yours for a song chapter 2

[figureofdismay]

Frank had ostensibly taken hold of Kendall’s leash but the day after Roman finally arrived on the east coast, Baird surprised her with the news that Frank had contacted him and asked him to unofficially come out of retirement to advise on some of the other arms of the company. Frank hadn’t had his hands on all the different aspects of Waystar, but Gerri had a sinking feeling that the light tone of voice with which he informed her – putting on his suit jacket after his morning espresso at the breakfast bar – that he was going in to make sure Kendall was across a few things – that something brewing, bubbling up from the underbelly of the company. Baird had been a loyal company man and a good lawyer, he’d never informed her about anything she didn’t she didn’t absolutely need to know, and hadn’t saddled her with any unnecessary complicity. It was perhaps the most fully executed and useful function he had as a partner, letting her keep her hands clean when he could. She was aware that there had definitely been things to keep her hands clean from, however, and the idea that a strung out, half-formed heir taking over the rudder of their management made her distinctly nervous.

Baird had gone into the office separately from Gerri. He had not visited her office. They had not arranged to have lunch together. This continued for the next few days, and seemed unlikely to change. Gerri had a great deal of work, things in danger of slipping through the cracks in the recent chaos, and was determined not to be the one to make an overture to Baird, she didn’t need him hanging around her office like a lost boy at semi-retired loose ends. When they’d both been working, they’d operated much the same way, carefully separated, chinese walls, and dinners when they could manage, maybe once a week, catch as can breakfasts, brief, tired evenings making conversation as if they hadn’t been working in the same building all day.

If Logan pulled them into the same meeting, the same project that was one thing, that was workable, but Gerri knew that her marriage had kept it’s delicate balance by cultivating as much distance as was possible inside the incestuous hothouse of Waystar until Baird became ready to retire. Gerri had even contrived to spend a solid block of years as general counsel for Waystar London when the girls were old enough, Estella boarding at Deerbrook Academy and Julia ensconced with the day school in the city and Helen, the nanny who both of the girls had preferred to her own maternal care. Living on top of each other did no pair of opinionated people any good, and the twin competitions for Logan’s favor and for the favoritism of their bright, self-contained daughters had added a bitter, manic flavor to what should have been a comfortable partnership that Gerri had found hectic and distracting, to be shaken off.

Stella was at college now, thriving at Yale with a fast set of cutthroat, stylish friends who had absorbed her into their midst and made her the ringleader. Two of them had come home with Stel for the Christmas break the year before, and Gerri had been torn between pride and concern to watch her daughter’s new friends hang on her every word with fawning complicity. Her elder daughter had always been a forceful personality, bright eyed and charismatic with a mind subtle and instinctive enough to keep the world around her hanging on her word, with enough work ethic to back up her efforts. She’d go far, Gerri was sure, but she didn’t know that she or Baird had done enough to teach her about humility, hubris, compassion, things that the Kellmans had never had much use for in Logan’s empire but which nevertheless worried a parent when they saw their lack reflected in their offspring. She and Baird had been called out to Deerbrook three different times when Stella was a teenager due to incidents around her tendencies as a ringleader and her masterminding a network smuggling contraband onto school grounds. The combination of her father’s impulse for hedonism and quick gratification, and her mother’s cunning and big blue eyes had made her part star pupil and part authority resistant nuisance. Gerri had hoped she’d grow out of it when real life intruded upon the walled garden of her elite, exclusive education, but she was in her second year now at Yale and being one clever young person among a few thousand hadn’t done much to check her, and Gerri was proud, but concerned.

Julia was now 15, still boarding at Deerbrook Academy in Massachusetts, only home for school breaks and the occasional long weekend. Jules wasn’t the troublemaker that Stella was, but she wasn’t the rising star pupil either. It was a struggle to get her to care about things beyond her horse riding, her pony club friends, her fashion blogging on Livejournal and Instagram, her frequent pleas to have parental permission to leave campus for pop singer concerts that Gerri felt no compunction about refusing. Gerri worried that Julia was turning into a shallow girl, or one willing to settle for shallowness if it gave her the sense of comfort and group approval she appeared to want, but on the other hand it was a relief not to have to deal with calming a headmaster and signing a helpful donation check once or twice a year to keep her younger child’s academic record spotless.

Julia was supposed to be coming home soon for the long thanksgiving break, but they were going to have to put her off. She was utterly unwilling to take a 15 year old girl along with the Roys and the rest of the entourage for the funeral in Dundee, and she knew that neither she nor Baird would be able to decline attending. Jules was often bored and listless when she was home for more than a week anyway, though being left at school by herself for most of the break seemed likely to be the kind of adolescent slight her daughter would struggle with and hold against her.

There was nothing for it, though. Estella could have thrived at Waystar if she had been allowed to associate with the Roys after Shiv’s half hearted teenaged mentorship had ended, but Julia wasn’t assertive enough, didn’t have the tools to defend against them. A pretty mousy girl whose vulnerability was too near the surface for that nest of predators and Gerri was determined to keep her apart from them and the corporate culture. Not just because Julia was to be protected, her sweetness saved as long as it could be, but because Julia had never met the version of Gerri who stood at Logan’s side, and she wasn’t sure that she ever wanted her to.

Her elder daughter saw her too well and her younger daughter didn’t see her well enough and Gerri didn’t feel completely comfortable with either of these states but she couldn’t deny that the latter was easier. She’d have to call Julia herself, ahead of the school authorities to arrange the delay, to help soften the blow.
Worrying about the girls, and about the likely now canceled thanksgiving event that Marcia was unlikely to hold now, was also easier than worrying about being shut into yet another jet with all the rest of them and follow Logan’s earthly remains to Scotland for the funeral. It didn’t bear thinking about, but it would happen, the movement of the Royco inner circle didn’t stop for mere mechanical anxiety. The jets had all been closely and urgently overhauled in the two weeks since the crash, on orders from Kendall, or more likely Frank or Baird. It seemed unlikely that lightning would strike the same uniform place twice in so short a time.

Logan’s body had been found a day after the crash, as had two of the crew member’s bodies and that of the mistress. If he had not been found they might have held the memorial in New York, but Logan had managed to find one last way to inconvenience them. He’d given up his homeland long ago, but not all of the way, it seemed, and his will had revealed that he’d still wished to be buried in the churchyard of his boyhood, a long but manageable drive from his Scottish castle, on a hilltop overlooking the River Tay. Logan had only ever had patience for sentiment over his own youth, and only his own sentiment, but in the end hadn’t been able to amputate those last dregs of the upbringing. Neither of the brothers could, and even in death the grudge seemed to live on. Ewan had still not committed to come to the funeral, or not to come, which was giving Karolina an impossible time with how to draft the statement about his presence or absence.
The rest of them were going though, including Baird, and including Kendall’s wife Rava and little Sophie, including waystar c-suite and Karonlina and some of the assistants because business couldn’t grind to a halt for a long weekend in Scotland.

*

Gerri settled herself away from Baird on the plane. The inner circle was settled together in Logan’s old luxury den to drink to the old emperor and hold whatever kind of somber male bonding rituals they needed within themselves to bury their resentment and loss suitably before the public exhibition of the funeral. Gerri had no curiosity about what they might get up to.

She found herself in the lounge with the Roy siblings and spouses. The atmosphere wasn’t so much that of a family drawing together but that of a pressure cooker beginning to build steam, which seemed unlikely to hold for the duration of the Atlantic. It wasn’t an appealing idea to spend the seven-plus hours of the flight watching them eye each other and snipe, but she knew how to beat an unobtrusive retreat when necessary, and she couldn’t deny that she was curious. How they were holding up, how they were working out the new hierarchy among themselves, and in a quieter, less useful subscript of a concern, how Roman was coping. It had taken a week and antianxiety meds to get him on a plane home, and now here they were in the air again 6 days later and Roman didn’t look any better than the last time she’d seen him, a fact that the family seemed to be ignoring.
Connor had made half an effort at least, as they were embarking, concerned patter and pats on Roman’s shoulder and getting him a drink from the cabinet, but Roman had smiled and nodded and bluffed transparently that he was holding up just fine and Connor had accepted it and melted away.

The eldest Roy was something of a puzzle but not one she’d ever been particularly interested in solving. He liked to live in a dream world, whether unwittingly or wilfully she didn’t know, but she did know that she was sure he wouldn’t be stepping into any kind of paternal role for the family, and had no interest in the company. He’d brought his girlfriend along, for his own comfort – Gerri couldn’t imagine that even if the girl was devoted, she would have really wanted to spend a few days and two long flights with this group, especially for a funeral. Susan was an interior designer, young for Connor, but not as obviously so as the last one. She’d managed to make the renovation and decorating of his Vancouver place last 2 and a half years, and Gerri admired her dedication for it, though whether it was through patience with Connor’s vacillations or determination to spend his money, she didn’t know.

Connor was already telling anyone who would listen how much the gray weather so much of the year wore on him, seasonal affective disorder this, mold spores that, so she could probably get another couple years out of him starting again somewhere else. Susan was decent company when Connor was hanging around and Logan was jamming the family and the company together again, but she’d claimed a migraine and Connor had managed to take one of the two sleeping berths for the two of them for the duration, no hope of distraction there.
If she had a Roy on a string, Gerri thought, she’d probably get him to do the same thing to escape this scene, she thought, but then she probably would have the very legitimate headache, too.

She buried herself in her laptop for a few hours, catching up on work she would normally have passed off and reviewing upcoming filings to the point of numbing minutiae. Then she paced down the plane to freshen up and stretch her legs, and snoop in the other lounges. She paused outside the door to the little den where Baird and the rest were ensconced, reassuring herself that they weren’t brewing up trouble, wondering if she should make an effort to blend into the boys club or if her presence would make them, would make Baird fractious and contrary.
Baird had been more and more irritated with her these last couple weeks.

Something about the combination of his startlement with his own grief for his old friend and tormentor, being called back in in such an amorphous and temporary way to try and manage Kendall’s bovine, slow intractability and bumbling, and her own unmoved business – showing him how much more important her time was than his to the company these days – had made him twitchy and ready to snap. For years their partnership had been a quiet, settled thing, Gerri knowing how to meet each of his moods and keep them ticking over smoothly, but he’d been wound up the wrong way lately. Maybe even since before Logan, though that had forced things to the surface. Nothing she said or did seemed to be the right thing, and while Baird wasn’t a loud man or prone to fits of temper, his passive aggression and his muttered, biting volleys responding to anything she said to try and smooth things over in recent days were already getting on her nerves.
Behind the smooth wood of the door she heard only male laughter, a little subdued, not shouting or worrying quiet – schemes almost always sounded like too much quiet behind a significant door, she knew – so she moved on. The other lounge was where the other Waystar staff brought along with the family were camped out, in row seats more like a commercial jet, and Gerri would have been happy enough to sacrifice the comfort to stay out of the middle of an argument between the siblings, but with Logan gone, Connor hiding with his girlfriend in one berth and Marcia on her own in the other, Baird and Frank and the old guard in Logan’s den, she didn’t know or trust what decisions Ken could be goaded into by the other two for the future of the company. Gerri paced back to the big, comfortable lounge with the Roys, guided by the old combination of dread and fatal curiosity.

When she stepped back through the doorway, she walked into chaos. Rava brushed by her as she came in, carrying a worried, teary looking Sophie wrapped in her comfort blanket while Rava told her that they were just going to visit her grandma for a bit – Gerri wondered how well that would last, Marcia playing step-grandma to Ken’s kids on the strength of a 3 and a half year relationship, but that was a future concern.

The concern of the moment was Roman and Shiv fighting like vicious school children, wrestling and kicking and trying to smash each other into immovable objects like walls and furniture while snarling insults at each other. Kendal was shouting, telling them to stop, calling them morons and animals, blaming them for not being able to stand together long enough to even get them through the funeral. Shiv’s boyfriend Nate was standing in the corner, clutching his drink and nervously calling Shiv’s name as if he could coax her out of it, but she didn’t hear or acknowledge him.

There was a crash as Shiv got Roman’s legs out from under him and he went down against the coffee table, thankfully against a bentwood rounded corner and he flailed Gerr’s abandoned coffee cup and saucer onto the floor with a smash. Roman made an animal sound of genuine pain, a half swallowed yelp. Shiv didn’t seem to expect the fight to end just because she’d made him squeal, as Gerri might have expected, but seemed intent on pressing her advantage, face red and blotched with tears, anger and exertion, long, messy ponytail flopping over her shoulder.

“You’re such a fucking weasel,” she was shouted, “you should have stayed over in you little LA wankpad, keeping your perverted little non-feelings and your sicko insinuations to yourself, none of us wanted you here.”

Roman tried to curl in on himself to protect his face from the clumsy, open handed blows that Shiv was trying to aim at his head. It would have been funny, the drunken reality star slap-fight antics of the spoiled rich, but Shiv’s face was wet and furious, and Roman’s flinching was all too real. Gerri felt a sinking in her stomach at the sight, the Roy’s and their violence. “Shiv, Shiv, I didn’t mean it, come on, fuck off, let me up,” Roman was saying, trying to catch her hands and getting scratched in the process, “I will bite you if you don’t get off me, you bitch, I will, you know it,” he threatened in a raw voice.

Gerri stepped forward before she’d processed that she meant to intervene. “Siobhan, this is not helpful,” she said, smooth and calm and stern, the way she might have spoken to Stella when she bullied Jules when they were younger, “There may be cameras when we arrive, either at the airfield or at the castle, and almost certainly at the funeral. Bloodied and bruised is not the image we would like to present.”

Shiv looked up sharply, noticing Gerri for the first time, and then down at her brother, and then up again, hearing Nate calling to her, as if waking up. She took a gasping breath, a half sob and then wiped the back of her hand roughly across her face, gathering herself and clambered awkwardly up, shrugging off Nate’s hand as he came around to help her. “You dogshit asshole,” she hissed at Roman and kicked his shin lightly, but it was pantomime, the fight gone out of her with a breathless blankness settling in its wake.

Roman slowly sat up, and then grunted again with muffled discomfort as he braced himself to get his feet under him. “I think you broke my fucking wrist,” he muttered. He paused in a low crouch against the edge of the coffee table that had tried to take him out looking whey-faced and ill, a faint reddening scratch under his lip and a little mark on his cheek where he must have hit the table, and damp hair flopping over his forehead. It was disgraceful, it was pathetic and juvenile. She should have been disgusted with both of them. She took another step towards Roman, unable to look away from his forlorn slump. She said his name, softly, checking to see if he was still aware of his surroundings, maybe. Roman looked up and met her gaze with eyes that were dark, fathomless and bleak – too old and too sad, something in her seized or snapped – for a heavy second before he lurched upright and marched out on stiff, unsteady legs.

How much had he drunk, she wondered, she hadn’t been tracking but it hadn’t seemed much, or were there more sedatives? She didn’t think it was that either, there was no laxity to him for all that he looked half dead on his feet. Whatever state that was, she didn’t like to see it. Gerri looked between Kendall, who had retreated to a chair in the corner and was settling headphones on his ears, and Nate and Shiv who had settled on the sofa, Nate’s arm looped around Shiv’s shoulders, already in their own little world. Gerri sighed to herself but not with any real surprise.

As she followed Roman down the plane, she asked herself why she was getting involved. Logan was dead and Kendall wasn’t likely to let Roman back into the company with much real power and Frank and Baird were the ones with their hands on the regency. There was even less reason than before to get in the middle of the Roy personal strife. But those terrible, sad eyes had cut her, plucked at some rare chord within her, not usually found, that made her want to reach out and soothe.

She stopped a steward and asked for some ice, in a bag if possible, and a tea towel, and when she was thus supplied, she tracked Roman down to the executive bathroom mid way down the plane, between the two lounges and opposite the wet bar station with a cramped seating area for staff in case of a need to belt in. A conveniently low traffic to wait Roman out inconspicuously. She leaned against the cabinet edge for a minute, asking herself why she wasn’t taking her laptop back to an out of the way seat in the staff side lounge and keeping her nose out of it, as she should. Then she tapped lightly on the bathroom door, listening for any response from within. Dead silence, sparking a note of worry and a hope that she wasn’t knocking on a door with no one behind it, if she’d missed him somehow.

“Roman,” she said softly, her voice pitched low so it wouldn’t carry, tapping again, “You’re in there aren’t you? I have ice for your wrist.”

The door opened and Roman emerged wordlessly and careful. He was carrying his jacket instead of holding it now, and his oxford shirt was half unbuttoned, revealing his brightly white undershirt, both damp around the neck. His face was flushed now instead of grimly pale, and glistened with water, the crest of his bangs pushed wetly back from his face. Had he been sick or had he been crying, she wondered, or had he simply been scrubbing himself at the sink and god knew what for the last ten minutes, trying to hide away after the altercation. His eyes looked clearer and more present, at least.

Instead of handing over the improvised ice pack as Gerri had intended, she took the jacket from his hand and motioned him over to the crew seat, where Roman settled, surprisingly bidable. She lay his coat across his knees and put the bag of ice on it for the time being, and then took the smooth linen towel and wiped the water off of Roman’s still, receptive face with gentle, matter of fact strokes, only the slightest brush of her fingertips under his jaw to encourage him to tip his head up. The scratch by his mouth hadn’t bled and would fade easily enough. The bruise on his cheek was visible but not swollen, not too bad.

“That should conceal well enough,” Gerri said. She was still speaking softly, as if not to jar the quiet around them. “You’re not my shade though.” she was wrapping the ice in the towel now, though she didn’t step back – there was hardly room.

Roman huffed a tiny laugh and his eyes brightened slightly before he looked back down at his wrist. It did look perhaps a little swollen, compared to the other. He presented it so that she could wrap the ends of the towel around his arm, securing the ice in place, and lower his hand gently to the cradle of the coat in his lap.

“It’s not really broken, is it?” Gerri asked, suddenly concerned by the unsuppressable wince in Roman’s face as he settled back, leaning against the tiny seat and letting his head fall to the plane wall.

“No, don’t worry, I won’t need to go out and get plastered,” he grinned darkly from under his lashes.

“You’d know the difference?” she prodded, ignoring the pun.

“Yes,” he said simply and gave a one shouldered shrug, eyes falling closed. “I just fell on it. Hurts like a bitch. My fault, mostly. Guess I forgot how to fall. And that Shiv fights dirty as fuck, pointy shoes and jabby fingernails.”

“What did you say to her anyway?” Gerri was watching his face shift while Roman couldn’t see her watching. Her shins were just about brushing his knees.

“What makes you think it was me? She could have jumped me all on her own.”

“Roman.” It was a gentle warning.

He shrugged again, a frown pinching his brow. Roman glanced at her face briefly, assessing. Seeing if she was still listening sympathetically, she guessed, and yet she felt unaccountably caught out when Roman inadvertently met her intent gaze. She shifted slightly but brazened him out, not wanting to retreat from the confessional mood.

“She was doing her little girl, crocodile tears, poor me thing, the baby Pinkie act, you know, for Nate. Right next to me, and I said— some things.”

“Oh yeah?”

“About Pop, not seeing her cry to give her a pat on the head and a lollipop and letting her sit on his lap anymore,” he winced again, either in remembrance or bracing himself for chastisement, “I know it was shitty! I didn’t mean it as perverted as she took it, though. Maybe I did, fuck, what does it matter, she knows she does this cutesy big wet eyes shit to get everyone to dote on her.”

“It’s a sad time, Roman. It could have been genuine sentiment and turning to her boyfriend to comfort her.”

“You really think Shiv would show her tender underbelly when any of us were around?” he asked dismissively, and Gerri was torn between telling Roman off for his inappropriate behavior and awareness that Shiv could be exactly as manipulative as he said. “I didn’t think she’d just go full wildcat on me in front of Nate either.”

“It sounds like you hurt her, Roman. Not that she should attack you in the middle of an airplane full of family and staff, but clearly emotions are running high. Shiv’s as upset as you are by the circumstances.”

“Maybe.”

“You should apologize to her, Roman,” she suggested, “If you didn’t mean to hurt her.”

Roman scoffed, and fiddled uncomfortably with his ice. “Come on, you know Shiv doesn’t accept that shit. If you try to apologize nicely like a straightforward human being, she thinks you’re needling her again. Like it’s a ploy.”

“Well. Show her a little more consideration indirectly then, try to show her you take her feelings seriously.”

“Shiv takes sincerity and feelings and nicey hand holding from us as an opening to ridicule. She can’t get away fast enough if I try to ask her how she’s actually doing.”

Gerri rolled her eyes and sighed at the impossible Roy sibling dynamics, knowing that Roman was right, the way Logan had trained them up around scorning sentiment, keeping them from showing weakness but instead to bite and snarl.

“Okay, then beat each other up again, I guess,” she said in sarcastic frustration, “But wait until after the funeral and the wake and anything else this weekend that involves public scrutiny, all right?”

Roman laughed drily and nodded. “I will if she will,” he hedged, but not grudgingly. He sounded exhausted and he slouched down further, tipping his head back. His knee inadvertently bumped her leg and then twitched away. “It’s not fair though, that she gets to cry to mister progressive-misogynist back there, while I–” he trailed off and rolled his head away slightly, protectively. His words were thick and loose with drowsiness.

She hummed the quietest noise of question, while wondering if he was falling asleep where he sat and if she should slip away unobtrusively, draw the scene to a close and not disturb him. Roman looked up at her instead, the seeking urgency there holding her in place.

“I mean it’s weird, right?” Roman asked, faux casual, “Like, I’ve done not being able to keep food down, check, panic attacks, check, sedatives, therapist appointments, make your siblings hate your guts, check, but not crying for him since it happened. That’s fucked up, right?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s more normal than people think.”

“Maybe he’d think it was a good thing. Shows I finally grew up,” he said, low and bitter.

Gerri pushed resolutely past a wash of anger at the dead man in question. He might have gone down with his plane but he’d left his children just as bent and shattered as the wreckage and he’d done it thinking he was fitting them for greatness, or for adoring him – as if those things were the same, but of course in Logan’s mind they were. Gerri shuffled past Roman’s legs and perched carefully on the other crew seat beside him, committing herself further to an interlude that sense said she shouldn’t have started.

“It was very sudden,” she said carefully, thinking through how the news must have come to Roman, out of favor with the inner circle and marooned in LA, in constant, sniping fights with Logan and Frank about where he was allowed to put money and energy but not quite able to drum up the will to force the studios in a direction he wanted in open defiance of his father. Still hoping that if he obeyed well enough he might earn a better spot at the table. Logan enjoyed when his children obeyed him, but at the same time complained to his real advisors about their lack of guts or original thinking. Roman couldn’t have won that balancing act without even being in the room. Gerri didn’t even know what had happened between Logan and Roman to prompt him to send him to exile on the other coast, or how much they communicated recently. “You’ve been away for a while. It’s harder to realize, that they’re gone, if you’ve been gone for a while, too. But it sounds like you’re suffering enough to satisfy anyone that you’re grieving, Roman. Even yourself, I believe.”

“Are your parents alive, Gerri?” Roman asked, tired and blunt but totally earnest.

“No,” she said, unflinching. She’d had years and years to get used to this state of affairs. She hadn’t been close to them, they had been so involved in their own lives, their own deep interests and their peculiarly passionate little love story. Her father had died when she was just beginning at Waystar in a road accident – what business had a 59 year old academic had still tearing around the countryside on a motorcycle? But he had been the one more like her, a secret weakness for a thrill – and her mother not long after, largely through willful self neglect on top of already delicate health, not quite intentional self destruction but not quite not, either. It had been a difficult time, full of sadness and anger that they each hadn’t tried just a little bit harder to stick around for each other or for their children. “I was about your age when they passed, actually,” she realized aloud, surprised.
She had an image of Roman still of the immature boy prince he’d been, both of the working family vacations when he’d been home from school and during his first stint in the New York office, clueless and trying so hard he was falling over his own feet and was painful to look at. But he was clearly an adult sitting there beside her, though an unhappy and unprepared one, just beginning to enter the real meat of his adulthood and career, the way she had been, a time of bigger decisions and bigger losses.

“How did you get over it?” he asked, like he thought she could actually tell him something that would make him understand, “Not get over it, I get that that doesn’t happen. How did you… get to live with it, I guess. You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know, it just happened. It took time. There’s no timeline to getting through this kind of thing, Roman. I went to work. Logan kept everyone busy, especially back then. I got married. Living with it happened when I wasn’t looking.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Roman said, bluntly bleak.

But you have to, Gerri thought with a cold catch in her breath, you have to see he wasn’t worth throwing yourself away over. If she had been a more tender kind of person, or a caring auntie and godparent to the kids when they were young in more than name, she would have taken his free hand in hers until he promised. Instead she cleared her throat and fiddled with the edge of the soft, draped sweater she’d wrapped around her for the flight, seeking some of her usual equilibrium. “What worked for me probably isn’t what works for you. I lived a life much more separate from who my parents were than you have from Logan,” she said, summing it up with laughable simplicity, “I’m not good at this kind of advice. Corporate strategy, yes, the big life things… I don’t know, Roman.”

“You’re honest, at least, blunt but honest. That’s better than some bullshit,” said Roman with a sad, weary smile that she could only glance at. It was worrying, how much he trusted her and how much he was willing to connect with her on the strength of so little. In his position, no one could have convinced her to pry herself open to show such vulnerability, no one had, in fact, in years. She wanted to warn him off somehow, tell him to shore himself up, that no one around here was to be trusted, but it seemed too cruel, and anyway she had waded this far in already. She took a slow, steadying breath.

“Well, believe this then. I do think you’re a lot stronger than you seem to think. Also, every other fucker in this family and this company is too wrapped up in their own feelings and their own disasters to even notice if you’re performing your stages of grief right. So don’t think about them. Think about you and keeping yourself together.”

“That include you in the count of the self-involved?” Roman prodded, absorbing what she’d said, seeming skeptical but considering.

“It should,” Gerri said wryly, “But I think we’re already a little past that, do you? Someone’s got to worry about you, it seems. I’ll be around. Though you’ve already heard the best of my interpersonal advice, so manage your expectations.”

“Sure,” he said, looking pleased. “Who would have guessed, huh, stone cold business bitch has a soft spot for sad, pathetic little monster boys. Watch out, next thing you know you’ll be stopping on the way home to save kittens from a soggy cardboard box on the street.” He beamed at her slyly, and gestured enough that the ice on his wrist shifted and started to fall away until he reverted to holding it in place.

“How long has that been on there now?” she asked, watching him, “You don’t want to give yourself frostbite, just get the swelling down.”

“I know, I know, this isn’t Roman’s first rodeo injury. It’s melting quickly anyway. I just want to get it nice and numb before I go rooting around for the advil in my bag.”
“Do you want me to stay and sit with you?”

“No… I’m good here on my own. Don’t want Ken to catch us looking like we’re treasonously scheming, right?” it was the ghost of his usual bantering tone, but it was also the truth and she knew it.

She couldn’t be seen huddling in corners with Roman at this particular juncture, no matter how innocent the reason. She gave him a rueful nod and stood. “Right. Of course.”

Roman reached up with his good arm to steady her elbow lightly as she stepped over his feet into the corridor. She studied him for another moment, reluctant to depart and leave him alone with his thoughts, and also unsettled enough that she didn’t want to step back in with her colleagues. Roman had settled back against the wall with his eyes closed again, no longer focused on her but inwardly, and probably needed his own moment alone to clear his head.

She pulled the drape of her cardigan closer around her and tucked in the tendrils of hair that had escaped the low knot she wore, distancing herself from the stirred silt of her emotions, and stepped back into the reality of the rest of the plane.


*


Ewan came to the castle after all, with all his closed-mouthed enigma and hypocrisy and dragging his gangling grandson with him. So did Caroline, appearing on the morning of the service, apparently be photographed with the kids, show the real widow she was magnanimous, and agitate her offspring even more deeply in a time already unsettled. Gerri would suspect she did it in order to make them draw close to her for comfort, but the woman had never seemed to have the patience or interest in comforting them, especially once they were grown.
The castle was just as she remembered it from retreats arranged by Logan over the years, huge and ancient, nestled among Scottish hills. The November sky was low and iron blue-grey, soft with mist that threatened to condense to rain in the cold. The cars left them in the grand front entrance, the whole entourage trickling into the hall, lingering, exchanging glances and slow to exchange the biting cold of the countryside for the grand, dim chill of the castle.

Gerri had the sense that they were all waiting for Logan to make his entrance, booming and chivying them and brightly haranguing them on their way to their first dinner-business ordeal. A cloying quiet hung over the crowd, a careful furtiveness as if they were all avoiding Logan’s temper swinging in their direction for the crime of carrying on with life and business without him. He wasn’t going to sweep in, though, and no one seemed ready to step in and spearhead the group in his absence. Gerri thought that maybe she should wait around and see if Kendall would have something organized, or what Baird intended to do with his evening, but she was drained by the events of the plane and unwilling to get dragged into the next Roy drama of the night so she went up on her own when she got their room assignment.

Dinner was arranged to be taken in the great hall, but much of the family failed to turn up, staying in their rooms with a silence that wasn’t so much decorous as the ominous calm before a storm. There was no sign of Roman. Gerri tried not to feel concerned, had considered how gravely inappropriate it would be to seek him out again, just to see, just to be sure, just to bring him another ice pack maybe – and tuck him into bed, too? She asked herself with derision.

Perhaps he reminded her very slightly of her younger brother, she rationalized, though Kit had been fair haired, smiling and charismatic with a serene way about him that Gerri had always envied. Her calm was cultivated and his had been innate, at least when he was young. It had been so long now since she had seen Kit, or heard from him, perhaps he had left his mona lisa smiles and his gentle certainties behind by now and joined her in the world of minute rages and impatience and middle aged doubts – he would be 44 now, something she couldn’t picture beside her memory of him as a college boy – but that wasn’t how she remembered him. She didn’t think there was much resemblance between Kit and Roman, save for the secret melancholy behind the eyes, but maybe that was enough to strike a chord and call up old habits. Enough of an excuse.

Baird sent her up to bed without him, choosing again to linger with the cronies, this time with Kendall in the mix. She hesitated, looking between Baird and Karl and Frank as they grouped together with plans to head to the billiard room after Ken, wondering if she should persuade him to come join her for an early night, not the physical kind but the even rarer kind of a solid night’s sleep in preparation for the next phase of the marathon. And what would adding Kendall do to the old boys club, would he corrupt them, or they him? Gerri refused to nag, not in front of the colleagues over which she had greater standing in the company than Baird did – his position was still unofficial – so she let them go.


*


The morning of the funeral dawned with sickly white sun glowing limply through a sheet of clouds and wisps of fog in the dips and valleys of the grounds. Baird was sleeping soundly beside her, she must have missed when he came in. But her body was on New York time and felt that she had gone to sleep for a long nap in the middle of the evening and thus it was impossible to stay asleep the whole night through.

She’d awoken at 4 and laid still hoping to regain sleep until the sky behind the curtains had begun to lighten and then she’d given in moving to the sofa with her laptop – Baird was a heavy sleeper and wouldn’t stir unless she turned on all the lights or his cellphone rang – though there wasn’t at that moment much to do. She poked at a few proposals that Kendall had already refused to consider. She wrote an email to her daughters to update them on the procession of dull events they were missing out on by not accompanying their parents to Scotland for thanksgiving break.

She got dressed, not in funerary formality for the eight am breakfast crowd but still with care, trim black slacks, a soft charcoal turtleneck and an indigo cardigan buttoned up against the damp chill, smoothed her hair down from its clip, and embraced the brightwire glimmer of exhaustion and adrenaline calling her ahead into the day.

She took a table by the windows, a legal pad folio open on the place setting beside her to signal her intent to eat alone while focused on sham busywork, an impenetrable shield most of the time. Most of the Waystar compliment was there already, breakfasting and having a subdued gossip. Of the Roys, she only saw Shiv, sitting in a far corner with her boyfriend, looking understandably subdued and distant while Nate tried in vain to offer her treats from the buffet. Shiv’s eyes and nose were red and she wore a huge sweater and jeans, and looked more like a distraught college kid than a polished operative this morning and Gerri felt a pang of real sympathy for her. Before too long, Shiv gave up and drifted out, Nate trailing worriedly after her. Roman was right about that, at least, while she didn’t think Shiv was enlarging her distress for her audience, Shiv certainly had that boy wrapped around her finger.

Rava was there, too, looking a little lost and cornered by Ewan and his grandson Greg, who apparently wanted to make an impression on his nephew’s family. She had Sophie with her in a booster seat, held in place by the need to finish feeding her 3 year old so that she had to hold still for Ewan holding court and the rambling interjections from the gormless college boy.

Her husband might not have much use for her company on this trip, but a little solitude was much better than that, at least, Gerri thought.

“Yeah, that looks fucking morbid and grisly,” said Roman, appearing at her elbow, having snuck up on her in her abstraction.

She hummed a vague assent, aware that he’d voiced her thoughts but not sure that she wanted to invite conversation. Gerri watched from the corner of her eye as roman wiggled into the empty place beside her, barely pulling back the chair. She waited to see if he would jar the table but somehow he managed it neatly, keeping his elbows and knees mostly to himself. She should have brought more impedimenta, to demark more space for herself, she thought with an interior roll of her eyes.

Nevertheless it was a relief to see him, awake and aware and not sporting a blooming bruise across his cheek. Gerri looked again more closely and saw that his bruise and under his eyes had the kind of matte perfection that meant that he’d cadged some concealer off of somebody, or sent out a bellhop for it. “You’re looking much fresher this morning,” she said, hedging, almost a question.

“Yeah, Karolina fixed me up with some foundation and whatever earlier. We wear the same shade, I guess. We’re both Winters,” he gestured to his face, parody-preening for her with a wry glance, “I look fresh as a baby who got 10 hours of sleep, right?”

“Did you get 10 hours of sleep? You weren’t at dinner last night.”

Roman laughed as if she’d made a dark little joke. “Fuck off, never in my life. I think a full night’s sleep is a myth, anyway.”

“Probably,” Gerri agreed. She wanted to ask Roman how he was doing, but it was a profoundly stupid question in the circumstances and one likely to break the even mood he seemed to have found this morning.

“Eggs no good in this place?” asked Roman, looking at the plate in front of her that she’d fixed up and hardly eaten, eggs, mushrooms, wheat toast points and a tiny pot of raspberry jam, untouched.

“They’re perfectly fine. But according to New York time it’s 3am, and eggs and mushrooms are not 3am food.” The truth was, as often as not, that 3am food was a bowl of cold breakfast cereal, but she wouldn’t be caught dead eating such middle class slob food among her colleagues and in any case her jetlagged appetite wasn’t up to much.

“No? Sometimes salty, fluffy scrambled eggs are perfect in the middle of the night,” protested Roman, “And supposedly the protein helps you sleep or something.”

Gerri picked up her plate and put it in front of Roman and pulled her notepad sheaf and her coffee cup over directly in front of her instead. Quick, casual movements as if this was an entirely normal and precedented gesture. “Dig in then, I don’t mind.”

“I don’t want your leftovers,” he scoffed pettishly, but then he sighed and picked up a clean table knife and the jam pot and set to fixing up the toast. “On the other hand, passing out at the graveside would be a cheap stunt and I’m a rich stunts only kind of guy so…” he dealt some toast triangles to himself, and some to her, setting them lightly on her notepad in a sprinkling of crumbs.

She looked up to scold him for getting her papers oily and messy only to catch Roman licking a daub of jam off of his finger in a distracted gesture that was casually obscene. The protest died unvoiced in an unexpected, unwanted spangle of warmth, of frictive curiosity. Don’t be idiotic, she snapped at herself, the boy is bereaved and lost, is looking for a friendly face, not flirting with you when he looks at you from under his lashes so darkly or sticks his fingers in his mouth in your presence. She cleared her throat and reached for her coffee.

“How’s the wrist today,” she asked. It was an emotionally less involved question than the ‘how are you holding up’ he likely heard underneath.


“Achey as fuck, thank you. But fine, doesn’t even need a big brace to shove in Shiv’s face.” It was Roman’s bantering voice but it sounded hollow today.

“I thought you wanted a truce with her,” Gerri reminded him drily.

“Sure. Yes. I did, do, whatever. But she’s just going to make it another thing where she’s the only one who, you know… Saint Siobhan, surrounded by all these idiots verus Pervert Roman who belongs in the dog pound, always and forever and shit.”

“You said you were the one trying to pick a fight, Roman. You know how she is,” said Gerri, not willing to put up with too much self pity from a grown adult who willingly poked a hornets nest at the worst possible moment, “But I agree, she shouldn’t have physically attacked you. I thought she’d grown out of that.”

Roman huffed and wiped his fingers fastidiously on his napkin. The toast points had disappeared in record time. “I don’t think Shiv will ever grow out of that.”

“Maybe not the impulse,” she acknowledged, “but the impulse isn’t the choice to follow through.”

“Gerri, you have actually met us, right? Impulse control is not like, a thing for this family,” he gestured at himself and then flapped a hand at the rest of the room, indicating where Ewan was still holding forth to his grandson and Kendall’s bride, “Even fucking Uncle Ewan’s impulse to see pop lowered into the ground overcame his thing about flying and his not wanting the rest of us to contaminate him.”

“Right. How could I forget,” Gerri said drily, realizing that of course he was right. Shiv had seemed so much more like an average person from the outside world the last few times she’d seen her before Logan’s death, not really average of course, but for given values of the monied and ambitious working on image in moderate politics. Gerri had had the impression that somehow her goddaughter had met escape velocity and made it out of the Roy event horizon, but she’d also seen in recent days that all that compressed anger and petulance was still there, simmering away. The way Roman spoke about them was unsettling though, somehow both carelessly accepting, and jaded, as if he’d already, at twenty-seven, been worn out by a hundred years of battering constants of tempers and implacability.

“Anyway,” said Roman in a softer voice, with a shrug and a solemn look down at his hands in his lap. “Dad liked that she was a fighter, so.”

Gerri was uncharacteristically lost for how to respond to that, sure that there was nothing to say but wanting to reassure him in some small way that Logan had — had what, valued the scrabbling and flailing for paternal approval he’d displayed, too earnest and unguided and twistedly vulnerable, baring his belly for Logan’s barbs, so much that he’d sent Roman away to the opposite coast? Gerri might have been distracted by her early days of transition to full GC in the wake of Baird’s retirement, but she’d still been close enough to see it all unfold in front of her decorously averted gaze. It occurred to her for the first time that perhaps she could have said something, quiet words, gentle planting of the idea that Kendall’s temperament still hadn’t settled out and that Roman was quicker and more aware than he seemed, that he might surprise them if he was given some guidance instead of being dropped in the deep end and scolded for not being able to swim. It left a sticky feeling of something at the back of her throat, verboten sympathy or regret.

She was saved from having to find a way to express or avoid any of this by a change in the atmosphere of the breakfast room, like a heavy cloud sliding over the sun. And indeed more of the deep gray November rain did seem to be rolling in to darken the high windows, but the shift wasn’t that. She looked up to see the direction of Roman’s sudden, tense, stare, and saw Caroline Colingwood make her entrance to the breakfast room, giving instructions to a uniformed member of castle staff and followed by a tall, rawboned man of appropriate age who looked bored and vaguely embarrassed.

Caroline was dressed in her funeral clothes already, a narrow black cashmere coat with a dark pine green silk scarf looped artfully around her neck, the way ladies above a certain age so often do, over a dress of black crepe, maybe a little too young for her in style but tastefully old-fashioned, and opaque black stockings on the skinny coltish legs that Gerri had at one point in the rosy, powdered, Chanel silhouette favoring early nineties intensely envied. Gerri thought now, as Caroline approached, that she looked older than her 62 years, in spite of her firm vigor and her lady of the house tailoring and her still-spare figure. But then seventeen years of marriage to Logan Roy likely did that to a woman. Gerri wouldn’t have wished it on anyone, even on Caroline.

“I didn’t know she was going to be here,” said Roman in a tiny, almost protesting voice beside her. But then he rose and smiled, an anxious, boyish and for once genuine expression, and stepped forward to greet his mother.

He ducked into a hug, holding on without reserve and stooping to bury his face in her scarf for just a moment while Caroline patted Roman’s glossy head and his shoulder, as if she were greeting a boy of six home from day school instead of consoling a young man who had recently lost his father. Gerri looked away, but wondered how much better she would do, if she was called to comfort the girls, if she could manage to be any more natural with them. Caroline took his hands in hers as she pulled away at least, in what seemed to be a genuine gesture, murmuring condolences and telling him how well he looked to be holding up, before automatically smoothing the fall of her coat. She thought Roman might lead Caroline away so they could talk as family, but he lingered beside the small table, leaving Gerri in range of Caroline’s scrutiny.

Caroline pulled out a chair opposite, and motioned the tall man down beside her. She arrived in a waft of rich, woody iris perfume and faint cigarette smoke – Gerri remembered how much Caroline had struggled to quit in the early 90s with the rest of their tenuous circle, and had then pretended she’d never tried, though she’d given up the rest of the party excesses as far as she knew, unlike her eldest son – and an aura of carefully posed concern. She wondered how much Roman saw through it to the awkwardness underneath and the sparkle in Caroline’s eyes that made it clear that deep down she was enjoying causing a stir.

Well, Logan had been a difficult, and at length cruel husband to her, Gerri didn’t see that there was anything wrong, in full and final judgment, with her trying to upstage him at his own funeral. Marcia would likely have a different opinion about that, though, and would have to be warned about Caroline’s arrival. The woman had lost her husband, and had to cope with finding out that Logan’s attention had already strayed from their short marriage. Gerri had never known just what kind of arrangement or what kind of sentiment existed between Marcia and Logan, but she had been genuinely distraught in the wake of the crash and wouldn't like to be forced to share her role as widow on top of all the rest.

“Why, Gerri Kellman, I haven’t seen you in well, I don’t know. It must have been Kendall’s wedding, hmm? And Logan turned that into a working event, too, as I recall. Though I can’t imagine that my sons have turned this into a working funeral, have they?”

“No, no, of course not. No more than absolutely necessary,” Gerri cleared the crumbs from her notepad and shut her folio with smooth, unhurried movements to show that she hadn’t accepted Caroline’s unsubtle accusation that she was a worker-bee hanger on. Caroline had long ago thought that Logan had held some kind of base infatuation with Gerri back in the early days of mixing with the inner circle on Baird’s arm, had hinted about Logan’s covetous ways and the double edged sword of his attentions, pally, girl to girl warnings with the undertone of resentment lingering in Caroline’s clenched-teeth smiles, and it seemed that Caroline’s impression that Gerri was horning in somewhere inappropriate had survived any attachment she might have had to Logan. “My husband was always close with Logan, if you remember.”

“Oh, yes, Baird, Thomas Cromwell to Logan’s Henry VIII, though I hear your husband has always managed to keep his head. An accomplishment with that lot, I’m sure,” Caroline said, waving away her earlier accusation with a gracefully dismissive gesture and a polite smile before turning back to her son. “Romey, I don’t believe you’ve met William, have you,” she nodded to the tall man who had come in with her, “William Haverford, my son Roman. Not the youngest of my three, but still somehow the baby of the family, isn’t that right, Ro-ro.”

Roman shifted in his chair, a brief, tight smile of frustration at being framed as a kid to his mother’s newest boyfriend but then apparently gathered himself to lean into the role. He put on his best big-eyed waifish imp look and gave a finger-wiggle wave to William, who nodded stoically. “Of course, Mommy,” he simpered slyly, “That’s me. Not ‘cause of like, being emotionally stunted by my upbringing or anything, though, it’s ‘cause I’m so damn pocket sized and adorable.”

Gerri rolled her eyes internally and wondered how just a few minutes ago she’d been stuck by Roman as a lovely young man with old-soul eyes who seemed mature beyond his years when here he was acting the adolescent terror again. Of course, there was that old truism about men reverting to children around their mothers, but the glee with which he lept to making the outsider squirm behind his phlegmatic stoicism outstripped even that. A good reminder of who she was dealing with, she thought. She also knew that her presence at the table – no matter that the spot and the breakfast was hers originally – was no longer appropriate and prepared to make her unobtrusive retreat.

Caroline smiled and smiled as if she couldn’t hear the barb, or perhaps assumed it was about Logan, and agreed that he was adorable and started talking about how William raised thoroughbreds. She was saying how she just knew Roman would love to come take a ride if the occasion wasn’t so inappropriate and the weather so miserable, that Will’s place was just the teeniest plane ride away, when Gerri made her exit. She could feel Roman’s gaze following her, was certain he was watching her go, though whether with envy or with– she refused to name to herself with what else he might be watching her with such heavy attention, and refused also to look back and check.

Baird was dressing when she got back to the room. He must have slept late, though he’d never been much bothered by jetlag. The boys must have made a late night of it after she went up, but as ever he showed no sign of headache or hangover. He’d pushed back all the drapes and the huge, ornate room was bathed in the thin, piercing, color-stripping sunlight that came in low and wintery through endless clouds.

He was looking weary, and a bit jowly, she thought, watching him methodically put in his cufflinks before the glass on the dressing table. He always pouted and pushed his lips in and out as he did up his cufflinks and tie, and always doubted her when she told him he did so. She’d found it endearing, at first, and had offered repeatedly to do it for him to save the laborious fiddling, but he’d always shrugged her off, and told her it wasn’t like her to hover and dote like that, that he could do it just fine, thanks. She hadn’t offered in years. Baird was independent and proud of his appearance, though his taste was desperately traditional.

His measured fussing grated on her nerves today, as it had recently. Get on with it, she wanted to snap, and felt guilty about it because there really was no hurry. They had an hour yet before they had to leave for the service, and maybe it was the reason for their trip and her diffuse embarrassment at the direction her interest had wandered for a few ludacris moments that had flayed her nerves, not Baird’s molasses slow predictability.

“You must have gotten in late last night,” she said, watching him, in lieu of morning salutations. They’d never gone in for the ‘good morning, sweetie,’ begin the day with a kiss and a smile tv husband and wife schtick.

“Late enough. Been down and eaten already?” he asked, “What’s it like down there, the family got their public face on yet?”

“Caroline showed up,” Gerri reported, curtailing the urge to pace with impatience. She collected her phone along with her funeral dress to get changed. “I need to call Karolina, make sure she’s heard.”

“That woman…” Baird sighed and shrugged on his jacket. “I guess we should have known she’d try to get in the mix. I hope she knows that whatever Logan did or didn’t arrange for her in the estate, it’s too late to change it now.”

“I don’t think she’s here about the estate,” she said, thinking they’d be better off if she was after something so straightforward as a will dispute.

Gerri thought that Caroline was here to remind her children that they still had one parent, and maybe on some level she meant that sincerely, but Gerri also thought that she was here to remind them that with Logan no longer around to be fed all their attention, they were finally free to feed her attention, too. And Roman at least would, for as long as Caroline’s attention held, or for as long as it took for one of the kids to force a difficult conversation and then she would cut them off all over again. Gerri had observed the pattern enough times over the years, emotionally uninvolved and no longer surprised that the three of them didn’t see through it, but this morning it seemed freshly and starkly appalling.

If she said any of this to Baird, he would say, you’re probably right, but why do you care, for which she had no appropriate answer. “I’m going to get changed,” she said instead, “Oh, and can you check if the concierge can get us umbrellas? I think it’s going to rain.”


**