by Karis Walsh
“You knew what I was writing?” Ari asked, confused by Jocelyn’s response. Did she know about Ari’s own mother somehow? Had she searched hard enough online to learn about Ari’s personal life? The thought made her feel exposed and she wrapped her arms around her middle, suddenly cold in the growing breeze.
“No. I recommended the book about beekeepers because it’s really about family and home. Somehow I guessed you were wrestling with those issues, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t really you. It was your character.”
“Do you moonlight as a psychic? Or do you use tarot cards to pick books for your customers?” Ari heard the challenge in her voice. Jocelyn had shared something deeply personal, but she still didn’t have the right to delve into Ari’s mind and emotions.
“Some locals call me the Book Witch,” Jocelyn said, as if proud of the title. “I pay attention to hunches, is all. But your premise sounds interesting. You handle painful emotions very well when you write, and I’ll bet this will be another best seller. What you need to do—”
“No.” Ari hated sentences starting with the words What you need to do or You should. “I’m here on a working retreat, and can’t let my attention be split between writing and making appearances.”
“One appearance. Not even an appearance, just a small afternoon gathering where you read a few passages, sign some books, and answer questions. Nothing to it.”
“It’s not nothing. It would be too much of a distraction,” Ari said, even though she had spent her entire visit to Cannon Beach searching for distractions to avoid writing. She halted again and faced Jocelyn. “I need to be left alone to write.”
“Why?”
Jocelyn clearly didn’t understand. Ari wasn’t sure she did entirely, either. She’d always been nervous when speaking to readers, but she’d loved it at the same time. She couldn’t stand up in front of people and claim to be a writer when she wasn’t writing. Her pain and grief were too close to the surface right now—what if the audience could see the real things she was facing, without the veil of her characters between them?
“Because,” Ari said. The meaningless answer would have to be good enough for Jocelyn.
It wasn’t. “I’d think a reading would be inspirational for you. It would be good publicity, plus you’ll be adored by your fans, your ego will be boosted, and you’ll sell books. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”
“You mean you’ll sell books.” Ari had to laugh when Jocelyn shrugged and grinned at her without even a hint of shame.
“Tomato, tom-ah-to. You’ll get royalties and I’ll generate a little income to help my business survive.” She leaned forward and balanced her arm on Mariner’s neck. “We’ll actually be helping each other.”
Ari shook her head and started to back away. “As much as I’d love to help, this trip isn’t about making money. It’s about communing with nature. Synchronizing my spirit with the timeless rhythm of the waves.” Ari spread her arms wide and shouted into the wind. “Becoming one with Mother Earth.”
“Baloney.” Jocelyn laughed. “I’ll ask again.”
Ari moved faster, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she was aiming toward the inn and wasn’t about to trip over some driftwood. “And I’ll say no again.”
Jocelyn raised her voice as Ari got farther away. “Then I’ll keep asking until you finally say yes.”
Ari waved her off and turned around. She crossed the deep, loose sand and got to the steps leading to the inn before she heard Mariner’s hooves slapping through the waves as Jocelyn cantered away. She climbed the steep wooden staircase, using the rough banister for support. Jocelyn was exasperating. She was so adorably and irritatingly confident that she’d eventually wear Ari down and rope her into the signing, that Ari was beginning to doubt her own ability to avoid it.
*
Ari sat on the wooden step at the top of the bluff with her jacket pulled over her head to protect her from the misty fog. The day was gray and wet. The ocean rolled and heaved, only discernible from the sky in movement, not in color. Something, either very low clouds or a heavy fog, Ari wasn’t certain, hid the fir-covered hills surrounding Cannon Beach from view. She hadn’t been all the way down to the beach since her encounter with Jocelyn three days before. She kept watch for the horse and rider pair, but even though she hadn’t even seen a hoofprint in the sand, she didn’t consider herself safe from Jocelyn’s relentless petitioning for a book signing. Ari tried to remain firm, but Jocelyn was a fighter. Ari had a feeling she was regrouping and planning her next attack. She stirred too many emotions within Ari—how long would she be able to withstand the turmoil of arousal and defiance she felt whenever Jocelyn was around? Soon she’d agree to anything Jocelyn asked, just to get some peace.
Unless, of course, she could avoid seeing Jocelyn entirely until she was scheduled to leave. The easiest way to accomplish the feat would be to spend every waking hour besides mealtimes in her room, diligently working on her new book. Or, to be more precise, starting her new book. Getting a sentence down on paper. She still struggled with the opening line, and she had used different tricks to get past her block. She’d tried starting a later chapter, writing some of the dialogue she heard playing in her mind, and doing every character-building exercise she had ever heard of. Nothing seemed to work, and after pacing in her room and staring out the window for several hours, she absolutely had to get outside.
And run the risk of seeing Jocelyn. She’d either gotten in her car and driven out of town or kept to the inn’s garden path over the past few days, places where she was sure to be left alone by anyone other than Pam, Mel, and the other guests who’d arrived two days earlier. Those two, a pair of honeymooners from Eugene, Oregon, were far too wrapped up in each other to care about Ari at all. Just the way she liked it.
Ari understood why Jocelyn was as tenacious as she was, especially given the circumstances of her childhood, but she still didn’t have the right to bulldoze over other people to get her way.
“Are you okay out here?”
Ari startled at the voice and she turned to find Pam standing behind her. “I’m good.” She pushed her makeshift hood back until she could look up and see Pam’s face. “Not the greatest weather for being outside, but it’s beautiful out here. Very powerful and ominous.”
Pam laughed and sat on the step next to Ari. She didn’t bother covering her head, and fine drops of mist settled on her short hair. “The ocean has many moods,” she said. “This is one of my favorites, when it churns and everything is monochromatic. The atmosphere is more interesting than on a calm, sunny day.”
The weather suited Ari’s own mood better today than it did when it was milder. She should feel inspired by her environment and the hints of an incoming storm. Maybe she needed a full-blown autumn tempest to really get her creative juices flowing. She needed the waves pounding against the bluff itself and the wind blowing debris across the inn’s garden before she could squeeze the depth of the moment out of her fingers, through the keyboard, and onto the page.
“Do you paint better when there’s a storm than when it’s quiet?” she asked.
Pam tilted her head to one side and considered the question before answering. “I don’t think so. Right now, I’m not doing much at all, whether it’s sunny or pouring rain. I came to tell you I’m done in the studio for the day, if you’d like to use it for a writing space. This doesn’t really qualify as rain around here, but if you stay out in the drizzle long enough, you’ll still get soaked.”
Ari believed her. Already, she was getting chilled sitting out here. She dreaded the thought of going back inside or into the studio to face her laptop, so she kept the conversation going. “How did your painting go today?” Ari had seen Pam in her studio every day, and she’d also seen the range and beauty of the paintings she’d done for the inn. Surely such talent couldn’t remain submerged for long.
“I have to admit my painting not only hasn’t gone well lately, but it’s been nonexistent. Today
I organized my brushes and canvases by size,” Pam said. “And I did get a nice pale ivory wash on one canvas, so tomorrow it’ll be ready to sit on my easel and stare at me mockingly. How’s your writing?”
Great. Never better. I’m churning out a hundred pages of brilliant prose a day. “I haven’t written as much as I’d hoped by this time,” she said. She hadn’t written at all, but she wasn’t ready to admit the whole truth. “I usually can process my emotions by putting the feelings into my stories and characters, but I haven’t been able to lately. I guess I’m sort of lost, with no outlet for all the stuff inside. I’d rather live through my characters than have to face the pain and hurt directly.”
“Wow,” Pam said.
“Wow? Do I sound crazy?” Ari had been desperate to confess her inability to work on her novel to someone, and Pam had seemed the obvious choice. She was an artist and she seemed to be doing just about anything besides practicing her art these days. Ari had thought Pam would understand how terrible it was to be unable to create, but maybe she’d been wrong.
“Not crazy at all. I meant wow, because I’ve felt the same way before. I could paint feelings onto a canvas, and only then did I really seem to get what they meant. Then, when I went through the most terrible time in my life, I couldn’t paint at all. All I could do was sit and stare at the pain. Until Mel came along.”
“What did she do?” Ari had some idea about how Mel had taken care of Pam. She seemed to truly honor and support Pam’s need to create. But it sounded like there was more to their story.
Pam laughed. “She somehow talked me into making the mosaics for this place. I didn’t believe I could even get one of the six she commissioned finished, and I was defensive every time she asked about them, but she wouldn’t let her vision for the rooms here go. She carried me along with her until I got all six done. Since then, well, I haven’t stopped. Over the past year, I didn’t need any special circumstances to create. I didn’t need to feel pain or joy, or to have the temperature, lighting, and environment within certain parameters. I would see something and feel an emotion attached to it, and then I’d paint it.” She sighed, a wistful sound. “I’d never felt anything like it, as if my connection to the world was healthy and…unhindered, I guess. It flowed.”
“What happened?” Ari asked. Pam would understand what she meant. Why had the connection ended? Maybe Pam knew the secret most artists sought to comprehend—how creativity could be controlled. How one could stop it from leaving a person alone, groping in the dark.
But Pam didn’t seem to know the answer. “I have no idea.” She shrugged. “The oil spill happened, I guess. I saw the horror of it all around me, what it did to the wonderful birds and animals that live here. What we did to them. And now, with Mel worried about the inn, and more businesses going under every day…How could I paint everything I was feeling? And then I couldn’t paint anything.”
“Does it scare you? Do you worry you won’t ever be able to paint again?” Ari’s own fear bubbled to the surface of her mind as she talked to Pam. She bent her knees and hugged them with one arm, the other holding her jacket in place over her head so she didn’t get wetter than she already was.
Pam put a hand on Ari’s shoulder and gave it a pat, as if she knew Ari’s questions were as much about her own work as Pam’s. “I was terrified. I thought I was going through the same thing I did before, when I went for years barely picking up a brush. I still get frightened sometimes, but I’m slowly finding faith in my need to paint. I feel more confident about finding my way back to art when I’m ready for it. I’m just not ready yet.”
“I wish I had your faith and confidence,” Ari said. She let the jacket droop over her eyes and wrapped both arms tightly around her legs. “I’ve got all these emotions, and I need to write them out before I can get past them. I just can’t get them organized and structured into sentences. Not even basic ones. Maybe it won’t ever come back.”
“I’ve read your books, you know. Jocelyn had us read one for her book club, and since then Mel and I have bought everything you’ve written. You’re a storyteller, Ariana. You have a gift for it, and it’s part of who you are. Mel and I talked about painting the other day. I think it hurts her as much as it does me when I can’t create. She saw what it did to me when I stopped before, and she doesn’t want me to go through it again. But she, always the practical one, said something that made me see what’s going on in a different light. Both the catalyst for the last dry spell and the oil spill were profoundly serious for me. Maybe I had to actually experience them before I could paint them as subjects. It happened before.” Pam paused and looked toward the sea.
Ari sensed Pam was looking into the past and not at the ocean. She was torn between wanting to give Pam privacy, and her innate need to understand other people. She gave in to her writer’s curiosity. “What made you stop painting the last time?”
Pam was silent for so long that Ari thought she wasn’t going to answer her at all, but she finally spoke. “I collapsed in on myself when my ex-girlfriend yanked her son out of my life. I felt like I’d lost my own child. Eventually I was able to finish his portrait and continue painting, but first I had to really mourn his loss. I can only believe I’ll do the same thing after I get through grieving the oil spill, the dead creatures and ruined lives. Maybe one day I’ll feel ready to paint the rescue center or the volunteers or the destruction and rebirth of the beach.”
Ari was happy for Pam and her optimism, but she didn’t feel the same hope for her future. Maybe Pam was better at facing emotions head-on than Ari was. And for a fact, Ari didn’t have anyone remotely like Mel in her life to spur her on. Jocelyn was the closest thing she had to a muse right now. Her most persistent fan.
After Pam patted her on the shoulder again and went back to the inn, Ari continued to sit in the increasingly heavy rain. She gave Pam’s suggestion a try and tentatively rummaged through the hidden cache of pain she held inside. Sadness, anger, and guilt performed their endless cycle until Ari felt queasy from the ride. She shivered and hunched her shoulders when the raindrops got big enough to drip through her jacket and run down her neck. She got up and ran past the studio and back to the inn. She couldn’t face this alone, not without the help of her fictional characters. And she couldn’t use them to help until she could get them out of her mind and into the manuscript.
She needed to find a way to be a writer again, without waiting for the readiness Pam was convinced would return. Maybe Jocelyn wasn’t as wrong as Ari had originally thought. Would reading old passages and answering the usual questions about her writing and inspiration break something loose inside her? Would it remind her of what it was like to create and allow her to recapture the inspiration she so frantically sought?
Maybe, just maybe, if Jocelyn approached her again, she’d be willing to give this new plan a chance. She imagined Jocelyn’s face when Ari would tell her she’d given in and would make an appearance in the bookstore. She’d probably wear a maddeningly triumphant expression, as if she’d known all along Ari would do her bidding. Maybe the whole damned thing was worth doing just to see Jocelyn’s reaction.
Ari left the muddy, damp boots outside the back door and ran up two flights of stairs in her stockinged feet. She bypassed the room with her laptop and notepads, going instead into the kite room and flopping on the bed. She didn’t feel like attempting to write anymore this evening. She watched television for a while, and then went downstairs to work on the jigsaw puzzle Mel had spread out on a card table. Ari picked up her phone and ordered delivery pizza for her dinner—why go out and make it easier for Jocelyn to find her?
When she had run out of ways to procrastinate, she got out the two books she’d bought from Jocelyn’s bookstore and read them far into the night. She wanted to go back and ask for more recommendations since Jocelyn truly had pegged her as someone who understood solitude and who was wrestling with family questions. Maybe the next book Jocelyn suggested would be a guide to recovering a lost mu
se.
Jocelyn was on her mind all night. Had she given up on Ari, or would she launch another attack? This time, Ari wouldn’t say no.
*
In the end, Ari had gone in search of Jocelyn, not the other way around. And now she was standing in the empty bookstore, organizing her notes for the reading at the podium Jocelyn had set in the corner of her store.
At first she’d resisted the urge to go back to the store and face Jocelyn. But then she got bored enough to Google herself. She had thought reading some positive reviews of her books might give her a boost in confidence. Unfortunately, the first one she found was for her most recent work.
Award-winning novelist Ariana Knight disappoints with latest novel.
She should have stopped reading after the headline, but she didn’t. She shouldn’t have gotten in her car and driven directly to the Beachcomber Bookstore and told a delighted Jocelyn she’d do this stupid signing, but she had. And now here she was. Ready to disappoint again.
Jocelyn came over and broke Ari out of her self-pity mode.
“Do you need a glass of water up here while you read? Will you be comfortable standing behind the podium, or does it feel too formal?”
Jocelyn had been nothing but helpful and appreciative since Ari had arrived, and Ari had to admit that Jocelyn had thrown together an elegant, yet intimate setting on short notice. Ari wasn’t sure exactly how short the notice had been. Maybe Jocelyn had been planning this night since the moment they met, confident she’d eventually wear Ari down.
“I like the podium because I can put my notes down instead of holding them,” Ari said. No matter how she had ended up in this predicament, she’d do her best to make it a success for Jocelyn and her store. Ari was dealing with her own demons these days, but she could set them aside for one night. She had come here to help Cannon Beach as much as herself, and this was a way to support the town. Along the way, perhaps she’d remember why she loved writing in the first place. “And water would be nice.”
