The Year that Everything Changed

by Georgia Bockoven

  “Basic it is,” Elizabeth said, already planning special touches. If this was their only Thanksgiving together, it would be one none of them would ever forget.

  They settled into the chairs and sofa in Rachel’s family room that overlooked a tree-filled canyon and were warmed by a fire in the stone fireplace. Their mugs of coffee creamed and sugared, a plate of cookies nearby, Christina opened the manila envelope she’d picked up at Lucy’s office. “I told Lucy I’d write a summation to prove we actually listened to today’s tapes, but she said it wasn’t necessary.” She reached for the portable tape player she’d brought with her.

  “By the way, she sends her best,” she said to Rachel. “And she wanted me to tell you that if there’s anything she can do, just let her know.”

  Elizabeth leaned back in the Queen Anne–style recliner and sipped her coffee. Over the past four months, as she listened to Jessie’s voice on the tapes, she’d gone from resentful to curious to melancholy. She’d forgiven her mother because not forgiving her was burdensome. More important, she allowed herself to feel love for her father again.

  “Ready?” Christina asked.

  Elizabeth started to nod, then impulsively said, “Let’s go outside.” She looked at the others. “I love fall.”

  “Me, too,” Christina said.

  “It’s my favorite season, too,” Rachel and Ginger said simultaneously.

  Minutes later they settled in again, this time in weathered Adirondack chairs. Surrounded by a landscape of gold, crimson, yellow, and orange, they listened to a now-familar voice that transported them to another time and place.

  Jessie’s Story

  I’d never cared much for whiskey, not even the aged and mellowed kind. It always seemed a little like punishment the way it burns all the way from the back of the tongue to the stomach and then hangs around to burn some more. It became my drink of choice after Frank died, the first thing I reached for in the morning and the last thing I had in my hand when I fell down at night. I’m ashamed to say I was drunk at Frank’s funeral and to this day can’t remember anything past the church being filled to overflowing and the snap and slap and crack of rifles being raised and lowered for a twenty-one-gun salute.

  I didn’t go to the house afterward, although I told everyone I would. I couldn’t take one more person telling me what a good kid Frank had been and what a shame it was the way he died. Never had a chance. What a waste. So young. Life just beginning. How proud I must be. I remember I wanted to kill the son of a bitch who said that bit about being proud.

  I didn’t know Barbara was at the funeral until she slipped into my car at the cemetery and took the keys. She drove me home, not minding or thinking less of me that I cried most of the way.

  I made a couple of attempts at finding a reason to get up in the morning, at caring that bills had come due and gone unpaid so long that cars were disappearing out of my garage and furniture out of the house. Most everything I owned had been repossessed except the house itself and a closet full of clothes. When I tried to write a check for a case of whiskey and it was refused it scared the hell out of me. How was I going to face life sober? I needed the numbness the whiskey provided, the punishment of feeling it burning a hole in my stomach.

  I had a gun—everyone in L.A. did back then, or at least everyone I knew. The more I thought about using it, the more appeal it had. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was damn close. Oblivion didn’t seem so bad compared to where I’d been living. As soon as the whiskey was gone I’d use the gun and my pain would be over. I didn’t hold any hope of seeing Frank. I’d called on God, offered Him my soul, but there wasn’t anyone on the other end of the line.

  Barbara must have sensed something because she showed up that night after her concert. I tried, but I couldn’t get rid of her. She just sat and watched me drink and held my hand when I’d let her. Finally she got me talking, and I spilled like rice out of a gunny sack with a split seam. She flat refused to believe it was my fault Frank had joined the Army. Her reasoning didn’t change my mind, but it let me know that not everyone saw what I’d done in the same light.

  The whiskey was gone, and I still had enough pride not to ask her to get more. She stayed with me for three days, holding me, talking to me, loving me. I’d never had a better friend. I’d never had anyone do more or ask less in return. It damn near tore my heart out three months later when she told me she was pregnant. She was riding a wave, a song away from her dream of a number-one record, and in the music business second chances were as rare as real overnight successes.

  I offered to find someone to take care of it, but she wouldn’t listen. She was determined to have her baby and just as determined that the baby would be raised far away from show business. She was smart enough to know the break in my slow dance with whiskey was just that. I was still a couple of years away from leaving that partner in the dance hall.

  I always wondered if Barbara didn’t have some kind of premonition that she wasn’t going to be around long enough to raise a child. She was the only one I ever knew who could squeeze seventy seconds out of a minute and still worry she didn’t have enough time.

  She got her hit record the next year and saved me a seat at every concert after that. I had enough sense to step back and let her go when her star shot into the heavens. She would call me on the baby’s birthday from wherever she was in the world, and we would talk about everything except her little girl. Three years before she died I hired someone to find Ginger. All I wanted was to know she was being loved and cared for the way she deserved. The detective thought I’d want proof, so he brought back some photographs of Ginger on a swing, grinning ear to ear like her life was nothing but sunshine and rainbows. I thought about it a long time before I gave one of the pictures to Barbara. She cried and tried to convince me they were happy tears, but I’ve always wondered if such a thing is possible.

  Barbara kept the picture. It was in the plane debris and among the personal things she’d left me in her will. When the box arrived I was in Mexico, trying to work out export problems with the government for a strawberry crop that was rotting in the fields. By the time I arrived home the following week Carmen had looked at everything and put the clues together to make an educated guess at my relationship with Barbara. She refused to believe the affair was over before I’d married her and used it as a reason to leave me and take Christina home with her to Mexico City.

  I was in my fifties when we met, Carmen barely into her twenties. She was the niece of my partner and from a powerful, wealthy family in Mexico City. And she was pregnant. Despite the threat of being disowned by distraught parents, she refused to name the father. I offered her a place to stay, she thought I’d proposed, and as easily as that I was married again. The marriage was doomed before it began.

  We could have and should have had it annulled when Carmen lost the baby a month later. But by then we were living in San Diego, and she wasn’t ready to go home. The taste of freedom she’d experienced away from her family was as intoxicating as cheap tequila and produced the same kind of headache years later when being with me in San Diego lost its charm.

  I was an old man in her friends’ eyes, an embarrassment. We had nothing in common except a child we both adored.

  “Come with me to Mexico City,” Carmen offered unenthusiastically.

  “My business is here.”

  “You don’t have to sell the strawberries here, you can sell them somewhere else.”

  “The business is based on bringing them into the States.” It was an old argument. “That’s how we make our money.”

  “What money?” she shot back. “There hasn’t been any money around here for months. I tried to use my credit card last week, and the clerk told me I couldn’t, that the bill hadn’t been paid.” She stood in the middle of our small kitchen and folded her arms across her chest, glaring at me. “Do you have any idea how humiliating that was for me?”

  “Things will turn around. They always do.”


  “I don’t care. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to go home. I want to be with my family. And they want me back with them.”

  This was the first I’d heard of it. “You’ve talked to your mother and father about this?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “They miss me and they want to be near their granddaughter.”

  Christina was sitting at the table, book and crayons spread out in front of her, intently coloring Mickey Mouse’s ears a bright green. “I’m not going to lose her,” I said.

  “You won’t. You can see her whenever you want.”

  “Be reasonable, Carmen. Mexico City is hundreds of miles from here.”

  She opened a cupboard, took out a pan, and slammed the door. “You don’t see her now. You and Mario are always off doing some business thing.”

  “You know the problems we’ve had lately.”

  “No, I don’t know. You never tell me anything.” She held up her hand to stop my reply. “I don’t want to know. Not now. It’s too late.” Her expression softened. “It’s always something with you, Jessie. I’m tired of living like this. I’m not going to do it anymore.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

  She put a hand on my arm. “I know you never loved me. And you know I never loved you. You were being kind when you asked me to marry you, and I was so grateful I thought it would be enough. But it’s not. I want more. I’m still young. I have a lifetime ahead of me. I don’t want to spend it in a loveless marriage.”

  Again, there was nothing I could say. She and Christina left the following week. The strawberry business folded that summer. Mario and I salvaged enough for him to start another business and for me to get back and forth to see Christina while I looked around for something else to do. I’d never learned to read Spanish and yet didn’t bother hiring a lawyer to look through the divorce papers when they arrived, foolishly trusting Carmen and not knowing I was dealing with her father. It never occurred to me that I was relinquishing parental rights to Christina when I signed.

  To be fair, neither did Carmen. Domination was the toll extracted by her father for being allowed into the family circle again. She’d paid without realizing the consequences. When my visits were cut off I used what money I had left to hire my own lawyer, but it was useless. Carmen sneaked Christina out of the house to see me when she could, but our time together was strained and awkward and never long enough.

  One day a man came with them to the park, Enrique Alvarado. Carmen said he was a friend, but I could see he was much more. She adored him, as did Christina. He was in his midthirties, well spoken, and wore his custom-made suit as if it were an entitlement. In comparison, in my shorts and flowered shirt, I looked like an aging surfer who’d had too many mai tais and too many years in the sun.

  Carmen took my arm. “Can we talk? Alone? There are some things I need to tell you.” Before, she’d spoken English with only a trace of an accent, never teaching Christina a word of Spanish. Now, suddenly, English seemed like a second language to her.

  I knew I wasn’t going to like what was coming. “Now?”

  “Enrique will watch Christina.”

  I followed her to a bench while Christina stayed behind and Enrique watched her climb the slide. Hearing Christina’s laughter and excited calls to Enrique, I was consumed with jealousy. The torment became almost unbearable as Carmen laid out the reasons she wanted me to stop seeing my daughter.

  “You can see how Enrique is with her, and how she feels about him,” she said. “We’re going to be married next month.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “She already calls him Papa,” she added gently, not responding to my sarcasm.

  I watched Christina a long time without saying anything. She was the one bright spot in a life without direction or reason. For the past year my existence had centered on the efforts it took to see her.

  But what was I to her? I knew she loved me. I could see it in her eyes when she first caught sight of me waiting beside the palm tree at the park. Was it enough? Was dividing her love and loyalty between me and Enrique too high a price to ask a four-year-old child to pay?

  “Give me some time with her,” I finally said.

  “You can have the rest of the day. I’ll meet you back here at five.”

  I don’t like zoos, even the best seem like animal prisons, but I didn’t know where else to take her, so that’s where we went. I didn’t try to explain how her life was about to change, I figured Carmen could take care of that. Instead, I spent my last day with my beautiful raven-haired daughter with her riding on my shoulders and seeing the world through her eyes.

  I wouldn’t have made the same decision today as I did then. I would have stayed and fought and bought and bribed whoever stood in the way. Christina wasn’t better off not knowing me. Wisdom gained in hindsight exacts a cruel toll.

  With that same bitter hindsight, I know now I should never have let Elizabeth refuse to see me either. I should have parked myself on her doorstep until she had me arrested and gone back when I got out on bail. We could have worked it out. I’m sure of it now. Eventually, she would have forgiven me for Frank. She might even have helped me forgive myself.

  I was right to let Ginger go. So was Barbara. Life taught me love doesn’t always come wrapped with a pretty bow. As often as not it hurts one or the other of the people giving and taking, sometimes both. I think that’s what happened to Rachel. Anna should have let her go the way Barbara let Ginger go, but she held on because she loved her daughter more than she loved herself.

  Elizabeth looked at Christina. “Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if he’d found a way to keep you?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have to wonder, I know.” She gave Elizabeth a smile and a wink through her tears. “It is what it is,” she said softly. “For both of us.”

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Christina

  Christina leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Seven nonstop hours at the editing desk and she was only halfway through the training film River City Studio was doing for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department. She was hungry, she had a headache, and she had shooting pains racing from her shoulders to her neck. She rocked her head back and forth, trying to work out the kink, and spotted Dexter trying to sneak past the door.

  Digging her heels into the floor, she shot her chair across the room and swung through the doorway and into the hall. “Dexter—how much notice do you want before I quit?”

  He tucked the folder he was carrying under his arm and looked at her over the top of his half-glasses. “All right—you can have a break.”

  “I don’t want a break, I want to quit. One more month and I’m on my way to L.A.”

  “Shit.” He came down the hall, grabbed the back of her chair, and hauled her into his office. “Let’s talk about this.”

  She scooted closer to his desk and put her feet up. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “What if I were to make you an offer?”

  “This better be clean.” They’d been working together six months, and Dexter had never come on to her. Not that she would have minded. He was kinda cute with his shaved head and dark red beard, but he wasn’t her type. Way too nice. The guys who usually caught her eye had a bit of a bastard in them. Like Randy.

  “You’re not my type, Christina.”

  She laughed. “Amazing—you popped the thought right out of my head. So, what’s the offer?”

  “What would you say if I told you Ian Grayson has signed on for After the Lightning?”

  “Signed on?” she said skeptically. After last year’s Oscar-winning performance in The Forest, Ian Grayson had moved to the top of the A list in Hollywood. He was the movies’ latest bad boy wanted by everyone from Spielberg to Howard. “Or you talked his agent into sending him the script?”

  “I sent him the script myself. He’s my cousin.”

  She put her feet back on the floor and sat
up straight. He had her attention. “So what’s the offer?”

  “I don’t want to go to any of the usual sources for money. With a star like Ian, I’m not big enough to keep control of the project if a problem develops. Which means we do everything on the cheap.”

  “And I’m cheap.”

  “More important, you’re good.”

  She’d found the script on Dexter’s desk a couple of months ago and asked if she could read it. The story was gripping, but chancy. For the first three-quarters of the movie Ian would play a seemingly unredeemable antihero. It would take a hell of a director to make the transformation believable. “So, how do I get paid?”

  “Scale, plus producer credit, plus front-end cut.”

  “And for this I do . . . what?”

  “Everything I can’t.”

  She could go to L.A., meet all the right people, hook up with the perfect script, do everything right, and never get the chance to work with an actor like Ian. She smiled. “I want everything spelled out in a contract.”