“I had no idea,” I said.
“If she’d stayed with him, we wouldn’t have to sell this house to pay off all the medical bills. You could keep it, raise your own family here. Or at least I could leave you something, so that you’d be comfortable. The reason we’re not rich is because my grandmother did what she needed to do, and the system was stacked against her. Wealth isn’t some marker of superiority. It’s a matter of luck and circumstance, and those with power using it to keep everyone else down.”
My mother looked me in the eyes then. “Nicole understands that. She wants to fix it, and the people with money are desperate not to let her, and that’s why there’s got to be something else going on. Don’t let them take her down.”
“I’m not really sure what I can do to stop that,” I said.
“I don’t know, do journalism!” she said, throwing her hands in the air.
“Okay,” I said, laughing. “I’ll do journalism.”
“I’m serious. You’re a writer, so write. And after I’m gone, after she puts all this behind her, I want you knocking on doors for her presidential campaign. When you watch her get sworn in as the first female president, you’ll know that wherever I am, I’m happy.”
It was a small blessing that she’d died only a couple of weeks later, before Nicole’s resignation, still believing that things might turn around.
• • •
I needed to believe that she’d be proud of me now. And oh God, all I wanted to do was talk to her, to tell her things and hear her thoughts and make her laugh her throaty laugh, but I would never be able to do that again, and instead I was staring down at my screen like an idiot, with tears pricking at my eyes.
I shook my head. I was not going to have a breakdown over an astrology app. I deleted it and went back to Googling Margot.
I found an almost overwhelming number of write-ups chronicling her see-and-be-seen event-going, all the way back to when she’d been in high school. How did a teenager have enough confidence to hang out with older celebrities? I guess it helped that Margot had looked like an angel temporarily deigning to grace Earth with her presence. I squinted at one old picture in the New York Post, in which a teenage Margot dangled a cigarette in one hand and slung her arm around a tiny, red-haired girl in a miniskirt whom the Post editors hadn’t deemed important enough to identify. The girl’s spaghetti straps were slipping off her slim shoulders, and she clasped her hands in front of her stomach as if she didn’t know what else to do with them. Her face was partially in shadow but when I looked closer, I saw that it was Caroline. Huh. They’d known each other longer than I’d assumed. Maybe that explained why they’d decided, against all odds, to join forces. In the picture, Caroline’s eyes were locked on Margot like if she studied her hard enough, she could mimic Margot’s ease.
A lot of the write-ups about Margot mentioned her mother, Ann Wilding, who had been a fixture on the New York social scene in her own day. I thought Margot was free-spirited, but compared to Ann, she was practically Victorian. I clicked through pictures of Ann in the late ’80s, gallivanting around the globe. She flashed the cameras a huge smile while on an African safari. She made inappropriate jokes to the queen of England. In Paris, she smoked a cigarette with a clique of thin, chic women. One of them had red hair, Caroline’s eyes. I squinted at the names in the caption. Caroline’s mother.
The tabloids had detailed Ann’s doomed love affair with a sheikh, which ended after three months because she wasn’t about to give up her life to move to Saudi Arabia (and also because he was married). When she found out that she was pregnant by him, she bucked all expectations and kept the baby, raising Margot by herself. Well, herself, plus the army of nannies and family help and the husbands from her two short-lived marriages after that.
According to her obituary, Ann had died in a boating accident when Margot was twenty. God, what a tragedy. I stared at the obituary a moment longer, my view of Margot shifting again, until I clicked over to a new article and figured out which man Margot had been talking about during our tarot reading.
Gus Wright. He was a writer and director of a certain brand of indie movies that received glowing write-ups in the New Yorker. I’d watched twenty minutes of one of his films once and found it to be unbearably pretentious.
Now, Gus was in his midforties, which meant that when he and Margot had started dating, she’d been in her early twenties, and he’d been in his late thirties. I found a photo that paparazzi had taken of them together, leaving a club in the early hours of the morning. He had overgrown curling hair, like Bob Dylan at the height of his fame, and even though he was lean, she looked . . . small beside him. Frail, her body hidden behind his, her gaze cast down, her legs twiggy in her
