“I never said he shouldn’t die,” she said. “Only that he needed a reason to live.”
38
Katie
When I got back to the house on Sunday night, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the sound of laughter, the smell of take-out pizza, and the back-and-forth of Meredith Bradford and Tyler McNally, the two biggest know-it-alls on this planet, discussingInfinite Jest, voices carrying from the glowing kitchen.
“It’s not supposed to read like a book! That’s the whole point! It’s more of a narrative geometry. It’s a pyramid—a fractal, you know? Those stories, getting smaller and smaller, closer to nothing at the center. Closer to—”
“Oh, please. David was just like the rest of us: bickering with his agent, obsessed with his wife, excellent at tennis. And he revised that thing while watching a movie about a sheepdog on repeat, lest you convince yourself you need to be struck with divine inspiration to kill your own darlings.”
I tiptoed closer, careful not to make a sound, until I was just outside the kitchen. My back, pressed against the wall right beside the arch. I craned my neck ever so slightly.
They were sitting at the breakfast table, surrounded by scissors and highlighters and notepads and pens. Sheets of what must’ve been a completed manuscript—there was no other explanation for the sheer quantity of them—hung like paper chains: black-and-white slices of story taped crookedly to the refrigerator, the cabinetry, the hood of the stove. Index cards were arranged in haphazard columns on the hardwood; white rectangles scribbled on in green and red and blue.
Meredith held a loose page up to the light and frowned. “These proverbs... Can you live without them? I like Shanghai—reminds me of Nicole Mones’s debut. I appreciate the foreignness, the loneliness. It has a bit of travel memoir in its bones, and I agree, we shouldn’t disturb that. But the quotes, they’re overkill. We get it: You’ve been to China.”
Tyler sighed, then reached for the page. He looked as alive as I’d ever seen him. He looked like he had that first night at the diner, and then all the endless summer afternoons on our beach that followed. Like he had a purpose. Like all those broken parts of him weren’t so big and bad and irreversible after all.
“You’re right,” he said. “Fuck. I mean, yeah, it’s too much. But what else goes there? We need the pauses. They’re spacers. They give you a moment to synthesize. To exhale. I want that.”
I crept a half inch closer. Pinot slithered by. We locked eyes, but he meowed nothing. I exhaled and remained just out of view.
“I think,” Meredith said, “those moments are actually an opportunity for lightness. They could poke fun—could be a wink. Maybe they’re a chance for the author to show his hand, to not take himself so seriously. Think about what he’s been exposed to: what books, movies, songs. Even if we do age him up, he’s still a kid. Let him be contemporary. Let him play.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
She smiled. “Work on that this week. That, and gutting the whole river sequence. Those flashbacks too. Consolidate them. And then, we can do this again. Next weekend.”
He nodded, grinning, and I—very quietly—hightailed it up the stairs and into my room.
Will They or Won’t They
Back at the Inn, strange weekends behind them, Willa and Henry got back to work. Except now, something felt different. Something felt latent—felt possible and tangible and right there. There was only one question. Were either of them going to do anything about it? Was anyone, ever, going to make that first move?
39
Katie
On Monday morning, when I arrived in the kitchen, Tyler was already standing on the other side of the island, reaching for the coffee carafe. Across the room, on the breakfast table, his laptop was open, and last night’s dangling pages were now scattered in frantic stacks.
“Hey,” I said, pulling a mug off the shelf, then walking his way.
“Hey,” he said. His hair was mussed. His voice, hoarse. His shirt, wrinkled and the same as last night. He poured his coffee, then slid the pot my way. “Welcome back.”
I filled my cup. We were maybe a foot apart, and both barefoot. I curled my toes into the floorboard. “How, uh, how was your weekend?”
He stroked his jaw, then sort of half-looked at me. His five-o’clock shadow, scruffy and exhausted and too long and exactly right. “Weird. How about yours?”
“Same,” I said. “Really, really weird.”
He nodded, then took a long sip. I wanted, all of a sudden, to float those nine, ten, eleven inches toward him. To push the hair out of his face. To tell him to take the day off, to take a nap, to eat a real meal, to slow down. I wanted, all of a sudden, for him to tell me what he and Meredith were up to. Not because I hadn’t figured it out, but because I wanted to hear it from him. Because I likedthe way he told stories, and I liked the way it sounded when the stories he told were only for me.
But just when I was about to break whatever was left of my rules to ask, Meredith glided into the kitchen, a notebook in one hand and Pinot asleep in the other.
“Hi, you two. Are we ready to get back to the plot yet?”
Tyler and I both muttered slightly startled affirmations. She smirked, then set her pad on the marble. “I’d like for us all to go to dinner,” she said. “There’s this little Italian place in town. Fantastic courtyard. The veal marsala is excellent.”
