Chapter Seven
Merritt opened the front door to the yellow Victorian on the outer rim of town to find her mother in her natural state: curled
up in the oversized easy chair in the corner of the living room–turned–personal library. Stepping into the space felt like
stepping into the branches of a lit Christmas tree, with its little fireplace and scattered lamps illumining a small forest
of houseplants, all hanging from wall-to-wall bookshelves. And there was Kathleen, like a favorite family ornament. She was
in what Merritt thought of as her nighttime uniform: a tan sweatsuit from her alma mater, with her copious gray-brown hair
twisted into a sloppy bun. Tonight she was wrapped in a quilt Merritt’s grandmother had made, with her reading glasses perched
at the tip of her nose, just inches above what looked to be one of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels. Verdi played from a
speaker hidden somewhere on the shelves.
“Hi, Mom. What are you reading?”
“Oh, Can You Forgive Her? And I have to say, at this point, I’m not sure I can.”
Kathleen looked up.
“Well, look at you.”
“What?” Merritt said, touching her face absent-mindedly.
“You looked pleased as punch.”
“I do?”
“You do. What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Merritt lied. She was immediately unsure of her reason for doing so. What did she have to hide? Whit had asked her to keep things quiet until they worked out the terms of their agreement with his lawyer brother-in-law, but surely that didn’t include her own mother.
Why didn’t she tell Kathleen? This was good news. A new job on top of her shifts at the bookstore. But more than that, she
was bursting with hope—she was going to be a writer! Again! A ghostwriter, sure, but a writer nonetheless, and for a series
of books that had meant so much to her. Surely this had to count as part of a dream, partly come true. Perhaps the curse was
ending—perhaps she could track down the missing spark and shove it back into her chest. And then maybe this would be the beginning
of her real life, her writing life, a life without Graydon or an MFA and all the better for it.
But it did feel, too, like she had done something crazy in agreeing to help this man she hardly knew on a stratospherically
huge project. The question was whether it was Steve-Jobs-in-a-California-garage-with-a-dream crazy, or just crazy crazy.
And of course, there was no guarantee that ghostwriting would lead to more writing—her own writing. But she had tried not
to think about that. First, they talked about money, which always made her feel awkward, but less so now because this was
real money. The advance alone would more than triple what she’d make at the bookshop in the same time frame. She could pay off
her student loans from the failed MFA, and if she were a little braver, or a little more settled in Whelk Harbor for the long
term, she could use it for an apartment or a duplex—but that was not something to worry about now. For now, she had a book
to think about writing, and her agreement to do so had made Whit smile in a way she’d never seen him do before. He had kept
smiling, actually, as they ate their dinner, even as Merritt needled him for more information on Vanderpump Rules.
Now, staring at her mother, she imagined herself saying these things, and her face fell. Whatever joy Kathleen had seen was leaving her body in real time. These days, Merritt knew better than to let herself be an optimist.
“Nothing’s happened,” Merritt said again. “I just had a nice day.”
That, at least, was true.
Annie Longacre had not had a nice day. Something had happened, Whit could tell, but she wouldn’t say what. Not on the car ride home, not as Whit
plied her with snacks and helped her with homework, not over dinner.
Often he wondered who he had to blame for his daughter’s sporadic bouts of emotional unavailability: himself or Helen. Whereas
Whit was often out of touch with his own feelings, Helen had been mysterious and, it seemed to him, intentionally reticent.
Early in their relationship, it had frustrated him. The woman had thoughts and feelings—why wouldn’t she just share them?
Just say what the problem was? But as with other early annoyances—Whit’s too-loud crunching, Helen’s tendency to sigh forcefully
but over nothing—it became something to get used to. She had her private, sometimes inaccessible interior world, and, it seemed,
so did their daughter.
At bedtime, Whit had read aloud from an old favorite—the trippy, delightful Dory Fantasmagory—and Annie had hardly listened. Normally she was in stitches, laughing away while Dory pretended to be a dog or at the novel’s
every mention of a toilet monster, but tonight she lay passively in her bed. When Whit finished a chapter, he looked down
to see her asleep already, and far worse, evidence of tears in her eyes.
He closed his own eyes for a moment, though the pink of Annie’s nightlight impeded his efforts at achieving a mind-clearing darkness. For all her personal reserve, Helen would have noticed the tears. Helen would have been able to convince Annie to talk without grilling her.
Whit looked around the room. It was all his late wife’s doing, in partnership with their daughter. The walls were a lavender
color, Annie’s choice, and he had resisted it, until Helen convinced him to “let her be little.” There were framed illustrations
from Anne of Green Gables and Heidi and the cover image from Esperanza Rising, round paper lanterns hung from the ceiling, and the bed where he sat now was draped with a gauzy white canopy. A large dollhouse
sat in one corner (Helen’s from childhood), and there was an old rocking horse that, to Whit’s knowledge, Annie had never
played with, as well as a toy chest that had belonged to Whit’s sister Evie. The other furniture was all antique and utterly
charming. Whit’s favorite piece was an old Larkin drop-front secretary desk that he and Helen had found together at an estate
sale when Helen was pregnant. “We’ll give it to her,” she had said, “when she’s old enough to use it,” and they had.
Now, alongside many books, Annie had made it into a sort of shrine to her mother, dotted with things Helen had given Annie,
as well as things Annie had taken for herself in the last year, with Whit’s permission. “Whatever you see that’s hers, it’s
yours. She would want you to have it.”
Annie had loved that, but she had been remarkably reserved, gathering only things that seemed really special to her. Along
the top two shelves, she’d placed a photograph of Helen, young and vibrant and passionate, in her student union shirt from
college; a porcelain ring holder shaped like a swan stretching its neck; a dried hydrangea from Helen’s wedding bouquet; a
Madame Alexander doll with one missing shoe; and an empty, quartz-colored perfume bottle with a crystal topper and a vivid
pink pump.
Whit stood, walked over to the desk, and put his nose to the bottle, which smelled of roses and something somehow green beneath. His heart ached—a physical thing—not just for himself, and not for Helen, but for the little girl who had only these things left of her mother.
He looked back at her now, fast asleep as she clutched a stuffed Totoro doll atop her comforter. He walked over, lifted her
eight-year-old frame in his arms, and used his hands, awkwardly, to pull down the blanket. As he set her back down, she stirred,
her eyes fluttering a bit as she took him in.
“I love you, Annie girl,” he whispered. “More than ice cream.”
She smirked at their old joke, her eyes already half-closed again.
“I love you, too, Dad,” she said, dazed, before immediately dipping back into sleep.
Well, that wasn’t nothing.
The next morning, a Saturday, Merritt decided to go for a hike. She had let Kathleen force various articles of clothing on
her, including hiking boots, a red flannel shirt, an army green puffy vest, and a navy puffy jacket on top. She felt like
an extra in A River Runs Through It, a movie that, she reminded her mother, featured only male fishermen.
“First of all,” Kathleen said, adjusting Merritt’s collar at the door and forcing a full canteen of water into her hands,
“you look adorable. And secondly, living here is all about dressing in layers. You never know when the wind will pick up or
a rainstorm might come in, especially out in the woods and hills, where the weather gets wackier.”
Merritt rolled her eyes, good-naturedly.
“I’ll probably walk a mile or two at most, Mom. And I’m going to stay on the path.”
“That’s a good plan, novice that you are. But it’s always better to be prepared. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”
It was not the time to say so, but Merritt was never not struck by her mother’s fortitude. When her father had died, Kathleen
grieved, as anyone would. But she remained her same caring, capable, occasionally acerbic self. She laughed and read and worked
a job she loved, and Merritt found herself thinking that people did, in fact, keep moving forward after great losses.
“Thanks, Mom,” was all she said now. She trudged down the front steps into a mist that made her grateful for Kathleen’s fussiness.
Merritt made her way to her Nissan, turned it on, and immediately swatted the radio off. She would not have her walk sullied
by another NPR sneak attack from Graydon Lyons.
On her mother’s advice, she had chosen a nearby trail, one that started and ended on the opposite edge of town and was therefore
hard to get lost on. After leaving her car in a small dirt parking lot, she began to walk. Merritt enjoyed walking, which
had never felt quite as true to her in Texas. Here, it took only a few steps to leave Whelk Harbor behind and feel like she
was out in the world, in capital-N Nature. Even as her feet padded along packed-dirt paths, and even in the presence of multiple elderly couples wearing unstylish
sunglasses and walking with those ski pole–looking things, she was a woman of the woods out here, a natural woman, whatever.