“Never trust a writer who tells you a true story,” Alice said, remembering something her middle school language arts teacher used to say. “They’re too good at making things up.”
Duncan nodded but didn’t laugh, and Alice appreciated that he didn’t pretend her remark was funnier than it was. A false laugh was as bad as a lie. It was a small point. Combined with his disinterest in her stories, it was enough for her to trust him.
She handed him a flash drive with her most recent stories. It was shaped like a cat, black with pink ears. Duncan examined it, amused.
“I like cats,” Alice explained.
“This looks more like an alien cat,” he said.
“I’m not prejudiced against intergalactic felines.”
“That sounds like the plot of a Douglas Adams novel.”
“I’ll write the novel and you can bind it with a gilded cat on the cover. Not that you would know what it was about because you wouldn’t read it.” Alice wasn’t sure if she was still testing him. The sober expression on his face indicated that he was not amused.
“These stories are a little shorter than the first one I gave you. Can you bind something that’s only like twenty pages?”
“I’ll have to make some accommodations. As long as it’s one-sixteenth of an inch thick it should be fine with a thinner cover and thicker paper. I may have to put the colophon on the back instead of the spine.”
“You’re the artist,” Alice said.
“And you,” he said, bowing, “are the writer.”
Normally she flinched when anyone called her a writer. It felt not only inconsistent with her gift but overly bold, like calling yourself a chef rather than a cook, a visionary rather than a boss. Yet she found herself liking the way Duncan saidwriter.
Alice nodded before waving goodbye. When she got to the door, she paused.
“Just one more thing—” She motioned toward the flash drive. Now that she was making hardcover books for her clients, she’d given them the option of having their books bound in any color they’d like. Without fail, all seven had chosen the same color. While the clients were as different as their stories, no matter how cynical and disenchanted some were, or how bubbly and generic, they all wanted the same thing, an unironic, unapologetic kind of love. There was only one color for that type of love.
“This time,” she told Duncan, “I’d like them bound in red.”
9
A Visit to the Library
Alice sat at her desk and opened her computer, stretching exaggeratedly to wake her body up. It was time to get to work on Madeline’s story. Her fingers spanned the keyboard, ready to create. As she stared at the screen, the cursor blinking steadily, her mind went blank. Her body felt none of the tingling sensation that she had learned to recognize as the muse summoning her to the page. She stared at the screen, waiting for an image to appear in her mind’s eye. All she saw were vast swaths of emptiness. There was no color. There were no thoughts to grab on to. No images from which to milk a story, not even tumbleweeds.
Motion usually helped spur the muse, so she gave Agatha a quick pat and set out into the thick fog of morning. She wandered through her neighborhood past Victorian and Craftsman houses, beyond the courthouse to the beach, where she stopped to watch the skateboarders race up and down the cement ramps, wheels whooshing. Alice shut her eyes, trying to absorb the satisfying sound. Still nothing came to her, no crash of inspiration, no flurry of chills up her arms. Eventually her stomach rumbled in a way that seemed promising until it revealed itself to be hunger. She walked home to prepare breakfast. Perhaps a little sustenance would do the trick.
When she sat at her computer for the second time, her apartment was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator buzzing. Its steady hum taunted her. Her cluttered apartment taunted her. So she did something she almost never did—she cleaned. Organizing her father’s records and dusting her books led to washing the dishes led to mopping the floors led to sanitizing the bathroom. Still no image materialized. When the toxic smell of disinfectant was almost enough to make her faint, Alice flopped on to the couch and turned on the television. She flipped through the channels, but watching other people’s stories unfold reminded her of the one she couldn’t write. And why couldn’t she write it? She understood that Madeline sought forgiveness. Though it had to come from within her, Madeline needed Alice to guide her to a place where she could let go of her guilt. This was Alice’s role with all her clients, identifying the change required in them, then nudging them down a path of self-discovery. So what was different this time? Why didn’t an image present itself? With the others, the pattern had unfolded swiftly. As soon as Alice knew what her story needed to accomplish, she saw the vehicle for it. With the image in mind, a current coursed through her, an adrenaline that carried her through to the end of the draft. She’d come to recognize each of these stages, to embrace them as her process, only here she was, with a clear sense of what she wanted the story to say and no idea how to say it. Not yet.
Without second-guessing herself, Alice hopped into her car and drove toward the mountains. Along the 154, the fog had dissipated, giving Alice a clear view of the ocean below. The aquamarine waters blended into the horizon, making everything beyond the road a uniform blue, as though neither ocean nor sky existed, nor the city below, its beaches, the stories Alice was neglecting in favor of one particular old woman in the woods.
On Stagecoach Road, the unmarked road to Madeline’s house was more obvious than Alice remembered. Once she dipped down beneath the highway overpass, she found it easily. Her old car kicked up plumes of dirt as it bumped down the path, partially obscuring her vision of Madeline’s house ahead. While the surrounding forest was thick, there was never any doubt that the redwood house was waiting for her.
When Alice pulled up, Madeline was sitting on the front porch, wearing cargo pants that could be unzipped above the knee and a wide-brimmed hat. She held two canteens of water. Maybe it was the bright light of early afternoon, but she looked paler today, thinner too.
“Ready?” Madeline asked, offering Alice one of the canteens.
“How did you know I was going to come back today?”
Madeline shrugged. “Frankly, I’m surprised it took you this long to realize you had to come back.”
Alice smiled awkwardly. She took a long pull from the canteen. The water was so cold it stung her teeth.
“Also, your car is very loud. Are you sure the engine’s okay? I heard you as soon as you turned off Stagecoach.” Madeline motioned her around the side of the house where they walked past a stone patio. On the table, a carafe of lemonade and croissant sandwiches were laid out. Alice looked longingly at a croissant, realizing she’d skipped lunch. Madeline caught Alice staring and wove her arm through her guest’s.
“That’s our reward. First, we walk.”
