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The Last Romantics
Tara Conklin
Sweeping and epic, The Last Romantics is an unforgettable portrait of one perfectly imperfect family – the Skinner siblings – and how the consequences of one fateful summer will change their lives forever.The stunning new novel from the New York Times bestselling author, Tara Conklin.Meet the Skinner siblings: fierce Renée, dreamy Caroline, golden boy Joe and watchful Fiona.Their story begins with the sudden death of their father and a period known as The Pause; one free and feral summer spent at the neighbourhood pond, which will bind the Skinners tightly together, and irrevocably shape the course of their lives.Two decades later, the adult siblings have scattered. But tragedy will draw them back together once again. They’ll be forced to question the life choices they’ve made and ask what, exactly, they will do for love.Beautifully told with warmth and heartbreak, The Last Romantics is a compelling story about family, the ways in which four siblings grow together & apart, the thousand little ways in which they can betray one another – but also how they’ll always find home.
Copyright (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Tara Conklin 2019
From Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf
Published by Hogarth Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 1985
Excerpt of three lines from “The Applicant” from Ariel by Sylvia Plath.
Copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
‘Maps’: Words and Music by Karen Orzolek, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase
Copyright © 2003 Chrysalis Music Ltd.
All Right Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved; Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Cover design by Ploy Siripant © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration by Joel Holland
Tara Conklin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008323349
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008323356
Version: 2019-01-12
Dedication (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Dedicated to the memory of Luella Briody Conklin
and Kenneth Jerome Conklin
For my sisters
Epigraph (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
—Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.
—Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Contents
Cover (#ucaed2190-013d-5d2a-a71c-47c45141c07e)
Title Page (#u210cb9cf-ca70-5f52-9018-ba95f958a8ea)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Year 2079
Part I: Bexley (#u21d5ef27-8f6d-5275-9cab-69d43ca35a38)
Chapter 1 (#u95589c2b-5aa1-55e1-972c-869c4115c013)
Chapter 2 (#u5c9480ba-36c0-573f-931c-81d11f367b64)
Chapter 3 (#u7d0f8f5e-63a9-55f8-98d4-efc528813ea9)
Chapter 4 (#u838c3111-dd28-5914-aee9-41953b198acf)
Part II: New York City (#u31bff54a-f2c8-5e36-a986-2974762cab02)
Year 2079 (#ub294129c-5af1-5191-a862-f9cf688185f8)
Chapter 5 (#u7f0d31e1-094c-5058-b1b8-671966cd9829)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III: Miami (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: After (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Tara Conklin (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Year 2079 (#ub3db7a4d-c5c5-561a-86be-2d37a64f8379)
AT FIRST I believed the girl to be an apparition. A ghost. She rose from the crowd in the auditorium and walked to the microphone.
I remained very still. For the past ninety minutes, I had been seated onstage to discuss my body of work. As much as I dread large crowds, the event had been a success. The audience was respectful, intelligent, curious. I’d even made them laugh. That joke about the frog, of all things. We heard the sirens only once, a brief wail during which I paused my reading. We all waited, the thousand here in the auditorium and the thousands more watching via satellite and DTR. We waited, and then the sirens quieted, and I resumed with my poem.
Afterward the questions. So many questions! My first public event in twenty-five years—of course there would be questions, but I was not prepared for the intensity, the thoroughness with which these people had read my work. It still surprises me now, eighty years into this literary experiment, that my words might mean something to anyone other than myself.
I am 102 years old and a poet of some renown. My name is Fiona Skinner.
When the girl stepped forward, my attention was elsewhere. My energy low. I wondered what snack Henry had waiting for me backstage and hoped it was the candy with the peanut butter in the center, my favorite. My thoughts fixed on other comforts: the tall, soft bed in my house in the mountains; the river stocked with trout; the deep, cold well; the generator with its soothing hum. We never heard the sirens there, no, the nearest town was too far. It was a safe place, our house, a place beyond the reach of politics and rising oceans. At least that’s what I chose to believe. It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.
The girl at the microphone was an arresting sight: slender and tall, a dark bob cut short and sharp to her chin. She looked eighteen, perhaps twenty years old. Not a girl, then, nearly a woman.
The crowd was silent. She coughed into her hand. “Ms. Skinner,” she began. “My name is Luna.”
“Luna?” I said, and my voice caught, my breath stilled. For a moment I traveled back all those years to a different place and time. At last, I thought. Luna has returned.
“Yes. My mother named me after the last line of The Love Poem,” she said.
“Oh, of course.” I smiled. Henry had told me about this, the popularity of the name. The Love Poem had that effect on some readers. They wanted to keep a piece of it. And here was one of those babies, now grown, standing before me. Another Luna.
The girl’s face was half in shadow. I saw a mole high on her right cheek. About the size of a dime. A birthmark. A dark kiss.
“My mother always wanted to ask you about the name,” Luna continued. “She’d memorized the last pages at school. When my brother and I were little, she’d recite them at dinner if we were feeling down.” Her face became soft with the memory. “The Love Poem meant so much to her. I want to know, for my mother. Who was your inspiration? Who was Luna?”
The auditorium went still. Onstage the lights had become hot, but a cold spread through me, ice flooding my veins. I shivered. A sweat rose along my hairline. It was a question I’d always refused to answer publicly. And privately; even Henry didn’t know the truth. But of course I should have expected it tonight. Isn’t that why I’d agreed to speak one last time? Isn’t that why I was here? To finally tell this story.
An old regret lodged in my throat, blocking my voice. I coughed.
“Luna is the Spanish word for moon, of course,” I said. “In the poem itself, there are many metaphors, many symbols that mean different things. I wrote it seventy-five years ago, my dear. Your mother, you, anyone here”—I waved my palm at the audience—“you know what the poem means more than I do now.”
The Luna standing before me shook her head in frustration. A lock of hair fell into her eyes, and she pushed it away. “No. I mean the real woman. My mother always said there was someone named Luna.”
I straightened my spine and heard the bones crack, a minor internal disruption. I wasn’t often put on the spot. At home I had a gardener, a personal assistant, a housekeeper, a cook. I lived with my second husband, Henry, but I ran the house and gave the orders. Some might say I’m imposing. I prefer to think of it as self-assured. This girl was also self-assured, I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the purse of her lips.
How to describe the first Luna? I met Luna Hernandez only once. On a night when the wind threw tree branches onto the road and leaves whirled in crazy circles. Decades ago, a lifetime ago. That Luna had grown and changed in my mind until I hardly saw her anymore. Were her eyes brown or gray? The mole, was it high on the right cheek or the left? Had it been remorse I saw on her face that night or merely dismissal?
“I wrote a poem about love,” I began, addressing the crowd. “But there are certain limitations. There are certain failings. I’ve always been wary of love, you see. Its promises are too dizzy, its reasons too vague, its origins murkier than mud.” Here I heard a chuckle from the audience. “Yes, mud!” I called in the direction of the laugh. “When I was young, I tried dissecting love, setting it up on a table with a good strong light and poking, prodding, slicing. For years I believed it possible to identify the crux, the core, and that once you found this essential element you might tend it like a rose and grow something beautiful. Back then I was a romantic. I didn’t understand that there’s no stopping betrayal. If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”
I paused.
“You’re not answering the question,” Luna said; her arms were now crossed against her chest, her chin down.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. “In these difficult times, stories are important. In a sense, stories are all we have to tell us about the future.”
Luna moved away from the microphone. She was listening intently, everyone was, shoulders pitched just slightly forward, curious and alert.
“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a father and a mother and four children, three girls and one boy. They lived together in a house like any other house, in a town like many other towns, and for a time they were happy.” I paused, and all those faces in the auditorium stared down on me, all those eyes. “And then—” I stopped again, faltering. I sipped my glass of water. “And then there was the Pause. Everything started there. Our mother didn’t mean for it to happen, she didn’t, but this is a story about the failures of love, and the Pause was the first.”
PART I (#ulink_028d1112-3e63-5d31-b4c9-192a104fa2b6)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_4444ca04-eeaa-52cb-960c-6ab82ba34176)
