Willa was waiting for Whit at the banquette in their usual corner, wearing a thick turtleneck sweaterdress the color of burlap, with her dark hair in Bantu knots. Their writing group had gotten smaller and smaller over the years, until just the two of them remained.
“Hello, Whitacre,” she said, using a nickname he hated. His full name was Whitman, not Whitacre,obviously, he would say, because could you imagine? WhitacreLongacre?
He nodded at the barista, who knew him and would soon pop over with his usual drink. Whit squeezed in across from Willa.
“Hello, Wilhelmina,” he said, using her actual full name, which she also hated. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, lifting her fingers from her laptop to stretch them, interlocked, high above her head. “It’s torturous and bleak, and I feel as if I have never written anything good in my life and never will again. So, the usual.”
She smiled. Willa had won many awards for her literary fiction. She was both critically and financially more successful than Whit had ever been. But it was nice to know they both struggled, even if her struggles apparently ended with six-figure book deals and second editions bearing shiny medallions on their front covers while his struggles just... kept on.
Whit opened his laptop and logged in. But when he saw that the number of unread emails in his inbox was closer to his age than his shoe size, he reached up and closed it immediately. Willa laughed.
“Emails?”
“Emails,” Whit sighed, dragging his hand through his beard, “and emails and emails.”
“Helen’s people or yours?”
Whit laughed.
“Helen’s, of course.” Her agent, her editor, even superfans, whose devotion to Helen bordered on the obsessive and deranged.
“Did you take your email off your website yet?”
“I did, but the fans are still emailing. I’m worried it’s on Reddit or something.” Whit sighed.
Helen’s fans were very kind usually, and very sad. Most of them were still sending condolences, but some of them did a thing Whit found repellant: implicitly comparing their grief to his.
“I don’t usually mind. It’s just when they act like we’ve both experienced the same level of loss—as if reading some books is the same thing as really knowing someone.”
Whit heard the words coming out and was surprised by how clinical they sounded and felt. No breaking down today—that was good.
Willa nodded. She had heard him say this before.
Whit shrugged in acknowledgment. It was nice to be understood.
“And what do the publishing people want?”
Whit closed his eyes. “What else?”
“An ETA on the book?”
“Always the book.”
After she died, Helen had shocked everyone, including Whit, by “leaving” her book to him, if it could be called that, in her will. It was one of her last wishes (alongside the scholarship fund for the Foothills School) that Whit be the one to finish the fifth and final book in her famous series. Helen’s books were fantasies set in a complex, diverse world full of magic and palace intrigue. Whit was a mystery novelist; the closest thing to fantasy in his books was the high success rate of his detective. Helen’s books were about three half-magical children: a half-elf, a half-giant, and a half-fairy. The children in Whit’s books were usually murder victims.
That Whit would be the executor of Helen’s will had been agiven, and he’d expected its contents to be standard, unexciting. They’d agreed long ago to keep their wills and bank accounts separate, because they were practical and because things like copyrights could get complicated. But they’d also agreed that Helen would get all of Whit’s assets and vice versa. In any case, reading a will whose contents he already more or less knew had not been top of mind in the days after losing Helen.
Annie had wanted to return to school as soon as possible, and so Whit had been in the car after dropping her off, driving like an automaton following its programming. He’d been listening to Steely Dan on the satellite radio and thinking of nothing—he’d been thinking of nothing for what seemed like forever—and the call had startled him. It was Helen’s lawyer, asking him to stop by when he got the chance.
He drove straight there, and the details of the meeting were hazy now. He remembered being walked through his duties with the scholarship fund and a financial gift for the MFA program where they’d met. The annotated book wasn’t mentioned, having been a spur-of-the-moment idea from Helen’s hospital bed. And when the lawyer finally said the words “literary estate,” Whit had not expected much beyond details of royalties and who held what copyright. But there had been a bombshell. In the early days of Helen’s sickness, she had amended her publishing contract so that it said, in legalese, that the fifth book would be written by Helen if she were able, and that her estate would decide her successor if she were not.
She had not been able to complete the book, and Whit knew this, of course he did. But he knew it in the same way he’d known she wouldn’t be able to see Annie graduate, or to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. It had not been something he could fix, but then here came the will, where it was mentioned alongside the ring she’d left to Whit’s sister and the heirlooms she’d left to her cousins:I leave the completion of the fifth and final novel in theGreenwood Castle Saga to my husband, Whitman Howard Longacre, using whatever means he deems necessary and appropriate.
After that, it seemed to Whit that he had teleported from the office to the car, and he suddenly found himself back on the road home, pulling into a grassy alcove in the trees used mostly as a parking lot for hikers and mountain bikers. His clearest memory was the way his head fell to the steering wheel of its own accord, and how all of it—the grief of Helen’s absence, the crushing heaviness and total exhaustion of single parenting, and now this new thing—seemed to pull him downwards, like a million tiny weights eager to drag him through the floor of the car and into the soil below.
This was the Monumental Task that weighed on him, at all times and in all places. It was up to him to finish a beloved series that he had had no hand in writing; it was his job now to surprise, delight, and satisfy millions of readers, sticking an impossible-to-stick landing, for the sake of the fans, yes, but for Helen, too. Helen’s editor would send him overly enthusiastic, carefully worded emails asking about his “progress” and his “vision,” using words like “endgame.” Her agent was kinder, though she did continually offer to connect him with “the Tolkien people,” meaning whoever was left of the people who’d helped Christopher Tolkien with the completion of his father’s Middle-Earth books.
