There was a pause, during which Whit began scrubbing, and then:
“So, listen.”
Here it was.
“I’m just going to cut to the chase. The publisher is getting antsy. Every day we’re fielding questions about when the new book is coming out, yada yada. And they’re prepared to put a rush on things, once the draft is completed, but—well, Whit, the problem is that it’snotcompleted. Right?”
Whit did not answer. The tomato stain did not budge.
“I mean, we just haven’t made muchprogress, have we? Realistically?”
Progress. We.
“So anyway, here’s the unpleasant part. They’re having the lawyers look into the contract. Helen’s contract. The idea is that we’re in danger of breaching the agreed-upon terms.”
Whit stilled. He waited.
“They’re saying,” Joan explained, her voice growing lower and slower and losing all of its brashness, “well, they’re basically saying that they canlegallyget someone else to finish the book. If you, um, don’t.”
Something small unspooled within him. A fleeting hope. Was this a way out? But no.No.How could he even want that? Helen had laid this task at his feet, and he’d be damned if he would fail to pick it up and carry it all the way through. He didn’t understand it, but then there had been a lot about Helen he’d never understood, and still she had trusted him. She had seen something in him (who knew what?) and trusted that he could do this, and to let her down in this favor, the final favor he’d ever do for her, wouldn’t just mean failing her scores and scores of fans; it wouldn’t even just mean failing Helen. It would be like giving up on their memory, their commitment to and belief in each other. He had to do this for both of them.
“They can’t do that.”
Joan waited.
“I mean, they can’t do that to Helen. They wouldn’t do that to her, would they?”
“Well, Whit, I really think they would. If it were any other book... But I’m guessing, and this is just a guess, I’m guessing they’ll try to leverage the drop-dead deadline—the if-everything-goes-wrong one that Helen agreed to—and they’ll use it against you. If you aren’t finished by then, you—Helen’s estate—and, by proxy, Helen will have technically broken the deal, freeing them up considerably.”
Whit wondered if Joan even heard herself.Drop dead. If everything goes wrong.Helen did. Everything had. A sick part of him wanted to laugh at Joan before hanging up dramatically—Drop dead yourself, you monster!
But Joan wasn’t a monster, and Whit didn’t have the energy to do anything dramatically. He took a deep breath. Maybe this was a bluff. Whit had met Joan in person a few times, at various dinners and readings and conferences. She had always seemedlike the embodiment of kindness and wisdom. Like a coach who knew that the way to get your best out of you was through gentle encouragement and a light but steady hand. He could see her now, with her ear-length black hair and the spectacular mole on her left cheek, cradling the phone with her shoulder while typing away on her computer at his imagined version of an agent’s desk, crossing her fingers and hoping her gambit paid off. If coddling and encouraging and all but wrapping Whit in a warm blanket hadn’t worked, maybe she was shifting to tough love and fearmongering.
The chances of that seemed low. Whit knew she was right: if it were any other book, things would probably look different. But this book was a guaranteed cash cow. Even if the final product was garbage, even if Whit just copied and pasted one of the more popular fanfics into the manuscript, the books would fly off the shelves and into the hands of costumed people at midnight parties. Delivery trucks weighted down solely by boxes of these books would encircle the globe. For all the publisher cared, the book didn’t have to be good. It just had to be finished. It just had to exist.
“So,” Whit said, brush discarded as he attacked the sauce stain with his fingernail, “when exactly isthatdeadline?”
He could hear Joan sigh into the mouthpiece.
“Oh, Whit. They want a draft by January.”
They let a pause settle over them.
January. So, four months. Four months to fulfill the last thing Helen had asked of him. God, he felt so ashamed when he thought of her, of how she had entrusted her magnum opus to him, placing it in his deeply incapable hands. He was not what she had imagined him to be, and that knowledge hung on him now like a suit of rusting armor.
Whit had four months to achieve what he hadn’t been able to do over the last twelve. The thought of navigating these treacherous waters—filled with sharkishly rabid fans and a decade’s worth of lore, backstories, and who knew how many little Easter eggs just waiting to pay off in some flashy way—had overwhelmed him from the moment he’d learned of Helen’s plans for him. Now he felt virtually immobilized.
He gave the burnt spaghetti sauce one final scrape, and up it popped, like the tab on a can of soda.
“Well then,” he said, in a confident voice that was utterly fake, “I guess I’ll have it for you in January.”
When he hung up the phone, Whit leaned on the stove again, feeling almost dizzy. Then he turned around and lowered himself to the floor, his back against the oven door, his legs splayed across the cold stone tile.
The Task was monumental. He needed help.
The fireplace at Goodenough Books was a fixture of the store, and except during the hottest parts of the summer, Diana, the owner, had told Merritt, it was to always be crackling with a fire made with fragrant wood from nearby forests. It burned now, and Merritt sat before it on a lumpy red leather armchair, drinking her tea and willing the bell over the door to stay silent. Huong was in the back, breaking down cardboard boxes for the recycling, and Merritt only barely had the energy to worry that her coworker would come out and see her still here in this spot, thinking and staring at the lava-like embers beneath a glowing block of pine.
Graydon Lyons had done what the two of them had joked about a year ago in his lake house. He had written a book about them.Serious Games, which sounded too much likeDangerous LiaisonsorFatal Attraction, though no one at NPR or in the interviews she’d read seemed to care. All of them, too, seemed to buy his repeated statement that it wasn’t autobiographical.Anyresemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.Sure.
