Mo Daviau’s Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a faded Vegas crooner and his much-younger Texas bride. Facing the cruel timeline of A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, Nina returns to Los Angeles after her divorce to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for those who share her condition. What follows is a deathbed confession written to her physician: a story of love and rivalry with Cole, the magnetic fellow patient who both heals and wounds her, an uneasy alliance with a tech billionaire, and the sudden reappearance of her estranged mother. At once luminous and devastating, Daviau’s novel explores mortality, inheritance, and desire.
The following is an excerpt from the now-available book.
CHAPTER ONE
Dr. Tabitha Chen, MD, PhD, Clinical Director of the UCLA Medical Center’s Rare Disorders Clinic:
I was eleven when you told me to my little lopsided face that I wouldn’t live past the age of forty. My mother, standing beside me in a too-tight miniskirt and platform sandals that made her wobble like a stack of plates, screamed at you, and tried to get you fired for saying such a horrible thing to a little girl. In twenty-nine years, though, I’ve never told you how happy you made me that day. How relieved. How special, even. The news that my life would be short set me free.
I was eighteen, on a routine visit to your office, when you sighed heavily and took my 1 hand—that hand—and advised me to never have a child. That a full-term pregnancy would break my already-broken body. You told me, with love, that I should do pretty much anything else with the two decades and change I had in front of me. So, I did. I listened to you. I’ve always listened to you,
Dr. Chen. You were like another mother to me. And now, you are the mother of the five-pound, four-ounce baby you cut from my uterus hours ago, leaving me to bleed, to grieve, to wonder how it could have been different. These last hours of my life, all joy and warmth and wonder from holding the beautiful rump roast who I claimed as my daughter for mere minutes before I handed her over to you for a lifetime. As you have sequestered me into this plush room in the Steven K. Elwood Wing at Stanford Hospital, with the pink blankets and the view of the campus and the family of stuffed elephants you had sent over, because you remembered me saying once that I loved elephants, I have approximately seven hours left to write you this letter, to tell you what I need you to know about the last few months my life, so that you understand me. This letter is my last shot at being understood.
You should know that there’s more to my choice of you as adoptive mother of my little sweet potato than the inevitability of my passing. And please don’t ever say that my passing wasn’t inevitable. After three decades of being told that I would be dead by now, to live beyond this day would be insulting. I planned for this. Honored it. Made choices around it. Even if I came to you desperate for a few borrowed days or weeks of motherhood, drunk on all these spicy hormones filling my head right now, I would want you to tell me no.
Like I said to you in your office, and on that night in my house in Los Feliz when you 2 found me crying and hyperventilating on the floor: I never want her to know me. I never want her to miss me the way I missed my dad, with that deep ache that never lessened with time. This the greatest gift I can give the little pumpkin that you are hiding somewhere in this hospital. My full, loving, wholehearted absence.
Did you know these last few hours of living are so sweet, Doctor? This is the first time I have ever felt real peace.
I, the once and former Nina Simone Blaine, the only ever documented female patient born with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome to give birth to a live, wriggling, A12-free sweet potato six weeks past my fortieth birthday, finally got to taste that elusive thing called happiness. Whomp, there she was, all in a single mad rush of oxytocin and dopamine. Sorry, I don’t sound like the Nina you’ve known and taken care of all these years. Rump roast. Sweet potato. Oxytocin. Dopamine. Whomp? I was never cutesy, was I, Dr. Chen? Things have changed.
Sigrid. My sweet potato. My sugar nugget. The love of my life. Sigrid Alma.
Thank you for all you did for me over the years, Dr. Chen. Not just for focusing your career on a rare genetic disorder that mainly affects the children of much older men. Or for violating HIPAA like the madwoman you are and bringing together all of your A12 patients so we could feel like family. You knew I’d never have a real family because we talked about that between blood draws and reviews of my MRIs. But you admitted to missing out on something, too. After I had grown up and left Los Angeles, I came to see you and noted one afternoon while staring up at all the diplomas on the wall of your office that you had lived a very accomplished life, and you told me that you felt otherwise. You had missed out on being a mother, not entirely your choice or fault, but parenthood had passed you by like the last bus out of town. Too much time at work, you lamented. Few potential fathers worthy of your gifts and brilliance. You laughed a little, tried to wipe those tears before I saw them, and mumbled something about trying IVF at forty-four and nothing happened, but maybe that was for the best, because you had student loans, you had a tiny, messy condo, and you didn’t have the means to pay for IVF until you were forty-four. You’d acted as the responsible oldest daughter you’d always been, never risking a mistake. Then you cried and I passed you a napkin I stole from the next table. I reminded you that you had us, misshapen children of the elderly semen demons of greater Los Angeles and the young, beautiful women who loved them and their money.
Thank you for your medical and research service, which came at the expense of having children. You took care of us, the A12ers who passed through your practice. You gave me Sylvia, my dear friend of thirty years, you gave me the praise and support I didn’t get at home, and you even gave me Siggy. All those times I asked about getting a tubal ligation you told me I couldn’t have an elective surgery because anesthesia might kill me, so we had to save it for emergencies. Why wasn’t frequent sex with Cole considered an emergency?
Allow me to be the one to repay you for your kindness and sacrifice.
I always hated it when certain woo-woo LA people say, “my child chose me as their parent,” because no way in hell did I choose the two mismatched weirdos with which the cosmos saddled me. When I told you that Tracy and Eddie were a bad act to follow, I meant it. I meant it when I said there were reasons beyond my A12 decrepitude that I could never be a mother. There was no way, emotionally, for me to take good care of my sweet potato, at the standards to which I would hold myself. And, as I knew my time on earth would be short, I did not cultivate those standards. That baby didn’t choose me, Dr. Chen. Never, ever say that to her. Don’t even mention old, forgotten Nina Blaine. Tell her she had a sacred vessel who loved her so much that she trusted you and only you to keep her safe. The scaffolding of my life was wobbly on a good day and unlike my own mother, I would never allow myself a misstep.
I would have chosen you, though, Dr. Chen. To be my mother, if choosing your parents 4 were a real thing. I get to choose you now for Sigrid, with absolute confidence that you are fit for the job. One of the things that we agreed to four months ago, when I told you I was going to barf up my lunch because I was pregnant, was that we’d leave my mother out of this. And Cole, whose return I await here in my hospital room as I write. You insisted we leave him out of this transaction as well, even though his single testicle had everything to do with this, biologically and legally. Like me, he was not long for this world.
When I came home to Los Angeles last March, I was thirty-nine years, three months, and twenty-two days old. My life already felt long. My hands were gnarled, my back stooped, and I couldn’t work at my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s restaurant anymore.
According to your research, the oldest known A12er died at forty-seven. Our A12 bodies relent to gravity. Our bones snap. Our lungs collapse. Our aortas tear open. Our muscles atrophy. Our skin melts, our brains drip out of our nostrils, our feet grow talons, and we sprout wings and fly, but only to the ocean to plunge to our deaths.
Whatever you think of us, we politely request that you resist pity. We always knew our time would be short. We were never anything less than messy Hollywood offspring, tragedies too grotesque to be made into gossip. We had as good of a time as we could on this effed-up ball of dirt. But truly, Sigrid Alma, a name I chose because it means Warrior of the Soul, does not share our affliction. Ten fingers and ten little toesies. Believe me, the last thing I did before you took her out of my arms was to count them. And as I touched each one and said the numbers out loud, I said a prayer for my baby girl who will be raised by you, who would love my child even if she did look like me: may her future be so epic and lovely as if to be divine.