one
Our mother was Judy Gale. The artist. Every time she left us behind with a friend or a nanny or (when friends and nannies couldn’t be found) bundled us off to Kansas, I’d tell my sister we were off on an adventure. Like the Pevensies fleeing wartime London or Harry taking the train to Hogwarts. Sometimes we were princesses in exile or orphans escaping cruel relatives. I dropped the orphans bit after our mother died. But lots of stories I told my little sister still began that way, with children on a trip into the magical unknown.
There was nothing magic about the English department office at Trinity College Dublin. The metal frame chairs and cinderblock walls were straight from my high school media center. The familiar smells of toner and floor cleaner overlaid the whiff of graduate student desperation in the air. Except for the glimpse of Georgian architecture through the windows and the bust of Yeats on a filing cabinet, I could almost be back in Kansas.
But this was Ireland, land of poets and fairies, witches and warriors, Jonathan Swift and Derek Mahon. I was finally moving on. Getting somewhere. Leaving my old self behind.
And maybe I was still telling myself stories to make me feel better.
I smiled hopefully at the gatekeeper behind the desk. A round woman, a cardigan draping her plump shoulders, green-framed glasses on a silver chain around her neck. “Hi. I’m here to see Dr.Eastwick?”
Her glasses flashed at me. “Sorry?”
“I have an appointment. Ten o’clock.” My flight from Newark had been delayed. I’d taken a cab straight from the Dublin airport so I wouldn’t be late.
“You’re American.”
“Yes.”
She tapped her keyboard. “Name?”
My heart raced. I cleared my throat. “Dorothy Gale.”
After my maternal grandmother. Dodo and Toto, Toni dubbed us when she was small. I’d never minded my old-fashioned name. It was unique, right? Mine. Nothing to be ashamed of. Until this past year, when Destiny Gayle, the titular character of a novel by critically acclaimed author Grayson Kettering, spent thirty-two weeks at the top of theNew York Timesand Amazon bestseller lists. It wasn’t just the similarity in our names. Destiny dressed like me, in vintage skirts and thrift shop sweaters. (“Her wardrobe reflected her mind,” the novel’s hero said on page 32, “only gently used, full of secondhand ideas and castoff morality.”) Plus, anyone who read his bio knew Grayson Kettering was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Kansas. And anyone who did a little digging—the features writer atNew Yorkmagazine, say, or a book reviewer at theWashington Postor the host ofEntertainment Tonight—could discover he had a two-year relationship with a graduate student there who bore a strong resemblance to brown-haired, cow-eyed Destiny.
Casting had recently started onDestiny Gayle, the movie.Fortified by a box of tissues and a cup of tea, I’d watched theETinterview from the couch in my aunt’s living room.
“Was she the real-life inspiration for your character?” the host had asked Gray.
On television, Gray looked exactly like his author photo, silver threading his thick hair, the top two buttons of his shirt undone. The camera and the interviewer had loved him. An ache stabbed my chest.
I leaned forward to catch his reply.
“A case of art imitating life?” His dark, deep-set eyes twinkled. “I suppose the comparison is inevitable, if somewhat reductive. You might as well say, life imitates art.”
“What about the relationship Destiny has with her professor?” the host asked.
My hand twitched, sloshing hot tea on my Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas.
“A professor at the college,” Gray corrected. “Technically, she’s not enrolled in any of his classes. He has no real power over her. She exerts her power—her will, her desires—over him.”
I listened, stunned. The host raised an expertly threaded eyebrow. “Are you saying their relationship is appropriate?”
“It’s certainly unwise,” Gray admitted ruefully. Of course he had to say thatnow. Before, he said I was his soul mate. He told me... Well. Not that he loved me. Not in so many words. But he said he couldn’t imagine his life without me.
“But let’s not strip young Destiny of her agency,” he told the interviewer. “She pursues an older man, her mentor, as willfully and aggressively as he imagines he is pursuing her.” He looked into the camera with disarming directness. “You could argue that he is the one being exploited in the relationship. It’s not until he’s free of her stifling domesticity that he can truly express himself.”
“Youjerk,” I yelled at my aunt’s TV. Not that anyone heardme. Not the interviewer. Not my thesis advisor at KU. Certainly not Gray. Aside from that one horrible scene in his office, I’d never been able to tell him... to tell him... Anyway, I blamed myself. Gray had never coerced me into anything. Ilovedhim. Everything he’d done, I’d let him do. Everything he’d written... Well, it must be partly true, right? He was Grayson Kettering, one of the modern masters of autobiographical fiction.
Aunt Em paused on her way into the kitchen. “Turn that off. Nobody cares about that garbage.”
My heart burned. I rubbed at the damp spot spreading on Pooh’s face. “Only four million viewers and the entire English department.”
“Nobody that matters,” Em amended. Which pretty much summed up her opinion of my entire postgraduate education. Her eyes narrowed in what might have been concern. “You should call the bookstore about that job. You can’t sit around drinking tea in your pajamas forever.”
“At least I’m not guzzling wine under a bridge.”
My aunt looked disapproving. Basically, her default expression. “You need to get out more. Go somewhere. Do something.”
