Chapter 30

el was flying to a book festival in Savannah when she decided to leave her first husband. She was twenty-nine, her fifth novel, Cold Steal, had just come out in hardcover, and she had accepted an invitation to speak at the Dolphin Beach Book Festival as a last-minute fill-in author, against her agent’s wishes. Gabe seemed to think that her reading audience was located primarily in the Northeast, and that she was wasting her time attending book festivals south of the Mason-Dixon line. Mel was of the opinion that an audience was an audience, regardless of the location. A well-known author had developed a case of nerves and canceled at the last minute, and Mel had received an e-mail from a desperate festival coordinator looking for a “replacement author of equal or greater literary standing” (i.e, an author with no advance publicity willing to prostitute herself for a few paltry book sales).

“I’m your girl!” Mel e-mailed her back.

It was November (Hurricane season, Gabe noted archly), and Mel had been just as eager to get out of cold and dreary New York as the Dolphin Beach Book Festival Replacement Committee had been to have her. Besides, it would give her some time to decide what to do about Richard.

Her marriage, which had effectively ended not long after the oceanside ceremony in Barbados, had limped along painfully for the last five years before reaching a state of total and irretrievable impairment. Richard, a masochist, had begun to hint desperately that children might be just the thing to get them going in the right direction and Mel, a realist, had just as vehemently refused to consider it. She knew firsthand the results of bringing children into an unhappy union, and she had no intention of making the same mistake her own parents had made. The sins of the father and all that.

In moments of quiet reflection she had to ask herself why she had stayed in the marriage as long as she had. Her answers were at first evasive, and later disturbing. She had stayed because she needed a quiet place to write. A place where she could work without constant daily distractions and worry over money.

It was pathetic, really. She was no more than a kept woman.

But now that she was making enough of an income on her own, she no longer needed to be kept. Poor Richard must find someone else. Someone with young ovaries and little imagination who could bear his Anglo-Saxon offspring like a dutiful wife should. The truth was, she’d been a wretched wife, and he would be better off without her. She was selfish and spoiled. She didn’t want to give up her quiet, productive life in exchange for a life of dirty diapers, au pair girls, and burned dinners. She didn’t want chaos. She had met other writers who tried to “have it all,” women with distracted expressions and clothes that smelled of sour milk and Vicks VapoRub. Women who attended conferences with cell phones strapped to their heads (Sophia has a runny nose? Did you take her to the doctor? What color is the discharge? Is it clear or is it green?) or who walked up and down bookstore aisles trying to calm frantic spouses (MacKenzie has diarrhea? Did you take him to the doctor? Is the poopie brown or is it green?). She had attended a conference recently with a dapper white-haired novelist in a tweed jacket, a professor at some prestigious back-east college, who had sat through a panel discussion called “The Angel and the Whore: Transcending Archetypal Symbolism in Dystopian Literature” with what appeared to be baby vomit on his lapel. He confessed to Mel later, over a double scotch and soda, that he’d been married before, a thirty-year union that had produced no children and ten novels. He had recently remarried a much younger woman who dropped three children in rapid succession, the result being that he, at sixty-five, now had three children under the age of four! And life was grand! (He hadn’t written a word in five years but life was grand.) He stared pensively at a spot just beyond Mel’s right shoulder, and she tried not to notice the vomit on his lapel. “I just had to know what I was missing,” he said tenderly.

Premature death, she thought dismally. A stroke at sixty-six. A coronary at sixty-seven.

By the time she got off the plane in Savannah, Mel had decided. When she got back to New York, she’d start looking for an attorney.

The author of note she was replacing had been put up in style in a two-bedroom condo on Tybee Island. So this is how they treat you when you sell eight million books, Mel thought, walking through the luxurious place. The condo overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and was so grand that for a moment Mel contemplated calling Booker to come down and join her. But he was on a shoot in Chicago, interviewing students at Northwestern University for a documentary he was making on video game addicts.

“Is there such a thing as a video game addict?” she’d asked in surprise.

“Of course. It’s quite common among the young.” He was sitting on the sofa playing Mortal Kombat at the time, in a loft in Tribeca outfitted with pinball machines, a basketball hoop, and a video game collection that would surely qualify as every fifteen-year-old male’s best wet dream.

Booker Ogar. Six feet four and blond as a Viking. In fact, he was a Viking; his parents had come from Naestved or some other ridiculous-sounding place. Mel had taken one look at him and fallen hard. She had met him five months before at a party she’d attended with Richard, one of those dreary West Village affairs popular with trendy young novelists, artists, and assorted hangers-on trying desperately to outdo one another in sheer outrageousness. At this particular party, one of the writers, a frail, disheveled young woman wearing a tutu, had done splits on a Porada coffee table while reciting the opening lines of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Not to be outdone, a performance artist named Tool simulated defecating on a Chinese flag to protest Tiananmen Square, and afterward smeared his seminaked body with chocolate, inviting the spectators to “lick it off.” Mel hated these parties. She hated the writers she met there, pretentious snobs who, when they found out she had a contract with a major publishing house, said things like, “Oh, really? So what exactly is it that you write about, dear?” As if being from the South and looking the way she looked, not to mention actually making a living as a writer, was somehow beneath them (when they were really just jealous). They were all graduates of the Columbia writing school, and they were like a high school clique, always discussing their latest “projects” in a breezy, affected manner (although it would seem that the New York City literary scene in 1989 was less about work and more about partying). They were always talking about the good old days of the Mudd Club and dear old (dead) Andy Warhol. They pretended to support one another but in actuality they were like terriers fighting over a bone, always gossiping about who was publishing (and who wasn’t) and what kind of advances they were getting, watching jealously to see who was going “mainstream” and who wasn’t. Mel had sickened of their company long ago, but it seemed that you couldn’t go to a party in New York City without bumping into them.

On this particular evening in the West Village, Mel stationed herself behind a potted plant in the corner and proceeded to get very drunk. She was halfway there when Booker walked in. He was hard to miss; he stood head and shoulders above the crowd and he was wearing a gray cable-knit sweater and a pair of jeans, while most of the men were dressed in sport coats. Mel stared at him, all the while repeating to herself, Look at me, look at me, look at me. It was a game she liked to play with attractive men. She sent them telepathic messages and then waited for them to find her.

It took Booker about two minutes. A new record.

Later, he said to her, “Let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“My husband wouldn’t like it.”

“We don’t have to tell him.”

She grinned. She was very drunk. She could see Richard across the room talking with some of his prep school buddies. They were talking stocks and bonds and the president’s proposed cut on the capital gains tax. The older he got, the preppier Richard got. He was slowly metamorphosing into the perfect WASP. Not a cockroach, a wasp. She giggled, wondering what the Columbia crowd would make of that, what literary conclusions they would draw.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go.”

•  •  •

Richard, of course, did not find it funny. When she finally managed to make it home the following day, he was waiting for her like an avenging prophet from the Old Testament. As their own relationship was predicated on infidelity, it did no good to deny that she’d slept with Booker. She didn’t even try. She did promise, though, to attempt not to see him again, a promise that ultimately proved too difficult for her to keep. He was, after all, Booker. Sex with Richard, by comparison, was bland and uninspired. Booker was like no one else she’d ever fallen for. He didn’t want to control her. He didn’t want to be in charge. He was only three years younger than she but he had the temperament of a boy. An eternal golden boy, a Nordic Peter Pan. He pouted, he had temper tantrums, he watched cartoons on television and ate Captain Crunch for breakfast out of a plastic bowl decorated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He was irresistible.

She and Richard moved into separate bedrooms in the brownstone and tried to work it out, but Mel was just going through the motions; her heart wasn’t really in it. By the time she left New York for Savannah, she had already made up her mind.

Still, she wished she had done it differently. She had never been unfaithful to J.T., at least not while they were together, but she had been unfaithful to Phil and now Richard. She hoped she wasn’t developing a pattern; cheat, love, cheat, leave. As she packed her suitcase for Savannah, she told herself this wouldn’t happen again. She’d learned her lesson, and this time would be different.

Besides, Booker was the man of her dreams.

The Dolphin Beach Book Festival was held in an old cotton warehouse along the Savannah River. It was located in the Factors Walk, an area of tall brick warehouses crowding a cobblestoned quay, now a park, along the river. The area had once been a breeding ground for eighteenth-century pirates, prostitutes, stevedores, and stowaways, but in the urban renewal of the 1970s had been reborn as quaint shops, restaurants, and art galleries catering to the tourist crowd. The festival itself was held in an old brick warehouse that had been transformed by the local council into a regional arts center.

Mel gave a morning reading in one of the downstairs rooms to a shifting crowd of approximately thirty-five people, and afterward walked across Bay Street to the Pirates’ House for lunch, returning to the arts center around two o’clock. She was scheduled for an afternoon panel session with a novelist who wrote crime thrillers and a woman who wrote, of all things, children’s books about a magical rabbit named Pierre.

With any luck at all, she’d be able to make it through to happy hour.

She survived the panel session and then went back to the condo to lie down and rest. She was scheduled that evening for a cocktail party at a local country club, the last event of the festival, where the writers would be exhibited like a group of exotic beasts, and expected to mingle with the paying guests.

She called Booker at the number he’d left and got no answer. That was not unusual when he was working, but it left her feeling forlorn and anxious. She went to the kitchen, opened the bottle of red wine the festival people had so thoughtfully left, and poured herself a glass, taking it and the bottle out onto the balcony. She sat with her feet up on the railing, slowly drinking her wine and watching the dying rays of the sun turn the sea to gold. All along the distant horizon, the sky was washed in shades of rose and gray, and clouds stood in ridges like rows of grazing sheep.

Mel sipped her wine and tried not to worry about Booker. She didn’t like leaving him alone for too long. He was a lightning rod for women; he couldn’t help it, they flocked to him like cats around a milk bowl, even when she was with him. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like when she wasn’t there. Not that she blamed him, of course. He couldn’t help it. He was just—Booker.

They sent a driver to pick her up, which was a good thing, considering that Mel was already pleasantly buzzed. The cocktail parties were always her least favorite events. It wasn’t that she minded making conversation with a room full of strangers. It was just that she felt that they expected her to say something intelligent and witty, and after a while it just got to be too much of a burden, especially after a few cocktails (and after all, wasn’t that the point of a cocktail party?). She found that after a few drinks she usually reverted to a Southern accent, which of course made people look at her as if she were stupid (especially New Yorkers), and she had a dry sense of humor that, when mixed with alcohol, became nearly combustible. Some people got her, and some didn’t. Some people laughed, and some were deeply offended. The whole point of these affairs, of course, was to win new readers, not alienate old ones, so she was always a little nervous about saying the wrong thing.

The Dolphin Beach Book Festival cocktail party was being held at the Regatta Club on beautiful Skidaway Island. It was the usual setup, a room with expansive views overlooking a large body of water, long buffet tables laden with exotic food, an open bar (thank God), and waiters and waitresses in faux evening attire circulating to pick up empty glasses and discreetly supply full ones. The crowd at this affair was somewhat older, more the retirement set, an interesting mix of males and females and Old South aristocracy and Yankee transplants.

Mel set herself up at her favorite station (the bar). “Hello,” she said, leaning over to read the bartender’s nametag, “Todd.”

He gave her a lazy smile. “What would you like, Pretty Lady?”

Nice. Todd had apparently missed the employee training film on sexual harassment in the workplace. “Let’s start with a cactus banger, shall we, and then see what we work up to.”

“I like your style.”

“That means a lot to me, Todd.”

“Tequila?”

“Patron Silver.”

He smiled, setting a glass down on the bar. “So what’s a pretty girl like you doing at one of these parties for old people?”

“I’m one of the writers.”

“Oh.” The smarmy look on his face disappeared and in its place slipped an expression of vacant professionalism. “Sorry. No offense, ma’am.”

“None taken, Todd.”

Just then the woman in charge, a tall, officious woman with an aristocratic accent, hurried up to Mel. “We’re asking all the owthas to sit at the assigned tables, Miss Bah-clay.” She lifted her hands to indicate three long tables set up like barricades around the perimeter of the room.

It was the worst possible setup. The writers were herded behind tables, while the bibliophiles wandered up and down the interior of the room staring at them like they were mutants in a freak show. Mel was glad she had started drinking early.

She picked up her cactus banger, gazing morosely around the crowded room and letting her eyes wander over the captive writers, wondering if she would see anyone she knew. You could always tell the fiction writers from the nonfiction writers. The nonfiction writers were the extroverts, standing like barkers in a circus sideshow and calling to the large crowd that invariably thronged their table. The fiction writers, on the other hand, were the introverts. They sat mute, glumly staring into space as if imagining themselves anywhere but here.

Mel quickly spotted the fiction table. Three women sat in varying attitudes of repose. One was talking on a cell phone, one was staring at a spot on the tablecloth in front of her, and one appeared to be sleeping. Mel sighed and pointed with her glass. “I suppose I’m with them,” she said.

The festival official looked aghast. “Oh, no, Miss Bah-clay, you took the owtha of note’s place on the program. You’re seated at the Poets’ Table.” Mel looked to where she was pointing, at a slightly raised dais at one end of the room where a man and two women sat gazing down at the crowd. Dear God, the poets were even worse than the fiction writers. They looked like the outcast table from high school, the one where all the suicides and visionaries sat, the kids who dressed in black and read Nietzsche during free period. One of the women looked like she might rise at any moment and open a vein, the other glared menacingly out at the crowd gathered in front of the nonfiction writers, and the man was reading aloud, to no one in particular, a rather depressing poem about dead leaves (from his own book, of course). Mel ordered another drink, and went to join them.

The female poets were rather uncommunicative but the male poet, Evan, was friendly enough. He was a pleasant-looking, gray-haired man in a turtleneck sweater. He was friendly, although he did ask Mel if she was a poet, and when she replied, No, a novelist, he looked at her like he would a smear of excrement on the bottom of his shoe. The three of them sat on one side of an empty chair and Mel sat on the other, with Evan closest to her. The empty chair was apparently reserved for the poet laureate of Georgia, who was a no-show and was rumored, according to one of the taciturn female poets, to have a “drinking problem.” (Me too! Mel said, gaily lifting her glass.) After that, the female poets pretty much left her alone.

By the time she had finished her second cactus banger (named, no doubt, for the way her head would feel in the morning), Mel was beginning to enjoy herself. She stacked and restacked her novels in a series of intricate pyramids and began to call out to people hurrying by on their way to the nonfiction table, “Sir, you look like a man who knows his way around a crime scene,” or “Madam, when was the last time you read a good romance novel about a serial killer?” In this fashion she managed to draw a pretty good crowd to the Poets’ Table, which Evan, at least, seemed to appreciate. He even managed to sell a few of his slim volumes of poetry, and after a while had lapsed into an almost jovial mood. Mel signaled the waitress and ordered another cactus banger for her and one for Evan. She’d never yet met a poet who didn’t drink, and Evan, as it turned out, was no exception.

“Ah, tequila,” he said, lifting the drink Mel had ordered for him. “Nectar of the gods.” It was a nectar Evan seemed all too familiar with, and before long he was ordering tequila shooters Mel had never even heard of, while the crowd of fascinated bibliophiles swirled around them and the lady in charge tried desperately to keep her owthas at the Poets’ Table in line.

“Have you read any James Dickey?” Mel asked, lining up a couple of Mexican samurais in front of one of her dwindling book pyramids. She was only trying to make friendly conversation. The truth was, she hadn’t read poetry since college, and the only poet she’d been able to think of in her inebriated state was Dickey.

Evan ordered another round of shooters. “Dickey!” he barked disdainfully. “That no-talent charlatan! That double-crossing imposter! I taught with Dickey at Vanderbilt, and I can tell you, that man’s no poet.”

Mel, a little surprised by his vehemence, said, “But Deliverance? That’s a pretty good novel.” She grinned and lifted her shot glass to the spinning crowd. “After all, it put Georgia on the map!” She tossed her drink back and set the glass down on the table.

“A good novelist, yes!” Evan thundered. “A good poet, no!”

Mel thought, Hey, to each his own, Bud. The cocktail waitress brought more Mexican samurai. The festival woman had warned her to cut them off thirty minutes ago but the waitress was working a double, and this was the most fun she’d had in ages. Who knew writers could be so entertaining?

“They say he was an airplane pilot,” Mel said.

“Who says?”

“He does. I read it in an interview.”

“Dickey’s a liar, I tell you! The man’s a lying chiseler. A fornicator, a hypocrite, a two-bit trickster! You can’t trust a thing he says. You can’t trust him.” And with that Evan the Poet stood up and lurched off in search of a bathroom.

“Dickey slept with his wife,” one of the other poets said to Mel by way of an explanation.

The crowd, drawn by the melodrama at the Poets’ Table, had begun to desert the nonfiction writers in droves. The non-novelists stood on tiptoe, craning their necks to try to figure out what Mel’s successful sales technique might be so they could steal it and use it at future book festivals. One of the poets argued bitterly with someone in the crowd over the mechanism of iambic pentameter. At the fiction table, the sole remaining writer put her head back and snored at the ceiling.

It was at moments like this that Mel had to remind herself that this was the life she had chosen. The failed love affairs, the children she would never have, the dull routine of a normal life, these had all been sacrifices on the altar of creative endeavor. Every decision she had ever made had brought her here, to this place, to this moment in time, a long line of choices and effects stretching back to that night in the darkened auditorium when she had listened to Pat Conroy speak and decided to become a writer.

Evan appeared sometime later, wedged between two burly book festival bouncers. He had misbuttoned his tweed sports coat and clamped his cap down at a jaunty angle on his gray curls. Mel could see the bottle of Casa Noble in his pocket.

“They’re kicking us out!” he said, pointing with his thumb at one of the bouncers. “The drivers are here. Let’s take this party back to my place!” The rest of the writers were being housed in a seedy downtown hotel. Mel hadn’t had the heart to tell them about the two-bedroom condo on Tybee Island.

“I’ll have to take a rain check,” Mel said, wondering for the first time in several hours what Booker was doing. “I’ve got an early morning flight.”

Someone turned the lights up and the club employees started breaking down the tables. Under the harsh overhead lights, the room looked suddenly stripped and forlorn. Mel got up, gathered her purse and coat, and stumbled out into the rainy night to look for her driver.

A month after returning to New York from the book festival, she moved out of the brownstone and in with Booker. Richard seemed to take her request for a divorce rather well, too well, really (Mel began to wonder if he might have something going on the side. Not that she would blame him if he did). They turned the gritty details over to their lawyers and began going through the process of obtaining a respectable New York divorce.

The change in living arrangements should have energized Mel but instead she found herself sinking into one of her depressive episodes (her Black Slumps, she called them). Her love life was going fine; it was her career that had begun to stagnate. She had begun to find herself bogged down in the sand trap that came with writing a series. Readers expected the same thing every time they opened a Flynn Mendez novel. The novels were gritty without being too disturbing, and there was always an element of humor to offset the tragedy. Crime-solving in Manolo Blahniks. Kind of a Moonlighting meets Dirty Harry, as the boys in the marketing department liked to describe her books.

But Mel was tired of writing the same thing every year. She’d been watching a Discovery Channel show not too long after her divorce was granted, and she’d come up with a great idea for a novel. And it would not be a Flynn Mendez novel. Mel pitched the idea to her editor one day over lunch at Felidia. It would be a thriller, the story of strange cattle mutilations occurring in Montana at the same time that a series of brutally mutilated bodies are cropping up in New York, the presumed work of a serial killer.

“Can you make it funny?” her editor asked.

This was a year after she’d left Richard and moved in with Booker. It was during a period of continuing adjustments in her life, personally and professionally, a midlife crisis coming twenty years too early. She and Booker were talking about getting their own place but rent-controlled apartments in New York City were hard to come by, so they made do at Booker’s Tribeca loft, which was really more like a college pad than a grown-up’s apartment. Mel had tried redecorating but Booker didn’t like his stuff touched; he liked the basketball goal where it had always been, he liked the overstuffed La-Z-Boy recliners that doubled as a sofa positioned in front of the big-screen TV, he liked the beanbag chairs that made it easy to sprawl while playing video games scattered around the room like some kind of exotic fungi. He had a fit when she threw out his Heather Locklear posters (she let him keep the porn videos), and when she replaced his water bed with a king-size box spring and mattress, he pouted for two days. Mel realized then that she’d have to tread lightly; she’d have to replace one thing at a time and then wait for him to adjust before trying anything else.

It was a new experience for her, treading lightly. He was the only man she’d ever done that with, the only man she’d ever tried not to upset. The only man she spent all her time trying to please. To please Booker she learned to cook, she learned to play poker, she learned to skydive. She wrote scripts for his documentaries, she helped him organize his office, and she made calls to wealthy patrons who might finance his projects, using those few contacts, among the many she’d had while married to Richard, who still spoke to her after the divorce. She kept herself lean and attractive, and scoured lingerie catalogs in search of outfits she thought he might like.

Booker looked upon sex as a normal part of everyday life, like eating and sleeping, and since he was very good at it, and put a lot of time and effort into making sure Mel enjoyed it as much as he did, she didn’t complain.

She made sure he ate well, made sure he took his vitamins, made sure he had clean underwear when he went for meetings with the studio execs. She organized poker nights with his friends and then stayed around to make sure they had enough to eat and drink.

In between taking care of Booker, she signed a contract to produce two more Flynn Mendez novels. And she began secretly working on her magnum opus her novel about the New York serial killer and the Montana cattle mutilations, tentatively titled Dead Meat.

All in all, her new life with Booker was not what she had imagined. It was not what she had thought she was leaving Richard for. It was exhausting. Especially in light of the fact that she was pretty sure he was cheating on her.

Not that he would ever admit it, of course. Booker was far too charming for that. He didn’t like upsetting people. He liked everyone to be happy, and he didn’t care what he had to do to ensure that they were: lie, cheat, steal. (Was it any coincidence that the charming serial killer in her new novel so closely resembled Booker?) She listened to him calmly lie to his producers about shooting schedules and postproduction delays, and she realized that Booker was a consummate liar, one of those people who can convince himself that something is true until it becomes, to him at least, true. One of those guys who could lie on an FBI polygraph test and pass with flying colors. So when she called a number that occurred with great regularity on his cell phone bill and a woman named Lucy answered, or when she went to surprise him at a shoot only to find that he wasn’t shooting that day, Mel listened to his smooth assurances with a great deal of skepticism.

She married Booker (against the advice of several of her friends and her own good judgment) and over the next few years, she adjusted to her life with him (after all, one of them had to adjust). But over time she found that the little eccentricities she had once seen as adorable—his fickle nature, the boxes of Captain Crunch in the pantry, the all-night X-box tournaments with his friends—were gradually beginning to lose their charm.

Still, there was the matter of that dimple in his chin. And the sex. There was that.

Mel’s mother died when she was thirty-three, the same year she married Booker, and she went back to Howard’s Mill for the funeral. She didn’t see Leland again for another five years, although she talked to him from time to time on the phone, usually when he’d been calling repeatedly, and she had no choice, finally, but to call him back.

He was looked after by a live-in nurse, a widow from Guadalajara named Mercedes who had come north to settle close to her son and his family. Mercedes had raised thirteen children, an occupation that served her well in caring for Leland Barclay, and she didn’t take any shit from the old man. She understood English well enough but preferred not to use it, so over the years she and Leland developed their own language, a mishmash of words in both tongues. They relied more on tone of voice than actual language in communicating with each other.

“Goddammit, woman, I need a bath!” Leland would shout at her. “A baño, comprendez, puta?”

To which she would inevitably reply (with an obscene gesture), “Chinga tu madre!” which, roughly translated, meant “Bathe yourself, you old goat. You stinking, pus-filled son of a whore.”

“I don’t know why she stays with you,” Mel said to him once.

“Well, Sister, why does anyone stay with someone who makes them miserable?”

“I don’t know—why?”

“Money.”

“It’s not all about money,” Mel said coldly.

“Spoken like someone who’s always had plenty.”

“I don’t want your money. I don’t even cash your checks anymore.”

“Don’t matter to me if you do or you don’t,” Leland said. “Everything I got is yours one day, whether you want it or not, Sister.”

“I don’t want it. Leave it to your favorite charity.”

“You’re my favorite charity.”

“Leave it to Mercedes.”

“Huh!” He snorted loudly. “I put that old puta in my will and I’ll be dead by sundown.”

“You should marry her, then. She’s perfect for you.”

“Now, Sister, don’t be jealous. I loved your mama, in my own way.”

“The same way you loved Junior?”

“A man does things he’s ashamed of later on. We can’t all be saints.”

“That’s a clever way of putting it.”

“I might not have been the best daddy in the world, but I did the best I knew how to do.”

“Well, that’s all right then.”

The summer she turned thirty-eight, she came home to Howard’s Mill. She flew into Nashville and rented a car, coming in on the south side of town. It felt odd driving through the quiet streets where she had spent so much of her unhappy childhood. She drove past the country club, past the Dairy Freeze, past the Dixie Drive-In and the ramshackle high school where she had spent long hours counting down the days until she could get the hell out of this hayseed town. The high school was abandoned now in favor of the new county school built out from town. Someone had broken out most of the windows, and the darkened building stood back from the road in the middle of a weed-choked lot covered in kudzu. Everything looked smaller than she remembered, and dirty. The whole town seemed to be drying up, at least the older downtown section, where desolate storefronts advertised GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sales or optimistically proclaimed FOR LEASE. All the growth over the last few years had occurred out by the expressway, miles and miles of fast food chains and strip malls and gas stations that sprouted up around the exits like hemorrhoids. At night, the town looked like the Vegas Strip. Leland had sold the downtown car dealership years ago, and a modern new dealership had sprung up on the outskirts of town, complete with rows and rows of shiny new automobiles and signs that advertised FAST EDDIE’S AUTO! NOBODY WALKS, EVERYBODY RIDES! FAST EDDIE—THE WORKING MANS FRIEND!

She’d come home to see Leland because she’d been dreaming about graves. Every night. Not newly dug graves with their fresh mound of dirt, but ancient sunken burial spots covered in creepers and twisting vines. Her therapist said that the graves symbolized unfinished business and that it might be time to go home and confront Leland once and for all, but Mel thought that interpretation weak and decided to stop therapy instead. She had a problem with the direction the therapist was taking, not to mention her fixation on the so-called maternal aspects of her relationship with Booker. Mel was pretty sure the dreams would stop once the therapy stopped.

But they didn’t stop. They got worse. They got so bad she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t write. So, in desperation, she went home to do battle with Leland. She came home for the Mother of All Battles, the Armageddon of Dysfunctional Family Meltdowns. She hated to leave Booker home alone—there was no telling what he might get up to, but she had no choice. There was something she had to get off her chest.

Still when she saw the frail, diminished Leland she was unprepared for the effect it had on her. She had come home expecting to do battle with the bully of her youth, and instead she found a doddering old man. Leland, the rogue tyrant, had disappeared, and in his place was a thin, frail creature, a wispy little gnome of a man who looked like he might blow away in a heavy breeze. He was as small as a child now and walked with a cane, bent over at the waist and moving with the small mincing steps of a geisha. His hair was long and yellowed with age, and his big hairy ears sprouted on either side of his head like toadstools.

The sight of him compressed her heart like a vise. All the ugly things she had saved up to say, all the poison she had stored in her heart for thirty-eight years, stayed buried where they were. She could no more confront him than she could kick an old lame dog who showed up on her doorstep looking for a meal.

“Did you tell him how bad he fucked up your life?” Booker asked when she got home. “Did you beat him within an inch of his life?”

“Shut up, Booker.” She’d made the mistake of telling him about her therapy dreams, a decision she now regretted.

“I knew you couldn’t. I knew you couldn’t bring yourself to do it.” He sat in a recliner with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs resting on his lap, looking as fresh and rosy-cheeked as an English schoolboy. The older he got, the younger he looked. There was only three years’ age difference between them, but Booker seemed to be regressing further and further into boyhood as she began the steep climb to forty. It was just a matter of time, Mel knew, before people started mistaking her for his mother.

“Why don’t you stay out of it? It’s none of your business.”

“It’s none of my business when you can’t sleep at night? It’s none of my business when you walk around the house all day in an old robe and a pair of ratty slippers?”

“Fuck off.”

“You fuck off.”

“Next time I’ll send you. You’re so eloquent. You’re so good at cleaning up messes.”

“Why would I want to go down there where everyone talks like Gomer Pyle?” He put his hand up like a traffic cop stopping traffic. “Sha-zam!” he said. “Ga-aw-lly.” He laughed and dropped his hand.

Booker was one of those people who laughed at his own jokes even when they weren’t funny.

“That’s right. Why would I send you to do my talking for me when you can’t even string a coherent sentence together?”

“Down where everybody talks like they’ve got marbles in their mouth. Down in the land of ignorant hillbillies.”

Mel knew at that moment that her marriage was over.

Two months later she found a lump in her breast, and shortly after that, Booker left for good.

One word. Two syllables. Can anyone who’s never heard the diagnosis cancer truly understand what it conjures? (Dread. Despair. Death.) Mel walked out of the surgeon’s office feeling like a reprieved felon. (You won’t be executed today, but perhaps tomorrow, or maybe even the day after that. I really don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?) Mortality is just a word until cancer. Every night you go to sleep aware of one more day of amnesty, and every morning you wake with fate hanging over your head like a noose. A trapdoor waiting to be sprung. A guillotine blade waiting to fall. A nightmare without end.

On the day Mel walked out of the surgeon’s office, it was a bright, glorious spring day. The trees along Central Park were in full leaf. Traffic crowded the streets; plumes of exhaust disappeared against the pale blue sky. Everything was the same, and yet everything was different. Mel watched an old woman tottering along the street and she thought, I’ll never grow old. She watched a young couple kissing in the park and she thought, I’ll never laugh again. I’ll never love. Despair settled over her like a thick, dank cloud. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel. As she walked she was thinking, I can’t live like this, I can’t live like this. It ran through her head like a mantra. By the time she reached her apartment, the mantra had changed. I don’t have to live like this, I don’t have to live like this.

It was her life. She could end it any way she chose.

Somehow that changed things. The idea that she could end her life if the despair became too much to bear caused a sudden shift in her perspective. It was odd, but the idea that she could step off a ledge or walk in front of a train or slip into a drug-induced coma if she so chose was strangely comforting. It gave her back a feeling of control over her life.

She told two close friends and then swore them to secrecy. She couldn’t bear the idea of people looking at her with pitying eyes. She couldn’t bear the thought of people whom she didn’t like, or who didn’t like her, being kind to her because of pity. She didn’t want to see the fear in other people’s eyes. She had her own despair to deal with; she didn’t want to deal with theirs. She jettisoned all the negative people in her life, the depressives, the therapy addicts, the naysayers. She couldn’t afford to have them around her anymore. It would take everything she had just to get well again.

“What are you going to tell Booker?” her friends asked her.

“The truth.”

When she told him, he went into the bedroom and shut the door. Later he came out and his eyes were red and puffy. “What is it you want from me?” he said. “What is it you expect me to do?” She saw then that the tears had not been for her; they had been for himself.

“I want you to leave,” she said. She hadn’t decided until that moment but now that she’d said it, she knew it was true. She couldn’t get well with him here. She couldn’t take care of herself and Booker at the same time.

The doctors were guardedly optimistic. “It’s early stage, and with the right treatment you have a ninety-five percent chance of making it five years,” they said, as if they were granting her a boon. But then, in case her spirits should rise too high, they would add, “Of course, with breast cancer there are no guarantees. The literature is filled with cases of women diagnosed with Stage IV who live twenty years and women with Stage I who live nine months.” They had been trained not to give hope. How much better to paint a bleak picture first, and then when things turned out to be not so dire after all, the patient would kiss their hands in gratitude.

By the time she’d finished treatment, Mel hated them all.

Gradually, she began to pull herself out of despair. She agreed to surgery to remove the lump, and afterward she agreed to chemotherapy, putting her head down and plodding through it like a dumb animal, saying I can do this. I can do this. But first she bought a wig (she refused the bald head and scarf that loudly proclaimed Victim) and then she had herself hypnotized to alleviate the hair loss and nausea. She ate a healthy diet and took large quantities of vitamins; she learned to meditate. She read every book she could find on miraculous healings and promising alternative therapies. She followed her doctors’ orders but she supplemented them with whatever alternative therapies made sense to her. She learned to trust her intuition. (After all, the doctors could not guarantee success with their horrific treatments, so what did she have to lose?) Her hair, which had fallen out soon after the first chemotherapy treatment, began to regrow after the fourth. With her healthy diet, her constant exercise, and her afternoon naps, she began to feel better than she had in years. She didn’t work, she didn’t call friends, she didn’t fritter her time away on meaningless pursuits. She spent all her time trying to get well.

When she called Leland and told him, he cried like a baby. Later, he said, “Don’t you die up there with all those Yankee strangers. You come home to die, Sister.”

She knew then that she wouldn’t go home. And she wouldn’t die either. She was strangely grateful to him, grateful for the anger he always roused in her, for her sudden determination to outlive him no matter what. She was glad now for his money, thankful that he’d pulled himself up from poverty and turned himself into a self-made millionaire. She had no health insurance, and he paid for everything, the doctors, the trips to Germany and Mexico.

She went to see a new therapist to help lighten her load of childhood anger and regret. She kept a dream journal. She paid close attention to her fourth-chakra issues. She meditated and tried to open her heart to love, trust, and compassion.

After her last chemo treatment, she went out with her friends to celebrate. When do you start radiation? they asked her.

I don’t, she said. It had just occurred to her. She would do no more damage to her body. No scarred lungs, no late-blooming leukemia. Enough was enough. Quality of life was more important to her than quantity of life, although she knew most cancer patients didn’t share her philosophy. And that was okay, too.

Her surgeon, when she told him her decision, wasn’t happy.

“Well, if I’d known you weren’t going to do radiation, I would have just taken the breast.” His attitude was so condescending, so cavalier, as if her breast was his to do with as he pleased. He was blond, blue-eyed, the darling of the ward. But by then, she had had enough.

“Really?” she said coolly. “Well, how about if I just take your balls? Hmm? How about if I just cut them off? Would you like that?”

His eyes flashed anger (no one had ever spoken to him like that), then concern, and then fear (My God, she was crazy She was capable of anything. Did no one screen these women?) as he turned and hurried out to find the nurse, leaving her chart behind on the table in his haste.

Mel watched him go. As the door closed behind him, she felt hope welling up inside her, swelling like a sail. She put her head back and laughed.

She knew then that she’d get well.

What else is there to say? Human beings are resilient; they can adapt to anything. Life returns in degrees, in increments, like the sun inching its way across a bare floor on a winter’s day.

Mel continued meditating, she chanted and opened her heart to the Infinite, she walked in the park and drank her wheatgrass shakes and ate brown rice and seaweed until she could stand it no more. She went for her three-month checkup and then her six-month checkup, endured the X-rays, the scans, the gentle prodding of competent fingers. Her new doctor (a woman) patted her arm and said, “Whatever you’re doing, keep up the good work.”

Each visit was a milestone, a celebration. Six months cancer-free, one year, two years, and you give a deep sigh of relief. By five years, it’s all begun to fade.

She thought often of Sara and Annie and Lola during these years, thought about calling them and letting them share her burden. She knew they’d do it gladly. But how to begin? They were no longer wide-eyed girls standing on the cusp of life. Their lives had gone in such different directions.

They had chosen motherhood and she had not. That, in itself, was not a barrier to friendship but it was an impediment, at least to Mel. They had their own busy lives, and she was gradually returning to hers. In moments of quiet reflection, she pondered the irony of their situations. She had rejected motherhood; yet while her friends had been happily growing fetuses, she had grown a tumor.

There was a book waiting to be written.

She went back to work, pulling the novel she had begun all those years ago, her magnum opus, out from underneath her bed. Her writing now had a new depth, a maturity, a quality of infused suffering that hadn’t been there before her illness.

By seven years it was all a distant memory, a nightmare, something that had happened to someone else. She was who she was before; and yet, not quite. Never quite.