Laura Caldwell - The Year Of Living Famously

“All right, so you’ve mentioned Emmie before,” Declan said. “Is she your best pal?”

“Well, sort of.”

I hadn’t given him many details about Emmie or my family situation—it seemed too grave a story to drop on someone too quickly—but now I explained that Emmie had raised me after my parents died in a train wreck going from Manhattan to Philadelphia.

Both of my parents were writers, my father an author of historical memoirs, usually on presidents or war heroes, my mother a fiction writer of short stories and young-adult stuff. On that day, when I was eight years old, my mother had a reading at the main library in Philadelphia for her new story collection. She and my father always tried to accompany each other to author events. They were the most supportive couple, Emmie said. The Philadelphia trip was also intended to be their twelfth-anniversary celebration. They’d been married ten years, but they always celebrated the day they met, rather than the day they tied the knot.

They’d reserved seats in the first-class section. I imagine they went immediately to the dining car and ordered champagne, toasting each other as the concrete landscape gave way to the green hills of eastern Pennsylvania.

A half hour before reaching Philadelphia, the train encountered a semi stalled on the tracks. Encountered. Probably too tame a word, because the train slammed into it, killing the truck driver instantly, and crushing the first six train cars, including the dining car, like flattened beer cans.

“Jesus fecking Christ,” Declan said. He squeezed my hand tighter. “I’m so sorry. Is it still tough for you?”

“No. I wish I could say it was, but it was a long time ago. It gets harder to remember them all the time.”

I told Declan that Emmie was my godmother, as well as the literary agent for both my parents. I’m sure Emmie never thought that anything would happen to them. I mean, who ever truly envisions a married couple will die together? Emmie was single by choice. It must have been a great shock to her when she had to take delivery of a tiny eight-year-old too smart for her own good.

I didn’t tell Declan right then, but I found out years after my parents died that there was a custody battle for me. A few, actually. My mother’s sister, Donna, who lived in my mother’s hometown of Plano, Texas, lobbied the courts with her husband to take me into their home with their four boys. My father’s parents made a plea, too. They lived in New Jersey. But my parents’ wills had stipulated that Emmie be my guardian, and Emmie spent about a year’s salary making sure she got to keep me. As I said, I never knew this at the time, but I wish I had. It would have been nice to know, in that weird, confusing time after my parents died, that I was wanted so desperately.

My father’s parents died within a few years of his death, so it’s a good thing I didn’t live with them. I’ve visited my aunt Donna and her family a number of times. She is an unnaturally thin woman who grinds her teeth whenever her husband, a bearish man who owns a chain of gas stations, speaks in his loud drawl. Her sons seem to scare her. I can see now that she probably didn’t want me for the sake of taking care of her sister’s child, for my well-being. I think she just wanted a friend, some kind of buffer in that house full of testosterone.

Whenever I visit Aunt Donna, I take her old Ford Escort (her husband drives a Mercedes) and drive around her town, wondering what I would be like if I had been raised by her. Would I still be a designer? Would I be living in Manhattan? Or would I be working in the home office of my uncle Larry’s gas stations? Would I still be creative and sarcastic and melancholy at times, or would I have adopted a nonstop sunny, albeit fake, personality to offset Aunt Donna?

Anyway, by the end of my explanation about Emmie, Declan and I had reached her building, a place called Hortense Court on East 92 nd, right by the park. Through the glass pane of the front door, you could see the lobby. The marble was chipping, and the paint on the ceiling peeled in thin strips, giving nothing away about what the apartments inside were really like.

“She’s like your mum, then?” Declan said. He had one foot on the stoop, but it seemed as if the other might be ready to run.

I almost laughed at his wary face. I could see him thinking that he’d only just got here and already he was forced to meet my de facto parent.

“Not exactly,” I said. “She fed and clothed me. She got me into school and signed me up for ballet classes. You know what I mean?”

“I understand food,” Declan said, “but not the ballet.”

“Well, she’s not really the mothering type, and believe me, she’s someone you should meet. She is the grande dame of New York.”

“I thought that was you.”

“I’m the second one.”

“Ah,” Declan said. “So I might fall for Emmie.”

I stood above him on the stoop so that I was a little taller than he. “I’ll fight her for you.”

His eyes widened in mock delight. “It’s what I’ve always dreamed of,” he said.

“C’mon.” I used my key and opened the lobby door.

He still didn’t move. “A little kiss for strength?”

I looked him up and down. “Why do I get the feeling you’ll want a grope next for good luck?”

“That’ll work.”

“I better just hold your hand for now,” I said coyly. I took his hand and pulled him inside.

“Emmie, it’s me!” I yelled as I stepped into her place.

“Kyra, sweetie!” I heard her call from the bedroom. “I’ll be there in a minute.” I hadn’t phoned Emmie to let her know we were coming, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. She was used to people stopping by all the time. She thrived on it.

“Come in,” I said to Declan.

He took a step in, glancing around the place.

Emmie has owned her apartment since the sixties. Sometime before I came along, she bought the apartment next to hers, knocked out the center wall and created a large, eclectic space where nothing matched, but everything had its place. One half of her living room, her original living room before she bought the other side, was lined with dark wood bookshelves from floor to ceiling. But even with all those shelves, books were stacked everywhere—under end tables, at the sides of the maroon velvet couches, on the wide round coffee table. This was Emmie’s side of the apartment. Her bedroom and kitchen lay behind the living-room wall.

On the other side of the living room, the books continued their dominance, but there the decor was more functional. Groupings of chairs and coffee tables took up most of the space, and the kitchen had been decked out with restaurant appliances for entertaining purposes. This side was where Emmie had her “salons,” as she called them, the gatherings of the crème de la crème of the New York publishing world. Famous authors, editors and fellow agents from work—they all came here to talk books, to gossip.

When I moved in as a child, Emmie gave me the tiny bedroom on the salon side of the apartment. That room was my own, papered with clippings from Vogue and my own childish sketches, but the rest of the place was decidedly Emmie’s. I knew how quickly people could be wrenched from your life, and I didn’t want to lose Emmie, too. So I learned fast to tiptoe around the Dresden figures on the end table and to always make sure there was scotch in the crystal decanters, ice in the silver bucket. There was no official bedtime at Emmie’s. If one of her salons was in full swing, I could slip through the apartment and stay up as late as I wanted. I liked it better when there was no one there with us, but that wasn’t often.

“Kyra, Kyra.” Emmie’s voice trilled from the hallway.