Chapter Twenty-Three #2
She held the sticky note up between two fingers, and Whit laughed.
“A fateful note, in the end.”
“I still wish we knew what it meant,” she said.
He nodded again. “I think we just have to be okay not knowing.”
They paused for a moment, then Merritt turned back to the desk and patted the laptop.
“Anything on this?”
“Yes,” Whit said, with his eyes back on the open book. “The most organized, least informative stuff you can imagine. There
are notes for each book, which I spent the early days reading—but they’re bare outlines, lists of possible names for characters
and places and things, which is sort of fun but not super-helpful, and I think maybe an early explanation of the books’ magic
system. I searched and searched for any information that seemed to gesture toward something in the final book, but I came
up empty. You’re welcome to look if you want. I’m checking the books for notes between the pages.”
Merritt did want to look. But it felt like the kind of thing she’d want to do on her own.
“I’ll help with that first,” she said.
She lowered herself to sit on the rug and began pulling volumes from the shelf. Within a few minutes, she found a bookmark
in one text, which was briefly exciting, but it was in a book on German philosophy, with nothing obviously relevant on the
page. Two dozen books later, there was still nothing to show for her efforts. Whit flipped the Fleetwood Mac record, and on
they worked, singing along to “Hold Me” in mumbly voices.
“Here’s something,” Whit said, holding up a book of fairy tales. “The page on Sleeping Beauty is dog-eared.”
“Oh.” Merritt watched Whit as he skimmed the page. Then he looked up to her with a face that was all sweetness and humility.
“So you were right about that. The allusion I thought she wouldn’t be making. You were right.”
Merritt wasn’t sure what to say.
“We don’t know that for certain” was what she settled on. There was something like vindication pulsing in her (she had been right!) but it was faint, and in this moment it didn’t matter as much anymore. “She might have folded that corner twenty
years ago.”
Whit smiled at her. “I suppose it’s not important. We’re writing the story now.”
Now Merritt really didn’t know what to say. She had been the proponent for alluding to Sleeping Beauty, but she had been treating
the book like a puzzle then, with missing pieces to be filled in. These days, she wasn’t so sure that metaphor was apt. Whit
seemed to think they might never find the right pieces, and it was their job to fill in the blanks in their own way. And maybe
he was right. Helen might have intended to use any number of allusions in the final book, but Merritt and Whit would never
be able to write the story in precisely her way. That way was lost now, and they were always going to be making something
different, putting themselves into the story, designing the final fraction of the tale as an approximation at best.
Merritt thought of the semester she’d studied abroad in Italy, where she’d learned that restorers repairing ancient frescoes
often left gaps in place rather than try to repaint what had been lost to memory. It was a way of honoring the old masters
and acknowledging the power of passing time. She and Whit, however, had no such luxury. The end of the story, if Helen had
ever finished conceiving it, was lost, and they had to splash some paint across the plaster and hope it worked out okay. There
was no other way of doing it.
Whit put the book back on the shelf.
“All right,” Merritt said, trying to will herself into agreement. She returned to the books, thinking about Sleeping Beauty
and the baby giant, too. If they were to honor (what they assumed to be) Helen’s wishes by weaving allusions to the fairy
tale or the cryptic note into the plot, they would have to unravel much of the winding story they’d settled on, unmaking some
of the magic she and Whit had managed to create, and who knew what would be lost in the process. We just have to be okay not knowing.
“Can I ask something that might seem invasive?” she said, sitting on the ground with her back against the desk.
Whit looked up from a book on the language of flowers. He pretended to think with squinted eyes, and then nodded firmly.
“Yes.”
“How did she leave the book to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you know she’d done it? Did you talk about it?”
Whit, who was also seated on the floor, shook his head quickly. “Oh, no. It was a complete surprise. There wasn’t a reading
of the will like they do in the movies, because nobody expected any bombshells. I knew everything was going to me and Annie,
and it more or less did. She left some money for a scholarship at Annie’s school, and she gave some to the creative writing
program at our alma mater, and we all thought that was going to be that.”
Whit shrugged. He was looking up at the windows, and his eyes shone in the midday light. Merritt could tell he was remembering
with the lucidity that came with big, life-changing moments.
“Then the lawyer—this elderly man straight out of central casting, with the exact voice you think of when you hear ‘elderly man’—called me into his office and told me there had been a late addendum, or whatever you call it in legalese, and he looked at me, and I won’t say I knew what he was about to say, but this great sense of foreboding washed over me. ”
“Had you thought about it?”
“About what?”
Merritt considered her words before speaking. “About how there was still one book left to be written? That someone would have
to do something, or else leave the series unfinished?”
“Honestly? No. I think—I know—that’s what most of her fans would have thought about—”
Merritt blushed, despite the fact that Whit was neither looking at her nor speaking with any unkindness about “fans” like
her.
“—but I think I was still in shock. Even when you know it’s coming . . .”
He trailed off, cleared his throat.
“And I was mostly worrying about Annie all the time.”
Merritt closed her eyes for a moment, feeling these words like a physical rebuke.
“Of course you were,” she said, and Whit gave her a quick, appreciative smile before drawing his eyes back to the light.
“Anyway, the lawyer read off what she had written. I could find it somewhere, but I remember it pretty well. ‘In addition
to the management of my estate (including all existing social media handles, all future editions, the approval of film rights,
and so on and so forth), I leave the completion of the fifth and final novel in the Greenwood Castle Saga to my husband, Whitman
Howard Longacre, using whatever means he deems necessary and appropriate.’ Something like that. The real legal force has to
do with her contract, which says her estate will decide who completes the book in the event of her death. And you’re looking
at her estate.”
Merritt felt relief whistle through her limbs. “She said that, though, about ‘whatever means’?”
Whit nodded. “Yup.”
“So we could use AI?”
Whit narrowed his eyes. “I do not deem that necessary and appropriate.”
They laughed together for a moment, and then Whit rubbed his brows.
“Is it hard,” Merritt asked, “being up here?”
Whit looked around more thoroughly before he spoke.
“I think it’s not as hard as it could be. I almost never came in here when she was alive, she was so private. It’d be like
if she had been an accountant and I had to collect her things from her office or something after. I don’t know that it would
affect me very much. It’s more the things themselves. That quilt. Her aunt made her that for her college dorm room.”
He nodded at the desk behind Merritt.
“There’s a pen over there that she loved—always those G2-10s, which I find to be so runny and messy, but she loved them.”
He smiled a soft smile, looking down at his hands as they touched the ground.
“I remember her picking out this rug. Things like that.”
Whit nodded to himself, and Merritt felt a little guilty about being here in this room with him, which she had not forced
him to enter but which he had entered on her behalf nonetheless. But then, he turned to Merritt with a look that felt layered
in meaning, like he was trying to comfort her, like he was seeing her, fully, in spite of all this talk and in spite of where they were, and he said something that felt
sharp and soft, like a knife and a blanket at once.
“She would have liked you.”
“Oh. Oh?”
“Yeah,” Whit said easily, with a quick raise of the shoulders. “You have the sort of humor she enjoyed, and you’re kind, which
was what she valued most. And she would’ve liked your work.”
Merritt felt warm all over.
“You can’t know that.”
“Of course I can.”
Whit stood up and extended a hand, which Merritt took.
“Grab that,” he said, nodding at the laptop. “Have a look around tonight. The password is just capital-A Annie.”
“Are you sure? I mean about me looking at it?”
Whit nodded, then continued his thought from before.
“I don’t know how she would have felt about what we’re doing with the book—I think she knew she couldn’t have an opinion at
this point anyway. Hence the ‘whatever means he deems necessary’ business. But if we could somehow remove what you’ve done
from the context of it being her series, she would have liked it. And I know she would have liked your own manuscript, which, by the way, cuts off at a very cliffhanger-y moment. I can’t wait to read
the end.”
He had deliberately shifted away from her as he said this, and Merritt’s laptop-free hand shot out, unbidden, and yanked him
back by the shoulder. He was laughing as he turned to look at her.
“You what?”
“I finished it. What you have anyway. I have some notes—almost entirely positive—but—”
“Shut up, you read it. And you waited until now to tell me? When did you finish?”
“Late last night after you left.”
“Last night?”
He was turning away again, walking toward the door and down the narrow stairs, giving Merritt the opportunity to storm after
him.
“And you didn’t call or text to tell me?”
He held his hands up, as if saying, What do you want from me?
“Oh my God,” she said, mildly frustrated. Then she stopped midway down the stairs and said again, in a new, fearful tone,
“Oh my God. You hated it, didn’t you?”
Whit stopped, too, and turned back to look at her. “What?”
“You hated it. Otherwise you would’ve told me—”
“I’ve just told you. And I explicitly said Helen would have liked it.”
She held up her pointer finger. “Exactly. And you have also explicitly said you did not like Helen’s books—”
“Hey now,” he said, holding up his own pointer finger. “I said they weren’t for me, there’s a difference.”
“But my manuscript would have been Helen’s kind of thing.”
“You are using a lot of emphasis,” he joked. “But it would have been her thing, yes.” Then he let out a heavy sigh and leaned against the wall of the stairway
for support.
“And you . . .”
He trailed off.
“What?”
He bit his lip, eyes on the ceiling as he spoke.
“You are about to force me to say something that makes me feel very guilty, but I am going to say it anyway.”
“Oh God, just get it over—”
“I liked it,” he interrupted, “more than I liked Helen’s stuff.”
He winced.
Merritt was aware that her eyes had gone wide and that her mouth now hung open, but a great hollowness also seemed to have
filled her skull, from ear to ear. She felt lightheaded.
“I’m not the best judge of kid lit,” he said. “So who cares what I like. But you’ve done something with this story—the reverse
Narnia aspect, the people on the other side of the portal—that’s subversive and interesting, but it still feels like the sort
of thing Annie would read, and I think that’s really impressive.”
Her face burned with the most pleasant heat she could ever remember feeling.
“But what really matters,” he continued, “is that the writing be undeniably good. And Merritt, it’s really good. You are a good writer.”
He said these words in a tone that left her incapable of disbelieving him. Then he squeezed her hands once and released them.
Merritt waited, a bit thunderstruck.
“And now, you must promise me you will never again be surprised when someone tells you something like that, okay?”
Merritt tried to think.
“I . . .”
He smiled.
“Fine, be surprised all you want, but know this: you’re going to be hearing it a lot, and one day you’ll get used to it.”
He smiled, a beautiful, proud smile, and then turned and walked away, leaving her stunned on the staircase.