Beach Read Page 8

  Wow, I typed back. It’s a tale as old as time.

  Truly, Shadi responded. Girl meets boy. Boy ignores girl except when she’s not looking. Girl goes home with boy and sees him hang his haunted hat on a crowded rack.

  The timer went off and I pressed the coffee and poured some into a mug shaped like a cartoonish orca whale, then took it and my computer out onto the deck, mist pleasantly chilling every bare inch of my skin. I curled up in one of the chairs and started to make a mental checklist for the day, and for the rest of the summer.

  First and foremost, I needed to figure out where exactly this book was going, if not in the direction of a feel-good summer romance with a single father. Then I needed to plan out Saturday’s romantic-comedy scenario for Gus.

  My stomach flipped at the thought. I’d half expected to wake up in a panic about our agreement. Instead I was excited. For the first time in years, I was going to write a book that absolutely no one was waiting for. And I’d get to watch Gus Everett try to write a love story.

  Or I was going to make a huge fool of myself and, far worse, disappoint Anya. But I couldn’t think about that right now. There was work to do.

  Aside from working on the book and scheduling the (actual only) Uber driver to take me to get my car from Pete’s, I decided I’d conquer the second upstairs bedroom today and divide whatever was in there into throwaway, giveaway, and sell piles.

  I also vowed to move my stuff into the downstairs bedroom. I’d done okay on the couch the first few nights but had awoken this morning to some serious kinks in my neck.

  My gaze wandered toward the swath of windows along the back of Gus’s house. At that precise moment, he walked into his kitchen, pulling a (shocker!) rumpled, dark T-shirt over his head. I spun back in my deck chair.

  He couldn’t have seen me watching him. But the more I thought about it, the more I worried that I might’ve stared for a couple of seconds before looking away. I could vividly picture the curves of Gus’s arms as he tugged the shirt over his head, a flat length of stomach framed by the sharp angles of hip bones. He was a little softer than he’d been in college (not that it took much), but it suited him. Or maybe it just suited me.

  Well. I had definitely stared.

  I glanced back quickly and started. Gus was standing in front of the glass doors now. He lifted his mug as if to toast me. I lifted mine in response, and he shuffled away.

  If Gus Everett was getting to work already, I also needed to. I opened my computer and stared at the document I’d been picking at for the last few days. A meet-cute. There weren’t meet-cutes in Augustus Everett novels, that was for damn sure.

  What was there? I hadn’t read either of them, not Rochambeau and not The Revelatories, but I’d read enough reviews of them to satiate my curiosity.

  People doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. People doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Only getting what they wanted if it would ultimately destroy them.

  Twisted, secretive families.

  Well, I had no experience there! The ache shot through me. It felt like the first few seconds of a burn, when you couldn’t tell whether it was heat or cold burrowing into your skin but knew either way it would leave damage.

  The memory of my fight with Mom after the funeral rose up like a tidal wave.

  Jacques had left for the airport the second the service was over to make it back for work, missing the showdown with Sonya entirely, and once she’d fled, Mom and I didn’t stick around for long either.

  We fought the whole drive back to the house. No, that wasn’t true. I fought. Years’ worth of feelings I’d chosen not to feel. Years of betrayal forcing them out.

  “How could you keep this from me?” I’d shouted as I drove.

  “She wasn’t supposed to come here!” Mom had said, then buried her face in her hands. “I can’t talk about this,” she’d sobbed, shaking her head. “I can’t.”

  From then on, anything else I said was answered with this: I can’t talk about this. I can’t talk about him like this. I’m not going to talk about it. I can’t.

  I should have understood. I should have cared more what Mom was feeling.

  This was meant to be the moment that I became the adult, hugging her tight, promising everything would be okay, taking her pain. That’s what grown daughters did for their mothers. But back in the church, I’d torn in half and everything had spilled out of me into plain view for the first time.

  Hundreds of nights I’d chosen not to cry. Thousands of moments I’d worried about worrying. That if I did it, I’d make things worse for my parents. That I needed to be strong. That I needed to be happy so I wouldn’t drag them down.

  All those years when I was terrified my mother would die, I’d tucked every ugly thing out of sight to transform my life into a shiny window display for her benefit.

  I’d made my parents laugh. I’d made them proud. I’d brought home solid grades, fought tooth and nail to keep up with Gus Everett. I’d stayed up late reading with Dad and gotten up early to pretend I liked yoga with Mom. I’d told them about my life, asked them endlessly about theirs so I’d never regret wasting time with them. And I hid the complicated feelings that came with trying to memorize someone you loved, just in case.

  I fell in love at twenty-two, just like they had, with a boy named Jacques who was the singularly most beloved and interesting person I’d met, and I paraded our happiness past them as often as I could. I gave up on grad school to be close to them but proved I hadn’t really missed out on anything by publishing at twenty-five.

  Look! I’m fine! Look! I have every beautiful thing you wanted for me! Look! This hasn’t affected me at all!

  Look, they all live happily ever after. Again.

  I’d done everything I could to prove that I was okay, that I wasn’t worrying. I did everything I could for that story. The one where the three of us were unbreakable.

  On the drive home from the funeral, I didn’t want to be okay anymore.

  I wanted to be a kid. I wanted to scream, to slam doors, to yell, “I hate you! You’re ruining my life!” like I never had.

  I wanted Mom to ground me, then sneak into my room later and kiss my forehead, whisper, “I understand how scared you are.”

  Instead, she wiped away her tears, took a deep breath, and repeated, “I’m not going to talk about this.”

  “Fine,” I said, defeated, broken. “We won’t talk about it.”

  When I flew back to New York, everything changed. Mom’s calls became rare, and even when they did happen, they hit like a tornado. She’d cyclone through every detail of her week, then ask how I was doing, and if I hesitated too long she’d panic and excuse herself for some exercise class she’d forgotten about.

  She’d spent years preparing for her own death without any time to brace herself for this. For him to leave us and for the ugly truth to walk into his funeral and tear all our pretty memories in half. She was in pain. I knew that.

  But I was in pain too, so much of it that for once I couldn’t laugh or dance any measure of it away. I couldn’t even write myself a happy ending.

  I didn’t want to sit here in front of my laptop outside this house full of secrets and exorcise my father’s memory from my heart. But apparently I’d found the one thing I could do. Because I’d already started typing.

  The first time she met the love of her father’s life was at his funeral.

  * * *

  —

  My love affair with romance novels had started in the waiting room of my mother’s radiologist’s office. Mom didn’t like for me to go in with her—she insisted it made her feel senile—so I’d sat with a well-worn paperback from the rack, trying to distract myself from the ominous ticking of the clock fixed over the sign-in window.

  I’d expected to stare at one page for twenty minutes, caught in the hamster wheel of
anxiety. Instead I’d read 150 pages and then accidentally stuffed the book in my purse when it was time to go home.

  It was the first wave of relief I’d felt in weeks, and from there, I binge-read every romance novel I could get my hands on. And then, without any true plans, I started writing one, and that feeling, that feeling of falling head over heels in love with a story and its characters as they sprang out of me, was unlike anything else.

  Mom’s first diagnosis taught me that love was an escape rope, but it was her second diagnosis that taught me love could be a life vest when you were drowning.

  The more I worked on my love story, the less powerless I felt in the world. I may have had to ditch my plan to go to grad school and find a teaching job, but I could still help people. I could give them something good, something funny and hopeful.

  It worked. For years, I had a purpose, something good to focus on. But when Dad died, suddenly writing—the one thing that had always put me at ease, a verb that felt more like a place only for me, the thing that had freed me from my darkest moments and brought hope into my chest in my heart’s heaviest—had seemed impossible.

  Until now.

  And okay, this was more of a diary written in third person than a novel, but words were coming out of my hands and it had been so long since that had happened I would’ve rejoiced to find ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY filling up the Word document a thousand times over.

  This had to be better than that (????):

  She had no idea whether her father had actually loved That Woman. She didn’t know whether he’d loved her mother either. The three things she knew, without doubt, that he’d loved were books, boats, and January.

  It wasn’t just that I’d been born then. He’d always acted like I’d been born in January because it was the best month and not the other way around.

  In Ohio, I’d largely considered it to be the worst month of the year. Oftentimes we didn’t get snow until February, which meant January was just a gray, cold, lightless time when you no longer had a major holiday to look forward to.

  “In West Michigan, it’s different,” Dad had always said. There was the lake, and the way it would freeze over, covered in feet of snow. Apparently you could walk across it like it was some Martian tundra. In college, Shadi and I had planned to drive out one weekend and see it, but she’d gotten a call that their sheltie had died, and we’d spent the weekend watching Masterpiece Classic and making s’mores on the stove top instead.

  I got back to typing.

  If things had been different, she might’ve gone to the lakeside town in winter instead of summer, sat behind the wall of windows staring at the white-capped blues and strange frozen greens of the snowy beach.

  But she’d had this uncanny feeling, a fear she’d come face- to-face with his ghost if she’d shown up there at just the right time.

  I would’ve seen him everywhere. I would’ve wondered how he’d felt about every detail, remembered a particular snowfall he’d described from his childhood: All these tiny orbs, January, like the whole world was made out of Dippin’ Dots. Pure sugar.

  He’d had a way of describing things. When Mom read my first book she told me she could see him in it. In the way I wrote.

  It made sense. I’d learned to love stories from him, after all.

  She used to pride herself on all the things she had in common with him, regard the similarities with affection. Night owls. Messy. Always late, always carrying a book.

  Careless about sunblock and addicted to every form of potatoes. Alive when we were on the water. Arms thrown wide, jackets rustling, eyes squinting into the sun.

  Now she worried those similarities betrayed the terrible wrongness that lived in her. Maybe she, like her father, was incapable of the love she’d spent her life chasing.

  Or maybe that love simply didn’t exist.

  10

  The Interview

  I’d read somewhere that it took 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. Writing was different, too vague a “something” for 10,000 hours to add up to much. Maybe 10,000 hours of lying in an empty bathtub brainstorming added up to being an expert on brainstorming in an empty bathtub. Maybe 10,000 hours of walking your neighbor’s dog, working out a plot problem under your breath, would turn you into a pro at puzzling through plot tangles.

  But those things were parts of a whole.

  I’d probably spent more than 10,000 hours typing novels (those published as well as those cast aside), and I still wasn’t an expert at typing, let alone an expert on writing books. Because even when you’d spent 10,000 hours writing feel-good fiction and another 10,000 reading it, it didn’t make you an expert at writing any other kind of book.

  I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t be sure I was doing anything. There was a decent chance I’d send this draft to Anya and get an email back like, Why did you just send me the menu for Red Lobster?

  But whether or not I was actually succeeding at this book, I was writing it. It came in painful ebbs and desperate flows, as if timed to the waves crashing somewhere behind that wall of fog.

  It wasn’t my life, but it was close. The conversation between the three women—Ellie, her mother, and Sonya’s stand-in, Lucy— might’ve been word for word, although I knew not to trust memory quite so much these days.

  If memory were accurate, then Dad couldn’t have been here, in this house, when Mom’s cancer came back. He couldn’t have been because, until he died, I had memories of them dancing barefoot in the kitchen, of him smoothing her hair and kissing her head, driving her to the hospital with me in the back seat and the playlist he’d enlisted me to help him piece together playing on the car stereo.

  Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind.”

  Mom and Dad’s hands clasped tightly on the center console.

  Of course I remembered the “business trips” too. But that was the point. I remembered things as I’d thought they’d been, and then the truth, That Truth, had ripped the memories in half as easily as if they had been images on printer paper.

  The next three days were a fervor of writing, cleaning, and little else. Aside from a box of wrapping paper, a handful of board games, and a great deal of towels and spare bedding, there was nothing remotely personal in the upstairs guest bedroom. It could’ve been any vacation home in America, or maybe a model home, a half-assed promise that your life too could be this kind of generically pretty.

  I liked the upstairs decor significantly less than the warm boho vibe downstairs. I couldn’t decide whether I felt relieved or cheated by that.

  If there had been more of him, or of her, here, she’d already done the heavy lifting of scrubbing it clear.

  On Wednesday, I photographed the furniture and posted it on craigslist. On Thursday, I packed the extra bedding, board games, and wrapping paper into boxes for Goodwill. On Friday, I stripped all the bedding and the towels from the racks in the second upstairs bathroom and carried them down to the laundry closet on the first floor, dumping them into the washer before sitting down to write.

  The mist had finally burned off and the house was hot and sticky once again, so I’d opened the windows and doors and turned on all the fans.

  I’d gotten glimpses of Gus over the last three days, but they’d been few. As far as I could tell, he moved around while drafting. If he was working at the kitchen table in the morning, he was never there by the time I poured my second cup of coffee. If he was nowhere to be seen all day, he’d appear suddenly on the deck at night, writing with only the light of his laptop and the swarm of moths batting around it.

  Whenever I spotted him, I instantly lost focus. It was too fun imagining what he could be writing, brainstorming the possibilities. I was praying for vampires.

  On Friday afternoon, we lined up for the first time, sitting at our tables in front of our matching windows.

>   He sat at his kitchen table, facing my house.

  I sat at my kitchen table, facing his.

  When we realized this, he lifted his bottle of beer the same way he’d mock-toasted with his coffee mug. I lifted my water glass.

  Both windows were open. We could’ve talked but we would have had to scream.

  Instead Gus smiled and picked up the highlighter and notebook beside him. He scribbled on it for a second, then held the notebook up so I could read it:

  LIFE IS MEANINGLESS, JANUARY. GAZE INTO THE ABYSS.

  I suppressed a laugh, then fished a Sharpie out of my backpack, dragged my own notebook toward me, and flipped to a blank page. In large, square letters, I wrote:

  THIS REMINDS ME OF THAT TAYLOR SWIFT VIDEO.

  His smile leapt up his face. He shook his head, then went back to writing. Neither of us said another word, and neither of us relocated either. Not until he knocked on my front door for our first research outing, a steel travel mug in each hand.

  He gave my dress—the same itchy black thing I’d worn to book club—and boots one slow up-and-down, then shook his head. “That . . . will not work.”

  “I look great,” I fired back.

  “Agreed. If we were going to see the American Ballet Theatre, you’d be perfect. But I’m telling you, January, that will not work for tonight.”