The words were...
The story was...
It was mine. It was Katie’s and mine. Meredith had all of it. She had every word. I rifled through the pages—past Katie’s prologue and Arthur’s warning. Past my deal with Selma. Past our first drive out east. It was all there: The sex. The secrets. The narrative asides. Every single sentence, perfect. Exactly how I’d seen it. Exactly how I’d have written it down.
I looked up. Meredith was pale.
“How the fuck,” I said, “did you write this?”
“I read people, Tyler. I’m an author. I’m just like you. I—”
“No!” I threw the manuscript across the room. Paper flew everywhere. Meredith grimaced, and Pinot scurried under the chair. “Don’t fucking lie to me! This isn’t possible! You can’t have this! All the surveillance in the world, all the talent in the world, and you couldn’t have this! There’s no way!”
Meredith said nothing. Her mouth was clamped shut. I took a step closer.
“Tell me how you wrote this! Is there a microchip in my brain? Is that what happened? Did you fucking chip us? Did you spend a million dollars turning us into a science experiment, hoping that somehow, you could find my dad? Is that what you did, Meredith? Did you fucking chip us in our sleep?”
“Tyler,” she said.
“Just tell me the truth! Tell me how you wrote this! Tell me how you did it! Tell me what you are!”
Meredith gulped. The sea breeze whistled through the open window. The pages of the manuscript took flight, then settled softly onto the hardwood.
She looked at me, and in the last of the day’s dust-swirled sunbeams, I saw it for the first time: a flicker. I reached out to touch her, and my hand went right through her heart.
She was thin air.
85
Katie
Ingrid and I lay on the carpet of Mikey’s bedroom, heads almost touching, eyes fixed on the blank white ceiling. For what seemed like an eternity, it had been like this. Ingrid, talking. Me, soaking up every last word.
And then there was silence.
She’d run out of stories, and that was that.
That was all we’d ever get.
“Ingrid?” I said.
She turned to me, wiping the tears from her eyes. The sun had shifted, and it was evening now, warm and still.
“Do you maybe have a ball gown?”
86
Tyler
Meredith flung Katie’s final question to Ingrid onto a crisp sheet of paper, and I nearly wailed. Pinot stepped toward the typewriter, removed the page, and then used his tongue to set it on the desk to dry.
“This can’t be real,” I said for the dozenth time since I’d forced Meredith to sit down and type—to show me how this could possibly work. All as I’d tried to make sense of the cold nothingness of her body, the fact that she’d fucked my father, the fact that she was not entirely there.
She said nothing. She simply sat at her desk, her hands in position as I scoured the latest scene. I traced the words, filling in the blanks Meredith had left up to the reader on my own. Katie, growing up. Katie, grieving. Katie, getting on without me. It was exactly what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? Exactly what I’d begged her to do.
I walked to what remained of the plot wall and ran my fingers over the beats of our summers—both this one and the ones cut short eight and eleven years ago. And here, in this room, with my own wounds at my fingertips, I could no longer run from the truth.
Even without Carolyn’s ultimatum, I’d believed that leaving Katie was the right thing to do. And every day, these past eight years, I’d believed it a little more. I’d fallen asleep to the memory of her face, the glow of her bedroom, and the warmth of her laugh, convincing myself that she’d be all right. That, in time, she’d forget me, and maybe—if I was very lucky—I might forget her. And all this time, I’d blamed Carolyn because it made me powerless. Because it allowed me to believe that, somehow, I was a decent guy. Because it allowed me to believe that, in some parallel universe, I was the kind of man who stayed.
