The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  He wasn’t absorbing what she was saying. He shook his head. “Maybe when they’re older, when they don’t need you as much, you can pick it up again.” He rubbed his eyes; he looked like Sebastian did when he was tired. “I want you to shut it down,” he said. “We never talked about spending money on a babysitter, when we still owe my parents, when we have a lot of expenses, Lu. We had an agreement, where for now I make the money and you take care of the kids. You can’t just opt out of the agreement.”

  “But that agreement is four years old. Things change!”

  “I don’t want some stranger raising our boys,” said Jeremy. “Neither did you, when we would’ve had to find a new nanny for Sebastian. And a new baby? I don’t want a stranger taking care of a baby. For now, you’re going to have to shut down the blog.”

  Lu thought of all the sponsors she’d gathered, the cookbook deal, the invitation to the conference, the advertising dollars, the momentum. She’d never get it back, not years from now, not if she turned it all down now. She had to build her empire before she could live in it—she couldn’t show up in ten years or more and say, Where’s my empire? I thought I left it right here.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do that, Jeremy. I’ve given a lot to the family, but I can’t give everything. I won’t.”

  And then she left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Chapter 56

  Anthony

  The events coordinator at Island Bound Books was a small young woman with a wide smile and suntanned skin. If eyes really could be said to sparkle, hers did (cliché). She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said I’m a Bad Girl. I Read Past My Bedtime and a name tag that said bridget. The T-shirt made Anthony think of Maggie.

  “Oh, I’m sorry! We’ve had to cancel our event for this afternoon!” Bridget said when Anthony rapped on the door. It had taken him some effort to get to the store. The wind was whipping off the water something fierce, and there was a point on Water Street where the air seemed to be pushing him back just as strongly as he was pushing himself forward. Bridget pointed dramatically at a handwritten sign that said AUTHOR EVENT CANCELED. “With the ferries stopped, it just seemed silly to continue.” She leaned toward Anthony as though she were about to divulge a great secret. “We don’t always get such big names here, you know, and the owner understandably would rather postpone until we can really fill the house.”

  “And then some, I’m sure,” said Anthony. “I mean, Leonard Puckett! He’s a big deal.” He tried to make his voice sound affable, but really he was thinking, Fraud. He was thinking, Liar.

  “One of my favorites,” Bridget confirmed. “I’ve just had a few minutes to speak with him. A real treat! An unexpected treat, I might add. Sometimes the big ones just blow in and blow out without so much as a sideways glance. But he’s quite the gentleman.”

  “He’s here?” asked Anthony. His heart started to beat very fast.

  “Oh, yes,” said Bridget. “He came in on the last plane this morning. As luck would have it! That’s why I feel so bad postponing the event. He was so gracious about it. A big name like Leonard Puckett! I know authors way less successful who’d never be willing to be flexible.”

  “That’s great,” said Anthony. He was sweating. His father was here. He wondered if Bridget had made the connection between his own face and either the Times article or the book jacket of A Room Within—she worked in a bookstore, after all, wasn’t it possible that she’d recognize the author of a bestselling novel? But there was the fact, as incontrovertible as the weather, that a certain amount of time had passed since the publication of his debut. Bridget looked awfully young, even though she sort of talked like a forty-year-old.

  “Well, well, well.” Leonard must have come from the author version of an actor’s green room, which in Anthony’s experience was more often than not a storage room filled with galleys and unpacked cartons of books and the occasional snack bin.

  “Hello,” said Anthony cautiously. He stopped himself before saying, Hello, Dad.

  “Oh!” said Bridget. “You two know each other. I hadn’t realized . . .”

  “We do,” said Leonard, at the same time as Anthony said, “Only very casually.” I Don’t Want to Taco ’Bout It, Anthony told himself softly. It’s Nacho Problem.

  Bridget hovered uncertainly, bouncing back and forth from one foot to the other like a tennis player preparing to return a serve. “Well, then,” she said at last. “I don’t expect anyone to come in with the storm we’re getting, and I’ve posted the cancellation on the door—why don’t you sit and talk for a few minutes while I close up?” She lowered her voice, although nobody else was around. “There are twelve bottles of wine we bought for a little reception after the reading. I didn’t bother refrigerating the white once we decided to postpone, but help yourselves to the Cabernet. They told me it’s a nice one!”

  Besides a small table, there were two chairs in the back room: a floral armchair that looked like it had been recovered from somebody’s basement, and a swivel desk chair. Leonard took the latter, which left Anthony no choice but to sink into the armchair, giving him a distinct feeling of being on uneven ground, looking up at Leonard.

  “So!” said Leonard expansively. “So, this is where you’ve been hiding out all this time.” He used almost the exact words Cassie had used, and Anthony resented them exactly the same amount.

  “Mom told me,” Anthony said, without preamble. “She told me everything.”

  Leonard’s face was inscrutable. “And what do you mean,” he said slowly, “by everything?” He took his time opening the wine and pouring a healthy amount into two plastic tumblers he selected from a stack on the table. At first Anthony wasn’t going to have any—it seemed like an admission of complicity, to join in a friendly drink, and it was still afternoon—but in the end he needed it to calm his shaking hands, his shaking nerves.

  “Everything about your career. Your collective career. She wrote as much of the books as you did. More, in some cases! The Beauty’s Beast. Red as Rubies. Jury of Peers.”

  “Ah,” said Leonard. He sat back in the desk chair and regarded Anthony.

  “Well?” said Anthony. “Is it true?”

  Leonard said, “So, with this little tidbit, you think you know everything. You think you know the whole story.”

  “I think I know most of it,” Anthony said. He felt like they should be drinking something more manly—bourbon, scotch—but the wine went down easy and he began to feel more relaxed.

  “I bet you don’t,” said Leonard. “So why don’t I tell you when it started?”

  “Okay,” said Anthony. He hated how compliant he sounded.

  “I was sick with the flu,” said Leonard. “I was so sick, for almost a month. I don’t know if you remember that. You were in middle school. My last two books had done extremely well.”

  “I don’t,” said Anthony evenly. He did, but he wanted to hear his father tell it. The year of the flu, seventh grade. Some particularly virulent strain had appeared, and half the school was out for days at a time. Then his father caught it. Anthony and Dorothy somehow escaped. He remembered his mother disappearing constantly into the master bedroom. Tending to the sick, Anthony had thought at the time.

  “Sick or not, the deadline didn’t go anywhere. There was no leeway. You wouldn’t understand, you haven’t been doing it like I have. You’re not the same kind of writer. One novel to your name.”

  “Two,” said Anthony. “And the short stories.”

  Leonard raised an eyebrow. “Not quite two, is it? And I don’t count the short stories. Short stories don’t sell.”

  “Well, I understand the concept of a deadline,” said Anthony evenly. He drank more wine.

  “The pressure to produce, to keep producing, on the schedule the publisher had set up. It was enormous. But to stop, when I was just getting that momentum—that simply wasn’t an option. I never would have become what I became if I’d stopped. So I was trying to work
on the book when I was quite ill, and I couldn’t keep the thoughts straight in my head. They kept—” He made a whirling motion with his hand. “They kept moving around. Every morning while you were at school your mother would come in with a pad of paper and take notes for me. My hands were too shaky to write. I’d say the lines of dialogue, and she’d write them down, and every now and then she’d make a suggestion. What if the killer said this instead of that? What if the child appeared in the scene in the restaurant, or the argument took place on the boat? And so on. On we went like that, for days and days and days, and when I was better, and I was back in my study, I realized how helpful she’d been to me. I started calling her in when I had a question, a doubt. Her suggestions became more and more integral to the book. That book did better than any of them, and when it was time to start the next book, it just seemed natural that we would work on it together. So we did.” He looked down at his hands, then took a long pull of the Cabernet. “And we’ve simply never stopped.”

  “Because all this time she’s been—she’s been your slave.”

  “No.” Leonard sat up. “No, not my slave.”

  “Your beard, then.”

  An almost-smile played at Leonard’s lips, but he swallowed it back.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not.”

  It was very strange to be talking to his father while surrounded by such a large selection of his father’s (mother’s?) books. The store had stocked up, naturally, on dozens and dozens and dozens of copies of The Thrill of the Chase, but also trade paperbacks and mass-market paperbacks of some of his earlier titles. Anthony picked up Escape the Unknown and flipped it over to look at the author photo, then he did the same with Grasshopper, which was published three years later. (In between were three more Gabriel Shelton books.) Leonard Puckett got a new author photo taken every two years (“Whether I need to or not!”), so Anthony could trace the evolution of his father’s face, of his aging, simply by looking through a vast collection such as this one.

  “I want to stop,” Dorothy had said. “I’m ready. But he’s not.”

  “So why don’t you stop?”

  “Stop?” Leonard, a man of letters, appeared not to understand the meaning of this very basic word. “Stop what?”

  “Stop writing, Dad. Why don’t you stop writing? Mom wants to. But she said you don’t.”

  “We can’t stop. We’re under contract.” So now it was we, Anthony noticed. Now that the cat was out of the bag, it was first-person plural all around.

  “For how many more?”

  “Two. After this one.”

  “So why don’t you stop after that? She told me she wants to be done. You can take her on a trip around the world.”

  “Your mother,” Leonard said, “has been around the world.”

  “Only in bits and pieces. And never on vacation, apparently. All this time I thought she was out and about, gazing at the Mona Lisa, touring the Kronborg Castle, but she was working. The two of you were working. And you took all of the credit.”

  “Don’t talk about credit.” Leonard slammed his hand down onto the table. “This has nothing to do with credit. Why must you fight me on this?”

  “I won’t stop,” Anthony pressed on. “I’m fighting for Mom, who nobody ever fights for. Why not put her name on the last two books? Why keep going after that, against her wishes? You have more money than you’ll ever spend. How much more do you need, Dad? To make you happy?” The twenty grand he owed Huxley reared its unattractive, inconvenient head once again.

  “Need?” Leonard Puckett seemed to consider the question. He looked around the room, peered into his tumbler, then said, “Well, none, I guess. No more. But it’s not about being happy.”

  “What’s it about, then?”

  “I don’t know what else I’d do, if I stopped.” His entire being seemed to sag. “Die, I guess.”

  “Oh, Dad,” said Anthony. “Come on, now.”

  For the first time in his life, at the tender age of seventy-two, his father looked weak and old. It wasn’t just the way the skin of his lower face slumped; it wasn’t the unfamiliar veins that throbbed at his temple. It was something internal turned outward: it was the revelation of the long-held secret.

  Leonard emptied his tumbler, and then refilled it. Anthony did the same. Leonard Puckett regarded his son, unblinking. “You have no idea what it’s like, son.” Anthony couldn’t remember if there’d ever been a time in his life when his father had addressed him as son. No, he decided, there hadn’t been.

  “You’ve made that clear,” he said. “I have no idea what it’s like to be as successful as you. I know that, Dad. I get it. I know I don’t have what you have.”

  Leonard was looking down at his cup, and when he raised his head again his eyes were damp. Was Leonard Puckett . . . crying? “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “You understand, presumably, what it’s like to have your talent—your immense, your enviable talent—without the career. But you will never know what it’s like to have the career without the talent. To be merely a hack. To need your wife to do half the work because you simply can’t keep up with it yourself.”

  It was the regret in Leonard’s voice that gnawed a pathway through to Anthony. Regret was such a painful and permanent thing. He felt a twinge of pity for his father. “You’ve written more books than any other writer in this store,” Anthony said, indicating with the wave of an arm the bookstore that lay beyond the storeroom. “In any store! You’re immortal.” Did he mean to say immortalized? He paused, uncertain, then let his decision stand.

  “But the truth . . .” said Leonard. He hesitated. “What I mean to say is—the truth you got at, Anthony . . . In all of your writing, from the first work of yours I ever read, you had a way of getting at the truth. A way of just—grasping it. Piercing it. In all of my years of writing, I’ve never been able to do that, to get at the truth.” He sighed, and pressed his hands to his temples. “How I’ve envied you that, son—right along, how I’ve envied you. The quality of your writing, the masterfulness, the beauty, the insight. And you didn’t have to work for it.”

  “Yes, I did. I worked for it.” His father was trying to negate Anthony’s blood, his sweat and tears, with a single furrow of his famous brow. “I worked like hell for it.”

  “Not like I did,” said Leonard, shaking his head. “Not like I did.”

  Why, then, did Anthony begin to feel a terrible sense of foreboding, as dark and heavy as a cloak laid about his shoulders? Then, so quietly that Anthony had to strain to hear him, Leonard said, “That’s why I did what I did.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do?”

  “I’m not proud of it.”

  “Of what? Dad? Of what?”

  Chapter 57

  Lu

  Lu dismissed Maggie, paid her, and went back up to the bedroom. She told Jeremy, “I need to go and think for a few minutes. You’re in charge of Chase and Sebastian.” She walked down to the beach.

  The day Lu had told the partners in her firm that she wasn’t coming back after maternity leave, there had been a terrible rainstorm. She’d found a day when Jeremy, then a resident working who-knows-how-many hours a week, was off, so he could drive Lu in and stay in the car with the boys. Sebastian nursed too often to be without her for long, and it had felt very important to Lu that she do this errand in person. (Though in hindsight a phone call would have been perfectly fine.) Chase was just beginning to be toilet-trained, and some error of judgment or timing had resulted in his leaving the house in his big boy underpants—a privilege he hadn’t yet earned.

  The partners were dismayed by Lu’s decision (she had been very good at her job) and they tried to woo her with talk of flex-hours and work-at-home Fridays. Lu was stalwart, firm. She knew those promises always lapsed and that at her firm there really was no such thing as flextime. The only real choice was all the time.

  Leaving the office, she’d come upon a third-year law school recruit who was b
eing given a tour of the building. She was probably only five years younger than Lu but at the time Lu—dark crescents underneath her eyes, nine pounds of baby weight lodged somewhere between her pelvis and her rib cage, breasts ballooned to three times their normal size, her whole body as unfamiliar as a foreign language on her tongue—felt like a dowdy spinster chaperone standing next to the season’s most desirable debutante. The envy she felt of this girl was palpable, breathtaking.

  “Well, that’s done,” said Lu when she got back to the car. She tried to keep her voice brisk and nonchalant.

  “How do you feel?” asked Jeremy. He looked even more tired and worn down than Lu felt.

  “Great,” she said untruthfully. She gazed at Sebastian, sleeping in the car seat. “So relieved. It went really well.” She sniffed. “Did something . . . ?”

  “Less well in here,” said Jeremy at the same time.

  “I made a giant poop,” said Chase. A proud grin snaked dangerously across his face. “Right in my big boys!”

  As if given a cue, Sebastian stirred in the car seat. He opened his eyes and began to suck frantically on his fist. A tiny spasm wracked his small body, and then he broke into a wail. Lu’s breasts simultaneously filled and began to leak. A great crack of thunder shattered the un-silence, and then the skies opened up.

  Now, on the beach, Lu thought about that day and looked up at the sky. The wind was picking up. There must be a storm coming after all. Of course there was. They wouldn’t have stopped the ferries for nothing.

  Lu had never walked out on Jeremy like that before. It was out of character. She wasn’t a passive fighter—she always saw a fight through to the bitter end, like a GLOW character with a mouth guard and a story to tell. Just ask her mother, her sister, or any of her ex-boyfriends. Jeremy had always been more cerebral, more measured in his approach to conflict, more willing to take a step back and think before speaking.