The Rabbit
The text I send Sam Vetiver says HIS LAPTOP IS OPEN. COME DOWN NOW. And I’m hiding behind the water heater to see what she does. If she wakes William up and they hunt for me, I’m toast. If she
doesn’t, and she comes downstairs, well. She’ll know what I know, and finally all this can end.
I’ve known for years. I figured it out the day the eighteen-wheeler pulled up to my first bookstore in Portland, Maine, almost
three years after I left Harrington. Every month at that time there was one book chosen by the world’s most popular TV talk
show host for her book club, and there were so many copies printed, it had to be delivered by truck. We had to clear the whole
front table for it, the most valuable one facing the door, and all the end caps and merch shelves. It was a big secret too.
We never knew in advance what the book was. It was a great guessing game for most of the staff, but I hated it because I was
always afraid the book picked would be William’s. Please, please, I prayed every time the truck pulled up with the talk show
host selection. Please don’t let it be him. But that June, I sliced open the top box and there he was, smirking at me from
the back of his new hardcover. A little older, he had some smile lines now, but same smarmy motherf*cker.
I didn’t read it, of course. Not right away.
Even though everybody raved about it, oh how they loved that f*cking novel.
The booksellers clutched it to their chests and said they’d devoured it in one sitting and then turned back to the first page to start over right away, it had kept them up all night, it was the best thing they’d ever read.
Bob, the GM of my original store, got tears in his eyes when he talked about it.
Customers came in demanding not one or two but five, ten, twenty copies for their families and book clubs. We could not keep it in stock.
Finally one afternoon, in William’s fourth printing, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I snuck a copy from the Hottest Summer Reads
table, not like anyone would miss it, and took it to the storeroom with my lunch, even though we weren’t supposed to bring
food in there. I didn’t want to be in the break room or around any of the other staff when I read it, in case I had a reaction.
Nobody at my store knew my history with William, or Harrington, and I wanted to keep it that way.
So I got myself settled on a box of new middle-grade books with my ham sandwich and my milk and I opened the novel. You Never Said Goodbye. From the very first sentence I understood why it was so popular, a worldwide phenomenon. It was so, so good.
And it was so, so familiar.
The language might have been all William, never a regular word when a hundred-dollar one would do.
But the story was pure Becky Bowman.
It was exactly the story she’d told me that night on Porcupine Rock, on her birthday. And we’d talked about it some after
that.
I couldn’t believe it. I got hot all over, then cold, then jumped up. I kicked my milk by mistake, and it spilled across the
floor.
I raced to the nearest computer and frantically tapped out an email to Becky, using the last address I had for her. Did you read You Never Said Goodbye, William’s new novel? You HAVE to. It’s your book!
I felt so jumpy and sick the rest of the day that I almost said I was ill and went home. But I’d never done that, so instead
I just surreptitiously turned all of William’s books face down and checked my email every half hour.
There was nothing. Not that day or the next. I tried again, several times. I was surprised. Becky and I hadn’t been in touch
since I’d run away from the program, but we’d been on good terms before that, so even if she’d been mad at me for leaving
without, well, saying goodbye, she still would’ve written back. I thought.
On the night of the third day, in my sh*thole studio, I bit the bullet and looked up Becky’s profile on social media. What I saw there made me run to my bathroom and throw up my mac and cheese.
Becky was dead.
Her whole wall was plastered with condolences from our cohort. We miss you, Becky. Thinking of you, Becky. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” about all the things a person can lose in life. Where were all these people when she was
alive, crying on the floor after they’d stomped her story?
The sad messages went back almost three years. She’d been dead that long, and I hadn’t known.
Maybe even worse than being dead, she’d been engaged. To William.
Her profile photo showed the two of them, William hugging her from behind as Becky extended her hand toward whoever was taking
the photo. There was a big joehonking diamond on her ring finger. She was grinning in a way I’d never seen, and I saw she
was pretty after all. I’d give anything to have a smile like that.
I clicked on that photo and saw all the congratulatory messages. Bravo, you two! Congrats! Happiest literary couple since Scotty and Zelda! The Shakespeare poem about Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.
The date of that photo was three years before.
So Becky and William had gotten engaged the spring after I left the program, right after winter break, from what I could tell.
By that summer, she was dead.
Two and a half years later, about the amount of time it would take for a speedy writer to turn an outline into a manuscript
and for a publisher to fast-track a manuscript into a book, William’s first international sensation came out.
Almost thirty years and three more monster bestselling novels later and here we are, and the code that cracked William’s laptop
was not his book birthdays after all. It was a death date. I started with poor dead Becky’s, but it wasn’t hers. It was that
last girl, Cyndi, the most recent one, the sweet little cuckoo-bird with all the cats.
The door opens at the top of the steps, and I fade back until I see it’s Sam Vetiver, not William, creeping down.
She’s holding on to the railing to distribute her weight so her feet won’t creak on the wooden steps, even though the storm is howling.
Extra cautious. Atta girl. At the bottom she glances in my direction, but maybe she’s just looking over her shoulder, scanning the dark basement.
Then she goes into the study, where the only light in the house comes from the laptop’s open screen.