by Sally Mason
Jane feels as if she is bashing her head against it.
Then she registers a couple of other details.
There is a landscape to the right of the wall.
A Fall landscape: a covered bridge over a creek, with colorful trees in the background.
The bridge that Suzie Ballinger crosses when she flees her life of debauch and returns to the unnamed New England hamlet where she was born, to nurse her ailing mother and recharge herself, no doubt, for the sequel that is certain to come.
Jane stares at the bridge.
Is this a clue?
She copies the cover and emails it to her younger brother.
She could never call him her little brother, since he is morbidly obese.
Then she speed-dials him on her cell phone.
“Sis,” he says, answering after the second ring, “what’s up with this book cover?”
“You see the bridge?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“I’ll buy you the game of your choice if you find that bridge for me.”
“Done,” he says and he’s gone.
Her brother is twenty-two and weighs 400 pounds. He still lives at home with their parents, shut in his room, experiencing the world on-line and through Playstation, gaming his brain to mush.
Jane had always felt so superior to him, with her nice job and her nice apartment (which she can no longer afford now that her not-so-nice ex-fiancé will no longer be carrying most of the rental) and her life in Manhattan.
She pays the check and walks the two blocks to her apartment and rides up in the elevator.
When she opens the door she almost hopes Tom is there with flowers, chocolates and apologies.
And some excuse for his bizarre behavior.
But he and his freak show are gone.
Jane sinks down on the couch and feels about as desolate as she has ever felt.
When her phone rings the only reason she yanks it from her pocket is to kill that ring tone.
Her brother.
“Jimmy?”
“East Devon, Vermont.”
“Huh?”
“The bridge. It’s in a town called East Devon.”
“How did you find it so fast?” she asks, her heart sinking.
If it was some well-known tourist site, then it wouldn’t be much of a clue after all.
“Oh, I wrote a quick app that did a visual recognition match to all available covered bridge pics on the web.”
“In English.”
“Look, there’s only one picture of that bridge on-line. On some guy’s Flickr account.”
“Is it that shot?”
“No. But it’s definitely the same bridge.”
“Who is the guy?”
“Some German. Looks like he was touring New England a coupla years back. This bridge is seriously obscure.”
“Okay, email me name of the game you want, Jimmy. Thanks.”
Jane ends the call and Googles East Devon, Vermont.
A village in the south of the state.
Not one of the bed-and-breakfast towns.
Not a tourist spot.
Just a little hamlet.
Like the one in the book.
It’s a long shot.
It may be a waste of time.
But something tells her that Viola Usher is in this town.
She calls Jonas.
“So?” he says, “have you found her?”
“Not yet, but I have a lead.”
“Yes?”
“I think she’s in a small town in Vermont.”
“Then why aren’t you in Vermont?”
“It’ll mean hiring car and driving up. There will be some expenses.”
“Why the hell do you have a company credit card? Just get going.”
Jane, listening to dead air, lowers her phone and looks at the cheerless apartment, thinking how pleasant it would be to escape and take a long drive through New England in the Fall.
She dumps the soiled clothes from her wheely, steels herself and goes into the bedroom, the tangled sheets and the faint smell of musk still hanging in the air nearly undoing her.
Hurrying, she finds clean clothes, packs her suitcase, walks out and slams the door.
4
Gordon Rushworth arrives at the Maple Creek Bridge without remembering how he got there, some internal GPS leading him along in his fugue state.
He hasn’t seen this bridge in the nearly twenty years since he crossed it when he left East Devon for Harvard, swearing never to return.
The covered bridge is disused now, blocked off by 55-gallon drums and white stones.
East Devon is connected to the world by a new road that skirts the river and the old bridge has fallen into disrepair, its wooden floor so rotten that the sluggish waters of Maple Creek are visible through it.
The surrounding trees are dense and all that can be seen of the town is the skinny church spire, reaching above the forest that’s as gaudy as an over painted old hag.
Gordon is sweating, despite the crisp Fall day, and breathes heavily.
When he sits on a rock to get his breath back he feels as if he’s sinking into his past.
As the almost middle-aged Gordon sits staring at the old bridge, oppressed by feelings of failure and disillusionment, he can’t help but travel back in time to when last he can remember being truly happy, and his memory returns the bridge to its former glory, pitched roof glistening, wood painted and varnished, twelve-year-old Gordon and his best friend Suzie Baldwin riding up on their bikes, laughing, the golden sun of that endless summer drawing them into the creek that they entered as children and emerged, wet, dripping, laughing as something else when they stood in the shadow of the bridge and kissed for the very first time.
The memory is so sharp and painful that adult Gordon is driven to his feet and he feels a salty sting on his cheeks that is not sweat.
Good God, man, pull yourself together, he thinks as he dabs away the tears with one of the monogrammed handkerchiefs he favors.
But that kiss is as fresh on his lips as if it happened yesterday.
Gordon has had relationships with women, even came perilously close to marrying a few years ago, but he has never loved anybody the way he loved Suzie Baldwin, with her freckles and her cropped helmet of dark hair.
The last time he saw her the wisps that remained of her hair were hidden by a beanie, her face gaunt, eyes made ancient by the chemotherapy and the leukemia that killed her at thirteen.
What made the rejections of Too Long the Night doubly painful was that it was his love song to Suzie.
A coming-of-age novel about a boy who watches the girl he loves die and then shuts himself inside his intellect, distancing himself from the hicks around him, fleeing across this bridge into a better life.
A life of ideas and ideals.
Of philosophy.
Of culture.
In the book Suzie Baldwin became Sarah Oatman and Gordon himself was Lance Prescott, a more handsome, smarter, version of himself.
Not smart enough, it would seem, for the publishing gatekeepers of Manhattan.
The irony, of course, is that in the summer, when Gordon, left adrift and rudderless after being fired, found himself alone for a month when his sister went off to some New Age boot camp, it was Suzie Baldwin who arrived unbidden and got him writing again.
The Suzie Baldwin who had lived on inside Gordon’s head through his teens and into his twenties, always there with a joke, with advice.
Always there to kick him in the butt when he became lazy or discouraged.
She’d stopped visiting him as he neared thirty, no room in pompous self-important Gordon Rushworth’s life for an imaginary friend.
Or any other friends, the truth be told.
The Suzie who colonized his imagination this past summer had grown into a hottie.
A libidinous, fun-loving girl with no patience for conventions.
As Suzie Ballinger, without much intervention
from Gordon, she spun a picaresque tale of sex and seduction.
After the decade spent working on Too Long the Night, the book that became Ivy was a frothy romp.
Made all the more pleasurable because it afforded Gordon the opportunity to take childish revenge on people who had slighted him.
The department head who had scorned his master’s thesis was caught, literally, with his pants down when Suzie seduced him in his wood-paneled office.
The high school jock who had bullied Gordon became the moronic captain of the lacrosse team, reduced to tears and laughable attempts at verse when Suzie dropped him.
The alcoholic grease monkey was a barely disguised version of the stepfather who had tormented him.
The Nobel Laureate was a writer-in-residence at a college Gordon taught at years ago, who had read a chapter of Too Long the Night and dismissed it as “twinky trash.”
They were all there, gutted and emasculated by Suzie Ballinger, until she had disappeared from their lives to return to her small town and nurse her dying mother and reunite with her teenage sweetheart in a treacly swirl of shame-making wish-fulfillment.
The book, a mere slip of a thing beside Too Long the Night, was written in a three week frenzy, at the end of which Gordon was bearded, even skinnier than usual (in his sister’s absence he frequently neglected to eat) and sour smelling.
He accepted that this book was an expiation of sorts.
A dumping of emotional and psychological baggage.
Of one thing he was certain: it would remain on the hard drive of his laptop, hidden from the eyes of the world.
Then his sister returned and brought reality with her.
There were bills to pay and his presence (although she was too kind to say so) was a burden.
Bitsy, divorced and childless, earned a living scouring Southern Vermont and Western Massachusetts for antiques and bric-a-brac that she sold to stores in the tourist towns.
She had an eye and could bargain with the best of them but her income was meager.
And Gordon knew that part of that income was tithed to these hocus pocus organizations she was drawn to.
One morning, eating breakfast (toast and coffee for Gordon, fruit and herbal tea for Bitsy), his sister had said, “Gordon, may I ask a question?”
“Of course,” he said, crunching through his toast.
“Why don’t you try and write something different? Something more . . . commercial?”
When she saw how he was glaring at her she blushed and shrugged.
“I know you think I’m a philistine, but I see writers with no talent at all making fortunes.”
He slammed down his coffee cup.
“I could no more write some bestselling hokum than you could become Miss Vermont.”
When he saw the hurt on his sister’s plain, aging face, he felt a pang of guilt.
“I’m sorry, Bitsy, I misspoke.”
“No, I shouldn’t stick my nose into your business.”
“It’s just that I don’t write mainstream fiction. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Suzie Baldwin appeared right there in the kitchen, standing behind his sister with her hands on her hips saying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
“Shut up,” Gordon said, speaking to the specter.
“No need to be rude, Gordon,” Bitsy said, standing up to clear the breakfast things. “You’ve made your point.”
“Forgive me, Bitsy, I’m not myself.”
She nodded, faked a smile and dumped dishes in the sink.
The clatter of mail through the slit in the front door drew her from the kitchen.
Gordon followed, and saw her lifting a couple of envelopes.
“Anything for me?” he asked.
“No. Just bills.”
She took the mail to her bedroom and closed the door.
A few minutes later she came out carrying the keys to her elderly Volvo station wagon.
“I’m going across to Pankhurst. The contents of an old house are being sold, I may sniff out a good piece or two.”
“Okay,” he said.
When her car rattled away down the road, he booted up his laptop and opened Ivy.
It took him two hours to read it, and what he read filled him with distaste.
It was slick, trashy and superficial.
Filled with sex and sentimentality.
It shamed him that he had been able to write such a book, that those cheesy tropes had come so easily to him.
He tried to console himself that even the greats wrote trifles.
Entertainments.
But this, he knew, was nothing but garbage.
He used the cursor to highlight the file, right-clicked on the touchpad and was about to send Ivy to the recycle bin when he saw his sister’s face as she entered the bedroom carrying the sheaf of bills.
Gordon, broke with no promise of employment, was skewered by guilt.
“Publish it.”
Suzie appeared, leaning against the wall, arms folded.
“Never.”
“It’s the best thing you’ve ever written and you know it.”
“It’s chick-lit,” he said.
“At least it’s not that pretentious drivel you usually write, all lofty ideas and philosophizing. It’s about flesh-and-blood people with feelings. And appetites.”
He shook his head.
“And it’ll sell like crazy,” Suzie said before she disappeared.
Even imaginary women, it seemed, had to have the last word.
Gordon sat for a long time, staring unseeing at the wall, then he made a decision.
He’d publish the damned thing as an ebook.
Maybe it would earn a couple of dollars.
He spent the morning investigating how this could be achieved and discovered that the process was ridiculously easy.
What took the most time was the cover.
Gordon, a promising artist as a boy, put his rusty skills to use, found a photograph of an ivy covered wall on-line and did a bit of work in Photoshop.
The name Viola Usher came to him unbidden.
Viola, from Shakespeare’s, Twelfth Night, (who had disguised her sex, a little joke of Gordon’s) and Usher from—of course—Edgar Allen Poe.
He stared at the cover and it was adequate, he supposed.
Then something, some previously unacknowledged superstition, had him searching through a box of his junk Bitsy kept in a closet in the kitchen, and he very nearly teared up when he found pictures of himself and Suzie.
He skipped them and found a photograph of Maple Creek Bridge that he had taken as a teenager.
He scanned it, Photoshopped it a little, and set it as the background to the ivy-covered wall.
It worked.
By the time his sister returned, the rear of her car jammed with booty she had picked up for a song, Ivy had been uploaded and would appear for sale on-line by the morning.
Bitsy, her usual cheer restored by her successful day, made pasta and they split a bottle of wine, and by the time a slightly tipsy Gordon fell asleep on the couch he had forgotten about the book.
But the world had taken note of it . . .
Just as Suzie had known it would.
“She’s dead,” Gordon says, rising from the rock overlooking the bridge. “Will you finally get it through your head that Suzie is dead?”
He almost expects her to appear and contradict him but she doesn’t and Gordon leaves the bridge and wanders home through the town that—though it has all the attributes that would seem to make it a tourist magnet—wears an air of failure like a blanket.
Stores are closed and boarded up.
There are potholes in the streets.
When he arrives back at Bitsy’s house there’s no sign of her Volvo.
Inside he boots up his computer to check his email and finds only the usual spam yelling about Viagra and holidays in Bermuda.
He sighs and clicks open the sales records for Ivy.
; It has sold over two hundred thousand copies.
Ten thousand today alone.
It’s going to take another week for the first royalty payments to flood Gordon’s parched bank account and then he’ll be able to lift the financial weight from his harried sister’s shoulders.
Gordon knows that he’s going to need all his skills at fiction to come up with an explanation for his sudden windfall.
4
Jane Cooper feels a giddy rush of happiness as she speeds the nippy little rental Honda across the RFK Bridge, leaving Manhattan (and her misery) behind.
She likes to drive.
Coming from the Midwest she’s been driving since she was a teenager and it was one of the things she missed living in Manhattan, where she’d surrendered her car and become just another face on the subway.
Not wanting to play any of the music on her iPod (too many memories of Tom) she tunes the radio to some easy listening station that gets her happily up the Hutchinson River Parkway and into Connecticut, the GPS’s reassuringly stern female voice guiding her.
A couple of hours into the drive, somewhere near Hartford, her happiness starts to leak from her and she feels icy tentacles of anxiety playing her nerves like a banjo.
What the hell is she doing?
She’s lost her relationship, does she want to lose her job, too?
Taking off into New England on a self-indulgent whim, looking to escape her own misery with nothing but the slenderest of clues linking Vermont to Viola Usher . . .
Getting on the bad side of Jonas Blunt would be career suicide.
She has seen him dispatching previously favored minions with all the emotion of an automaton.
Jane has been with the Blunt Agency for five years, carefully negotiating perilous waters, slowly trying to make herself indispensable to Jonas.
She still earns peanuts, of course, and has to live with junior agent printed on her business cards, trusted to represent only a few unimportant authors.
But what if she’s right?
What if Viola Usher is in East Devon, Vermont?
A coup like that would put her on the fast track to promotion.
Crossing into Vermont from Massachusetts, the Fall leaves a burst of color in the late afternoon sunlight, she tries to calm herself.
She has merely acted on her intuition.