by Bruce Wagner
—
She blamed Ginevra for pushing her to tell—
She blamed herself—
She blamed God . . .
The irony was that she no longer blamed her mother.
For a while, there just wasn’t time for guilt. In those first weeks, Aurora was touch and go. So many broken bones, so much trauma . . . They had a little birthday celebration in her room—Dusty took a cuddling selfie with her still-sleeping princess, who wore a rhinestone “37” tiara—and the very next day the doctors discovered something called compartment syndrome in a shattered leg. For an entire month there were whispers of amputation but the actress said no fucking way, I don’t want to even hear that again.
A miniature palm broke the fall but she struck her head on a giant terra-cotta pot. Her brain swelled and she didn’t emerge from the induced coma until the end of Month Two. Even then, it was impossible to assess the degree of neurological damage. An eye—that beautiful blue eye!—went fetus-milky. Thank God for Elise. She took on the “new challenge” like some Mafia shot-caller.
The usual website suspects insinuated that it was a suicide attempt over a “looming breakup”—they said Allegra was “living” at the Four Seasons, and claimed “she had returned to the Trousdale residence to pick up a few personal items” when she fell—and the usual wingnuts claimed divine retribution for sins committed against our Lord. Thanks to the stewardship of Elise and a handpicked P.R. team, perceptions began to slowly shift from self-harm to misadventure. Yes, the Wildings were checked into the hotel because of recent home renovations. Yes, Allegra had been drinking (a small, pre-birthday celebration) and was innocently dancing/carousing when the freak accident occurred. The doomed cover girls launched a thousand magazines, each newsflashy, retrospective-style feature adorned by photomontages of inner-circle A-list BFFs, wedding festivities, and sundry happier-days domestic horseplay—all the articles predictably ending with twenty-four-hour bedside vigils and the implied certainty of brain damage. (A chart of available B-list bis and dykes were on Perez Hilton’s site, with the caption Who will she be with next?) But the haters were swept away by the floodwaters of public sympathy; until now, Dusty had been unscathed by tragedy, and the horrible event had all the aspects of a tribal initiation. Elise kept assuring her it would “blow over.” One of the publicity gals tried to be supportive by telling the star it was a tempest in a teapot, coolly comparing the eventual outcome to the Shatner case in ’99. The actor came home late one night to find his estranged wife at the bottom of the pool “but now, no one even remembers!” Dusty wasn’t thrilled with the analogy.
Mostly, she was oblivious. A mother’s instinct kicked in—the only thing that mattered was seeing Aurora through and getting to the other side, whatever that would look like. In eight months, she was supposed to be in England for the Bloodthrone sequel. Every time she said there was no way that was going to happen, Elise told her not to think about it, that no decisions needed to be made “just now.” One time, breezy and can-do, Elise said, “Bring Allegra with! By then, a change of scenery might be just what the doctor orders—for both of you.” As if Aurora was detoxing in some fancy rehab . . . It was crazy-surreal but Dusty understood what her manager was doing. She was keeping hope alive.
When she emerged from the coma, Dusty was up on Carla Ridge, gathering clothes for her daughter. By the time she got to the hospital, Aurora was in the middle of a sponge bath, a big goofy smile on her face. Dusty tearfully kissed her forehead but Aurora pulled away, shouting “No! No! No!” “Awwww,” said Dusty. “Are you cold? Are you cold, little one? Baby girl? Are ya cold?” Aurora kept saying No! while an R.N. dried her legs with a towel. Aurora squirmed and cried NONONONONO and Dusty asked them if maybe she was itching or hurting underneath her leg cast. “She’s just fussy,” said the nurse. “She’s been asleep for a while.” Then she turned to her patient. “Haven’t you. Oh yes, you’ve had a very long nap. Did you know that, Allegra? Did you know you’ve been napping? But we’re so happy you woke up! Look who’s here! Your wife’s here, Dusty’s here, and she’s so, so happy to see you!” Aurora was crying and her mother enfolded her, kissing the pasty white, sweat-laden brow. “It’s okay, baby!” she told her. “It’s okay, I’m here. I’m here and you’re going to come home soon. Bet you want to go home, huh. Don’t you? Poor thing! I’ve got your room ready, and all your favorite stuffies . . .”
“Mama! Mama! Mama!” she cried, to no one in particular.
Dusty swallowed her tears, and the nurses did too. It was always super-emotional when patients woke up from comas.
—
While Aurora was in the hospital, Dusty knocked out a wall between the upstairs guest rooms, creating an “open plan” suite. She wanted caregivers to be able to sleep in the same space as her daughter, without barriers. She outfitted the gym with special equipment recommended by the physical therapy team; they said the pool would play a key role in Allegra’s recovery as well. The medical team thought it too soon for her to return home, and that transitioning to a rehab center might be better. They were overruled. Dusty said she could create the exact same environment on Carla Ridge. When Aurora was discharged, the actress invited the doctors and some of the staff to the house for a thank-you dinner. Everyone was genuinely impressed by the renovations.
She’d been gone almost five months. Having her back—this version—was unbearable on so many levels. The kink and the anguish, the madness of it, were mitigated by the whirlwind of professionals who came and went, prosecuting Aurora’s hurlyburly schedule with military precision. Half of the activities focused on repetitive movement and relearning the basics—grasping and holding silverware, drinking from cups, brushing teeth, toilet training—while the other half was taken up by the honing of cognitive skills: word recognition and pronunciation and the expression of wants and needs. She was prone to random outbursts of laughter and tears (the doctors called it PBA, for Pseudobulbar Affect). She took medication for seizures but had them anyway, frightening Dusty, who made certain her daughter would never be alone. Progress was impossible to gauge, though once or twice a week there was a much ballyhooed “miracle,” e.g., she’d appear to get the obscure humor in a subtle remark of Jeremy’s or be caught on a nanny cam, dancing to Michael Jackson with a carefree elegance reminiscent of her old self. Yet such moments were always countered by discouraging setbacks. The caregivers said it was a marathon, not a sprint, and their clichés comforted. They insisted that Aurora was doing incredibly well but Dusty didn’t know what to believe. “It’s a process,” they told her. “You’re in recovery too, you know.”
Elise hadn’t brought up Bloodthrone 2 again but Dusty started thinking it might be good to go back to work. She was conflicted, though, about the selfishness of that impulse, torn between the notion of what she did and didn’t deserve. (Ginevra, whom she’d resumed Skyping, encouraged her to “dip your toe.”) But how could she? How could she indulge in something as frivolous as acting, that gave her so much pleasure? What right did she have to experience those movie-set feelings of camaraderie, jubilance, fulfillment? Those erotic feelings . . . how could she, while Aurora convulsed or cried out in physical, psychic, and spiritual pain? Dusty fantasized about leasing that cottage in the Cotswolds . . . why not? Maybe Aurora would be well enough to make the journey. And if she weren’t, she’d bring her anyway, because what the fuck difference would it make? What difference did it make what part of the world they were in, as long as her baby was doing all the things she needed, to heal? It’s not like there aren’t doctors, speech therapists, and P.T. folks in the U.K. They’re probably even better at it in Europe . . . what if Aurora thrived over there, if she straight-up bloomed?
As the house settled into a routine, the actress felt a tenuous balance return. Jeremy half joked, “I think your sense of humor might be coming back—in a minimal way.” The trick was never to have a chink in the support system. If a practitioner w
asn’t pulling their weight, they were immediately fired and replaced. It was like running a small corporation; she’d always excelled at overseeing the practical minutiae that governed the ease and necessities of everyday life. They spent weekends at the Carpinteria love shack because the beach there was private (though security still kept a watchful eye for drones and seaworthy paparazzi) and she believed it essential that Aurora experience the ocean. When she nervously waded in for the first time, squealing and running from the waves with primal delight, Dusty bawled. They built sandcastles and threw mud pies at each other and barbecued on the sand.
Fireworks and tiki torches . . .
The couple was swamped by well-wishers. Dusty hired a service to sort the thousands of letters that arrived through agency, law firm, and management—vowing to answer them all. She got the most amazing orchids “from your Bartok Family,” with a heartfelt note signed by the chairman, Dominic, the Gertrude, and the Missoni. George and Amal sent boxes of the chocolate truffles Leggy fell in love with when they spent part of their honeymoon in Lake Como. Tom Ford and his husband, Richard, had a huge assortment of Legos delivered from London (the therapists said they were an excellent tool for hand-eye coordination)—so thoughtful . . . she got the most touching call from Liam. She had dinner with Natasha a week before her death, and while he didn’t speak of her directly, Liam’s former wife wove through his words of consolation like a golden thread.
Dusty made the decision not to look at emails or listen to phone messages for a while. (If anything was urgent, her assistant would let her know.) Friends wanted to visit Allegra but she wouldn’t allow it. Not even Patrice the hairdresser, whom her daughter adored. Dusty wondered if she was doing the right thing; there were so many people that loved Allegra, and who she loved back. It might have been beneficial for her to interact, but in the end, Dusty went with her gut. Only Jeremy, Elise, and Livia had backstage passes—though she did enjoy inviting the kids and grandkids of caregivers over for picnics and beach days. Aurora was great around children but somewhere along the line had grown fearful of dogs. (Allegra was a total dog person.) Angie Dickinson was one of the few exceptions to the visitor rule. She’d known Angie for years. Her daughter had been challenged from birth in ways now reminding Dusty of her own; watching them, back in the nineties, was something she’d never forgotten. She had been honored to bear witness to the fierce grace of Angie’s patience and devotion, her unconditional mother love.
Aurora called everyone “Mama.” One of the aides said, “But she knows you’re the only ‘Mama.’ When you’re not here, she likes to call us that.” Other helpers said the same, and while Dusty knew they meant well, the little campaign being waged on behalf of her primacy embarrassed her. Though in time, when her daughter cried out in fear, it was Dusty who soothed her and no one else. That was an observable fact.
They watched movies in the plush home theater. When they saw one of Dusty’s, Aurora laughed in delight, pointing to the image on the screen and then to her mother. They saw Frozen and Aurora knew the song perfectly, singing along like they used to—
Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky!
Let it go, let it go
You’ll never see me cry!
Sometimes, overcome by medication and mangled circuitry, Aurora fell asleep without warning, say, smack in the middle of the noisiest, most outrageous scene of her favorite, Mad Max: Fury Road. She’d lean her head on Dusty’s shoulder, and begin to snore; her mother would lower the volume and stare at her baby while the projector threw images onto Aurora’s features, to create a living metaphor of the actress’s colliding worlds—a pietà of film, fame, and blood, of fractured family regained.
—
It was a good day. More IATSE checks arrived and someone who saw a late-night rerun of Dr. Wrigley offered to anonymously pay the debt on one of their credit cards—$27,000.
Derek had been staying in Tristen’s room but crawled into Larissa’s bed around midnight and fell right to sleep. She woke up.
It’d been a few weeks since she thought of her—her son had been dead only a few days when she heard that Allegra tried to kill herself. Larissa was already out of her mind with grief and her imagination ran wild; she became convinced she was responsible for the botched suicide. She knew Allegra had “broken up” with her out of guilt, and assumed she must have finally told her wife of their dalliance. Dusty was probably so pissed that she threatened divorce, or even insisted on it, which was why Allegra did what she did.
Still, she was thankful her obsession had run its course. She was no longer “in love” with either Mrs. Wilding. She turned on her side, away from Derek, and drifted off . . .
In the dream, Tristen was in the passenger seat. They were driving to Whole Foods on a sweetly boring day. Everything was uneventful, sunlit and divine. It felt good to have him with her again, even though she had an awareness in the dream that he was dead. He spoke boyishly; she couldn’t make out his words. He wore jeans and was shirtless. It didn’t bother her that his chest was gutted—the inside-outs were slick and clean, painted a deep maroon, hard-rubbery, like the anatomical model in science class when she was a girl. Larissa began getting uncomfortable in her body as she strained to understand what he was saying. She couldn’t breathe. She felt pressure now, and winced in pain behind the wheel—when she awakened, Derek was heavy on top of her. She startled, then let him keep fucking her.
She felt her son’s heart pound against her own.
—
She bathed her little girl, something that calmed them both. Aurora loved a bath more than she loved the pool, and Dusty thought that was because the tub was fun but the pool was work—all that resistance-training the therapists demanded (with peace and love). She thrilled when Mama drew the giant sea sponge over her skin, squeezing out the warm, soapy water.
She examined Aurora’s body closely, noting its small and larger transformations. The leg was healing well; the white scar from the incision over once-infected bone looked like the bleached, toothy nose of a sawfish. Coarse black hairs had begun to sprout topside between ankle and knee, like blades of grass after a fire. The other breaks were healing remarkably well. The shoulders were lopsided from the awful dislocation (it would never be totally right) and a foot arched cartoonishly, causing a slight limp. Her midsection had thickened as an effect of the meds, and also because she’d been eating like a draft horse since she was home. The weight gain hadn’t distributed evenly—her legs remained spindly from the weeks spent in coma and her rear end suffered accordingly, grown wasted and slabby—steroids had provided a classic moonface. The staph-infected bedsore that threatened her life when in hospital had completely closed and all that was left was the pinkish crater of a dead volcano. Dusty washed her privates like a mother would her babe’s, making Aurora giggle and squirm, and Dusty laughingly chide. Sometimes when they lay in bed and she sang the girl a lullaby, Aurora reverted to the self-calming frottage she once practiced as a girl, and Dusty would stop her, gentle yet firm, flashing for a moment on the pride and care Allegra used to lavish on the waxing and manicuring of those nether parts, now overgrown and homogeneous. And the face: that gorgeous face! So different now, always changing yet somehow still the same, still her love, her lunar child—still her wife, in a way, forever and always—avid in its familiarity and otherness, the disorganized, perfect features like a valentine from Eternity. They’d capped the teeth that broke against the pot; thank God Aurora had been unconscious when so much knitting and rebuilding had to be done. There’d been sieges of cystic acne in the last few months, worsened by Allegra’s compulsive, scratchy explorations—her nails had to be clipped way back. But the cosmetician who came each week doted over and nourished the lovely skin, and just now, as she bathed her, it had sloughed pristine. The hair on the head had grown out. It was vibrant and gorgeously cut, and grew wilder than ever, as if willfully asserting its indepe
ndence of all that was ravaged.
And how Dusty adored that milky eye!
Like the rarest of marbly gems, rolling from the recesses of an Egyptian tomb to land eerily at the foot of a humbled explorer.
The cottage—Dusty referred to it by that architectural misnomer—was in Somerset, just outside Bruton, which is to say not a far soak from Bath, nor farther still from Glastonbury, as the starling flies; though the birds did tend toward a more vertical migration, ascending in helices so dense and perfect one could easily imagine the hand of God tugging them home.
“The humble abode,” as she called it in dry-wit emails to Jeremy, was actually a seventeenth-century Grade II–listed manor along with outbuildings for staff and guests, though in the nearly three years they’d lived there, guests had been few and far between. Shetland sheep, Old Spots, and Gloucester cattle were more common, having run of the property, which gave Aurora (who had no memory of ever being called anything else) and the other mistress of the house great, giddy pleasure. The carriage entrance of the two-story, slate-roofed stable block of paneled stalls and mangers was grazed by an unexpectedly elegant frieze and cornice; adjacent was a heaven-sent paddock; venturing beyond, one found oneself in the dream of a Grade II–listed garden with a weather-worn Grade II–listed gazebo, graffitied by Aurora herself with fancied words and phrases of the hour. The whole affair—all twenty-five acres of it—was enclosed by a crinkle-crankle wall, whose bricks often wore a necklace of soft, hanging fruit, and wove a charming cuff of talismanic protection around the property’s borders.
With its stone abbey, stone bridges, and stone streets, its medieval chapels and graveyards older and stonier still, its endless succession of weddings between rolling hill and sky (officiated by that which pulls the starlings)—marriages that weathered all manner of domestic ecstasies and abuse—with the glittering river that stood in for the cathedral train of all those bridal gowns, and its towering dovecote famously presiding over all, the Paleolithic county’s genius loci resounded like the celestial pieces of a lost, cherished reverie the actress had finally gotten to match.