Chapter Five
It was a Thursday. Meaning that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday had all ambled past Whit with nothing to show for themselves.
Just a blank Word doc and a blinking cursor and, yet again, the sense that Helen had made a horrible mistake. It wasn’t just
that she should have left the completion of her series to another children’s fantasy author; she should have left it to someone
who, at the very least, knew how to write a damn book.
The failed giant-baby escapade had been discouraging. It was Whit’s most proactive undertaking in weeks, and it had amounted
to nothing beyond proving to him once and for all that he was not cut out for this—not if people like Merritt Pryor had better
recall of the minutiae of Helen’s publication history than he could ever dream of having.
And then today had been especially demoralizing. After dropping Annie off at school, he returned home to his little writing
room, which just now felt less cozy, more cramped, more farcical. It was like a set piece for a play about a failed writer
where you could knock on the bookshelf, the desk, Whit’s cranium, and they would all ring hollow. He had sat in his chair,
aimless, for a quarter of an hour; then he had done a truly terrible thing and gotten on YouTube. He felt himself falling
deeper and deeper into a hole of Amateur Singers Surprising Competition Show Judges with Their Unexpected Talent videos, but
he did not resist.
An hour and a half later, with a gasp like an unfortunate Titanic passenger breaching the ocean’s surface, he pulled himself back into the real world.
He did the brave thing then and actually tried handwriting something, anything (his own work, the beginning of Helen’s), and found himself doodling like a bored teenager in chem class.
He went for a walk in the woods behind his stonewalled, ivy-covered house.
There was a lot of woods to walk in. The house, along with the family Range Rover, had been bought after the astronomical
success of Helen’s first two books. They had drastically remodeled the home’s interior, and when the land bordering the back
of their property went on the market, Helen snatched it up, lest it become a shopping center or data farm or something equally
depressing. Now there were twenty-five acres of woods and hills to roam in, and Whit paid for a monthly service that maintained
miles of trails and mended fence lines. This was one of the perks of being married to a queen of kid lit that Whit particularly
enjoyed, especially when he needed a long, long walk. He had felt that need more frequently in the months since Helen’s death—and
especially as the burden of the Monumental Task and his potential failure to accomplish it had grown more onerous and frightening.
The long walk—which, he told himself, would “get the juices flowing” and “help the gears start to turn”—had simply made him
thirsty, hungry, and listless. Once back, he made tea, then ate a whole sleeve of Milano cookies from the bag while leaning
over the sink. He emptied all the trash cans and started a load of laundry. When he was standing at the stove with a stiff
brush in hand, ready to tackle a particularly stubborn bit of charred spaghetti sauce, the phone rang.
It was Joan Eaton, Helen’s literary agent, whom he resented a little because he heard from her twice as often as he spoke
with the woman who represented his own books. He groaned and stared at the phone and groaned again, and then decided to get
the hard part over with now, because at least that was easier than going back to his study.
“Hello.”
“Whit, hi. What are you up to?”
He glanced at the hardened black tomatoey scab. “I’m writing.”
“Ohh, that’s what we like to hear,” Joan said, her voice low and drawn out, like the voice people use to speak to an especially
old person or a friend’s nervous pet.
Whit twisted the brush in his hand. “Yup,” he said, trying to rush through the small talk to get to what was surely next:
the inevitable flurry of questions, the patronizing encouragements. The word “progress.”
“And how are things? How’s Annie?”
“Oh, she’s good, I think, as far as I can tell. Kids, you know.”
“Yes, yes.”
What were they even saying? Kids, you know? Get on with it.
There was a pause, during which Whit began scrubbing, and then:
“So, listen.”
Here it was.
“I’m just going to cut to the chase. The publisher is getting antsy. Every day we’re fielding questions about when the new
book is coming out, yada yada. And they’re prepared to put a rush on things, once the draft is completed, but—well, Whit,
the problem is that it’s not completed. Right?”
Whit did not answer. The tomato stain did not budge.
“I mean, we just haven’t made much progress, have we? Realistically?”
Progress. We.
“So anyway, here’s the unpleasant part. They’re having the lawyers look into the contract. Helen’s contract. The idea is that
we’re in danger of breaching the agreed-upon terms.”
Whit stilled. He waited.
“They’re saying,” Joan explained, her voice growing lower and slower and losing all of its brashness, “well, they’re basically saying that they can legally get someone else to finish the book. If you, um, don’t.”
Something small unspooled within him. A fleeting hope. Was this a way out? But no. No. How could he even want that? Helen had laid this task at his feet, and he’d be damned if he would fail to pick it up and
carry it all the way through. He didn’t understand it, but then there had been a lot about Helen he’d never understood, and
still she had trusted him. She had seen something in him (who knew what?) and trusted that he could do this, and to let her
down in this favor, the final favor he’d ever do for her, wouldn’t just mean failing her scores and scores of fans; it wouldn’t
even just mean failing Helen. It would be like giving up on their memory, their commitment to and belief in each other. He
had to do this for both of them.
“They can’t do that.”
Joan waited.
“I mean, they can’t do that to Helen. They wouldn’t do that to her, would they?”
“Well, Whit, I really think they would. If it were any other book . . . But I’m guessing, and this is just a guess, I’m guessing
they’ll try to leverage the drop-dead deadline—the if-everything-goes-wrong one that Helen agreed to—and they’ll use it against
you. If you aren’t finished by then, you—Helen’s estate—and, by proxy, Helen will have technically broken the deal, freeing
them up considerably.”
Whit wondered if Joan even heard herself. Drop dead. If everything goes wrong. Helen did. Everything had. A sick part of him wanted to laugh at Joan before hanging up dramatically—Drop dead yourself, you monster!
But Joan wasn’t a monster, and Whit didn’t have the energy to do anything dramatically.
He took a deep breath. Maybe this was a bluff.
Whit had met Joan in person a few times, at various dinners and readings and conferences.
She had always seemed like the embodiment of kindness and wisdom.
Like a coach who knew that the way to get your best out of you was through gentle encouragement and a light but steady hand.
He could see her now, with her ear-length black hair and the spectacular mole on her left cheek, cradling the phone with her shoulder while typing away on her computer at his imagined version of an agent’s desk, crossing her fingers and hoping her gambit paid off.
If coddling and encouraging and all but wrapping Whit in a warm blanket hadn’t worked, maybe she was shifting to tough love and fearmongering.
The chances of that seemed low. Whit knew she was right: if it were any other book, things would probably look different.
But this book was a guaranteed cash cow. Even if the final product was garbage, even if Whit just copied and pasted one of
the more popular fanfics into the manuscript, the books would fly off the shelves and into the hands of costumed people at
midnight parties. Delivery trucks weighted down solely by boxes of these books would encircle the globe. For all the publisher
cared, the book didn’t have to be good. It just had to be finished. It just had to exist.
“So,” Whit said, brush discarded as he attacked the sauce stain with his fingernail, “when exactly is that deadline?”
He could hear Joan sigh into the mouthpiece.
“Oh, Whit. They want a draft by January.”
They let a pause settle over them.
January. So, four months. Four months to fulfill the last thing Helen had asked of him. God, he felt so ashamed when he thought
of her, of how she had entrusted her magnum opus to him, placing it in his deeply incapable hands. He was not what she had
imagined him to be, and that knowledge hung on him now like a suit of rusting armor.
Whit had four months to achieve what he hadn’t been able to do over the last twelve.
The thought of navigating these treacherous waters—filled with sharkishly rabid fans and a decade’s worth of lore, backstories, and who knew how many little Easter eggs just waiting to pay off in some flashy way—had overwhelmed him from the moment he’d learned of Helen’s plans for him. Now he felt virtually immobilized.
He gave the burnt spaghetti sauce one final scrape, and up it popped, like the tab on a can of soda.
“Well then,” he said, in a confident voice that was utterly fake, “I guess I’ll have it for you in January.”
When he hung up the phone, Whit leaned on the stove again, feeling almost dizzy. Then he turned around and lowered himself
to the floor, his back against the oven door, his legs splayed across the cold stone tile.
The Task was monumental. He needed help.
The fireplace at Goodenough Books was a fixture of the store, and except during the hottest parts of the summer, Diana, the
owner, had told Merritt, it was to always be crackling with a fire made with fragrant wood from nearby forests. It burned