The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

by Sharon Pywell

  But then something broke through the wonderful sensations, something loud and assaultive. Rifle fire? Cannon? BANG! BANGBRSCHHKKKKK!

  “Neave?!”

  I struggled through the gelatinous sleep, upward to the voice, found myself sitting in a narrow bunk in a neat cabin whose door was wide open and filled with a spiky silhouette. I looked around. I was not deep in watery space but in the little cabin of the Rubber Duck.

  “Neave?”

  The silhouette was speaking to me: Max Luhrmann, wearing pajama bottoms, his hair standing out mostly to the left of his head and his feet bare. My eyes adjusted and I saw his face pink up, possibly in response to my scrutiny. I couldn’t tell.

  “I’m awake,” I said uncertainly. “I’m awake, right?”

  Max nodded. “Of course you are.”

  “The explosion. There were gunshots or something.”

  “That was just Charlie Healey setting out at an ungodly hour with a backfiring engine. He’s two slips down from the Rubber Duck.”

  I quieted myself and listened. There it was: the liquid sound of a small boat chugging off into the harbor. “Max, where did you come from?”

  “The lab owns another research vessel at this dock. It’s got a bunk. I thought…”

  “What? That Ricky would come here and shoot me?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “You’ve been sleeping two boats down and waiting for him?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “What exactly did you think you’d do if he managed to follow me and showed up?”

  “Stop him,” he said.

  He spoke matter-of-factly and he looked sure of himself. He held something that looked like a tire iron in his hand. I noticed the muscles along his forearm, the curving lines running up to the upper arm. He saw my eyes run from his hand up to the shoulder and back to the tire iron. He tucked the weapon behind a hip, a bit out of sight. “Well. I guess I’ll head back.”

  His pajamas had slipped down enough to expose the curve of a slender hip. He was close enough for me to smell sleep on him and metal and rope. Just a hint of toothpaste. I crossed the two feet of cabin that separated us, slipped a hand behind his head and pulled it down. He let me. I kissed him.

  I was entirely sure of this: he kissed me back. His free hand—the one without the tire iron—made its way around me. He drew the whole length of me against him for just a moment and then, as if a switch had been flicked, his entire body stiffened and then he stumbled, actually stumbled, back and away. I waited, the two of us frozen in place so close to each other that I could still smell the sleep on him. The toothpaste. I kept my feet where they were but tipped the rest of me an inch, maybe two, closer to him. He’d kissed me, really kissed me, before he pulled away.

  “I’ll just go back,” he whispered. He whacked the back of one heel against the door on his way through, recovered, twisted quickly, and caught his elbow on the doorway before disappearing back to his watch post.

  He didn’t want me. Or did he want me? There had been the kiss, the whole body pressed against me, but then the stiffening, startled rejection.

  Nothing I had known about desire was anything at all compared to what was burning its way through me now. He had kissed me back. Hadn’t he? Wasn’t that what I’d felt before he stumbled backward?

  Which was truer: the kiss, or the rejection of the kiss?

  I spent what little was left of the night pacing back and forth between the cabin’s miniature refrigerator and miniature door, five steps either way, weighing the two against each other. In the end I decided to go with rejection. I lost my nerve, or I came to my senses—it wasn’t clear which—but I decided that I’d have to behave as if the moment were an aberration, an inauthentic moment of distress. He’d recoiled from me: I saw no other way to save myself any dignity.

  I hadn’t known that desire could feel like something slashing into your chest and pressing all the air out of your lungs. The skin of my body felt charged and light, expansive and tight at once—it couldn’t contain what I felt. If I’d known how to get out of my own skin I would have blown myself open to get some relief. Why would anyone want this? How had anyone in history survived this, much less longed for it, written poems and novels and songs about it? All this time I’d thought I’d understood my books, understood Electra’s Marais dress, understood what the women at our conferences were buying and selling and hoping for.

  I’d understood nothing.

  LILLY

  What You Go With

  I was so confident. I could turn him around; it wasn’t that bad, blahblahblah. But somehow it surged past the place where I could control him. It started to snowball. Neave is interfering, Neave poisoned your mind against me; Neave is ruining everything. Who put that bitch in charge? Why does she think she’s got all this power?

  Because she did have all that power. She co-owned Be Your Best. She was my sister. But don’t think for a second I ever said that to the man. I let it go. Now, of course, I see how dumb that was, but back then all my experience told me that I could smack unproductive ideas out of his head with a bottle of Champagne, some interesting underwear, and a little commonsense talk. I’d been telling myself this would be the same as other times. It would go away. She’s ruining nothing, I said to him. So what if you don’t like her? Lots of people don’t like her. She’s not likeable. Also, Neave Terhune is not the boss of me—and neither are you.

  He started insisting that I break off from Neave and have my own business—get her out of my life. Our lives, he said. Neave, I reminded him, is my business partner, my sister. She and Annie are the ones who love me more than anybody else on Earth, including him. When those words hit the air, “including you,” I saw the truth of what I’d said. He didn’t love me best. Neave and Annie did. Janey and Snyder did. He didn’t support me. Be Your Best did. I saw that he wanted to take all these things away from me, and when I looked at him then I felt something go dark. He hated my sister. He felt nothing at all for my daughter. Ricky saw me feel it. He knew I was considering things from a new distance and I felt the whole weight of what I was to him shift.

  He said he had something in mind for Neave, and I reared up and turned on him. I said bullshit you do, and he said I should buzz off about things that he knew more about than me. I felt things between us start to spin.

  I had to slow this down, get control again. I said we should go away, get out of town and cool down a little. Maybe check into some little romantic joint in Vermont. I fell back on the strategies that had always given me a firm grip on him before, but “before” was gone. We were in a different place, further out than any lingerie could reach and pull us back. I was trying to find a way forward was all; my repertoire of strategies was more limited than I’d known. If I were Neave I maybe would have come up with a fresher strategy. But I’m not Neave.

  He said okay. I had this sweet little inn in mind when I put on the turquoise suit with the nipped waist and snug skirt to meet him. That suit used to make me feel like I was mistress of my destiny. I knew what my ass looked like when I was walking away in that suit. From Where I Am Now I see that your destiny is a tough thing to steer, even with the help of Chanel and the right shoes, but I’d built a whole career on that kind of thinking and I wasn’t prepared to give it up that morning.

  We’d stopped for a cup of coffee. We were getting back in the car. He’d twisted the conversation back to Neave, how she was probably a little dyke who poked in our business, his business. I knew then that something had to be made clear, some line in the sand had to be drawn right there. I told him to shut up. I told him if he ever bothered her, he’d never touch me again. If he so much as made a vague threat against Neave I wouldn’t waste my time complaining to him or his brother, Max—I’d get on a witness stand and I’d say whatever had to be said. I would positively take care of his ass if he stepped over that line.

  Whose line? Ricky said.

  The way he said it. Not just calm, but happy someplace that’d been
rooted in him for a long time.

  * * *

  He stayed happy, all the way through the hard work of making me dead. He used a tire iron, and then he used saws. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but the truth is, I was so surprised. Why are we surprised when the thing that was coming at us all along finally reaches us?

  Then he put me in the water, all in different places. He’d thought about this, apparently, and was ready with a plan. Some of me was dropped off on Cape Ann, other parts went to a lonely pier in Lynn, and the last of me went off a deserted dry dock in Chelsea. Off I went, drifting, sinking, turning, rising. It’s not easy parting ways with your body. For that first little while it felt like being blind and deeply confused.

  Then I was here, Where I Am Now, which you can imagine was strange, but less strange somehow because the dog was here to greet me. I was so grateful to see anything or anybody familiar, even if it was Boppit. I knew him right off.

  We got more comfortable with each other. He’d try to explain things to me.

  “You’re close to where you were,” he’d say. “It feels very different at first, but then if you look over your shoulder, you see it all curving behind you. And ahead. Only the thinnest little film of something in between you and that other place. There’s not so much distance between as people think. Twist around here and take a look.”

  I did, and there right in front of me was Annie, following Jane up a flight of stairs, chattering, looking preoccupied, serious but not unhappy. I felt a wave of relief. Then Annie vanished and I saw Neavie. She was lying on a little bunk in a boat, a pile of Mars Bars wrappers at her elbow, an open magazine in front of her. Something had dribbled down her blouse and her hair looked like a hedgerow. It was as bad as Boppit had tried to make it.

  “Oh my God!”

  “You aren’t kidding.” He nodded. “And she’s been raging around, scaring your staff, insulting your vendors, disappearing from work and not telling anybody where she’s going.”

  “She’s got good reasons to act like that.”

  “We all do, sugar. You have to step over it. She’s got to order the panda-bear incentives for the Christmas gift orders, nail down the conference trainer schedules. Neave’s been letting things slide with only weeks to go before the company’s sales conference. Some of the staff think the ship is going down and they’re taking four-hour lunches and looking for other jobs. She needs some help. I’m going to get you to her so you can help her.”

  “The conference…” I murmured. Suddenly I was in Neave’s head. I could see a pink platter being struck out of Janey’s hands, lemon cake and pale icing sprayed in an arc on the stairs behind her. “What’s happening?” I whispered.

  “You’re seeing something Ricky’s already done from inside Neave. You’re sliding around.”

  “Ricky…”

  “Yes. He has her in his sights; worse, he’s in her head. You don’t necessarily have to be dead to get inside somebody’s head, Lilly. We have to do something about that blouse. And the purse: look at that ink-stained baggy old thing. Good lord above. They’re horrible. A monkey would have made better choices.”

  “So what?”

  “Lilly, these are our jobs: Keep Neave from driving the business into the dirt. Keep Ricky away from Neave.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Oh, we’ve been doing it. You know parts of their minds that nobody on Earth but you knows. You help get us in. I concentrate it into a kind of real. We’re already there, just not as much there as we need to be.”

  Boppit saw my expression and sighed. He said, “I’ll try to describe it. We’ll call it dreaming for now. When Ricky thinks of her, if he’s heading to Neave’s apartment when she’s alone, I feel it. I dream myself into his mind. I suggest that he is very, very thirsty; how had he ever gotten so thirsty? And here’s a bar that he suddenly needs to go into to get a beer. He thinks, Just one. Just a few minutes. He gets to her apartment and she’s gone, because I dreamed her into her car and off to the docks while I was dreaming Ricky into a bar. I put an impulse in her to go now, now, now! You do it too.”

  “I don’t feel myself doing it,” I said.

  “Lilly, when I go into Ricky’s mind, you’re there with me whether you know where you are or not. Do you ever feel like something’s sliding down your spine, something pulsing and whipping around?”

  “Yes.”

  “There you go. That’s Ricky. Soon when you travel into a mind, it’ll run in your head like a newsreel. You’ll get better at it.”

  It already sort of did run in my head. It didn’t feel real, but when it happened its moving parts could give me a shock of recognition.

  “I know,” Boppit said, though I was sure I hadn’t spoken out loud. “It will feel familiar even though it also seems like it hasn’t happened yet, or never happened in the past.”

  “If we can dream him away from Neave, why can’t we make Ricky forget about her and go away?”

  “We’re just pushing a few things into his path. We’re not changing his nature.”

  “Isn’t there something more we can do?”

  “We’re going to work on her accessories.”

  “Accessories? I thought we decided that a good pair of shoes doesn’t protect you from much in this world.”

  “Sometimes they just tip the balance the littlest bit, and Neave needs us to put a thumb on the scale for her.”

  “No offense to you, Boppit, but you’re not the first thing that would come to anybody’s mind if they needed heroic intervention. And we both know what came of my thinking I could control Ricky Luhrmann. We’re all wrong for this problem.”

  “Yet we are here. And Ricky has not once been behind Neave when she drove to the Rubber Duck.”

  “You said she’d be able to see us, Boppit. When’s that going to happen?”

  Mr. Boppit laced his arm through mine. “Just stay with me. Concentrate. We’ll get there.”

  “Where is ‘there’?”

  “We’re close. It’s what I told you: We think of her. She thinks of us.”

  “Then what happens?” I asked.

  “She’ll see us.”

  “Even if that’s true, what good will it do us, or her?”

  “We’ll be in her universe, in her time. From there it’ll be easier to turn her attention back to Be Your Best and away from Ricky Luhrmann. We stay alert, on guard, keep watch for him, and we think her into safer places. We push her back into a life where she isn’t sitting in a pile of crumbs looking like every psychopath’s ideal victim. Then we’re going to get her a good haircut.”

  I’m no crier, but I started crying then.

  “Now, now,” Boppit said gently. “Don’t despair. I’ll take the purse. You take the hair. We’ll go from there.”

  It was what we had, and that, in the end, is what you go with.

  NEAVE

  Lilly and Boppit Break Through

  I woke to full sun shining through the Rubber Duck’s cabin windows and across the legs of a young man sitting on the tiny cabin refrigerator. He wore marine whites—formal military except for a Chanel silk scarf at his throat, and a pair of high heels on his feet. He grinned happily and his tongue kind of lolled a bit to one side as he closed his mouth again. The expression was distinct, idiosyncratic, unmistakable.

  “Boppit?” I whispered. He nodded, and the gesture summoned up the idea of a wagging tail. I glanced at his feet.

  “At last! You see me. What about Lilly?”

  “Lilly? Do you know where she is?”

  “Of course I do. She’s sitting at the end of your bunk.”

  “I don’t see any Lilly.”

  “Look harder, honey.”

  I looked. There was just a dark blur in the air, maybe, at the other end of the bed. Then it was like a purple foggy mass, then the purple solidified into my favorite blouse—purchased sometime around 1941 and borrowed by Lilly Terhune for a special date. The blouse never returned. But Lilly, my Lilly, seemed to be si
tting three feet away from me wearing it now. She smiled at me and lifted one hand in greeting. A lit cigarette balanced between her fingers.

  “See me now, Neavie?”

  I opened my mouth but I couldn’t make any sounds come out.

  Lilly nodded at Boppit and grinned. “You were right! She sees me.”

  Boppit smiled. “Of course I was right. The truth is, though, I’m relieved. It took so long.” He turned to me. “Neave, snap out of it!”

  “You aren’t there and I don’t see you. I’m fine.”

  “You’re fine,” Boppit said, “and you do see us. We’ll just sit here for a while until you calm down.”

  I looked down at his feet, the high heels peeping up beneath the cuff.

  “Aren’t those our mother’s favorite pumps?”

  “They were.” He lifted one leg and tipped the toe of the shoe toward me so I could appreciate the instep. “The woman had terrible taste, but these shoes—the mysterious exception.”

  “I was shopping with her when she bought them,” Lilly explained. “I forced them on her.”

  “Well, of course.” Bop nodded. “That would explain it.”

  “You chewed those pumps to Kingdom Come and she locked you in the garage,” Lilly said.

  “She did.” He laughed. “Remember that, Neave?”

  I said, “What are you?”

  “Exactly what we look like.” Boppit tilted his head toward me, the tongue managing to look like it was hanging over an incisor even though it wasn’t.

  “Lilly, are you…?”

  “Alive? No, sweetie. I’m something different.”

  “But … different, meaning dead? The ponytail … it meant what we thought it meant?”

  “It did.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening, Lilly.”

  Boppit broke in. “Understanding is overvalued. You have to get dressed, Neave. You have to get to the office.”