Chapter Eleven #2
“Oh yeah, I know her a bit,” Whit said before registering the words. Diana. Bookstore. Dropping Merritt off.
“She’s fine,” Merritt continued, giving the word a different thrust than he’d ever heard someone give it. “Just patronizing and a little
nosy.”
“Ah.” Whit was trying to play it cool, but there were precious few things Diana might be as curious about as why Merritt was
visiting Whit Longacre.
Merritt dropped her half-eaten sandwich onto her crumpled lunch sack and held up her hands. “Don’t worry,” she said quickly.
“I didn’t tell her anything really.”
“What does ‘really’ mean?”
Merritt gave him a look informing him that his tone had shifted.
“I told her just enough to make it clear that a ride was necessary.”
Whit tried, really tried, to look neutral and understanding, but he was thinking, again, of what Helen would say about all
this. Wondering if he was doing something wrong by her, or something stupid in the grander scheme of the series and this book’s
existence. If Diana found out that Merritt was helping Whit on the book, and if she realized how long this help was taking
and put two and two together . . . It was not outside the realm of possibility that a woman who owned a bookstore would have
connections in the broader literary world.
If the rumor mill got to churning—Whit Longacre spends his days with a lovely younger woman writing his late wife’s last novel from scratch—well, the fans could be ruthless, and the longevity of the Greenwood Castle franchise, as Joan was fond of reminding him,
was tied up in this novel’s success. Whit sighed despite himself.
Merritt crossed her arms. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, hollowly.
“No, it’s not nothing.”
Whit opened his mouth, but he had difficulty finding words that didn’t sound like he thought she was careless, indiscreet,
stupid—
“Whit, do you think I’m stupid? I understand the deal. I signed the contract. I’m a grown-up.”
He laughed, not because it was funny, but because he felt caught. He started blindly into the next sentence. “No, I just worry—”
“You worry that I’ll give the game away and screw everything up.”
He lowered himself into a chair in a way that felt like a full-body shrug.
Merritt stared at him, not letting him off the hook. He wanted to close his eyes to hide from the glare, but he wanted to
stand firm, too. He did believe in Merritt, but there was a lot riding on this.
“Just what did you tell her?”
Merritt dropped her head backwards, clearly annoyed, but after a moment she straightened back up.
“I told her I was helping you with copy. I kept it very vague.”
Whit considered this with squinted eyes, talking as he thought. “So I, who have written several books on my own, suddenly
need to hire someone to do some sort of copy—”
“Oh stop,” Merritt said, standing up. “That’s basically what she said, too.”
Whit had never seen her like this. Miffed was the word that came to mind, and he understood, but still, he needed this to all work out.
“We’ll just workshop the line,” he said eventually, “and work on your, uh, mediocre lying skills.”
To his surprise, and clearly despite her best efforts, Merritt laughed.
“Shut up, please.”
Whit nodded, and Merritt sat again, this time sideways in her chair.
“And please trust me, Whit,” she added. “I won’t mess this up.”
Whit nodded. “I believe you,” he said, and he really wanted to mean it.
They started writing soon after, in the living room with the fireplace going. They were in it now, writing what could eventually
become the first few chapters of Helen’s book. Merritt had an uncanny knack for imitating the narrative voice, and she knew
the characters like they were her own inventions. But Whit was an experienced novelist, and he had a better handle on plot,
suspense, stakes, satisfying revelations. He did a lot of concurrent editing of Merritt’s words, cutting here or asking her
to elaborate there, occasionally suggesting something that Merritt would then acknowledge good-naturedly but unenthusiastically.
Only once, days ago, had she outright laughed at his ignorance: he’d suggested that they bring in a character who had famously
died a tragic death in book 3.
“She could come back,” he had said, laughing as well, despite himself. “It’s a magic world, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Merritt had said, rubbing her eyes, “in which one of the three primary and oft-repeated rules is that no one ever returns from the dead.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Today they were more in the zone than usual, keeping their side conversations to a minimum as Merritt researched an allusion in book 4 that she thought might be worth capitalizing on in book 5; Whit was doing his thing, reading and rereading what they’d already written, cutting and condensing here, pushing for more there, and adding to or adjusting their copious outline in an effort to give the story all of the thrust and inevitability and occasional surprise of a good mystery novel.
Still, Whit kept feeling antsy, thinking about Diana and the tiff with Merritt and, beneath all that, worrying again that
he was somehow doing something wrong. He had to keep telling himself to sit on his hands, to refrain from suggesting they
take a break fifteen minutes in, then thirty minutes in. Finally, the hour mark rolled around.
“Break?” he said, cutting Merritt off midsentence. “I mean . . . sorry. Should we break in a minute? It’s been an hour.”
Merritt glanced at the clock on her phone. “Yeah, sure,” she said, clearly surprised.
“Actually, do you think we could go on a walk or something? I’ve got all this nervous energy for some reason, and I think
I need to get rid of it.”
“A walk? It’s freezing.”
“Maybe for Texas,” he joked, “but in New England this is basically spring. Come on, I’ll show you my favorite trail. It’s
where I go when I have writer’s block.”
“Do you have writer’s block right now?”
“No.”
Merritt considered this, then shrugged. “Sure, fine.”
“What?”
“It’s just . . .” Merritt paused and searched the ceiling with her eyes. “I’m starting to see why you haven’t written very
much. All these breaks you take.”
She smiled in a prodding way, and Whit smiled back, shaking his head as if she had disappointed him.
“Breaks are good for your brain, Merritt. It’s been proven.”
“Where exactly?” she asked, standing up from her chair.
“I don’t know. Studies. Science. I was an English major, don’t ask me.”
“You’re lucky I was an English major, too.”
The two of them put their coats on. There was a door in the kitchen that led to the yard, which Whit held open for Merritt before following her out.
“What were you planning to do with that English major?” he asked as he began to lead her on the trail into the woods to the
right of the house. “Write?”
“Not originally,” she said from behind him. “I didn’t know what to do really. My first job out of school was a horrible fundraising
job in elementary schools, where I’d beg kids to sell wrapping paper and buckets of popcorn, which was not quite what I’d
dreamed of back in class reading Toni Morrison and George Eliot.”
“And you gave all that up,” Whit asked without looking back, “for grad school?”
A sniff of a laugh behind him, then: “Kind of. I got a technical writing job eventually, doing instructional materials and
troubleshooting guidelines for a software company—really grim stuff. And then my dad got sick.”
Merritt’s pause let Whit know, somehow, that her father had not gotten better.
“So I came here for a bit, and then, after—well, after, I started the MFA program.”
“I’m sorry,” Whit said.
“Me, too, sometimes. Two years and nothing to show for it—”
“No,” Whit interrupted, “I mean about your dad.”
“Oh.”
He turned to look at Merritt. Her indigo coat stood out against the yellows, oranges, reds, and greens of the trees around
them.
“What was his name?”
Whit had read somewhere that this was a kind thing to ask, though in his case, with Helen, it hadn’t often been necessary.
It turned out to be true, however, because Merritt’s face brightened.
“Barry,” she said, almost laughing. “A very dad name.”
Whit smiled and nodded, and then turned to walk. They passed the next few minutes quietly, listening to the wind and the crunch of leaves punctuated by occasional animal sounds, until Merritt spoke.
“By the way, did you walk the five miles to the bookstore that day you came in about the baby-giant thing?”
Something hot filled Whit’s face. He glanced back at her.
“You’re looking at me like that’s crazy,” he told her.
She smirked at him. “It is a little crazy.”
He shrugged. “That day I definitely did have writer’s block. But then, I had writer’s block basically every day before we started working together.”
Merritt looked down, rubbing her arm absent-mindedly, and Whit realized he had probably sounded embarrassingly desperate.
To move on, he started walking again, then stopped to point at something to their right.
“There, that stream there is what Helen based the one in the book off of.”
“The Brook of Lost Memory?” Merritt asked, stopping to stand at his shoulder.
“Yeah, that.”
Merritt made a noise of amusement at his persistent ignorance, then hmm-ed. “I can see it, I think. Yeah, that’s sort of how I imagined it.”
Whit shrugged, lost in a thought that felt like a sense memory. It wasn’t often that Helen had joined him on his walks, but
there was one fall day, like this one, when the two of them had come out here. Annie had been small enough for them to take
turns wearing the front-facing baby carrier.
“Maybe,” Helen had said, out of nowhere, in her ever-calm voice, “it’s a water thing.”
“What?” he’d asked, squeezing Annie’s cold hands in each of his. Then he saw Helen’s face and knew what was happening, because it often happened to him. She was in the world of her books, working out questions as she walked, and the nearby stream had provided an answer to one of them.
“I need a way for Ursula to remember something she’s forgotten. Maybe she has to bathe in a brook or something to get the
memory back.”
This was after the second book had sold but just before the series had become a global phenomenon. Whit had just published
his first book in the Sister Marguerite series, and though they had more money than they’d ever had, the future remained murky,
and it felt like the two of them were still just trying to make it as writers.
“Sort of like Achilles,” Helen continued.
“Or a backwards Lethe,” Whit had put in, offering another Greek myth.
“Exactly,” Helen said, presenting him with a shining grin that communicated pure gratefulness. “A backwards Lethe, exactly.”
There were so few moments like that, times when they had felt like two writers side by side, and remembering it now felt like
a blow to the chin.
“Whit?” Merritt said, for what he realized was the second time. “You okay?”
“What? Yes, sorry. I zoned out there for a second. What were you saying?”
“I was asking if any of this is in your books.”
She waved her hands before her at the tall green spruces and firs, the more festal beeches and maples, the wet rocks and their
overcoat of moss.
“My books?” Whit said, caught off guard.
“Yes?”
Whit thought for a moment, then smiled, surprised at himself. “You know, I suppose it is. There’s a Sister Marguerite book
where they stumble onto a corpse while making a pilgrimage to a holy tree in Italy that supposedly grew from a seed dropped
by Saint Paul.”
“Okay . . .”
Whit shrugged. “A lot of that book takes place in a forest, and, well, I’ve never been to an Italian forest. It’s just these
woods reimagined, though I never realized that until now.”
Merritt nodded, interested. “Well, I look forward to that one. I’m liking The Hour of Matins so far.”
“You what?” Whit said in a voice that was half-gulp. Something electric had raced through him, which didn’t make sense. People
did, in fact, read his books, and he had been the one to give Merritt the speech about writers writing for an audience. Still,
the knowledge that Merritt was reading his book—his first book—had caused an internal frisson, a second, different blow to his body.
“I’m liking it,” she said, casting her eyes around the trees in a way he found suddenly maddening.
“Oh, please don’t start with that one.”
“Of course I started with that one, what do you mean? Should I start in the middle of the series?”
“Yes. I promise, it gets better. I’ll catch you up on the important plot points.”
“Okay, that’s absurd. I’m a completist. And anyway, I said I’m enjoying it.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Whit turned and began walking in the direction of the house. The old story slithered through
his brain as they walked: Sister Marguerite, the Anglican novitiate and amateur detective who investigates the mysterious
death of a fellow nun during their morning devotions. He liked his novels, truly, and he thought they did the things he wanted
them to do—did them well. They were murder mysteries, but they were also ruminations on faith, doubt, and duty, on wanting
to believe in goodness and not always being able to.
And he did believe in being read by people.
But, with the exception of Helen, Willa, and, for a time, Ian Hoult, his readership had always been distant and sort of imaginary.
They existed, but somewhere else. He didn’t see them, and he only very rarely heard their opinions on his work.
The idea of Merritt reading his books, though . . . he didn’t know what exactly that felt like (beyond the sudden squirminess
in his stomach). (Where had that come from?) But it definitely felt like something.