Chapter 1 If They Only Knew
If They Only Knew
Sam Vetiver was lost.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Well, perhaps a little bit of both. But for now, it was actually having lost her way that counted.
She was on the final event of her fourth book tour, and if the GPS of her rental car didn’t come back online, Sam would be
late. She had a recurring nightmare about this very thing, showing up forty minutes after the start time, so two-thirds of
her audience had left and the remaining one-third were disgruntled, then opening the reading copy of her novel to find her
familiar prose had been replaced with woodcuts.
She hunched over the steering wheel like a jockey urging on a horse, as if by doing so she could coax the little blue arrow
back onto the road from the body of water into which it had floated. The actual lake, invisible from the road, was unfamiliar
to Sam, as was everything in this wealthy exurb of a midsize midwestern city she had never visited before. “Return to the
route!” the stern Australian lady who lived in the car’s dashboard scolded.
“I’m trying!” Sam said.
Mercifully the GPS decided to reactivate.
Sam gave thanks and cranked up the AC so perspiration wouldn’t destroy her makeup.
With her first novel, she had visited three book clubs a day in person, back in the dark times when she had to rely on printed-out instructions from the hostess: Look for the driveway with the balloons!
If you see a barn next to a pond, you’ve gone too far!
She’d thought everything would get easier with technology, and it had, but there were just so many ways to lose your path.
Sam drove as fast as she dared along a winding road bordered by very high rhododendrons, like something in a fairy tale, from
which anything might pop—a centaur or a child—and shot out into an area of palatial stone homes set far back on velvet lawns.
She wondered, as she did everywhere: What would it be like to live here? What did people do? No doubt there were patios behind those houses, on which families would gather after days of . . . golf? Tennis? Did anyone
still play croquet? There would be grilling, maybe barbecue. If she lived here, Sam could be sitting with her feet in her
husband’s lap, drinking a gin and tonic, watching the kids cannonball in the pool, and smelling the fresh-cut grass the landscapers
had tended that morning.
She felt the usual wistfulness and reminded herself, that wasn’t the life she had chosen. And there were specific reasons
why. And maybe it didn’t exist at all, maybe Sam was telling herself a story: The husbands or wives here were having affairs
or traveling on business, the kids avoiding their parents or on drugs or glued to their phones. Who knew what people did behind
their castle doors, really?
A few more miles, and Sam entered a Rockwellian hamlet whose town green surrounded a limestone mansion like something in a
Shirley Jackson story. That had to be—Sam checked the address—yes! The library. She turned into the drive. There it was, the
marquee sign saying Author Reading Here Tonight! New York Times Bestseller Sam Vetiver Reads The Sodbuster’s Wife 7 PM. They had ringed it with the big light bulbs usually seen on hipster restaurant patios, a nice touch. Sam would post a photo
of it later on social.
She checked her lipstick in the rearview—one of her top ten tour hacks was never apply a red lip in haste, lest you end up
with that unfortunate cannibal look, but sometimes you had no choice—and grabbed her bag with her reading copy, book cover
postcards, and pens.
“Showtime,” she said, as she always did, for good luck.
She got out of the car, hitching up the bodice of her strapless red jumpsuit. All of Sam’s tour outfits were red, to match
her book jackets, on which heroines of whatever century Sam was writing about gazed soulfully across historical vistas with
their backs to the reader, garbed in era-accurate crimson costumes. Sam’s red clothes were branding—she loved it when she
showed up at an event and a reader commented, Wow, your dress matches your cover!, and Sam said, Oh, does it?, and winked. This jumpsuit was a pain because Sam had to undress completely every time she used the ladies’ room. But it
was the last clean outfit Sam had, the rest stuffed into the laundry section of her suitcase. The end of tour. Almost.
Sam headed up the library walk, pausing to snap a selfie blowing a kiss to the promotional sign. Most authors said they hated
tour. Sam was not among them. She often thought she wrote books to go on tour. She loved everything about it: the airport breakfasts consisting of hummus; the room service cheeseburgers she
wolfed down after events. She loved the thing every other human was phobic about: public speaking. She loved being hustled
through country club and community center kitchens like some sort of superstar—when else did writers ever get to do this? She even loved flying, marveling that she was traveling because people cared what she had to say about,
amazingly, her own books.
Most of all, Sam loved the readers. The readers, the readers, the readers. The people who gave up hours of their lives they
could have used to indulge in many other pleasant activities, like shopping or sex or watching TV, to read Sam’s novels and
then, curiouser and curiouser, come hear her talk about them. Sam spent much of her life in a room by herself, inventing characters
and trying to squeeze their stories out of her head; when it turned out, years later, that her words had made a sort of magic
bridge, allowing Sam to slide down into strangers’ minds and making them all friends—that was an actual miracle.
Most authors also said they resented tour because it took them away from their real job, writing.
Sam was not one of them, either. Once upon a time, she had loved it.
When she was a kid and writing had all the mystery and magic of getting up early, when nobody else was awake and the world belonged to you alone, a time when anything could happen.
When she was in college and grad school, burning with ambition so fierce it felt like, as Orwell said, an illness.
When she was writing her first book, before commerce and sales entered the picture.
When she’d been living with her ex-husband, Hank, so she knew when the day’s work was done she could open her study door and there’d be somebody to have dinner with.
She did not love it now. She feared it. Most specifically, Sam feared her fifth book, The Gold Digger’s Mistress, for which she was under contract and which was due in five months and of which she had yet to write a single sentence. For
which she felt not only apathy but antipathy. She quailed at going home and facing the demonically blinking cursor, the empty
screen. She dreaded the deep plunge of being, except for imaginary people, completely and cataclysmically alone. As she hustled
up the library walk, she had the strangest, most aberrant thought:
I would give this all up if I had someone to share my life with.
Sam shook her head as if bothered by a horsefly. What the actual? She had been writing since she was four years old. It was
all she’d ever done. It was all she’d ever wanted. It was who she was and who she wanted to be.
She saw the librarian waiting for her in the vestibule and waved.
“You found us!” said the librarian, whose name Sam could not remember—she was terrible with names, assigning people the ones
she thought they should have as characters instead of using the ones they actually had. Pamela? Erica?
“Here I am,” Sam agreed. “It was touch and go there—my GPS went offline.”
“I should have warned you about that,” said the librarian, whose name, it came to Sam now, was Monica. “But you made it. Do
you need the ladies’ room?”
“Perpetually,” said Sam. “This is a beautiful library.”
“Thanks,” said Monica. “We’re proud of it. It used to be a Rockefeller mansion, you know . . . Here you go. I’ll wait here.”
In the bathroom, which had Band-Aid-colored stalls and a vase of plastic flowers Sam found inordinately touching, she struggled
out of her jumpsuit, used the facilities, and checked her reflection in the mirror. Her lipstick had not migrated to her teeth,
and her strawberry-blond French braid was intact, but she looked tired. Another facet of life on the road. Once Sam had hit
forty, flight dehydration and hotel beds created dark circles no concealer could erase. She crossed her eyes at herself and
emerged.
“Ready!” she said.
“How’s your tour been?” Monica asked, hustling Sam back through the library, past a fireplace, a grandfather clock, and oil
paintings of, incongruously, ships.
“Great,” said Sam. “I love meeting readers.”
“That’s refreshing,” said Monica. “And we’re glad to have you. We’ve had trouble finding authors this year—not that I’m surprised.”
“What do you mean?” said Sam.
“Oh, you know,” said Monica. “Shifts in the industry. Fewer publishers, fewer books, slashed budgets . . . it all means fewer authors
on tour. It’s a terrible time to be a writer. I’m surprised anyone keeps at it. Grateful, too, of course,” she added hastily.
Sam smiled. She’d heard this all her life.
When she was in college, waiting tables to put herself through: Are you crazy?
Choose an actual career. When she was in grad school: Get a job to fall back on.
When she’d graduated: Nobody wants debut fiction; you can’t get an agent, an editor, a publisher.
It was all impossible, and somehow, she had managed it.
“It’s always a terrible time to be a writer,” she said mildly.
“I suppose that’s true,” said Monica. She stopped in front of an oak door that was studded like the entrance to a dungeon
and threw it open. “Ladies and gentlemen, our author!”
Heads turned as Sam followed Monica down the aisle to the podium; she did the Queen’s wave, and they laughed.
Not as many people as Sam had anticipated when she’d set up this event: The library had promised two hundred, and there was half that, if even.
Still, despite some empty chairs, this was a decent turnout for a summer evening, and there was no place Sam would rather be.
“Where are you from, honey?” said a woman in the front row—the whole audience was female, per usual, except one husband who
had obviously been dragged there and sat patiently with his arms folded.
“I flew in from Boston,” said Sam, and some of the women clucked their tongues as if she’d said I came from prison.
“You’re so young to be an author,” said another woman.
“Thank you, I love you,” said Sam, and they laughed. Even the husband smirked.
Monica checked the clock. “Let’s go ahead and get started. Hi, everyone, thanks for joining us for our Summer Author Series.
Our special guest tonight is Sam Vetiver . . .”
Sam stood with her head lowered modestly as Monica read her bio, although she could feel the readers observing her curiously,
trying to sync Sam’s career accomplishments with Sam herself. Bestselling author of four novels, one selected for a TV book
club by a popular host. National Book Award finalist. Teacher. Speaker. It was always strange for Sam to hear herself introduced;
although she was proud of and grateful for everything she’d spent her life hustling to do, there was such a gap between the
accolades and what she actually did. What would these nice people with their curious smiles think if they knew what Sam’s
life was usually like? At the thought of where she’d be this time tomorrow—home in her empty study—Sam felt fear wash over
her again.
I’d give all this up if I had someone to share my life with.
Totally untrue. Wasn’t it?
And what would these lovely readers with their inquisitive, anticipatory faces think if they only knew about some of the situations
Sam had left to hop onto a stage, sometimes only hours before?
For a second Sam saw her fist knocking on a plywood door, Are you in there?
, turning the knob, surprised it was unlocked, the beige carpet.
The dark Rorschach on it. How it was soaked in blood.
How Sam hadn’t known until then how overpowering blood could smell.
“And now, all the way from Boston,” Monica was saying, “please help me welcome Sam Vetiver!” and Sam stepped up to the mic.