“What?” Merritt said, touching her face absent-mindedly.
“You looked pleased as punch.”
“I do?”
“You do. What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Merritt lied. She was immediately unsure of her reason for doing so. What did she have to hide? Whit had askedher to keep things quiet until they worked out the terms of their agreement with his lawyer brother-in-law, but surely that didn’t include her own mother.
Why didn’t she tell Kathleen? This was good news. A new job on top of her shifts at the bookstore. But more than that, she was bursting with hope—she was going to be a writer! Again! A ghostwriter, sure, but a writer nonetheless, and for a series of books that had meant so much to her. Surely this had to count as part of a dream, partly come true. Perhaps the curse was ending—perhaps she could track down the missing spark and shove it back into her chest. And then maybe this would be the beginning of her real life, her writing life, a life without Graydon or an MFA and all the better for it.
But it did feel, too, like she had done something crazy in agreeing to help this man she hardly knew on a stratospherically huge project. The question was whether it was Steve-Jobs-in-a-California-garage-with-a-dream crazy, or justcrazycrazy.
And of course, there was no guarantee that ghostwriting would lead to more writing—her own writing. But she had tried not to think about that. First, they talked about money, which always made her feel awkward, but less so now because this wasrealmoney. The advance alone would more than triple what she’d make at the bookshop in the same time frame. She could pay off her student loans from the failed MFA, and if she were a little braver, or a little more settled in Whelk Harbor for the long term, she could use it for an apartment or a duplex—but that was not something to worry about now. For now, she had a book to think about writing, and her agreement to do so had made Whit smile in a way she’d never seen him do before. He had kept smiling, actually, as they ate their dinner, even as Merritt needled him for more information onVanderpump Rules.
Now, staring at her mother, she imagined herself saying these things, and her face fell. Whatever joy Kathleen had seen wasleaving her body in real time. These days, Merritt knew better than to let herself be an optimist.
“Nothing’s happened,” Merritt said again. “I just had a nice day.”
That, at least, was true.
Annie Longacre hadnothad a nice day. Something had happened, Whit could tell, but she wouldn’t say what. Not on the car ride home, not as Whit plied her with snacks and helped her with homework, not over dinner.
Often he wondered who he had to blame for his daughter’s sporadic bouts of emotional unavailability: himself or Helen. Whereas Whit was often out of touch with his own feelings, Helen had been mysterious and, it seemed to him, intentionally reticent. Early in their relationship, it had frustrated him. The woman had thoughts and feelings—why wouldn’t she just share them? Just say what the problem was? But as with other early annoyances—Whit’s too-loud crunching, Helen’s tendency to sigh forcefully but over nothing—it became something to get used to. She had her private, sometimes inaccessible interior world, and, it seemed, so did their daughter.
At bedtime, Whit had read aloud from an old favorite—the trippy, delightfulDory Fantasmagory—and Annie had hardly listened. Normally she was in stitches, laughing away while Dory pretended to be a dog or at the novel’s every mention of a toilet monster, but tonight she lay passively in her bed. When Whit finished a chapter, he looked down to see her asleep already, and far worse, evidence of tears in her eyes.
He closed his own eyes for a moment, though the pink of Annie’s nightlight impeded his efforts at achieving a mind-clearing darkness. For all her personal reserve, Helen would have noticedthe tears. Helen would have been able to convince Annie to talk without grilling her.
Whit looked around the room. It was all his late wife’s doing, in partnership with their daughter. The walls were a lavender color, Annie’s choice, and he had resisted it, until Helen convinced him to “let her be little.” There were framed illustrations fromAnne of Green GablesandHeidiand the cover image fromEsperanza Rising, round paper lanterns hung from the ceiling, and the bed where he sat now was draped with a gauzy white canopy. A large dollhouse sat in one corner (Helen’s from childhood), and there was an old rocking horse that, to Whit’s knowledge, Annie had never played with, as well as a toy chest that had belonged to Whit’s sister Evie. The other furniture was all antique and utterly charming. Whit’s favorite piece was an old Larkin drop-front secretary desk that he and Helen had found together at an estate sale when Helen was pregnant. “We’ll give it to her,” she had said, “when she’s old enough to use it,” and they had.
Now, alongside many books, Annie had made it into a sort of shrine to her mother, dotted with things Helen had given Annie, as well as things Annie had taken for herself in the last year, with Whit’s permission. “Whatever you see that’s hers, it’s yours. She would want you to have it.”
Annie had loved that, but she had been remarkably reserved, gathering only things that seemed really special to her. Along the top two shelves, she’d placed a photograph of Helen, young and vibrant and passionate, in her student union shirt from college; a porcelain ring holder shaped like a swan stretching its neck; a dried hydrangea from Helen’s wedding bouquet; a Madame Alexander doll with one missing shoe; and an empty, quartz-colored perfume bottle with a crystal topper and a vivid pink pump.
Whit stood, walked over to the desk, and put his nose to the bottle, which smelled of roses and something somehow greenbeneath. His heart ached—a physical thing—not just for himself, and not for Helen, but for the little girl who had only these things left of her mother.
He looked back at her now, fast asleep as she clutched a stuffed Totoro doll atop her comforter. He walked over, lifted her eight-year-old frame in his arms, and used his hands, awkwardly, to pull down the blanket. As he set her back down, she stirred, her eyes fluttering a bit as she took him in.
“I love you, Annie girl,” he whispered. “More than ice cream.”
She smirked at their old joke, her eyes already half-closed again.
“I love you, too, Dad,” she said, dazed, before immediately dipping back into sleep.
Well, that wasn’t nothing.
The next morning, a Saturday, Merritt decided to go for a hike. She had let Kathleen force various articles of clothing on her, including hiking boots, a red flannel shirt, an army green puffy vest, and a navy puffy jacket on top. She felt like an extra inA River Runs Through It, a movie that, she reminded her mother, featured only male fishermen.
“First of all,” Kathleen said, adjusting Merritt’s collar at the door and forcing a full canteen of water into her hands, “you look adorable. And secondly, living here is all about dressing in layers. You never know when the wind will pick up or a rainstorm might come in, especially out in the woods and hills, where the weather gets wackier.”
Merritt rolled her eyes, good-naturedly.
“I’ll probably walk a mile or two at most, Mom. And I’m going to stay on the path.”
“That’s a good plan, novice that you are. But it’s always betterto be prepared. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”
It was not the time to say so, but Merritt was never not struck by her mother’s fortitude. When her father had died, Kathleen grieved, as anyone would. But she remained her same caring, capable, occasionally acerbic self. She laughed and read and worked a job she loved, and Merritt found herself thinking that people did, in fact, keep moving forward after great losses.
