27. Frankie
Frankie
The essay takes four days to write. Being able to write it took my whole life. It comes out short, which is how I know it’s true. Lies need room. The truth fit on nine pages.
I write it at the Brick with my coffee going cold, before the internet wakes up, and it is the strangest drafting experience of my career, because there’s nowhere to hide in it.
No June, no Beau, no invented anything, no last page to check, because I am writing it: the last page of the pen name, of the hiding, of the version of me that watched her own life from a safe distance.
Every sentence has to stand there under my real name.
It says my name is Frankie Delaney, and I have published eleven novels and a bestseller as J.M.
Sinclair. It says the initials were never a brand.
They were a hiding place. I have known that people leave since I was nine, when my father packed a bag while I was at school and never came back.
That is the year I started reading last pages first. The initials were the grown-up version of the same trick, and I have been trusting strangers from behind them ever since.
It says I met a man on a plane. That he was kind to me in rough air when he had no reason to be, and told me true things because I was safe, and I was only safe because I was a nobody, and that I went home and did the thing I do, the thing I have done to every person who ever trusted me with something private: I wrote it.
That Mile High is fiction the way a portrait is paint.
That he never knew, never consented, never got a vote, and everything the internet fell in love with, the wrist, the stillness, the soul of the thing, was taken without asking from a private man whose whole life has been people taking without asking.
It says the leaked manuscript was mine. Written in December, in the dark, out of the worst habit I own.
Deleted the same night, badly. Circulated by honest mistake by people doing their jobs, and killed by me the morning I learned it existed, at the top of a market I’d dreamed about since I was nineteen.
It says: there will never be a book two.
Not at any price, from any house, under any name, and this document is the only sequel Mile High will ever have, and it’s free, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever published that no one bid on.
It says, because this part matters and the lawyers made me say it carefully: I will not discuss the contents of any reporting about his health, not to confirm, not to deny, not ever.
His body and his history belong to him. They were never mine, not even when he was; especially then.
Ask me anything about myself. The file on him is closed, and I am the one who closed it, eleven pages too late, and I will spend whatever is left of my career defending that.
And it says, last, the part I wrote in one take and never revised, the part Cami read standing up:
I fell in love with him. Not the myth, which is excellent, but the man, who is better.
I don’t know if he’ll ever read this, and for the first time in my life I am writing something without checking how it ends.
He taught me that. He taught me most things I know about staying when it costs, which makes it very strange that the one time it counted, I was the one who couldn’t stop hiding the truth.
If you take one thing from all of this, take that: hiding the truth from someone is never a way of protecting them.
I learned that from a man who stood up at the lowest point of his life and stayed standing.
The rest of what I learned from him is none of your business, and I mean that with my whole heart, under my own name.
Becca reads it Thursday morning with her lawyer on speaker, and the lawyer flags four sentences and Becca overrules him on three, and when she gets to the end, she’s quiet for a moment, and then she says, in a voice I’ve never heard her use, the off-duty one, “Kid. I’ve sold everything you have ever written.
This is the first thing you’ve ever written that isn’t for sale, and it’s the best.” A sniff, brisk, reassembled.
“Post it wherever you want. I’m not going to advise you on this one either.
Being your friend instead of your agent suits me lately. ”
Cami comes over Thursday night to sit with me while I hit publish, because some things you don’t do alone, and we sit on my floor with the Brick between us on the coffee table like a patient prepped for surgery, the essay loaded on my own website, no outlet, no exclusive, no embargo, no paywall, a page as plain as a diner menu.
She reads it one last time over my shoulder, crying frankly and without ceremony, the way she does everything.
“You know what happens after you press it,” she says. “Every outlet in America runs it by morning. You can’t un-name yourself.”
“I know.”
“The predator people will say it’s a spin. The book people will say it’s a stunt. Barlow will say—”
“Barlow will fact-check it and find it accurate, because he’s good at his job, and it will drive him insane that his best story about me is that I told the truth first.” I look at the screen, my whole life on nine pages, cursor resting on a gray button I built myself this afternoon because I didn’t want a platform between me and it.
The button says PUBLISH, because they all do, but I renamed the page slug this afternoon, one word, for me, for the plane, for the woman who used to read endings first because she couldn’t survive a middle: /out-loud.
“So you know,” Cami says, hand on my shoulder, glasses fogged, “I’m so proud of you I could spit.”
Fabio steps onto the keyboard.
I would love to tell you I pressed it myself, after everything, that the arc completed clean, the coward-turned-brave clicking her own destiny with a steady finger.
The truth, which is the theme of the season: a three-legged cat stood on the trackpad reaching for Cami’s abandoned pie plate, and the page went live at 9:14 p.m. on a Thursday, and Cami screamed, and I screamed, and Fabio ate pie through the chaos, completely serene, a creature with no secrets, and that is how the truest thing I ever wrote entered the world: by accident, like the book, like the man, like every important thing I have ever done.
We laugh until we can’t breathe. It’s that or the alternative, and the alternative can wait its turn.
The phone starts at 9:31. I silence it at 9:32.
There will be a version of tonight where I read the coverage, watch my name trend for the third time in one season, learn what the internet decides I am this week, but it is not this version, because there is exactly one reader I published that page for, other than myself, and either it reaches him or it doesn’t, and refreshing a feed has never once moved a man’s heart an inch.
So instead we sit on the floor, Cami and Fabio and I, and we eat what’s left of the pie straight from the tin, and somewhere across town the presses of the internet are stamping my real name onto the story at last, and I wait to feel naked, exposed, spent, all the words I always assumed lived on the far side of that button.
What I feel is rested. That’s the one I didn’t see coming. Like a woman who set down a tote bag she’d been carrying so long she’d forgotten it was heavy.
***
Later, apartment empty, dishes done, cat asleep in the exact center of my bed, I stand at my window with the last of the wine and look at the city, the mountains black behind it, the arena glowing somewhere in the middle distance with somebody else’s event, and I catch myself starting the old incantation, the woman stands at the window, the woman has finally—
No.
Not the woman. Not tonight, not anymore, and I feel the tic dissolve mid-sentence, a whole childhood of grammar putting itself away, because the third person was always the emergency exit and I welded it shut at 9:14 p.m. with the help of a cat, and whatever happens now, the gate that opens or doesn’t, the review, the podium I don’t know about, the ending I have not read and will not skip to, it happens to me, in the first person, in my one and only name.
I stand at the window. I have finally said it out loud.
I did it. I’m still standing here. Both things are true, and for once, at last, so am I.