The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  But really, Anna wrote, how do you feel about my visiting? I want to be sure this isn’t just me, hurling myself at you from the other side of the country.

  Jake took a gulp of his water. How I feel is: hurl away. Please. I would love to have you here, even for a couple of days.

  And you can take the time from work?

  Actually, he couldn’t.

  Yes of course.

  They arranged for her to arrive at the end of the month, and stay for a week, and after they stopped texting Jake went online and ordered a headboard and a pair of bedroom curtains. It actually wasn’t difficult at all.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Something Out of a Novel

  Anna arrived on a Friday in late November, and Jake went down to meet her cab. There were still police barriers in front of his West Village apartment building, and as she got out of the car he saw her look at them rather nervously.

  “Filming,” he said. “Law and Order. Last night.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. I was thinking, I just got to New York and I’m already at a crime scene?” After a moment they hugged awkwardly. Then they hugged again, less awkwardly.

  She had cut her hair a couple of inches, and just that small change carried with it a hint of transformation: Seattle grunge to some version of Gotham chic. She wore a trench coat over black jeans, and a gray sweater a couple of shades lighter than that silver hair, and a single misshapen pearl on a chain around her neck. After weeks of wondering how he’d feel when he saw her again, he was powerfully reassured. Anna was beautiful. And she was here.

  He took her out to a Brazilian restaurant he liked, and afterward she wanted to walk: down to where the World Trade Center had been, east to South Street Seaport. He led by vague sense of direction only; he didn’t know these neighborhoods, which struck her as hilarious. In Chinatown they stopped at a dessert bar and shared something made of shaved ice with about eight toppings, including actual gold leaf. He offered to get her a hotel.

  She laughed at him.

  Back at the apartment he made the gesture of depositing a spare blanket and pillow on that pathetic old couch. “For me,” he’d suggested, when Anna came to stand beside him. “I mean, I don’t want to assume.”

  “You’re adorable,” she said, before taking him into his own bedroom, where at least there were now curtains on the window. And a good thing, too.

  The next day, they didn’t leave the apartment.

  The day after that, they managed to get out for lunch at RedFarm, but went home immediately afterward and stayed in for the rest of that day, too.

  Once or twice, he apologized for monopolizing her time in the city. Surely she’d wanted more from her visit to New York than even this intimacy and—as far as he could tell—mutual pleasure?

  “This is exactly what I wanted from my visit,” said Anna.

  But the following morning she left him to work and went to explore, and that became the way the rest of the week took form. He did his best to get a few hours in after she’d gone, and late in the afternoon he went to meet her wherever she’d wound up: the Museum of the City of New York, Lincoln Center, Bloomingdale’s. She couldn’t decide which Broadway show to see, and on her final night in the city they ended up at some strange thing where everyone ran around a huge warehouse in the dark, wearing masks, and it was supposedly based on Macbeth.

  “What did you think?” he asked her as they emerged into the Chelsea night. Her flight was early in the morning and he was already dreading the moment of her departure.

  “Well, it was a long way from Oklahoma!”

  They walked down to the newly fabulous Meatpacking District and looked at the restaurants until they found one that was quiet.

  “You like it here,” Jake observed after the waiter had taken their order.

  “It looks good.”

  “No, no, I mean here. New York.”

  “I’m afraid I do. This place, I could fall for a place like this.”

  “Well,” said Jake, “I’ll be honest, that does not make me unhappy.”

  She said nothing. The waiter brought their wine.

  “So, this woman you met once, for an hour, and who lives on the other side of the country, comes to visit you for a couple of days and starts making noises about how much she likes New York, and you’re not even slightly freaked out?”

  He shrugged. “A lot of things freak me out. But oddly, not that. I’m just getting used to the idea that you liked me enough to get on a plane.”

  “So you’re assuming I got on a plane because I liked you and not, for example, because I got a cheap flight, and I’d always wanted to run around a warehouse in a mask, pretending I’m twenty-two and not my actual age.”

  “You could totally pass for twenty-two,” he said after a moment.

  “But why would I want to? That whole thing tonight was the emperor’s new clothes.”

  Jake threw his head back and laughed. “Okay. You’ve just turned in your cool millennial card. You know that.”

  “I couldn’t care less. I don’t think I was young even when I actually was young, and that wasn’t yesterday.”

  The waiter arrived. They had each ordered the same thing: roast chicken and vegetables. Looking at the two plates, Jake wondered if they weren’t, in fact, eating both halves of the same bird.

  “So why weren’t you young when you actually were young?” Jake said.

  “Oh, it’s a long and tortured story. Something out of a novel.”

  “I wish you’d tell me.” He looked at her. “Is it hard to talk about this?”

  “No, not hard. But it’s still kind of a thing that I’m doing it.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. “I am appropriately honored.”

  She took a moment to begin her meal, and drink from her glass.

  “So the long and short of it is, my sister and I ended up in Idaho, in the town where our mother grew up. We were both pretty young, so we didn’t remember a lot about her. She committed suicide, unfortunately. She drove her car into a lake.”

  Jake let out a breath. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”

  “And after that our mother’s sister came to take care of us. But she was very strange. She never mastered the art of taking care of herself, let alone anyone else, let alone two little kids. I think we both understood that, my sister and I did. But we handled it different ways. After we started high school I could feel the two of them moving farther and farther away from me. My sister and my aunt,” she clarified. “My sister pretty much stopped going to school. I pretty much stopped going home. And my teacher, Miss Royce, when she figured out what was happening in my house, she just asked if I’d like to live with her, and I said yes.”

  “But … wasn’t there any kind of intervention? I mean, social services? Police?”

  “The sheriff came out a couple of times to talk to my aunt, but it never quite connected with her. I think she really wanted to be capable of parenting us, but it was just beyond her abilities.” Anna paused. “I bear her absolutely no ill will, by the way. Some people can paint or sing, others can’t. This was a person who just could not be in the world the same way most of us can. But I do wish …” She shook her head. She reached for her glass.

  “What?”

  “Well, I tried to get my sister to come with me, but she refused. She wanted to stay with our aunt. And then one day the two of them just left town.”

  Jake waited. As he did, he grew more uneasy.

  “And?”

  “And? Nothing. I have no idea where they are. They could be anywhere, now. They could be nowhere. They could be in this restaurant.” She glanced around. “Well, they’re not. But that’s just how it is. I stayed, they left. I finished high school. I went to college. My teacher—I got into the habit of calling her my adoptive mother, but there was never any formal process. She died. She left me a little money, which was nice. But my sister, I have no idea.”

  “Did you ever try to find her?” Jake ask
ed.

  Anna shook her head. “No. I think our aunt had been living a pretty marginal life before she came to take care of us. Or try to take care of us. I think, if they’re still together, they’re not going to be paying rent or using an ATM, let alone on Facebook. But I’m on Facebook and also Instagram, mainly for that reason. If they want to find me, I’m a few clicks away from any public computer in any library in the country. If they reach out to me I’ll get an alert through my email. I try not to think about it, ever, but even so … every single time I turn on my computer or my phone, some part of me is wondering: Is today the day? You can’t imagine what that’s like, waiting for some message that’s going to totally upend your life.”

  In fact, Jake absolutely could imagine it. But he didn’t say so.

  “Did it … I mean, did all of this make you feel depressed? As a teenager?”

  She seemed not to take the question all that seriously. “I suppose. Most teenagers get depressed, don’t they? I don’t think I was all that introspective as a kid. And frankly I also wasn’t very ambitious back then, so it’s not like I felt I was being kept from something I really wanted. And then one morning, the fall of my senior year, I picked up an application off a bench outside the guidance counselor’s office at my school, for the University of Washington. It had these pine trees on the cover and I just thought … you know, that looks so nice. It looked like home. So I filled it out right there in the office, on their computer. Three weeks later I got my letter.”

  The waiter returned and took their plates. They both declined dessert, but asked for more wine.

  “You know,” Jake said, “if you think about it, you’re amazingly well-adjusted.”

  “Oh, right.” She rolled her eyes. “I hid away on an island for the better part of a decade. I got to my mid-thirties without ever having a serious boyfriend. For the past three years I’ve devoted myself to making a complete imbecile sound semi-cogent and semi-informed on the air. Does that sound amazingly well-adjusted to you?”

  He smiled at her. “Given what you’ve gone through? I think you’re some kind of Wonder Woman.”

  “Wonder Woman was a fiction. I think I’d prefer to be an ordinary real person.”

  She could never be ordinary, he thought. The sheer fact of her, this lovely, gray-haired woman out of the forests of the Northwest yet seamlessly present, here, in a thrumming restaurant in the city’s buzziest neighborhood, was simply norm-defying: a thunderbolt out of the blue. But what stunned him most, he realized, was the fact that he was so entirely at peace about all of it. For as long as Jake could remember he’d been torturing himself about the books he was writing, and then the ones he wasn’t writing, and the people surging past him in line, and the deep and terrible fear that he wasn’t good enough—or good at all—at the only thing he’d ever wanted to be good at, not to mention the fact that all around him people his own age were meeting and pairing off and pledging their allegiance to one another and even creating entirely new baby people together, while he’d barely found a woman he liked enough to date since breaking up with the poet, Alice Logan. Now, all of that was done: suddenly, peacefully, done.

  “First of all,” said Jake, “making your boss sound smarter than he is—that’s what most people’s jobs are. And Whidbey Island seems to me like a pretty nice place to spend the better part of a decade. And as far as not having a serious boyfriend, obviously, you were waiting for me.”

  She hadn’t been looking at him through this. She’d been looking down into her own hands and the glass they held. Now, though, she looked up, and after a moment, she smiled. “Maybe I was,” she said. “Maybe I thought, when I read your novel, Now this is a brain I could stand to get to know. Maybe when I went to your event in Seattle and I saw you, I thought, That’s a person I wouldn’t be miserable looking at across the breakfast table.”

  “Breakfast table!” Jake grinned.

  “And maybe when I got in touch with your publicist I wasn’t just thinking how we should be trying to get some real authors on the show. Maybe I was thinking, You know, it wouldn’t actually be horrible if I could get to meet Jake Bonner.”

  “Well now. So it comes out.”

  Even in the restaurant’s inadequate light he could see she was embarrassed.

  “Look, it’s fine. I’m glad you did. I’m incredibly glad.”

  Anna nodded, but she wasn’t looking him in the eye.

  “And you’re positive this isn’t freaking you out at all. I acted unprofessionally because I had a crush on a famous author.”

  He shrugged. “I once contrived to sit next to Peter Carey on the subway, because I had this fantasy that I could strike up a conversation with Australia’s greatest living novelist, and we’d start having weekly Sunday brunches together where we’d discuss the state of fiction, and then he’d give my novel-in-progress to his agent … you get the idea.”

  “Well, did you?”

  Jake took a sip of his wine. “Did I what?”

  “Sit next to him.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. But I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. And he got off like two stops later, anyway. No conversation, no brunch, no introduction to his agent. Just another fan on the subway. That could have been us, if you’d been as much of a wuss as I am. But you actually reached out for something you wanted. Just like you picked up that application, off the bench, and filled it out. I admire that.”

  Anna said nothing. She seemed overwhelmed.

  “Like your old professor said, nobody else gets to own your life, right?”

  She laughed. “Nobody else gets to live your life.”

  “It sounds like that pabulum we used to serve up in the MFA program. Only you can tell your singular story with your unique voice.”

  “And that’s not true?”

  “That is absolutely not true. Anyway, if you’re living your life, more power to you. I can’t think of anyone you owe a thing to. Your adoptive mom is gone. Your sister and aunt took themselves out of the equation, for now at least. You deserve every bit of happiness that’s coming to you.”

  She reached across the table and took his hand. “I completely agree,” she said.

  CRIB

  BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

  Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 36–38

  Her decision was: she wanted an abortion. It should have been straightforward, given the fact that her parents seemed to want an addition to their family about as little as she did. But there was an unfortunate complication, namely that her mother and father were Christians, and not the Jesus-is-love kind of Christians but the Hell-has-a-special-room-waiting-for-you kind. Also, the laws of the state of New York gave them veto power over Samantha (who was very much not a Christian of either kind, despite her hundreds of Sunday mornings in the pews of the Fellowship Tabernacle of Norwich) and over the blastocyst inches south of her navel. Did they regard said blastocyst as a beloved grandchild, or at least a beloved child of God? Samantha suspected not. She suspected, to the contrary, that the point here was to teach her some kind of “lesson” about the wages of her sin, something along the lines of In pain you shall bring forth children. It would all have been so much simpler if they’d just agreed to drive her to the clinic in Ithaca.

  It hadn’t been part of the plan for her to drop out of school as well, but the pregnancy made that decision on its own. Samantha, it turned out, was not one of those girls who could carry on, attend the prom, throw the javelin into the ninth month, and generally power through every single quiz, test, assignment, and term paper, with only the occasional hall pass for the purpose of upchucking in the girls’ bathroom. No, she got diagnosed in month four with upwardly trending blood pressure, was ordered to bed for the sake of her baby’s health, and forced to summarily forfeit her position as a tenth grader without a single complaint from either parent. And not one of her teachers lifted a finger to help her finish out the year, either.

  For the five brutal months that remained, she gestated uncomfortably�
��mainly horizontally in her childhood bed, an old cannonball four-poster that had been her mother’s father’s, or her father’s mother’s—and grudgingly accepted the food that her mother brought up to her room. She read whatever books were in the house—first her own books, then her mother’s from the Christian bookstore outside Oneonta—but already Samantha was noting a disruption in the hardware of her brain: sentences folding in on themselves, meaning draining away by the midpoint of a paragraph, as if even that part of her body had been scrambled by the unasked-for tenant. Both of her parents had given up on trying to ferret out the name of the impregnator; maybe they’d decided Samantha didn’t know. (How many boys did they think she’d slept with? All the boys, probably.) Her father wasn’t talking to her anymore, though it took Samantha some time to figure that out, given that he’d never been all that much of a talker. Her mother was still talking—or, more accurately, screaming—on a daily basis. Samantha wondered how she had the energy.

  But at least there was going to be an end point to all of it, because this thing, this ordeal, was going to be finite. As in: it was going to end. And why?

  She did not want to be a sixteen-year-old mother any more than she’d wanted to be a fifteen-year-old pregnant person, and here, at least, she dared to believe that her parents felt exactly the same. Therefore, in the fullness of time, the baby would be given up for adoption, and then she, the gestational host, would be returning to high school, albeit in the company of those dull classmates she’d powered past back in sixth grade: a year further from her goal of going to college and getting away from Earlsville, but at least back on track.

  Ah, the naivety of youth. Or had she dared to believe her parents might one day recognize that a sentient human, with her own plans and priorities and aspirations, had lived alongside them, lo these fifteen years? She dwelt in the possibilities and even took the step of reaching out to one of those “abortion counselors” (not really an “abortion counselor,” as she well knew) who advertised in the back of the Observer-Dispatch: “A loving Christian home for your baby!” But her mother wouldn’t even look at the pamphlet they sent her.