Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty
After the men in suits placed the wooden box holding Maxine’s ashes in the marble chamber, Rainy and the other mourners drifted away to let Anthony have a moment alone at his wife’s final resting place.
Rainy couldn’t imagine a lovelier place to spend eternity. The cemetery overlooked the ocean. She walked right to the edge of a cliff and saw the beach below and then the endless expanse of sea and sky. The sun had started to set, turning blood red as it sank lazily toward the horizon.
And there, at the fence that overlooked the beach, stood Jessa Charming, all alone, like the heroine of a women’s novel searching the water for answers to questions she didn’t even know how to ask yet.
Game time.
Rainy took a deep breath, then walked over.
Jessa’s eyes widened as Rainy approached.
“Good cosplay,” Jessa said as she wiped her face with a wad of tissues.
“It’s not a costume,” Rainy said. “This is how I dress.”
“You dress just like Rainy March?”
“I am Rainy March.”
Jessa turned to her, took a step back, and nearly tripped, but Rainy caught her by the arm and righted her.
“Finish the story,” Rainy said. The words came out a little harsher than she’d intended, so she quickly added, “Please?”
Jessa looked at Rainy’s hand on her arm, then her face. She pulled away, her mouth open.
“It is you. How?”
Rainy grimaced. “Can we skip all the explaining? It’s magic. The end.”
“At least tell me why you’re here before I pass out.”
“Maxine sent me. She wants you to finish the book. The March Hare Mystery. And don’t pass out. I need you to get me back to Duke.”
“You know about the book?”
“Know it? I lived it. And I’d like to know the ending, but I won’t until you write it.”
“I…can’t.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Both?” Jessa offered, wincing.
“Not good enough. Get to writing, please. Maybe I have some paper on me.” Rainy dug around in her pockets. “No paper. Darn. You have a phone. Start writing on your phone.”
“That’s not how it works,” Jessa said.
“Writing doesn’t work by…writing?”
“Okay, fine, it does,” Jessa admitted. “But you don’t understand. I loved your books. I loved Maxine. I’ve been reading them since I was fifteen years old. I’ve read every story at least three times.”
“Great. You sound supremely qualified to finish the book.”
Jessa shook her head, turned her gaze back to the ocean. “I think I’m hallucinating, but I’m going to go with it for the time being.”
Rainy nodded. “That’s the spirit. Now tell me why you can’t finish my book.”
“When I was fifteen, sixteen…I wanted to be you. When I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty…I wanted to be Maxine.”
“You wanted to be a writer.”
“No, I wanted to be Maxine Blake. I wanted to be the author of your books.”
“Now’s your chance. Really, Jessa, I’m not seeing the problem here.”
“I can’t,” she said again. “Don’t you get it? Maxine is my hero, my idol. How could I begin to fill shoes that big?”
“Oh, please, she wore a size seven. Your feet are at least nines.”
Jessa looked down at her shoes. “I’m tall, okay. I need a larger surface area for balance.”
“And there’s no reason to idolize Maxine.
I met her. She wasn’t perfect. She loved her husband but neglected her marriage to write.
She doubted herself constantly. She probably sped up her own death by taking up writing again after she was supposed to retire and rest. She put on her granny pants one leg at a time, trust me. ”
“You’re one to talk. You think your mother was the perfect Book Witch.”
“She was.”
“Ha,” Jessa said.
“Ha?” Rainy asked.
“Ha!” Jessa exclaimed.
“Why are you ha-ing at me?”
“You really are clueless if you haven’t put two and two together about your mother,” Jessa said. “And if you didn’t idolize her so much and think she was flawless, you wouldn’t even need me to finish the book. You would have figured it out by the end of Act One.”
“I don’t even know when that is! Do you think I see the act breaks floating in the air like confused bumblebees?” Rainy waved her hand to indicate little word clouds dancing above her eyes. “It doesn’t work like that, Jessa.”
“It’s after the ‘Find the March Hare’ phone call from your grandfather.”
“You obviously know how the story ends. You know more than I do. I have a fairly good idea who the March Hare is, although what that has to do with my mother, I still don’t know.”
“I can tell you,” Jessa said. “I can tell you everything.”
Rainy narrowed her eyes at her and said slowly, threateningly, and in no uncertain terms, “Write…it…down.”
“You are so annoying,” Jessa said. “I can’t believe I wanted to be you.”
“I hop in and out of books and hang out with fictional characters. I’ve been to Narnia.
I’ve been to Middle-earth. I’ve been to Camelot.
I’ve been to Mars, sweetheart. The last time I was on a beach looking at the ocean was with Elizabeth Freaking Bennet, okay?
Everybody should want to be me.” Rainy paused, rethought a few things.
“Apart from the dead mother. Nobody wants that. Almost nobody, I mean. I’ve read Carrie. ”
“My mother’s alive,” Jessa said.
“No need to rub it in.”
“But my parents divorced when I was a freshman in high school.”
Rainy’s heart dropped. “Oh, Jessa, I’m sorry. That’s the hard time you mentioned in your speech?”
“?‘Hard time’ was a euphemism for ‘the worst time of my entire life.’ Probably why I wanted to be you. I was metaphorically living in books while you were literally living in books.” Jessa looked up at the sky.
“And now I’m arguing with you at Maxine Blake’s funeral. I am having a nervous breakdown.”
“Later. Finish the book first.”
Jessa laughed. She shook her head and sighed. “I’m not Maxine,” she said to Rainy. “I’ll never be her.”
“Good, because she’s gone. And you’re here. And here always beats not here. Jessa, I need you. I need a writer. I’m not saying you have to write a trillion more of my books, but at least finish this one so I know…I know what my mother was trying to tell me.”
Jessa sighed. “Her message to you is pretty good.”
“Maybe if we went down to the beach, you could write on the sand,” Rainy suggested.
Jessa pulled her hands through her red hair and shook her head. “I don’t know, Rainy…I mean, I don’t even know if I believe this is actually happening.”
Rainy felt her happy ending beginning to slip away.
What could she say to make Jessa understand how much she needed her?
“There’s a fun scene in Through the Looking-Glass, ” Rainy said, “where Alice meets the unicorn. You know it?”
“Of course I know it.”
“Alice is shocked because she didn’t believe in unicorns, and the unicorn is shocked because he never believed in little girls.
So the unicorn says to Alice…‘ Well, now that we have seen each other,…if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.
’ So, Jessa Charming…if you believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Deal?”
“Rainy March believes in me?”
“I believe in you.”
Jessa lowered her chin to her chest and took a breath. “A week before she died, Maxine called me, asked me again to consider carrying on the series after she was gone. You know what I told her?”
“Whatever you said, it probably killed her.”
Jessa glared at her. “I said, only if Rainy March herself shows up and tells me to do it. And you know what she said?”
“She said don’t be surprised if I show up.”
“How did you know?”
“I guess you could say we shared a brain. I don’t know everything about her, but I know this much—she believed in you too. Otherwise she wouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s a big ask,” Jessa said.
“Come on, don’t make me employ Plan C.”
“Plan C? Oh, right. Crying.” Jessa took a deep breath. “What if I finish the book, and it’s bad?”
“Let me ask you this. Would you rather have bad pizza or no pizza at all? Or bad coffee or no coffee at all? Or…” Rainy waved her hand toward the cemetery, all the graves, not empty but occupied. “Would you rather have a bad day or no more days at all?”
Jessa pointed at Rainy. “You fight dirty.”
“I fight to win. Come on, Charming, it’s not Shakespeare. Slap a happy ending on it and call it a day.”
“Slap a happy ending on it? Do you think that’s how it works?”
“You’re the writer, not me.” Rainy put her hands on Jessa’s shoulders. “Have you seen Duke in person?”
“No, of course not.”
“I have. And whatever you’re imagining…it’s even better.”
Rainy hoped this line of argument would work. She was running out of ways to beg.
Jessa nodded. “It was fun to finally read how you and Duke met,” she said. “Maxine had been teasing readers with that story for sixteen books. Shame if no one else gets to read it.”
Rainy started. “Wait a minute. My case files are my stories?”
“Is that a bad thing?” Jessa asked.
“A little, yeah. Those case files are my journals! Do you want people reading your journals? I wrote them for posterity, to record the glorious history of the Book Witches, not for public consumption.”
“First of all, no, ” Jessa said as if she were talking to a child. “You didn’t write them. You only think you wrote them. Maxine Blake wrote them. And second of all…there is no second point. You are a fictional character. Your journals are published works of fiction. Get used to it.”
“It’s a little embarrassing. There’s personal stuff in there.”
“I would never embarrass you.”
Rainy narrowed her eyes at Jessa. “You mean…when you’re writing my book?”
Jessa threw her hands in the air. “Fine! I’ll do it!”
Rainy exhaled with relief, then held out her right hand to shake. Jessa took it, held it.
“Thank you. Please start right now,” Rainy said.
“If we were in your story world, you could look into my heart with your magic and see how much your books meant to me over the years. I won’t pretend they saved my life, but they did help me find myself.”
“I don’t need to see in your heart,” Rainy said.
“You can see it in my eyes?”
“You’re holding my hand so tight I’m losing circulation.”
Jessa laughed. “How about a hug?”
“I can do a hug.”
Rainy stepped in and embraced Jessa gently. “Don’t forget to feed Koshka,” Rainy told her. “Maxine said she was always forgetting to write him into scenes.”
“I won’t forget.” Jessa let go first and stepped back, took a breath and nodded. “Is this where we say goodbye?”
“I don’t say goodbye,” Rainy said. “I say, ‘Our revels now are ended.’ Now please write the ending of my book. I need my grandfather back, and I want to see if my hunch was right.”
“I do have a notebook with me. I always do.”
“Thank you, Jessa. I’ll never forget you. Oh, wait. I will forget you. Won’t I?”
“You’ll definitely forget me,” Jessa said. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“That’s disappointing. I was hoping to remember I was a fictional character when I’m back in my book. It would help with my stress levels.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said with a mysterious grin. Then she sighed. “I won’t forget you, Rainy. Ever.”
Rainy took one last long look around. “Nice world you have here. I like mine better, though. So let’s, you know…” She wiggled her fingers in the air, miming fast typing.
“I’m doing it. I’m doing it,” Jessa said. “Wish me luck.”
But Rainy didn’t wish her luck. Instead she said, “Pencils up.”
Rainy walked over to Anthony, who was waiting by the limousine. She gave him a big thumbs-up.
“She said yes?” Anthony asked. “That’s a relief. For you at least.”
“You all right with her finishing the story?”
He paused before answering. “Your books took her away from me. But then again, they bought our house.”
Rainy took his hand, squeezed it gently before letting go.
“I’m at peace with it,” he said. “It’s what Maxine wanted.”
Rainy rose on her tiptoes and kissed Anthony on the cheek. “Thanks for taking such good care of my writer.”
“It was odd to meet you but rather nice,” he said. “I’m glad Maxine was able to bring you here.”
“Me too,” she said. Jessa had her steno pad out of her bag, ready to begin writing. “But do you ever wonder…I mean, how do you know you’re not in a…”
Rainy stopped speaking as a black SUV pulled up. A strikingly handsome man carrying a bouquet of roses got out, glanced around furtively, then approached Maxine’s grave. Rainy recognized him at once from the portrait in the Pilcrow House library.
“LeVar Burton!” she shouted.
He turned to wave at her—
—
But Rainy March was already gone.