A few days later, the Western Union truck pulled up in front of the house. Winnie was the only one around. Garrett and Beth had gone running together and Marcus had fallen asleep down on the beach. Winnie was in the kitchen making sandwiches when she heard the crunch of tires on the shell driveway and she reached the front door in time to meet the driver and sign for an envelope. Winnie became sore with the memories of previous summers-the FedEx truck came nearly every day with documents for her father.
The Western Union man tipped his hat at Winnie in an old-fashioned way that made her smile. She looked at the envelope and saw it was addressed to Marcus. It was a telegram, she realized, another telegram for Marcus. There had been one a few weeks earlier, back when they were angry at one another, and she had forgotten to ask him about it. From one of his parents, his father probably, telling him it was time to come home. She wanted to throw the envelope away, or else she wanted it to contain happy news, like Marcus had been offered a college scholarship. Like his father had found a great new job and they were moving to Manhattan.
Winnie took the envelope down to the beach along with their lunch. Marcus was still asleep, face down, on his beach towel. He was so tall and solid; at night, when he held her, she wanted to melt into him and disappear.
She nudged the bottom of his foot with her big toe. “Turkey sandwiches,” she said. The days of Malibu and Coke were over, but she’d brought a thermos of icy lemonade. She laid out lunch as Marcus rubbed his eyes and sat up.
“I’m really going to miss this,” he said. “You know?”
Winnie squinted at the ocean. A seagull stopped at the edge of their blanket and squawked for some of their lunch. Winnie threw a piece of bread crust. Finally she understood the heartache her mother felt every year when she left this island. It was falling in love here that did it, Winnie guessed. It was falling in love here that made you never want to leave.
“A telegram came for you,” Winnie said. She pulled the envelope out of her jean shorts. “Just now. Western Union.”
Marcus looked at the envelope but didn’t reach for it right away. Winnie’s heart dropped. It was bad news. She remembered the morning of March sixteenth, her mother coming into her bedroom while Winnie was getting dressed for school. Her mother didn’t have to say a single word; Winnie knew in her gut that her father was dead.
“Is everything okay?” Winnie whispered.
The seagull returned, begging for more. Throw the telegram to the seagull, Winnie thought. Throw it into the ocean. It seemed plausible on such a gorgeous day that bad news could simply be tossed away.
Marcus opened the envelope, shaking his head all the while. Maybe it was from Constance. Could a person send telegrams from prison?
“What does it say?” Winnie asked.
He fell back onto his towel. “There’s something I have to tell you. Remember back a couple of weeks ago when I got that other telegram?I know you were the one who slid it under my door.”
Winnie nodded. It was awful of her to slide the telegram under the door like Marcus was some kind of leper, but at the time she’d been too indignant to knock.
“And remember when I told you that I had a secret?”
Of course she remembered! She felt like shaking him. Didn’t he understand that his every word printed indelibly on her brain?
“Yes,” she said. “But you don’t have to tell me what it is if you don’t want to.”
“I want to,” Marcus said. “These telegrams?Are you ready?”
Winnie was pretty sure she wasn’t ready, but she nodded.
“They’re from my editor.”
Winnie smiled at him. She thought he’d said “editor.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I have an editor,” Marcus said. “At Dome Books in New York. His name is Zachary Celtic.”
Winnie felt like the butt of some kind of joke, though she wasn’t sure yet if she was supposed to be angry or laugh along.
“I still don’t understand.”
Marcus squinted at the ocean. The sun seemed to have gotten brighter in the past few minutes. So Winnie was skeptical. She believed in him, but not that much.
“I have a book deal with Dome,” Marcus said. “This guy, this editor, Zachary Celtic, offered me thirty thousand dollars to write a book about what happened with my mother.”
“You’re kidding,” Winnie said. “Thirty thousand dollars?”
Those three words had power, Marcus realized, even over someone with plenty of money like Winnie. They’d held so much power over him that he’d agreed to write a book he didn’t want to write. There, he’d admitted it.
He didn’t want to write the book.
“They gave me five hundred dollars already,” Marcus said. It sounded like such a paltry sum when compared to thirty thousand, but since Marcus now knew he had to pay it back, it seemed like a lot. “But I spent it. And what this telegram says is that the first fifty pages and a complete synopsis are due next week, September first. ‘Per our agreement.’ ”
“You’ve written fifty pages?” Winnie said.
“No,” Marcus said. “I’ve only written one page. I had writer’s block this summer.”
“Maybe they’ll give you more time,” Winnie said. “Like an extension on a term paper?”
“More time won’t help,” Marcus said. “I’m not going to write it at all.”
“Really?” Winnie said. Now she was having a hard time processing what he was telling her. He had a book deal for thirty thousand dollars but he was giving it up?Turning it down? She felt compelled to push him toward greatness. Marcus could be a writer, a real writer, before he even turned eighteen. “Why not?”
“I don’t have it in my heart,” Marcus said. “I’m furious with my mother and I know better than anyone else that what she did was wrong, but that’s not stuff I want to explain to the rest of the world. I want to work it out privately.”
“But you don’t talk to your mother,” Winnie said.
“Yeah, I know,” Marcus said. He felt like crumpling up the telegram and tossing it into the water, but it had the phone number of Dome Books on it and now he had to call. “Don’t get me wrong. I want to be a writer. And I will be someday. But I’m not writing this story. I kept thinking of your dad, too. He wouldn’t have wanted me to write this book.”
“Yeah,” Winnie said. “He wasn’t into exploiting his cases.”
That word, “exploiting,” was the one that made Marcus squirm. Along with the horrible things Zachary Celtic had said at lunch, and the way the five hundred dollars was handed to him-cash in an envelope-so seedy, so underhanded. They were buying Marcus’s betrayal. “Anyway, that’s my secret. I have a book deal with this big publishing house for all this money but I’m not going through with it.”
“Well, okay, then,” Winnie said. She poured two cups of lemonade and handed one to Marcus. They clicked cups in a toast, though they had different ideas about what they were drinking to. Winnie thought they were drinking to Marcus’s future career as a writer, if not with this book then with another. Marcus thought they were drinking to his freedom.