the whole truth.
The good and bad, the magic and curses, all the blues and grays right alongside the reds and golds. I tell her the story about a love so powerful it remade the world for her. I welcome her to this great big beautiful life.
