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  “My mother is busy and it’s hard for her to respond to letters she receives,” I said. “I’m happy to give it to her, but know that you probably won’t hear from her.”

  “I’m used to her not responding. I just want her to know that I’m still here. And I’m still wondering. And I’m not going away.”

  This didn’t sound so good. Was she a crazed fan, like some of the others?

  Yet her face, with her droopy eyelids and pout across her thin lips, made me feel more curious, and a little worried for her, than afraid. Somehow, she’d been terribly wronged or mistreated. The world had not been kind to her. I glanced at her hands, still trembling in her lap, and said in my softest voice, “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t. And you don’t need to know. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if she’d answered my letters. And if her publisher hadn’t referred me to its legal department. All I want is for her to answer questions about what she did.”

  And all I had to do was thank her, take the letter, and say that I’d deliver it. Then she’d be gone because clearly she wasn’t here for help with a paper. But I wanted to know what she was talking about. I needed to take care of this before it went any further, to Joel, to a newspaper, to God knows where else. “Maybe I can help you with this. What do you think she did?”

  Lucy shook her head. “No, no, you’re making a distinction that just isn’t there. This isn’t about what I thought she did. This is about what she did. Plain and simple.”

  I was starting to feel impatient and thought about a woman who kept calling our apartment on Dean Street, just after Listen was published, demanding to talk to my mother. She has to change the ending, the woman screamed at me on the fourth call. Whit can’t die. Whit can’t die! We got an unlisted phone number after this.

  “Okay,” I said. “What did she do?”

  “You really want to know?” she asked. I nodded. “Phoebe and Whit, and their entire story, are mine. Your mother stole it from me.”

  I felt my mouth fall open—to my knowledge no one had ever accused her of this—and quickly closed it. Writers borrowed and stole from each other all the time. But I had a hard time believing that my mother (you had to be tough, resourceful, and smart to be a female Miltonist, my dad once said) would stoop to stealing Phoebe and Whit’s entire story from this woman. “How did she steal it from you?”

  I started to shake and stuck my hands under my thighs. I didn’t want this woman to think that she’d unnerved me.

  She studied me for a moment before speaking. “Your mother was, well, my savior. For a while. If it weren’t for her, because I was having such a terrible time, I probably wouldn’t have stayed in school that year. One day I took a short story I’d written into her office hours—I was always going to her office hours—and asked if she’d read it and give me feedback. She agreed.”

  Wait, my mother was her savior? I pulled my hands out from under me. Every part of my body felt at attention.

  “The next week, I went to office hours again, and she told me that my story would never be published because a young narrator wouldn’t work in an adult story,” she continued. “I said, ‘but there are plenty of adult stories told from a young person’s point of view.’ She shook her head and said that it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t work. I’d never get published. I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have what it takes.”

  My cheeks had grown warm and my heart was beginning to beat faster. This woman was making an outrageous claim. Yet at the same time, I felt a sudden sliver of doubt—could it be possible? —that I didn’t like or want. “So, you’re saying that my mother stole Phoebe and Whit from a short story you wrote.”

  Lucy seemed not to hear me. “That day I went back to my dorm, devastated. I’d expected criticism. I hadn’t expected humiliation. Two weeks later, I went home for Thanksgiving, put the story away in a box under my bed and forgot about it and writing. I even switched out of English. That’s how much I believed your mother, that I was no good as a writer. So, imagine my surprise, years later, when I read in the news about your mother’s book. And imagine my anger when I actually read it and saw what she’d stolen.”

  My mother was many things but not a thief of this caliber. I shook my head. “These are serious allegations. Why didn’t you contact the publisher’s legal department if you were so sure about this?”

  “I’d never shown the story to anyone else. And when I went looking for it at my parents’ house, I realized that it had been tossed out with the rest of my papers from college. Which was so typical of my family. Let’s erase anything Lucy ever did! Let’s erase Lucy! Christ! Anyway, it was essentially Eleanor’s word against mine. You don’t believe me, do you? You probably think your mother is above this.”

  I wasn’t sure what I believed but I certainly didn’t want her to know this. I thought of another woman who burst out crying in the grocery store when she told my mother that she’d found her father hanging from a rafter in the garage when she came home from school one day. Please write about this, she’d cried.

  “You can’t believe the claims people have made on her.” I glanced at the envelope. I wanted her to leave and folded my arms across my chest again. “So, what do you want?”

  She sat forward, her sad eyes opening wide again. “I want to talk to her. I want to know why she stole my story. And I especially want to know why she turned against me, after she said that she’d help. I want to hear these answers from her.”

  I felt sudden, sharp needles race up and down my back. They were warning signs, telling me that something wasn’t right. Something was off. I was beginning to feel angry, too, although I didn’t know why. “My mom is working and doesn’t meet with people very often. If you think I can talk her into meeting you, you’re wrong.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  She was making me angry. I shook my head. “I’m sorry that you think she stole your story. But I can’t imagine her doing that. I’ll give her the letter, however, and maybe she’ll write you back.”

  Her nose flared and then her eyes seemed to shrink—she was skeptical—as she stood and hoisted her big bag on her shoulder. Then she was gone.

  I sank back in my chair. What the hell? I imagined Logan, if I told him about this, saying, She’s lying! She’s after our cash!

  I rubbed my forehead.

  My mother had always been mum on the origins of Phoebe and Whit. I assumed she took a little from my life, a little from her own life and a whole lot of imagination to come up with the story. I held the sealed envelope up to the light but couldn’t see through it. I imagined telling my parents about this and both of them shaking their heads and saying, not again. That poor woman! I slipped the envelope into my backpack. I wasn’t going to worry about this. In two hours I’d be at the house, picking up my credit card, and I’d hand the letter to my mother and ask about Lucy’s accusations. And then I’d know who was lying and who was telling the truth.

  CHAPTER 9

  I hopped off the T, walked across the street, through the Feldmans’ backyard, and then up the steps to the back door of our house. When I was a freshman in high school, my parents moved from our apartment on Dean Street to this much larger house off Washington Square. A Georgian colonial with floor-to-ceiling windows and a large winding staircase to the second story, the house was charming, old, and creaky. Too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, it was “an uncomfortable nightmare,” according to Logan. I didn’t know if he believed this or just no longer felt welcomed. When we moved, our parents got rid of his bed and bureau and when he came home, which he did less and less, he had to sleep in the guest room. Which now Ben had taken over for the summer.

  I let myself in with my key. I glanced at Ben’s running shoes that he’d placed next to the door on a perfectly folded sports section of the Boston Globe and then up at the kitchen counter. I wouldn’t find his empty oatmeal bowl in the sink with the other dirty breakfast dishes. Ben, so neat and organized, always put
his bowl in the dishwasher.

  “Are you sure?” Ben asked when I told him that my parents were fine about him living with us for the summer while he interned at the law firm. Originally, he planned to be with us only a few weeks. But then his sublet fell through and rent was so expensive, so I said, why not stay here? “Your parents are a lot more liberal about this kind of thing than mine.”

  My parents were liberal Democrats, to be sure, but I didn’t think liberalism was behind their decision to condone our living arrangement. Actually, I didn’t know what was behind it. All I knew was that on the days they were here, which weren’t often, they didn’t ask questions or even seem to notice that Ben woke every morning in my bed (and not in the guest room bed).

  “Hello?” I dropped my backpack and duffel bag on the kitchen table. The house was quiet and stuffy, the smell of onions and tomatoes from the sauce I’d made last night still hung in the air. I listened for my dad’s familiar voice and the carriage return on my mother’s typewriter. Nothing. I glanced at my watch—my train was leaving soon and I had to hurry. I pulled Lucy’s letter out of my backpack. The wood floor creaked under me as I peeked into my mother’s empty writing room and then walked to the living room.

  The heavy burgundy curtains were pulled across the floor-to-ceiling windows and it was so dark—my God, it was a bright, sunny day outside—that I barely saw my mother on the couch.

  “Clare?”

  This wasn’t the voice she normally used. I felt the back of my throat tingle and my cheeks sting. I squinted, my eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, and saw her sprawled on the couch against the window, papers spread around her.

  “Clare!”

  Anguish. That was what I heard in her thin, shaky voice. Not whining or complaining; not asking—not demanding—anything. For a moment I felt dizzy and disoriented and then suddenly I was eleven, when I’d first heard and seen her this way, and we were back in the hotel bathroom and she was on the checkered tiles in her Halston dress and black patent leather shoes, her head in the toilet. But that was then and this was now and yet I couldn’t remember why I was here. All I thought about was that I was scared and had to do something to help her.

  Outside, a siren shrieked and came so close that I squeezed my hands into fists and waited for it to crash through the window. Soon it faded. I reached for the light and turned it on. My mother moaned and covered her eyes with her arm. I saw my credit card on the antique wood coffee table in front of her and remembered that yes, that was why I was here. All I had to do was walk over, pick it up, and leave.

  Finally, I looked at her. Black smudges from where her mascara had run formed half-moons under her eyes. She wore no lipstick, no cover up, and red blotches peppered her cheeks and neck. Outside, behind the curtains and the closed windows, I heard the faint sound of birds chirping. Where was Dad?

  “It’s not worth it.” She buried her face in her hands. “I’ve got to end this.”

  End writing? Or her life? I’d always feared, even though I’d never articulated it until now, that she’d kill herself just as Whit had killed himself. Just as her grandfather had killed himself. I didn’t care how much she or Welleck and Warren insisted that a novel leads an independent life. Writers wrote about what they knew.

  She didn’t say these things to her fans or her students or news reporters. I was sure she didn’t do this to Logan, either; she never let him see this chaos. Yes, that was the perfect word. I wasn’t even sure Dad saw it in the same way I did.

  My breath seemed to catch in my throat and my body seized. I tried to move but couldn’t. I felt myself reaching back for something, anything, to steady myself. I saw glimpses of afternoons at Lucy Vincent Beach, walks through our neighborhood and dinners in the kitchen. Her hair was longer and fuller and her body plumper, more sensual. But I couldn’t see her face. Surely she was happier and less anxious back then. Because these problems, this crushing insecurity and fear, began with the success of Listen. Right?

  When my mother shifted and knocked a stack of papers off the couch, the top sheet fluttered toward me before resting on the rug. I was too far away to read it but recognized the letterhead. My mother’s publisher. Something had happened. Something had set her off.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Janice hated it,” she said. “She said that it didn’t feel like 1920 Europe. That she didn’t believe the voice. That the war scenes were unrealized.”

  My mother’s new novel. Why did she always write about war? But no way would I engage her in a conversation about what she should or shouldn’t write. Too many times I’d seen her defensive over this question. I shifted my feet and then something came over me and I slowly felt revived. Or maybe I just knew what to do. I put Lucy’s letter in my back pocket, walked behind the couch, and pulled the curtains. I unlatched the lock and lifted a window. Warm air and noises—birds, cars, dogs barking, the T from down the street—blew into the room. I breathed in the freshly cut grass and put my hand on the glass and felt the coolness travel up my fingers and into my wrist and forearm.

  “Ah, it’s too bright,” she moaned.

  But we were on the other side. I felt it. I turned from the window, put my credit card in my front pocket, squatted, and began picking up her manuscript; pages and pages, red lines drawn through entire paragraphs, thick red words in the margins. Not clear here. Where did this come from? Need to show this.

  “I’m never going to get another book published,” she said.

  “Don’t say that. You’re a great writer.”

  “Nothing will ever be as good as Listen, Before You Go.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” I dropped the stack on the coffee table. “Where’s Dad?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Have you eaten today?” I asked. She shook her head. “I’ll make you something and then I have to go.”

  “No, don’t leave me!”

  I frowned. “I’ll just be in the kitchen. I’m not leaving yet.” In the kitchen I filled the kettle and put it on the stove. I loaded a plate with sausage pieces, cheese, crackers, and a few digestive biscuits I found in the pantry. And then I waited for the water to boil.

  Was she safe to leave? I’d gotten fairly used to these fits of insecurity—they were happening more and more—but it had been a while since she’d scared me. I thought about three years ago when she cried for a week when the reviews of her second book, one after the other, had been so harsh. And last year when she couldn’t get out of bed after the Broadway people backed out of the Listen theater deal. But not since the awards ceremony in New York had she said, I’ve got to end this.

  I heard the lock in the back door turn and my dad walked in, his sturdy arms filled with grocery bags. His cheeks were rosy, but his hair, streaked with gray, swept every which way across his forehead and over the top of his collar. I should remind him that he needed a haircut. “Clare! What are you doing here?”

  I took the bags and set them on the counter. “I forgot my credit card and Mom called Ben, who came to the coffeehouse to tell me.”

  “So nice!” Dad beamed, the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes multiplying, and pulled a tea box from the grocery bag. “This’ll go with those dynamite sugar cookies you made. Which Ben and I fight over. Where’d you hide them?”

  “Dad?”

  He nodded toward my mother’s office. “She’s not working?”

  “She’s in the living room. She heard from Janice and it’s not good.”

  He frowned, dropped the tea on the counter, and walked past me. I poured the boiling water, dunked a tea bag, and set the cup on the tray with the food. Then I carried everything into the living room. My mother was at one end of the couch, curled into a fetal position, her bangs pulled off her forehead and exposing her gray roots. My dad was at the other end, elbows on his knees and the fingers of his right hand lost in his hair as he read Janice’s letter. When he looked up at me, face pleading, I felt a rush of anger. How could he let this go to her
editor before it was ready? Why did he allow her moods to run our lives?

  It was true. How many times had I walked in the door, nervous about how she’d be? Nervous about how I should be because of her and what I’d have to do to make her feel better? Her moods and state of mind had gotten worse with each book. I’m not good enough. What am I going to do? Help me, Clare! Why put us through this? Why didn’t Dad stop it? Well, I wouldn’t put up with it anymore.

  I dropped the tray on the table, the biscuits bouncing off the plate and the tea sloshing over the rim of the cup. Then I turned for the foyer and stomped up the stairs to my room. Sheets and blankets, piled on my bed, were just where I’d left them this morning. Clothes, towels, shoes, books, an empty Doritos bag, and a bowl of curdled milk and bloated Lucky Charms (the oats, not the stars and moons, because who would ever leave the candy?) covered the floor. Everything I planned to take on my trip was packed and waiting downstairs. Yet I crossed the room and opened my closet. Hanging in the back, behind my ski parka, was the dress I’d bought last month with Elise. I pulled it out.

  The dress was cherry red with spaghetti straps and a plunging neckline that rested low on my chest. It was made of soft, stretchy material that fit so snug against my hips and stomach it almost hurt to breathe when I wore it. Sexy and revealing, so unlike anything I’d ever owned, the dress had been a joke—a challenge by Elise—to simply try on. That I’d bought it was even harder to believe.

  I walked out into the hallway and stopped at the top of the stairs.

  “I have no idea what to do,” my mother said from below.

  “That’s not true.” My dad’s voice was slow and steady. “We’ll go through these comments, point by point. You said yourself that the plot was problematic.”