The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Here’s the statement I’ll be releasing if you don’t get out of my life and keep your mouth shut. Any corrections before it goes out?

  “In 2012 a young woman named Rose Parker died violently at the hands of her own mother, who then stole her identity, appropriated her scholarship at the University of Georgia, and has been living as her daughter ever since. She is currently harassing a well-known author, but she really ought to be famous in her own right.”

  He could smell the soup, and all of those health-giving greens in it. The cat, Whidbey, leapt up onto his lap and looked optimistically at the tabletop, but there was nothing there for him, so he absconded to the kilim-covered couch Anna had chosen, part of her campaign to make his life better. She hadn’t wanted him to go to Georgia, obviously, but when he told her everything he’d discovered she would understand why it had been the right decision, and she’d help him make the best possible use of the information he’d brought back.

  He heard the door. She was home with a loaf of bread and an apology not to have been here on his return, and when he hugged her she hugged him back, and the relief he hadn’t realized he was so in need of came sweeping through him.

  “Look what I brought,” he said, handing her the bourbon.

  “Nice. I’d better not have any myself, though. You know I need to head to LaGuardia in a couple of hours.”

  He looked at her. “I thought it was tomorrow.”

  “Nope. Red-eye.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  She wasn’t sure, but she wanted to keep it as brief as possible. “That’s why I’m flying at night. I’ll sleep on the plane and go right to the storage unit from the airport. I think I can get it all sorted out inside of three days, and the work stuff, too. If I have to stay another day, I will.”

  “I hope you won’t,” Jake said. “I’ve missed you.”

  “You missed me because you knew I was pissed at you for going.”

  He frowned. “Maybe. But I’d have missed you anyway.”

  She went to get the soup and brought back a single bowl.

  “Aren’t you having any?” Jake said.

  “In a bit. I want to hear about what happened.”

  She put the bread she’d just gone out to buy on a cutting board, and poured wine for both of them, and he began to tell her everything he’d learned since leaving Athens: the drive north into the mountains, the chance meeting at the general store, the campsite far enough back in the woods that you could barely hear the creek. When he held out the photograph he’d taken on his phone, she stared at it.

  “It doesn’t look like a place where somebody burned to death.”

  “Well, it’s been seven years.”

  “You said, the man who took you out there, he’d been at the scene that morning?”

  “Yeah. Volunteer fireman.”

  “That’s quite the lucky coincidence.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Small town. Something like that would involve a lot of people—EMTs, cops, firemen. People at the hospital. The coroner turned out to be this guy’s neighbor.”

  “And the two of them just sat down with a total stranger and told you everything? It seems kind of wrong, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it? I guess I ought to be grateful. At the very least they kept me from poking around all the cemeteries in Rabun Gap with a flashlight.”

  “What does that mean?” said Anna. She refilled Jake’s wineglass.

  “Well, they told me where the plot was.”

  “The plot you sent me the photo of?”

  He nodded.

  “Look, I’m going to have to ask you to be more specific. I want to be exactly sure I understand everything you’re saying here.”

  “I’m saying,” said Jake, “that Rose Parker is buried in a place called Pickett Hill, just outside of Clayton, Georgia. The headstone says Dianna Parker, but it’s Rose.”

  Anna seemed to require time to think this through. When that had been accomplished, she asked how he was enjoying the soup.

  “It’s delicious.”

  “Good. It’s the other half of that batch we had before,” she said. “When you got back from Vermont. The night you told me about Evan Parker.”

  “Soup for the raveled sleeve of care,” he recalled.

  “That’s right.” She smiled.

  “I wish I hadn’t waited so long to tell you about this,” Jake said, bringing the heavy spoon to his lips.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Drink up.”

  He did.

  “So, just because we’re talking this through, what is it you think happened here, exactly?”

  “What happened is that Dianna Parker, like hundreds of thousands of other parents, was delivering her kid to college in August of 2012. And maybe, like probably most of them, she had mixed feelings about that kid’s departure. Rose was smart, obviously. She rammed her way through high school and into college in only three years, didn’t she?”

  “Did she?”

  “With a scholarship, apparently.”

  “Genius girl,” said Anna. But she didn’t sound that impressed.

  “Must have been pretty desperate to escape her mother.”

  “Her terrible mother.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Right,” Jake said. “And probably she was very ambitious, just like her mother might have been, once, but Dianna never made it out of West Rutland. There was the pregnancy, the punitive parents, the uninvolved brother.”

  “Don’t forget the dude who got her pregnant and then was like: leave me out of it.”

  “Sure. So there she is, driving her daughter farther away than either of them have ever been, from the only place they’ve ever lived, and she knows her daughter’s never coming home. Sixteen years of putting her own life aside and taking care of this person, and now boom: it’s over and she’s gone.”

  “Without a thank-you, even.”

  “Okay.” Jake nodded. “And maybe she’s thinking: Why wasn’t this me? Why didn’t I get to have this life? So when the accident happens—”

  “Define accident.”

  “Well, she told the coroner she might have knocked over a propane heater while she was leaving the tent in the middle of the night. By the time she got back from the bathroom the whole tent had gone up.”

  Anna nodded. “Okay. That would be an accident.”

  “The coroner also said she was hysterical. His word.”

  “Right. And hysteria can’t be faked.”

  He frowned.

  “Go on.”

  “So after the accident happens, she thinks: This is terrible, but I can’t bring her back. And there’s a scholarship waiting and nothing to go back to. And she thinks, No one knows me in Georgia. I’ll live off campus, take classes, figure out what I want to do with my life. She knows she doesn’t look young enough to say she’s the daughter of a thirty-two-year-old woman, so maybe she says she’s the victim’s sister, not her daughter. But from the moment she drives out of Clayton, Georgia, she’s Rose Parker, whose mother died in a tragic fire.” Burned up.

  “The way you put it, it sounds almost reasonable.”

  “Well, it’s horrible, but it’s not unreasonable. It’s criminal, obviously, because at the very least we’re talking about theft. Theft of identity. Theft of her daughter’s place at a university. Theft of an actual monetary scholarship. But it’s also an unanticipated opportunity for a woman who’s never managed to live her own dreams, and by the way who’s still young. Thirty-two is much younger than we are. Doesn’t it still seem possible to make an enormous change in your life when you’re thirty-two? Look at yourself! You were older than that, and you left everyone you knew and moved to the other end of the country and got married, all inside of … what, eight months?”

  “Fine,” Anna agreed. She was filling Jake’s glass with the last of the Merlot. “But I have to point out that you seem to be making every excuse for her. Are you really this understanding?”

  “Well, in
the novel—” he began, but she interrupted him.

  “Whose?” Anna said quietly. “Yours? Or Evan’s?”

  He was trying to remember if Evan’s Ripley submission had covered this. Of course it hadn’t. Evan Parker had been an amateur. How far beneath the surface could he really have gone into the inner lives of these women? Unfurling his extraordinary plot that night in Richard Peng Hall, Parker hadn’t troubled himself to describe or acknowledge the complexities of Diandra (as he’d called the mother) or Ruby (as he’d called the daughter); how much better would he have done over the course of an entire novel, even assuming he’d been capable of completing one?

  “In my novel. Samantha is a thwarted person, and bitterly unhappy. Those things can corrupt you every bit as much as some predisposition toward evil. I always thought of her as a person who’s fallen into a hole of terrible disappointment, which over time—and as she watched her daughter prepare for her own departure—just worked on her, with devastating results. And then when it happened it was a kind of accident, or at least not something planned or prepared for. It’s not like she was a—”

  “Sociopath?” Anna said.

  He felt genuine surprise. Of course he understood that this was the predominant view amongst his readers, but Anna had never said as much about the character.

  “And that’s where the dividing line is?” his wife asked. “Between something any of us might do under the circumstances and something only a truly evil person would do? Planning it?”

  He shrugged. His shoulders felt impossibly heavy as he lifted them and let them fall. “It seems like a good enough place to put the dividing line.”

  “Okay. But only as far as your made-up character is concerned. It has no bearing on this actual woman’s life. You can’t have any idea what was going on in her head, or what else she might have done, before or after this unplanned act. I mean, who knows what else this Dianna Parker got up to? You said yourself, nobody seems to get sick in her family.”

  “That’s true.” He nodded, and his head felt fuzzy as it inclined forward. He had written an entire novel around this one terrible thing, and he still couldn’t fully accept there was a real mother out there who’d been able to do it. See her child die like that and just move on? “I mean,” he heard himself say, “it’s incredible. Isn’t it?”

  Anna sighed. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Jake. Do you want more soup?”

  He did, and she went to get it, bringing him back another brimming, steaming bowl.

  “It’s so good.”

  “I know. My mother’s recipe.”

  Jake frowned. There was something he wanted to ask about that, but he couldn’t think what it was. Spinach, kale, garlic, essence of chicken; it was certainly tasty, and he could feel the warmth of it spreading inside him.

  “This plot you sent me a picture of, it looked like a pretty place. Can I see it again?”

  He reached for his phone and tried to find it for her, but that wasn’t as easy as it should have been. The pictures kept shooting forward and back as he scrolled, refusing to land on the right one. “Here,” he finally said.

  She held the phone in her hand, and looked intently.

  “The stone. It’s very simple. I like it.”

  “Okay,” said Jake.

  She had picked up the single gray braid of her hair, and was twisting the end around and around her fingers in a way that was almost hypnotic. He loved so many things about the way she looked, but that silver hair, it occurred to him, he loved most of all. Thinking of it swinging loose made a kind of weighty thump inside his head. He had been traveling for days, and worried for months. Now, with so many of the pieces finally in place, he was deeply tired, and all he wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that she was leaving tonight. Maybe he needed some time to recover. Maybe they each needed a couple of days to themselves.

  “So after the accident,” said Anna, “our bereaved mom keeps heading south. Lemonade out of lemons, right?”

  Jake nodded his heavy head.

  “And when she gets to Athens she registers in Rose’s name, and gets permission to live off campus for her freshman year. And that gets us up to the end of the 2012 to 2013 academic year. What happens after that?”

  Jake sighed. “Well, I know she left the university. After that, I’m not sure where she went or where she’s been, but it doesn’t really matter. She can’t want to be exposed for her real crime any more than I do for my imaginary one. So tomorrow I’ll send her an email and tell her to fuck off. And I’ll cc that asshole attorney to make sure she gets the message.”

  “But don’t you want to know where she is now? And what her name is? Because obviously, she’ll have changed her name. You don’t even know what she looks like. Right?”

  She had taken his bowl to the sink and she was washing it. She washed his spoon and the pot she’d used to heat the soup up. Then she put all of those things in the dishwasher, and started it. She came back to the table and stood over him. “Maybe we should get you lying down,” she said. “You really do look beat.”

  He could not deny it, and he wasn’t up to trying.

  “It’s good you got that soup into you, though. One of the only things my mother gave me, that soup.”

  Then he remembered what he wanted to ask her.

  “You mean, Miss Royce. The teacher?”

  “No, no. My real mom.”

  “But, she died. She drove into a lake when you were so young. Didn’t she drive into a lake?”

  Suddenly, Anna was laughing. Her laugh was musical: light and sweet. She laughed as if all of that—the soup, the teacher, the mom who’d driven her car into a lake in Idaho—was some of the funniest stuff she had ever heard. “You are so pathetic. What self-respecting writer doesn’t know the plot of Housekeeping? Fingerbone, Idaho! The aunt who can’t take care of herself or her nieces! I didn’t even change the teacher’s name, for fuck’s sake! And don’t think that wasn’t a risk. Tempting fate to prove a point, I guess.”

  He wanted to ask what it was, that point, but getting his throat to breathe and talk at the same time had suddenly attained the complexity of juggling with knives, and besides, he already knew. How hard was it, really, to steal someone else’s story? Anybody could do it—you didn’t even have to be a writer.

  Still, there was something about this he just couldn’t work out. In fact, there were only a few things he seemed capable of understanding at all, and whatever powers of concentration he still possessed had gone to those things, like blood to the vital organs when you’re stranded in a snowbank, dying of frostbite. First: that Anna was leaving for the airport soon. Second: that Anna seemed to know something he didn’t. Third: that Anna was still angry at him. He didn’t have the strength to ask about all three. So he asked about the last one, because he had already forgotten the first two.

  “You’re still angry at me, aren’t you?” he said, speaking the words extremely carefully so as not to be misunderstood. And she nodded.

  “Well, Jake,” she said, “I’d have to say that’s true. I’ve been angry at you for a very long time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  That Novelist’s Eye for Detail

  “I wasn’t going to do this yet,” said Anna. She had the crook of her elbow under his arm and she was lifting him, or helping him up, one of the two. He must, at some point, have become terribly light, or else the floor of the apartment had helpfully tipped to a forty-five-degree angle. She held him tightly as they passed the kilim-covered couch, and it slid up one of the walls as they went by, but magically, without actually moving. “There was no rush. And then you had to start running around like Lord Peter Wimsey. It’s something I don’t really get about you, this compulsion to understand everything. And all the sturm und drang! If you were going to be this troubled about what you’d done, why steal someone else’s story in the first place? I mean, torturing yourself about it after the fact. S
uch a waste of energy, especially when I’m right here, and I’m so good at it. Don’t you think so?”

  He started to shake his head no, because he hadn’t stolen, but then he understood that she was good at it, so he nodded. She probably didn’t notice either one. She was helping him along the slow walk into their bedroom and he was shuffling beside her, his arm over her shoulder, her hand gripping his wrist. Jake’s head was down, but he could see the cat, darting past them into the living room.

  “I have some medicine for you,” Anna said, “and then, I don’t see any reason not to tell you my story. Because if there’s one thing I know about you, Jake, it’s how you appreciate a good story. My singular story, told in my unique voice. Do you see any reason?”

  He didn’t. Then again he didn’t understand the question. He sat on the bed and she gave him the capsules, three or four at a time, and he really didn’t want to but he swallowed them all, until there weren’t any more. “Good job,” she said, after each handful. He drank the water from the glass. That went onto the bedside table, next to the empty pill bottles. He did want to know what they were, the pills, but did it really matter?

  “Well, we’ve got a few minutes,” said Anna. “Was there anything you wanted to ask, in particular?”

  There was something, thought Jake. But now he couldn’t remember.

  “Okay. I’ll just, sort of, free-associate. You stop me if you’ve heard any of this already.”

  Yes, said Jake, though he couldn’t actually hear himself say it.

  “What?” said Anna. She looked up from her phone. His phone, actually. “You’re mumbling,” she said. Then she went on with whatever it was she was doing.

  “I don’t want to be that person who’s always whining about her childhood, but you need to know it was always about Evan in our house. Evan and football. Evan and soccer. Evan and girls. The guy was an imbecile, but you know how it is with families. The pride of the Parkers! Scoring goals and passing his classes—wow! Even when he started doing drugs they thought the sun just shined out of his ass. As for me, it didn’t matter how smart I was or how good my grades were or what I wanted to do in the world, I was still nothing. So there’s Evan getting girls pregnant right and left and he’s an angel from heaven, but when I got pregnant it was like their job to punish me, and make sure it stuck for the rest of my life. It was all: you’re dropping out of high school and keeping this baby because that’s what you deserve. Zero chance of an abortion. Zero support for giving the baby up for adoption, either. You were spot-on with all that, actually, the way you wrote it. That’s absolutely what it was like for me. Which isn’t a compliment, by the way.”