Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/10

by EQM

  “Oh, it’s not as hard as you might think.”

  They were seated at the kitchen table. Gwen had disregarded the menacing clause and had told Louise about her job. She’d felt in conspiracy with Louise for over a week now, and so this breach of contract didn’t seem too terribly wrong.

  “A story can end one way, or it can end another. I mean, if you view life as a series of small decisions—and every day we’re faced with hundreds of them, right?—then every story has countless possible endings.”

  “Or only one,” Louise said as she bopped Max up and down on her lap, “if you believe in fate.”

  “Well, I suppose,” Gwen said. “Of course I have to go with the one that seems the most satisfactory, or fated, based on what came before. And it can’t be too shocking or too tragic or too happily-ever-after. I guess it’s a little tricky in that you don’t want readers to see an ending coming, yet you want them to get there and say, Of course!”

  “I see. But how do you make them sound right, your endings for other writers?”

  Gwen stood to clear the dishes; they’d eaten large slabs of a coffee cake that Louise had baked that morning in Gwen’s kitchen.

  “I happen to have an ear for voices,” Gwen explained with her back turned. It was a skill, the way she could step into other people’s stories, but not one she was too proud of, because this ability of hers was tied too closely to one of her deepest fears: that she didn’t have her own voice, that each of her belabored sentences was shaped out of latent memories of sentences she’d read. “I can read two-thirds of a manuscript and take it from there. It’s kind of like the way some actors have a knack for impersonating.”

  “You’re very talented,” Louise said.

  “Or easily influenced,” Gwen countered.

  They hadn’t talked about it in any official capacity, but the old woman had become Max’s nanny. Gwen wasn’t paying her. She felt as if she should be, but the subject of money hadn’t come up and Gwen didn’t want to broach the topic for fear of possibly insulting Louise and because it would mean admitting to just how much Louise was doing for her, and she wasn’t ready for that admission. Also, she and Dan couldn’t afford a nanny, and on top of that, she’d yet to tell Dan about her unspoken arrangement with Louise. Louise arrived each morning soon after Dan left for work and stayed into the early evening. Somehow she sensed when it was time to go, because she was always gone—though sometimes only by minutes—by the time Dan returned.

  Gwen’s days were a breeze now. Louise played with Max after breakfast while Gwen worked on her endings. In her basement office she could hear Max’s quick steps and the thunks of Louise plodding after him in Dan’s kneepads. At lunchtime Gwen reemerged and the three of them ate together. Some days, Gwen would give Louise the cash intended for the young babysitter, whom Gwen had fired, and Louise would go grocery shopping. She’d return with ingredients for complex recipes that she patiently taught Gwen how to make. Around three each afternoon, Louise and Max retired to the playroom for a long nap on the beanbags, and Gwen worked on her own writing.

  She’d actually begun a story. It was about recent events: an old woman following a young mother and son home from the grocery store and nudging her way into their lives. It had a fairytale-esque quality to it, Gwen thought, though without the dark edge.

  So things were good. Of course, there was some unease attached to this new arrangement. Who was Louise? Where did she return to each evening? How did she spend her weekends? Gwen was curious, but whenever she asked Louise about her life away from them Louise would somehow manage to avoid talking about her current situation and would instead drift into stories about her childhood in Germany. Only later would Gwen realize that Louise hadn’t answered whatever question she’d asked. Once, when Louise and Max were napping, Gwen went out for the mail and noticed a gap in one of the flowery, sun-faded curtains that covered the Volkswagen’s windows. She stood on her toes for a peek and saw that the bus had been stripped of its back seats. She saw a sleeping bag and a semi-inflated air mattress, a large black trash bag with clothes spilling out in a jumble, a stack of books, a discarded apple core. A sour taste came to Gwen’s throat. She stepped away. The mess in the bus didn’t fit with her picture of Louise, who was always wiping the counters in Gwen’s kitchen and picking up after Max. The bag of clothes? Maybe she’d been meaning to get to a Laundromat. The mattress? Maybe she was a camper. She was very hippie-ish, very earthy. Maybe, during the warmer months, she liked to sleep under the stars.

  Gwen didn’t look in the bus again. Life was going too well to question the things that were a little off about Louise. The tug of dissatisfaction that had been pulling at Gwen in the months before meeting Louise had disappeared. She and Dan were getting along again. She wasn’t tired and grumpy at the end of each day, and he no longer had to work so hard to keep things harmonious. He was taken aback the first time she served spaetzle for dinner, but he was also thankful for the home-cooked meal. He started coming home from work at a more reasonable hour, and they spent their evenings playing with Max, who, once he pulled himself from the stupor of his afternoon nap, was always in a delightful mood. He was learning a few words now (Daddy and uh-oh!), and they loved to listen to his guttural babble. “He sounds German, doesn’t he?” Dan said one night and Gwen, caught off guard, had laughed.

  She finished her story.

  She composed a cover letter and sent it off with high hopes to the editor she’d worked with years ago at the highly respected literary magazine. She sent it snail-mail, the old-fashioned way, and she felt lighter than she had in years when she dropped it in the mail.

  “Dear Ms. Smith:

  Thank you for the opportunity to read “The Secret Ingredient.” There is much to be admired in these pages. Sentence by sentence, the prose is very strong—am I wrong in saying I hear a touch of L—— M—— (minus her finely timed humor) in your voice? The first few scenes were wonderfully promising—Who is this old woman who has found her way into the narrator’s home? What trouble will she cause?—but then the story sort of petered out as all began to go so swimmingly for your narrator. Surely you know that in fiction, trouble is essential! (See Burroway, Writing Fiction.) And your ending ... hmmm ... don’t think you’ve quite nailed it yet. Sorry to disappoint on this one.

  Best wishes,

  (illegible signature)”

  “Why aren’t you writing today?” Louise asked.

  She’d come up from the playroom to find Gwen at the kitchen table, blowing on a lukewarm cup of tea. Max was still asleep in the basement, in his playpen.

  “Just taking a break,” Gwen said.

  She’d forgotten how debilitating rejection letters could be. She’d received all types—tiny-slip-of-paper rejections, try us again, if only you’d done x y or z, love it but we ran out of money rejections—and she’d never been able to dismiss them lightly. Once she’d realized that they were part of the whole writing/publishing world, she’d become inhibited, then stalled.

  The letter lay before her on the table. Louise bent forward to read it. “Oh, I see. I hadn’t realized you’d written a story.”

  “It was nothing,” Gwen said. “Kind of silly, really. Now that I think about it.”

  She told Louise how the story had been sparked by their meeting in the grocery store, but it lacked tension.

  “Tension? Who wants tension? What’s wrong with a happy story? There should be more happy stories in the world.”

  “In the world, maybe. But happy stories don’t make for a great read.”

  Louise lowered herself into the chair across from Gwen. “So you need more trouble in your life, is that it?”

  “No.” Gwen gave a half-hearted laugh. She picked up the letter and creased it down the middle. She thought she heard Max squeal, and she stood to go get him, glad for the distraction.

  “It’s just the neighbor’s cat,” Louise said. “He’ll sleep another forty minutes.”

  “Oh.” Gwen pulled at
the skin of her neck, feeling suddenly annoyed. It irked her that Louise had come to know her son well enough to predict his naps to the minute. She wished Max would wake early; she missed him now that he was doing all this sleeping. She felt like taking back what Louise had taken from her—this intimate knowledge of her son. Or, rather, what she’d willingly given.

  “Your story,” Louise said, “can you add some trouble and send it again?”

  “No.” Gwen stood and took the letter to the recycling bin. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a story.”

  “But that’s not true,” Louise said. “I can see that it matters deeply.”

  That night, the baby was fussy. Gwen had gotten her wish earlier in the day in that Max had woken early from his nap, but it turned him into a little crab apple and he fought going to bed. Or maybe Gwen’s own bad mood, brought on by the rejection letter and the fact that Dan had had to stay late at work, had infected him. She tried to shrug off her sadness and keep focused on cheering up Max. “It doesn’t matter!” she chattered in a sing-song voice as she bathed him. “It doesn’t matter deeply!”

  Then the baby got sick. He threw up in the tub. It wasn’t much, but what came out of him was thick and pink and had a medicinal cherry smell that made Gwen wonder, for the first time, how exactly Louise was getting her son to sleep. What secret ingredient had she been slipping him? What magic elixir? And how had Gwen refused to see?

  5.

  She didn’t wake with a start but with a sickly feeling brewing inside her, as if she’d eaten something spoiled and now that spoiled thing was flourishing. She’d taken a nap; she hadn’t meant to, but she’d fallen asleep reading. The first two-thirds of someone else’s manuscript lay spread on the comforter. She wasn’t sure how she knew something was amiss, but she knew. The house was quiet. That morning, she’d told Louise that they couldn’t spend their days together anymore, that she needed to get back in sync with Max on her own. Louise had looked stricken; she’d winced and reached for the baby, who was snug on Gwen’s hip, but then she’d let her arms fall. “You’re right,” she’d said. “It’s what’s best for you and Max. I understand.”

  They’d gone out to the stoop to see her off. A month had passed since Louise first entered their lives and Gwen couldn’t help but feel a little sorry to see her go. There’d been some pink vomit, but Louise, when Gwen questioned her, said she’d given the baby some of the infant Tylenol Gwen kept in the medicine cabinet because his teeth seemed to be bothering him. She’d been beside herself to hear it had made him sick, and this made Gwen feel bad for suspecting something else. Still, the incident pushed Gwen into acknowledging that it was time to part ways.

  When she woke from her nap, she remembered the last thing Louise had said to her. Before driving off, she’d rolled down the driver’s-side window of her bus and called out, in a perfectly cheery voice, “I hope you get your trouble!” When Gwen had looked at her quizzically, she’d said, “For your story! I hope it comes to you.”

  Wrongly quiet.

  The baby wasn’t in his crib where she’d left him. She searched the house from top to bottom; he wasn’t anywhere. The front door was closed but unlocked and Gwen couldn’t recall if she’d remembered to turn the bolt before taking Max up for his nap. In all likelihood, she hadn’t. She circled the house again and ended in the basement in the playroom trying to quell a dizzying rise of panic. Louise must have returned, she told herself. She’d taken Max somewhere, to the park, maybe, but they’d be back. She stared at the beanbags where Louise had often napped with her son. Her perfect child. There was no sign that Louise had ever been there. Not even a stray gray hair.

  Something erupted inside Gwen, a geyser of fear. She thought for a moment that it had lifted her up, that she was floating, but then she looked down and saw that her feet were still miraculously on the ground. She ran to the kitchen and called her husband at work. She told him to come home; told him she couldn’t find the baby.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Did you call the police?”

  “No,” Gwen said. “He’s with the nanny. I know he is.”

  It was quiet on the other end of the line. Gwen tugged at her neck as if trying to free her voicebox. The useless thing. Of course she should have called the police before calling her husband. How had she not thought of that? It didn’t matter. Louise would evade the police as she’d evaded Gwen, revealing nothing about who she really was or where she might be headed.

  Dan said, “Gwen? Honey? We don’t have a nanny. Do you mean the sitter?”

  “I fired the sitter. Weeks ago.”

  “Honey?”

  “She’s driving a bus. A rust-colored VW bus. He’s with her.”

  “I’ll be right home,” Dan said. “Stay there.”

  He didn’t say It’s your job to keep him safe, though Gwen heard it in her head. She hung up the phone, remembered the scrap of paper Louise had handed her the day they met. She found her purse, dumped the contents onto the floor, and rooted through the mess until she found Louise’s number. She dialed. An upbeat female voice told her she’d reached a day spa.

  Gwen asked for Louise. “Don’t know any Louise,” the woman said.

  Gwen read the number on the paper aloud and the woman said, “Right number, no Louise.”

  “No,” Gwen said firmly.

  “What do you mean, no? Honey, you sound like you could use a massage. Would you like to set something up?”

  The phone slipped from Gwen’s hand. The kitchen tilted sideways. The world was un-righting itself. This isn’t happening, Gwen thought. This isn’t right.

  (Afterthought)

  There are countless possible endings. Happy endings and sad endings. Abrupt endings that leave readers wanting more. Anti-climactic endings in which a character’s been given an opportunity for change or redemption, but she turns and walks away. Near-misses. Joycean epiphanies, Oprah aha!s A character experiences a moment of insight that changes her view of the world forever. Sometimes the insight comes too late. Sometimes the thing a character wanted from the start turns out to be the wrong thing; she didn’t want that after all. Be-careful-what-you-wish-for endings. You could be punished for wanting too much, for never ever being satisfied. For averting your eyes a moment too long. For making a silly mistake. For trusting a stranger. The story will end—it has to; it’s inevitable—but the punishment might not.

  6.

  Gwen sat in her car in the parking lot of the grocery store watching the automatic doors open and close. She was here because it was the only place she’d ever seen Louise outside of her own home, and she was hoping the old woman would reappear. She would need food for Max, and milk. If Gwen spotted her, she would follow her in, snatch Max from her arms, turn back time to the way things had been before that ill-fated meeting. She was here because she didn’t know where else to go or what else to do. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t face this particular ending that she herself had made inevitable. She’d left the house before her husband had gotten there. Surely he’d called the police by now and they were looking for Max and also her. She would sit here until the sun went down, until someone came and dragged her away.

  Outside the car it was an incongruously sunny day—incongruous considering the storm that raged inside her. It was warm in the car, but Gwen knew that outside, the air was chilly. She felt as if she were in a vacuum, as if in the stale space of her car time had paused, was holding its breath. She thought of something Dan had told her the evening after her first encounter with Louise. He’d come in stomping the snow off his shoes and when she’d asked if the drive had been bad, he’d said it was the weirdest thing—the weather had been clear in the city, just a light drizzle until he’d hit the edge of their neighborhood, and then his view had gone white.

  Please, Gwen thought, I’ll do anything, give you anything, just bring him back.

  A knock on the window broke the vacuum’s seal. A policeman stood looking down at her. A young man; someone�
��s grown son. “Ma’am?” he said in a gentle voice. “Ms. Smith? Are you all right? One of the grocery clerks said you’ve been out here for some time. She called the station. Your husband called too. He’s worried. He said to tell you Max is fine.”

  7.

  She found them in the basement, curled on a beanbag. Max was sleeping and Dan had a protective arm around him. When Gwen came in he untangled himself from the baby and stood and put his arms around her. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

  She nodded. “What about Max? Where did you find him?”

  “Here. We have a little escape artist, it seems. He must have gotten out of his crib and made his way down the stairs on his own. It’s a miracle he didn’t hurt himself. I guess it’s time to get some gates up, huh?”

  Gwen shook her head; she started to say that it wasn’t true, the baby hadn’t gotten from the top floor to the basement on his own—but then she stopped. She sunk to her knees and pressed her cheek to Max’s forehead. She kissed his nose. He sighed, eyes still shut, and reached up to pat her face with a pudgy hand. Such a tiny, delicate, perfect being.

  “Honey,” Dan said, his voice soft. “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m all right. I got a little lost. A little confused. I let my priorities get out of whack. But I’m okay.”

  “I read the letter,” Dan said. “About your story. I saw it when I was taking the recycling out this morning. I’m sorry they didn’t want it. I know how those letters can get to you.”

  “It’s no big deal. Not after this scare with Max.”

  “It’s been some day, huh? Your phone call terrified me. You weren’t making any sense. The nanny? The bus? What were you talking about?”

  “Not now,” Gwen said. “I’ll explain some other time.”

  Dan accepted this with a sigh. He said, “When I was driving home all I could think was, what if he’s really not there? What if, just like that, my world’s gone? I offered up one of those bartering prayers: Take anything else, but not my son. Then I got home and he was here and you weren’t. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t meant to barter you.”