The mistake, a product of his own arrogance, had cost him months.
This had never been about an appropriation, real or imaginary, between two writers. This had been a far more intimate theft: not Jake’s at all but one Evan Parker himself had committed. What Parker had stolen was something he must have seen up close and very personaclass="underline" the mother and the daughter and what had happened between them, right here, in this house.
Of course she was angry. Not for one minute had she wanted her story to be told, not by her close relation and certainly not by a total stranger. That much, at long last, he finally understood.
CRIB
BY JACOB FINCH BONNER
Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 178–80
Gab had parents: a mom who “struggled” and a dad who came and went. She had a sister with CF and a brother whose autism was so bad he sometimes had to be tied to his bed. She had, in other words, a home life so desperate and sad that even Maria’s domestic circumstances must have seemed like something out of a family sitcom. She was a year behind Maria, allergic to nuts and obliged to carry an EpiPen everywhere, dull as dishwater, and headed exactly nowhere.
Maria, at least, was marginally nicer to be around once Gab became a fixture. Samantha credited herself for being not a prude, not a religious freak like her own parents, and not a controlling asshole in general, so she tended to see the advent of her daughter’s relationship as having a positive impact on these final years. It had all passed so swiftly that sometimes, when she was first waking up in the morning, in her parents’ old bed, in her childhood home, she actually thought of herself as the person counting down the days to departure, and then she would encounter Maria and Gab at the kitchen table eating leftover pepperoni pizzas from the night before, and remember she was a nearly thirty-two-year-old mom about to say a permanent sayonara to the only child she was likely to have. Here and gone as if none of it had ever happened, and she was catapulting backward, ten years, thirteen years, sixteen years to this same kitchen table with her mother and her father and her own lost hopes, and the classroom where she had once vomited on her problem set, and the very clean room in the College Inn where Daniel Weybridge had promised her he couldn’t get her pregnant, not even if he wanted to.
One morning in the spring of what should have been Maria’s junior year, she got a call from Mr. Fortis, of all people, letting her know that she had to come in and sign some release so her daughter could graduate early. This was mystifying, but she went that afternoon, finding the old math teacher—he had been made assistant principal years before—more bent, more gray, and so addled that he failed to acknowledge her as a person he had ever met before, let alone a former student, let alone a gifted former student he’d failed to support when she’d been forced to drop out of school. And it was from this man she had to learn her daughter had gotten herself a scholarship to Ohio State.
Ohio State. Samantha herself had never been to Ohio. She’d never been out of New York.
“You must be so proud,” said Fortis, the old fool.
“Sure,” she said.
She signed the paper and returned home, where she went straight to Maria’s room, formerly her own room, and found the papers in a neat file marked OSU in the bottom drawer of her daughter’s old oak desk, formerly her own old oak desk. One was a formal acceptance to the Honors Program in Arts and Sciences and another was a notification of something called a National Buckeye Scholarship and something else called a Maximus Scholarship. Samantha sat there for a long time at the foot of Maria’s neatly made bed, the same cannonball four-poster she herself had slept in as a child, and dreamed of escape in, and been imprisoned in while incubating that baby she hadn’t wanted to carry, or give birth to, or raise. She had done all of those things without any outward complaint, simply because people in temporary power over her life had told her she had to. Those people—her own parents—were long gone, but here Samantha still was, even as the object of all of this sacrifice was herself preparing to fuck off forever, without a backward glance.
Naturally, she had not been unaware of this exit, in itself; Maria was hardly going to mess up her chance the same way Samantha herself had, or any other way. From her earliest years, when she’d toddled about reading letters out loud, she was headed for college if not even farther, and some life—it went without saying—beyond Earlville and probably upstate New York itself. But there was something about that final year Samantha had been expecting, in her life as a mother, perhaps holding inside it some slim possibility of reversal, even redemption, which now was suddenly not there. Or possibly it was the way Maria had managed to get back at her for that skipped sixth grade she hadn’t given permission for. This time, under her old calculus teacher’s oblivious eye, she had signed that release, too cowed and too ashamed not to give in. It was June now. Maria, she supposed, would be gone by August, if not before.
She did not confront her daughter. She waited to see if Maria would at least invite her to the graduation ceremony, but in fact Maria had no interest in walking across that crepe-paper-decorated basketball court, and on the day in question she was off with Gab in Hamilton, possibly at the bookstore or even cluelessly hanging out on the porch of the College Inn. (The inn was now Family run for four generations!, Dan Weybridge having died of pancreatic cancer.) The only thing she said when she got home that night was that she had ended things with her girlfriend, and it was for the best.
The summer, a hot one, began. Maria saw no one. Samantha stayed in her office with the fan on, doing the same medical billing job she’d been doing since Maria was small, the job that had paid for her daughter’s food and clothing and doctors’ appointments. June passed, and July, and still Maria said not one word about the fact that she was about to depart, but Samantha did begin to see some incremental motion. Clothing was being bagged and taken to the donation box in town. Books were being boxed and dropped off at the Earlville Library. Old papers, tests from middle school, crayon drawings from all the way back to early childhood were being sorted and then wedged into the wastepaper basket under Maria’s desk. It was a complete rout.
“You don’t like that anymore?” Samantha said once, pointing to a green T-shirt.
“No. That’s why I’m getting rid of it.”
“Well, I might keep it, if you don’t want it.”
They were, after all, the same size.
“Suit yourself.”
It was early August.
She wasn’t planning it. Truly, she wasn’t planning anything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sole Survivor
Afterward he needed to think. He drove back into town and parked outside a Walgreens for nearly an hour, head bent, hands gripping his own knees, trying to peel away the many layers of what he’d assumed he knew about @TalentedTom, and then to form some sense of what he needed most to know right now. There was much, and he was starting from a radically different place, and it was so hard not to want to hold on to his earlier assumptions about vengeful novelists and loyal MFA classmates. He had to be humble now, Jake decided, if he was going to stop this person—this, he now recalibrated, woman—before she caused him irreparable injury.