Dan softened his tone to deliver the winning line: “We can easily afford it, I’ve looked at the numbers, and imagine being in the countryside . . . by the ocean, too. It’ll be so good for us.”
I was susceptible to emotional blackmail, and to the potential for romance. Writing is a lonely job, as I’ve said. I also had to trust him on the money, because he managed my finances for me. Trying to grapple with taxes and columns of numbers plunged me into panic.
I agreed to rent the place and watched him click “Book Now,” but as he did, I had the strange feeling that life had somehow just shifted a little bit beyond my control.
There’s something else I should mention, in the spirit of full disclosure.
On paper, ours was a nice, mutually beneficial, privileged arrangement where I would write a thriller each year and continue to rake in the money, and Dan would provide all the support I needed, but there was a large and rather revolting fly stuck in the ointment, its legs twitching occasionally.
The fly was this: Being my assistant wasn’t the life Dan had dreamed of. He’d wanted to be a bestselling author, too.
I.
On the night Teddy disappears, you wait until midnight before trying to leave the house. You’re eager to get going because dawn will break in just a few hours and it’s only until then that the spirits will be out, moving among real people, making mischief, playing tricks.
You know what happens on the summer solstice because you researched it in the library. You are a very able nine-year-old. “Exceptionally bright,” your teacher wrote in your report. “Reading and writing to a level well beyond her age.”
Your bedroom door creaks and the noise cuts right through you. You count to ten and nothing happens, so you think you’re safe, and you step out onto the landing, but Teddy’s door opens when you’re right outside it.
“What are you doing?” he says.
You shush him, hustle him into his bedroom, helping him back into bed, nestling his blankie by his head the way he likes it.
“Go back to sleep,” you whisper. You stroke his hair. He puts his thumb into his mouth and sucks. His eyelids droop. You force yourself to stay there until you’re sure he’s gone back to sleep.
You’ve just crept over to his bedroom door when he says, “Lucy, I want you.”
Your fingers clench. You very badly want to go out into the woods. You’ve been planning this for weeks. You turn around. He looks sweet, lying there.
“Do you think you can be really quiet?” you say.
“Teddy can be quiet.” He refers to himself in the third person more often than not. Later, someone will say it’s as if he always knew he wouldn’t be with us for long.
“Don’t take him with you,” Eliza says in your head. Your imaginary friend always has an opinion.
“He’ll cry if I don’t,” you reply silently, “and wake up Mum and Dad.”
“Then you can’t go.”
That’s not an option you want to consider. You hold out your hand and Teddy’s eyes brighten.
“Do you want to come on an adventure?” you ask him.
3.
Sitting in my office alone, I didn’t just feel disappointed, I also felt guilty, because the end of a book was happy news and Dan deserved to share it right away. My schedule was punishing for both of us, and he needed these moments of celebration just as much as I did.
I levered myself up from my seat, left my lair with a sense of traversing a portal, and found him in the kitchen, stirring a casserole. I watched him for a moment before he sensed me. He seemed preoccupied by something, the wooden spoon doing little more than troubling the surface of the food.
“Hi,” I said from the doorway. He turned and half smiled, evidently trying to assess my state of mind, his first instinct at this stage of a book to be wary of me. Here I was, his very own Gollum whose precious obsession was a novel. Had she finished? Finally? Or had her glazed and bloodshot stare been fixed on a blinking cursor at the top of a blank page, while at the far end of her optic nerve, her mind shredded itself with doubt?
I saw those questions in his eyes and had the stupid idea that it might be fun to break the tension by conveying that I had good news to share by doing a little victory dance. I tapped one fist on top of the other, twice, then swapped over. Got my hips swaying. Kept it jaunty. It took a lot of concentration in the exhausted state I was in, and I might have been frowning, but I wanted to try it because it was the sort of thing that he and I used to do all the time, a frivolous language we shared with one another that made us giggle.
But Dan’s eyes widened. It was as if he didn’t know how to speak frivolous anymore—or didn’t want to. I stopped, awash with self-consciousness. He flipped the dishcloth he was holding over his shoulder and cleared his throat. “How’s it going?” he asked. He was wearing a novelty apron I’d bought him, with the slogan “I can cook as good as I look.”
He did look good, sleek and composed, buffed and polished. The Dan I’d met seven years ago, that shabby, pudgy guy running on creative passion and budget groceries, had been transformed by the injection of money. He wasn’t just taking care of his appearance but had worked on improving himself in other ways, too. He knew about wine now. He’d invested in a fancy car. He’d even encouraged me to get a stylist, but I hadn’t had the time to do that, or to keep up with him in other ways. The only efforts I’d made to improve were my occasional splashy online clothing purchases, and even then, I was never quite sure whether I’d bought the right thing.
I also wasn’t exactly certain when Dan’s pattern of transformation had begun. While I wrote my second book? The third? After that big royalty check? The book-a-year schedule meant that time was sometimes confusing to me, its linearity a deck of cards that could be reshuffled. Creating fiction left no mental space for orderly recollections of reality. I thought of my memories as tall grasses that could be blown this way or that.
“Your memories were like that before you started writing,” Eliza muttered. I couldn’t deny it. Eliza and I were always honest with one another.
“Earth to Lucy,” Dan said. “Hello?” He sounded irritable. He hated it when I zoned out.
“I finished the book. I sent it to Max.”
“Truly?”
I nodded and smiled at him, and realized it was probably the first time I’d smiled in a while. The relevant muscles in my cheeks had fallen slack from disuse but making them work was a glorious feeling. Dan hugged me and I felt the adrenaline leave my body in a rush, as if he was squeezing it from me. He smelled of wood smoke and the ragù he was making. The aroma of normality. I was landing back on earth. Coming back to life. Blinking in the daylight.
“Congratulations,” he said into the top of my head. The sweet intimacy of it was lovely. “Bloody well done. What can I do? Can I make you a cup of tea?”
I sat down at the table with all the grace of a sack of flour dropped from a height and felt as if I’d been released from a hospital room after months of convalescence. Everything was possible now. Normality was possible. I could make up to Dan for everything he’d been doing for me. We could have some fun. Just so long as they liked the book.