Now that my closest female friends had married, moved to the suburbs, and started producing little versions of themselves who demanded all their attention, and now that my mother’s absence highlighted how tenuous all of my other family relationships had always been, I became hyperaware of how lucky I was that I still had someone I trusted. Thank God for this Nevertheless adventure, for reminding me of how important our friendship was. He was maybe the only person left in the world who would be willing to do this crazy thing for me. I didn’t want to try his patience. I didn’t want to screw anything up.
“What?” he asked, catching me staring.
“Just . . . thank you, again, for being here for me.”
“Of course, Jilly,” he said.
TWELVE
So yeah, I leaned into my routines when I could. But every other free moment I had, I was reading all that I could find about the women of Nevertheless, starting with Margot.
For someone who’d made a name for herself on the parties and events she attended, she was surprisingly tight-lipped about her personal life. She gave plenty of interviews about her business, though. I scrolled through article after article, reading up on her philosophy behind In the Stars so I could know how to talk to her about astrology, then pulled up the app to download it for myself, for research purposes. In the Stars, the icon said, against a blush-pink background speckled with golden stars. The app asked me to input my birthday, and then it needed to know exactly when and where I was born. Text unfurled on the screen. This information will help us determine your moon and rising signs. (More likely this information will get sold to third parties and make us richer.) I did not know what “moon and rising signs” meant, but I dutifully selected Bay Ridge, then paused at the question asking me to type in the precise moment I had emerged into the world. Please be as accurate as possible, so that we can see exactly where the stars were positioned over your birth.
I didn’t know. I’d have to call my mom to ask. I got as far as starting to put in her cell phone number before I remembered that I couldn’t call my mom because she was gone. She wouldn’t pick up the phone because she didn’t have fucking hands, because she was only ashes that we’d scattered into the Atlantic Ocean, bits and pieces of her floating halfway across the world by now. She couldn’t remember what time I’d been born because her memories didn’t exist anymore, except in the little snippets she’d passed on to me when I’d been smart enough to listen. She’d died, and a whole vast bank of experiences had died with her.
Anyway, if I had been able to call her, and had said, Hey, Mom, what time did I burst out of your vagina? I need to determine my rising sign, she probably would have said, Honey, what in the world is a rising sign? And when I explained it, she would have teased me about my newfound interest in astrology—she was a practical woman to the end—and so I would have told her about this whole undercover assignment and the mess I was making.
God, what would she think of me doing this? Would she be proud? Or would she advise me to run in the other direction and not look back? She’d always told me not to be stupid. But then again, she’d longed for the truth about Nicole to come out.
• • •
When the scandal first broke, we’d been going through old family photos the way that you do when someone is dying. You try to figure out what is worth saving, try to get all the stories you can from that someone before they’re gone.
I’d brought the boxes to her bedroom and climbed into the bed next to her. Her limbs were so thin that she looked like an alien, head too big for her body. We laughed over awkward old school pictures, snapshots of me as a red-faced baby in her lap.
I pulled out a few pictures of her and my father, grinning next to each other in happy times, my mother still oblivious about his affairs. I put them in the trash pile.
“Maybe you should try to have a relationship with him when I’m gone,” she said. “He’ll be the only family you’ve got left.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. He’s a cheating asshole and a compulsive liar.” I left out the part I’d never told her—that once, when I was fifteen and annoyed with my mom, I’d e-mailed to ask if I could spend the summer with him in Chicago. He’d never responded. “I don’t think I need that kind of family.”
“Well, then, I guess you’ll have to make your own. Soon, though, because of your eggs. My doctor said his son just broke up with his girlfriend—”
“Mom,” I said, then paused as my phone dinged with a text from Miles. He had sent me a New York Post headline about Nicole. My face dropped as I read it, so my mom peered over my shoulder, and we digested the news in silence for a moment.
“No,” she said, finally. In addition to the T-shirt with Nicole’s face on it, my mother had acquired a Nicole Woo-Martin coffee mug, poster, and votive candle. “Rumors. They’re making it up because they’re afraid of what she’s going to achieve.”
“Yeah, probably,” I said, and put my phone away. But we looked through the rest of the photos in silence, moving backward in time, past my mother as a little girl, sitting red-faced on the lap of her own mom. The photos turned weathered, black-and-white. My mother’s grandmother appeared in the frame, a tall woman in her forties or fifties with a jaded look on her face.
“She used to be rich, did you know that?” my mother
