“Don’t look now,” he said, “but wearebeing watched.” He turned them so they faced the horizon. “That guy there, see him? Orion the mighty hunter. He shows himself only at this time of year.” With a dripping finger William traced the celestial giant’s limbs and sword, his arrow permanently aimed at the Bull.
“The world’s biggest Peeping Tom,” said Sam.
“Exactly. Think I could take him?”
Sam laughed. “Absolutely.”
“What if I get one of his stars for you?”William squinted and pointed. “Likethatone, that brightest one there. What if I pluck it from the sky and put it on your finger?” He reached for his robe and took from its pocket a black velvet box.
“What if,” he said, “we got married? Would you feel safe then?”
Sam stared at the box. William was moody, arrogant, prone to not taking responsibility for his actions. Paranoid about his study and his past. Vain about facial hair. Vituperative when angry. And Sam loved him. She loved him with all her heart.
“Please, Simone, open it,” said William.
Sam did. The ring was emerald cut, a skating rink on a platinum band. The diamond glimmered green from the fantastical lights above.
“What do you say?” William said. “Will you marry me, Simone?Come, madam wife, sit by my side and let the world slip/ We shall ne’er be younger.”
Sam put her palms on either side of his wet face and kissed him.
“Yes,” she said, “I saidyes I will Yes.”
The Rabbit
Oh no. No no no no no. He went and did the thing, held out the ultimate bait, and the dumb-@$$ b*tch went for it. First he ruined yet another chance I had to take a crack at Sam Vetiver, I was just about to put my trusty box cutter on her throat and tell her to drop that silly rock, and William popped out of his study like a d*ck-in-the-box and f*cked that up. And now this abomination, Sam Vetiver squealing like a pig and William saying “Well, now, Mrs. Corwyn, I like the sound of that,” and Sam Vetiver saying, “And it’s such abeautifulring!” This is so bad. Not only are they talking about getting another place in a more populated area, which will make everything harder than it already is, but they’ll be even more joined at the hip than they are now. I’ve got to finish this before they move. It’s not checkmate, but it’s definitely check, and as I go through the bushes back to the Rabbit Hole and seal myself in, I look at the big hunter man in the sky with his show-off sword and say, “You f*cker.”
Chapter 33
Harrington
The weight of the ring was still unfamiliar on Sam’s finger when she drove off the property later that week. Everything was strange: the height of her Jeep; bumping up the causeway and the logging track, which had taken William a full day to plow out. Just being off the island was surreal. Since their pre-Christmas shopping trip to Augusta, Sam hadn’t left once. She felt like an Amish girl on Rumspringa, marveling at her speed, travel plazas, other cars on the highway. And she kept checking her rearview to make sure nobody was following her. The Rabbit, for instance. Intent on driving her off the road.
But the farther from Maine Sam got, the more those unpleasant fantasies faded. Sam was heading to Harrington, William’s graduate alma mater, to teach a workshop for the MFA program. He’d been going to do it and then got offered a last-minute, irrefutably generous keynote opportunity at the San Diego Writers’ Conference when their headliner got food poisoning, so he’d passed the workshop to Sam.See if you can spot the ghost of Young William quoting e.e. cummings in the halls, he’d said, grinning, and although Sam didn’t want to see ghosts of any sort, she was excited about the opportunity to teach. It had been far too long.
By the time she drove onto campus, it was her life with William that seemed like a dream. Sam felt like herself again, slammed back into her author body. She stopped at the entrance to take a photo of the guildsign—HARRINGTON COLLEGE, est. 1824—and texted it to William, then navigated to the guest parking lot. How often had Sam done just this, parachuted into some unfamiliar college or university to give a lecture, run a workshop, teach? She applied lipstick, grabbed her bookbag, and stepped out of her Jeep, the heels of her leather boots gritting on pavement in a way she hadn’t heard in months. “Showtime,” she said to herself.
Harrington was pretty, a typical liberal arts school with stone buildings, big old trees, snow-covered quads bisected by icy paths. Sam located the English Department on the map the assistant had sent, and the graduate program director, Dr. Zahra Alaam, came to greet her. Sam just had time to slough her coat in Zahra’s office and use the bathroom before she was escorted to a room she would have recognized in her dreams: oak paneling, mullioned windows, the students sitting in a circle. Sam smiled at the aspiring writers, remembering what it was like to be one of them, a twentysomething slouching in her black leather blazer, reeking of cigarettes and trying to appear both ambitious and blasé—i.e., literary—yet having only one question in mind. She was therefore not surprised when, after Zahra introduced Sam, a student raised her hand and said, “How did you get published?”
After workshop, Zahra took Sam to the student union for quinoa bowls, which they brought to Zahra’s office. With the exception of a large red beanbag chair and the leg lamp fromA Christmas Story, the space was like all academic offices: small, cramped, overheated, crowded with books and papers. “That was so much fun,” said Sam, sitting in the non-beanbag chair across from Zahra’s desk, taking the lid off her eco-friendly bowl. “Thank you. I haven’t taught in months.”
“You are very welcome,” said Zahra. “They loved you. But your website says you teach a novel workshop?”
“Oh yes, I do. I’m just taking a little break. An intermission.”
Zahra smiled. She was an East Asian woman in her mid-fifties, Sam guessed, in leather pants and a purple cashmere sweater, a nose ring, peacock earrings Sam greatly coveted, her hands covered with the redtracery ofmehndi. Zahra’s debut novel,The Woman with Delicate Skin, had been a New York Times Notable Book, and she had published a few more since, including a memoir about linguistic diaspora. “It can’t be too serious a break,” Zahra said, patting her own hair. “You have a pen in your braid.”
Sam’s hand rose. “Ha! I always forget about that. Habit. I’ve been doing that since I was in myHarriet the Spydays.”
“Ah, Harriet. She was a great mentor to so many of us.”
“She was. Besides, you never know when you might need a pen.”
“That is true,” Zahra agreed. “And how is it going, your intermission?”
“It’s weird,” said Sam, and they both laughed. Sam thought about it as she speared roasted vegetables and tofu prepared by a stranger. Her last months on the island seemed as harsh and lovely as a Russian fairy tale, all snow and passion and wolves and the Rabbit.
“I did this crazy thing,” she confessed to Zahra. “I stepped out of my life in Boston without a second thought.”
