Chapter Fifteen
When Merritt woke up, she thought she was back in Texas. In the split second before her eyes cracked open, she pictured the
clean, white studio apartment she’d shared with Mrs. Robinson, an elderly shelter cat. Mrs. Robinson and the graduate student—adorable
at the time, perhaps slightly unsettling in hindsight. Then she remembered that Mrs. Robinson had died of some horrible worm
disease, and she had dropped out, and now she was here, in a high wrought-iron bed in her mother’s guest room. The walls were
painted a yellow Merritt found simultaneously infantilizing and suggestive of a nursing home. There was a whatnot full of
knickknacks, and her bed had a crocheted quilt that had been made by a great-somebody in the past. But there was a window
seat, beyond which was a grassy, tree-lined park where people sat on benches and played with their dogs and watched fireworks
from blankets on the Fourth of July, and that was nice.
Merritt moved from her bed to sit by the window, allowing herself to feel like this was an accomplishment after the night
she’d had. She brought Whit’s novel, The Hour of Matins, with her, though she didn’t feel like reading it, and eventually she found herself scrolling her phone.
After a half hour or so, she FaceTimed her friend Bebe—since last March, her sole confidant in the Serious Games nightmare—to regale her with the story of Willa’s party.
As she waited for her to pick up, Merritt felt only slightly horrified by the unbrushed, unwashed person reflected in her phone, knowing Bebe wouldn’t care.
But Bebe didn’t answer. As Merritt wondered whether her friend was in class or off at some literary conference (the kind of thing you did when you were still in an MFA program), she felt even lonelier.
The knock at her door interrupting her loneliness was not necessarily welcome.
“Hi, honey,” her mom said from the doorway. Kathleen Pryor wore a Foothills Craft Club T-shirt and cargo shorts: her gardening
outfit. “Want to come help me in the yard?”
Merritt opened her mouth to respond, but then let her reclining, bedraggled state speak for her. Kathleen laughed and moved
forward to sit on the bed.
“You came home sooner than I expected you to last night,” she said in what Merritt recognized as her treading lightly voice. When she had explained to her mother that she was joining Whit for a party, Kathleen had resorted to the practice
she’d maintained since Merritt was in high school: she bit her tongue, but made a great show of doing it, so Merritt knew
exactly what was going on in her head.
Now her mother sat waiting on the bed for an explanation, and Merritt, who every day made a concerted effort to distinguish
her current existence from her adolescence, chose to give her one.
“The party, um, took a turn.”
Kathleen raised her eyebrows, and Merritt spent a moment ordering her thoughts. There were multiple ways in which this was
true, but which “turn” should she expound on? It took only a few seconds to determine that, no, she would not be mentioning
Ian Hoult and his investigation into the truth behind the novel, because Merritt and Kathleen had never yet discussed Serious Games—though she was sure her librarian mother was aware of its existence and had put two and two together. In classic Kathleen
style, however, she had not mentioned it.
Instead, Merritt groaned, pushed her head back into a throw pillow, and then sat up to tell the story of Willa’s party.
After sharing a few well-chosen details about the beginning of the evening, she explained to Kathleen that eventually she had stepped outside for air, waiting for Whit, who eventually came.
“And we almost, well . . .”
“Uh-oh . . .”
“. . . kissed.”
“Oh, darling, no. A fate worse than death.”
“Don’t joke.”
Kathleen made a stern face and saluted her daughter. “Roger that. Why did you only almost kiss? Did he chicken out? Did you?”
“No,” Merritt protested, “Annie interrupted us.”
“Oh, poor thing.”
“Her or me?”
Kathleen considered this. “Mostly her. But you, too, of course.”
Merritt laughed. “I don’t think she saw much. It was just, you know, immediately awkward, and I realized how stupid it was
to kiss my brand-new boss.”
“But you didn’t kiss him.”
“Well, no, but—”
“Maybe you should have. He’s very cute.”
“His wife just died.”
Kathleen nodded, then added gently, “It has been over a year.”
“But he’s still sad, I think. And he has a daughter, and I just know she’s still sad. How could she not be?”
“Poor thing,” Kathleen said again, then waited a few beats. “These things do happen, though.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re a good idea.”
“It doesn’t mean they’re no—”
“I still need to work with him, Mom,” Merritt interrupted. “Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I should quit—”
“No,” Kathleen said, shaking her head. “Anyway, he’s the one who needs to work with you, from everything you’ve told me.”
Merritt smiled at that. She knew her mom was right. Kathleen straightened up. She had always had a knack for knowing when
to move on from conversations like this.
“All right, Merritt, you stay here and fret.”
“Mom!”
“Justifiably fret. I’m going to work in the garden, but . . .” Kathleen raised her index finger. “You can’t control when things like this
happen—no, don’t object. Listen to me: you don’t get to choose how these things go. They just go, and maybe you go with them. Maybe you don’t,
but it’s up to you.”
Merritt smiled, begrudgingly.
“I feel like there’s more.”
Kathleen nodded. “There is: I will not allow you to quit working with him. If he makes you feel weird about last night, you
remind him what you’re made of, just in case he somehow forgets. All right?”
“All right, Mom.”
Kathleen stood. “And I’d still welcome your help in the garden, when you regain the vigor required to get up and out of bed.”
“I’m out of bed!”
“You’re very much recumbent, dear,” Kathleen called back, having already left the room.
Merritt laughed. She lay back against the wall and looked out her mother’s window, down at her mother’s low-fenced autumn
garden, barely visible around the building’s far corner. She had a good mom, and it had been good talking to her. Talking
like two adults, at that. Except Kathleen had reminded her of one horrible truth: she and Whit still had to write a book together.
Oh joy.
Whit’s parents had divorced when he was in ninth grade.
The signs had been visible long in advance, and he and Evie, who was three years younger, had developed strategies to avoid the unpleasantness of their parents’ slowly crumbling relationship.
Whenever the cold war between Ned and Maureen Longacre bubbled up into full-scale aggression, the siblings would ride their bikes to the convenience store or the nearby playground.
When the divorce was finalized, the back-and-forth between their parents’ houses felt, to Whit, like he and Evie were soldiers on the move, constantly deployed and redeployed to familiar spaces with slightly different objectives: support Mom, cheer up Dad.
Evie was better at both missions. She could see where their mother’s path needed easing (“Let’s clean the kitchen before Mom
gets home from her meeting”) and sensed her dad’s impending depressive episodes (“Star Wars marathon tonight?”). Whit had
been happy to follow his sister’s lead, despite being the older of the two, but it was his torn ACL in eleventh grade that
really cemented her role as Emotionally Intelligent Surrogate Parent. Evie was the one who’d come to his room when he called
out for help in that first week after surgery, and she was the one who made sure he remembered his PT appointments, regardless
of which house they were at for the week. She was the one who’d always ask, “You okay, Bubba?”
She’d been checking on him ever since. So when Whit called Evie this time, she answered immediately.
“Whit? Are you okay?”
He laughed. “I’m fine.”
She waited.
“Okay, that’s a lie. But everything’s all right.”
“Annie—?”
“—is fine.”
“Mom and Dad—?”
“—are alive and well. Seriously.”
“Ok-ay,” Evie said, her voice rich with restrained anticipation.
Whit clenched his jaw for a moment.
“It’s just . . .” He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know.”
Whit sighed. He was sitting on the back terrace, looking out over the wide lawn, on the other side of which he could see the
woods through which he and Merritt had hiked. Behind the woods the land continued to rise into a hill, and beyond that was
the sea.
“I am worried about Annie.”
This was not the only thing that had compelled him to call his sister, but it had been where his mind landed after the party.
He both did and did not want to talk about the mistake he’d made with Merritt, and the image of Lord of the Rings Helen was hanging like haze before his eyes, twisting his humiliation over Merritt into something more complicated.
But when he squeezed those thoughts out of his head, his memories returned to the dull feeling that had wormed its way into
him as he held the picture frame and then looked at Annie’s hopeful face. He’d focused on his daughter.
“I don’t know what to do about her. She seems . . . most of the time she seems really okay, but the other day she was clearly
upset after school, and then later I found her crying in bed, and she wouldn’t tell me why. Even after I pressed. I’ve asked
her a few times since, too, and she won’t budge.”
“Oh, Whit,” Evie said, and unlike the irritation Whit normally felt at her displays of sympathy, the gentleness in her words
nearly broke him. He felt like he had at age twenty when he called home after being dumped at college. The sound of his mother’s
voice, her chipper hello, had sliced through him then, and his next words had come out all weepy.
Whit did not cry now, but he did take a deep, settling breath.
“I know,” he said at last. “It’s pathetic.”