Graceland, p.1
Graceland, page 1
Dedication
For Paul—my copilot, my compass
Epigraphs
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
—John Steinbeck
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a while, but it ain’t goin’ away.
—Elvis Presley
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Boston, MA Chapter 1: Hope
Fairfield, CT, to Harrisburg, PA Chapter 2: Dylan
Chapter 3: Olivia
Chapter 4: Hope
Chapter 5: Dylan
Chapter 6: Hope
Chapter 7: Olivia
Chapter 8: Hope
Chapter 9: Dylan
Roanoke, VA Chapter 10: Hope
Chapter 11: Olivia
Chapter 12: Hope
Chapter 13: Dylan
Chapter 14: Hope
Chapter 15: Dylan
Chapter 16: Hope
Chapter 17: Olivia
Knoxville, TN, to Nashville, TN Chapter 18: Hope
Chapter 19: Dylan
Chapter 20: Olivia
Chapter 21: Hope
Memphis, TN Chapter 22: Olivia
Chapter 23: Hope
Chapter 24: Dylan
Chapter 25: Hope
Chapter 26: Olivia
Chapter 27: Hope
Chapter 28: Dylan
Chapter 29: Hope
Chapter 30: Olivia
Chapter 31: Hope
Chapter 32: Dylan
Chapter 33: Hope
Graceland Chapter 34: Olivia
Chapter 35: Hope
Chapter 36: Dylan
Chapter 37: Hope
Chapter 38: Dylan
Chapter 39: Hope
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Graceland
Copyright
About the Publisher
Boston, MA
Chapter 1
Hope
Two days before my mother and daughter disappeared, my mother did something entirely out of character. She asked for my help.
She took her time, of course. Say what you want about my mother, the woman won’t be rushed. Even after I’d rinsed our lunch plates and tucked the leftover pad thai into her fridge, she refused to explain the message she’d left at my office saying she needed to see me urgently. It wasn’t until I’d sunk deep into her overstuffed sofa, and she’d handed me a sloshing cup of tea, that I fully appreciated her genius. My only escape would be to sip my way out.
Finally, though, she seemed to be coming to the point. I could tell because she’d moved to the window.
My mother never plays a scene without using light and shadow to her advantage. If you Google old episodes of The Light Within, you’ll notice how before delivering a key line, she lifts her chin and cocks her head toward the light. For years, my father and I debated whether her movement was instinctive or if she blocked it out in advance. Either way, whenever Olivia Grant is about to deliver a showstopping line, a window is invariably to her right.
And so, with her signature chin lift and head tilt, my mother shared what was so urgent.
“Before I die,” she said, “I want to see Graceland again.”
I didn’t mean to snort. Never in my forty years had I made fun of my mother’s obsession with Elvis—at least not to her face. She’d simply caught me off-balance, and I laughed to cover my panic. Graceland? Graceland for God’s sake? Just the thought of Memphis made my stomach churn. Leave it to my mother to ask for the one thing I absolutely couldn’t do.
“Which part do you find amusing, Hope?” she asked. “Graceland? Or my dying?”
“Mom,” I said, determined to steer the conversation away from Memphis, “you’re not dying.”
She turned and, as if on cue, the green tube connected to her oxygen dispenser caught on the edge of the coffee table, yanking the cannula from her face. I had to give her points for that one. Effective use of props.
“We’re all dying,” she said, repositioning the prongs under each nostril. “I’m just doing it faster than the average seventy-nine-year-old.” With the afternoon sun backlighting her profile, my mother was still stunning: snow-white hair pulled back into a chignon, nose long and thin, with a hint of distinctive crookedness. I started to protest, but she waved me off. “No, no, this isn’t self-pity. I’m explaining why we need to do this Memphis trip soon. Right away, in fact.”
I bent forward and gulped the tea, scalding my mouth. I needed to end this conversation—quickly, decisively, for all time. My mother didn’t realize what she was asking.
“I understand you want to see Graceland again, Mom,” I said, substituting “want” for “need,” the way I did with my daughter, Dylan, when she needed Lady Gaga tickets. “I just can’t take you anytime soon. Work is out of control.” This wasn’t the real reason but had the advantage of being true. The entire marketing department at EduLearn was putting in crazy hours. I couldn’t afford time off—not after I’d missed a key meeting two weeks ago when Dylan pulled that stunt at school. “Let’s plan a trip for later this year,” I said, not specifying where. “Maybe in the fall.”
My mother clapped a hand to her forehead. “You’re missing the point! It’s getting harder for me to travel now that I’m tethered to this”—she wagged a finger at the tubing circling her face—“this . . . cannoli.”
“Cannula.” She knew the word. It was her idea of a joke.
“Whatever.” She flung a hand into the air, as if playing to the folks in the mezzanine.
My mother had smoked three packs of Camels a day for most of her life, despite my father’s pleas for her to quit. She’d known the risks. And yet when her new specialist at Mass General repeated that she needed the oxygen day and night, even in the shower, I’d watched her close her eyes as if betrayed. Et tu, nicotine?
She wandered to her mahogany end table and lifted the photo I knew well: the framed black and white of her with Elvis the night of his 1970 Los Angeles Forum concert. In it, the King’s sweaty face is framed by enormous sideburns, and a silk scarf hangs in the V-neck of his jumpsuit. He has one arm around my mother, the young soap star, with her jet-black bouffant. My mother was thirty-three at the time and—as she will be quick to tell you—often mistaken for Sophia Loren. The photo was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and appeared in Life’s “The Year in Pictures.” One columnist even called it the pop-culture image of the decade, pairing the King of Rock ’N’ Roll with the Empress of Evil, the nickname given to my mother’s villainous character, Andromeda, on The Light Within. When I was little, and my mother still lived with my father and me in Memphis, she kept the picture locked in a glass cabinet and let me hold it if I sat quietly on the sofa.
My mother wiped a speck of dust from the glass and replaced the photo on the table. “I need your help with this, Hope.” She draped the red scarf Elvis had given her over the top, letting it puddle around the base. I waited. My mother was a master of the dramatic pause. “I’ve never asked you for much.”
Hard to argue with that. For decades, the two of us had lived on different coasts, keeping a continent tucked between us like a pillow between uneasy bed partners. Even this spring, when my mother’s health had forced her to move from LA to Boston to be closer to Dylan and me, she’d barely consulted me before hiring a real estate agent, leasing an apartment, and shipping her few belongings. I’d picked up the phone one day astonished to learn she’d arrived.
Since then, I’d stood ready to help. Shopping, errands, doctors’ appointments. Whatever she needed. But not this. Not Memphis. My mother had no idea why I’d fled from my hometown almost eighteen years ago, though that wasn’t her fault. I’d never told her.
I picked at a loose thread in the sofa cover. My mother was a trained reader of faces, and mine hides nothing. Instead, I pointed to the green tubing that snaked around the floor and connected to her liquid oxygen concentrator, a machine resembling R2-D2. “Mom, how can you even consider flying again? You said it was a nightmare.”
“Oh, I refuse to fly.” Her tone said I should know better. “Besides, how would we get around Memphis? We’d have to rent a car. Too expensive.” My mother could pinch a penny until it squeaked—lucky, given that her last lover had drained her bank account and fled to Argentina. “We’ll have to drive,” she concluded.
“Mom, you’ve got to be kidding. That would take, what, two days?”
“Dylan could help.”
“Right,” I laughed. She couldn’t be serious. My daughter drove like she did everything—impulsively, angrily, full throttle. Since getting her license, Dylan had scored two traffic tickets and taken down half our neighbor’s fence.
I was done discussing this. Lowering my teacup to the floor, I dug furiously in my purse. “I think that’s my phone.”
My mother huffed, “This trip is for you, too, Hope. You need to get back to Memphis.”
“Sorry, Mom, gotta go,” I lied, pretending to read the imaginary text while heaving myself out of the sofa. “My manager called a meeting.” Grabbing my bag, I pecked my mother on the cheek and made a beeline for the door.
“We can discuss this more tomorrow,” she said.
I halted, my hand on the doorknob. I needed to put this subject to rest. “No, Mom, we can’t. I’m happy to take you shopping, or to the MFA, or a Pops concert, but I simply can’t do this Graceland . . . thing.”
&nb sp; She was peering out the window again. “You have issues with Memphis.”
Her words raised the hair on my scalp, but I kept my voice steady. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Really, Hope?” And there it was again. The dramatic pause. Flawless. “I think maybe you do.”
Outside, the July humidity was like breathing water. Another Uber wasn’t in my budget, though, so I headed for the nearest T stop. By the time I’d reached Allston Street, sweat dripped down my back, and my pencil skirt clung to my legs. I plunged down the stairs, nearly missing a step as daylight turned to soothing darkness.
The train wasn’t crowded, and I collapsed into a seat in a far corner of the car, flipping my phone’s camera to selfie mode to use as a mirror. Just as I feared—my cheap mascara was fleeing down both cheeks, making me look like Alice Cooper’s less attractive sister. Rummaging through my purse, I unearthed a rubber band and the remains of a granola bar but no tissues, so I spit on a CVS coupon and wiped under my eyes, then yanked my hair back into a ponytail. Not cover-of-Vogue material, but good enough for my office.
I ran through the excuses I could offer my new boss for my grossly extended lunch hour and settled on a doctor’s appointment. That would work. If anything shut Gary up, it was the fear of too much medical information from a woman. Scrunching down, I rested my head on the hard vinyl seat, hoping the vibration of the train would clear my mind. Instead, I kept replaying my mother’s words.
You have issues with Memphis.
Where had that come from? Was it possible she knew something?
I couldn’t imagine how. When I’d hightailed it out of Tennessee nearly eighteen years ago, in the late fall of 1998, my mother hadn’t questioned my lies about wanting to travel, trying someplace new. My father had died earlier that year, and Mom and I weren’t speaking much anyway. I sent her a postcard after I landed in Boston. When I realized I was pregnant, though, I didn’t tell her for five months, and I waited until Dylan was six weeks old before sending a newborn photo. Was it possible my distracted and self-absorbed mother had done the math? No, almost certainly not. And even if she had connected my pregnancy with Memphis, she couldn’t know more than that. Not the truly shameful part.
Across the subway aisle, a toddler in a Red Sox shirt scrambled onto his mother’s lap and kissed her nose. She blew raspberries on his cheek.
I longed to please my mother. Always had. In one of my earliest memories, I’m perhaps three or four, and Mom is bathing me, rubbing a warm, rough washcloth across my belly. I press my nose to the bottle of baby shampoo, breathe in the sweet scent. When I look up, though, she is staring right through me, her eyes dull and sunken. Even at that young age, I knew I didn’t make my mother happy.
This past spring, when my mother moved to Boston, I fantasized that the two of us might enjoy a late-in-life bonding, a new détente. We’d share things normal moms and daughters did—confidences, long hugs, favorite Netflix shows. So far, nothing had changed.
The train barreled to a stop and a burly, bearded man plopped down next to the young mother and toddler. The woman took one look at his baseball cap, which loudly proclaimed his pick for president, and scooted herself and child to the other end of the bench. Tensions were running high in that early summer of 2016, made worse by the heat. Both political parties were gearing up for their national conventions. I refused to talk about the election, told people at the office I hated politics. That hadn’t always been true. I’d been enamored for a brief time—if not of politics, at least of a politician. Aaron’s warm voice, disarming grin, the intense way he held your eyes when he listened. Lately, anytime I turned on the TV, there he was: revving up crowds, providing commentary, dismissing rumors of his own ambition. I kept the TV off.
Since fleeing Memphis as a distraught twenty-two-year-old, I hadn’t ventured farther south than Philadelphia. An overreaction? Probably. I’d agreed never to return to Memphis, not to split the country Civil War–fashion, taking the North and ceding Aaron the South. Somehow, though, this felt safer, cleaner. My world and his world, with the Mason-Dixon line between. I planned to keep it that way.
As I climbed the steps from the T station, shading my eyes from the assault of sunlight, I heard quacking. I swiveled toward the Public Garden, but no, the duck noises were coming from my purse. Dylan had changed the alert for my text messages again. A few weeks earlier, she’d switched my ringtone to a car horn, scaring the crap out of me as I’d crossed Beacon Street.
I took refuge under the awning of the Heal Within yoga studio to read her message: “Why won’t you take Olivia to Graceland?”
Had my mother even waited until I’d left the building before complaining to my daughter? I dialed Dylan’s cell.
“Since when do you call your grandmother Olivia?” I asked.
“She said ‘grandma’ made her feel like an old fart.”
“She is an old fart.”
“Well at least she doesn’t act like one.”
A late bloomer in most respects, my daughter hadn’t begun snipping at me in earnest until almost a year ago, around her sixteenth birthday. That’s when it all started: the military clothes, the neon pink hair, and her kamikaze, take-no-prisoners activism. “Where are you?” I asked. In the background, I could hear loud voices and an odd clanging sound.
“My question first. Why won’t you take Olivia to Graceland? She says it’s urgent.”
A motorcycle roared behind me, and I leaned my forehead against the yoga studio’s window, shoving a finger in my ear. “Trust me, honey, there’s nothing urgent in her desire to see Elvis’s microwave . . .”
“Hold on,” Dylan interrupted. “Someone’s beeping in.”
“Dylan!”
My forehead still pressed to the glass, I noticed two women behind the desk of the yoga studio staring at me. I stepped back and, for show, tried a deep, cleansing breath, but caught an updraft from the subway and gagged. I hurried off down the sidewalk, phone to my ear.
Why was my mother calling Dylan? For years, she and my daughter had ignored one another. My mother had visited us maybe four times since Dylan was born, and only then if she was traveling to New York for an audition. Dylan had grown up seeing her grandmother on Viagra commercials more often than in person.
After my mother’s move to Boston, I’d begged Dylan to spend time with her grandmother. This past weekend, I’d finally wrestled my shame to the ground and bribed her. Dylan had pocketed the twenty, but as soon as we got to my mother’s apartment, I wondered what in God’s name I’d been thinking. My mother took one look at Dylan’s hot-pink hair and quipped, “What’s with the clown hair?” Her eyes trained on her grandmother’s white updo, Dylan had shot back, “What’s with the Q-tip?”
At some point that afternoon, though, the two of them bonded. I’d left them alone while I picked up our Indian takeout, and when I returned, neither of them even looked in my direction. I had the odd sense that the teams had realigned, and I hadn’t been picked by either side.
Dylan’s voice on my cell brought me back to the present. “Sorry,” she said. “Where were we?”
“Can’t recall,” I lied, pressing the crosswalk button too many times. “I may have dialed you by mistake.”
“Oh, yeah, Graceland. Olivia said this was, like, her dying request. She’s not dying, is she?”
“Of course not. Your grandmother loves hyperbole.”
“That fake lettuce?”
I made a mental note to get my daughter tutoring before the SAT. “Dylan, bottom line, a trip to Memphis isn’t possible right now. I can’t afford to take time off work.”
“That’s bullshit, Mom, and you know it.”
I stopped abruptly. A cyclist swore and swerved around me. “I beg your pardon?”
“You were just talking about the two of us going to Cape Cod. Remember?”
Crap. She was right. I’d been longing for something Dylan and I could do together and floated the Cape idea. I missed the days when we’d lay our towels side by side at Nauset Beach, dig our toes into the hot sand, and brave the frigid, salty surf. At night, we’d order pizza and share a single fleece throw as we watched The Princess Bride for the hundredth time. When recently I’d suggested a week in Provincetown, though, Dylan had scrolled through her phone and said, “Whatever.” After checking the price of Airbnb rentals, I’d let it go.
