Chapter 1: A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

“...She tied you to her kitchen chair,
she broke your throne and cut your hair,
and from your lips he drew Hallelujah...”
--Leonard Cohen

It should have been you, I think as I look at my mother. Probably shouldn't think that, but I can't help it. It should have been her.

I haven't been in a limo in years. Everything is resplendent leather. My mother, her black suit. Who wears custom-made YSL to a funeral, anyway? Coiffed just so. But not the way she was three and a half years ago. No, she never wore that particular style again.

I'm only here for Sky. I look over at him, take his hand. He is lost. Even closer to Daddy than I am. Was. Was. He's dead now. I glance at the hearse driving ahead of us and it just isn't real. We had lunch last week.

Give your mother a chance, he said. First, it was an order. She's your mother and you'll respect her whether you like it or not. But I can't respect her, no more than I can fly. She made it clear where her priorities lie. Pretending to respect her would not do anyone any good.

Then it was begging. Please, do it for me. But I couldn't. Not even for him.

Then, he tried to bribe me. I had a mad crush on Joss Stone and he contrived to have her over for dinner. I refused to set foot inside the house, Joss be damned.

After a year or so he stopped trying. I never asked him why. Now I'd like to know. Did he stop respecting her too?

I haven't talked to her in years. She has accepted my presence in the limo with cool indifference. She seems to feel nothing, though I imagine it isn't the case.

She is not the rival I remember. She is aging, and even the mantle of wealth can't stop that. She has had work done, but the lines on her face are still taking over. She seems steeped in regret. Does she still remember Shane, on nights when she is alone, taking out the memories and letting them warm her, if only for a moment?

I do.

She looks at me in that second, and I look away. I'm here for Sky.

I look at the hearse through the window, and swallow the grief of my father.

The funeral home is modern, airy in an L.A. way. White marble floors and skylights and hushed music. It smells of sandalwood and candle wax.

We walk on either side of Sky. My baby brother is nineteen now, as I was during that confusing, horrible summer. The summer of Shane and love and betrayal. The hushed, husky voice in my ear, arms around me, showing me how to putt, stoking my soul.

My mother is pulled into a round of condolences by people I haven't seen in years, except in magazines and society pages. They take her hands and kiss both her cheeks, and when I keep walking, my brother is torn between us.

"It's okay," I whisper, nodding toward them. "I'll save us seats."

I slide into the chapel, letting the heavy oak doors slide shut behind me. No one is here yet, just the open coffin at the front. I look up. The fluorescent lights in the front part of the ceiling are pink, a trick of light, casting a faint glow of life.

I can't go up there just yet. I sit in the front row, thinking back to that summer.

She never touched me, never kissed me. She was my first love. Her wide, lucid eyes, her sultry lips, her wisdom. Most of all her compassion, and that dopey grin she got when she called me a smartass. She could have fucked me, fucked me and destroyed me, but she didn't.

I still don't understand how she was in love with someone else and that someone else was my mother. I've come to accept it. But it didn't compute then and it doesn't now. My mother, of all people? The woman who caught me in bed with Jenna Kroft when I was fourteen, writhing in ecstasy, and made me feel shame so burning and acute that I wanted to die?

I walled up that part of myself for a long time. Until college. Then I washed up, flunked out, and fell hard at Shane's feet, only to find out that she and my mother were in love.

It still stings. I still see her on that day, jagged hair around her face like a blur, crying, holding my mother and sobbing and saying that she would never do that. She revealed my lie, and in that second everything exploded: my shame at having lied. My fury at Cherie's hypocricy. Most of all, the brutal pain of seeing Shane with those walls down, face earnest, professing everything, giving it not only to someone else, but to my mother.

I close my eyes and try to catch my breath as tears flood in quick. I don't know why I don't just lose it. I guess I did so much screaming and crying after that that I don't ever want to give anyone the power of seeing me in that state again.

There are soft footsteps on the carpet and someone is approaching. I think of myself the way the other guests must see me: a wiry blonde with studs going up each ear, in a black suit that is more trendy than funereal. Do they recognize me as Steve and Cherie's little girl? It's been a long time since I played at the house of Steven Spielberg. When they see me on the street, they don't know me. Maybe it's the tats. Maybe it's the piercings. I wonder if any one of them will know who I am when they see me sitting up here.

I don't really care. I left that world behind long ago, shed it like a richly ornamented cape. I found out at nineteen that under that cape I was naked, undeveloped and unformed, and markedly deficient.

The footsteps come closer and I wonder who it is. I hear the door close softly. I feel eyes on me and I think of how I must look: like punk rock dressed up in my trendy suit with my hair in a chignon and my pierced ears.

Shit. It's her. I close my eyes.

"Clea." She sits next to me and seems to crumple in her seat. "Please."

I want to be a snot about it, say "Please what?" but I've vowed long ago to grow up and take the high road. So I look at her.

Her eyes are red, very red and watering. She looks lost and pain stabs through me.

She looks at me, takes me in, and I wonder, is she disgusted? Is she proud of what I've become?

In the end it doesn't matter. I'm proud of who I am. I know who I am.

"I loved her too."

It is the last thing I expected her to say. The tears I've tried to corral just come flooding out of me. I press my thumb and forefinger to the bridge of my nose, head down.

Rage whirls through me, derailing my thoughts. I am so angry I begin to shake. I can't think straight. This is your chance, something inside me flashes. This is your chance to tell her everything you've wanted to, all these years.

So I do.

"I know how much you loved her. I heard you. I know how little she meant compared to your money and your house in the Hamptons. Oh, and of course your black tie galas and trips to Paris."

I look at her now. The motion of turning to face her is predatory. I'll admit that I want to see her reaction. I want to see her in the face of her own hypocrisy.

But she doesn't. She merely looks sad. A lone tear glitters on her face and it pisses me off. Even her crying is elegant. I want to see her broken and sobbing.

"Clea, if you were there then you heard me tell her that he would kill her. If he found us together..."

I turn away, then swallow, and breathe. Then I speak clearly.

"No. All I heard was you saying that she was just a rank little assistant hairdresser with hardly a foot in the door. I stood there and watched you while you broke her heart. She loved you. And that's how you saw her."

But even then I'm remembering other things, other little words that filter up through the ones I've remembered. You heard him... He'll kill you.

"I loved her like... like I've never loved a man. No matter what you think, I loved her." Hearing it in her voice, I know it's true and I don't want it to be true because it makes me ache. "He threatened to kill her. You know he would have."

I sit there shaking, not sure of what to think. It comes flooding back fresher than ever. I'd like to think that the man lying in his coffin several yards away couldn't do that, but I can't...

"I know you hate me because you think I took her away from you-"

"I don't think that. And it's not why."

"Then why?" she sobs. "Clea, please, tell me what I can do to make you stop hating me. Why?" I have hurt her, and suddenly it doesn't feel so good.

"Because I loved her. And I watched you break her heart."

"I did it to protect her."

I want to tell her to stop lying, but my mind is tracing backward, connecting dots.

"She was going to get herself killed. She wouldn't stop calling. She wouldn't leave the gate until he got a restraining order. I had to protect her, even if it meant breaking her heart."

I sit there, and breathe, and try to remain still. It doesn't work. I'm back in that summer, back in it, Shane and all of those fresh scary feelings. I'm lost in it.

The tears won't stop. My eyes flutter closed and I bend over, trying to hide from the world. The sobs start.

I feel her hand on my hair. She soothes back my sleek chignon with a gentle hand that takes me right back to childhood, swiftly and directly back to being five years old and home with the chicken pox. And I sob. She pulls me to her, and we cry like that.

Only later do I think how perfect the irony - that my mother and I spent my father's funeral crying for the woman he forbade us to love.