Fractured

by Catherine McKenzie

  “Unh-uh, no way, no fair,” Sam said.

  “Haven’t you learned yet, kiddo?” Daniel said, aiming a large, soft snowball at Melly. “Life isn’t fair.”

  Of all the things that are strange about having your book published, let alone read, the strangest is happening upon someone who’s actually reading it. I’d been told this by other authors, but I didn’t quite believe it until it happened to me. And, oddly, given how well The Book had done and how long it had been out, the first time it happened to me was when we were on our way to Mexico, three months after we’d moved to Ohio.

  It was a few days after New Year’s. We had a layover in LA on the way to Puerto Vallarta. In that big, anonymous airport is where I saw it: a woman intently reading a copy of The Murder Game while curled into her seat in the waiting area at our gate. I’d recognize that cover anywhere.

  “Oh,” I said to Daniel. “Look.”

  He followed my finger, then smirked at me. We’d been up since four in the morning. Melly had thrown up in the car on the way to the airport, and Sam had been particularly hyper on the flight to LA, but was now looking green.

  “Someone’s reading The Book,” Daniel said. “Oh, my.”

  I whacked him on the arm. He’d forgotten to get a haircut before we left, and his hair was standing straight up, like a stop sign. “Quit it. I’ve never seen that before.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, all righty, then. Oh, good, four seats together.”

  He walked toward the seats as the twins followed him. They were each wearing a small backpack full of their books and toys for the plane. Their shoulders were drooping under the weight of their inability to narrow their choices down to reasonable proportions.

  I should’ve followed them. A good mother would have, but instead I stood there, watching the woman for a while longer. She was intent on the page, a slow reader. The copy she was holding looked like it had been read before.

  I edged closer, wondering what the etiquette was. Should I ask her what she thought of it? Suggest she might want my autograph? What was I thinking? I didn’t like that kind of attention, or so I was always saying. But yet, I would’ve paid to have been able to crawl inside her brain and watch the words I’d written unfurl through her synapses.

  She adjusted the book in her hands. The back-cover copy was angled toward me. I read the words from afar.

  Ten years working as a prosecutor has left Meredith Delay jaded and unsure of what she wants out of life. She’s good at her job, but it haunts her. Her boyfriend wants her to commit, but she keeps him at arm’s length. When she gets assigned to a high-profile prosecution involving the violent murder of a fallen hockey star, it appears at first to be just another case to work. But when her estranged law-school friend, Julian, gets accused of the murder, it takes on a whole new dimension.

  Meredith, Julian, Jonathan, and Lily were a tight-knit group in law school. But now, Jonathan’s defending Julian, and Lily’s loyalties aren’t clear. And when Julian invokes a rare—and risky—defense, Meredith is forced to confront their past.

  Has something they played at as students finally been brought to death?

  I took a few more steps. I was close enough to see that she was in the middle of the chapter where Meredith, Julian, Jonathan, and Lily meet after the verdict is released.

  It’s the chapter where the reader finds out if a murder occurred.

  “I loved that book,” I found myself saying.

  The woman looked up, puzzled. Was I really talking to her?

  “Oh, sorry. I just saw what you were reading and . . .”

  She was young, midtwenties. Clear skin, bright-eyed, unbowed, and unlined by anything life had to dish out yet.

  “I’m still not sure about it yet,” she said in a Midwestern twang. Su-ur.

  “How come?”

  “It’s kind of twisted, ain’t it? Like, turning murder into a game?”

  “It’s a thought experiment. You know, to see if they can do it.”

  “Spoiler alert!”

  “Sorry.”

  She shrugged. “No biggie. Besides, with the movie coming out and everything, it’s kind of hard not to know what happened.”

  “Oh, no, the book’s much different than the movie.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I work in the business,” I said, the lie slipping easily through my teeth. “I got to read the script.”

  That part was true. The Book had been optioned for film, and then greenlit. Someone—not me, though I’d kind of wanted to—had written a script and gotten stars attached. One day last summer before we moved to Cincinnati, I’d spent a day on set. A surreal experience, if ever there was one, like stepping into your imagination and having everyone follow you in. I just hoped, when the movie was finally cut and set loose in the world—we were getting a release date any day now, my agent kept telling me—that they hadn’t murdered my book.

  “Cool.”

  “It is cool. Say, what do you think of Meredith?” I asked.

  Meredith, the protagonist. The one everyone assumed I’d based on myself, a charge I vehemently denied. But yet, for all my protests, she was the one I felt closest to.

  “She’s a bit off, isn’t she?”

  “In what way?”

  “Julie,” Daniel called. “I could use some help here.”

  We made eye contact. Sam was crawling on his back. Melly was silently crying.

  “I have to go. Nice chatting with you.”

  “Sure . . .”

  I hurried over to my family and spent the next few minutes calming Melly down while Daniel took Sam to the men’s room for a bathroom break and a stern talking-to. Given the circumstances, we were probably going to have to break our screen ban and hook them into the iPads for the next flight.

  When Melly finally calmed down, I felt a pair of eyes on me. I looked up from where I’d buried my face in her soft hair to find the girl I’d been talking to earlier watching me. She had my book closed on her lap, turned over to the author photo on the back. She glanced down at it deliberately, then back at me, raising her shoulders in a question.

  I raised my own to her in response.

  That’s me, I wanted to say. But it also isn’t.

  Once we’d made it through the gauntlets of immigration, security, and time-share salesmen, the warm air and greenery greeted us like a balm. I closed my eyes and took a deep yoga breath, exhaling slowly.

  The resort had sent a private car to pick us up, and just that alone—not having to struggle with luggage and the kids and making sure we weren’t being ripped off by the taxi driver—was almost worth the price of admission.

  The resort itself was even nicer than the brochure, and the brochure—found in my e-mail one day soon after we’d moved—was what had sold me on the place. As the twins pointed to palm trees and colorful birds, I told myself to be grateful for my life. The Idea, The Book, had changed it completely from one of struggle to one where I could see something I wanted and have it. So much of that change was good—the money, the recognition, the satisfaction I got in those moments when the words flowed out of me in what felt like an effortless stream—that it had to outweigh the bad. There was only one Heather Stanhope, and she was in another country. I’d been wanting to move for a while, and Heather was the perfect excuse. I’d spun a tale to suit my own whims, and not for the first time.

  And then there was the simple fact that no one knew where we were. We hadn’t even told our families precisely where we were going, mostly out of embarrassment at the cost. I’d actually hidden the total from Daniel, paying more than half of it out of an account he didn’t know I had, so it would seem more reasonable.

  What was the point of having money if you couldn’t enjoy yourself once in a while? I’d said to Daniel time and again over the last two years.

  “It’s so green,” Sam said, before nestling into my chest and plugging his thumb into his mouth.
/>   “Okay, you were right,” Daniel said. We were halfway to the semiprivate villa we were staying in, on the edge of the massive complex that housed three thousand people at capacity. We were being driven in an oversize golf cart, a child on each of our laps. They’d been numbed into silence from all the travel and the lushness around them.

  “Is that just a general statement, or are there particulars attached to it?”

  “This,” he said, waving his arm around. “This is incredible.”

  “Right?”

  “I just wish . . .”

  His thought trailed off, but I could follow it.

  He just wished he was the one who could afford to pay for it.

  I never thought Daniel would have such traditional thoughts; he didn’t, either. But with my lack of drive after I quit the law, and then the twins, we’d fallen into an old pattern where he paid most of the bills. It was hard for me, for a long time, to reconcile his assuming that responsibility with my instincts to pay my own way in the world, but we both got used to it, I guess.

  Then my book came out, and that all changed. Suddenly, I had more money than I knew what to do with. Paying-off-the-mortgage money. No-more-student-loan money. Setting-up-the-twins’-college-fund money. Sold in a bidding war. Sold in twenty-five countries. Sold to the movies. Another large sum for Book Two. “Fuck-you money,” we called it, because it was easier than discussing the amount. In truth, I’d never even told Daniel how much it was, how much it still was every month. I’d even stopped checking that closely when royalty money from some part of the world arrived in my bank account, or what the amount was, and only vaguely absorbed how much they paid for Book Two, the book I was starting to suspect I might never finish.

  The day I got that deal was the day I opened the other bank account, the one he didn’t know about—not because I didn’t want to share with him, but because I could tell it was all too much. It was too much for anyone, certainly for a penny-pinching DIY couple—we used to make our own pizza and Halloween costumes, for Christ’s sake, and even, for a while, cleaning products. So many things can throw off the balance in a marriage, and money was doing that to us. It was easier to deny its existence most of the time than flaunt it or acknowledge its power.

  All that being said, I’d wanted this vacation from the first moment the evil airline club I belonged to e-mailed me about it. I needed this vacation: its seclusion, its warmth, its color. And the fact that it was more than the price of the car I drove didn’t faze me. I clicked to book it and told Daniel about it afterward.

  “You’ll get the next one,” I said as we pulled up to the white adobe villa. Flowers whose scent I couldn’t identify perfumed the air. I couldn’t see the ocean yet, but I could sense it, the pull of the tide, the distant echo of waves hitting the shore.

  “Run-down cabin by the ocean?” Daniel said.

  “Wherever you want.”

  He smiled and leaned over the heads of our zoned-out children.

  “I want you,” he said quietly in my ear.

  “No kissing!”

  Despite the luxurious surroundings—there was actually a personalized butler service available, and a masseuse on call twenty-four hours a day—it took me two full days to relax. Two full days to shake off the lingering feeling I often had when I was away from my laptop that I should be working, putting down words, curating my social media profile, or at least thinking about these things at all times. It was worse than when I was a student. At least then, during summer or at Christmas break, there wasn’t anything I could or should be doing. But writing was a job that followed you around everywhere. Bits of dialogue popped into my head at odd moments. A thorny knot of plot unraveled when I should’ve been listening to Daniel. A weird detachment could overtake me during a real-life moment, a feeling that I had to mentally capture it so I could use it later.

  But I had a stack of easy novels to read and enough sunscreen to cover every inch of me. The twins spent their days in Kids’ Club, happy as browning clams with their newfound friends. Daniel was content to float on a blow-up bed, reading one of the lengthy histories of England he loved. Our semiprivate infinity pool was quiet and peaceful and close enough to the ocean that the crash of its salty waves acted as a sort of white noise in my brain.

  That and the margaritas. I limited myself to two a day (okay, maybe three, it was vacation, after all) and switched to wine at dinner. All this worked its magic on me so that by lunchtime on day three—the bar would start serving alcohol in eight minutes, but who was counting?—I felt a deep sense of peace I hadn’t achieved since I didn’t know when.

  Which is why I felt perfectly safe taking out my laptop, connecting to the resort’s Wi-Fi, and opening my author e-mail. As I scanned my in-box, adrenaline slammed the calm out of me. Along with the hundreds of unanswered fan letters (I’d long since given up feeling guilty about not getting to them all), requests for blurbs, and writing advice, there were several flashing red alerts; someone had tried to access my e-mail account from an unusual IP address and location. If it was me, I could ignore the message, but if it wasn’t, then I should change my password immediately. I’d received the first message when we were in the air—impossible for it to have been me logging in from Mexico or anywhere else. When I checked, the IP address location was somewhere in British Columbia, but I knew enough from the last time this happened (Heather, who else?) that anyone with simple skills could make it appear as if they were logging in from nearly anywhere.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening again. Why couldn’t she leave me alone? Why couldn’t she just disappear?

  Why couldn’t she just die?

  And right at the moment when the panic was crashing against my heart like the waves against the shore, the sun was blocked by someone standing above me, and a voice said, “Funny meeting you here.”

  Trouble in Paradise

  John

  Nine months ago

  Hanna’s family is into family vacations. Every couple years, her mother starts sounding the gong. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend some time in . . . wherever it is that’s caught her fancy that year. We’re all expected to heed the call. Hanna pretends to hate these trips in solidarity with me. But I know she actually loves them.

  In fact, when I told Hanna I’d lost my job, it seemed like the only thing that really bothered her was the possibility that we might not go on the trip.

  “It’s already paid for,” she’d said, and it took me a minute to realize what she was referring to.

  “You mean the vacation? Not really. Not entirely.”

  We’d put down a deposit and bought our tickets during a seat sale the month before. But the real expense, we both knew, would be the meals and drinks and tips during the week itself.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hanna said. “We can afford it.”

  And I knew the subject was closed.

  It was one of the unwritten rules of our marriage. She had jurisdiction over things to do with her family. I had it over mine. The fact that my own family sought ways to avoid being together was my bad luck. All bargains have a losing side.

  I put it aside. But in the space between Christmas and New Year’s, I worked up my courage and brought it up again. Perhaps we could . . .

  “No. Absolutely not,” Hanna said. “And no mentioning the fact that you’re out of work to my parents while we’re there. Mom will be too stressed out. And she’ll offer to loan us money.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing?”

  She shot me a look. “You’re seriously asking me that?”

  She was right. At the beginning of our marriage, we’d borrowed money from her parents to do renovations to the house we’d inherited from my aunt. Although we had a payment schedule and easy terms, we got a reminder phone call from her mother five days before payment was due.

  Every single month.

  “Hi, kids! Just thinking of you! Oh, and if you were going to be late with the payment this month, let me know, okay? Love y
ou!”

  We’d never been late, not once. She always called when she knew we’d be at work and would get our machine. Seeing that blinking red light when I got home on the twenty-fifth of every month was enough to drive anyone crazy. I actually went to a bank to see whether we could take out a mortgage to pay her off immediately. The bank said no, and that was probably a good thing. A better thing happened when I “accidentally” dropped our answering machine and convinced Hanna not to replace it. We made a plan, adjusted our payment schedule to the most we could afford, and paid off the loan as soon as we could. Then we vowed we’d never borrow money from them again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. We can’t borrow money from your parents. But we really shouldn’t be going on this vacation.”

  “I know. But we’ll manage. And you’ll find something soon, right? Another job.”

  “Of course I will.”

  We went.

  And as I stood drinking my morning coffee in early January with a view of the ocean, it sunk in that I had no right to complain. We had our own condo. One room for Hanna and me, and one for the kids. The rooms were far enough apart that we could lock the door and make love quietly, something we’d done the previous two nights. The condo even had its own kitchen, which meant we could cook most of our meals and even bring in our own beer. That made the whole thing more manageable financially. The only thing that brought me down was how I was thinking about every dollar, every peso, that was going out the door.

  I was really going to have to step up my job-search efforts when I got home.

  “Hon, can you locate Becky?” Hanna called to me from our balcony, where she was sitting in what was not so charmingly called the “cuddle puddle.” Basically a hot tub that was six inches deep, warmed daily by the sun. “I can’t see her down there.”

  Becky had gone down to the pool an hour before with strict promises that she’d stay in view. Chris was off God knows where. But at fifteen, and a boy, different rules applied.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” I said. “Maybe she went down to the beach.”