Nora Roberts: Tribute

"It was beautiful here, beautiful and hopeful and happy,” he told her. “Horses grazing, her dog napping in the sun. The flowers were lovely. Janet did some of the gardening herself when she was here, I think. She came here to relax, she said. And she would, for short stretches. But then she needed people-that’s my take on it. She needed the noise and the laughter, the light. But now and again, she came out alone. No friends, no family, no press. I always wondered what she did during those solo visits.”

"You met Mom here.”

“I did. We were just children, and Janet had a party for Dilly and Johnnie. She invited a lot of local children. Janet took to me, so I was invited back whenever they were here. Johnnie and I played together, and stayed friends when we hit our teens, though he began to run with a different sort of crowd. Then Johnnie died. He died, and everything went dark. Janet came here alone more often after that. I’d climb the wall to see if she was here, if Dilly was with her, when I was home from college. I’d see her walking alone, or see the lights on. I spoke to her a few times, three or four times, after Johnnie died. Then she was gone. Nothing here’s been the same since.

“It does deserve better,” he said with a sigh. “And so does she. You’re the one who should try to give it to them. You may be the only one who can.”

“Thanks.”

“Patty and I will help. You should come stay with us until this place is habitable.”

“I’ll take you up on the help, but I want to stay here. Get a feel for the place. I’ve done some research on it, but I could use some recommendations for local labor-skilled and not. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, landscapers. And just people with strong backs who can follow directions.”

“Get your notebook.”

She pushed to her feet, started inside, then turned back. “Dad, if things had worked out between you and Mom, would you have stayed in the business? Stayed in L.A.?”

“Maybe. But I was never happy there. Or I wasn’t happy there for long. And I wasn’t a comfortable actor.”

“You were good.”

“Good enough,” he said with a smile. “But I didn’t want what Dilly wanted, for herself or for me. So I understand what you meant when you said the same. It’s not her fault, Cilla, that we wanted something else.”

“You found what you wanted here.”

“Yes, but-”

“That doesn’t mean I will, too,” she said. “I know. But I just might.”

FIRST, CILLA SUPPOSED, she had to figure out what it was she did want. For more than half her life she’d done what she was told, and accepted what she had as what she should want. And most of the remainder, she admitted, she’d spent escaping from or ignoring all of that, or sectioning it off as if it had happened to someone else.

She’d been an actor before she could talk because it was what her mother wanted. She’d spent her childhood playing another child-one who was so much cuter, smarter, sweeter than she was herself. When that went away, she’d struggled through what the agents and producers considered the awkward years, where the work was lean. She’d cut a disastrous mother-daughter album with Dilly, and done a handful of teen slasher films in which she considered herself lucky to have been grue-somely murdered.

She’d been washed up before her eighteenth birthday, Cilla thought as she flopped down on the bed in her motel room. A has-been, a what-ever-happened-to, who copped a scattering of guest roles on TV and voice-overs for commercials.

But the long-running TV series and a few forgettable B movies provided a nest egg. She’d been clever about feathering that nest, and using those eggs to allow her to poke her fingers into various pies to see if she liked the flavor.

Her mother called it wasting her God-given, and her therapist termed it avoidance.

Cilla called it a learning curve.

Whatever you called it, it brought her here to a fairly crappy hotel in Virginia, with the prospect of hard, sweaty and expensive work over the next several months. She couldn’t wait to get started.

She flipped on the TV, intending to use it as background noise while she sat on the lumpy bed to make another pass through her notes. She heard a couple of cans thud out of the vending machine a few feet outside her door. Behind her head, the ghost sounds of the TV in the next room wafted through the wall.

While the local news droned on her set, she made her priority list for the next day. Working bathroom, number one. Camping out wasn’t a problem for her, but moving out of the motel meant she required the basic facilities. Sweaty work necessitated a working shower. Plumbing, first priority.

Halfway through her list her eyes began to droop. Reminding herself she wanted to be checked out and on site by eight, she switched off the TV, then the light.

As she dropped into sleep, the ghosts from the next room drifted through the wall. She heard Janet Hardy’s glorious voice lift into a song designed to break hearts.

“Perfect,” Cilla murmured as the song followed her into sleep.

SHE SAT on the lovely patio with the view full of the pretty pond and the green hills that rolled back to the blue mountains. Roses and lilies stunned the air with perfume that had the bees buzzing drunkenly and a hummingbird, bold as an emerald, darting for nectar. The sun poured strong and bright out of cloudless skies to wash everything in the golden light of fairy tales. Birds sang their hearts out in Disneyesque harmony.

“I expect to see Bambi frolicking with Thumper any minute,” Cilla commented.

“It’s how I saw it. In the good times.” Young, beautiful in a delicate white sundress, Janet sipped sparkling lemonade. “Perfect as a stage set, and ready for me to make my entrance.”

“And in the bad times?”

“An escape, a prison, a mistake, a lie.” Janet shrugged her lovely shoulders. “But always a world away.”

“You brought that world with you. Why?”

“I needed it. I couldn’t be alone. There’s too much space when you’re alone. How do you fill it? Friends, men, sex, drugs, parties, music. Still, I could be calm here for a while. I could pretend here, pretend I was Gertrude Hamilton again. Though she died when I was six and Janet Hardy was born.”

“Did you want to be Gertrude again?”

"Of course not.” A laugh, bright and bold as the day, danced through the air. “But I liked to pretend I did. Gertrude would have been a better mother, a better wife, probably a better woman. But Gertrude wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting as Janet. Who’d remember her? And Janet? No one will ever forget her.” With her head tilted, Janet gave her signature smile-humor and knowledge with sex shimmering at the edges. “Aren’t you proof of that?”

“Maybe I am. But I see what happened to you, and what’s happened to this place, as a terrible waste. I can’t bring you back, or even know you. But I can do this.”

“Are you doing this for you or for me?”

“Both, I think.” She saw the grove, all pink and white blossoms, all fragrance and potential. And the horses grazing in green fields, gold and white etched against hills. “I don’t see it as a perfect set. I don’t need perfect. I see it as your legacy to me and, if I can bring it back, as my tribute to you. I come from you, and through my father, from this place. I want to know that, and feel it.”

“Dilly hated it here.”

“I don’t know if she did, always. But she does now.”

“She wanted Hollywood-in big, shiny letters. She was born wanting it, and lacking the talent or the grit to get it and hold it. You’re not like her, or me. Maybe…” Janet smiled as she sipped again. “Maybe you’re more like Gertrude. More like Trudy.”