by Dan Noble
“I can’t.”
“Please.”
“It’s crazy.”
“Crazy? What do you know about art? You’re a builder.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Try to anger me so that I do it.”
“At what point did you get to know me so well?”
“You’re a wonderful writer. I have never known anyone better.”
“Then do it.”
“Dying is not going to take you to your daughter.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s rubbish.”
“Even if it is rubbish, the art will stand and make people think about the kind of world we created that let something like that happen to Olena.”
“Will it? People don’t even read anymore.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth. Don’t you want the truth? For Olivia?”
She shuddered. For him to use the name. It was a red line. She knew what she had to do. “What good is that? We each live our own truth.”
“You can run away from everything and make our life together your truth.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Well, it doesn’t work the way you think it does, either.”
He was still inside her, and he thrusted. She closed her eyes, again, the moment taking precedence. She was so close to whatever was next, she could taste it. If it took words to get Micko to do what she wanted, she could get there. She was excellent with words.
He thrust again.
Now she felt herself waiting for more. She pushed against him, but he wouldn’t move. It was a game. She pushed and pushed, and he began to moan, and again he came inside her. Life inside her. But she didn’t finish, and so she pushed more. She was close now. Then there. She heard herself moaning. And then footsteps. Closer up the walk. She didn’t pay it much mind because she hadn’t written anyone else in. Though Micko’s use of her name had sent her worlds colliding.
The door flew open.
“Gav!” She jumped up, straightening her skirt.
She felt as if she were seeing her husband in combat. She’d heard a few stories from his friends, when they’d been drinking, but she hadn’t been able to picture it. Especially when she knew how much they all embellished. But this was the image that had eluded her: he was all business. She almost couldn’t recognize him. They were his features, but with no give. More like a welder’s mask made to resemble him. Micko was strong, but he either wasn’t trying or didn’t have a chance. His arms barely flapped. He still had an erection.
She heard herself yell, “No! No!”
Gav’s hands were around Micko’s neck, squeezing. This would be the worst possible outcome: if she hurt everyone around her. “No! Don’t kill him.”
She did all she could think to do: she picked up the lamp, which was heavier than she’d suspected, and used the wide top, rather than the narrow bottom, to hurt, but not kill, Gav, so that he’d let Mick go. She was disgusted at the feeling of satisfaction that striking the blow instilled: had she blamed him somehow for what had happened to Olena? It was illogical. The fault was not his, but still, here she was. She could not deny the feeling, blooming there amid the panic and care for him.
The force of the blow was enough for Gav to drop his hands and stumble back onto the coffee table. Mick’s hands went right to his throat. He gasped and then coughed and eventually sighed as great breaths tumbled through his passageway.
They were in a sort of circle, chests heaving, taking in the scene, what had happened. Footsteps again, the door crashing against the wall. The bartender.
It was clear from Micko’s response that he knew her.
23
AGGIE
She could never get enough of the story. In it, she came off like an angel, a savior. And in the end, that was how it had turned out. But it wasn’t what she intended when she burst through the door. She didn’t know what she had in mind.
She was outside looking in, and then all of a sudden, she was part of the action. Immediately, she sensed she’d made a mistake. This wasn’t her story. She’d crossed some sort of line. She was worse than a peeping Tom. At least those guys stuck to the rules.
Micko’s look said it all. What the fuck are you doing here?
She’d been binge-watching this unfold, and she had to know the ending. Now all she wanted was to run back to her spot under the tree, but it was clearly too late for that now.
“Please don’t call the police,” the woman said to her.
She hadn’t even considered it. But now she saw she held the power. It changed things. She took them all in: Micko, who’d fucked her over, the bitch who had it coming, the bigwig who everyone knew, who’d looked at her like a maggot when she’d dobbed in his wife. And yet, she had it over all of them. So, what would she do now?
She waited too long. Gavan was up again, this time with the pointy end of the lamp, and he yielded it like a weapon and smashed Micko in the skull once, twice, three times.
Micko put his hands to his head. His fingers came away covered in inky dark blood. He had to pull his fingers away because Gavan kept smashing, as if he were possessed and couldn’t stop even if he wanted to.
Micko was probably dead after the fifth time, but Gavan kept hefting the lamp and making contact with Micko’s skull, which made the most disgusting wet sound, as if it had gone liquid.
She nodded once so they’d both see, and then she turned around and left. She would never tell. It was the only thing to do, and it had been clear to all of them. She didn’t know how it was all handled, but Micko’s death was never linked to Gavan. It was a small town, and he was considered a good person and Micko was not. And the only people who knew they bore any connection were Aggie and Irene.
Looking back, she’d done the right thing, telling Gavan, then keeping everything to herself. She even grew to admire the woman. She was strong, did what she had to do. Aggie could respect that.
Irene moved away. She suspected her friend had been in love with Gavan. But in the end, Aggie had probably helped her, too. Because he was never going to be with Irene in any real way, and she would have wasted who knows how long in pursuit. Last Aggie heard, she was in Brussels. There’d been a bomb blast. A real one. She didn’t know whether Irene had been there, but she’d never heard from her again.
Gavan and his wife moved on to a new posting. The house was painted yellow. Everything looked different now. Still, whenever Erin put out a new book, she read it. It was easy to find out, even though she put them out anonymously, because the media made a huge deal, trying to guess her identity. Always the plot revolved around a senseless death. Like a literary serial killer. They were not bestsellers, but they made waves, made people think, and for a few weeks after, she thought people were kinder, more careful, giving. But maybe that was just her imagination.
The first one came out a year after the murder. It gave her chills to hear the story as fiction, to hear herself named Katarina, to hear how respected her discretion had been. Noble, was how she saw herself after that reading.
She’d gone to the bookshop in a disguise. Her hair was that pinky-blonde Irene’s had been at the time this had all gone down, cut to shoulder length, with an edgy, razored finish. She wore a white dress and a white coat and told herself Erin’s words, which she’d inscribed over the book-signing table, with only the most cursory of glances at Aggie, but a glittering smile, were a thank-you: Memento mori, she’d written.
She’d walked out of that bookshop and drove right to the bar to tell her boss where to shove her job. She was going to do something that would help people. Clearly, this was her calling. How was she to know the next book would be about her? The bare wires. Why would she touch them? Because Erin’s words, when she finally answered Aggie’s letter, were that powerful. Now that she’d been invited back, she couldn’t have kept away from the scene of the crime if she’d tried.
Coming Soon�
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An excerpt from the next installment of THE GIRL IN THE BOOK Series:
THE BOOK CODE
A Novel
by Dan Noble
“The type of mind that can understand good fiction …is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”
-Flannery O’Connor
____
Polonious: What do you read my lord?
Horatio: Words, words, words.
Polonious: Though this be madness, there is method in it.
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
____
“You’ve gotta be stronger than your story.”
–The Killers
PROLOGUE
You want to know what this book’s about, don’t you? You’ve read the blurb, deciphered the cover, seen a few newspaper write ups. You’re intrigued, and even feeling clever about the way you understand instinctively how to balance the reader reviews to account for trolls, friends, and bonafide readers. Yes, yes, it’s a psychological thriller, but it’s also about books and reading. There’s a disappearance that can’t be easily explained. A family at risk. Well, that’s all well and good. But can’t you just say exactly what it’s about? Sorry, no. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, the meaning of a story does not rise to the top of a book like schmaltz in a soup pot. A story is not a textbook. As she so eloquently put it, “the whole story is the meaning.” Try putting that in a blurb.
It is better to think of a book like a wonderfully engineered car driving through a new land with no itinerary. And no roads. The good news is Reader can wind up with an excellent guide. It is possible to recognize an excellent guide immediately. If this guide can show Reader a character who travels back in time along a telephone connection and Reader buys it, hook, line, and sinker, then he can be confident he has an excellent guide. He knows the rules, this guide, and he can choose which to follow and which to bend because he knows what’s important about these rules and why. He knows he can make anything happen, because in the story, it is the experience that matters. But to Reader, everything is so dazzling, this is easy to forget. The journey is eye-opening. The brain is careening off in different directions. As Reader is propelled along these roads, he feels himself changing. Wanting to try that Indonesian dish mentioned in The Novel. Interested in taking a tour of Perugia, like the heroine has. Skinny-dipping in a neighbor’s pool at midnight. There is something not-quite-right about the way Reader is glued to all he encounters in The Novel, and yet, at the same time, aches to race through the pages to see where it is he’s going to. But Reader realizes, if he does that, gobbles it all up ravenously, it will be over too soon.
And suddenly it is. Abruptly, like a tumble with lots of bruising. And that’s when the question haunts most: which is the reality? The dazzling, eye-opening journey that sent Reader’s heart racing, or this lonely bedroom, where Reader faces a pile of unwashed laundry and an alarm clock that will go off with such monotonous regularity in a few hours that Reader doesn’t even need it anymore to signal the start of another soul-destroying day? Surely, there must be something more to it all than that. How to harness the magic of the story and keep it when the alarm bell rings? Well, I’ve got the answer, fuckers. No one would believe it if I told them. So I don’t.
1
As a child, it all seemed innocuous enough. Mother drilled the same words into me as she buttoned me up at the front door: “Do you have your book? Always carry a book with you, so you can ground your reading experience in real life,” she’d say. How cultured. How well-rounded.
“But why-uh?” I wanted to know. I’d stopped plugging my ears with my fingers long ago.
“Never mind why-uh. Like most things in this life, you have to work it out for yourself.” I was six; I had my book, but often no snack or extra underwear. I assumed she thought I’d eventually find a way to read myself out of sopping pants. I never doubted she loved me, but she was specific about what was important (books), and was self-contained, as if she’d still be whole without me, and didn’t that make me feel I needed her all the more?
“Mom! Mom!” I’d yell once she’d turn and head for the school gates.
“What is it?”
But it was never anything. I wanted everyone to see. This formidable woman was my mother.
My readiness would get tested, the way we did in school for atomic bomb explosions. On line at the echoey bank, below the gothic ceiling, I’d ask, “Can I have some goldfish?” She’d fish in her purse for a moment before saying, “Sorry darling. I forgot them. Do you have your book?”
“Do you have your book?” I’d ask when I felt stroppy. But she ignored such things. She knew I didn’t mean them and I didn’t need to apologize.
Between the queue’s velvet ropes, my mind careening between the exact likeness of my hair—dark, thick, and ropy—to Mother’s, though hers was braided and mine in two ponytails, and those square cushions of bubblegum in the machine at the door. I watched as another girl’s mother pinched a penny out of her pocket and handed it to her hopping daughter, who carefully placed it in the slot and, practiced, cupped her hand beneath the chute as she turned the dial that set the gum cascading.
I pulled a face but Mother wouldn’t look at me.
What could I do but start reading my book?
Beneath the gaze of those capacious eyes, her dark features at their most severe, my face tingled, my stomach lurched.
“I’m not messing around, Millie,” was something she liked to say.
I distinctly remember suffering a minor bladder failure at such a moment at that bank, and tying the arms of my ski jacket around my waist to hide it. This wasn’t a woman who needed to say, My way or the highway. She’d have to turn people away because of crowding at the Road Not Travelled, where I could have made a fortune selling Depends to bladder-challenged six year-olds, so they could all make a good, dry impression on her.
“Remove that ear from your mouth and speak up,” was another thing she said, referring to what she liked to call ‘your father’s guilty-conscience plush beagle,’ whose ear was always soggy between my front teeth that year. Mother’s tone was plainly less Land of Make-Believe than do or die. As if to detract attention from my dripping pant leg, a croak escaped, vibrating the matted toy between my lips.
I mastered the art of carrying my book around, had one of her old satchels for the purpose. God, I loved the worn canvas of that thing, sucked its strap almost as much as the dog’s ear. By the time I was in junior high school, I was wearing ribbed turtlenecks and vintage floral skirts, my nose in a book by my own accord. Emulating her containment, I amassed my own admirers, who didn’t realize I was all show.
Even the show crumbled soon enough. When I pretended to master the magnificence of books (err, have one with you, act like you understand why), she started in on something else.
“How do you know what’s real, Millie?”
I always offered the wrong answer. She wouldn’t speak to me all afternoon so I could take time to work it out. Which I wouldn’t. I often took my dinner alone. It would have been too juvenile, too much of a failure in her eyes for me to hate her.
And so it began.
It would be many years until I knew why, and exactly how much you must trust that eventually everything will come together to make sense, and perhaps most importantly, until I understood exactly why Mother was so focused on separating fact from fiction, but in the meanwhile, the learning curve made me into a clever party trick.
“Tell them,” Mother would say.
At least I felt special then: no one else in that room knew Mother took this where I read this book show seriously, none of them suspected she was up to anything the way I already did—even if I didn’t know exactly what. I would tell them all, in my frilly dress with its floral sash, that Jane Eyre is forever entangled with the rear-facing back of our Volvo station wagon, and Robinson Crusoe with the small electrics department of
Bloomingdale’s Lexington Avenue. I’d heard Mother recount my performances, and these were proud words she used. I didn’t understand them all but I sounded lovely when she spoke of me that way.
This was all before the divorce, and of course I never noticed how this act drove my father out of the conversation. I just listed off these book/life associations and soaked up the attention: “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret and spaghetti carbonara,” I would say, eventually, getting the dramatic pause right. “Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Intercourse, at the Pennsylvania Dutch Country.”
Our flashy neighbors and the trio my father referred to as Mother’s holdover hippie college friends laughed into a cloud of menthol cigarette smoke and started to sing out their own pairings. When the comments became more obviously inappropriate for a girl my age, Mother assumed I wouldn’t understand, and chortled along with “Anais Nin and furry handcuffs,” shooting me barely a glance over her gin and tonic. But even if the Intercourse double entendre was above my head, I sensed what this last comment meant. By ten, I’d read the slim volume with the bow-topped, mary-janed girl on the cover, and terrifyingly, felt my body respond. Books had taught me everything. Even—if I’d noticed, which was hard to do in the shadow of Mother—why someone like my father would be hunched awkwardly in the corner, fumbling with the pull-tab of his Budweiser. Alienation is a novelist’s pet theme.
I didn’t stop to think why any of it was important, but it certainly made Mother happy. And back then that made everyone happy. Even my alienated father—for a while anyway. This is where it starts to sound depressing. But, I never think of it that way. I don’t give in to depression. I think of how my father used to say to me, “Some of us don’t have the luxury of being depressed,” though he’d never dare say that to Mother, and it made me hate him a little when he tried the phrase on my ears. Even still, we don’t get to choose what affects us, do we?