Page 10 of The Quiet Rebuild

Lydia sucked in her cheeks. Her eyes looked dangerous. “I don’t want you to think we don’t love you,” Lydia said finally. “We love you, and we hate that this happened. You and Jason were our favorite couple. This tears us apart.”

Taylor squeezed her arms over her chest and reminded herself to breathe.

She had to make it through the rest of dinner. It felt like a marathon now.

“Please, don’t let me ruin the day,” she said now to Lydia, baring her teeth.

“You didn’t ruin it. I did, with my stupid memory, and my stupid mouth,” Lydia said, blinking away tears. “I never should have mentioned it. I saw that wine, and thought it was a memory we’d all shared.”

“Well,” Taylor said, “we did not.”

But soon enough, it was time for pie. At this point, Taylor was alone in the kitchen, slicing through pumpkin and apple and pecan and listening to her so-called friends in the next room, talking about the movies they were going to work on and the celebrities they’d seen at various parties. Taylor had heard these same kinds of conversations for years and years. Previously, she’d been a part of those conversations, talking about on-set drama, about scripts she’d read and passed on, and about ridiculous costumes she’d had to wear. Jason had always loved when she’d transformed into a storyteller at one of their parties. He’d always said, “You captivate them! They eat out of your hand!”

“It’s time for pie!” she called into the living room. And soon, her friends were back at the dining room table, piling their plates with at least two different flavors, plus vanilla ice cream. They looked greedy and happy. They refilled their wine and again complimented Taylor on all she’d done. Taylor felt about five seconds from a nervous breakdown. “Thank you,” she said each time. “You’re too kind.” Could they tell how mentally far away she was?

Over the next half hour, Taylor sat cross-legged on the floor in the living room, trying to get herself to eat a bite of pumpkin pie. It had always been her favorite, so much so that sometimes, Jason had had one made for her birthday rather than a cake. She adored that cinnamony, nutmegy, gooey flavoring. But she simply couldn’t pick up her fork. Rather, she found herself thinking constantly about Lydia and Steven’s trip to Spain. She needed to know more. What had they eaten together? Had it been that steak, or had that been make-believe? What had Jason’s new girlfriend talked to them about? Did she seem smart? Or stupid? What had she worn when they’d gone to dinner? Taylor had read (accidentally) that the young Spanish woman had come from no money at all, like Taylor and Jason themselves, and she imagined the Spanish woman was green in all the ways she and Jason had been a million years ago. Maybe that made Jason feel nostalgic for the times when he and Taylor had been coming up. And weren’t men always looking to be reminded of a past when they were stronger and had better hair? Weren’t they always looking for the past, when their girlfriends or wives were younger and slightly thinner and more optimistic?

“I’m sorry,” Taylor blurted, because she couldn’t take it anymore. “I just can’t believe you went to Spain. I can’t believe you would do that to me.” Her voice wavered, and then she burst into tears. They were violent, stormy tears that forced everyone to stand up, take their plates to the kitchen, and prepare to go. The only person who stayed with her was Lydia, who sat beside her on the living room floor, stroked her arm, and told her how sorry she was.

One by one, Taylor heard her “friends” leave. She heard the opening and closing of doors and their whispers as they talked about how messed up she was. She knew in her heart of hearts that she would never see them again, that they’d talk about her as though she were just another washed-up actress. This was what she was, she knew.

“My life is over, Lydia,” she said, rubbing her eyes so that her makeup smeared off. She wondered if Steven was still here, then reasoned she didn’t care. He was hiding somewhere.

“Your life isn’t over,” Lydia reminded her. “You have beautiful homes all over the world. People love the work you’ve done. You can spend the rest of your life writing and reading books, watching movies, and eating delicious foods. You can take a lover!”

“Oh, that sounds so sad,” Taylor said, shaking her head. “I’ve only ever dated Jason. You know that.”

Lydia looked exhausted. Taylor hated being pitied, but this was what it was.

“You should go,” she told Lydia now. “I need to clean up.”

“I want to help,” Lydia said.

“No,” Taylor said. “Please, don’t. It’ll just make me feel worse.”

Eventually, Taylor managed to shoo Lydia and Steven out the door. It was only five, and there was so much left to Thanksgiving Day, but Taylor had no energy to clean, nor to do anything else but sprawl in front of the television and drink wine out of the bottle. She was a pathetic sight. Sometimes her friends texted her to ask if she was all right. A few of them offered to send a cleanup crew so that Taylor didn’t have to do everything herself. Taylor ignored every single one. For maybe the thousandth time, she searched online for news of Jason and his girlfriend, but it was clear they were keeping a low profile. All of her social media accounts were still blocked, which she could probably pay to have fixed. But she guessed that marketing team back in Tokyo had been right. It was probably best not to know what the entire social media world was saying about her.

At around nine thirty that evening, a favorite film of hers came on: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. It was on regular television, which meant that there were commercial breaks. Funnily enough, Taylor had always found commercials to be comforting. They reminded her of being a kid and watching television with her mother and father, long before they’d taken her to Los Angeles for her first audition. Back then, the commercials were for vacuum cleaners, carpet cleaners, and medications. Things weren’t too different now.

For more than two hours, she watched as Steve Martin and John Candy journeyed home for Thanksgiving, bickering and befriending one another in equal measure. By the end, she was fully sobbing again. She wondered who else in her life was watching this on their television, then considered her mother and father, who didn’t live too far from here and had always loved Steve Martin, too. She let out an awful growl, then reached for the remote and flicked to the next station.

She was immediately transported to an island. Beautiful Atlantic waters shone around pristine beaches and slate houses. Birds soared in the air, and sailboats peppered the horizon line. She took a breath, recognizing the place immediately as Nantucket Island. She’d been there twice before, once with Jason and an old costar and another time with her mother, before she and her mother stopped speaking. Had it always been so beautiful?

And then, a woman appeared on screen, a newscaster, who spoke about Nantucket Island’s brand-new Harbor House. "When philanthropist Stella Vanberg passed away earlier this year, she left her children and her assistant with a single plan: transform her Nantucket estate into a place for women in the midst of upheaval, women with nobody to turn to and nowhere else to go. What Stella’s children didn’t know was that Stella had died with a bevy of secrets. Over the next half hour, we’re going to uncover the truth. Who was Stella Vanberg? Why did she want to hide herself from her children and those she loved? And what’s the mission of the Harbor House? Stay tuned after these messages.”

Again, Taylor was plunged into another round of commercials. But the image of the Harbor House still fluttered in her mind’s eye. Women with nobody to turn to and nowhere else to go. Surely, this didn’t mean her, did it? After all, Taylor Charron had all the money in the world. She could book herself a yearlong spa retreat with a daily massage, a personal meditation consultant, and a personal nutritionist. She could have some New Age scholar follow her around for weeks and tell her how to change her life to find unending happiness (not that she believed in unending happiness).

Why, then, did the Harbor House stick out to her as her only hope?

She pulled out her phone and googled it. They had very little online presence, presumably because they were brand new. It said they were going to welcome their first group of women in the spring, early April in fact, for a six-week program of healing, nurturing, community, and personal growth. Taylor blew all the air from her lungs. Was she really in the market for “personal growth”?

Then again, this story about Stella Vanberg intrigued her, so much so that she decided to watch the rest of the news broadcast. They showed a tiny mountain town in Tennessee, a bubbling stream, a few shoddy houses that were more ramshackled than anything Taylor had seen up close. Taylor was originally from Ohio, which wasn’t so far from the mountains of Tennessee, but her parents’ flatlands were nothing like these ominous, craggy mountains. How had Stella Vanberg escaped? How had she built such an iconic life from the darkness therein?

Soon, the newscaster explained a bit more of Stella’s story, including Greta Vanberg, the German woman who’d come to the United States after the death of her husband in the war.

“It was happenstance that Greta came to Nashville at all,” the newscaster explained, moving down a Nashville street with the sun on her face, her hand still gripping that microphone. “Love brought her here, in fact. But when the man in question abandoned Greta, she came to this so-called “honky-tonk” and saw Stella and her sister, Sally McGee, performing their country-western. A German woman who’d gone through tremendous heartbreak, she listened to Stella and Sally’s tunes and felt a kinship. So when Stella’s husband and father came barging in one night to steal Stella and Sally back to their mountain town, Greta did what any compassionate human might have done. She invited Stella to return to Nantucket Island to rebuild her life.

“It’s clear to this reporter—as well as the Vanberg children—that in death, Stella wants to uphold Greta’s mission. She wants to offer hope, a new chapter, and space to rebuild quietly.”