by David Bell
“I know. That’s how I’ll revise it. On a computer. I promise.”
“I flipped through it a little earlier. What’s up with those pages near the end that are actually typed? For a while, I thought it was some postmodern intertextual commentary. Why did that happen? Did your computer rise from the dead for a few days?”
“No. I borrowed a computer . . . but it didn’t really work out for the long run.”
He drank his beer. His shoulders were slumped, and up close, he looked older than he did in class. Madeline saw lines around his eyes she’d never noticed before, the amount of gray in his dark hair. He’d told them he was forty-three, and that just sounded old. Madeline knew people in their forties could still have a good time, but Connor looked like a great weight was pressing down on him. And she couldn’t stop thinking about what Isaac had told her.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
He looked over, the light catching his brown eyes. “I’m drunk.”
“Anything besides that?”
He lifted the glass to his mouth but stopped without drinking. “You mean, the haunting memory of my wife and son being devoured by a dog?”
Another classic rock song was playing, one Madeline didn’t know. Something about a guy who kept moving on from one woman to another. Then again, maybe that was every classic rock song.
“I’m sorry,” Madeline said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I’m kidding,” he said. “They didn’t get devoured by a dog.”
“I know,” she said.
He perked up some. “You do? What do you know? I’m always curious to hear what’s being said about me. Each new class brings in a new rumor. So what is it now?”
Madeline knew she was getting in deep, that maybe it was time to make her exit. But she told herself to stay, to talk to Nye like he was just another human being instead of her professor.
“Drowning,” she said. “They went to a conference your wife had to go to in Maine, and they went kayaking in the ocean. Some kind of crazy tide swept them away. A freak thing.”
Connor turned back to his beer and took a long drink.
“It sounds so specific that it must be true,” Madeline said. “That’s how I know it’s not a rumor. It’s like in class when you say that the more unique a detail, the greater sense of truth it creates. Whether it’s physical or emotional, the right nugget of information makes it seem like the writer has really been there and done that.”
Connor finished the beer in one big gulp. He waved to the bartender and asked for the bill.
“That’s what’s going on with my thesis,” she said. “It might be too real . . . some of those details I included.”
“How can fiction be too real?”
“If it’s based on something real, and that very realness hurts somebody. Or puts them in danger. Or makes the wrong person angry. Do you know what I mean?”
Nye leaned forward, like he was hard of hearing. “Danger? If someone is in danger . . . I mean, I don’t see how a book could do that. A book no one has read.”
“People have read some of it, or they will. I think maybe I just need to back away from the project, maybe write something else.”
“You can’t do that,” he said. “You have to write what you want to write. I mean . . . after Emily and Jake died, and I tried to write, every story began the same way. With a mother and her fifteen-year-old child dying in the ocean on the first page. Over and over. Fifty different times.” He stared into the empty glass in front of him, and his voice sounded weary. “God, I got sick of myself.”
“My dad died when I was little. Very little. I used to try to write about that, but I never really could.”
“It’s too real. Or raw.”
“Maybe not real enough,” she said. “I didn’t know him well because I was only three. I’ve never even been to his grave. Is that weird?”
Nye shook his head. “No. I go to my family’s graves pretty regularly. It’s peaceful. In times of stress it’s calming . . . to be near them in a way. Sometimes I even go over there at night and sneak in when the gate’s locked. There’s a way to do it. A big tree about fifty feet down from the gate has pushed through the fence, and you can slip in.”
“I’m sorry,” Madeline said. She felt like an ass for pushing about things she had no business getting into. She always did that and never knew when to back off. She wanted to say more about her thesis, but her concerns seemed small next to a guy who’d lost his family.
“I’m drunk. My wisdom is sloshing around in my head. Pickled.” Connor handed a credit card to the bartender. “It’s okay. I have to get going. And if I want to talk, I’ll talk to Grendel.”
“Your dog?”
“He listens to me all the time.”
“You’re not driving, are you?”
“No chance. But that was the rumor one semester: that my family had been killed by a drunk driver. And the drunk driver was me.”
Connor signed the credit card slip with a flourish. Madeline wanted to be able to sign her name in a book like that someday. Confidently. Stylishly. Like she owned the world. Connor had published a book of short stories with a small press while he was in graduate school. Madeline had found a copy in a thrift store in town and bought it for a dollar. She’d never told Connor she’d read it, never asked him to sign it. That was the kind of thing the sycophants would do. But she loved the stories and wished she could get out of her own way enough to ask him about them. Where did the ideas come from? How long did it take to write them?
What was it like to see his own words in print?
“But the drunk-driving thing isn’t true,” he said. “The kayaking thing is right. A rip current. And it is so weird it sounds made-up, doesn’t it? It’s a heck of a lot weirder to try to live through.”
Madeline watched him go. His shoulders were still a little bent, and he stumbled once before he reached the door. She knew he lived about a ten-minute walk from Dubliners. But it was already dark, and he’d had way too much to drink.
Once again Madeline asked herself—Isn’t this the kind of thing I should just stay out of? Back off and let things play out the way they play out?
But if they reached his house, maybe she could ask for the thesis back. Maybe she could explain it all, and Dr. Nye would reassure her and tell her she was overreacting to everything. That what she thought she knew wasn’t really true, just one gigantic misunderstanding.
She threw back the rest of her beer and grabbed her purse. She rushed to the door, following him.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONNOR
PRESENT
“Madeline,” I say, “why don’t you just let me explain what happened?”
She leans back, the book and the oversized glasses in her lap, and gives me a long look. “I think I know what happened. It seems pretty obvious.”
“Yes and no,” I say. I feel like a fool, trying to justify something that has no justification. I’m not even sure what my own defense will be, but I have to say something. “I really wasn’t myself after Emily and Jacob died. To lose them in such a bizarre way, drowning in the ocean. I almost think if they’d died in a car accident close to home, I would have handled it better. I lost thirty pounds because I wasn’t able to eat. I mean, I was really in a fog. Jake had just turned fifteen, and I know that isn’t college age, but it was tough to go in and see all those young faces in class, faces that reminded me of him. I barely kept my job. Only through the good graces of my colleagues, who gave me a lot of rope. It’s not a time in my life I like to think about. Even though those years define everything. I’d sit in faculty meetings and start to sob. I’d go days without bathing or shaving. I’d sit at home and go through a bottle of Jim Beam in one evening. None of it was pretty.”
“I’m not trying to diminish your grief,” Madeline says. “I saw what
it was doing to you back then. Everybody did.”
“When I read your thesis, Madeline . . .” I stand up and walk across the room. Grendel watches me, his mouth open. I rarely have company, so he must be wondering why a stranger is in the house. A nice stranger but a stranger. Emily had loved to entertain. Dinner parties, cocktails. She’d invite people over for the Super Bowl, the Derby, Halloween. Since she’s been gone, I haven’t done any of that. If people come over, it’s random. Scattered. “Your thesis was so good . . . for an undergraduate to write so well. That’s all I can say. The writing was so compelling.”
I remember the story so vividly. And not because I was just talking about it at the library.
And not because I read and reread it as I revised the book.
I remember the story because it was so well done.
On the surface it appears to be a conventional thriller. Two women are friends in a small college town. One is a student, the other in her late twenties. When the older woman’s husband starts to show an unhealthy interest in the younger woman, it threatens to tear their friendship apart.
But then the older woman ends up dead. Murdered in her car outside her place of employment. And the husband is the prime suspect. And since the younger woman is the only one who knows the troubles in their marriage, the husband may be coming after her next, hoping to silence her forever.
I turn back around. Her cheeks are flushed. Maybe in response to the praise? I remember what it was like to have a compliment from a professor.
“It’s about so much more than the murder,” I say. “You do so much with the friendship between the two women. Their class differences. One woman went to a really expensive private school and grew up privileged. The other is working her way through a state university with a crappy job. The way they confide in each other so intimately. Did I teach you how to do that?”
“Some of it, I guess. Some of it I just . . . knew how to do.”
“I’d been trying to write for years,” I say. “Even before Emily and Jake died, I’d been floundering. I’d started about thirty different novels. None of them went anywhere. When they died, there wasn’t a chance I was going to write anything.”
“You would have at some point,” she says. “It takes time when you lose someone.”
“That’s what they say. I think that’s one of those pieces of conventional wisdom that are bullshit. I don’t know if we’re ever the same.”
“You might be right,” she says.
I think I’m getting through to her. I take a couple of steps toward her and keep going. “You remember that night in Dubliners? That last night we saw each other.”
“I remember that night very well,” Madeline says.
Her words make me cringe. “Ugh. I really don’t remember it all. I had a lot to drink—”
“I’m more interested in what you’re saying about the book.”
“Okay. I came home that night, and I fell asleep in that very chair you’re in. I didn’t have to teach the next day. I woke up, hungover, just after the sun came up. I walked Grendel, drank a bunch of coffee, and started reading. It started innocently enough. I made some notes on my computer, things I wanted to tell you. Just little suggestions. And I could see how some of the scenes could be slightly different. Tighter. Or more expansive. The story was already so good, so vivid. And I was so consumed with it. No thesis had grabbed me that way or made me care that much in a long time. Not many published books had. I sat at the kitchen table and read the whole thing in a day. It was amazing. It is amazing.”
“Thank you,” she says. “It was pretty rough when I turned it in.”
“Sometimes raw and rough are better,” I say. “Sometimes we just need to get out of our own way as writers. We have to try not to overthink it.”
“That’s what you used to say in class,” Madeline says.
I always feel like a fraud when I say those things to my students. They listen to me eagerly, hanging on my every word. But who am I to hand out advice when I’m not writing anything either?
“I’d typed up all these notes and ideas about your manuscript,” I say. “And I was going to see you in class the next day, and we’d be able to talk about it. And I thought to myself . . . I tried to convince myself that I’d really be happy if you had success with the book. That I could bask in your reflected glory because maybe I’d played some small role in getting you there. That’s enough for some people who teach. But the truth is, I hadn’t even helped you that much. I know I was disconnected. I know I wasn’t mentoring you the way you deserved.”
“Nothing ever goes as planned, does it?” Madeline says.
“No. Before I could reach out to you and tell you how much I liked the book, you were gone. Disappeared.”
CHAPTER SIX
Now that it’s out, I feel agitated, restless. My thoughts are a jumble.
“Do you want a drink or something?” I ask. “I think I need bourbon.”
“Sure,” she says. “I always drank when you paid.”
I go back out to the kitchen, Grendel at my heels. It’s cold out, and I’d turned the heat down when I left the house. But I feel flushed, sweaty. Almost like I have a fever. I open the corner cabinet and take down a bottle of Rowan’s Creek and two glasses. When Jake was born, twenty years ago, Emily’s brother gave me a bottle of Rowan’s Creek, so whenever I drink it, I think of my son. My hand shakes as I pour.
Grendel starts eating. I hear his chomping in the corner.
“You were drinking a lot when I last saw you.”
I turn toward Madeline. She’s standing in the doorway from the living room, leaning against the jamb.
“I was,” I say. “I’ve cut back. A lot. I had to.” I hand her the glass, trying to control the trembling. “But I think I could use one or maybe two tonight.”
“I guess it isn’t every day that a ghost shows up in your house.”
I swallow and lean back against the counter. “They looked for you, Madeline. Searches all over campus and town. It was on the news. Some people thought you just up and ran off on a whim. Some students do that. Impulse trips.”
“Some kids can afford to do that.”
“Right. But they looked in your apartment. You left all your books and clothes behind. You were an excellent student, an honors student, a few months away from getting a degree. And you stopped coming to class. The police questioned everybody who’d had any contact with you, including me. Especially me because we were all at the bar that night.”
“And I left Dubliners right after you did.”
“Right. Some of this is fuzzy. How I got home . . . how I even managed to get my key in the lock and get inside . . . I kind of think you came with me . . . but I don’t know how far . . .”
“Out in the living room you were talking about the book,” she says, arms crossed, glass in front of her. “After you read it and wanted to talk to me and I was gone.”
I finish my first glass and pour another. This is it, I tell myself. Just two drinks.
“You know I have to publish to get tenure,” I say. “That’s the way to survive in academia.”
“I’ve heard about that.”
“Publish or perish, they call it.”
“It sounds awfully bleak.”
“It can be,” I say. “And I hadn’t published anything in the seven years I’d been here. That book of stories Autumn Sunset came out when I was still in graduate school, so it didn’t count. If you don’t get tenure, you get fired. And if I didn’t get tenure here, I probably wouldn’t get hired anywhere else. They’d see I failed to produce, and no one would touch me. Why would they want a middle-aged guy with a huge blank spot in his publication record?”
“You could tell them about your family,” Madeline says.
“Sure. And the university here gave me an extra year for bereavement. I still coul
dn’t produce a book or even a few stories.” Grendel appears to be finished eating. He slurps some water, shakes his head, and goes back out to his perch on the couch. “Dr. White, the department chair, is a pretty good friend. And he really looked out for me. But he could only do so much. And he was really on me, reminding me what was at stake. He kept telling me, ‘Just produce something, Connor.’ ”
“No pressure, right? Hurry up and write an entire book while you’re grieving.”
“Life goes on at some point.” I drink some more. “The world doesn’t stop forever. Six months had passed after you disappeared. Six months. No one really said it out loud, but everybody was thinking the same thing. After a few days—a week, really—people were thinking the worst had happened. That you weren’t coming back. That you were dead. Murdered. Even your mom said it in an interview she did with the local paper. Does she know you’re—”
“I’ll call her soon,” Madeline says, her voice sharp. “You just finish telling me about the book and how all of this happened.”
We’ve reversed roles. She’s asking the questions. She’s playing the part of authority figure. And I feel compelled to answer her and give a full accounting of myself.
“I had your book,” I say. “Almost all handwritten. And you were gone. And I had an agent interested in my writing from years ago, although I wasn’t even sure she still knew I existed. I took your handwritten book and retyped it on my computer.”
“You gave me a hard time about turning in a handwritten draft. I told you my computer died. . . .”
“It turned out to be to my advantage. I made some of the revisions as I went along. I kept telling myself I wasn’t going to send it anywhere, that I was just going to type the book out as an exercise, a way to get my own creative juices flowing again. But the deadline was coming up for my tenure review. And I really wasn’t sure how I would handle it if I lost this job. On top of everything else, to be unemployed with nowhere to go.”