The USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids returns with a tale of two generations of women reconciling family secrets and past regrets. Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Barbara O’Neal’s Write My Name Across The Sky, which releases on August 10th 2021!
Life’s beautiful for seventysomething influencer Gloria Rose, in her Upper West Side loft with rooftop garden and scores of Instagram followers—until she gets word that her old flame has been arrested for art theft and forgery, and, knowing her own involvement in his misdeeds decades earlier, decides to flee. But that plan is complicated when the nieces she raised are thrown into crises of their own.
Willow, overshadowed by her notorious singer-songwriter mother, has come home to lick her wounds on the heels of a failed album and yet another disastrous relationship. Sam, prickly and fiercely independent, is on the verge of losing not only her beloved video game company but the man she loves, thanks to her inability to keep her always-simmering anger in check.
With the FBI closing in, Willow’s career in shambles, and Sam’s tribulations reaching a peak, each of the three woman will have to reckon with and reconcile their interwoven traumas, past loves, and the looming consequences that could either destroy their futures or bring them closer than ever.
Gloria
I am setting up a photo shoot when I hear the news that Isaak has been arrested. For a long moment, it doesn’t sink in. My body reacts ahead of my mind, warning me with a long ripple over my spine as I tweak the red shoes sitting beneath a Lady Slipper orchid in the soft green environment of the conservatory.
Then his name penetrates my brain. Isaak Margolis. I lift my head and look at the radio, as it if will show me his long-lost face. My heart pauses, as if bracing to be shattered all over again, then starts up again with a hard thud.
Isaak.
All these years I’ve been waiting for the other shoe. Now it falls like a meteor into my life, when I have finally relaxed into this rich, ordinary life filled with music and my Instagram photos and monthly luncheons at the Russian Tea Room with the dwindling numbers of former flight attendants I’ve known for more than 40 years.
I sink to a chair nearby the table, my legs too shaky to support me, and listen to the BBC announcer explain that the suspected art thief and forger had been picked up by Interpol in Florence at the end of a decades-long search for missing art works. The art world is electrified because he’d been found with a Pissaro that’s been missing since before World War II.
All this time. All this time.
For long moments, I allow panic and regret and longing to roar though my veins, emotion surging through me in ways I’d forgotten. I think of Isaak’s hard, long face and lovely hands, think of our shared history—our mothers who’d suffered unimaginable tortures during the war, our desire to shake off that history and forge a new generation.
I think of the very real possibility that I will spend the declining number of my days in prison.
I think of his body. His rough voice.
Then I stand, take a calming breath, and begin to make plans.
How long do I have?
CHAPTER TWO
Willow
As I ride the train to Gloria’s on a rainy February evening, I am shivering in my flowered dress and thin jacket, clothes that worked in LA but are no good in this weather. My neck is cold even beneath my hair and I’m going to have to get a scarf. Not something in floaty silk, but a real scarf, knitted and thick. I’m a little embarrassed to be so naively underdressed.
Not that I had much of a choice. I’m carrying everything I own.
My aunt Gloria called yesterday to ask me to house sit while she jets away to the home of one of her old TWA buddies. I’ve done it fairly often the past few years, watching over the apartment and her cats, but the job is really about the greenhouse on the roof and the hundreds of plants she’s nurtured for more than two decades.
It would be impossible to say how much of a relief her call was. My last gig finished with a whimper and I’ve been couch surfing much too long, thanks to my asshole ex, who locked me out of his Malibu house after a big fight. When my album failed, he had no more use for me, which I should have expected, but it stung. Now, I’m down to $549 in cash after buying my dinner at LAX last night, hiding in the back of a Panda Express to eat it, and to say I have my tail between my legs would be a major understatement.
The train stops and I feel a rush of relief at the sight of the actual subway tiles of the actual subway, faintly green in the florescent light. People get off. People get on. A blonde teenager with a startling peacock tattoo across her neck; a woman in a blue hijab holding the hand of an impish toddler, a remarkably tall, bald white man wearing a bowler hat, a pair of weary-looking middle-aged Latinas with shopping bags on their laps.
Nothing could say home more than this mix of peoples. LA is a wild mix, too, but everybody is so spread out, you’re working with a patchwork quilt more than a stew. Relief runs up my spine and I relax my hold a bit on the Johnny Was bag on my lap, a tote I bought when the album first came out, a celebration of success.
The embroidered bag is now packed to the brim with pretty much everything I own in the world. I am wearing the handmade cowboy boots that are my trademark, and I wish I had some leggings, but I forgot how cold the February rain would be. The mark of an outlander, a tourist. I am neither.
At the 72nd Street station, I get off and climb the stairs to greet the pouring rain. That, too, feels like home. Sometimes the sunshine in California can start to feel oppressive. Huddling in my sweater, rain dripping down the back of my dress, I hold my violin case close to my chest and hurry home to what is, in summer, one of the prettiest streets in the neighborhood. By the time I reach the six-story pre-war building, I’m soaked clear through.
Jorge, the burly, aging doorman greets me with a joyful cry. “Willow! Where is your coat? Why don’t you have an umbrella?”
I’m shivering and exhausted. “I know.” I squeeze his arm. “We’ll talk, but I’m wiped out.”
“Sure, sure. She’s up there, waiting for you.”
I nod wearily. My boot heels clomp over the marble entry way and I punch the button for the old elevator. It’s been upgraded, but it’s still slow and tiny. It carries me to the top floor, number six. The hallway smells of dinner—meat and aromatics and even a note of bread baking—from the other apartment. My stomach growls. I hope she’s shopped.
Jorge must have rung her, because before I reach the door, it’s flung open and my aunt opens her arms. She’s wearing turquoise, of course, because that’s her signature. Today it’s a silk caftan printed with peacock feathers, belted tightly to show off her tiny waist. “Willow,” she says. “You’re soaked! Where is your umbrella?
“I forgot I might need it,” I say wearily.
