Chapter 35
Tyler
I woke up to streaks of sunshine—to bright and balmy morning. I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of my midnight, and all
the fog-cloaked, sea-smoked impossibilities still developing like film in my mind. It was only when I began to reach for my
glasses that I fully remembered I’d lost them in the woods.
But just when I was beginning to put together a reason for scouring that forest—a sex scene in which Henry railed Willa against
a tree, I’d tell Meredith when I saw her next—my brain realized my hands were already gripping the frames.
My glasses were right there on my nightstand, exactly where I always left them—and the wind whistled through an open window
I swore I’d left shut.
I biked into town, bought myself a sandwich I could barely eat, and tried to read a book.
I sat on a park bench and thought about my glasses for several hours.
I went to the library and stared into the manuscript I was writing with Katie, expecting her to be in there, revising, when obviously, she was not.
I found an in-person meeting at a clubhouse behind a grocery store, drank two sludgy cups of coffee, and then made a few minutes of parking-lot small talk with a semi-disgraced movie producer.
And then, around nine thirty, when I could not put it off any longer, I pulled out my phone, called a busy-being-a-grandpa Arthur, and let it all out.
The white-blue glow of that supermarket sign, my spotlight.
When I finally shut up, Arthur let out a sigh. “It seems to me, Romeo, that you could stop thinking about that girl and that
cat, cool it with all this amateur sleuthing, and maybe start showing a little compassion instead.”
“Compassion?” I was still pacing. “She’s a billionaire who doesn’t fucking work, and she’s up to something, I swear. Whatever
happened last night, it felt like a show. A performance. Like she was reenacting a Fitzgerald scene just to fuck with me.
I mean, how did I end up with this job? How did I wind up working with Katie, of all people? And how is it possible that every
time we write one of our tropes into the story, it—”
“She’s a drunk, kid. I told you this after your first brunch, after your picnic date. She has a disease, and she’s no different
from you or me.”
“That’s not—It’s not . . .”
“Tyler,” he said. “You know better than this. I’m not sure if you’re jealous or insecure or what, but it’s clouding your judgment,
and you’ve got to do something about it, before you end up fired or loaded or . . . You sound like you’re losing your mind.
You need to get your shit together. This is what we talked about, remember? When you took this job? Keeping your side of the
street clean. Making sure—”
“You don’t understand! I had this dream about Katie, and Henry, he imagined the same thing! He—”
“Tyler,” Arthur said again. “This agent who hired you. What’s she paying you to do, exactly?”
I groaned. “Write a book.”
“All right,” he said. “Why don’t you get back to the house, try and get some sleep, and then, in the morning, get back to writing that damn book.”
I headed home, determined to put the events of the weekend behind me and focus instead on doing exactly what I’d been contracted
to do. Write a love story. A fictional, trope-riddled, formulaic love story. I’d stow the visions of the carriage house and
that mist-cloaked shoreline and Katie’s glowing window on the very top shelf of my mind, where I couldn’t reach them, where
they couldn’t tempt me, where they’d gather dust next to the too-bright, too-blurred Polaroids of the summers we’d spun together
before everything fell apart.
But just when I’d slipped through the garden gate to head straight to the cottage, I froze. Sitting ten feet from my door,
right there on the edge of a lounge chair, was Meredith. Her face, neutral and lit by what appeared to be a lantern, flickering
candle and all.
“Good evening, Tyler,” she said, setting her hardcover—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, if my eyes could be believed—onto the cushion.
“I, uh . . . Hey. Hi.”
“Why didn’t you come in through the kitchen just now?” she asked, rising to her feet. I took a step back. “I’ve been waiting
all day to speak with you.”
I gulped. My whole body, hot and cold and clammy.
It was over. I had fucked up. I was going to be fired, or murdered, or maybe even both.
There were probably cameras all over this place—every square inch of it, surveilled.
My glasses had been returned because Meredith had seen them fall from my face.
Her supposed ban on technology, likely bullshit, and even if remotely true, not enough to keep Maurice or whoever else was invisibly managing this mansion from using whatever means necessary to keep it secure.
I had been given the keys to all the things I wanted, and I’d thrown them away for what?
A tangential literary fiction walk? A chance to prove that Meredith Bradford was batshit crazy?
A chance to forget, for half a fucking hour, the smattering of freckles that dusted Katie’s perfect face?
“Meredith,” I said. “About what happened, I—”
“I think,” she said, signaling toward the main house, “it’s time you and I had a little chat, no? About the elephant in the
room?”
My throat was on fire, and my stomach was in scraps, and still, I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do. I simply followed
her toward the dimly lit kitchen, trying to stop my heart from racing. She took a seat at the breakfast table, then glanced
at an open chair across from her. I slid into it. Sweat lined my forehead, the nape of my neck, the creases of my palms. I
clenched my fists to wring out the panic.
“The meeting at the church is a good one,” she said. “Tuesday nights at eight.”
“Wh-what?”
“The meeting in the church off Linden. It’s a good one. The clubhouse is always there, but the speakers aren’t as good. You
should try it.”
My hands unfurled themselves. I wiped the moisture onto my jeans. My words, coming out impossibly quiet. “I don’t . . . I
don’t understand. How did you know I was sober? How could you possibly know that about me?”
“You don’t drink,” she said. “You disappear for two hours almost every night. And some of the things you’ve written into the story, some of the phrases you choose—your language is a tell. That, and the way you carry yourself. I read people, you know. That’s what I do. I pay attention.”
My mouth opened, but for a moment, no sound came out.
“So, you . . . you were sober?” I managed, finally.
She shrugged. Her face, now, flickering with a humanity I’d never bothered to search for. She was not just some trope, was
she? Not just some unfathomably rich and, therefore, not real figure who was there for me to judge or joke about. And I had
known that. I had known it the previous night—had seen what I’d seen, heard what I’d heard, finding those handprints on her
stoop, watching her almost disappear into the mist. I had understood what she’d said, earlier that week, in the library. That
she had suffered enough. And still, I did not completely believe her.
You have to understand, I was not a bad person—not anymore, anyway. At least, I was trying not to be. I had been rehearsing
the same mantra since I was eighteen. Six simple words. I am not what I did. I am not what I did. But the truth was this: until now, Meredith Bradford had been a punch line to me. Her loopiness, her moodiness, her stratospheric
success? Her weird-as-shit cat? Her clear and present seaside misery? I had chalked it all up to satire. Some kind of comical
retribution for the luxuries she enjoyed and the late-stage capitalism that seemed to unfurl behind the pearly gates of her
picture-perfect home.
But now, sitting here, I finally saw her for what she was. What Arthur had told me she was from the very start, but I had refused to see. A drunk. One who could not stay sober. One who was far worse off than me.
“Meredith . . .” I said.
She waved off my mutter. It was almost as if she knew I needed more time—another few minutes to fuse together the newest pieces
of our summer’s puzzle.
“I have been,” she said, “in and out of those rooms for decades. I could never really put more than a few months together.
A year, once, but that’s it.”
I nodded. The moisture, still gone from my mouth. My next attempt at a sentence, coming out small and cracked. And despite
all that, I heard Arthur’s voice guiding me forward. Be of service, kid. Remember what it felt like when you couldn’t stop.
“Do you think, maybe,” I said, “you’d want to try again?”
Her lips quivered into a sad, quiet smile. And then, so slowly, she shook her head.
I did not reply. I just let her answer linger in the air. I twirled a fallen hydrangea petal—its silken edges, browning—around
the smooth white lacquer. When I glanced up, she was doing the exact same thing. An unsophisticated and tiny fidget that,
an hour ago, I would not have believed. And then, finally, she spoke.
“Do you ever wish,” she said, “that you could go back in time? That you could rewrite your first drink, your first . . . ?”
I knew the rest of her question before she finished asking it.
This was that secret language we shared—a deep and thorough understanding of our own inciting incidents.
Of whatever it was that rewired your heart, brain, and body to want nothing but more, then began to gut all the good in your life at an indeterminate and personalized pace you could not have prevented or predicted or put a stop to, which you wouldn’t have anyway, because you were born to do this.
To get drunk, to get high. To disappoint people. To let them down.
“I’m an addict, mostly,” I said. “I drank plenty, though. My dad, he would sneak me sips of his whiskey when I was a kid.
That’s what my mom said, anyway. He’s gone now—left when I was little. But when I first got clean, an old friend of his who
had a bunch of time started taking me to meetings. I guess I’d been to a few with my dad when I was really young, when he
was trying to get his shit together for a little while, and they felt safe to me. So I stayed.”
She nodded, her lips pressed together, slight and tempered. Her eyes had welled with tears.
“How long do you have?” she said.
“Nine years.”
“That means . . . You were . . .”
“Eighteen,” I said. “High school.”
“God, are you lucky. Saved yourself so much pain.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “it really feels the other way around.”
We sat there for a few more minutes. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. Meredith’s eyes were still damp—still dulled. And then,
after a little while longer, she pushed away her parched ivory petal, straightened her shoulders, and rose to her feet. Her
voice, at once, was calm and collected.
“I’d like to help you with your manuscript,” she said.
“Oh, I . . .”
“I understand that it failed to sell a few years back. That it needs a bit of . . . revising?”
“Selma told you? About my book? About why I’m here?”
At that, Meredith smirked. “You didn’t think I thought you accepted this job just so you could stare at Katie all day long,
did you?”
I laughed. Sort of. It was more a yelp, but whatever.
She smirked again. “Library opens at ten tomorrow. Why don’t you go print this thing out? I’d be more than happy to take a
look. See whether Selma’s right, or if she’s just being, well . . . Selma.”