Page 44 of Kill Your Darlings

She came and stood next to him, and together they stared through the bowed bay windows of their newly purchased Victorian and out toward Naumkeag Cove, the water choppy and almost black. “It’s different every time I look at it. Can you believe we get to live here?” Thom said.

“Not really, not yet.”

“I might go for a walk before it rains.”

“Or you could unpack the books in your office,” Wendy said.

“Or I could unpack the books in my office,” Thom repeated. “That’s a possibility.”

On his way to his attic study, he peeked into Jason’s room on the second floor. Jason had been anxious about the move, so they made sure to unpack his room first, make it look just like his room had looked in Cambridge. It had apparently worked because he was lying on his stomach on his animal-print rug, flipping throughCars andTrucks and Things That Go, one of Thom’s old Richard Scarry books that had been unearthed when they’d cleared out their portion of the basement at the Cambridge house.

Thom went into his own study with its sloped ceilings and its ancient metal radiator. His desk had been set up but not much else. Boxes of books lined one wall, and his grandfather’s bookshelf stood empty in the middle of the room. Using his thumbnail, he opened up one of his boxes. It was the one that was filled with yearbooks from high school and college, plus an assortment of literary magazines and periodicals in which he’d published a story or some critical piece. He pulled out the Mather College yearbook from 1990 and idly flipped through it, stopping at a page called Study Abroad, finding that group picture he was in, Penelope Harrison and Annie Imbornoni and Jill Ringgold in front of the Colosseum. It was funny because he remembered so much of his time spent with Jill while she was visiting Rome but didn’t really remember the four of them making that trip. And who had taken the picture? Still, it didn’t matter. He studied the faces. Not really Penelope’s and Annie’s but his own and Jill’s. They’d almost begun a romance the day before, but it hadn’t happened. And a month ago, Thom had gotten his Mather College alumni magazine in the mail and read that she’d died suddenly in August. He’d called Annie and she’d told him that Jill had died in a freak accident, hit by a car in a grocery-store parking lot. Apparently she’d seemed fine immediately after it had happened, but had died that night from a brain bleed. Thom booted up his iMac, the only item currently on his desk, and waited for it to power on. He’d had the computer for over a year but they hadn’t had an internet connection in Cambridge so he’d only ever used the computer for trying to write stories and articles and for playingBugdom. But Wendy had insisted they get both cable television and the internet at the new house, and now it was all connected. He opened up a browser window and put in Jill Ringgold’s name. An obituary came up thatincluded several pictures. It happened so fast and Thom wasn’t entirely prepared. It turned out she was married and had just had a baby. Except for the length of her hair she looked the same.

He read the obituary, written by Jill’s older sister. Thom wondered, not for the first time, whether spending the night with Jill back in Rome, when it looked like they might have, would have altered her history enough so that she would still be alive. Of course it would have, he thought. Life wasn’t fate but a series of tiny accidents. And if they’d spent that night together, it would have changed her life enough that she would never have been at that exact spot in that grocery-store parking lot. Of course, she might have died earlier, or maybe he would have. It was all random.

He stood up and went and stared out the window, down toward their road below. He could see a lone woman out walking a dog. She wore a yellow raincoat, and he wondered if she was a neighbor he would get to know, someone who would become important to him, or to Wendy. Would he attend her funeral? Would she attend his? He thought for some reason that the yellow raincoat indicated she was an older woman, but what did he know? Maybe she was young.

Back at his computer, Thom started a new search. He’d done it once before on one of the computers in the library at his university, but thought he’d look again. He punched in “Bryce Barrington,” then “death.”

There were two obituaries for Wendy’s ex-husband, one from theLubbock Avalanche-Journaland one from Rice University, and then there was a short news article that had been archived, an announcement that Bryce Barrington’s death had been ruled an accident. The date of the article was August 25, 1992. Thom wished there were some way to see the whole newspaper from that date, but there didn’t seem to be. Instead, he put in the words “death” and “Lubbock” and “1992” and hit Search. There were several results, but not what hewas looking for. He added the word “prostitution” and hit Search again. This brought up an online article, “Lubbock Stabbing Prompts Investigation into Caprock College Prostitution Ring.” His heartbeat now audible in his own ears, he clicked on the story, bringing up a long piece. He read only the first paragraph.

The still unsolved murder of Alexandra Fritsch, a sophomore at Caprock College, has prompted an investigation into allegations of prostitution at the elite private school. Fritsch, 19years old, originally from Houston, was found dead from multiple stab wounds in northwest Lubbock on the night of August22.

It was all he could read. For so long he had wanted a name, and now he had one. It was enough. He quit the browser, then thought for a moment and brought it back up. Then he cleared his browsing history and shut his computer down.

He went and stood in front of the office window again, staring at rooftops. Now that she had a name, everything had changed. A name meant she had a family, a childhood, a history. And a name meant she had truly existed. There had always been a sliver of Thom’s mind that wondered if what had happened with her was some kind of awful dream, a manifestation of guilt. A gust of wind spattered rain against the windowpanes. As he turned from the window Wendy was stepping into his office. His body convulsed in fright.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

Wendy was laughing. “You didn’t hear me yell that I was coming up?”

“No, I didn’t.”

She was holding one of his large framed posters, his three-sheet original ofThe Maltese Falcon, the best poster he owned, one she’d bought him for their first anniversary. “Thought you might like this up here,” she said.

“Thanks.”

He went and got it from her as she looked around the room. “Coming along, I see,” Wendy said.

“Ha-ha.”

“It’s your office. I won’t come back up here and judge, but I knew you’d want that poster.”

After she left, he leaned the tall frame against a stack of boxes and stared at it. She’d had it framed under protective glass, and its colors were still really good. He remembered how he’d felt when she gave it to him, one year after they’d gotten married at a casino wedding chapel in Las Vegas. It was back when they’d first moved to Cambridge and had rented the apartment that they would eventually buy. He’d slept in and the poster was hanging on the wall when he woke up, replacing the fadedChinatownposter that had been in that spot. After thanking her for the gift, he’d asked her how much she paid.

“Fair market value was what the shady man told me” was her answer.

Thom must have frowned, because she said, “We’re rich. You know that, even if we don’t want the world to know.”

“I know,” he said.

“Besides, you earned it.”

It was that phrase, that he’d “earned it,” that haunted him every time he looked at the poster, and that echoed through his head now, theMaltese Falconnow relocated to their new house with its views of the water. Thom wondered where they’d be living right now if they were forced to live off his salary as an associate professor and Wendy’s nonexistent royalties from her book of poetry that had been published just over a year ago. “What does it matter?” he said to himself, then realized he’d said the words out loud. He checked his watch. It was just past four in the afternoon, but the sun was already sinking over the cove, casting long, pink fingers across the sky. He opened the window and lita cigarette, even though he’d promised Wendy he wouldn’t smoke in the house. Maybe he should finally switch to a pipe, he thought, picturing himself suddenly on a book jacket, that thought filling him with a combination of hope and shame.

ii

Wendy watched the sunset from the front steps of their new house. She wanted to go get Jason to watch with her, but when she’d poked her head into his room, he was fully absorbed in whatever book he was reading. She’d also told herself that this particular view of the sun setting on the inner harbor of New Essex was a view she now owned, one she could look at for the rest of her life. A woman walked past, a small, bedraggled dog dragging her on a leash. “Oh, hello,” the woman said from under her hooded coat. “You bought the Derwatt house.”

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