Chapter 5
James’s typewriter hums under his fingertips as he finishes off the final draft of his sole fixation.
Through the window above his desk, Pat the mail carrier’s white vehicle hisses to a stop at the mailbox, blasting Nicki Minaj.
Friday. It has been two days, and the letter is finally at a point where he thinks it makes sense.
Where his questions for Nelle sound more curious and concerned than offensive.
Where he is apologetic for sending the police and hopeful she is all right regarding that lapse in judgment.
He signs the letter, From your friend James.
His next article for Nancy remains untouched, and yesterday was the deadline. Maybe, just maybe, if he starts working now, he can still beg her for forgiveness.
James folds Nelle’s letter into an envelope as he steps into the dark garage to leave, but someone is already in there.
“Holy shit!” he shrieks, his caw bouncing between the garage walls.
His mom is seven feet off the ground, on a ladder, tinkering with the dome light.
“Please don’t curse in front of me,” she says. Then, straight to the point, “Where are you going?”
“To see one of my friends.” He holds up the letter as proof. “I wrote her a letter.”
“You what?” His mom frowns, either confused that her son is actually leaving the house for an innocent reason, or that someone in this day and age would send a letter. She climbs down the ladder, reaching for the envelope.
He snatches it back.
“Who’s the girl, James, and why haven’t you brought her to dinner yet?”
Her hands get all grabby, the baggy arms of her sweater swinging as she reaches for him. Reluctantly, he gives into her embrace, an iron grip around his letter.
“She’s just a friend,” he says.
“Sure.”
When she finally pulls away, James tucks the envelope in his back pocket and wrestles with a question that has been on his mind.
Before he started college, in the living room of their downtown house, eavesdropped on by his mom’s hutch of antique dolls, his parents explained the financial burdens of life and how he would go under and be doomed if he didn’t build foundations of support early on.
His future could either be in medicine or law, no questions asked, and medicine felt like a subject he could study enough to be good at.
“Can I talk to you?” James asks.
His mom’s teary-eyed pride transforms into a skeptical, furrowed brow.
Last December, in the sterile hallway of the science building, a brochure gave James an idea.
It has stuck with him since, a thought cultivated into a dream, then into a plan.
He already talked to his advisor and secured himself a spot in all the classes he will need.
He has done everything to prepare for this change, save ask the people who will be paying for it.
Wincing, he drops the bomb. “I want to add a second major.”
“What do you have in mind?” Her arms cross. “Political science?”
“What? No.”
“Oh God.” She pinches her forehead. “Please tell me it’s not psychology.”
“What do you have against psychology? You go to therapy.”
“It’s not a lucrative career path, James. Right now, if you don’t get into any med schools, you can have a reliable job, like a nurse, but employers are not seeking out recent graduates from the Department of Psychology.”
He laughs at his mom’s odd prejudices. “It’s not psychology. I want to add journalism. I love to write, you know I do, and this way, I can maybe make a living doing it.”
“James—”
By her tone alone, he can tell it’s a no, so he interrupts. “Please, Mom. I know it’s impractical to you, but nothing else will make me happy. Journalism will at least . . . give me a purpose.”
His voice cracks, and for a second he forgets about the letter.
“Don’t you realize I’m settling here, too?
” he continues. “Majoring in two degrees will add at least a year until graduation. It’ll double my coursework this year, and though it’s not writing novels in an English country house, being a journalist is a hell of a lot better than putting catheters into old men. ”
She sighs and flips on the light switch. The garage floods with stale LED.
“Keep dreaming. Money’s tight right now, hon.
With your sister about to graduate, we can’t afford you to add a year.
Trust me, it’s smarter to focus on medical school.
A journalism degree, there’s no future in that, and the extra coursework would only distract you from making good grades in the classes that matter. Eyes on the prize, remember?”
“Yeah, I hear you.” Her words fall through his head like air. All but two.
Keep dreaming.
Now that he has met the man inside the house, the driveway of 23 Blackwood Road becomes the same terrifying mouth to the underworld that it seemed to James as a kid. Even as, through the rustling trees, sunlight flickers like a jewel off the tin roof.
He parks at the top of the drive, before the trees part to reveal the house.
The July heat slicks up his back as soon as his shoes hit gravel.
With every crunching step, the letter in his pocket grows heavier.
He considers heeding Jessie’s advice and remaining uninvolved.
Turning around. It would be smart, but in his mind he sees Nelle staring at her oatmeal, so paper white she looked sick.
He circles the right side of the house, avoiding the front porch and Quill’s Jeep.
Knowing that Quill is only a few walls away dries out James’s mouth.
I’m here for Nelle, he reminds himself as he stands on tiptoes in patches of weeds and dandelions, peering through the windows.
He first sees the kitchen, with its small round table and ceramic countertops.
The next window is covered by tasseled velvet curtains.
The last window reveals a room with rose-printed walls, an iron bed, empty canvases, and a shelf of books.
Little Women. Jane Eyre. Anna Karenina. Around the World in Eighty Days.
James prays this is Nelle’s room and taps the window.
Flattening himself against the siding, he waits. Sweat clings to his shirt and hair. He reaches up to knock again, but his knuckles don’t hit the windowpane.
They hit air.
He spins around, fearing Quill’s black glower, but instead he finds Nelle, the window budged open, her hair hanging in wispy strands. Arms folded. She wears an expression that suggests she has been waiting around for him all day.
Her mouth twists even as she hisses, “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see you again,” he whispers. “Is that okay?”
“Did you call the police?” A creak echoes inside the house, and Nelle flinches.
“Yes,” James says. “Sorry.” He holds out the letter. “Read this. My address is inside. Write me back, and we’ll talk that way. So he doesn’t have to know.”
“I can’t write to you.” She checks over her shoulder. “Come here tonight. You have to go now, though, I think he’s coming.”
As James slips away, he turns around. “I’ll see you tonight.”
But the window is closed, the white curtains drawn.
Nelle snatches up the closest book she can find as her door bursts open.
Father’s eyes are woven with red, a strand of sweat-slicked hair dangling over his forehead, a sheet of paper clenched in his fist. She recognizes his neat handwriting on the page: an account of what she will do tomorrow, ripped from one of his journals.
No doubt what she will be doing for the following months, even years.
All because of her mistake on the Fourth of July.
She had one chance to see the outside world, to watch people and fireworks, and she ruined it all by talking to James.
A choice she still can’t make herself regret.
“Who were you talking to?”
She thinks about her painting of the caged woman, now shredded up and burned. He’ll never let me out again.
Behind her back, she slides James’s letter into the pages of Little Women. The corner of the cover scrapes the raw skin on her palm, still not yet completely healed from the stove two days ago.
Nelle knows better than to lie to him. At least fully.
She unveils the book in her hand. Four floating heads, the March sisters, against an emerald background. Staring at him with eight black dots.
“I was reading aloud.” A hard bubble rises in her throat, her tell that she is lying.
He glares at the book. Nelle swallows.
“Let me see,” he says.
She hands it over.
He runs a hand across the cover.
Nelle can’t hide her pounding heart. Her ache to swallow again. If he finds that letter—if he reads it—what will she do? What can she do?
But he tosses the book to the hardwood with a thump.
Nelle presents a stoic expression to hide her relief.
“Read in your head from now on,” he says. “Your chatter is distracting me.” He holds the crumpled paper up as evidence of his hard work before storming out of the room.
Nelle waits forty-two seconds before crawling under the bed. The pages of Little Women split on James’s letter, tucked into the scene where Laurie confesses his love to Jo. She has read it enough times now to know it by heart.
Cramped beneath her bed, next to her five thousand tally marks, Nelle reads James’s letter, each word fuzzy in the dark.
She finishes with a sigh. When night comes, she will tell him the truth.
He might run off, terrified by what she is, but she doesn’t want to keep lying to him.
And even if he doesn’t believe her, she wants him to know. Wants him to see for himself.
Nelle hides the letter between the pages and sits by the window. Maybe James will believe her. Maybe he will trust her.
She imagines herself taking off to New York with a finished manuscript and a typewriter case.
She’s Jo March, not a girl written into life by a man with ice for a heart.
She makes coffee in her apartment. She picks up a paintbrush without it making her nauseous.
She walks the streets she wants to walk. She learns to ride a horse.
Time drips slower than honey, and nothing James does seems to speed it up.
He buys coffee from the gas station, finishes his article, emails Nancy to let her know he will drop it off in the morning, and reviews his schedule for the fall semester.
He is taking biology, anatomy, two science labs, and precalculus.
The only class on his schedule that doesn’t make him want to vomit is a once-a-week fiction workshop he signed up for electively, not for his major.
His to-do list eats up only half the evening, and he promised Nelle he would wait until nightfall to come over, so he grabs his notebook and writes a vignette as the sky turns the color of a nasty bruise.
Only, now that night has come, James wishes he had more time.
His nerves skyrocket. In his letter he asked Nelle why her father acted the way he did, why she ran away on the Fourth, why she is his age and lives in this small town but he has never seen her.
He wrote that he is concerned for her well-being, and he wants to make sure she is safe.
He told her that he finds her interesting, and that if she wants, he would love to get to know her better. What was he thinking writing that?
James has no friends outside of books. Yes, Jessie, but she is only in town once or twice a year, and she is his cousin. Talking to Nelle on the Fourth awakened a part of him that has been hibernating for years. The part that likes people.
Or in this case, a specific person.
So when night finally comes, James shuts off his typewriter, closes his notebook of scribbled thoughts, and slips out of his parents’ house.