Chapter Three #2
carefully worded emails asking about his “progress” and his “vision,” using words like “endgame.” Her agent was kinder, though
she did continually offer to connect him with “the Tolkien people,” meaning whoever was left of the people who’d helped Christopher
Tolkien with the completion of his father’s Middle-Earth books.
But it wasn’t as though Whit only needed a little mentoring or guidance. He needed someone to teach him how to write again.
In the time since Helen had gotten sick, he’d started three separate mysteries of his own—two attempts at sequels and one
stand-alone—and all of it had been derivative, lifeless garbage. Even he didn’t care who had done the murders. He tried a
contemporary literary thing without any bloodshed, but it was about a widower and his daughter and every word he typed nauseated
him.
Far worse than failing at his own writing, though, was the experience of sitting himself down to work on Helen’s book.
Both cognitive and fine motor function left his body.
He couldn’t type. He could remember nothing about the first four books in the series, despite having read them all.
There was just so much stuff in them; each was nearly twice as long as his longest novel, and each relied on a complex magic system and an arcane class
structure, with continual nods to Helen’s novellas and her fans’ theories. And beneath all of that was the sense that Helen
had known, since page 1 of book 1, how the saga would end.
He had found a few charts and a half-erased whiteboard in her office, but the truly shocking thing, what no one could believe,
including the editor, the agent, and Whit himself, was this: nowhere had she written down the hard-and-fast ending of the
years-long tale. Helen hadn’t discussed it with the publishing people, so implicit was their trust in her and so private her
writing process. He had searched her computer, the drawers in her office, her car, her bedside table, and found nothing. Whit
didn’t even have a title to go by.
“Didn’t she ever mention . . .” the editor, Shreya, would start on their occasional phone calls.
“No,” Whit would sigh. “She was very tight-lipped during the actual drafting. It was usually only after the first go-round
was completed that we’d talk about it at all.”
But even in those conversations, he and Helen hadn’t gone into much detail. They worked in different literary worlds: he wrote
for adults, she for children and teenagers (and, she always reminded him, women in their twenties and thirties). Scratch that,
she wrote for everyone, and he wrote for people who had opinions about Masterpiece Theatre and for the one woman at the Los Angeles Review of Books who usually liked his stuff okay.
Helen’s worlds were infused with a cozy kind of magic, a dark but defeatable evil, and a unique lightning-in-a-bottle Greenwood Castle sensibility, while Whit’s books were grim and rainy.
Sometimes the mystery was solved only after someone beloved died, and a few times it wasn’t solved at all.
So why him? That was what really ate at him. Apart from the fact that they were married, and that they had loved each other,
once very powerfully, he could think of no good reason why she had left him with this task. He was baffled, and beneath that,
if he could manage to crack the shell that usually kept his own emotions concealed from view, he also felt a steely anger.
How could she do this? Why hadn’t she told him? Why had she been so withholding about so many things?
Willa coughed and drew Whit’s attention from his closed laptop to her wary eyes.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I ask you a terrible question?”
Whit’s stomach dropped like it did when he knew someone was about to mention Helen. But he only said, “Of course.”
“How’s the actual writing going?”
Relieved, Whit mimed getting shot. Willa smiled.
“It isn’t going,” he admitted. Once again. “Days and days of blank documents.”
“Have you tried writing by hand?”
“Yes.”
“Writing in different places?”
“Yes.”
“Changing the time of day? Writing in the evening instead of the morning, that kind of thing?”
“Yes, Willa.”
She nodded, thinking. “I have a friend who lights a candle whenever she’s ready to write. She says it sets the tone and tells
your brain you’ve entered ‘the writing space.’ ”
“That is very woo-woo of you.”
“Not me,” Willa corrected, raising a finger. “My friend. Have you tried typing in Comic Sans?”
Annoyance crept into Whit’s voice for the first time. “Have I what?”
She shrugged. “It’s a thing. People on the internet say it makes them type faster.”
Whit breathed deeply into tented hands.
“I don’t think we’re that desperate yet.”
Willa made a face that said, I think we are very close to being that desperate.
The coffee shop inhaled a cold breath as the front door opened, and Willa’s insightful look turned to one of dread.
“Incoming.”
Whit’s irritation spiked. He knew before turning to look that it would be Ian Hoult. Ian the Terrible. The man’s eyes searched
the room lazily before landing on Willa and Whit, and then he made a show of reluctantly walking their way, as if they were
waving him over against his will rather than trying not to make eye contact.
Whelk Harbor was a small town with a high number of writers per capita. Ian was the third of three (formerly four) members
of the writing group, and Whit had more than once fantasized about going head to head with him on the National Book Award
shortlist, beating him, and then stabbing him with the pointy end of that exhaust pipe–shaped trophy. Never would Whit speak
this fantasy out loud, not only because of the daydream’s violent nature, but also because he and Ian both knew who would
actually win in such a showdown. If one of them was the critical darling, it was not the mystery writer but the author of
heavily researched novels in which famous and friendless figures did ambiguous and/or ruthless things for three hundred pages.
Once upon a time, the writing group had consisted of Whit, Willa, Helen, and Ian.
For a while, it felt like the four of them were struggling side by side, and even when they got agents and book deals, they had been in it together.
Ian was unassumingly smart, as if he was used to being overlooked, and it had given him a kind of lovable snarkiness.
But then his second novel, a literary historical volume called And Now We Must Say Farewell, had won the PEN/Faulkner, and there had been a big book tour and the obligation to “do press,” as Ian had told them over
and over, each time as if he regretted it. As a consequence, Ian had started missing their weekly meetings, and though the
other three had feigned disappointment, in fact they were relieved. Success had not agreed with the man.
Ian reached their table now and shrugged with his whole body, because his life had become one of faux apology. He had started
dressing as if he’d read the definition of unkempt and taken it as a costuming guideline for day-to-day living. His linen shirt looked as though he’d been practicing sailing
knots with it; his brown jeans were stained in two places, and his shoes were horrible closed-toe Birkenstocks. His brown
beaded bracelet and longish hair, dark and wild, were so at odds with his ever-increasing vanity that the man radiated pretense.
“Here you are,” Ian said in his lazy way, “my fellow writers in arms. The life of the mind.”
After this non sequitur, he did a painful show of solidarity with two raised fists.
“How are the ‘lyrical marvels’ going?”
He quoted these words at Willa often, hardly masking his jealousy. They were taken from a review of one of her early novels,
and he somehow made them sound like ironic curse words.
Willa gave him a bland smile. “Oh, you know.”
“Ah. And Whit, how are the wizards?”
Helen’s book was not about wizards, and Whit was never quite sure whether this was an inexpert attempt at teasing or a real
display of Ian’s ignorance.
“They’re just fine.”
Ian raised his cheeks in something smile-adjacent and waited, completely comfortable with the silence. Finally, after an excruciating
fifteen seconds:
“And what about Detective Fraulein Maria? I hope she hasn’t returned to the convent indefinitely. She doesn’t seem the type
to be satisfied with a cloistered existence.”
Ian laughed so loudly at his own joke that people from other tables looked their way.
Whit gripped the leg of the table. His “Sister Marguerite” books riffed on that strange phenomenon in detective fiction, where
members of the clergy, usually British, stumble into solving crimes in tiny hamlets with as many murders a year as there are
beads in the rosary. Whit’s books were cozy mysteries with diminished coziness. They were serious (he hoped) and compelling
(he hoped) and surprising (please, God), and they turned the genre on its head in welcome, unexpected ways (surely they at
least did that).
Whit clinched his teeth and smiled. “Not indefinitely, no. She’s just on hiatus while I finish the book for Helen.”
Something about the direct answer—the acknowledgment of Helen and her absence—seemed to disarm or confuse Ian, who looked
away. But still he stood, waiting, and finally Willa let her compulsion to be polite win out.
“What about you, Ian? What are you working on?”
“Oh, well, there’s the new book, of course, if I can ever get to it. I’m calling it Standard Deviations, it’s about mathematicians. I’m trying to trace a line from Ada Lovelace to Sofya Kovalevskaya to Benoit Mandelbrot.”
He had delighted in perfectly pronouncing Kovalevskaya and now waved a hand like this was all probably too complicated for Whit and Willa to follow.
“But The Atlantic wants me to write something about the class I’m teaching at Plymouth College this semester, and it’s taking up all my time.”
He seemed to pause for a show of praise or awe, but this time even Willa refused to take the bait.
“Right now,” he said, entirely unfazed, “I’m grabbing a cuppa on my way out to visit a creative writing class at the high
school. I wish I’d said no, but the teacher’s an old friend of my mother’s, and well, duty calls.”
“Oh, how fun,” Willa said, presumably in an effort to move things along. “Well, enjoy. And good luck with all that.”
“Yes, thank you. Well.” Another long, oblivious pause, and then, at long last: “Happy writing, friends.”
“You too,” Willa said, before sighing in relief as the man walked away.
Whit laughed, but mostly he was thinking of how Helen would have said just the right thing to put Ian in his place. She had
always been better with words.