“In my novel. Samantha is a thwarted person, and bitterly unhappy. Those things can corrupt you every bit as much as some predisposition toward evil. I always thought of her as a person who’s fallen into a hole of terrible disappointment, which over time—and as she watched her daughter prepare for her own departure—just worked on her, with devastating results. And then when it happened it was a kind of accident, or at least not something planned or prepared for. It’s not like she was a—”
“Sociopath?” Anna said.
He felt genuine surprise. Of course he understood that this was the predominant view amongst his readers, but Anna had never said as much about the character.
“And that’s where the dividing line is?” his wife asked. “Between something any of us might do under the circumstances and something only a truly evil person would do? Planning it?”
He shrugged. His shoulders felt impossibly heavy as he lifted them and let them fall. “It seems like a good enough place to put the dividing line.”
“Okay. But only as far as your made-up character is concerned. It has no bearing on this actual woman’s life. You can’t have any idea what was going on in her head, or what else she might have done, before or after this unplanned act. I mean, who knows what else this Dianna Parker got up to? You said yourself, nobody seems to get sick in her family.”
“That’s true.” He nodded, and his head felt fuzzy as it inclined forward. He had written an entire novel around this one terrible thing, and he still couldn’t fully accept there was a real mother out there who’d been able to do it. See her child die like that and just move on? “I mean,” he heard himself say, “it’s incredible. Isn’t it?”
Anna sighed. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Jake. Do you want more soup?”
He did, and she went to get it, bringing him back another brimming, steaming bowl.
“It’s so good.”
“I know. My mother’s recipe.”
Jake frowned. There was something he wanted to ask about that, but he couldn’t think what it was. Spinach, kale, garlic, essence of chicken; it was certainly tasty, and he could feel the warmth of it spreading inside him.
“This plot you sent me a picture of, it looked like a pretty place. Can I see it again?”
He reached for his phone and tried to find it for her, but that wasn’t as easy as it should have been. The pictures kept shooting forward and back as he scrolled, refusing to land on the right one. “Here,” he finally said.
She held the phone in her hand, and looked intently.
“The stone. It’s very simple. I like it.”
“Okay,” said Jake.
She had picked up the single gray braid of her hair, and was twisting the end around and around her fingers in a way that was almost hypnotic. He loved so many things about the way she looked, but that silver hair, it occurred to him, he loved most of all. Thinking of it swinging loose made a kind of weighty thump inside his head. He had been traveling for days, and worried for months. Now, with so many of the pieces finally in place, he was deeply tired, and all he wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that she was leaving tonight. Maybe he needed some time to recover. Maybe they each needed a couple of days to themselves.
“So after the accident,” said Anna, “our bereaved mom keeps heading south. Lemonade out of lemons, right?”
Jake nodded his heavy head.
“And when she gets to Athens she registers in Rose’s name, and gets permission to live off campus for her freshman year. And that gets us up to the end of the 2012 to 2013 academic year. What happens after that?”
Jake sighed. “Well, I know she left the university. After that, I’m not sure where she went or where she’s been, but it doesn’t really matter. She can’t want to be exposed for her real crime any more than I do for my imaginary one. So tomorrow I’ll send her an email and tell her to fuck off. And I’ll cc that asshole attorney to make sure she gets the message.”
“But don’t you want to know where she is now? And what her name is? Because obviously, she’ll have changed her name. You don’t even know what she looks like. Right?”
She had taken his bowl to the sink and she was washing it. She washed his spoon and the pot she’d used to heat the soup up. Then she put all of those things in the dishwasher, and started it. She came back to the table and stood over him. “Maybe we should get you lying down,” she said. “You really do look beat.”
He could not deny it, and he wasn’t up to trying.
“It’s good you got that soup into you, though. One of the only things my mother gave me, that soup.”
Then he remembered what he wanted to ask her.
“You mean, Miss Royce. The teacher?”
“No, no. My real mom.”
“But, she died. She drove into a lake when you were so young. Didn’t she drive into a lake?”
Suddenly, Anna was laughing. Her laugh was musicaclass="underline" light and sweet. She laughed as if all of that—the soup, the teacher, the mom who’d driven her car into a lake in Idaho—was some of the funniest stuff she had ever heard. “You are so pathetic. What self-respecting writer doesn’t know the plot of Housekeeping? Fingerbone, Idaho! The aunt who can’t take care of herself or her nieces! I didn’t even change the teacher’s name, for fuck’s sake! And don’t think that wasn’t a risk. Tempting fate to prove a point, I guess.”
He wanted to ask what it was, that point, but getting his throat to breathe and talk at the same time had suddenly attained the complexity of juggling with knives, and besides, he already knew. How hard was it, really, to steal someone else’s story? Anybody could do it—you didn’t even have to be a writer.
Still, there was something about this he just couldn’t work out. In fact, there were only a few things he seemed capable of understanding at all, and whatever powers of concentration he still possessed had gone to those things, like blood to the vital organs when you’re stranded in a snowbank, dying of frostbite. First: that Anna was leaving for the airport soon. Second: that Anna seemed to know something he didn’t. Third: that Anna was still angry at him. He didn’t have the strength to ask about all three. So he asked about the last one, because he had already forgotten the first two.
“You’re still angry at me, aren’t you?” he said, speaking the words extremely carefully so as not to be misunderstood. And she nodded.
“Well, Jake,” she said, “I’d have to say that’s true. I’ve been angry at you for a very long time.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
That Novelist’s Eye for Detail
“I wasn’t going to do this yet,” said Anna. She had the crook of her elbow under his arm and she was lifting him, or helping him up, one of the two. He must, at some point, have become terribly light, or else the floor of the apartment had helpfully tipped to a forty-five-degree angle. She held him tightly as they passed the kilim-covered couch, and it slid up one of the walls as they went by, but magically, without actually moving. “There was no rush. And then you had to start running around like Lord Peter Wimsey. It’s something I don’t really get about you, this compulsion to understand everything. And all the sturm und drang! If you were going to be this troubled about what you’d done, why steal someone else’s story in the first place? I mean, torturing yourself about it after the fact. Such a waste of energy, especially when I’m right here, and I’m so good at it. Don’t you think so?”