Chapter Twenty-Seven
Merritt lay on her bed, fully clothed. Her hair was wet once more from the rain, and her hands were chilled, and she thought
she really might die. She felt as though a twister had entered her bloodstream and turned her entire body into a disaster
zone. Her thoughts were a mangled mess, making vast jumps from subject to subject and feeling to feeling. She was happy for
Whit, because he had found something meaningful; she was frustrated with Helen, for not mentioning the existence of the journals
when she was alive; she was perplexed by Whit, who had somehow not known that his wife kept writing notebooks for years. And
oh, oh, she was worried about what this could mean for the thing she had dedicated her working hours and her resting thoughts
to for weeks upon weeks. Writing this fifth installment of the series had been the most difficult and rewarding thing she’d
ever done. Doing it with Whit had meant something wonderful, yes, but she had also proven so much to herself. Until Annie
(sweet, darling Annie) had pulled the rug out from under them.
Merritt was fairly certain that she knew what this meant. It was the end of her hard work. How could it be anything else?
How could they keep up this sham effort when Helen’s own wishes had been discovered in black and white?
“I feel sick,” she said out loud to herself.
She also felt generally damp, which was not pleasant.
Slowly, she roused herself. She took a warming shower, put on her pajamas, and returned to the high bed with her laptop.
She’d decided in the bathroom, under the pulsing rhythm of steaming water, that she would read through what she and Whit had written.
She owed the work that much at least. She owed herself that much.
She read for a long, long time.
Whit held it together through the night. He took two melatonin and listened to a podcast about the Supreme Court and its failings
until he fell asleep. And he held it together the next morning on the way to the Foothills School, driving through the endless
rain and listening to Annie’s hopes and dreams for her school’s upcoming holiday party (apple cider, the Rankin/Bass Rudolph movie, Liza’s mom’s homemade chocolate fudge). He made it through the drop-off line and pretty far down the storm-slicked
road, but when his initial turn came at the thickly settled sign, he passed the bowered lane to his house and drove, aimlessly at first, then with a destination in mind: the sea. Not
into the sea, though he did make a private joke to himself about how What’s-Her-Name at the end of The Awakening probably would have liked to have a Range Rover to speed things along. But no. He wasn’t suicidal, had never been suicidal.
He was just—and this should not have come as the shock it did—extraordinarily sad.
His wife was dead. Time had betrayed him, and he was unable to fulfill her final wishes, and in spite of everything, he was
suddenly very much alone.
For over a year, the stress of Helen’s final task had filled every space, like the gases Whit learned about in science class,
except that this gas had left room for nothing else, and the liquid feeling of grief had mostly trickled away. Then, the book
was actually happening; the crushing worry had begun to retreat, and there was Merritt, who had cracked the seal on the cryogenic
vault where he kept his feelings imprisoned, and all of it had begun to thaw. But now . . .
Whit was feeling now, all on his own. He drove to the pier and parked. He turned off his headlights and watched the rain hit the misty gray waves. He sat for a moment, a man on autopilot staring at the sea, and then he dropped his head to his steering wheel.
People say that grief is something that gnaws, but this wasn’t like that. This grief had teeth, and those teeth had latched
onto Whit from the inside. The feeling was sharp and deep at once, and it gripped all of Whit, he felt it everywhere, it was
all there was. A sob jumped from his throat, and Whit realized this was what people meant when they talked about weeping.
He shook, he gasped for air, he felt his eyes grow sore and tired, and he did all of it in the Range Rover P615, which he’d
never wanted but which Helen had convinced him would be safer than his old jeep. It had been an easy sacrifice to make for
Helen. She had, after all, started putting the silverware upright when she loaded the dishwasher. For him. And he had folded
clothes the way she liked, and they had bought the couch he wanted, and they had sent Annie to the school Helen liked. They
had pleased each other like this, in small and big ways in the beginning, offering little gifts, surrendering their preferences
when they could. Whit had gone to bed earlier than he would have liked, just because Helen liked for him to be in bed with
her, and Helen had gone to see more than one post-punk revival band with him in concert. The house was Helen’s idea, and he’d
ended up loving that house.
And here was the truth: Just before she died, they were fine.
They were not unhappy. They did not often argue.
But they had stopped giving these gifts to each other.
Things had changed, and some days they hardly spoke.
Life was all Annie and their careers, and what made Whit feel ill now was that he had been okay with that.
He had been okay just existing in his wife’s proximity, and with her in his, never thinking that one day that would be impossible, and that she would leave him with an impossible task that he had been stupid to believe would ever grow less impossible.
He had tried to bring in someone else to fix his problem for him, a choice he now felt had only ever been a slap in the face to Helen—how could it have been anything else?
And he had thought he was somehow making it all up to her, as though, by finishing her life’s work, he was undoing those last months or years of accepting that things were only fine, but he wasn’t.
He simply could not do it. It would never be done.
And now Helen was gone, and he had failed her, and he felt it everywhere.
“Well,” Merritt said later that day, “what do they say?”
They were standing at the kitchen table, Whit having skipped his writing group for the journal emergency. Whit had them arranged
on the table when Merritt arrived, and she tried not to read into what she saw as a less cozy, more clinical setting than
their usual armchairs and blankets.
Whit tapped his fingers on the table before selecting a plum-colored journal from the stack.
“This one,” he said, holding it up like a preacher might hold a Bible, “has a full outline. All of book 5 just laid out for
us.”
“Oh my God,” Merritt said in disbelief. All this time.
“Yeah.”
Whit dropped his eyes. He had hardly looked at her since she arrived. The previous day’s downpour had abated into a drizzle,
but the clouds were as dark and heavy as ever, and the temperature was just above freezing. When Merritt had peeked into the
living room, she noticed that Whit had forgotten to start the fire.
“So,” she said, slowly, feeling her heart dribble more quickly against her ribs.
Whit leaned on a chairback and looked to his side.
“So.”
“Seriously, Whit,” she said, in an attempt at lightness, “you’re scaring me a little. What do we do?”
Now he looked at her. His eyes held pure astonishment.
“What do you mean? What else can we do?”
Merritt’s neck was hot, her throat was pounding, her eyes felt shadowy.
“What do you mean?” she said, feeling dumb for repeating the phrase back to Whit.
He narrowed his eyes at her, really and truly in disbelief.
“We have to start over.”
She had mostly expected this. She had known it would come to some version of this, and still the words were a metal rod through
her chest.
“Whit, wait a minute. The book is due in a month. We’re already cutting it close as it is. I’m not sure starting over is—”
“Merritt, please.”
He looked deeply troubled. Sad. Her heart dropped.
“We were wrong,” he said. “We were so wrong. She—Helen imagined it all differently. New and different characters, different
conflicts and revelations. It’s all so different.”
Merritt bobbed her head from side to side as if deliberating.
“I mean, of course it is, Whit,” she said after a moment. “We always knew that was probably true.”
“No, but now we know it’s actually true.”
He was leaning his hands on the table now, so that his head was lower than before. More like a cornered animal that might
pounce out of desperation.
“Right, but Whit—”
“What?”
Merritt took an involuntary step back. His voice was harsher than she’d ever heard it before.
No, she told herself, remembering what she’d felt the night before. She straightened her spine, pushed her shoulders back, and spoke in a level, self-assured voice.
“I read it over last night,” she explained. “I reread everything we’ve written.”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know what to say, Whit, other than that it’s really good.
It’s . . . it’s a perfect ending to the series.
It will be a perfect ending, when we finish it, and I think we have to finish it.
Even apart from the deadline, it just . .
. it deserves to be finished. To be published. It’s good. It’s the
right ending to the story.”
Whit looked to the ceiling and shook his head.
“How can you say that? It’s not what she wanted.”
“But our story is—”
“It’s not our story, Merritt, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s her story. It’s been hers all along. You and I have just been playing
pretend. Writing fan fiction. We haven’t made anything real.”
The last word came as a slap.
An echo of an echo reminded her that this man was grieving. These journals had reopened the cuts he’d been healing from. She
knew that.
But her work deserved more than this.
“Whit,” she said, moving away from the table, “I know how you’re feeling—”
“You don’t.”
She took the response in stride. “You’re right. I just mean, I understand. This feels like it changes everything, and of course,
it affects what we’ve done. But it doesn’t change that we’ve written something wonderful, something we should be proud of,
and something I really believe Helen would be proud of, too.”
She knew the final words were wrong as she said them.
“How could you possibly know that, Merritt?”
He had been cold and burdened, and now he looked beaten down, a shell of the man she’d met back in her mother’s library. He slumped into a kitchen chair at last as Merritt spoke again.
“I just feel like, knowing what I know about her, that—”
“But that’s just it, Merritt. You don’t know her. You might know her books, but you didn’t know her.”
How did he keep finding new words to sting her with?
“This was the last thing she asked me to do, and you’re asking me to betray that wish. When I think about what she would have
thought if she knew . . .”
“Knew what?”
“Knew that I asked you to come and help me make up this bastardized version of what she wanted.”
Merritt winced but quickly crossed her arms, refusing to show any feeling but indignation.
“So that’s it?”
Whit looked up.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re just supposed to throw out everything we’ve done. Everything we . . .”
Merritt trailed off when she felt her voice begin to falter. She would not do it this way. She waited to see what Whit had
to say next.
He pressed on his eyes with his fingertips.
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding completely exhausted. “I don’t know what to do, Merritt. I’m back where I started.”
“But you have me now.” Merritt was pacing as she spoke, ignoring the personal pronoun he’d chosen. “Let’s call the publisher.
Call your agent, whatever, I don’t know how it works. Let’s ask for more time. We can try to blend Helen’s vision with ours,
maybe, and—”
“Merritt.”
He was grasping her wrist in his hand and looking at her from his seat. His ocean blue eyes seemed deep and yawning. He was giving up.
“What?”
She waited, dreading his answer.
“We can’t.”
She pulled her hand away.
“Whit—”
“We have to start over from the beginning—”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not doing that.”
Whit’s eyebrows crinkled. Now he was the one who looked like he’d been slapped.
“What do you mean?”
The thought shot across her mind, like a meteor streaking across the sky: If she said these next words, that would be it.
The job would be over. The money that had changed her life and made it possible to imagine herself writing full-time would
disappear. She said them anyway.
“I’m not writing someone else’s story.”
“What? We were always writing someone else’s story—”
“You know what I mean. I won’t do it. I’m not doing some paint-by-numbers novel. I never would have agreed to do that.”
“Merritt, don’t be silly—”
“Don’t call me silly. I am a writer, Whit. A good one. You said it yourself.”
“Of course I did. But Merritt . . .”
She could see Whit preparing his next statement. An explanation of some sort. But she had already chosen a direction and said
her piece. She would not choose another person’s story over her own—not again—not even if that person was Helen. Not even
if that person was Whit.
She spoke first.
“I think I should go.”
Whit stood.
“Merritt, don’t.”
But she was already gathering her bags. The Tupperware container holding her uneaten lunch banged against her leg as she lifted
her tote.
“I’m sorry, Whit, but I can’t do that. I can’t do this if that’s what you want.”
As she looked at him guilt and anger crisscrossed within her chest. She had given up on her writing for a man once before.
Not intentionally, not because he’d asked her to, but she had done so nonetheless.
And Whit was not the same man. And he had every reason to ask what he was asking. But the only person she could answer to
in this moment was herself.
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know, Whit. I don’t know. But I don’t think I can help you write your wife’s book anymore.”
The sentence hurt as she said it, and again Whit looked as though he’d been struck. His shoulders sagged. He opened his mouth
to speak, then bit his lower lip and looked away.
“All right,” he said finally.
“All right?”
He nodded slowly.
“All right.”
So he’d made his choice then, too. And he hadn’t chosen her.
“All right, fine,” she said, using all her restraint to keep the contempt and pain out of her voice. She turned to hide her
eyes from him.
“Goodbye then, Whit.”
For the second time in two days, she left without waiting for him to say goodbye.