“Oh,” Merritt said, in a quiet church voice. She resisted the urge to wipe her eyes.
Whit gave her a kind, appreciative smile.
“Yeah,” he said, dropping his eyes. She wondered what he was thinking, and what it was like for him to have her here. “Let’s have a look around. You can have the desk. I’ll start with the bookshelves.”
“Okay,” she said. He turned to the nearest set of books, and she walked across the room, feeling like a trespasser.
But then he said, “Here,” and she saw on the shelf a small, table-top record player she hadn’t noticed before. In a few seconds, the room was filled with the sounds of Fleetwood Mac’sMiragealbum.
“Because you like Stevie Nicks,” he said, reminding her of Halloween. She smiled, and the two of them set to work. Merritt chose not to sit in Helen’s seat, showing the same respect she might show a Victorian novelist’s writing chair in the British Library.
The desk was a mess, which Merritt found refreshing. Helen’s laptop still sat on the leather-top, and around it were stacks of papers: copies of old publishing documents, a handwritten draft of a speech for the American Library Association, and many, many fan letters. Merritt got hung up on those for a time, reading from young people who asked questions about warlocks and elves, or who wanted help with school projects, or who just wanted Helen Albright Longacre to know that they, too, were going to be a writer someday. Merritt felt wistful for these kids who had probably felt the loss of their favorite author rather deeply, and she wondered whether Helen had gotten the chance to respond to any of them.
Then there was the sticky note: lime green, with a phrase written in Sharpie.
Check baby giant story??
This was the note Whit had found, two months before, that had driven him to the bookstore looking for her help. She was grateful for this note, for a multitude of reasons, though she hadn’t thought of it since. Now it caught her eye. Did it mean something? What was Helen going to check the story for? And was there a copy of that story somewhere—perhaps an early, pre-auction draft?
Crouching now, she started opening drawers, this imaginary draft on her mind, and was surprised to find them mostly vacant but for a half-empty package of pistachios, an old Luna Bar, a gray woolen glove, and a pair of scissors. In the central drawer, beneath which Helen’s legs would have sat, there were only paper clips and an unused Moleskine. Merritt glanced back at Whit, who was absorbed in a book, then padded her fingers around inside the drawers, searching blindly, idiotically, for the kind of hidden compartment you might see in an old film caper. No such luck.
“There’s nothing over here,” she said, and Whit nodded, unsurprised but unannoyed. “I did find this, though.”
She held the sticky note up between two fingers, and Whit laughed.
“A fateful note, in the end.”
“I still wish we knew what it meant,” she said.
He nodded again. “I think we just have to be okay not knowing.”
They paused for a moment, then Merritt turned back to the desk and patted the laptop.
“Anything on this?”
“Yes,” Whit said, with his eyes back on the open book. “The most organized, least informative stuff you can imagine. There are notes for each book, which I spent the early days reading—but they’re bare outlines, lists of possible names for characters and places and things, which is sort of fun but not super-helpful, and I think maybe an early explanation of the books’ magic system. I searched and searched for any information that seemed to gesture toward something in the final book, but I came up empty. You’re welcome to look if you want. I’m checking the books for notes between the pages.”
Merrittdidwant to look. But it felt like the kind of thing she’d want to do on her own.
“I’ll help with that first,” she said.
She lowered herself to sit on the rug and began pulling volumes from the shelf. Within a few minutes, she found a bookmark in one text, which was briefly exciting, but it was in a book on German philosophy, with nothing obviously relevant on the page. Two dozen books later, there was still nothing to show for her efforts. Whit flipped the Fleetwood Mac record, and on they worked, singing along to “Hold Me” in mumbly voices.
“Here’s something,” Whit said, holding up a book of fairy tales. “The page on Sleeping Beauty is dog-eared.”
“Oh.” Merritt watched Whit as he skimmed the page. Then he looked up to her with a face that was all sweetness and humility.
“So you were right about that. The allusion I thought she wouldn’t be making. You were right.”
Merritt wasn’t sure what to say.
“We don’t know that for certain” was what she settled on. There was something like vindication pulsing in her (shehadbeen right!) but it was faint, and in this moment it didn’t matter as much anymore. “She might have folded that corner twenty years ago.”
Whit smiled at her. “I suppose it’s not important. We’re writing the story now.”
Now Merritt really didn’t know what to say. She had been the proponent for alluding to Sleeping Beauty, but she had been treating the book like a puzzle then, with missing pieces to be filled in. These days, she wasn’t so sure that metaphor was apt. Whit seemed to think they might never find the right pieces, and it was their job to fill in the blanks in their own way. And maybe he was right. Helen might have intended to use any number of allusions in the final book, but Merritt and Whit would never be able to write the story in precisely her way. That way was lost now, and they were always going to be making something different, putting themselves into the story, designing the final fraction of the tale as an approximation at best.
Merritt thought of the semester she’d studied abroad in Italy, where she’d learned that restorers repairing ancient frescoes often left gaps in place rather than try to repaint what had been lost to memory. It was a way of honoring the old masters and acknowledging the power of passing time. She and Whit, however, had no such luxury. The end of the story, if Helen had ever finished conceiving it, was lost, and they had to splash some paint across the plaster and hope it worked out okay. There was no other way of doing it.
