Chapter Twenty-Three
Whit had called Merritt after carrying Annie to her bed. She had fallen asleep watching The Santa Clause, her second Christmas movie of the season, and Whit had felt momentarily crestfallen at failing in his plan to talk to her.
But she looked so sweet and content that he allowed himself to be convinced she’d had a good day.
After a shower, he’d gotten into bed with his laptop, more eager than ever to read Merritt’s manuscript, which he’d been ingesting
in large doses over the last few days. But within a minute of opening it, he thought, screw it, and called up the real thing. Only after the call had he let himself be satisfied with reading her words.
Now it was Friday, and they were writing again. Evie and édouard had made the insane choice to bring Annie along with them
for Black Friday shopping, so Whit and Merritt had the house entirely to themselves. They usually had it to themselves, but
today there was potential in the space, as if what had happened was a secret and the house was waiting for them to slip up
and spill the beans.
Whit had greeted her at the door, and Merritt had laughed at him, telling him he looked serious. She extended her hand as
if expecting him to kiss it and said, “How do you do?” He shook it as if they were business partners, and she laughed at him
again. But then she, too, had settled into a business-as-usual groove, and the two of them wrote and wrote all morning. Finally,
Merritt cleared her throat.
“Okay,” she said, taking off her glasses to rub her eyes. She was sitting in her spot by the fire, with her legs tucked up under her, laptop balanced on the armrest, and she was cradling a cup of steaming tea in both hands.
“Okay?”
“I think it’s time,” she said, “to kill Ursula.”
“Oh,” Whit said, and despite his assurances of his trust in Merritt the day before, he did find himself hesitating.
“You’re hesitating.”
“I know. I am.”
“It is a big deal.”
“Exactly.”
Merritt took a deep breath, and Whit smiled at the way her bangs swooped up when she exhaled, and the indentation her teeth
made on her bottom lip. He had always noticed these kinds of things about her, but now he was allowing himself to enjoy them.
“Does it feel,” she asked, “a little bit like killing someone else’s child?”
“Goodness, that’s dark.”
“You know what I mean. Helen created her, and now we’re . . . un-creating her.”
Whit shrugged. “The story has to go somewhere. That’s what stories do.”
“Okay, Mary Oliver.”
Whit laughed, and Merritt did, too. She looked out the window, her eyes glinting for a moment in the sunlight.
“I just wish there was a way to know whether Helen would’ve approved,” Merritt said.
“I can assure you, there’s not. I’ve looked everywhere.”
Merritt nodded, unsatisfied. Whit thought about Helen’s study high at the top of the house.
He hadn’t disturbed it in months and months, but now he had an idea.
He briefly wondered whether it was a betrayal, and then he wondered whether that mattered, whether such things could even be betrayals when the person to be betrayed was gone.
But he had kissed this woman. He had already taken the first step in whatever direction they were going. Had already taken many steps, in fact.
He decided.
“Would it make you feel better to look around?”
Merritt’s eyes zipped to his. “What?”
“In her study. Upstairs.”
Whit watched Merritt’s face open up with what could only be described as obvious appetite. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth
hung open slightly. He almost laughed.
“I don’t know, Whit, would that be an invasion . . .”
“Of what? Her privacy?”
Merritt shrugged.
Whit thought. Would it?
“She left me the book. It’s mine to finish. Ours now. I think it’s our right. I think it’s what she would have expected.”
“But, you would be bringing another . . . bringing someone else into her space, and—”
“—and finishing the book. I think that’s the main thing.”
Whit was less sure than he sounded, but more sure than he would have been two months ago. This moment was internally tense,
and there was something compelling about that. Tension meant he was feeling something, two somethings even, and being pulled
between them. Tension meant he was alive. He stood up, signaling his resolution.
“Listen,” he said, his voice soft and full, “the only reason the book is in the state it is—the only reason the end is in
sight—is you.”
“That’s not true, Whit—”
“It is true, and you know it. You have saved this book, and you’re as entitled as anyone to do what we have to do as we search for the proper ending. Let’s go have a look.”
Merritt smiled, holding his eyes in hers. When she stood up in agreement, he grabbed her hand, pulled, and they kissed again.
A gentle, comfortable thing, her soft lips against his, as he took in the smell of her hair and the Ivory soap and amber oil
on her skin. And still his belly dropped, and his head felt light and airy.
When she pulled away, she was smiling. “Whit, please, I’m working.”
He nodded.
“Come on. The ivory tower awaits.”
Merritt’s heart rate increased as she followed Whit up two flights of stairs, the first one wide with a well-trod oxblood
runner down its center, the second narrower, like the passageway to servants’ quarters in a period drama. She was nervous.
She had anticipated something like this, an almost forbidden glimpse behind the curtain, all those weeks ago when she and
Whit had spoken over their meal at the bistro. She was going to see, finally, where Helen had worked. Where she had crafted
the books that had saved Merritt in more ways than one, had made her into a writer with a dream.
And here they were, at a wooden door painted the gray-blue color of a raincloud, and there was a golden emblem like a door
knocker about where a peephole might have been: a kestrel with a spoon in its beak. Just like the necklaces, worn by the characters
Ursula, Rupert, and Christabel, that had become the symbol of the Greenwood Castle books in the real world as well.
This was it. The inner sanctum.
Merritt took a deep breath and tried to hide it.
Inside was a square room, perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with windows all around, like a lighthouse.
The ceiling was peaked and paneled with wood slats; on either side of the doorway and along the right and left walls were low bookshelves that went from floor to window.
A built-in desk lined much of the far wall, and the space in the middle was covered by a rug patterned in emerald and seafoam and sage greens.
It was cold up here, and Merritt noted the quilt draped over the back of the desk chair and the space heater at its feet.
It was like stepping into a keepsake box. The room was lovely, exactly the kind of place Merritt would’ve liked to write in,
but it was also sad in its disuse, its emptiness, its bygoneness. She spun slowly in a circle and looked through the windows,
where she could see the hillside, a strip of the sea, and the peaks of the buildings in the village. So this was what Helen
had seen as she thought and imagined and wrote and revised.
“Oh,” Merritt said, in a quiet church voice. She resisted the urge to wipe her eyes.
Whit gave her a kind, appreciative smile.
“Yeah,” he said, dropping his eyes. She wondered what he was thinking, and what it was like for him to have her here. “Let’s
have a look around. You can have the desk. I’ll start with the bookshelves.”
“Okay,” she said. He turned to the nearest set of books, and she walked across the room, feeling like a trespasser.
But then he said, “Here,” and she saw on the shelf a small, table-top record player she hadn’t noticed before. In a few seconds,
the room was filled with the sounds of Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage album.
“Because you like Stevie Nicks,” he said, reminding her of Halloween. She smiled, and the two of them set to work. Merritt
chose not to sit in Helen’s seat, showing the same respect she might show a Victorian novelist’s writing chair in the British
Library.
The desk was a mess, which Merritt found refreshing.
Helen’s laptop still sat on the leather-top, and around it were stacks of papers: copies of old publishing documents, a handwritten draft of a speech for the American Library Association, and many, many fan letters.
Merritt got hung up on those for a time, reading from young people who asked questions about warlocks and elves, or who wanted help with school projects, or who just wanted Helen Albright Longacre to know that they, too, were going to be a writer someday.
Merritt felt wistful for these kids who had probably felt the loss of their favorite author rather deeply, and she wondered whether Helen had gotten the chance to respond to any of them.
Then there was the sticky note: lime green, with a phrase written in Sharpie.
Check baby giant story??
This was the note Whit had found, two months before, that had driven him to the bookstore looking for her help. She was grateful
for this note, for a multitude of reasons, though she hadn’t thought of it since. Now it caught her eye. Did it mean something?
What was Helen going to check the story for? And was there a copy of that story somewhere—perhaps an early, pre-auction draft?
Crouching now, she started opening drawers, this imaginary draft on her mind, and was surprised to find them mostly vacant
but for a half-empty package of pistachios, an old Luna Bar, a gray woolen glove, and a pair of scissors. In the central drawer,
beneath which Helen’s legs would have sat, there were only paper clips and an unused Moleskine. Merritt glanced back at Whit,
who was absorbed in a book, then padded her fingers around inside the drawers, searching blindly, idiotically, for the kind
of hidden compartment you might see in an old film caper. No such luck.
“There’s nothing over here,” she said, and Whit nodded, unsurprised but unannoyed. “I did find this, though.”