The Inconceivable Life of Quinn

by Marianna Baer

  He squeezed her shoulders gently.

  “Don’t you understand what’s going on here?” he continued. “You heard these stories when you were little. You wanted them to be true. You wanted friends. And now, in a time of crisis, you’re going back to this . . . fantasy. It makes perfect sense, Quinn.”

  “So you won’t even talk about Meryl? And the similarities? How strange it all is? You won’t talk about it now, just like you never gave me that letter.”

  He briefly looked toward the ceiling. “Someday,” he said, meeting her eyes again, “when you’re better, you’ll understand. You’ll see that everything I’ve done has been to help you. Mom and I . . . we love you. And we need you here, Quinn, in this world. The real world.”

  QUINN

  Her parents wouldn’t let her stay on Southaven. She couldn’t go back to the house in Park Slope, either, for obvious reasons. Gabe wanted her to go to an inpatient program, to try to find an antipsychotic drug regimen. Luckily, her mother and Dr. Jacoby were against that idea, both because she shouldn’t take the drugs while pregnant and because they didn’t see anything dangerous or harmful about her fantasies.

  “She’s not suicidal or self-destructive in any way,” Dr. Jacoby said. “For the time being, she’s found shelter in this story. I’m not saying that we should pretend what she’s saying is real. But I don’t think we need to go further than regular appointments—over Skype, if necessary—along with close monitoring and communication. If something changes, we can reassess.”

  “But what about whoever did this to her?” Gabe said. “One of those other guys.”

  Marco’s DNA test had come back negative, just as Quinn thought it would. Her parents’ lawyer said they didn’t have enough evidence to demand DNA samples from Foley and the other guys who were at the party.

  “If that’s what happened, we let her come to it in her own time,” Dr. Jacoby said.

  In the end, Quinn and her mother ended up staying with Katherine’s friend Alex in Boston. Gabe stayed with Lydia in Brooklyn, and the two of them went to visit Quinn and Katherine on several weekends, traveling in the middle of the night to avoid being followed. Gabe wasn’t sure if anyone would be following them anymore. Now that Quinn wasn’t at the house, people didn’t gather in front any longer—just left the occasional snapshot or bouquet or letter. And without the people, there was no press, either. But, still . . . if the family had learned anything, it was that you could never be too careful.

  Every so often, Quinn thought about lying. All she’d have to do would be to tell her parents that she’d come to her senses. That, of course, the story of the Deeps was just a myth. Tell them that she once again believed that her pregnancy was a normal one and that she probably had been drugged that night in Maine and had hallucinated the whole swimming experience.

  She knew how much easier the lie would make everything. And sometimes she even told herself the lie so convincingly that she began to believe it. The logical explanations her dad had forced down her throat so many times began to seem as obvious as he said they were.

  But she always came back to her memory of the water spilling up the beach to meet her, of it pouring through the forest and churning at the bottom of the road, keeping those people from coming to the house. (Breaking that man’s leg!) That water had moved with purpose. With intention. Her father might believe that it was a storm surge, but she didn’t see how she ever could.

  And lying was what had started all of this to begin with. The lies she believed and the ones she told. Saying what people wanted to hear. Being who they wanted her to be. Wanting them to love her, even if the “Quinn” they loved was someone they had made up.

  One day, when she was reading a book that she’d taken from her grandmother’s boxes in Southaven, she came across a picture nestled between the pages, a picture she’d never seen before. It was in an envelope addressed to Meryl with a return address in Cincinnati. The picture was of Quinn’s father at maybe four or five. While she didn’t know for sure if the picture was taken before or after Meryl left him, she would have bet anything that it was after. He was standing in front of a slide at a playground, wearing pants that were too short and a striped top with an orange stain on it. His hands were together in front of his chest, one resting on top of the other, his elbows tight to his body. It was a strange pose that made him look insecure and nervous, but also defensive. Like he wanted to protect himself but wasn’t quite sure how. His mouth was set in a small, straight line, and his eyes were both sad and guarded.

  As she looked at it, Quinn remembered one of her dreams, one of the dreams in which she was her grandmother, at the bottom of the ocean. Her father had been there, too, and Meryl had said, “I forgive you.” And Quinn wondered now if Meryl had been forgiving him for not telling Quinn about the Deeps, for destroying that letter. And Quinn wondered if maybe she should forgive him. Because, after all, his mother had hurt him in the worst, most primal way, and that last time he saw her, she had been talking about something that had no relation to Gabe’s reality. Why would he have listened to her? Why would he have wanted to let her into his life again, let her into his daughter’s life, after what she had done to him? His lies and anger had damaged Quinn, that was true, but maybe it was also true that those lies had seemed like the only way to protect her.

  Maybe, in a way, his lies and anger had been proof of his love, not evidence against it.

  QUINN

  The bone-splitting, muscle-shredding pain had stopped, but now Quinn’s heart was bruising her ribs. Something wasn’t right. Nurses and doctors were crowded around the baby, the baby that had just been born, calling out words and phrases Quinn didn’t understand completely but understood well enough to know that they weren’t good. She’d done a water birth in the special tub, and the baby had finally swum out between her legs, and everything had seemed fine, but now . . . now it wasn’t.

  “Is he okay?” she kept asking. “What’s wrong? Is he okay?”

  Her mother squeezed her hand.

  The baby wasn’t breathing. That was the problem. He wasn’t breathing, and Quinn wasn’t breathing either. It couldn’t end like this. It couldn’t. It made no difference that the baby was being adopted. She had fought to keep him and had carried him with her for nine months and needed him to live. Please. Please.

  Then . . . “There, hear that?”

  A sound—weak, at first, then stronger.

  A tiny, life-filled cry.

  PETER VEGA

  March 1, Boston—Quinn Cutler, daughter of bestselling author and ex-congressional candidate Gabe Cutler, has given birth to a boy, according to an anonymous source at a hospital in Massachusetts. Secrecy was high around Miss Cutler’s whereabouts over the last few months and the location of the birth, due to the amount of attention her pregnancy received when it was revealed that she thought herself to be a pregnant virgin. Tabloids and bloggers had speculated that she might be hiding the father’s identity because it was someone in the family, but an accidental leak of a DNA test result proved that the father is not someone closely related to Miss Cutler. The baby is being adopted, and various people have expressed anger that “the next messiah” is being hidden away from the people who need him. Others have expressed faith that when the boy is older, he will “naturally fulfill his role as God’s second son.”

  Gabe Cutler did not respond to a request for comment, but in recent weeks did say, once again, that the family does not plan on revealing the identity of the baby’s father, as it is a private matter, but that his daughter is healthy, and that it was a normal pregnancy.

  Cutler reportedly received a seven-figure advance for his upcoming memoir Political Virgin: The Disillusionment and (Near) Destruction of an American Candidate.

  QUINN

  They were lying on the cold sand at Coney Island, alone except for some seagulls, a couple of joggers, and a few old women walking up and down the beach speaking Russian. It was April, and while spring had already made a gr
and entrance in the park, here on the water, winter was hanging on for as long as she could. The sky was a blue as clear and sharp as glass. There was almost no wind, just a gentle touch now and then. The ocean was whispering instead of roaring. A still morning sea . . .

  “So . . . what about Madagascar?” Jesse said. “Did we make a decision on that?”

  “I think it’s in the ‘possible’ column,” Quinn said. She was on her back, staring into the blue above. It comforted her that wherever her baby was, he saw the same sky. And that if he could see or hear an ocean, any ocean, it was the same body of water as the one she was listening to right now. The same body of water where his twin spirit lived. These things felt important to her.

  “Quinn?” Jesse said. “Did you hear me?”

  She turned her head. He had gotten up and was standing on a rock, arms out for balance, like he was about to fly.

  “No, sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”

  “I said they have those cool trees, on Madagascar. But it’s not important.” He jumped onto the sand. “So . . . I have an idea . . .”

  “About the trip?”

  “No. About him.” Jesse didn’t have to say who “he” was. They both knew that since Quinn gave birth six weeks ago, she’d barely stopped thinking about baby. The first weeks had been the worst, when her breasts ached and her milk came in, a constant physical reminder of the separation. She’d had to tell herself over and over that adoption had been the right choice, not just for her, but also for the baby, who wouldn’t have been safe if people knew where he was. She cried more than she’d cried during all the trauma of the pregnancy itself. Now, she mostly worried. About who his family was and where he lived and whether he was healthy. And about whether he’d feel a connection to the ocean, and whether he’d sense the Deeps and not understand.

  “I know you’re not allowed to get in touch with him,” Jesse continued. “So, I was thinking . . . It’s a great story, you know, the story of the Deeps. The whole myth. And I was thinking—what if you made a movie or wrote a book or just posted something online about it? Tell your story.”

  Jesse never pretended to Quinn that he one-hundred-percent believed in the Deeps. But he loved the possibility that it might be true, loved how that made the world a bigger place. And he respected her belief.

  “People have finally stopped gossiping about me,” Quinn said, sitting up, “and now you want me to publicly announce that I’m nuts?”

  “Of course not.” He sat down next to her again. “First of all, you’re not nuts. And anyway, you can use a pen name. And you can wait. Wait like five, ten years or whatever. Pretend it’s fiction. Change all the details about your family, so no one knows it’s you. The true part would be about your connection to the Deeps, and the myth.”

  Quinn wasn’t following his logic. “Why?”

  “You want him to know about it, right? But you’re not allowed to have any contact with him. Well, if you write a book, or if we make a movie, maybe he’ll see it. And your family isn’t the only family like this, right? There are other families you think might have lost the story, but not the connection to the ocean. Other girls who should know what’s going on. Some of them might read it and be like, “Holy shit! This is about me.’”

  Quinn remembered back to the first weeks she knew she was pregnant and her desperate search for a story that mirrored hers. She thought about her crushing disappointment at finding out her father had destroyed her grandmother’s letter . . .

  “I would like to find a way to share it with him,” she said. “And others, if there are any. But I don’t know if I want to tell everyone else.” Even if it weren’t written under her own name, and were written as fiction, she couldn’t stand the thought of people tearing it apart, making fun of it, calling it stupid. It felt too sacred to her to open up to that. She felt protective of the Deeps. “Also, I don’t know how I’d describe it. There’s no scientific explanation. I don’t have the right words.”

  “I could help you,” Jesse said, leaning his body into hers. “Some people think I’m a decent writer, you know.” He’d gotten an honorable mention in the screenplay contest, which guaranteed admission to the film program, and he was thrilled. So was Quinn.

  “I’ve heard,” she said, nudging him. “And maybe I will do it. Someday.”

  Maybe it was even her responsibility to bring the story back into the world.

  She would never do it under her own name—never wanted that kind of notoriety again. But, at the same time, she’d reached a point where she cared shockingly little what people thought about her. She’d worried so much about the fact that other people were dictating how she was going to be seen, that other people were writing “the story of Quinn” in their tabloids and blogs and comments and talk shows. But it had turned out that what mattered was the story she told herself. Discovering the Deeps had changed her, making her feel like there wasn’t anything “wrong” with her for the first time since she was a kid playing in the water at Holmes Cove. She wouldn’t have thought change that elemental was possible.

  “Is it my imagination,” Jesse said, “or is that bird staring at me?”

  The beach was almost exclusively populated by gulls, but sitting about two feet from Jesse was a pigeon, its small, round eyes looking right at him.

  “It’s probably the one from outside your window,” Quinn said, only sort of kidding.

  Jesse stared back at it. He stood up and began walking. The pigeon waddled after him. He walked faster. The pigeon flapped its wings and flew-walked to catch up.

  “Seriously?” Jesse said, breaking into a jog. “You get to be friends with the ocean, and I get a pigeon?”

  Quinn started laughing. And then laughed harder as Jesse began running faster, in big circles around her, and the pigeon followed, apparently determined not to lose him.

  “It’s an especially cute pigeon,” Quinn called out. “If that helps.”

  He shook his head. “No, that doesn’t help.”

  “How about a girl?” she said, standing up. “If a girl chased you, would that help?”

  “Hmm . . .” Jesse stopped. “It might.”

  Quinn didn’t even have to chase him, because he just stood there, waiting for her to reach him. Soon she was in front of him, on her tiptoes, hands on his shoulders, lips against his, body meeting and pressing into his warmth, everything melting together, like losing yourself in a midnight-black ocean, like swimming with stars . . .

  When they broke away, he was smiling. “That helped,” he said.

  Before they headed home, Quinn walked down to the water to say good-bye. It was washing up in low waves edged in white lace and left a wide swath of sand glistening silver when it slid back. She squatted down and reached out her hands so that the next wave washed over them. The touch of the water on her skin whispered things to her the same way the touch of Jesse’s lips on hers did. This ocean, and this boy . . . they knew her. And they loved her.

  She stood back up and stared out at the rippled surface stretching out to the horizon, the glittering surface of another world. So much life hidden underneath it. So many mysteries.

  It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  But after some time, a voice calls your name.

  The Deeps feel a pull from back where they came.

  They slip out to sea, you wave a farewell,

  From two different worlds, one story to tell.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Tsunami-size challenges arose while I was writing this novel. Many wonderful people kept me afloat, but two need special mention. Thank you to my amazing agent, Sara Crowe, for being my fierce supporter and champion, always. Her belief in me and in this book never faltered. And huge thanks to my dear friend Jandy Nelson: for her boundless enthusiasm and optimism—about Quinn’s story and about life in general; for her sage advice and astute feedback; and, most importantly, for helping me have the courage to tell the story I wanted to tell. Sara, Jandy—I adore yo
u!

  I’m thrilled to have worked with my brilliant editor (and friend) Maggie Lehrman, who understood exactly what I was trying to do and how to help me do it. Thank you, Maggie! And thank you to everyone at Abrams Books, especially Anne Heltzel, Alyssa Nassner, Chad Beckerman, Samantha Hoback, and Susan Van Metre. For the most sublime jacket illustration ever, thanks to Christopher Silas Neal. Thank you to everyone who generously gave me critical feedback, especially on early drafts when the waters were truly murky: Tim Wynne-Jones, Marie Rutkoski, Jill Santopolo, Eliot Schrefer, Elizabeth Bird, Kekla Magoon, and Kristin Daly Rens. Much appreciation to friends who helped me with tricky story issues: Stephanie Knowles, Samera Nasereddin, and Signy Peck. And enormous thanks to my uncle the Reverend Robert J. Ginn Jr., whose perspective was invaluable.

  The VCFA community cheered me on right from this project’s beginning. Special thanks to Jill, Katie Bayerl, Kate Hosford, and my Beverly Shores peeps, whose counsel, kindness, and humor I rely on heavily. My friends in Brooklyn didn’t forget about me when I disappeared into my writing cave for long stretches, so thanks to them for their loyalty and patience. Thank you to Alexandra Shor, my beloved best friend, for everything, always, and this time specifically for being my on-call OB/GYN. And thanks to her and Roz Zander for giving me a home on a magical island in Maine. To my father, Allan; my stepmother, Tamara; my sister, Rebecca; and my brothers Alexander and Henry: Thank you for making sure that I can’t rely on personal experience when writing about difficult family members.

  Finally, thank you to my mother, Lucy, for way too many things to fit on this page. Simply put, I wouldn’t be a writer without your love and support.

  Loved the book?