If it seems I’ve mistakenly forgotten to mention her before now, forgive me, Readers. Though you should know that introducing her this way is also indicative of the role she played in her daughter’s life at that time.
“What you call preciousness I call critically informed realism,” Merritt said. “And not one thing about this movie is yet a success. If it even gets made.”
“What do you think, Lainey?” her mother’s ghoul mouth asked, her eyes not leaving her laptop and her fingers flying over the keys. “Is sullen the new look for the young artist?”
“It’s an old look,” Elaine said. “But I still say the best way to get over old work is to get on to new work.”
This was an even scabbier scab to pick, because Merritt was having a shit time writing anything new. She did have one idea, but—
“And not by resurrecting Truman Capote’s worst effort,” Elaine added, pressing her palms together and lifting them in mock prayer. “Please not that.”
See, Readers? Nobody but Merritt seemed to like this idea very much.
Merritt thought that maybe her father would have liked it, that her taking it on would have delighted him, but when she thought things like this she never trusted them; it was so easy to make him stand in as phantom antagonist to her mother whenever she and her mother disagreed.
“You know one day soon you’ll both be filled with shame,” Merritt said. “You’ll think, This book is exactly as it should be and yet because I lack vision, I tried to talk her out of it.”
“I look forward to that day, my darling,” Elaine said, “though I doubt very much you’ll get to it through Answered Prayers.” She patted Merritt’s leg a few times before standing.
“Ha!” Merritt’s mother said. “That was perfectly placed.”
“Give me the lowest form of humor and I’m the brightest star,” Elaine said. Then she did some comic impression of a showgirl flouncing her curls before gathering the s’mores tray.
According to Elaine, Truman Capote’s worst effort was his infamously unfinished final novel, Answered Prayers. Hence the pun.
She hovered. “I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. “You’ve always worked well here and you’re also one to rise to the occasion, so write the thing and prove us wrong. At my age I’m so rarely proven wrong—I relish it when it happens.”
“I will write it,” Merritt said. “I am.”
Elaine smiled. Then she and her tray were on the stone stairs that led to the upper terrace and the bank of open French doors spilling light from Breakwater’s cavernous (and recently remodeled) kitchen. And then she was swallowed by her house.
Elaine’s opinions took up so much space that Merritt felt their absence when she was again alone with her mother. She scrolled through movie buzz on gossip sites and feeds, her own face now a ghoul mask awash in the light of her phone screen. She returned, as she’d been doing for days, to Harper Harper’s Instagram and read the comments on a post made not twenty minutes before—a shot from a Jacuzzi on a deck in the dark outdoors, The Happenings at Brookhants script cover page plainly legible from its perch on the Jacuzzi’s rim, legible and also close to becoming script soup if it happened to be brushed by a stray appendage. Harper’s caption: Taking a dip with my favorite new project.
The comments were a predictable mixed bag:
HOMOFOMO9 #GOALS ♥
kevinbranderson get me in that tub with you, mama
suefirrelisonfire excuse me?! new project what? !!
design.my.life OMG I FUCKING LOVE THAT BOOK I CANNOT WAIT I WANT TO REACH THROUGH THIS SCREEN AND STEAL THAT SCRIPT S;OKFEPFLPGK[WORGJOR[IUJRPIOT GAH!
NoYourGaybot sorry. that book is so basic and you should do better. your queer fans need you to do better.
TheRealHAnniehKBarries SO MUCH THIS
FeatherBirdBank #STAN #STAN #STAN
Whyureadingthisbruh$$? @neckbeard4lyfe is Bo Dhillon really into this shit? what happened to that guy?
MrsKnockKnockKnock Srsly: another round of “kill yer gays?” Could we just not?
And on. And on. And on they went—already 6,482 comments deep. Merritt typed her own comment. Edited it. Deleted it. Typed another. Edited it. Hovered over the post button . . .
She closed the app.
Then she used a garden hose to douse the fire pit, leaving it a sloppy pile of ash and char, said goodnight to her mother, and went to bed.
The guest room she slept in was on the woods side, not the ocean side, and it was dark even in the daytime as a result. Now, of course, it was night and even darker, but Merritt didn’t flick the light switch near the doorway. Instead, she brushed the keyboard of her laptop, open on the desk beneath the window, and its screen popped on and lit the room with a pale white glow. The screen showed a blank Word document. This was how much of her new book she’d managed to write.
Merritt pulled on her pajamas, leaned over the desk to close the window, and then, with her hand on the window, she stopped and looked closer: there were three dead yellow jackets in the inner casing along the screen. They were all in a clump together. One was missing its head. She wondered if they died this way, touching each other, or if the wind had piled them there afterward. She wondered when the head was lost and where it went.
Merritt left the window as it was and climbed into bed. As she lay there, she worried a thought. It was hard and unwelcome, like a popcorn kernel stuck in her gums, something she could run her tongue over but not properly dislodge. Not without assistance, anyway. Not without pointy instruments and blood and pulling it out into the light, leaving a wound behind.
The thought was this: she hadn’t actually been the one to write The Happenings at Brookhants. Elaine had been that book’s true composer, the one with all the ideas and the know-how to manifest them and she, Merritt, had only ever been the vessel for relaying those ideas—the chimp at the keyboard.
What had Truman Capote said? That’s not writing, that’s typing.
A typist. What if she’d only ever really been the typist?
About That Missing Copy of Mary MacLane’s Book
Come early December, it was found with Eleanor Faderman. Eleanor was one of the Brookhants students said to have been wary (or was it jealous?) of Flo and Clara. When Flo and Clara were alive, that is.
Eleanor Faderman had, in fact, tried to purchase her own copy of The Story of Mary MacLane after it had first caused such a furor on campus the previous spring, but she’d never been able to find it in any of the bookshops she visited during her summer holiday—at least not when her older sisters weren’t looking over her selections and magpieing their opinions to their mother.
Eleanor Faderman was short and slight, her features sharpened as if to points, her hair an odd sort of color, almost like it should have been brown but then most of the pigment had been leached from it, leaving it a dull tan. More importantly, Eleanor Faderman was known among her classmates to have the gift of thieving fingers and a curiously silent presence, the ability to slip in and out of spaces unnoticed. The students in her dorm made note of this often: Eleanor, where did you come from? Or its inverse: Wasn’t Eleanor here a moment ago?