by Emily Henry
“‘To my parents,’” Gus said. “‘Who are proof of fate’s strong, if animatronic, hand.’”
My mouth fell open. I’d almost forgotten what he had told me at the gas station, that he’d read my books. Or maybe I hadn’t let myself think about it, because I was worried that meant he’d hated them, and somehow I was still competing with him, needing him to recognize me as his rival and equal.
“You remember that?” It came out as a whisper.
His eyes leapt toward me, and my heart rose in my throat. “It’s why I asked about them,” he said. “I thought it was the nicest dedication I’d ever read.”
I made a face. Coming from him, that might not have been a compliment. “‘Nicest.’”
“Fine, January,” he said in a low voice. “I thought it was beautiful. Is that what you want me to admit?”
Again my heart buoyed through my chest. “Yes.”
“I thought it was beautiful,” he said immediately, sincerely.
I turned my face to the window. “Yeah, well. It turned out to be a lie. But I guess Mom thought it was a nice enough one. She knew he was cheating on her and she stayed with him.”
“I’m sorry.” For several minutes, neither of us spoke. Finally, Gus cleared his throat. He made it sound so natural. “You asked why New Eden. Why I wanted to write about it?”
I nodded, glad for the topic change, though surprised by his segue.
“I guess . . .” He tugged at his hair anxiously. “Well, my mom died when I was a kid. Don’t know if you knew that.”
I wasn’t sure how I would have, but even if I didn’t outright know it, it fit with the image of him I’d had in college. “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So, my dad was garbage, but my mom—she was amazing. And when I was a kid, I just thought, like, Okay, it’s us against the world. We’re stuck in this situation, but it’s not forever. And I kept waiting for her to leave him. I mean—I kept a bag packed with a bunch of comic books and some socks and granola bars. I had this vision of us hopping on a train, riding to the end of the line, you know?” When his eyes flashed toward me, the corner of his mouth was curled, but the smile wasn’t real.
It said, Isn’t that ridiculous? Wasn’t I ridiculous? And I knew how to read it because it was a smile I’d been practicing for a year: Can you believe I was so stupid? Don’t worry. I know better now.
A weight pressed low in my stomach at the image: Gus, before he was the Gus I knew. A Gus who daydreamed about escape, who believed someone would rescue him.
“Where were you going to go?” I asked. It came out as little more than a whisper.
His eyes leapt back to the road and the muscle in his jaw pulsed, then relaxed, his face serene once more. “The redwoods,” he said. “Pretty sure I thought we could build a tree house there.”
“A tree house in the redwoods,” I repeated quietly, like it was a prayer, a secret. In a way, it was. It was a tiny piece of a Gus I’d never imagined, one with romantic notions and hope for the unlikely. “But what does that have to do with New Eden?”
He coughed, checked his rearview mirror, went back to staring down the road. “I guess . . . a few years ago, I just sort of realized my mom wasn’t a kid.” He shrugged. “I’d thought we were waiting for the perfect time to leave, but she was never going to. She’d never said she was. She could have taken us out of there, and she didn’t.”
I shook my head. “I doubt it was that simple.”
“That’s why,” he murmured. “I know it wasn’t simple, and when I talk about this book, I tell people it’s because I want to ‘explore the reasons people stay, no matter the cost,’ but the truth is I just want to understand her reasons. I know that doesn’t make sense. This cult thing has nothing to do with her.”
No matter the cost. What had staying cost his mother? What had it cost Gus? The weight in my stomach had spread, was pressing against the insides of my chest and palms. I’d started publishing romance because I wanted to dwell in my happiest moments, in the safe place my parents’ love had always been. I’d been so comforted by books with the promise of a happy ending, and I’d wanted to give someone else that same gift.
Gus was writing to try to understand something horrible that had happened to him. No wonder what we wrote was so different.
“It does make sense,” I said finally. “No one gets ‘looking for postmortem parental answers’ like I do. If I watched the movie 300 right now, I’d probably find a way to make it about my dad.”
He gave me a faint smile. “Great cinema.” It was so obviously a Thank you and a Let’s move on now. As different as I’d thought we were, it felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.
“We should have a film club,” I said. “We’re always on the same page about this stuff.”
He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “It really was a beautiful dedication,” he said. “It didn’t feel like a lie. Maybe a complicated truth, but not a lie.”
The warmth filled me up until I felt like a teakettle trying hard not to whistle.
When I got home, I turned on my computer, went to the Pete’s Books site, and ordered Gus’s first book, Rochambeau.
* * *
—
And here came the true montage.
I did surgery on the book. I ripped it up and stored the pieces in separate files. Ellie became Eleanor. She went from being a down-on-her-luck real estate agent to a down-on-her-luck tightrope walker with a port-wine stain the shape of a butterfly on her cheek, because Absurdly Specific Details. Her father became a sword swallower, her mother a bearded lady.
They moved from the twenty-first century to the early twentieth. They were part of a traveling circus. That was their family: a tight-knit group who ended every night smoking hand-rolled cigarettes around a fire. It was the only world she’d ever known.
They spent every moment with each other, but somehow told each other very little. There wasn’t much time for talking in their line of work.
I renamed the file, from BEACH_BOOK.docx to FAMILY_SECRETS.docx.
I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.
I gave them each a secret. That part was the easiest.
Eleanor’s mother was dying but she didn’t want anyone to know. The clowns everyone believed to be brothers were actually lovers. The sword swallower was still mailing checks to a family back in Oklahoma.
They became less and less like the people I knew, but somehow, their problems and secrets became more personal. I couldn’t put my father or mother down on paper. I could never get that right. But these characters carried the truth of the people I’d loved.
I was particularly fond of writing a mechanic named Nick. I loved knowing that no one except me would ever recognize the skeleton of Augustus Everett I’d built the character around.
Gus and I made a habit of writing at our respective kitchen tables around noon, and most days we took turns holding up notes. They became more and more elaborate. It was obvious that while some were spontaneous, others were planned—written out earlier in the day, or even the night before. Whenever inspiration struck. Those written in the moment especially became nonsensical as writing-madness took us over. Sometimes I would laugh so hard I’d lose muscle control in my hands and be unable to write any more notes. We’d laugh until we both laid our heads down on our tables. He’d snort into his coffee. I’d nearly choke on mine.
It started with platitudes like IT IS BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST THAN TO HAVE NEVER LOVED AT ALL
(me) and THE UNIVERSE SEEMS NEITHER BENIGN NOR HOSTILE, MERELY INDIFFERENT (him) but usually ended with things like FUCK WRITING (me) and SHOULD WE JUST DITCH THIS AND BECOME COAL MINERS? (him).
Once he wrote to tell me that LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES. YOU REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE EATING AND THE CHOCOLATE MAP IN THE LID IS FUCKING ALWAYS WRONG.
I wrote to tell him that IF YOU’RE A BIRD, I’M A BIRD.
He let me know that IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM, and I wrote back, NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST.
Going through Dad’s stuff fell to the back burner, but I didn’t mind procrastinating. For the first time in months, I wasn’t flinching every time my phone or laptop pinged. I was making progress. Of course, a lot of that progress was research, but for every new factoid I gleaned about twentieth-century circus culture, it seemed like a new plot light bulb illuminated over my head.
At night, Gus and I sat on our separate decks, having a drink and watching the sun slide into the lake. Most nights we’d talk from across the gap, mostly about how productive we had or hadn’t been, about the people we could see from our decks and the stories we could imagine for them. We’d talk about the books (and movies) we’d loved (and hated), the people we’d gone to school with (both together at U of M and before that: Sara Tulane, who used to pull my hair in kindergarten; Mariah Sjogren, who broke up with sixteen-year-old Gus—a full three months into their relationship, he was way too proud to tell me—because he smoked a cigarette in the car with her and “kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray”).
We talked about our terrible jobs (my part-time car wash position in high school, where I regularly got sexually harassed by customers and had to scrub down the tunnel before I could go home at night; his call-center job at a uniform manufacturer, where he got yelled at for incorrect embroideries and delayed shipments). We talked about the most embarrassing albums we’d owned and concerts we’d been to (redacted for the sake of dignity).
And other times, we’d sit in silence, not quite together but definitely not alone.
“So what do you think?” I asked him one night. “Are romance and happiness harder than they look?”
After a moment, he said, “I never said that they were easy.”
“You implied it,” I pointed out.
“I implied they were easy for you,” he said. “For me, they’re about as challenging as I’m sure you’re imagining.”
The possibility hung in the air: at any time, one of us could have invited the other over, and either of us would have accepted. But neither of us asked, and so things went on as they’d been.
On Friday, we left for our research excursion a bit earlier than we had the week prior and headed east, inland.
“Who are we meeting this time?” I asked.
Gus answered only, “Dave.”
“Ah, yes, Dave. I’m a big fan of his restaurant, Wendy’s.”
“Believe it or not, different Dave,” Gus said. He was lost in thought, barely playing along with our usual banter.
I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. “Gus?”
His gaze flinched toward me, as if he’d forgotten I was there and my presence had startled him. He scratched at his jaw. His usual five-o’clock shadow had stretched closer toward a seven-o’clock dusk.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
His eyes bounced between me and the road three times before he nodded. I could almost see it—him swallowing down whatever he’d been considering saying. “Dave was part of New Eden,” he said instead. “He was just a kid back then. His mother took him out of there a few months before the fire. His dad stayed behind. He was in too deep.”
“So his father . . .”
Gus nodded. “Died in the fire.”
We were meeting Dave at an Olive Garden, and on the way in, Gus warned me that Dave was a recovering alcoholic. “Three years sober,” Gus said as we waited at the host stand. “I told him we wouldn’t be drinking anything.”
We’d beaten Dave to the table and put in an order for a couple of sodas. We’d had no problem talking in the car, but sitting across from each other in an Olive Garden booth was a different story.
“Do you feel like your mom just dropped us off here before homecoming?” I asked.
“I never went to homecoming,” he said.
I pretended to play a violin, at which point I realized I had no idea how a person actually held a violin.
“What’s that,” Gus said flatly. “What are you doing?”
“I think I’m holding a violin,” I answered.
“No,” he said. “No, I can safely say you are not.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. Why is your left arm straight out like that? Is the violin supposed to balance atop it? You need that hand on the neck.”
“You’re just trying to distract me from the tragedy of your missed homecoming.”
He laughed, rolled his eyes, scooted forward on his bench. “Somehow, I survived, tender human heart intact,” he said, repeating my words from the carnival.
Now I rolled my eyes. Gus smiled and bumped my knee with his under the table. I bumped his back. We sat there for a minute, grinning at each other over a basket of Olive Garden breadsticks. I felt a little bit like there was water boiling in my chest. At once, I could feel his calloused hands gathering my hair off my neck as I puked into a carnival trash can. I could feel them on my hips and waist, pressing me closer as we danced in the sweaty frat house basement. I could feel the side of his jaw scrape my temple.
He broke eye contact first, checked his phone. “Twenty minutes late,” he said without looking at me. “I’ll give him ten more before I call.”
But Dave didn’t answer Gus’s call. And he didn’t answer Gus’s texts, or his voice mail, and soon we were an hour and twenty minutes into the bottomless breadsticks, and our server, Vanessa, had started seriously avoiding our table.
“Sometimes this happens,” Gus said. “They get spooked. Change their minds. Think they’re ready to talk about something when they’re really not.”
“What do we do?” I asked. “Should we keep waiting?”
Gus opened one of the menus on the table. He flipped through it for a minute, then pointed to a picture of a frozen blue drink with a pink umbrella sprouting out of it. “That,” he said. “I think that’s what we do.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “If we drink our frozen blue things now then I’ll have to totally rethink my plan for tomorrow night.”
Gus lifted an eyebrow. “Wow, I was living the lifestyle of a romance writer all along and I didn’t even know it.”
“See? You were born for this, Augustus Everett.”
He shuddered.
“Why do you do that?”
“What?” he said.
I repeated, “Augustus Everett.” His shoulders lifted, although a bit more discreetly this time. “That.”
Gus raised the menu as Vanessa was trying to bound past and she screeched to a stop like Wile E. Coyote at the edge of a cliff. “Could we get two of these blue things?” he asked.
His eyes were doing the sexy, intimidating X-ray thing. Color rushed into her cheeks. Or maybe I was projecting what was happening to me onto her. “Sure thing.” She sped away, and Gus looked back at the menu.
“Augustus,” I said.
“Shit,” he said, flinching again.
“You really don’t like sharing things about yourself with other people, do you?”
“Not particularly,” he said. “You already know about the vomit-phobia. Anything more than that and you’ll have to sign a nondisclosure.”
“Happily,” I said.
Gus sighed and leaned forward, forearms resting on the table. His knee grazed mine beneath the table, but neither of us moved away, and all the heat in my body seemed to focus there. “The o
nly person who called me that was my father.” He shrugged. “That name was usually said with a disapproving tone. Or screamed in a rage.”
My stomach twisted and a sour taste crept across the back of my mouth as I grasped for something to say. I couldn’t help searching his pupils for signs of the history he’d been piecing together for days. His mother had stayed with his father, no matter the cost, and part of that had been her son learning to hate his own name.
Gus’s gaze lifted from the menu. He looked calm, serious. But it was a practiced look, unlike the alluring openness that sometimes overtook his face when he was deep in thought, working to understand some new information.
“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly. “That your dad was an asshole.”
Gus gave a breathless laugh. “Why do people always say that? You don’t need to be sorry. It’s in the past. I didn’t tell you so you’d be sorry.”
“Well, you told me because I asked. So at least let me be sorry for that.”
He shrugged. “It’s fine.”
“Gus,” I said.
He looked me in the eye again. It felt like a warm tide rushing over me, feet to head. His expression had shifted to open curiosity. “What were you like?” he said.
“What?”
“You know enough about my childhood. I want to know about baby January.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “She was a lot.”
His laugh vibrated through the table, and my insides started fizzing like champagne. “Let me guess. Loud. Precocious. Room full of books, organized in a way that only you understood. Close with your family and a couple of tight-knit friends, all of whom you probably still talk to regularly, but casual friends with anyone else with a pulse. A secret overachiever, who had to be the best at something even if no one else knew. Oh, and prone to juggling or tap-dancing for attention in any crowd.”
“Wow,” I said a little stunned. “You both nailed and roasted me—though the tap lessons were my mom’s idea. I just wanted the shoes. Anyway, you missed that I briefly had a shrine to Sinéad O’Connor, because I thought it made me seem Interesting.”