The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Oh? When were you going to mention all this?”

  Again, that shrug. “Now, I guess. I thought maybe I could drive my stuff out there, then I’ll bring the car back. Then I’ll take a bus or something.”

  “Wow. Great plan. I guess you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “Well, it’s not as if you’re going to take me to college.”

  “No?” Samantha said. “Well, how can I if you haven’t even told me it’s happening?”

  She turned, and Samantha could hear her stalking back along the corridor to her room. She got up and followed.

  “Why is that, by the way? Why did I have to hear from my high school math teacher that my daughter is graduating early? Why do I have to look through your desk to find out my daughter’s going to college out of state?”

  “I thought so,” Maria said, her voice maddeningly calm. “Couldn’t keep your paws off my stuff, could you?”

  “No, I guess not. Same as if I’d thought you were doing drugs. Proper parental oversight.”

  “Oh, that’s hilarious. Now you’re suddenly interested in proper parental oversight?”

  “I’ve always—”

  “Right. Cared. Please, Mom, we’ve got, like, a couple more days to get through together. Let’s not blow it now.”

  She got up from the bed and stepped in front of her mother, on her way, perhaps, along the hall to the bathroom, where Samantha had once confirmed her predicament with a pregnancy test from the Hamilton ThriftDrug, or down to the kitchen where Samantha had once tried to persuade her own mother that it made no sense—no sense!—to have or at any rate to keep this baby she had never wanted, never for one moment wanted, not then, not since, not now, and as that body passed before her she saw, shockingly, herself: slender and straight, with thin brown hair and that family way of slouching, both as she was now and as she had been in that long-ago moment, only wanting, hoping, and waiting for the day she could leave like Maria was about to leave. And without understanding what she was doing or knowing she was going to do it she reached out for her daughter’s wrist and yanked it hard, swinging the body attached to it powerfully back along an invisible arc, and as she did she had an idea of herself, swinging a little girl up into the air and smiling into her smile as the two of them spun around and around. It was something a mother might have done with her daughter, and a daughter with her mother, in a film or a television commercial for dresses or Florida beaches or weed killer to make the backyard pretty for an innocent child to play in, only Samantha couldn’t remember ever having done this herself, whether she’d been the spinning mother or the spun little girl, around and around in a perfect arc.

  Maria’s head swung into one of that old bed’s wooden cannonballs, and the crack was so deep and so loud it silenced the world.

  She fell like something light, barely making a sound, only there she was: half on and half off an old braided rug that had once, when Samantha herself was young, been in the hallway outside her parents’ bedroom door. She waited for her daughter to get up, but the waiting ran along a parallel track to something else, which was the absolute and weirdly calm understanding that she was already gone.

  Off. Fled. Escaped, after all.

  Samantha must have sat there for a minute or an hour, or the better part of that night, watching the crumpled thing that had once, long ago, been Maria, her daughter. And what a waste that had been. What an exercise in pointlessness, bringing a human being into the world, only to find oneself more alone than before, more thwarted, more disappointed, more perplexed about what anything meant. This child who had never once reached for her or expressed love, who had never shown the smallest appreciation for what her mother had done, what she’d given up—not willingly, sure, but resignedly, responsibly—and now it had come to this. What for?

  She thought, at one point in the deepest part of the night, I could be in shock. But it didn’t stick. That thought dropped behind her, and also lay still.

  Samantha was, as it happened, wearing Maria’s discarded green T-shirt that night. It was soft, and it hung on her pretty much exactly as it had on her daughter: same narrow shoulders, same flat chest. She rubbed the cotton between her fingers until they hurt. There was another shirt of her daughter’s she had always liked, a black, long-sleeved T-shirt that looked slouchy and comfortable and had a hood. She thought of herself wearing it and wondered if anyone would see her and ask: Isn’t that Maria’s shirt? What would she say? Oh, Maria gave it to me when she left for college. But Maria wasn’t going to college now. Surely everyone would know that. But who would tell them?

  I’m not telling them, Samantha realized. She wasn’t telling anybody.

  It was all so obvious after that. She finished packing up her daughter’s belongings, and some of her own. She closed up the house and put everything into the car and drove west, as far west as she had ever traveled before, and then farther. At Jamestown she turned south and at last left New York state, and by late that afternoon she was deep in the Allegheny National Forest, taking at each turn the road that looked less traveled. In a town called Cherry Grove she saw a sign for a rental cabin, so remote the owner told her not to bother if she didn’t have a four-wheel drive.

  “I have a Subaru,” she told him. She paid cash for a week.

  The following day was spent looking for the best place, and that night she dug the hole with a shovel she’d brought from Earlville. The next night she brought her daughter’s body and left it there, deep in the soil and covered with rocks and brush, after which she took a shower and tidied the cabin and left the key on the front porch, as she’d been instructed. Then she got back in her old car and put that, too, behind her.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Athens, Georgia

  “I need to go to Georgia,” he told Anna, a day after his return from Rutland. They were walking from their apartment up to Chelsea Market, and immediately they began to argue.

  “Jake, this is crazy. Going around talking to people in bars and sneaking into people’s houses and offices!”

  “I didn’t sneak.”

  “You didn’t tell the truth.”

  No. But it had been worth it. He had learned, inside of twenty-four hours, more than he’d been able to figure out in months. Now he understood what he’d actually been dealing with, or at least what he’d been avoiding dealing with, all that time.

  “There has to be another way,” she said.

  “Sure. I could go back on Oprah like my spirit animal, James Frey, and hang my head and whine about my ‘process,’ and everyone will totally understand, and it won’t destroy everything I’ve accomplished or get the movie canceled, not to mention the new book, or make me a pariah for the rest of my life. Or I could ask Matilda or Wendy to set up some kind of public breast beating, and make Evan Parker into a tragically lost Great American Novelist, and give him credit for a book he didn’t write. Or maybe just let this bitch have complete control over my life, and the power to blow up my career and my reputation and my livelihood.”

  “I’m not suggesting any of that,” Anna said.

  “I can see how to find her now, or at least where to start looking. It’s the wrong moment to ask me to stop.”

  “It’s the right moment. Because you’re going to get hurt.”

  “I’m going to get hurt if I do nothing, Anna. She doesn’t want to be exposed any more than I do. She wants to be in control, and so far she has been. But the more I find out about her, the more I can redress the balance. Frankly it’s the only thing I have in my corner.”

  “But why is it still ‘I’? I got my own nasty letter from her, remember? And even if that wasn’t the case, we should be dealing with this together. We’re married! We’re a partnership!”

  “I know,” Jake agreed miserably.

  Maybe he hadn’t fully understood the impact of his own evasions on Anna, or even the damage he’d caused to his brand-new marriage, not until he’d been forced into this conf
ession. Six months of hiding the existence of TalentedTom (not to mention the existence of Evan Parker himself) had worn away at him—that part he understood—but now he saw the risk he’d taken with her, and the worst part was that he probably still wouldn’t have told her about any of it, not if he hadn’t been forced to do so. It was a terrible indictment of what remained of his character, and she had every reason to be furious at him, but even as he acknowledged this he hoped the previous night’s confessions would ultimately serve to make things better. Maybe letting Anna into his personal circle of the Inferno, even against his will, would bind them closer together. He had to hope so. He was desperate to get to the end of it, and when he did, he vowed to start clean—with Anna and with everything else.

  “I need to go to Georgia,” Jake said again.

  He had told her, already, about the Rutland attorney, William Gaylord, Esquire, who’d acted in conjunction with the seller’s out-of-state representation. He had told her about the Rose Parker who was the right age, and had once lived in Athens, Georgia. Now he told her what he had learned by spending five dollars on a twenty-four-hour pass to the online Vermont Town Clerks Portal: the name and address of that out-of-state attorney, an Arthur Pickens, Esquire. Also of Athens, Georgia.

  “So?” said Anna.

  “You know what else is in Athens, Georgia? An enormous university.”

  “Well, okay, but that’s hardly a smoking gun. More like a big coincidence.”

  “Okay, if it’s a coincidence, then I’ll find that out. And then I can just resign myself to letting this woman destroy our lives. But first, I want to know if she’s still there, or if not, then I want to know where she went when she left.”

  Anna shook her head. They had reached the Ninth Avenue entrance to Chelsea Market, and people were streaming out. “But why can’t you just call this guy? Why do you actually need to fly down there?”

  “I think I’ll have a better chance of getting in to see him if I just turn up. That seemed to work in Vermont. You can come with me, you know.”

  But she couldn’t. She needed to go back to Seattle to finish dealing with her stuff in storage and take care of some final business with KBIK. Already she’d put that off a couple of times, and now her boss at the podcast studio had asked Anna not to travel later in June (when he was getting married and going to China on a honeymoon) or July (when he’d be attending a podcasting conference in Orlando). Anna had been planning her trip for next week, and Jake couldn’t persuade her to change her plans, so he gave up trying, and there remained a palpable tension between them. He booked his flight to Atlanta for the following Monday, and then he spent the intervening days finishing his revisions for Wendy. He sent off the manuscript late on Sunday night and when he turned his phone on after the plane landed in Atlanta the following afternoon, there was an email letting him know the book had been put into production. So that particular weight, at least, fell away.

  Atlanta was a city he had passed through a couple of times on his book tours but never really visited. He picked up a car at the airport and headed northeast to Athens, passing through Decatur, where many months earlier, as Crib first surged into the national consciousness, he’d attended a book festival and experienced his first “entrance applause.” He remembered that day—only two years ago—and the strange, disembodied feeling of being known by someone (in this case, by many someones) he himself did not know, and the sense of wonder that he had actually written a book strangers had paid money to buy, and spent time to read, and liked enough to have filed into the DeKalb County Courthouse just to see him and hear him say, presumably, something of interest. How far from that heady moment to this, Jake thought, passing the exit signs for Decatur on 285. He wondered if he would be permitted to feel pride in his new book when it came out, or whether he’d ever be able to write anything else after this ordeal, even if he did, somehow, manage to bring it to a peaceful conclusion. And if he didn’t, if this woman succeeded in bringing him to his knees, shaming him before his peers and his readers and everyone else who’d placed their own professional reputation in support of his, Jake wondered how he could continue to hold up his head in the world, not just as a writer but as a person.

  All the more reason to get the answers he’d come for.

  By the time he reached Athens it was too late to do anything but eat, so he checked into his hotel and went out for barbeque, marking up a map of the locations he needed to visit as he sat waiting for his ribs and beer. He was surrounded by blond young women dressed in red UGA shirts. They had musical, inebriated voices and were celebrating some plainly nonacademic triumph together, and he thought how unlike these admittedly pretty young people his own wife was, and how fortunate he felt to be married to Anna, even if Anna was plainly distressed about the choices he’d been making and upset with him in general. He thought of how, each morning after his wife left for work, he found a nest of her long gray hairs coiled in the drain of the shower, the extraction of which gave him a powerful, if admittedly odd, satisfaction. He thought of how their home was warm, colorful, and comfortable—not one facet of which was a thing he’d been able to achieve on his own—and how the refrigerator and freezer were full of her delicious food: homemade soups and stews and even bread. He thought of the cat, Whidbey, and the particular satisfaction of cohabiting with an animal (his first actual pet since a woefully short-lived hamster when he was a boy), and the ways in which the animal occasionally deigned to express gratitude for his extremely pleasant life. He thought of the gradual addition of new and agreeable people to their life as a couple—some from the world of writers (whom he could enjoy as people now that he had no reason to envy them) and some from the new media spheres Anna was beginning to move in. All of it underscored the powerful sense that he had embarked upon the best period of his life.

  Now, sipping his beer and eating his barbecued ribs as the sorority girls yelped at the next table, he marveled at the chance of it all: that late addition to his crammed book tour, which Otis (he actually had to try to remember the name of his tour liaison!) had accepted on his behalf, the irritating, borderline insulting on-air interview, the utterly spontaneous invitation to have coffee, and above all the unanticipated bravery of someone willing to upend her life and join his, leaving so much behind. And here he was, less than a year later, married to this wise and lovely woman, with a new life and a new novel that carried not the slightest taint of compromise in its conception, looking ahead to every variety of fulfillment.

  If only he could put Evan Parker and his appalling family behind him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Poor Rose

  In the morning he walked to the UGA campus and found his way to the registrar’s office, where he requested the records of a student named Rose Parker, hometown: West Rutland, Vermont. He had a story prepared—estranged niece, dying grandparent—but nobody asked him for anything, including identification. On the other hand, he was only offered the information allowed under something called the Buckley Amendment, and if that seemed sparse compared to all of the questions Jake had it also represented a bouquet of wonderfully concrete facts. First, that Rose Parker had enrolled at the University of Georgia at Athens in September of 2012 without a declared major. Second, that she’d requested and received a waiver for the requirement that freshmen live in an on-campus dormitory (in a welcome bonus, the off-campus address provided to the university matched the one from his previous internet search). Third, that only one year later, in the fall of 2013, there was no longer a Rose Parker among the 37,000 enrolled students at the university. Needless to say, the registrar had no forwarding address or current contact information of any kind, and if Rose’s academic records had ever been sent to another institution of higher education in support of a transfer application, that information did not fall within the parameters of what he was permitted to know.

  He walked out into the June morning and took a seat on one of the wooden benches in front of the Holmes-Hunter Academic Buildin
g. It was both marvelous and somehow disturbing to imagine this person walking along the collegiate pathways, perhaps sitting on this very bench in front of the distinctly plantation-esque building he’d just exited. Could she still be here in Athens? It was certainly possible, but Jake suspected she was long gone to some other town in some other state, doing who knew what else as she kept up an obsessive campaign against him and his work.

  Jake found the offices of Arthur Pickens, Esquire, on College Avenue and took an outdoor table at a café a few storefronts up the street to gather his thoughts. He was looking over some of the distinctly unsavory information about Pickens gathered over the days since his visit to that other Esquire in Rutland, Vermont, when he saw an obviously irate father ushering his college-aged son, clad in the now familiar UGA red attire, into the attorney’s office. The pair stayed inside for a long time, and when they finally emerged, Jake got up from his table and entered by the same door, finding himself at the foot of a steep staircase. On the second floor, the office’s glass door was unlocked, and inside, a florid-faced man was seated at a massive mahogany desk. Behind him: shelves of law books, so pristine they looked as if they’d never been opened. That wasn’t inconsistent with what he’d learned about Arthur Pickens, Esquire.

  The man was frowning. Jake, also, was frowning. Then he remembered that he had the first line.

  “Mr. Pickens?”

  “I am. And you are?”

  “Jacob Bonner.”

  Jake crossed the room with his hand extended. He was going for southern genteel, the Yankee approximation. “Sorry not to call first. If you’re busy I’d be happy to come back.”

  Pickens, however, remained seated. He did not extend his own hand. He seemed to be giving Jake more disapproval than even an unexpected walk-in deserved.

  “I don’t believe that will be necessary, Mr. Bonner. I won’t be able to help you, even if you come back another time.”