Mia Luce
My God – it's an update!!! And she's working backwards… yes, the logic of a procrastinator is most difficult to follow, dear readers, but bear with me if you can! I felt this could be a more powerful opening to this little tale, and hopefully the experience of actually putting pen to paper again will encourage me to finally get Chapter 3 up! Oh Fabrizio dear boy, why did you have to be so difficult to voice?
DISCLAIMER: hats off to Elisabeth Spencer, Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas for delivering this gorgeous story in both it's novella and stage forms.
Prologue: Homecoming
As she stepped over the faded threshold of 142 Eastlake Street, Margaret tried to place the familiar smell of home but found nothing. The stench of Roy's cigars stuck to the wallpaper like obstinate grease to a pan, but it brought out no emotion, triggered no instinctive or natural reaction. A momentary shock followed this revelation and passed just as swiftly, a belated sense of jetlag taking it's place. Every bone in Margaret's body pleaded for release as she placed her luggage at her feet, her designer travel bags a good deal lighter than when she had left for Italy 2 months before. She stood stock still, barely breathing, heavy with the air of a woman whose very soul had sunk in unison with the thud of the bags upon the carpet. Looking about at the furniture and silverware she had once been so proud to own, Margaret took time to consider. No, this wasn't home anymore… had it ever been?
It was impossible to declare that this house held no claim upon her, for was it not here that she and Roy had first shared a bed, where she had watched Clara learn to walk on chubby little legs, and where all their lives had been altered by one meaningless phone call on the eve of Clara's tenth birthday party? The walls of the hallway stood solemn and silent, confining Margaret within the very place in which she'd heard the screams…. She had run from here all those years ago and somehow left an entire life - carefree and joyous and typical - discarded in her wake, flung aside in panic like the butt of her cigarette. Of course, there was no actual evidence of that here, the one incident which had been the focus and informing narrative for all the years that followed it. Photographs of Clara then, plump, pretty and perfectly normal, had been removed by Roy days later, stripped with shaking hands from every wall or album as though they were an insult, or something taboo that must not be seen.
"Roy! She'll never understand if we start treating her differently! She won't know why things have changed. You can't just take her past from her"
"Are you going to be the one to explain it to her then – everything?! This is what's best - this is the only way. She couldn't cope… if we told her anything, she just wouldn't cope"
Margaret had kept them of course, the photographs, storing them away in her bottom bedside drawer the way she had once done as child, hiding candy bought against orders with her pocket money. When had she last looked at those snapshots of the before-life? When had Roy? Perhaps they had never felt the need, as the genuine child Clara had still been there, residing within her beautiful grown-up body. Clara had a medical condition as yet unheard of in their circle of friends, or indeed anywhere within the township of Winston, Salem – her situation was a scandal due only to ignorance, but still, it had to be kept secret. Their most precious creation was in fact a girl only partly known by her friends; she was living a half-life and she had never suspected a thing… or so they had arrogantly assumed, in that wishful way parents do when desperate to shield their children.
The trip to Italy had altered everything, sending carefully constructed lies shattering in harsh, hot sunlight. As Margaret entered her barren bedroom (so stark and bleak from the lush apartments she had become accustomed to) she began to suspect that she had left her true self behind with her daughter, allowing it to linger a while longer in some sun-drenched corner of a Florentine piazza. If this was the case, if all that she was, or had been for that short time, now remained content and liberated in southern Italy, forever keeping watch on her beloved Clara, so blissfully happy and more accepting in her awareness than Margaret could ever be … well, than she could be satisfied with this. After all, a life of denial and suppression had been removed and forgotten in just a few months …. This 'homecoming' was a heralding of change, though only she knew it.
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