Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
Fiona comes striding up the driveway to the deck, where Miguel and I are waiting.
“Hello, Harold,” she says, and I give her a grin nearly as wide as the one Miguel’s wearing.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he says. His hair’s still wet, but he’s thrown on another linen shirt, this one in a darker hue, and he just brushed his teeth.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“You’re his secret weapon!” he says excitedly. “Jonathan wouldn’t exist without you. Or at least his books wouldn’t. I see it now.”
“Yes.” She lowers her eyes and raises a hand to her face, almost as though she’s mortified by this admission. “I wondered if you knew. I’m sorry I didn’t say something earlier—I wanted to, and believe me, I’ve been trying.”
“There’s no need to apologize. I’m dazzled by your genius,” he says, and she looks at him again.
Then he steps forward, puts his hand gently behind her head, and puts his lips to hers.
This time, I don’t even want to bark.
They’re still kissing, and their bodies are pressed together; I’m getting a strong whiff of what my Amelia liked to call “the tingles.” But Miguel and Fiona fit together differently than he did with her. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s just right.
At once, I’m overcome with the strangest, most melancholy joy—because I just realized that I have fulfilled my mission. I no longer need to worry if he’ll be okay once I’m gone; he will be.
Our Amelia would be so proud of us.
“Was that too much?” he says breathily when they finally let each other go.
“No.” Her voice is lower than usual. “I could’ve done that all day. But I’m dying to know: How did you figure it out?”
“It was the line about who the protagonist would have been if she’d been born in another era. I recognized that from our conversation at the park. You must’ve been up all night editing.”
Her eyes flash with something; I don’t know what it is, but it’s no longer her mating instinct.
Miguel doesn’t catch it, though. “No wonder we’ve had such a connection,” he says in a husky tone. “I’ve spent years admiring your hard work, your influence.”
“Influence,” she repeats.
“How much do you edit? Do you start when he thinks of an idea?” he asks. “I want to hear everything.”
She sits gingerly on one of the chairs on the deck and places her hands on her knees. “Miguel, I think you should sit down.”
“What is it? Are you all right? Should I bring you something to drink?” he asks, taking the chair beside her.
“No, it’s not that. I…think there’s been a misunderstanding.”
He leans toward her, concerned. “How so? What can I do to help?”
“I didn’t edit the story you just read.” In a near-whisper, she says, “I wrote it.”
He pulls his head back almost violently. “I don’t understand.”
“When you just said you knew it was me, I thought you meant you knew I’d written the story, and Missing Person.
Honestly, I assumed you’d known since we talked about literature at my house.
It felt like you were peering right into my heart and were only waiting for me to find the courage to reveal it to you. ”
“No—I—I don’t get it,” he says haltingly. “You wrote Missing Person? Did you write I, Edward, too? And The Way We Weren’t?”
“Yes. I mean, it’s complicated.” She’s gripping her hands together tightly. “Missing Person is the book of my soul, but Jon has a remarkable memory, and he helped me with the details because I forgot a lot of what happened, probably from the trauma. In that way, he practically wrote it with me.”
Miguel looks as though he’s awoken from a deep sleep and is having trouble telling what’s a dream and what’s reality.
I’m starting to feel a wee bit dizzy myself.
What happened to the tingles, to their connection?
They should be professing their love right now—not confessing that they’ve completely miscalculated each other.
He stands from his chair and takes a step away from her. “Who knows about this?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told,” she says. “Vik knew from the start—he’d pushed Jon to give up the charade so they could enjoy their life together without constantly being under a microscope. Yet I’ve never breathed a word of this to anyone. It’s an incredible relief to say it aloud.”
But she doesn’t look relieved. And it’s probably because his face is twisted up in pain.
He curses quietly in Spanish. “I always wondered how a twenty-two-year-old could have possibly written Missing Person. The answer is, he couldn’t—and he didn’t. Why didn’t you tell me when I told you about my parents, and how much that story meant to me?”
“I tried to,” she says, wincing. Why isn’t he consoling her like he did when she told him she hadn’t been taken seriously, or at least touching her to tell her it’s going to be all right? “I’ve been trying to summon the courage nearly every time we’ve been together. I was just…afraid.”
“The girl doesn’t know, then,” he says plainly.
Fiona lowers her head momentarily. “Amelia Mae is quite clever, as you’ve probably gathered. Now that she’s older, it’s clear she has her suspicions. Jon and I were going to tell her together, but then…he left.”
“Is that why your brother ran off to Europe? Because he didn’t want to fess up?
” He rubs his forehead and doesn’t wait for an answer.
“And is that why you wanted to write the bookstore a check—because it’s really your money?
After all, you’re the one who built JMB’s entire legacy, and your brother’s the front man.
No wonder you read the article I wrote.”
“Miguel, neither Jon nor I wanted to keep this up. We had no idea that it would come to this. But you don’t know what it was like for us,” she says with newfound urgency.
“My ex-husband ran off the minute he found out I was pregnant with Amelia Mae. A few months later, my employer pink-slipped me because they thought I couldn’t do the type of reporting I’d been doing if I was expecting or worrying about childcare—they actually said that, though of course they didn’t put it in writing, so I couldn’t sue them.
I had bills to pay and a young child to care for.
Jon helped me with Amelia Mae when I could barely look after myself, let alone an infant.
Really, he nearly saved our lives. But he was working at Burger King at night and studying during the day, and we desperately needed money.
The manuscript I’d written a few years earlier was just sitting in a drawer, and even though it had been rejected by dozens of literary agents, I knew in my soul it was good.
Really good. Except no one would give me the time of day. ”
Miguel exhales loudly, waiting for her to finish.
“So, I made the protagonist male and gave him a sister instead of a brother. Then I asked Jon if I could use his name, since it was really his story, too—after all, we’d lived through it together, and he’d supplied so many of the specifics that my mind refused to remember.
When the first few queries didn’t get a response, I mailed a photo of him with the next letters I sent to literary agents, knowing that his youth and good looks would be the foot in the door we needed to get someone to read the whole manuscript and see its potential.
I doubt we could’ve gotten away with it now, but it worked then.
Ten days later, he’d signed with Bunny, and a week after that, boom—a five-way auction for the manuscript that I’d repeatedly been told ‘lacks imagination’ and ‘isn’t salable,’ ” says Fiona, making little motions in the air with her fingers.
“That’s not even including the foreign rights and then all the film stuff and the prizes.
Now do you get it? We were both broke and beaten down, and just hoping to survive and give Amelia Mae a good life, Miguel. But…”
“One book turned into three,” he says quietly.
“Yes,” she concedes. “I’d call it golden handcuffs, but after a while, I began to recover from my ex leaving and the depression I’d experienced over him and losing my job and what felt like everything else.
I finally had the time and money to write fiction, as I’d always wanted to.
Truly, I don’t know if I could have stopped if I’d tried.
But over the past couple years, Jon has been convinced we were on the verge of being found out because so much is on the internet.
My poor brother, who wants nothing more than to be left alone, has entire AOL chat boards dedicated to him! ”
Miguel grimaces, but he still doesn’t go to her.
Fiona continues. “He panicked, and then I freaked out when I realized what this could cost us—which led to a year of writer’s block.
I haven’t been able to write…until you showed up at his door.
Then it was like the floodgates had opened back up.
I can’t tell you how much that means to me.
I feel like myself again, when I haven’t in the longest time.
Was I incorrect in thinking that maybe you did, too? ”
Miguel says nothing now.
“I’m truly sorry you feel deceived,” she tells him. “That’s the last thing I wanted.”
“Thank you.” He squeezes his lids closed. “But why did you call me and offer to have Jonathan do an event at Lakeside?”
“I was telling the truth about loving Amelia’s work—and helping bookstores.
I went to one of her readings in Chicago before she got ill, and we got to talking afterward.
She mentioned how hard it was to run a bookstore, and she spoke so highly of you.
She even told me we’d get along. And it turns out she was right. ”
Miguel’s eyes are as wide as an owl’s. “You knew who I was when we met? When you first called the store?”
“I did,” she says simply. “I hadn’t thought twice about my conversation with Amelia until I saw an article online about her passing and…
I only wanted to help in some small way and had no idea so much was riding on that one event.
I thought maybe she’d have mentioned me to you—I told her that she and my Amelia Mae shared a name, and she said it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.
But then you were so surprised when I introduced myself, and things just… happened the way they did.”
His face has gone pale. “Why didn’t you tell me that? I would have wanted to know you’d met Amelia. But now that it’s coming out like this…”
I start pacing between them, though I’m not sure what I’m trying to accomplish. I wish the other Amelia were here to help me. Because she was right: They’ve just made things unnecessarily complicated. And I don’t know what to do about it.
“Have you ever been rejected for who you are? It wasn’t just publishing that told me I wasn’t enough, Miguel,” rasps Fiona.
“I wanted to be a mother more than anything, and my ex pretended like he wanted that for me, too—only to leave me in the lurch when that happened. Even now, I’ll meet someone who becomes a friend, but as soon as we start getting close and I tell them about the losses I’ve encountered, they retreat because they’re only interested in the sunny version of me.
People say they want authenticity. The reality is, they want it in the smallest possible doses and exclusively when it’s convenient for them.
” Fiona rises from her chair and stands in front of Miguel, so they’re eye to eye.
“I liked you from the get-go. And you liked me, too—no matter what you think now, I know I wasn’t imagining the spark between us.
And even though I felt terrible about the circumstances that led to us meeting, I’ve waited an awful long time to feel the way I feel when I’m around you.
But now I can’t help but wonder if you’re just like everyone else. ”
“I’m not,” he says, but his voice lacks conviction.
“No? It occurs to me that you didn’t rush to compliment my genius once after I told you I wrote your favorite novel.”
“Fiona—”
She cuts him off. “Nor are you embracing me right now and telling me it’s all right that I couldn’t tell you until I was ready.
Because it’s not all right, is it? You liked the illusion of me.
Maybe even parts of me that fit your preexisting narrative.
But you don’t want the whole package—and you hate that you’ve just seen it. ”
“That’s not true at all.”
Except it must be, because he still hasn’t put his arms back around her, and he’s not comforting her, either. He’s just standing there like he’s frozen from tip to tail.
Fiona shakes her head sadly. “I’m going to go. We should have left this morning. Or maybe days ago.”
His shoulders slump, and he stares across the yard instead of looking at her. “Okay.”
What is he talking about? This is the opposite of okay!
He’s supposed to be groveling right now.
“The hero, no matter how tortured, how racked by guilt and suffering he might be, has to fight for his love’s love,” Amelia said one time when she was helping another writer with her work.
Really, if I learned anything from her reading her books aloud to me, it’s that the hero must care; he has to try.
But Miguel must be all out of caring. Because when Fiona grabs her tote from the back of the chair then walks down the driveway and out of our lives, he lets her go.