I wish Bethany was here. If only… If only Mom could strap her into the car seat and bring her here, could walk in the door without knocking, just like she used to. Bethany could worm onto her stomach next to me, her tiny elbows against the wood floor, her eyes big. She would cover her mouth and giggle. Lower her chin to the floor and peer under the heavy leather couch. I could tell her that mice tails can grow as long as their bodies and that they eat 15 to 20 times per day.
I push the cheese with the tip of my nail and pull back my hand, waiting to see if the tiny creature will appear. Maybe he has a family, a tiny nest somewhere with five or six tiny pink bodies tucked in a cluster of scrap paper and misplaced threads, their miniscule mouths gaping open and begging for food. This piece of cheese can be their dinner, can pair nicely with the chunk of bread I left yesterday.
Maybe I should have let Charlotte WhatsHerFace in. The girl who showed up yesterday, armed with her questions, intent on ruining my day. Maybe her visit was just routine, a cop following up on Simon’s death, a four-year check-in, and not an intensive investigation into the circumstances. Or maybe the Simon reference was an excuse, and she is actually my long lost sister. Our conversation might have unveiled a story of fire station abandonment, her youth spent in foster homes before she was finally adopted—probably by a wealthy sheik, one who crowned her a princess and is now marrying her off. She might need my help, wanting to run away to a happier life, one of freedom and sisterhood.
Ha. A terrible plot, full of holes, the first being that my mother would never abandon a child. She would have embraced a second child, especially one with Charlotte’s delicate features and blonde hair. I bet she was a pretty baby. I bet she didn’t refuse pacifiers or request more nutritious meals at preschool.
I turn my head, resting my ear against the wood floor, and watch the white chunk, waiting for the tremor of whiskers, a tiny nose peeking out, hesitant steps taken toward the food. I’ve never had a pet. Mother always crushed that possibility, appalled at the idea of drool, pet dander, urine and feces.
I shift on the floor, and close my eyes, a headache pinching hard, the pain almost blinding in its stab.
I push back from the laptop, my fingers trembling when I fumble with the edge of the drawer, pulling it open. I twist the cap off of the medicine bottle, shaking out two pain pills and popping them into my mouth. Another headache, my vision spotty from it. This morning there was a doctor’s appointment, one where I laid out my symptoms and the doctor assured me they will only get worse. He gave me a sales pitch on chemo, along with a fresh script for pain meds. The chemo I passed on, but the meds I accepted.
I eye the bottom of my computer screen. Seventeen hundred words. Barely a chapter, and my fingers are stalling, my sentences grinding to a halt, my mind tripping over simple words it knows by heart. I’ve written fifteen books and never had such a complete whitening of thought, like a blizzard against your windshield, no options available but to pull over and stop. I push away from the desk, settling back in the chair and swinging my feet up, resting my socked heels against the wooden surface.
Three months left. That’s what the doctor said. Three months, and a book that will easily run three hundred pages. I close my eyes and do the math, giving myself forty days to write, forty to rewrite, and ten days leeway for sickness. I’ll need to write 8 pages, two thousand words each day. My stress rises. Ten days off in three months is a crazy schedule. And two thousand words a day is daunting, especially for me, who takes a year to produce a normal manuscript.
This will not be a normal manuscript. This is a heroine who will be closer to me than any other. A heroine whose shoes I filled, whose steps I took, decisions I made, sins I committed. Once I write her story, she will be real, she will be exposed, dead to edits but open to everyone’s eyes. On their tablets, in their hands, grubby fingers and manicured nails skimming the pages faster-faster-faster until they reach The End and move on to the next. Done with that heroine. Done with that story.
I’m terrified at the thought. Thousands of words of truth and life, published and out for them to digest, creating the chance, the very small chance, that no one will buy her. Or that they will read her words and pick at them, reviewers typing away, their lips chit-chattering, musing about her motivations and her weaknesses and her actions and whether she is deserving of her fate.
I don’t know what is worse, if they hate her or if they don’t read her at all. She could end up in a clearance bin, a flashy 99￠ sticker plastered to her front.
I can’t do that to her. I can’t do that to me.
Maybe that’s why I’ve waited until now, the moment when I won’t be around to see the carnage, to deal with the police, the consequences, the judgement.
Two thousand words a day. Three months that are already whittling down. My stomach heaves, and I open my mouth, inhale deeply, a panic attack rising, my body suddenly hot, this office stuffy, the glow of the computer’s screen too bright.
I can’t do it. There is no way, not enough time, not enough hours to dedicate to what is the most important novel of my entire life.
I almost reach for the phone, dial Kate’s number, and ask for help.
Instead, I lean forward, dropping to the floor, hand yanking at the plastic trash can beneath my desk, and vomit.
The summer I met Simon, I lost Jennifer. It was as if a hole opened in my heart, and he stepped right in, his hand where hers had once been, his smile replacing hers. Granted, they were different. She was eleven, he was twenty-two. She ran away…
I delete the last line, and then the entire paragraph. Lies. I am forgetting that this is not an ordinary novel, that I can’t take fictional liberties, can’t provide clues, or lead the readers down a path I didn’t travel.
There is no Jennifer. Maybe if there had been, then I would be in a different place now. Maybe if I had had a friend, even an eleven-year-old one, then Simon wouldn’t have been my everything.
I try to picture a friend of the twenty-year-old me, a girl whose interests had been singularly focused on reading and writing, her days spent at a notebook or computer, her mind preoccupied in thoughts of fictional characters and strange cities. Girls in my high school had seemed like foreign creatures, the boys leering villains. Another writer would have been my best bet. Or possibly a librarian, though none had ever given me the time of day.
I think of Marka Vantley, of our seven-year war, and make a face. Maybe another writer wouldn’t have been my best bet. Then again, most writers aren’t buxom supermodels who write trashy smut.
My gaze drifts over the stack of books beside my desk, all but one of my novels present. Missing is Blue Heart. The worst book I ever wrote. It was about a girl who gets a heart transplant as a child and—either due to the medical procedure or her God-given personality—is unable to love. Critics loved it and readers rushed out to purchase it, a million copies sold in the first year. Marka Vantly sent me a scathing email that spoke the truth. It said the book was terrible—flat and insipid, my attempts at matchmaking weak.
She had been right.
I hadn’t responded well, reading the email and then pushing the laptop off the counter’s edge. Simon had come home to find bits of the screen dotting our kitchen floor, punk music blaring through the house—an unsuccessful attempt to drown out her words.