How to Write a Novel

by Melanie Sumner

  I put her on speakerphone while I checked my Facebook page. Tiffany and Billy had begun appearing in photos together. Tiffany had “liked” Billy’s basketball photo. Billy had “liked” some dumb picture of her. Apparently, she played girls’ basketball.

  “Aris!” Grandma yelled into the phone. “Aris? I can’t hear you. Something is wrong with your phone.”

  Max walked into the kitchen. “She put you on speakerphone, Grandma!” he shouted, thumping his hand along the counter as he made his way down one side of the galley kitchen and up the other.

  There was a pause while Grandma digested this information. Then she said, “Well, I guess I better go. Y’all are busy.”

  “Aris,” said Max after she hung up. “Will you play Pokémon with me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m busy,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He stepped closer and stared into my face, but I brushed him away. “Have you been crying?”

  “No.”

  “You look weird.”

  “Thanks. You too.”

  He started thumping on the counter again. “We’re going to be poor,” he said. He opened a cabinet and shut it and opened it and shut it and opened it and shut it. “We are going to be poor and hungry. Don’t you care, Aris?”

  I stared at a cracked tile in the floor, imagining myself getting smaller and smaller until I could slip inside that crack and disappear forever. Did I care?

  “Will you play with me later? At seven fifteen?”

  “I have to do my homework.”

  “You never do your homework.”

  It was true. I had been letting my homework lie fallow while I finished the novel.

  “Will you play with me tomorrow?” He opened the cabinet again and pulled out a bag of ancient marshmallows. Diane quit buying them after Penn told her they were made of petroleum.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “What time? Will you play Pokémon with me at nine o’clock in the morning?”

  “Probably.” I swiped some marshmallows and walked down the hall, pausing in front of Diane’s bathroom door to listen to the soft splashes in the bathtub. In my room, I sat down at the little white desk from Sears that had taken Diane a week to put together and which I never use. According to the calendar she had hung on my bulletin board, I had less than two weeks to finish my novel.

  Two weeks! I put on my headlamp, grabbed my laptop, and dived under the bed. A few more dust balls had formed since I cleared out Diane’s journals, and one sticky note had fallen off the wall. I gathered the loose papers that had slipped from Diane’s notebooks: an old gym schedule, a couple of bills, and then—I don’t know how I missed this—a short story, stapled together and folded in half. Under the bed, in the dim, dusty light, I read it.

  Greensleeves

  By Diane Montgomery-Thibodeau

  When Joe’s mother died, we flew to Houma for the funeral.

  “Will Mr. Lafontaine be there?” I asked.

  He shrugged like it didn’t matter; then he looked hard at me. “I am asking you not to say anything or do anything,” he said. I tried to shrug like him, but he wouldn’t have it. Kept looking into me. “I am asking this of you,” he said.

  Before we were married, he said, “Now I have to put the dead fish on the table.” I saw him in the kitchen of the restaurant where he worked, wearing a white apron spattered with blood, leaning into a halibut with a thin knife half as long as my arm. The fish eye stared straight up at the ceiling. Scales glittered along the backs of his brown hands like silver sequins. Then I looked out the trailer window at our blank, white world in Alaska and felt the butterfly kick of the fetus.

  Victims generally choose similar victims, I read from a library book. So it would be a seven-year-old boy, a neighbor’s son, someone whose dad had recently died, a big brown-eyed kid with five siblings and an overwrought mother, a boy who needed a mentor, perhaps a deacon and the chief of police in the town of Houma, Louisiana. He would give him rides to Little League practice. It would happen again and again and again, in the basement of the man’s house. The boy wouldn’t tell because if he did, Chief/Deacon Lafontaine would tell his mother that he had been drinking. I tried to imagine the glass a man would pour whiskey in for a seven-year-old. Was it a plastic cup that wouldn’t break if he dropped it on the basement floor? This went on for three years.

  “Why did he stop?” I asked Joe.

  “I don’t know,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets, his head nearly grazing the water-stained ceiling of the trailer. “He got tired of me? Found someone else?”

  “I’m going to kill him,” I said.

  “Okay. You do that.” He pulled on his coat, took the snowshoes off the nails on the wall, and went outside.

  I sewed a little black velvet jumper for Aristotle, a funeral dress. I stitched pink ribbon around the hem and saved a piece for a pink bow. She was a beauty, with his big, dark eyes and ruby studs in her ears.

  “Maybe you’ll see an alligator,” I told her.

  The velvet dress was too hot for Louisiana, even in February. Aris took it off in the middle of the funeral service after she’d slipped out of my arms and dashed up to the casket, where her grandmother lay in her favorite red dress, eyes closed in a forever sleep. I caught Aris, carried her screaming outside.

  “Hot!” she cried, pushing me away with her damp arms as I tried to get the velvet back over her head. So I let her walk with me around the parking lot in her big-girl pants and Mary Janes, looking for alligators. When she began to cry because the sunlight hurt her eyes, I put Mickey Mouse sunglasses on her face. The ribbon held fast on her shiny head.

  As we passed by the window of the funeral home, she stopped to listen to the recording of “Greensleeves.”

  “It’s Daddy’s song,” she said. They had asked Joe to play his saxophone at the service, but he wouldn’t. He used to play it for his mother when she called, putting the phone on speaker and strapping the sax across his chest. They spoke French to each other. “Je t’aime, Maman.”

  When people began filing out the door after the service, I looked for Mr. Lafontaine. I thought that somehow I’d recognize him, but I felt confused in the crowd. After so many dark months in Alaska, the sunlight made me dizzy. The Creole drawl sounded more like French than English.

  “My wife,” Joe would say in introductions. “My daughter.”

  “Yo wife,” they would drawl. “Yo daughtah,” with the accent on the end.

  “Mon cher,” an older woman said to him, pulling him into a hug, and he was eased away from us into a blur of shoulders and backs the colors of shadows.

  “I’m tired of the funeral,” said Aris. “I want to go home now.” She handed me her glasses and pressed her face against my leg to hide from the light. “I’m hot,” she said. “I’m thirsty. Merm, my shoe came off.”

  One afternoon when the ice on the roads had begun to melt into a beer-colored slush, I stomped home from my job at the coffee kiosk to find Joe stretched out on our mattress with the baby. He was wearing what we had worn all winter, in and out of bed, long underwear with sweatpants, a turtleneck, a pullover, and two pairs of wool socks. She lay in his arms, shocking in her pink flesh. Even the diaper was gone.

  “Why did you take her clothes off?” I asked him. It was the way I leveled off each word, making them all flat and even, as if I was cutting something out.

  He looked at me, looked into me. “She’s always so bundled up,” he said. “I want to see what she looks like.”

  The baby focused her eyes on my chest. She was pale and long in the belly and too thin, I thought. At night, I would reach into the sheepskin bag we tucked between us, where she lay soft and warm, and put my finger under the tiny nose to make sure she was breathing. “Do you tell her that you love her?” he had asked me.

  “She doesn’t know words yet.”

  “She understands,” he said.

  Later I would r
emember getting a new doll, taking its clothes off to look at it, to know it, but the memory came too late.

  “It’s just weird,” I said, and I took the half stride that led into the kitchen. Over the miniature sink, there was a window slightly bigger than my face that looked out over the rusty wall of the next trailer. A few weeks ago, the snow had been higher than the window, but it was melting away. I could see through the ashen light into the other window, but there was no movement there.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said from the bed.

  I dumped a cup of cold coffee into the sink and then carefully scraped the grounds away from the thimble-sized drain so it wouldn’t clog. I prayed. Please, God. Please help me. Please help us.

  Mr. Lafontaine came upon me suddenly, while I was bent over putting the shoe back on Aris’s foot. “Hello,” he said. I stood up too fast, trying to blink away the colored spots that danced before my eyes. He looked nothing like I had imagined. It’s not him, I told myself.

  When Joe first told me about Mr. Lafontaine, I called a nun hotline. Having grown up Baptist, I had an image of nuns as sweet ladies with pink cheeks and kind wrinkles around their eyes.

  “It happens all the time,” said the nun in a Brooklyn accent. There was a long pause on the line, as if she was giving me a chance to tell her something she didn’t already know. “Be glad that your husband lived,” she said. “A lot of them kill the victims. Keeps them from telling.”

  I thought about the man handing the little boy a glass of whiskey down in the basement. There must have been a dart board, maybe a foosball table, some posters of football or baseball players. Little League. “I’d be happy to take Joe to practice when I take my boys,” he must have said to the mother. There was a Mrs. Lafontaine and two children, a dog, and a cat.

  I imagined the sweaty gray Louisiana sun thickening the air around them on the ball field, wet circles widening under Chief Lafontaine’s armpits, the smell of deodorant. “Strike one! Choke that bat, boy! Choke up on it.” Later, his big hand clapping him on the back, resting for a moment between the birdlike shoulder blades. “I’m proud of you, son. That was a good effort.”

  “Mark Lafontaine,” he said, pumping my hand as he called me by the name of Joe’s ex-wife. He had sandy hair, streaked with gray, and light-colored eyes. He was tall, with a slightly athletic stance, but just an ordinary man, somebody’s husband, somebody’s father.

  “It’s so good to see Joe after all these years,” he said.

  The words sat waiting in my mouth. I had practiced them in front of mirrors, recited them to myself as I fell asleep, repeated them upon awakening. There were many versions: So you’re the man who molested my husband when he was a child. Nice to meet you at last. / Hi. Nice to meet you. Raped any little boys lately? / Mr. Lafontaine! Yes, Joe has talked so much about you. He told me everything.

  Then I would punch him in the face. Then I would draw a Smith & Wesson and pull the trigger. Then I would scream and scream and scream.

  The humidity was a steady, suffocating entity, pressing evenly all around me, squeezing the air out of my lungs, making the zipper of my dress hot against my back. He was looking down at Aris.

  “And what is your name?”

  Suddenly, Joe cut in between us, smiling, saying something about the LSU season.

  They talked about football.

  As we drove to the graveyard, Aris and I pressed our faces against the windows, searching for movement in the murky swamp on the side of the road. “Ooze,” said Aris. “Ooze, ooze, ooze.” She beat her hand on the car seat. “Bite you!” Every stick floating in the water looked like an alligator.

  “You can’t see them,” said Joe. “They show up when they want to.”

  “I saw bubbles,” I said, but he wouldn’t stop the car.

  That night at a restaurant we ordered crawfish with corn on the cob and iced tea. The crawfish came in a plastic bag stuffed inside a bucket. Someone called them mudbugs. Joe took one out, delicately twisted off the head, and sucked the juice out of it. I watched him dig the fat out of the head and then break the tail.

  “Daddy’s eating roaches,” said Aris, watching him intently. He grinned at her, teeth flashing, bringing that light all around him.

  My God, I thought, he’s forgiven the bastard.

  I left Diane’s story under the bed. I sat down at my white Sears desk, scooting the chair all the way in even though my knees scraped the wood. I felt safe at my tiny desk, in control. Once upon a time I was a little girl who thought growing up meant having birthday parties. I had never read my mother’s journals, learning more about my past than I wanted to know. I had never heard of Chief Lafontaine.

  It was too late; I knew what I knew. For the rest of my life, the image of my seven-year-old father being molested by a man in a basement would live in my head.

  Through the wall, I could hear Diane getting out of the bathtub. She would be standing on the mat in the steamy room, smelling of lavender bubble bath, humming tunelessly as she patted herself dry. A few bubbles would remain in her hair. When I was little, we all took baths together. “Just keep his head out of the water,” she would say as we passed a slippery Max between us. You wouldn’t think cleaning such a small body could be so much work, but it was. “It takes a village to wash a baby,” I said, and she grinned under the tall bubble hat I had made on her head.

  All of a sudden, I wanted to run to her and tell her everything. I would say, Merm, I read your journals. I read about the basement. Maybe she would say, Oh, Aris, that’s just a story. That’s fiction. She would say, There is no such thing as Mr. Lafontaine.

  But there is such a thing as Mr. Lafontaine. I knew this. Deep down, I had always known. That’s why she drove me and Max past the pedophile houses in the Orchard. That’s why she dressed me in an anti–human trafficking sweater to go to the airport. When a man sometimes looked at me funny, Diane was instantly by my side emitting danger vibes like an electric eel. News flash: Aris, there is evil in the world. I know, I have always known, but—

  I don’t think I can do this anymore, I imagined telling Dr. Dhang. I can’t hold on. I saw myself stretched out on the velvet divan while she adjusted her glasses to peer at me across a long room.

  Are you having thoughts of suicide? she would ask me.

  It’s complicated, I would say. As my Montgomery genes kicked in, I would retreat into the safety of analysis, approaching the issue from a practical standpoint.

  The author of Write a Novel in Thirty Days! is generally opposed to killing off characters. The chapter on endings warns writers not to chase the characters off the edge of a cliff like bison hunters just to finish the story. Apparently, this is a temptation. The book points out the obvious—as soon as you wipe out a first-person narrator, your story is finished.

  Even if I could, logistically, kill myself in my own novel, there is the matter of method. We are probably the only people in Kanuga who do not own a gun. In Georgia, you don’t even need a license to have a gun unless you are wearing it. Kanugians keep a pistol in the glove compartment, a rifle hanging in the truck window, and a few AK-47s back at the house. You can buy guns at Walmart, and Max is always pestering Diane to put one in the cart. “No,” she always says. “We have a machete.”

  No, Dr. Dhang, I am not having thoughts of suicide. I have a better plan. The idea came like a firefly, like the spirit of Dad. It grew into a streak, and then, the more I thought about it, into a sky popping with fireworks. I would go to Houma, Louisiana, and confront Mr. Lafontaine.

  I imagined holding the blade of the machete to his bobbing Adam’s apple, watching his eyes dart fearfully as I said, “I am Aristotle Thibodeau, Joe’s daughter.” Diane had failed to challenge him, but I would succeed.

  I would bring Billy with me, in case I needed a backup. Billy, I would say, standing at his doorstep in Boston with snow blowing all around me, I know that you have been ignoring me and that you are in all likelihood dating your cousin, but I nee
d your help to settle a score. Of course, Billy would fall in love with me all over again on our heroic mission, but I tried not to dwell on those details: the sunglasses we would wear, how I would sweep his hand aside and knock on Chief Lafontaine’s door myself, the way the moon hung over the bayou when we had put that evil man away and Billy held me close. I could fix this.

  On Friday, February 20, after everyone in the house was asleep, I removed the machete from the car and hid it under my bed. If there were a police report of what happened on Saturday, February 21, it would look like this:

  Incident Report 001001

  Kanuga Police Department

  At 2300 hours on February 20, Aristotle Thibodeau, of 17 Plum Lane, sent a Facebook message to Billy Starr, of Northampton, Massachusetts.

  I need you. We have something important to do. Call me.

  There was no response.

  2430 hours Ms. Thibodeau sent a second message to Billy.

  You say I’m an idealist, but if we aren’t going to change the world, who is? I know where we can start. I found out something terrible about my father. We can make the world a safer place. Will you help me?

  0116 hours Ms. Thibodeau sent a third message to Billy.

  I know you’re not asleep. I AM NOT STALKING YOU, but your Facebook status is ONLINE. Hello?

  0430 hours

  You haven’t answered ANY OF MY EMAILS OR TEXTS in forever. I don’t mean to sound desperate or anything, but really? Am I, like, nothing to you?

  0800 hours There is a knock on Ms. Thibodeau’s bedroom door. Her mother, also of 17 Plum Lane, is reported as saying that she is going to run errands and will be back in a few hours. Ms. Thibodeau is informed that Penn MacGuffin, an employee, will be on the premises before 1000 hours to continue construction work on an external building on the property (shed/playhouse).