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Chapter Five
When Elise awoke thefollowing morning, she felt more resolute than ever. This world wasn’t her world. Midwest had nothing at all to do with her wild, coastal West. And whatever mistakes her mother had made back in the late seventies had been buried by countless other stories, other Mackinac Island resident mistakes, other births and deaths and marriages and divorces. Elise had to return to California. She had to find a purpose in the world she’d always had.
That was what a writer had to do, wasn’t it? A writer had to look at what was laid before her and make something of it. She’d always been imaginative. She owed it to herself to use that wild imagination and become something new.
I guess I could download a dating app?
I could sell that screenplay to Rex after all?
I could take a class in something? Pottery? Poetry?
Elise took a morning walk, breakfasted in the little nook at the Bloomingfeld, with a near-constant eye across the water. Rhonda, the woman who operated the front desk most mornings, greeted her, waving a gloved hand.
“I’m already cold to my bones,” Rhonda told her, referring to the glove. “Another Mackinac Island autumn. Brr! Is that coat you’re wearing these days warm enough for your long walks?”
“It does the trick,” Elise said. “Although I’ll have to donate it when I return to California.”
“You’re leaving us, then?” Rhonda sounded resigned. “I imagine Mackinac Island doesn’t look as beautiful to you these days, now that the sun is fading.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s more beautiful than ever,” Elise said truthfully, her heart full. “But a girl has to know when to move on, you know?”
Wayne abandoned me. My family wants nothing to do with me. I have reached the end of the road.
Elise headed back to her room and began to remove her dresses, skirts, jeans, and shirts from the little closet. She organized them slowly, folding them up as tidily as possible. She drew the suitcase she had recently purchased out from under her bed and splayed it wide open. It looked like a hungry mouth.
She hadn’t texted Wayne back after last night. But she hadn’t heard from him yet, either.
If that dinner had actually been for someone else—an idea that still broke her heart into many pieces—she imagined they were still tied up together in bed.
As she packed, several ideas came to her. She brought her laptop out onto the desk and typed out a few scenes she wanted to remember for the screenplay. Although her stomach tied itself into knots and her head swam with anxiety and fear and she was generally sure that she would never find love again—at least she could write again.In some ways, Mackinac Island had made her creativity bloom again. Maybe that was all she’d wanted in the first place.
Her phone buzzed from the desk.
It was Penny.
“Mom!”
“Hey, honey.” As always, Elise felt an overwhelming level of love for her daughter’s voice, which she knew better than her own hand. “How is your morning?”
“Sleepy, I guess. I’m off to rehearsal.”
“And how’s that going?”
“Excellent! The director and I had a long chat last night about the character. Really getting to the root of it, you know?”
“Oh, I know,” Elise said. “Your grandmother used to sit me down to have long conversations about her characters. I was just a teenager, trying to talk to my mother about her abused character’s motivations.”
Penny laughed. “How’s it going over there on the island? Still loving it just as much as before?”
“Um...”
“I was telling the director about it, and he said he actually spent a whole spring and summer there once, writing his novel! Can you believe it?”
“Actually, I was thinking about...” Elise began to tell Penny her plans to leave, that her adventure had ended.
But Penny spoke over her.
“I know I was being unfair about wanting to have you back here. You’ve been through enough. Dad, Brad, and I get to be selfish all the time, but you? You’ve been there for all of us, every step of the way, and have even been cool with Dad’s new weird lifestyle choice.”
