What Was Mine

by Helen Klein Ross

  It took her longer than it usually did to sew something—she whipped up most of our clothes in a matter of hours. The pleats were tripping her up, she said. She didn’t have a pleater attachment, had to create them by pushing and prodding the material awkwardly under the needle. But when she was finished, it looked just like the original and I marveled at how clever she was to create what less clever mothers had to pay dearly for.

  My pride in my mother’s handiwork that day was short-lived, however. As soon as I got to school, a girl behind me in line proclaimed my uniform to be counterfeit—she could tell by the zipper. I knew that every kid in the class would soon know it, too, and I hated my mother for her betrayal, for tricking me into not seeing a thing that was obviously perceptible to others, and for denying me what they had, what should have been mine.

  My sister doesn’t remember it this way. Our mother sewed her uniform, too, and her fine job as a seamstress inspired Cheryl to learn how to sew, a skill I made sure I never acquired.

  So much of who you are has to do with your mother. From her, you acquire your first moral ideas, your first assessments of character. And because of this, I assure you—my mother is not to be blamed. She was honest to a fault, painfully earnest about appropriating only what was indisputably hers. She hailed from the Midwest and though raised in Chicago, maintained a farmer’s sensibility all of her life: rise with the dawn, do work, take what’s yours and no more, don’t buy new when old will do. She was a good example to me, a good role model. The only thing she can be accused of inculcating in me was a wish to be like her—to be a good mother.

  You forgive your parents if you live long enough. But I don’t expect Mia will ever forgive me. I don’t forgive myself.

  35

  cheryl

  For my fiftieth birthday a few years ago, Doug sent out index cards to a bunch of people asking them to record words of wisdom for me, since I’d reached the age where one is supposed to be wise. Mia’s card was my favorite: Don’t leave home without your keys. It was such a witty thing to say. But sad, too. She was fifteen and her nanny had gone back to China. Mia was too old, of course, for another nanny. But fifteen is still a kid, after all. Which meant for all that Lucy lavished on her, my niece didn’t have some things my kids took for granted, like someone to greet them when they got home from school.

  Of course, I had the kind of work where I could juggle my hours. I wasn’t in a cutthroat office like she was. But Lucy always wanted a big life. From the time she was little, she talked about leaving home and going down to the city. I was the opposite. I liked it here. I liked living in a place where I knew people and people knew me, a place where it was safe to bring up a family.

  Family has always been important to me. Years ago, on 9/11 when I saw the attack on the news, I was frantic, worrying about Lucy and Mia. I kept calling down to the city, calling and calling until I finally got through. I thought she’d want to come up to be with us, like so many from Emmettsville did that week, wanting, needing to reunite with family. But not Lucy. She said that she and Mia were fine. When I called a few days later, she said they were going to a candlelight service in a park. It was a slap in the face to hear she sought comfort in the company of strangers, instead of wanting to be with us, her own family.

  36

  lance

  Lucy was a creative director on dog food when I met her at the ad agency in 1998. The executive creative director was a friend of mine who gave me use of an office to write in. I was just getting started, had just published Red Dogs and was looking to capitalize on that success, work it into a series. In exchange for the office, I agreed to be on call for copy emergencies. I found it impossible to work on my book there during the day. Too much commotion. I ended up writing there mostly at night. It’s my best time to get work done anyway. No phones, no noise, the city twinkling below. It was on the thirtieth floor and had a great view.

  Lucy would be coming into the office around 8:30 a.m., just about the time I was powering down, to go home. She’d get in after she dropped off her daughter at some fancy uptown school. No one showed up on the creative floor before ten. Lucy seemed like any other New York mother to me—neurotic but not especially crazy. We got to be friends. More than friends. We’d talk about writing. I’d bounce ideas off her—after working all night, I’d be glad for someone to talk to. Eventually, the talk led to other things. Carrying on in the office was new to her. She said she’d never done it before and I believed her. She practically had a heart attack the morning her boss walked in on us in his office—we didn’t confine things to our own offices, that was part of the fun. He gave us a break, just turned around and went back out—a lot of crazy stuff went on in those days, before advertising became a numbers game.

  I knew Lucy wanted to write about other things besides dog food. One day, I asked if she wanted to moonlight for me. I had ideas for more series than I had time to write. The Crying Stone was the first book we did together. It hit the best-seller list and stayed there for weeks. Of course, only my name was on the cover—that was part of the deal. The publisher felt the reading public wouldn’t take well to two names. Anonymity was fine with Lucy at first. But after the first couple of books, she wanted her name on the cover, too.

  I didn’t want to press the publisher for it. I figured the money was good enough compensation for her. The stories, the characters, the plots were all mine—all she did was execute them, like a seamstress in the garment district brings a clothing designer’s ideas to life. But does the seamstress get her name on the garment? No.

  Usually, I’d have to rework what she’d written. I should have charged her for the PhD she was getting in fiction. I taught her the rules of telling a good story. Cut the parts people skip. Don’t waste time on description. A good story moves forward, all action, action, action. Each chapter a cliffhanger. That’s what busy people who buy books want to read.

  Baby Drive was the first book of hers I didn’t have to touch. The pacing was great and the scenes all rang true in a way they didn’t in drafts of other books she wrote for me.

  Now I know why.

  37

  lucy

  A few years after I met him, Lance offered to try me out as a ghostwriter. He gave me an outline and asked for five chapters. I sweated those chapters. How hard it was to go from writing sixty-eight words, the length of a thirty-second commercial, to thousands of words, one after another. Lance’s outline was seventy pages, almost a book in itself. I admired his pacing, the way he let a story unfold with a leisure that narratives in commercials couldn’t afford. I worried I wouldn’t be up to the job of writing something that wasn’t a print ad or commercial, but he took me on.

  Lance would come up with the plot twists, chapter by chapter. I never admitted to him what a hard time I had writing some of those chapters. They weren’t the kind of books I read for my own pleasure: historical novels or domestic fiction. These were thrillers, full of gore and violence and gruesome sex play. Lance had done research. These were the books that millions wanted to buy.

  In advertising, I’d sometimes feel guilty writing copy that promoted frivolous luxury or products that posed risks. More than once, for a pharmaceutical client, I’d had to urge a voice-over to sound cheery while announcing alarming side effects like “gambling urges” or “suicidal ideation.”

  But writing Lance Orloff stories often made me feel even worse. The scenes were grisly. Dismemberment. Torture. Necrophilia. Scenes had to be sensational enough to shock a reader who didn’t shock easily. Writing them sometimes gave me stomach pains. But—Mia was in middle school, college wasn’t far off, and it was the most lucrative freelance gig that ever came my way. I’d long ago set up a college fund for her, but I’d lost a lot to reversals in biotech stocks.

  I didn’t quit my day job, of course. Freelance doesn’t come with benefits. I’d write the books at night and on weekends. I’d come home after dealing with office politics and client revisions and sit down to whatever Chine
se meal Wendy had cooked before she left for the day, help Mia with homework if she needed it, then sit at my desk for as long as I could, tapping out pages.

  “If you work for yourself, how come you have such a mean boss?” Mia asked one sunny Sunday I spent behind my computer. But she was a child. She knew nothing of finances. And I didn’t want her to have to.

  As soon as I got my name on a cover, I thought, I’d be able to forge a future in publishing. It was work I could do no matter how old I got. I was in my fifties. Advertising was a young person’s business.

  Without my name on a cover, who was I, to a publisher? Just one more copywriter with a manuscript in a drawer.

  We kept it quiet, but Lance and I had a thing for a while. He wasn’t my type. But the way his brain worked—the way he could not only dash off campaign ideas for clients, but mastermind the plots of novel after novel, come up with narrative twists, the way he could take my pages and, with a few cuts or edits, heighten what I was trying to do—I found that very sexy. He was a few years younger than I. It made coming into work in the morning exciting.

  I never brought him home to meet Mia. She remained my only significant other. I didn’t want to risk consequences of letting anyone come between us. I’d seen those movies. They never turned out well. And, I didn’t dare let myself become involved with someone I’d fall in love with, with whom I’d be tempted to share my secret.

  I never told my secret to anyone. Anyone.

  After our first two books together, Lance moved out of the agency in midtown. Orloff Enterprises acquired its own office: a spacious, all-white loft down in SoHo.

  The way it worked was, Lance would bounce ideas for books off me before doing up outlines. He’d throw out book summaries, elevator pitches, on the phone or at lunch, to gauge my response. Siamese-Twin Serial Killers! Roving Gang of Girl Cannibals! I was never as good as he was at concocting stories; my ideas were never gruesome enough for his taste. But I could weigh in on which of his ideas would most appeal to our audience, which, according to publishing data, encompassed a surprisingly wide range of readers from high school dropouts to college professors.

  Baby Drive came as a complete surprise to me. We’d never talked about a kidnapping story. Lance’s outlines were long and I used printers at the office to print them out. I recall standing in the copier room, watching pages for Baby Drive roll out of the machine. I saw the words “baby” and “kidnapping” and my first reaction was to look behind me, to make sure that no one else was in the room.

  I read the synopsis: sociopathic woman kidnaps a baby to replace the one she has lost.

  Was Lance onto me somehow? Had I blurted out something in my sleep? We weren’t together anymore. Things had cooled once he moved downtown, which I thought was a result of our diminished proximity, but maybe they’d cooled for other reasons. Did he know something? He had a phalanx of obliging detectives on small retainers, who sometimes helped him research details of his plotlines. Perhaps he’d talked about me, and one of them had made the connection.

  My face grew hot as pages piled up in the printer tray. The words seemed to leap from the machine in accusation: baby lust, mother envy, infertility dreams. I gathered pages as soon as they’d cooled and took them to read in my office, closing the door behind me.

  The baby in the story was a girl, but in other ways, the story he’d written was different from mine. She had been taken from a hospital, not a store. The woman was single and childless, like me. She got away with it until the daughter was a teenager and found out and murdered her in her sleep. I had a terrible, fleeting vision of Mia, coming at me in bed, with an ice pick.

  I canceled a meeting and grabbed a cab headed downtown. I needed to see Lance’s face when I questioned him. Confronting him in person was the only way I’d be able to detect any trace of his suspicion of me.

  He thought I’d shown up because I liked the outline.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” he said, self-congratulatory. “I thought of the story last week, watching Law & Order. We haven’t done kidnapping before and I don’t know why—it tested off the charts in our last data probe.”

  Lance had figured out how to make book writing as well oiled a machine as the ad business was, employing algorithms and focus groups to help him determine the themes of his novels.

  I tried to talk him out of it. Kidnapping was too common, I protested. It was a cliché, the subject of too many movies and books already.

  “You’re right,” Lance conceded, and momentarily giving me hope. But what he meant was, we needed to add plot twists. Unexpected character traits. And lots of what our readers expected: gore.

  The only change I convinced him to make was to change the sex of the kidnapped baby.

  “Yes, a boy,” Lance agreed, rubbing his hands together. “Incest opportunity.”

  I knew I’d have to get the story out of me quick, or succumb to failure of courage. I wrote Baby Drive all at once, in a rush, taking a vacation from work, spending weeks in a cheap hotel in New Jersey.

  I told Mia I had a shoot in L.A. By this time, she was in college; it was her junior-year summer. She was home, working on a senator’s reelection campaign and taking a prep course for the LSAT. I couldn’t write that story in our apartment, with her there. I didn’t want my writing it—or who I knew I had to become while I was writing it—to taint the sanctuary of our home, to denormalize the wholesome environment I’d worked to create. I was afraid that the story I’d have to generate would poison the air, that Mia would sense the disturbance, divine the truth.

  It was a hellish few weeks. I spent them at a Red Roof Inn, just across the river, in my rattiest bathrobe, constricted as a prisoner, moving only a few steps each day, from bed to desk to door for takeout—but the writing poured out of me. I tap, tap, tapped myself back to that day, to the desire, the thrill, the heart-pounding fear, and every so often, I’d kneel by the toilet, shaking, my body revolting at what I had to recall.

  I took some consolation in knowing that Mia had had a happy childhood. She hadn’t been abused as my protagonist’s son was, raised by a woman who didn’t let him out of her sight, subjecting him to a host of emotional traumas and a variety of sexual deviances. But I couldn’t help seeing myself as a reader would—someone who had stolen a baby, taken her from another mother. I had treated Mia kindly, provided for her generously, but there had been brutality in my wresting her from the life she’d been meant to live. That was how a reader would see it. No amount of explaining, no rationalization could spare me from that dispassionate conclusion.

  I wrote in a fever. The writing came more easily than it had with any of the other books I’d written for Lance. At my little desk lit by a lamp bolted to it, words moved through me, spilling into the ocean of words on the screen, filling up page after page almost without my having to think.

  But again and again, I had to retreat to the bathroom, hugging the porcelain. Each time, I rested for a while afterward, holding on to the bowl, as if I was afraid of being uprooted, as if the room were caught up in some sort of a twister, as if I had to hang on for dear life.

  After twenty-seven days, I came to the end of the book. As soon as I pressed send, I took off my ratty robe, fell across the bed, pulled my knees to my chest, and, in an almost fetal position, cried myself into a twelve-hour sleep.

  I awoke feeling lighter, as if something in me had been exorcised. I walked barefoot across the thin carpet to take my first shower in days, feeling as if I was lifting into the air.

  38

  lucy

  Usually, Lance started a new book with me almost as soon as I’d handed in a manuscript. But that didn’t happen after Baby Drive. He put off our briefing, told me on the phone he hadn’t had any new ideas. I suggested I meet him in SoHo to talk; we’d come up with something. He agreed. But when I went down there, almost as soon as I showed up, he made me a drink, though it was still before noon, and gestured me into one of the white director’s chairs, which I didn’t l
ike sitting in, they made my feet dangle.

  He told me he wouldn’t be needing me anymore. He said this quickly, without inflection, as if he were telling me a twist in a plot. He said my dismissal had nothing to do with me, or with him. The publisher wanted to move away from the series.

  “You’re a good writer,” he said. “You’ll be able to work on your own.”

  I tried to contain the upheaval inside me, to keep from spilling my Bloody Mary on his white chair.

  “Because I’ve got a present for you,” he said, and I guessed he was talking about a severance. No severance was in our contract, but I thought our personal relationship might induce him to give me one.

  He brought out an envelope from behind his back and presented it to me with a flourish.

  It was a large padded envelope from the publisher, the kind they sent early galleys in.

  I drained half the drink, set the glass on the table, and opened the envelope. It wasn’t a bonus. It was the galleys for Baby Drive. How was this a present? Was he suggesting I didn’t have to read the 285 pages for typos, other errors, that he’d take over that job himself, sparing me, was that his idea of a parting gift?

  “Look at the cover,” he said.

  I looked. There was my name—Lucy Wakefield—on a book about kidnapping. Undeniably, indisputably, unmistakably, there it was, just below Lance’s. Though the type size was smaller, the letters looked bold and colossal, the font jumping off the page. My face went hot, as if I’d been smacked.

  “I knew you’d be happy,” Lance said. “You can make a lot more being out on your own.”

  My first thought was to ask him to change it, even though a set of galleys would have been hard to change. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. My name on a book would help me make a name for myself. I needed that, now that he was letting me go. I reassured myself that the book contained nothing that could technically link the story to mine. But, as he refilled my drink, and our glasses clinked, unease coiled in the pit of my stomach and lodged there.