M
ena watches Sam as he considers the winding expanse of road in front of them. He has been driving since New York. He doesn’t say so, but he doesn’t like it when she drives. When she drove, she could see his jaw muscles flexing, the way they worked and worked, even if he was feigning sleep.And so she stopped offering to take over the wheel. She’d rather look out the window anyway, read or nap. It was Sam’s idea to come here.
It’s been nearly three hundred miles, and no one has said a word. Finn is in the backseat with headphones on, the music so loud she can hear it, like jingling bells. It can’t be good for his ears, but she bites her tongue. She doesn’t want to take his music from him; it’s one of the few things they haven’t confiscated in the last couple of months. She watches him in the rearview mirror; his eyes are vacant. Not even sad anymore, just empty. Next to her, Sam is concentrating on the road. He’s been stiff like this, focused, since they left Manhattan. But they’re far, far from all that gridlock now. He could relax a little. Theirs is the only car on the road.
They could have gotten here more quickly if they hadn’t had to stop in New York, but as soon as Monty found out that they were coming back east (driving back no less), he’d insisted they take this more circuitous route. Mena knew it wasn’t a good idea to stop, for a lot of reasons. She worried about New York, about all the places Finn might run. But Monty was persistent, and Sam felt guilty, and so they drove the long way. Luckily the stay was uneventful, in terms of Finn, and Monty put them up at the Four Seasons (which, Mena had to admit, was a welcome change after the series of Motel 6’s they’d occupied each night since they left San Diego). That night he took them all out for dinner at the Union Square Café (also a welcome change from the Burger Kings and Wendys along the way). All of this just an effort to coax Sam into spilling his plans for the next book.
“Don’t want to jinx it?” Monty asked when Sam quietly pushed his duck confit around his plate. “Mum’s the word, huh?”
Only Mena knew that Sam was not being evasive or elusive, but that he simply had no plans to reveal. He was under contract for the next book, and the deadline was just six months away, but as far as she could tell, Sam hadn’t started it. He still disappeared into his office every day, but Mena knew that while he might be typing in there, he certainly wasn’t writing.
Not that long ago, Sam and Monty would spend hours over multicourse dinners talking about his fictional characters as if they were real people. Gossiping like schoolgirls about people who existed only in Sam’s mind. Mena used to love to listen to them chattering on and on. For twenty years Monty had been Sam’s agent. Twenty years of friendship. You’d think he’d realize something wasn’t right.
“Vermont will be good for you,” Monty said, spearing a bloody chunk of meat with his knife and popping it into his mouth. “You renting that same place?”
“I bought it,” Sam said.
“Bought it?”
Sam nodded.
“How much a place up there cost you? Two, three hundred bucks?” Monty chuckled.
“Something like that,” Sam said. In fact, Sam had spent his entire advance for this novel on the little cottage, financed the rest.
Monty smiled his big warm smile. “What’re
you
gonna do stuck in the woods up there, Finny?”
“Probably lose my fucking mind,” Finn said.
“Mouth,”
Sam said, grimacing.
Finn’s arms were crossed over his chest; he hadn’t eaten a bite. He was peering across the restaurant, but when Mena followed his gaze, she saw only the empty bar. The doors to the kitchen. She couldn’t help but imagine him casing the place, looking for the glowing EXIT signs, plotting his escape. Sam seemed oblivious, his thoughts elsewhere. Mena noticed a vein throbbing at his temple, noticed the gray hairs sprouting there too. She looked down at her salad, the heirloom tomatoes arranged like a painting on her plate.
“You got any neighbors up there?” Monty asked. “Some moose maybe? A few cows?”
Sam poked at his duck.
“Didn’t you hear?” Mena asked, laughing just a little too loudly. “McNally finally put it on the map. Since then it’s been swarming with tourists. A real hot spot.”
Finn snorted.
“It really is beautiful,” Mena said, and smiled, suddenly feeling bad for Monty, who was trying so hard. She reached for his hand across the table. “You and Lauren should come up and visit. You
should
. Get out of the city, breathe some fresh air.” She tried to imagine Lauren Harrison in her Chanel suits and pointy shoes navigating her way up the winding driveway to the cottage. Mena has always liked Monty (with his boyish enthusiasm and boyish looks and boyish manners), but Lauren has a way of making her feel uncomfortable. She is so polished, she almost shines. The thought of her in that musty cottage was ridiculous.
“Maybe we will.” Monty smiled, nodding his head. “See the sights.”
In the hotel that night, Mena stayed awake, waiting for something bad to happen. But both Finn and Sam fell asleep as soon as their heads touched the downy pillows, and she watched them until the sun filtered through the butter-colored curtains.
“We’re almost here,” Mena says, gently touching Sam’s leg. He turns to her, startled, his face slowly softening, as if he has been woken from a dream. “Isn’t Hudson’s just up the road?” she says. The last stop in civilization before the lake.
They pull into the dirt lot in front of the store. Sam turns off the ignition and rolls his head from side to side, stretching. Mena resists the urge to reach over and knead out the crick that she knew would come if he kept driving like that, sitting upright, not using the headrest.
“About time,” Finn says, pulling the headphones from his ears and tossing his iPod onto the seat. “I need to take a piss.”
Mena feels her chest tighten. “Okay, but come right back. I’m just going in to get some milk. Coffee. I’ll come back into town tomorrow for real food.”
Finn gets out of the car, stretching his long legs. He has grown four inches since last summer. He’s already over six feet tall, and not even seventeen yet. At night, in his sleep, he moans as his bones expand. The sound makes Mena cringe. In Amarillo, he’d been moaning so loudly in the motel room that Sam had gotten up, delirious, convinced that a wounded animal had found its way in.
“Hurry back,” Mena says again, this time more reprimand than plea, as Finn disappears around the side of the gas station with the restroom key attached to a large wooden paddle. He rolls his eyes at her, and she winces.
Sam has gotten out of the car too and is battling with the vending machine, hitting the side of it with his palm, muttering under his breath.
“Need more change?” Mena asks, reaching into her pocket.
“Nah. Forget it,” he says.
Mena touches him on the shoulder. She can’t stop touching him, even though he barely responds anymore. “Sure?”
He nods and walks back to the car, stretching his arm over his head, cracking his back. She watches as his pants slip a few inches. All of his clothes are too big for him lately. She would have been smart to pick up a few pairs of his favorite khakis at Brooks Brothers before they left California. Once they get to Gormlaith she’ll have to do all of their shopping online. She wonders if they can even get Internet access at the lake.
When she comes out of the convenience store with an overpriced gallon of milk, a block of cheddar cheese, a dozen eggs, and a six-pack of beer, Finn is rounding the corner. She adjusts the grocery bag on her hip like a baby, leans into him, and kisses his cheek. She can smell the smoke on his clothes, on his breath, but she doesn’t say anything. She is simply grateful that he is still here.
“Ready?” She musters a smile.
“Do I have a choice?” he asks, and gets into the car, plugging up his ears again with music.
I
t’s not the way Finn remembers it. He’s even convinced for a minute that they’re fucking with him, that this is some sort of joke. He looks to his father for the punch line, but he’s already disappeared inside the cottage with some of their suitcases. It’s not the same place; it can’t be. True, they haven’t come here since he and Franny were twelve or so, but he’s not crazy. He knows this place like his own goddamn dick. For one thing, the tree in the front yard is way smaller than the one in his memory. He distinctly remembers his father having to use a ladder to hang the tire swing on the tree’s one thick limb that jutted out over the front yard. But looking at it now, he’s pretty sure he could just jump up and grab a hold of it if he wanted to. And the cottage itself seems like a doll’s house, like a playhouse. Like something at fucking Disneyland.
He gets out of the car and starts walking down the hill toward the water. It must have rained earlier; the grass is slick. He almost loses his footing as he makes his way down the hill, glancing around quickly to make sure nobody saw him almost wipe out, and then realizes that there’s nobody here to see him anyway.
Butt Fuck Nowhere
. That’s where he’d told Misty they were going when she asked. They were making out in the parking lot at the beach. Misty had gotten a hold of some X, and he could feel every single inch of his skin. He wanted to lick things. He wanted his tongue on everything: the leather seats of her father’s car, her skin, the sand.
“Will you miss me?” she had asked, twirling her tongue around in his ear.
He’d nodded, touching each of her eyelids with the tip of his tongue, tasting the mascara and tears that were brimming in the corners of her eyes. This made him want to go taste the ocean. He wanted to go to the water and take the whole thing into his mouth, swallow it in big gulps. He wanted everything inside of him: Misty, the ocean, the night.
“I guess,” he’d said, smirking. “A little bit.”
The lake also looks smaller, a miniature version of what he remembers. Compared to the Pacific, still bodies of water like this are pathetic. He picks up a rock and chucks it into the lake, watches as it disturbs the ridiculous peace of the water’s surface. He looks across the lake at the opposite shore. There are a handful of houses, all of them empty still. Beyond that are trees and still more trees. A small mountain jutting up into the hazy sky.What have they done to him? What has he done to deserve this?
Of course he knows exactly what he’s done. And when he thinks about that night now, even
he
thinks it was stupid.The trip to Tijuana, and coming back across the border so loaded he could barely walk. They’d gone down there to celebrate Misty getting into Brown. She was a year ahead of him at school, second in her class. She’d gotten into every goddamn school she’d applied to, but Brown was her top choice. And he was an asshole that night, jealous a little, maybe, of Misty getting exactly what she wanted (she always got exactly what she wanted). Jealous of the way she was dancing while every guy at that dirty bar was watching her. He was wasted, but he remembers the flash of her skin, the belly ring, the way her sweaty hair clung to her face and neck. But he shouldn’t have left her there alone. God, it
was
stupid.
Where’s Misty?
his father had asked, shaking him by the shoulders inside the brightly lit cubicle at the border station until he felt almost carsick.
Where’s Misty?
It took six hours before he was sober, six hours before they found her. Her parents were mad as hell; they’d never liked him before and now this. But
Misty
had forgiven him. And wasn’t that all that really mattered? Nothing bad had even happened. Everybody was down in TJ that night. Half the kids from their school did the same thing almost every weekend. When Finn left, Misty just found another girl from Country Day. They’d crossed back over the border and went to the beach. A fucking bonfire in Mission Beach. No big deal. It wasn’t his fault she didn’t go straight home. Later, when he told her what his parents were making him do, she’d apologized to
him
. Said it was her fault that he was getting banished for the whole summer before his senior year. Their last summer together before she went off to college.
Of course he knows that TJ wasn’t the last straw. That came afterward. He’s never really known when to stop. Even he has to admit that. But still, he is pissed at his father. At his mother. He knows that Misty won’t wait for him; why the hell should she? He’s got to figure out a way out of here, a way to get back to her. He looks up at the cottage, at the scraggly lawn, at the woods behind the house that, for all he knows, stretch all the way to fucking Canada.Where the hell can he go? He picks up a handful of rocks and hurls them into the quiet water, watching the stones come crashing down like rain.
S
am wrote his first novel when he was twenty-one years old. He can still remember what it felt like the day he sat down to write. He remembers the massive oak monstrosity from Goodwill that served as both his kitchen table and his desk. The blue electric typewriter he��d bought at a pawnshop for five bucks and some change. His father had just died. Sam was living alone with a family of gray mice in an apartment in downtown Burlington, the one above the French bakery. There was a poster of a giant fried egg that the last tenant had left behind, hanging from thumbtacks in a bright yellow kitchen. Every morning he bought a chocolate croissant and a cup of coffee from the pretty redheaded girl who worked in the bakery. It was the winter of his senior year at UVM, and outside the wind coming off Lake Champlain felt like knives. After his father died, he’d stopped going to classes and started to write. He didn’t plan on getting famous; he just wanted to bring his father back.
But strangely, as he wrote, it wasn’t his father who appeared on the page; all that crazy love and grief and horror conjured, instead, a girl.When she first appeared, he’d been thinking about his father’s hands. About the gray work gloves he wore when he was splitting wood. He’d been thinking about the sound of the ax splitting through the thick trunks. He’d been thinking about the way his father would run his hand over the top of his head, leaving a dusty layer of sawdust in his hair. But the words that came out (
pine, autumn, chill
) captured, instead, a girl in a red wool coat standing in a field of fallen leaves. He knew he was meant to be a writer when he left his father and followed her, when she offered him her soft hand and he took it.
What he didn’t expect was everything that happened afterward. He didn’t expect when he finally showed up to English class again that spring with the manuscript (a cardboard shirt box filled with smudgy onionskin papers) that his professor at the university would give it to his friend’s son, Monty Harrison, who had just started up a literary agency in New York, and that three days later Monty would drive all the way up to Burlington in his beat-up Karmann Ghia to tell him that he’d written something brilliant. That this novel would make them both famous. He also didn’t expect that Monty, who was only a handful of years older than Sam himself, would proceed to pull off what finally amounted to a series of small miracles: a book contract with a reputable house, a sizable advance, and the one thing that would change everything: a film deal with an independent film producer in Los Angeles who knew a girl who would be perfect to play the lead. She was nineteen, a student at CalArts who came from somewhere in Arizona.
Phoenix, Flagstaff?
No matter, she was Greek, a knockout, and her name was Mena.
Mena.
The first time Sam saw Mena was on the film set, inside a crappy warehouse in Studio City. But when he saw her, it was as if she had crawled out of the pages of the book. Mena, with her gypsy hips and oil spill hair. She was wearing a pair of brown motorcycle boots and faded Levi’s held up by a belt with a massive pewter Alice in Wonderland buckle.When she offered him her hand, he couldn’t stop himself from turning it over and over in his palm, examining it. He had written this skin. This smell of trees. She was his words manifested in lovely skin and hair and breath. And when she leaned into him and said, “Come with me?” he understood that, just as he had pursued the woman in the woods, he would follow Mena anywhere. Within a couple of months, he’d relocated to Los Angeles, leaving Vermont and school and his old life behind.
He watches her now, as she unpacks the groceries, as she blows the dust off the cupboard shelves. Her hair still spills down her back, liquid, but in the last year he has watched as tiny gray hairs sprouted up, asserting themselves with their wiry defiance. He has watched lines etch themselves into the corners of her eyes. He has watched sorrow take its toll on her. Looking at her now no longer fills him with desire but remorse.
“You want the loft again?” she asks. “For your office?”
He nods.
“Why don’t you go set it up,” she says. “I’ll make dinner.”
Her eyes are so wide now. She always looks on the verge of tears. At first it made his heart ache; now, it makes him want to retreat. He can barely stand to look at her, at those pleading eyes asking him for something he doesn’t have.
He leaves her and goes to the main room. The furniture is covered with tarps. The windows are greasy. There is an upright piano here now, painted bright blue and sitting in the middle of the room like something abandoned. It wasn’t here the last time. The dining table is still there, the long wooden expanse of a top and its wobbly legs. They used to put matchbooks under them to keep it still, opting to eat outside most nights. Everything smells like dust. He remembers the way it used to feel to come here, the excitement of uncovering the furniture, the sense of anticipation. He used to love to sweep the dusty floor, tear the cobwebs down, collect handfuls of dead flies from the windowsills. The windows, swollen shut all winter, always seemed to thank him as he lifted their sashes. He remembers the thrill of two tiny sets of footprints leading from the dusty floor all the way to the back door.
He climbs the ladder to the loft.Years ago, he had the blue electric typewriter that he would lug up with him every summer. He still has the typewriter, but has opted now, reluctantly, for a laptop. It was a gift from Mena. After two years, he still resists its streamlined body. Its silent keys.As he climbs up, he misses the old typewriter, both the burden and the sense of possibility. He will miss the rhythmic clickety-clack. He will miss the noises.
It isn’t the same. He must have been crazy to think it would be. The faded red velvet chair and small wooden desk are still there, but the view out the window is not as he remembers it. The first time he brought Mena here, she was pregnant with the twins. He remembers her sleeping on the mattress he’d also hauled up here, while he wrote. He remembers the words and the way they felt:
swollen, sunshine, repose.
He remembers the way the light caught on the water through the small round window over the desk. Later, when the twins were small, he would watch them below through the window—the choreography of a mother and her children:
bloody noses, pinched fingers, tiny toads
and
perfect stones.
But now, as he looks through the dirty window at the still water, he only thinks:
lost, gone, was.
Outside the sun is starting to melt over Franklin Mountain in the distance, like pale fire.
“Where’s Finn?” Mena hollers up, and he hears that new panic in her voice that’s been creeping in lately. A tremble, a breaking. And the worst part is, he doesn’t think there’s a damn thing he can do to make it go away.
“He’s just down by the water,” he says. “Throwing rocks.”