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Cobb reaches out and grabs the loose cotton fabric of her pant leg. "No," he says, “stay.” He puts the notebook on the couch that he's leaning against and focuses on Marigold. "Tell me about your life." He looks around the room. "I feel weirdly at home here."
"Could be all the English country cottage touches," she says, glancing at the leaded glass windows and the hand-knotted rugs tossed around the wood floors of the house. She'd even had wooden beams installed across the ceilings, and everything about the place, from the walls to the floors, felt cool and inviting--even in the dead of summer.
"I think it just feels like you, Gold," he says, turning his gaze back to her. "Everything you do just somehow feels like you."
"Thank you," she says, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around her shins. They're sitting there on the floor like a couple of kids, listening to a Christmas album together, and it reminds her of the first summer they'd met. "Hey," she says, reaching out one bare foot and tapping his shin with her toes. "Remember that first time you came to Vermont with me to meet my family?"
Cobb lets his head fall back against the couch and he closes his eyes, a smile playing at his lips. "Of course. You had just turned twenty, and I wanted to meet your folks so that they didn't think that you were running around New York with some sort of debauched rockstar."
"But they were too in awe of you to see you as anything but a famous person," Marigold remembers. "And my sister...oh my god, Christina was beside herself."
"I can't believe you never warned me about that poster she had of me on the back of her bedroom door."
Marigold cackles at the memory. "I didn't want to ruin the surprise. And after you left, she was the only girl in town who had a personally autographed Cobb Hartley poster in her bedroom."
"She was also the only girl in town--besides you--who'd seen me naked," he says, reaching out with his own foot and tapping hers playfully as he winks.
"Oh, nooooo," Marigold says, falling back on the carpet and putting both hands over her eyes. "I'd forgotten about that--intentionally!"
Cobb laughs. "I hadn't. It's every man's dream to have two cute sisters see him naked."
Marigold sits up and reaches for a throw pillow, which she tosses at him. "Stopppp! Christina was only seventeen!"
"I kid, I kid," Cobb says, catching the pillow with both hands and putting it behind his lower back. "I truly do kid, because it was honestly kind of horrifying. I'd gotten out of the shower and I was standing there, unaware that the bathroom door wasn't latched, when Christina walked in." It's Cobb's turn to put his hands over his eyes. "And this was back in the days before kids stumbled onto naked people online all the time--I'm pretty sure I was the first man she'd seen that way."
"Well, based on her scream, I would say yes," Marigold remembers, chuckling. "She slammed the door and shouted for me, and I thought she was bleeding to death or something."
"I forget--how did you get her to not tell your parents about it?"
Marigold blushes. "I told her she could tell all her friends how hot you looked naked."
"You did not," Cobb says, lowering his chin and looking at her with disbelief.
"Hey, I didn't want my parents to hear about it and think you were flashing my kid sister."
"But you didn't mind her little teenage friends thinking that I'd done that very thing?"
"Eh, who cares. They were just teenage girls and it made for a great story. She lived on it for years."
"Well that's embarrassing. No wonder she's never been able to be alone in a room with me since. How is Christina, by the way?"
"She's good." Marigold nods, trying to think of her last text from her younger sister. "Since the divorce she's been a little bitter, I think. I try to talk on the phone to her once a week, but she usually comes up with a reason why she can't. Truthfully, I think she's depressed. She's seeing a therapist though."
"You know," Cobb says, pausing as The Beach Boys switch to a new song. "That's one thing about you that I truly admire, Goldie: even in the thick of our divorce, you were never bitter."
She watches the lights on the tree, nodding her head so slightly that it's almost imperceptible. "I was," she finally admits. "I was bitter. Angry. Tired. I never planned on living a life without you in it, and honestly, it's really hard when you're in the thick of it to truly understand why another person would choose a substance over you." She looks at him with eyes full of truth and regret. "I know better now, of course--I know that it was never as simple as you choosing drugs over me--but that's how itfeelswhen you're living through it."
"I put you and Elijah through some stuff, Marigold. And I've apologized a million times--"
"I'm not asking you to apologize again," she says, giving a hard shake of her head. "I know you're sorry."
"Right. And words are just words. I've apologized, but then I've tried to live differently. I've tried to be someone who deserves to have the two of you in my life--in whatever way you're willing to be in it. Because at this point, I know that I forfeited my right to have you as a wife and Elijah as a son."
"Oh, Cobb. Stop it," Marigold says. "You and I may have split up, but I've never once been completely out of your life, no matter how complicated things got. And Elijah is absolutely your son. He chose to live in London instead of over here, for God's sake. Don't you think that was by design?"
They look at one another while Elijah bangs around in the kitchen, singing along to the song on the stereo while his parents sit by the tree in the front room.
"You think he stayed there for me?"
