Chapter 8
During the final hottest weeks of July, James spends more time at Nelle’s bedroom window than his typewriter.
He gets to know the buzzing crickets, the coin-thin split in the wooden sill, the dried-out ladybugs crusting the frame’s bottom groove, and when the wind blows in, the honeysuckle from the bushes by the back of the house. He stretches back into the smell.
Nelle perches on her vanity stool by the window, chin on her knees, her eyes like a chinchilla in the dark.
“When was the last time you cried?” she asks. Her tone is bored, but James sees it for what it is. The effortless speech of the intimate.
He observes the wall of trees over his shoulder.
A month before he met Nelle, he had a drunken meltdown during a two-hour bubble bath.
He hated the pointlessness of his life, the school he had prayed to get into, his parents and their expectations, his lack of friends, his sister and her excess of them.
“I can’t remember.”
“Did you cry when Misty died?”
At some point over the last three weeks, he told Nelle about his family’s golden retriever. Red blood matted in her fur. His dad burying her in the backyard. To James, losing Misty was like losing a sister.
“I didn’t.” He would do anything to scratch behind her ears again, to throw the ball for her. “Not in front of my dad.”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t want him to think I was weak.”
The corner of Nelle’s mouth twitches down. “I’m sad a lot, but it only sharpens me. You’re better off for the shit you’ve been through.”
“You think?” James touches the hollow of his neck, the vial on its chain halfway visible beneath the collar of his sweatshirt.
“You show your feelings proudly, James. At least around me,” she says. “The smartest people don’t push their emotions into boxes.”
He laughs. “You sound like a tea bag.”
Nelle’s head gives a little shake, her face a question mark.
“The little paper thing attached to a tea bag.” James motions with his hands. “Sometimes it has a saying on it, like a fortune cookie.”
“What is a fortune cookie?”
“You’ve never heard of a . . . ? Well, it’s like a wise phrase delivered to you with your food so you can think while you eat,” James says. “At least, that’s how I think about it. I’m not sure what the actual history behind it is. Why don’t we look it up?”
Nelle sighs. “I can’t go to a library. I can’t leave.”
“As much as I’d love to go to the library with you, I meant with my phone.” He holds it up. A spiderweb crack laces its glassy back.
“A . . . cell phone?” Nelle reels back like he’s holding a bomb.
“A smartphone.” He types his question. “Wait, have you never seen a phone before?”
“Of course I’ve seen a phone,” she says, a drop of Quill’s Scottish in her American accent. “But it’s big, with a cord attached to the wall.”
“Welcome to the new decade.” James reads the first article aloud. A full history of the fortune cookie with all its potential creators.
“Do you have an encyclopedia inside there?” Nelle asks.
“Think of it as a tiny computer,” James says. “That you can also call and text people on.”
“Text people?” She shakes her head again.
“Nothing nefarious.” He rests his forearms on the window, fingertips dangerously close to Nelle’s. “It’s like sending a letter.”
“Yours was the first letter I’ve ever received,” she says. “I think I prefer that over texting.”
“I think I preferred handwriting it, to be honest.” James laughs.
His voice rings out into the night, and he thinks about how late it is.
How frequently he has come to visit Nelle and not once seen any sign of Quill, other than the car out front.
Maybe it is worth the risk, just being close to her.
Nerve worked up, he asks, “Do you think I could come inside?”
Nelle’s fingers tighten around the windowsill. “You’re the first friend I’ve ever had, James, and if Quill found you in my room, he’d kill you. Or he’d kill me.”
He’d kill us if he found me outside the house, too. James respects Nelle’s apprehension, but he longs to talk to her like on the Fourth. To feel her beside him.
He opens his mouth, “Maybe—”
“You remember how I told you an officer came to our house?” Nelle says.
James leans in closer to her whispering lips. “Because I called.”
“I assume.”
A rat of worry gnaws at his stomach. “Did Quill”—James licks his lips—“kill her?”
“No. But after she left, he made me pay.” Nelle’s glossy stare scorches his shoulder.
“He wrote for me to burn my hand on the stovetop,” she continues, fighting a tremor.
“As punishment. Every time it healed, I’d have to burn it again.
” She’s shaking now, like a tiny dog out in the rain. “For hours.”
“Nelle, if I’d known, I never would have called the police. I thought I was helping, I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t give me sympathy, James. I just want you to understand the kind of monster Quill is. Why you can’t come inside.”
He clutches his shirt, fist over heart. “I understand.”
Low, like an animal, a long creeaaaak resonates through the night.
Nelle goes rigid.
Around the house, the front door opens, screen slapping. Footsteps move out onto the porch.
Every tree and animal freezes in the midsummer night as Quill bellows, “I Know You’Re Here! I Can Hear You, You Bloody Bastard!”
The birds flap away. James, too, feels the instinct to run. If he goes into the woods, Quill will see him. If he stays, Quill will see him. If Quill sees him, he will hurt Nelle again. Worse this time.
“Let me in,” he says to Nelle. He tries to heave himself up. Shit, shit, shit—
“James, run around the back of the house,” she says. “I promise it’ll be worse if you’re in here.”
Around the corner of the house, a yellow light bobs closer.
“Let me in,” James repeats. “He’ll see me, Nelle.”
Hearing her name snaps Nelle out of her trance. She reaches out with clammy hands. James clasps on and folds over the windowsill, slamming the wind out of his chest before crashing to the floor in a pile of bony limbs. The world goes quiet.
While he gathers his breath, James takes in the room. A bedside lamp, its shade hung with tiny pearls, glows softly. Above the small brick fireplace, a line of tattered paperbacks holds court on the mantel. The walls are papered with two-inch pastel roses.
Nelle pulls the windowpane shut, locks the latch, and straightens the gauzy curtains.
“You can sneak out the back door,” she whispers.
“I might run into him out there. Why don’t I hide under your bed, wait it out?”
“No, no, no, if he finds you in here, he’ll make assumptions.”
“But won’t he—?”
“Father—no, dammit! Wallace is not a reasonable man, James.” The color leaches from her cheeks.
James hears pure terror in her voice, so he risks peeking into the hallway. Photographs line the walls. Quill holding up a book, Quill standing with a baby in a field of daises, Quill and a suntanned woman kissing on a striped towel.
“Down the hall. Through the living room. The door leads out back,” Nelle instructs him. “Go through there, and you can run to the woods.”
James, realizing that he is half a foot taller, kisses the top of her head. She blinks, flustered.
“Wish me luck.”
Each whimper of the hardwood floor makes James flinch.
Before he enters the living room, he checks around the corner.
The furniture is old and floral printed, facing a blocky TV.
Curtains pulled shut. Maroon shaggy carpet.
Space heater filmed by dust. Fifteen steps to the door, burst outside, get out.
Click.
James freezes, staring down the barrel of a pearl-handled derringer, Quill’s steady wrist at the other end.
“Hello, there.” A disconcerting smirk twitches Quill’s face. “I don’t remember scheduling a playdate.”
“You’re sick.”
“Really, Doc?” Quill doesn’t lower his gun as he steps closer. Closer, closer, until that cold metal is pressed against James’s forehead. Safety released. “But I feel fine.”
“Don’t hurt him!” Nelle yells from her bedroom.
Quill’s eyebrow cocks. “She fancies you, does she?”
“She’s my friend.” He contemplates throwing a punch. “You piece of shit.”
A growling laugh bubbles up in Quill’s throat.
James glares at him. “What’s funny?”
With that gun against his head, he’s strangely not scared anymore. If he dies, he dies, oh well. But if he fights back . . .
“You’re more amusing than I thought you’d be.” Quill points his gun to a chair beside the fireplace. Within feet of the exit. “Sit down. It’s story time.”
He doesn’t move.
“I’ll make it quick,” Quill says. “Promise.”
With no other choice, James sits. Back straight, legs tense, ready to bolt at the first chance.
Quill crosses his legs on the couch, pistol resting on his thigh, pointed at James. He clears his throat and adjusts a framed photograph on the side table, a Polaroid of himself and Nelle when she was around twelve. She shows off a gap-toothed grin, her freckles pepper, her hair corn silk.
“I used to have a dream,” he says, “which I carried with me from the time I was a child. To be an author.”
James thinks back to his own childhood, mindlessly flipping through books and pretending he had written them. Signing sheets of notebook paper during math class until his signature was consistent enough.
Quill grins like the Cheshire cat. “You have a similar dream?”
James hates that he is that easy to read.
“I toiled throughout my teenage years, writing whiny, pretentious books. Then I wrote a tragic love story, as all are in the end, and my dream came true. Hallelujah, I had a book published! It was a hit. I was only twenty-five, and Bianca was pregnant with Eleanor—” Quill sinks into the couch cushions and sighs.
“They were my world. It took only three months to know Bianca was the one, but I fell in love with Eleanor the second I knew about her. I read books to her, Moby-Dick and things like that, hoping she’d catch my wildfire for writing. ”
Quill stares off for a moment, smiling to himself.