The Shadow Writer

by Maxwell, Eliza

  Laura rolls her eyes and dismisses him with a wave. He pulls his office door shut behind him.

  “You’re working here? As David’s TA? What a small world.” The expression on Laura’s face throws Graye off-balance. She appears delighted.

  People tend to look through Graye. She’s come to terms with that.

  There was a time, perhaps, when she hoped things might be different. Before her first lecture she could hardly hold a thought in her head. Seventy-eight pairs of eyes, all focused on her.

  With clammy palms and a racing pulse, she’d taken up her position at the front of the lecture hall.

  It’s not a memory Graye dwells on often. It never fails to bring a flush of embarrassment to her cheeks and a hot lump of something hard to her stomach.

  The students who were polite enough to look up stared at her through glazed eyes, chins on their hands, showing no reaction at all. The rest focused on their phones, the furious working of their thumbs across the small screens the only indication of life.

  Not being noticed was nothing new for her. But being invisible in front of a room full of people, her carefully chosen words falling on deaf ears, left her feeling foolish for expecting anything else.

  Yet Laura’s attention doesn’t waver.

  The tremble in Graye’s hands lessens. “I just started a few weeks ago.”

  “David never tells me anything. What happened to Zoe?”

  Zoe Kendrick was Dr. West’s teaching assistant before Graye.

  “I’m not sure, exactly,” Graye says. “Some sort of family emergency.”

  She’d been too pleased at the job opportunity to worry much about what had taken Zoe Kendrick away from Cornell, but the look of concern that passes over Laura’s face makes her wish she had more information to share.

  “I hope everything’s all right,” Laura murmurs. “Zoe’s a sweet girl.”

  The door to Dr. West’s office swings open and he joins them. Graye doesn’t imagine the slight hesitation or the twitch of his lips before he leans in and kisses his wife on the cheek.

  “This is a new look.”

  The clouds on Laura’s face pass and she gives him a sunny smile. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you over lunch. I think it’s rather chic,” Laura says, winking at Graye.

  One of his eyebrows rises slowly, but Laura only laughs.

  “At least Isaac knows you,” Dr. West says. “Anyone else would think I was bringing a student along for a business lunch.”

  Her laughter dies. “Business?”

  He checks the time on his phone before tucking it into his pocket without meeting his wife’s eyes.

  “David, you didn’t tell me we were meeting your editor.”

  The amusement is gone from Laura’s voice, and Graye feels a sudden urge to look busy.

  “Didn’t I?”

  “No. You most definitely didn’t.”

  “Must have slipped my mind.” He adjusts his tie and steps toward the open door leading into the hallway. “We should go. I don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  Laura’s lips are parted slightly, one hand cocked on her hip as she stares at him.

  “Two minutes,” she says. She holds up a pair of fingers, then turns her back to him, facing Graye again. Her eyes brighten. “I have the best idea. Why don’t you join us for dinner tonight? I’ll make pasta and we’ll have wine and we can get to know each other a little better.”

  Graye’s expression freezes. Her first instinct would normally be to fumble for an excuse, but Laura’s sincerity is a beacon on a foggy shore.

  “Are you inviting my TA to dinner?” Dr. West demands from the doorway.

  Laura ignores him. “Please say you’ll come.”

  “Do you think that’s appropriate?” he asks.

  “I don’t want to put you on the spot,” Laura says, continuing as if he hasn’t spoken. “If you have plans already, I understand—”

  “Laura—”

  “I’d love to,” Graye blurts out.

  The smile that spreads across Laura’s face is equal to the irritation on Dr. West’s.

  “Seven o’clock,” Laura says. “I’ll text you the address.”

  She turns and walks toward her husband, slips an arm into his. It’s his turn to stare.

  “Come on then,” she says. “You don’t want to keep Isaac waiting, do you?”

  Graye listens to their footsteps recede down the corridor.

  Little has changed, yet Graye’s edges have smoothed. She’s more in control.

  If someone like Laura West can see her . . . truly see her, then she must be real.

  4

  GRAYE

  Crestview House is always too cold. The residents and nursing staff stay bundled in sweaters regardless of the season.

  Maybe the lower temperature keeps the smell of urine and sickness in check, though it can’t eliminate it entirely.

  Graye suspects nothing can.

  She signs the visitors log, and the receptionist passes her a neon-green sticker to affix to her shirt. Proof that Graye isn’t some rogue criminal, there to ravish old ladies and steal pieces from the jigsaw puzzles.

  The routine never varies, not once in six years. The only things that change are the faces of the residents, replaced as death claims them one at a time, making room for a relatively younger generation.

  There’s a strange comfort in that. Graye appreciates things that are clear about their purpose. It’s all there in the name.

  Crestview House. A house for people shuffling toward the crest of their lives, eyes pointed toward the view from the top. A moment’s pause, then they’ll shuffle forward again, right over the edge.

  And someone else will be waiting behind them.

  The same end is coming for everyone. Yet some people, younger people, avert their eyes and fill their days with responsibilities and appointments and unexamined expectations that things will be different for them.

  In their own way, the elderly of Crestview House are as invisible as Graye. Most of them seem surprised by this. Their bewilderment at finding themselves in such a state, with no memory of how they came to be there, its own form of illness.

  Maybe that’s what keeps her coming back. Everyone deserves to be acknowledged. The people at Crestview see her, and she sees them.

  Ms. Ellis is in the common room playing cards with several other gray-haired denizens.

  “Hello, Graye,” she’s greeted by a few of them. “Nice to see you.”

  Eileen Ellis glances up from her cards. “We need to finish this hand before you go distracting everyone with that mindless drivel.”

  She tosses a card into the center of the table, and the players around her follow suit.

  “I’ll be glad when you finish with this one.” Age hasn’t quieted Ms. Ellis’s complaints. “Why Doris insisted on a bodice ripper is beyond me. You’d think at her age she’d have better things to occupy her mind.”

  “I heard that,” comes a reedy voice from the next table.

  “So what if you did?” Ms. Ellis calls over her shoulder.

  “It’s not so bad, is it?” Graye asks. “Not that different from your mystery novels, really.”

  “Just with lots of sex thrown in as a bonus,” Doris adds.

  Ms. Ellis rolls her eyes.

  “It certainly draws a crowd.” Graye glances around the room. Most of the seats are filled, and more residents, a surprisingly equal mixture of both women and men, are making their way through the door. “Faulkner didn’t pull in numbers like this.”

  “Pooh, Faulkner,” Doris says. “With his run-on sentences and stories you have to work to keep up with. Nobody has time for that.”

  Graye can’t help but smile. She once had a particularly fussy American lit professor with a Faulkner obsession. She can picture his face turning an apoplectic shade of purple at the easy dismissal of the literary giant.

  Graye takes a seat on the stool in the corner and pulls a battered library copy of Duches
s by Twilight from her bag. For the next forty-five minutes, Graye, or more accurately, the inwardly tormented and outwardly well-endowed Duke of Cheshire, holds the rapt attention of the audience of septuagenarians.

  When Graye comes to the end of a chapter brimming with sexual tension between the troubled duke and his reluctant fiancée’s paid companion, she places her bookmark between the pages.

  The move elicits groans from the crowd, but Graye resists their pleas to continue.

  “Same time on Thursday,” she says.

  As the audience pulls themselves to their feet and disperses, Graye stuffs the book into her bag and walks back to Ms. Ellis’s side.

  “A total waste of time,” the old woman grumbles as Graye lends her an arm to help her up. “Like we have any to spare. Ridiculous.”

  Graye raises a brow but doesn’t point out that Ms. Ellis gasped along with everyone else when Clarissa, the feisty companion, pushed the entitled duke into the fountain at Vauxhall Gardens.

  “Maybe you’ll win the drawing to choose the next book,” Graye says.

  Ms. Ellis snorts. “Ha. Not likely with every Tom, Dick, and Doris throwing their name in the hat.”

  It’s true. The twice-weekly sessions have become a popular attraction at Crestview, much to Ms. Ellis’s chagrin. But complaining is part of Eileen Ellis’s makeup, a trait that runs straight to her core.

  Graye has learned to sift through her grievances and find the ones with meat on their bones.

  “Have you had any more trouble with Nurse Jeffries?” Graye asks as she walks Ms. Ellis back to her room.

  The other woman’s lined face brightens.

  “No,” she whispers, then leans in closer. “And I think there’s something going on there. She didn’t show up for her night shifts this week, and the other nurses were clucking about it. Hedda, who’s always been nosy, you know, asked if Nurse Jeffries was coming back, but of course, they don’t tell us anything.”

  Ms. Ellis shakes her head. “I hate to get my hopes up, but I’m beginning to think she’s quit. Or been fired.”

  “That would be a relief.”

  Graye says nothing more. Ms. Ellis is excitable and if Graye stokes that flame of indignation, the frail old thing will get so worked up she won’t be able to rest.

  “I’ve been invited to dinner tonight,” Graye says, veering the subject to one designed to distract.

  “Dinner? As in a date?” Ms. Ellis peers closely at her.

  “No, not a date.”

  “Well, I don’t see why not. You’d be an attractive girl if you’d make an effort. I swear, it’s like you’re trying not to be noticed.”

  It’s a refrain Graye has heard many times. She doesn’t bother to explain, again, that spending a large portion of your formative years in the care of nuns doesn’t prepare you for the complexities of decorating yourself.

  An image of Laura floats up. The classic simplicity of her beauty, so far removed from Graye’s experience, may as well be another language. Nothing about Laura sparkled, yet everything shone with a warm and effortless light.

  “It amazes me, sometimes, that you and Natalie were such good friends. My great-niece had a shallow streak, you know.”

  Natalie Ellis was Graye’s roommate during her freshman year at Cornell. She vividly recalls the sense of reckless energy that followed Natalie into a room, then lingered even after she’d gone.

  They don’t speak of her often, the doomed girl whose death brought them together.

  Married a jaw-dropping six times, Ms. Ellis reverted to her maiden name after divorcing her first husband. (“Fewer complications when you trade them in, dear.”) She never had children of her own, a choice she says she mostly doesn’t regret, but she was extremely fond of her great-niece.

  Natalie had come to upstate New York at her great-aunt’s urging, Eileen willing to pay for her education to have her nearby.

  At the funeral, her voice hollowed by loss, Ms. Ellis admitted to Graye that she’d always seen her younger self in Natalie. “Never satisfied, that girl. Always looking for a bigger thrill.”

  Heroin had proved one thrill too many.

  Graye first visited Ms. Ellis at Crestview on a desperate whim a month after Natalie was buried. She couldn’t settle into the quiet Natalie’s loss left behind.

  “I suppose you saw something of your sister in her,” Ms. Ellis muses. “Both daredevils, from what you’ve said.”

  Graye smiles, touched that Ms. Ellis remembers the stories she’s shared over the years. That the details are mostly fiction doesn’t matter. To Eileen Ellis, they’re real. And to Graye, they’re more than real. When she’s spinning stories, the boundary between truth and lies fades, and she can paint the past in any colors she chooses. It’s the best, the only, form of therapy that helps.

  “Alex and Natalie were a lot alike,” Graye agrees.

  Eileen Ellis is eighty-four years old. At some point, Graye knows, she’ll come to sign the visitors log, and one of the nurses will pull her aside to break the bad news with practiced and sympathetic phrases.

  One thing Graye has learned, family doesn’t always fit neatly into a predetermined shape. Sometimes, family is no more and no less than what you make it.

  5

  GRAYE

  “You’re leaving?”

  Graye’s hand stalls as she lifts the wine glass to her lips.

  “Not right away,” Laura says. “At least, not David. He’ll finish the semester before joining me.”

  Graye’s head is spinning. Whether from the unexpected news or the generous amount of wine the Wests have poured, she isn’t sure.

  “You’re moving to Texas?” Graye tries to imagine the couple, so urbane in their red-brick townhouse with jazz playing softly in the background, in Texas.

  Laura smiles like she knows what Graye is thinking but finds it all a grand adventure.

  “Not necessarily the Texas you might be picturing,” she says. “There’s a tiny, nearly forgotten island on the Gulf Coast called Port Mary. Not a tumbleweed in sight.”

  Laura stands and leans over the table to refill Graye’s wine glass.

  “I spent summers there with my grandmother as a kid. Three magical months every year.”

  Her voice grows soft, her smile sad and nostalgic. “She passed away last year.”

  “I’m sorry,” Graye says softly.

  Laura tilts her head and studies Graye. “Thank you. You sound like you mean that. I loved her very much.”

  Graye has nothing except broken impressions of her own grandmother. A hoarse voice that frightened her, the overpowering smell of thin, cheap cigarettes. Screaming matches between her and Graye’s mother.

  Mother. She can go months at a time without thinking about her, then from nowhere, an image will flicker into focus, catching her off guard, always.

  In life, Graye’s mother was difficult at best. In death, she’s a wound that won’t heal.

  Gracie’s, she corrects. Not her mother. Gracie’s mother. Gracie’s grandmother. They’re both gone now. They all are.

  “She left us her old carriage house by the beach,” Laura goes on. “It’s been in the family forever, along with the main house that was converted into a hotel almost seventy years ago.”

  “She left you her house by the beach, you mean,” David adds. The slur in his voice has become more pronounced as the evening has progressed.

  Laura’s gaze flickers briefly toward her husband. Her patience with him is admirable, but Graye can see it’s wearing thin.

  Dr. West answered the door with a drink in his hand and hasn’t slowed down since.

  “The hotel is self-sufficient and runs fine without me, but the carriage house has been vacant since my grandmother passed. With David’s teaching post coming to an end, there’s no better time. I’m going to head down next week to get it set up. Once the semester is through, I’ll be ready and David won’t have to be bothered with the details.”

  “What did I ever do to
deserve such a practical wife?”

  Laura turns her head slowly to stare at him as he lounges in his chair, studying the ice in his glass.

  “I really don’t know,” she says.

  A dry smirk forms on his lips.

  “Enough about us, though.” Laura turns her attention back to Graye. “Tell me about yourself. Is your master’s nearly complete?”

  “Soon.”

  “Creative writing, you said? Any big plans for after?”

  “I . . . I’m not exactly sure yet.”

  “Miss Templeton is surprisingly circumspect when it comes to her own ambitions,” Dr. West states with an emphasis on his consonants. “She went through the entire interview process without once uttering the words aspiring writer. It’s the reason I chose her.”

  “Really?” Laura says. “A grad student in creative writing who’s not working on the next great American novel? How very . . . extraordinary.”

  “You and my wife have that in common, Graye . . . if nothing else. She’s not a novelist either.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” Laura says in a light but distinctly chilly voice. “One artistic temperament in the house is enough. Two, and there might be no survivors.”

  “My dearest wife is too humble,” Dr. West says to Graye with a wave of his bourbon. “She may never have written a word of prose, but her opinion holds an inordinate amount of sway. She could part seas on a recommendation alone.”

  Laura’s face has grown guarded.

  “And thank goodness for that.” Her words are no less lethal for the softness of their delivery. “Otherwise, where would we be?”

  Dr. West raises his glass in mock salute, then drains it with a grimace.

  “Please excuse me, ladies.” He struggles to stand without toppling out of the chair. “As stimulating as the company is, duty calls.”

  He sets the glass on the table with a bang that makes Graye flinch, and gives his wife a long look. Laura’s eyes meet his in a silent challenge, a challenge he turns and walks away from without a glance in their guest’s direction.

  “I apologize, Graye,” Laura says once David is gone.

  Graye shakes her head and waves off the apology, though the poison-tipped words the couple throw at each other leave her unsettled.