Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  She was working her way through her third glass of Chardonnay and had almost gone through her third hundred-dollar authorization on her credit card when she heard someone say her name.

  “Colleen?”

  She pressed the Play button on the slot machine, turned her head, and tilted her dark glasses up so she could get a good look at this blogger or reviewer or whatever he was. He was young—maybe in his early twenties, but to be fair anyone under thirty these days looked like a child to her—with an awful lot of hair, thick and frizzy, framing his round, bespectacled pale face. He looked soft and doughy, like he’d never taken a lick of exercise since getting out of required gym class in high school, earnestness positively radiating off him with his nervous, excited smile and his glasses, which looked to be almost as smudged and dirty as her own. He was wearing what looked like a vintage Mötley Crüe T-shirt from the 1980s—whatever happened to Vince Neil, she wondered, when she was a girl she’d lusted after him madly—and long, dirty-looking shorts reaching past his knees in a weird plaid pattern mix of earth tones, browns and oranges and beiges. His white calves were dusted with curly brown hairs, some of them ingrown. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other nervously.

  Well, it wasn’t her job to make him comfortable.

  “Jacob?” she replied icily, letting her glasses drop back down to her nose, and turned her attention back to the spinning screens on the bar. Another loss. She bet again, the last few bucks authorized, ignoring him and letting him stand there, staring at her bare shoulder while she watched the screens spin, blurring images of bananas and cherries and apples and God knows what else whirring past her eyes. The wine was kicking in, and she was feeling more like herself again, the headache and the nausea gone and the edges of her mind blunted, softened, sanded down by the cheap wine. Once the whirring stopped and she’d lost again, she slid down off the seat. “Let’s sit out on the patio,” she said to him over her shoulder, “and get me another glass of Chardonnay.”

  There weren’t many people out on the patio—maybe because it was over ninety degrees and there was a big fire going in the open air fireplace in the direct center. There was a steady stream of people up and down the stairs just on the other side of the low wall where stools were set up for people to sit, young men and women in bathing suits so skimpy there didn’t seem much point to them, all in various stages of precancerous tanning. Young men these days spend too much time on their bodies, she thought, looking back through the tinted glass, wondering where Jacob was with her wine. The hot, dry air was making her thirsty, wasn’t good for her skin, aggravating the rosacea that spread across her cheeks and chin and her nose.

  That snooty doctor she’d seen—where was it, it didn’t really matter—had insisted to her that alcohol made it worse. She knew what he was really saying, that it wasn’t rosacea at all but too many years of too much alcohol.

  She hadn’t gone back to him, instead found a sympathetic woman who knew just exactly what she was dealing with, who knew how hard it was on a girl to have rosacea, how terrible it was to have everyone think you drank too much and sit in judgment—

  “Here you are,” he said breathlessly, sitting down across the table from her and placing the glass of wine in front of her. He hadn’t gotten anything for himself, and sweat was already beading up on her reddening forehead. He fumbled with his shoulder bag—was there anything worse than a man carrying a purse, because really, that’s what it was—and pulled out a pad of paper with a pen clipped to the front. “I can’t tell you what this means to me, I’ve been a fan of your father’s ever since I was a kid and first read The Last Gleaming—”

  “He was particularly proud of that one,” she said, cutting him off, remembering that she shouldn’t call him Daddy in front of this young man, from the blog or website or e-zine or whatever it was called.

  She’d made that mistake once, and the article hadn’t been kind.

  She’d not been sorry when that rag had ceased publication, which was nothing more than they deserved.

  Daddy was still alive as long she kept his legacy going, as long as new readers found his books.

  He started talking about himself, as she’d known he would, even though she’d tried to make it clear she wasn’t interested in his story. They never listened, even when she told them point blank she didn’t care. They always told her everything, way more than she cared to know. How they found her father’s work, which one was their favorite, why it meant so much to them, and so on and so on until she could almost scream. She knew their stories, she’d heard them all so many times, knew everything there was to know about them once they told her which one of her father’s books was their favorite.

  Since The Last Gleaming was his favorite, she knew Jacob was a loner, someone who grew up feeling unloved and unwanted by his parents, might have had a step-parent who mocked and belittled him constantly, who drew solace from a cruel world by withdrawing into comic books about super-heroes, eventually moving his way into more of an interest in darker fiction. For some boys there was a direct correlation between super-heroes and dark fiction, the two genres caught up in a strange dance of connection, an almost latent misogynistic thing where women were just things, objects of attraction, there only to serve as visual stimulation.

  And they would never understand why they couldn’t get a date for their prom, why girls just smiled awkwardly when asked for a date and said no.

  “So, why do you think your father never achieved the success in this country he enjoyed in Europe?”

  There it was, the Holy Grail of questions, tacked on the end of an overlong rumination of why he was such a major fanboy of her dearly departed father. They always asked, every last one of them. They’d never dared ask when he was alive, of course, they only dared after he was gone, when she’d taken it upon herself to keep his memory alive, to maintain his legacy, his brilliant body of work that had influenced so many others who’d come after him, so that his brilliance could continue to inspire and influence future generations of writers, as long as she lived.

  “As long as I live,” she’d whispered to her mother, dying in that hospital, her skin like tissue paper in Colleen’s hand, her mother somehow finding the strength to make sure Colleen knew, that Colleen would keep the flame of her father’s genius alive, make sure he would never be forgotten.

  She answered Jacob’s question automatically, by rote, because it was all part and parcel of the script of her father’s life, one she had told so many times she could do it without thinking, the words coming out of her chapped lips as she watched the people beyond Jacob, the plump young woman with the Bride-to-Be sash across her full figure, the plastic penises hanging around her neck on a string, and the cheap tiara on her head smiling at a pair of handsome young men whose board shorts hung from hip bones, what someone back in school had told her was called the “girdle of Venus,” deep lines that ran from their hip bones toward the center, disappearing into the tops of their shorts, the chests waxed smooth and tanned, and she couldn’t help but think, as she told once again the story of the evil editor at the evil publisher who’d succeeded in destroying her father’s career in this country, forcing him into exile in the United Kingdom where he met her mother and rebuilt his life, managing to still get published in North America but never quite getting the respect and success his talent deserved, all because of one editor’s jealous and vicious vendetta.

  She was getting close to the bottom of her glass, and she was about to order Jacob to get another when he looked at her, confused, and said, “But why would David Garrett do that to your father? What did he have to gain? He risked his own career and reputation by ruining your father’s book.” He shook his head. “And I’ve never been able to find anyone who could answer that question. I know you weren’t born yet when it happened, but why do you think Garrett turned so viciously against your father?”

  No one had ever asked her that before, no one had dared question the Gospel According to Colleen Fitzger
ald in all the years she’d been telling the story, just as no one had questioned her mother while she was still alive. It was merely taken as truth, just as when Colleen had put the book back together from pieces—well, it wasn’t really pieces, was it, no matter what she said in the introduction? She’d really rewritten it, hadn’t she, basing her rewrite on things her father had said over the years in interviews, on things he had said to her and her mother while he was drunk, when he was drinking. But no one would want it if Colleen had written it, so she pretended, hadn’t she, that she’d found drafts and bits and pieces in his papers, and from that she had pieced the destroyed book back together, written an introduction about her painstaking efforts to rebuild the masterpiece David Garrett had wrecked, cornered a small press publisher at a convention after the estate’s agent had no luck finding anyone who wanted the book, and gotten him to publish it and even pay her a pittance in advance…

  She gaped at him, her mouth open, as her mind—more addled with wine and last night’s vodka than she’d thought—tried to find an answer, couldn’t, and finally just said, when the silence was getting too long and maybe a tad awkward, “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”

  He nodded, his eyes narrowed in agreement with her. “Well, he’s dead, of course.”

  “Of course.” She exhaled carefully, so he couldn’t see her relief. For a moment, she’d forgotten—need to switch to water, no more wine with this one, he’s a little more sharp than I thought he’d be—but that was right, Garrett had died even before Daddy.

  Which was why the story worked, was never questioned.

  Maybe there were still people around from back when it happened, back when Dusk of a Summer Evening was first published, but they’d never said anything, never called her brazen bluff.

  The Gospel According to Colleen Fitzgerald was allowed to stand unchallenged.

  She’d told the story so many times she now almost believed it herself, believed the tale of a bitter editor determined to derail the career of a rising star in the crime noir genre.

  “No one must ever know,” her mother had said, dying, in that hospital bed, the beeps and chirps of all the machinery hooked up to her, “promise me, Colleen. Promise me you’ll protect him.”

  “It’s always—it’s something I’ve always wondered about,” he stammered, his pale face flushing almost to a red hue to match her own, “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. Why would an editor risk his career like that? And Dave Garrett went on to edit a lot more great books before he died.”

  “He wasn’t stable,” she heard herself saying, so far away that she might have thought it was someone at another table if she didn’t recognize the timbre of her own voice. “Stable people don’t kill themselves, you know.”

  Stable people don’t kill themselves.

  “Can’t we keep it quiet?” her mother, talking again, Colleen sitting in a chair, her arms wrapped around herself, to try to keep herself from shaking, so cold, so cold she felt like she would never be warm again. “Can’t we just say it was a heart attack?”

  The police, the doctor, both fans of Daddy’s, had agreed. He’d clearly done it himself, his toes still lodged in the trigger mechanism, his hands on the barrel of the rifle he’d fit into his mouth. And so the story went out that he’d died suddenly, of a massive heart attack while working on his latest book, dead in front of his typewriter, and no one questioned it, never, but it had been weeks, months, before Colleen could sleep through the night without waking up gasping, her chest heaving, before she could get the image of the blood spatter and the bone and hair and gristle—and the brains—all over the wall behind his desk.

  There hadn’t been a note, but Colleen knew why.

  Oh yes, she’d known.

  That was why she’d sent Jimmy away once and for all, returned the ring, canceled the engagement. It was her fault he’d done it, unable to bear the things she’d said to him when Daddy had said she couldn’t marry Jimmy, couldn’t go away.

  The last things she’d said to Daddy had been unspeakable, and the moment she walked out of the room he’d gotten the rifle down and put his mouth on the barrel and his toe on the trigger.

  No, she couldn’t marry Jimmy after that.

  She couldn’t marry anyone after that.

  Jimmy.

  Her heart constricted. She hadn’t thought about Jimmy in years.

  “Is it possible that what Dave Garrett did to your father might have had something to do with his daughter’s breakdown?” Jacob was saying, and she couldn’t do anything but stare into the bottom of her glass, now empty, wishing she had more Chardonnay—no, she needed vodka, she was beyond wine at this point, not even a Xanax or a Klonopin or anything she carried in her makeup kit would help her at this point.

  He was so, so close, this stupid young man, just another one of Daddy’s fanboys, no one had ever gotten so close before.

  No one has ever cared enough before.

  “What do you mean?” Another bride-to-be, this one a lot thinner than the previous one, boyish hips and a flat chest, standing on the top step, shading her eyes against the hot afternoon sun, looking for someone.

  “The timing,” Jacob said, fumbling with his notebook and the file folder he was holding, trying to find the right paper, whatever evidence it was he thought he’d found that might explain the mystery behind the publication of Dusk of a Summer Evening. “Jenny Garrett—his teenage daughter—she had a breakdown that summer, had to be committed to a mental hospital, when her father was working on your father’s book.” He frowned. “But that doesn’t make sense. He was working on other books, and they—they didn’t turn out to be disasters.” He was still fumbling with his papers, his moon face beaming suddenly when he found the paper he was looking for. “In your introduction to the reconstructed version, you said your father had said that Garrett had destroyed it, gutted it, added things that weren’t in the original form…but didn’t your father see galleys?”

  No one ever thought to ask that. That’s the part of the story, the Gospel my mother and I peddled for years, the story no one ever questioned.

  The galleys.

  There had been galleys, of course, she’d seen them. The galleys Daddy had signed off on, agreed to before fleeing the country once and for all.

  She hadn’t, of course, allowed the library where Daddy had gone to college to have them for their collection of his papers.

  If the galleys had gone there, the proof was there for anyone who cared to look, dared to call her on the lie.

  Daddy had signed off on the galleys, had approved them.

  He’d never discussed the book publicly, refusing to answer questions about it.

  That had been the agreement between Daddy and his editor.

  “He signed off on the galleys,” she said, looking at his doughy face, worried because she’d had four glasses and wanted another, wasn’t at her sharpest, was going off script and was making a mistake, but that had always been her fear, her mother’s fear, that a copy of the galleys might turn up somewhere. Ensign never cared, Garrett was long dead, but they might—there might be a set of them somewhere. “They told him fixing it all, making it right, taking out all the stuff that had been rewritten without his knowledge would be too expensive, and he—he,” she made it seem like she was floundering, pushed the glasses back up the red nose, made her voice break as she continued, “needed the money. They told him they would keep the rest of his advance to pay for resetting the galleys if he insisted on it…and he was afraid, his agent was afraid…that he’d get a reputation for being difficult…”

  Difficult. Yes, that was Daddy’s problem.

  Jenny Garrett.

  She’d seen a picture of her once.

  Jenny had been a young girl, almost thirteen, when she’d been sent away for good. In the picture she was laughing, a big smile on her heart-shaped face, her long black hair in braids hanging from either side of her head, wearing a white T-shirt with JENNY in black block letters across
the flat girl’s chest, just starting to sprout breasts that summer at Disney World, the Mouse-ka-ears pressed down on her head. She’d been pretty, braces on her teeth and dimples in her cheeks, the only child of Daddy’s editor and his wife, the two people who’d been closest to Daddy before he fled to England and met Mummy. Dave Garrett, who’d pulled Daddy’s first book out of his slush pile and given him a two-book contract, pushed him forward and brought him to the attention of the important reviewers and critics, introduced him to the right people, smoothed his way, preparing him to be the next Ross Macdonald, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler. That was who the reviewers compared him to, and maybe the books didn’t sell quite as well as Dave Garrett and Ensign Books might have hoped, but the second one sold more than the first one did, and there was a third book contract…only a one-book contract, to see if the third sold as much as the second, hedging their bets before plunking down enough cash for a fourth and a fifth.

  The third book, Daddy always said, is the make-or-break one.