The Ghostwriter Read online

  Three months left. That’s what the doctor said. Three months, and a book that will easily run three hundred pages. I close my eyes and do the math, giving myself forty days to write, forty to rewrite, and ten days leeway for sickness. I’ll need to write 8 pages, two thousand words each day. My stress rises. Ten days off in three months is a crazy schedule. And two thousand words a day is daunting, especially for me, who takes a year to produce a normal manuscript.

  This will not be a normal manuscript. This is a heroine who will be closer to me than any other. A heroine whose shoes I filled, whose steps I took, decisions I made, sins I committed. Once I write her story, she will be real, she will be exposed, dead to edits but open to everyone’s eyes. On their tablets, in their hands, grubby fingers and manicured nails skimming the pages faster-faster-faster until they reach The End and move on to the next. Done with that heroine. Done with that story.

  I’m terrified at the thought. Thousands of words of truth and life, published and out for them to digest, creating the chance, the very small chance, that no one will buy her. Or that they will read her words and pick at them, reviewers typing away, their lips chit-chattering, musing about her motivations and her weaknesses and her actions and whether she is deserving of her fate.

  I don’t know what is worse, if they hate her or if they don’t read her at all. She could end up in a clearance bin, a flashy 99¢ sticker plastered to her front.

  I can’t do that to her. I can’t do that to me.

  Maybe that’s why I’ve waited until now, the moment when I won’t be around to see the carnage, to deal with the police, the consequences, the judgement.

  Two thousand words a day. Three months that are already whittling down. My stomach heaves, and I open my mouth, inhale deeply, a panic attack rising, my body suddenly hot, this office stuffy, the glow of the computer’s screen too bright.

  I can’t do it. There is no way, not enough time, not enough hours to dedicate to what is the most important novel of my entire life.

  I almost reach for the phone, dial Kate’s number, and ask for help.

  Instead, I lean forward, dropping to the floor, hand yanking at the plastic trash can beneath my desk, and vomit.

  The summer I met Simon, I lost Jennifer. It was as if a hole opened in my heart, and he stepped right in, his hand where hers had once been, his smile replacing hers. Granted, they were different. She was eleven, he was twenty-two. She ran away…

  I delete the last line, and then the entire paragraph. Lies. I am forgetting that this is not an ordinary novel, that I can’t take fictional liberties, can’t provide clues, or lead the readers down a path I didn’t travel.

  There is no Jennifer. Maybe if there had been, then I would be in a different place now. Maybe if I had had a friend, even an eleven-year-old one, then Simon wouldn’t have been my everything.

  I try to picture a friend of the twenty-year-old me, a girl whose interests had been singularly focused on reading and writing, her days spent at a notebook or computer, her mind preoccupied in thoughts of fictional characters and strange cities. Girls in my high school had seemed like foreign creatures, the boys leering villains. Another writer would have been my best bet. Or possibly a librarian, though none had ever given me the time of day.

  I think of Marka Vantley, of our seven-year war, and make a face. Maybe another writer wouldn’t have been my best bet. Then again, most writers aren’t buxom supermodels who write trashy smut.

  My gaze drifts over the stack of books beside my desk, all but one of my novels present. Missing is Blue Heart. The worst book I ever wrote. It was about a girl who gets a heart transplant as a child and—either due to the medical procedure or her God-given personality—is unable to love. Critics loved it and readers rushed out to purchase it, a million copies sold in the first year. Marka Vantly sent me a scathing email that spoke the truth. It said the book was terrible—flat and insipid, my attempts at matchmaking weak.

  She had been right.

  I hadn’t responded well, reading the email and then pushing the laptop off the counter’s edge. Simon had come home to find bits of the screen dotting our kitchen floor, punk music blaring through the house—an unsuccessful attempt to drown out her words.

  I never responded to her email. I hadn’t known what to say, my footing weak and unfamiliar. I’d solved the problem with a big sleeping pill, topped off with Chardonnay and hostility toward my husband. That email had been the spark that had started Marka’s and my rivalry. The kindling had been our constant competition on the bestseller ranks, every week a new scorecard, our print runs and sales figures a giant tally that anyone with a Publishers Weekly subscription could access. That email had been the first of many, each release bringing another, my competitive nature unable to resist similar pettiness, barbs exchanged with increasing hostility.

  I’d always told myself that it didn’t matter what Marka Vantly thought. I’d convinced myself that she wrote trash, and couldn’t tell intelligent talent from the smutty garbage she vomited out. But honestly, her prose isn’t trash. If anything, behind all of the ass slapping and handcuffing and screaming orgasms… it’s fairly good. What I hate—and what I can never confess in my emails to her—is that she is wasting such writing on smut. I write sex. I write, in the majority of my novels, a fair amount of sex. She can write sex and still write a great novel. And that’s what infuriates me about the woman, even more than her perfectly pouty lips and incessant publicity. She’s wasting her talent. She could be giving us more.

  Then again, she might not have anything more to give. Maybe all she was blessed with is the talent to tell stories, and not the talent to create them. There’s a very real distinction between the two. Maybe she writes drivel because she doesn’t have a better story to tell. I feel a momentary burst of empathy for the woman, the sort of emotion I instantly recognize as condescending. But still, it’s there, a crumbling of the hatred I’ve fostered for so long, a peace at the understanding of my adversary. Maybe that’s why she sends such vile emails, the poor woman coming from a place of insecurity, jealousy, and frustration.

  It’s a good possibility, and I hold onto it, envisioning the positive scenario as an actual tree, giving it roots that dig into the earth and branches that reach into the sky. It is an exercise I haven’t done in a decade, the concept taught to me by my psychiatrist mother, back when I was a bookworm without friends, a condition worthy of concern. I had a dozen painful appointments on her micro-suede couch before my mother gave up. In those appointments, I learned how to compartmentalize worries into an imaginary box in an attempt to relax. I also learned this stupid tree exercise, and how to bore clients while pretending to know a lot of stuff. Mom learned she was stuck with me and my ‘oddities’, which I’m fairly certain she blamed on my father’s genes. If he loved learning, the dogged pursuit of a perfect SAT score, and setting the bell curve out of pure competitive spite? Then yes, we’re practically twins. But I wouldn’t know any of that. He took off two weeks after Mom told him she was pregnant. He left his wedding ring on the kitchen counter, along with divorce papers and a note. I don’t love you enough. I’m a pretty cold, emotionally distant individual, but even my black heart can tell you that’s just wrong.

  I shove my Marka tree of happiness into a wood chipper and give up, pushing to my feet and abandoning the manuscript, moving downstairs in search of food and a distraction.

  Seventeen hundred words down. Seventy-seven thousand to go.

  Impossible.

  Running. Wet grass tickles my legs, and I gasp out his name, pulling on his hand. He looks back and laughs, slowing to a walk. He tightens his grip, his fingers on mine, and tugs me closer, my shoulder bumping against his chest, the smell of his cologne mixing with the scent of moonlight and wildflowers. A foreign collision, my senses going wild, my chin tilting up, his mouth lowering to mine. The taste of peppermint and salt, his tongue so firm and confiden
t, his hand sliding up my stomach and under my shirt.

  “Simon…” I stop as his fingers work their way under my sports bra, my heart thudding at the contact of his palm against my breast. His kiss deepens, then breaks, and my shirt is pulled over my head, and he presses my hand to the buckle of his jeans.

  “Touch me,” he pants.

  I sigh, leaning back, needing space from the scene, from the memories. My chest pounds, my breaths tight and painful, and I don’t know if it’s due to the cancer or the pain of the past.

  There is nothing like young love. It comes at a time before the heart knows to protect itself, when everything important is raw and exposed—the perfect environment for a soul-sucking, heart-crushing burst. It burns brightest, hits hardest, and touches deepest. It’s why Facebook flames erupt two decades later between high school sweethearts. Between two naive and innocent souls, anything can happen. Soulmates or Tragedy. And sometimes, both.

  I had been completely exposed when Simon hit, his presence a glowing meteor through my life, one I had followed as blindly as a firefly to an electric light.

  I stand, my knees cracking, back crying in protest, and it takes a few steps toward the door before I work out my kinks. I open the office door and step into the empty hallway. One lap through the house, one pill, one nap, and then back to work. It’s an equation I’ve used for years, even before the cancer—only the pills back then were for depression, not pain.

  I walk down the hall, my steps slower than they used to be, my breath harder. Bethany used to sprint down this hall, racing from our bedroom to hers. The media room to her bedroom. The guest room to the top of the stairs. The only room she never ran to and from - my office. That space had been “off limits”, my rules unwavering, any violation met with swift punishment. I fix my eyes on the floorboards and try to push the image of her out of my head.

  My lap of the house used to include the entire second floor. I would carry a damp cloth in hand, a Clorox bottle in the other, and clean baseboards, door knobs, and light switch panels as I went. On weekends, the Clorox was replaced with Windex, and the windows were taken care of. Each room got a once over, and when writers block would hit, the entire house gleamed. My lap changed four years ago. It now avoids the media room and our master bedroom. I don’t carry cleaning supplies, and avoid the windows altogether.

  My house, like the rest of me, is falling apart.

  I head downstairs slowly, taking cautious steps, my hand tight on the wooden rail, no room in my timeline for missteps or injuries. I reach the last riser and lower myself to the step, taking a deep breath, my energy gone.

  From this spot, I can see both front rooms, the sort of grand places that rich people like to put uncomfortable furniture in, back before formal living and dining rooms went extinct. When Simon and Bethany lived here, the left room was a den of sorts—filled with her toys, a comfortable chair I would read in, and an old firetruck from Simon’s youth. The right room had held a dining room set that Simon had found online—one that cost a fortune to ship in, but that had once belonged to Clint Eastwood, and should have been in a Colorado hunting lodge and not our McMansion.

  Now, both rooms are empty, the front curtains pulled shut, the rooms somehow smaller without anything in them. My eyes drift over the bare foyer and to the great room, where a lonely sofa sits in front of a TV. The sofa I bought off a Craigslist ad, the TV off an internet special. Both purchases were made a few weeks after I sold everything, once I realized that my crazy had more room to grow, and its feed was boredom.

  Sometimes novels aren’t enough. Sometimes I need the mindless drone of a television, the brief escape of superficial housewives and train wreck relationships, something to assure me that Simon and I weren’t alone, and everybody has problems.

  If only our problems had been simple, the sort fixed by a marriage boot camp, or a romantic getaway, product endorsements and scripted discussions.

  I close my eyes and try to summon the energy to stand, to make it the thirty or forty feet to the kitchen. Maybe food will help. Food and a pain pill. Then maybe I can churn out some more words.

  KATE

  Kate steps back from the imposing front door, one that most certainly belongs to Helena Ross, given the tiny angry sign above the doorbell, one that proclaims DO NOT RING! in angry handwritten font. If the tiny note wasn’t enough of a tell, there is also the laminated list, taped to the center of the door. It is a list of rules, designed for anyone who dares to step on this property. Through Kate’s worry, she is amused to note that this list is just as long and ridiculous as the one Helena once gave to Kate.

  To read the list, you’d think a monster lives in the house, one who feasts on small children and gives stern looks when afforded a joke. You’d never dream that the same skinny fingers who typed these lines also created Eva and Mike, the couple who flies through the air when not falling madly in love. There is a sense of humor and wonder inside Helena, it just chooses to come out in her novels and not in her human interactions. Kate has spent many nights sipping wine and envisioning Helena’s life, wondering whether her rules are in place everywhere or just in her interactions with Kate. She has pictured Helena with a big home, bookworm babies, and her adorable husband, one who tickles her while she writes, then pulls her into the bedroom to make love. Surely that is the type of world that creates the stories that Helena Ross writes. And why wouldn’t she have those things? She isn’t an unattractive person, almost cute in a sort of owlish way. And she is funny, with a bone-dry, off-beat sense of humor. You can’t read a novel of hers without recognizing that. She manages to slip humor into the darkest of situations, adding just enough life to keep a reader’s heart from stopping.

  Her knock unanswered, she steps off the porch and looks at the house. The large home stretches into the overcast sky, two stories squatting on the top of a hill and peering down on the surrounding homes. It dominates the end of the cul-de-sac, the neighboring lots vacant and overgrown, their tall grass snug against the neat and perfect property line that is 112 Hilltop Way. Dark grass, stiff and short, blankets the front yard, its edge sharp and precise when it meets the bleached driveway. The stones that lead to the front step are also painfully white, set carefully in black mulch that matches the dark grey brick of the home. There is no color anywhere, everything varying shades of somber grey, and set off by the white blooms in the window boxes. The curtains are drawn at each window, no chance of peeking in, their edges stick straight and pinned in some fashion. It must be pitch black inside, with none of the warm sunlight that is starting to play across Kate’s arms. This house isn’t the world of Kate’s wine-fueled musings. This house is a much starker, sadder reality, one that matches the darker, harder side of Helena. The side that creates rules and snaps at agents, the side that she fears. She peers up at the security cameras that point down at her from the porch eves. Lifting a hesitant hand, she waves.

  Maybe Helena’s husband is home. Simon, that was his name. He’d be a good one to talk to, could give her some insight into Helena’s retirement. She’d met him once, a decade ago, at Helena’s first and only attempt at a book signing. He’d been a great guy, super helpful, and seemingly immune to Helena’s quirks. She waved again, then gave up.

  This is silly. Helena isn’t the sort to be okay with a pop-in. She should leave, get back into her rented Camry and drive the three hours back to the city, pretend this terrible idea never happened. Yet… she pauses. There are times in an agent’s life when she needs to be there for her authors. And Helena’s proclamation of early retirement certainly qualifies as one of those times.

  She moves down the steps, stopping beside her car, and risks a final glance at the two-story Victorian.

  Sad, that house. She can almost hear it crying, its yearn for a life not its own.

  She opens the car door and stops short, catching sight of death itself.

  The woman is almost skeletal, h
er sharp bones tied together with skin, her dark eyes sunken, her lips chapped and pale. She walks carefully, struggling up the inclined drive, her hair stringy and damp, her mouth pinched in a grimace of anger. No—not anger. Pain. Kate recognizes it in the hunch of her shoulders, the furrow of her brow, the halting stop. Behind her, a large bush hides a mailbox, the envelopes in Helena’s hands a hint as to her origin.

  “What are you doing here?” From the haughty tone, Helena’s words clear and enunciated, you’d have never guessed at the condition of her body. In those words, she recognizes the author, even if her appearance has changed so drastically.

  Seven years since they’ve last seen each other. Other clients would have hugged her. Or smiled. Yet, for Helena, the greeting is almost warm.

  “I wanted to speak to you,” Kate says, forcing her shoulders back, her posture into place. “About your retirement.”

  “Has seeing me answered that question?” Helena asks dryly.

  It hadn’t, until that question, that terribly simple clue that clicks all of the puzzle pieces into place. In the brief moment it takes Kate’s heart to seize, she understands.

  Helena Ross isn’t retiring. She’s dying.

  It’s interesting to see the reaction when it hits, the pale flush that covers Kate’s generous cheeks, the widening of eyes, the stiffening of her chin, as if she’s expecting a blow. I watch the action as an observer, the author part of my brain carefully cataloging the indicators for some future book that I’ll never write. It’s an automatic action and I stop myself before the pain of reality hits. It comes anyway. I will never write another book again.