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At Celeste’s insistence, the Kane family only vacations to warm climates. Napa Valley, Mykonos, southern France — places where she can tilt her face up to the sun and sip her wine.
Celeste Carnathan was raised in a fishing town in Downeast Maine; Celeste Kane is a sophisticated California woman. Celeste Carnathan knew snow the way Jake Kane knows sand, and Celeste Kane tries her best to make everyone forgets that. She goes from one coast to the other between heartbeats, slips into that Southern California smoothness like a second skin.
But it’s called a second skin for a reason. Her children grew up clinging to the rise and fall of Downeast Maine like the waves of the ocean they knew so well. Even Veronica had grown up on it in a way, tucked next to Lilly in a twin-sized bed begging for one more bedtime story.
“Please, Mrs. Kane? You do the good voices!” Veronica would plead, pink butterfly nightgown slipping down her five-year-old shoulder. Veronica (or Ronnie as she was then) was small everywhere Lilly was tall, three foot four with banana yellow hair.
Celeste would feign protest but give in, tucking twin locks of blonde waves behind little ears and pressing kisses to apple-red cheeks.
Long before she knew of Jake’s infidelity, Celeste would marvel at how much Ronnie and her little Lilly flower looked alike. Sisters in another life, she thought, pulling down Corduroy or Peter Rabbit or another chapter of Matilda for two fascinated little girls.
Celeste had loved Ronnie like her own, and maybe that’s why it hurt so much to find out about Jake and Lianne. Veronica could be Jake’s daughter but never hers, and didn’t that sting? Jake off with the drunkard that made her daughter cry while Celeste was there to wipe her tears, Jake absorbed in Lianne fucking Mars as Celeste taught Veronica to braid her hair.
Lilly always insisted that Ronnie was the only person allowed to touch her hair, so she would scrunch up her nose in concentration and make two meticulous braids on Lilly’s head. Celeste was the one to guide her hands, Celeste had been there to teach her how to wind ribbons through her pigtails and make snickerdoodles and play hopscotch. All the while Ronnie's sorry excuse for a mother fucked a married man. Her married man.
Then little Ronnie became Veronica Mars and Veronica Mars looks at Celeste like the enemy. Celeste supposes she can’t really blame Veronica. She has spent the past five years looking at Ronnie and only seeing Jake, vomit rising in her belly as she realizes Lilly and Ronnie’s hair are the exact same shade of blonde. Veronica fell in love with her son and the bile really did come up because she and Duncan look so happy and all Celeste can see is Jake and Lianne in their place.
They might be siblings.
Celeste isn’t sure if she really wants to know.
So she ducks and weaves away from little Ronnie’s devastated face, looks down her nose at Veronica and raises a condescending eyebrow. Passive aggressive is a California specialty, and Celeste has spent the past twenty years learning to be a California woman until it almost felt like home.
But the Atlantic is in her bones and Ronnie is in her soul, and at Lilly’s funeral she lets Veronica cling to her one more time. Lianne isn’t there to hold Ronnie (probably at home with a hangover) and so Celeste steps to the plate, brushing her hair and wiping her eyes and kissing her tear-stained cheeks.
Tomorrow she’ll be Celeste Kane again; she’ll finally do something about that cheating bitch and she’ll cut her teeth on Lianne’s suffering. But right now she gets to hold one of the daughters she lost.
Celeste whispers platitudes she doesn’t believe into Ronnie’s Lilly-blonde hair, letting the Downeast in her voice rise and fall like the waves her daughters loved so much.
Lilly will never see snow.