Beach Read

I’D READ SOMEWHERE that it took 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. Writing was different, too vague a “something” for 10,000 hours to add up to much. Maybe 10,000 hours of lying in an empty bathtub brainstorming added up to being an expert on brainstorming in an empty bathtub. Maybe 10,000 hours of walking your neighbor’s dog, working out a plot problem under your breath, would turn you into a pro at puzzling through plot tangles.

But those things were parts of a whole.

I’d probably spent more than 10,000 hours typing novels (those published as well as those cast aside), and I still wasn’t an expert at typing, let alone an expert on writing books. Because even when you’d spent 10,000 hours writing feel-good fiction and another 10,000 reading it, it didn’t make you an expert at writing any other kind of book.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t be sure I was doing anything. There was a decent chance I’d send this draft to Anya and get an email back like, Why did you just send me the menu for Red Lobster?

But whether or not I was actually succeeding at this book, I was writing it. It came in painful ebbs and desperate flows, as if timed to the waves crashing somewhere behind that wall of fog.

It wasn’t my life, but it was close. The conversation between the three women—Ellie, her mother, and Sonya’s stand-in, Lucy—might’ve been word for word, although I knew not to trust memory quite so much these days.

If memory were accurate, then Dad couldn’t have been here, in this house, when Mom’s cancer came back. He couldn’t have been because, until he died, I had memories of them dancing barefoot in the kitchen, of him smoothing her hair and kissing her head, driving her to the hospital with me in the back seat and the playlist he’d enlisted me to help him piece together playing on the car stereo.

Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind.”

Mom and Dad’s hands clasped tightly on the center console.

Of course I remembered the “business trips” too. But that was the point. I remembered things as I’d thought they’d been, and then the truth, That Truth, had ripped the memories in half as easily as if they had been images on printer paper.

The next three days were a fervor of writing, cleaning, and little else. Aside from a box of wrapping paper, a handful of board games, and a great deal of towels and spare bedding, there was nothing remotely personal in the upstairs guest bedroom. It could’ve been any vacation home in America, or maybe a model home, a half-assed promise that your life too could be this kind of generically pretty.

I liked the upstairs decor significantly less than the warm boho vibe downstairs. I couldn’t decide whether I felt relieved or cheated by that.

If there had been more of him, or of her, here, she’d already done the heavy lifting of scrubbing it clear.

On Wednesday, I photographed the furniture and posted it on craigslist. On Thursday, I packed the extra bedding, board games, and wrapping paper into boxes for Goodwill. On Friday, I stripped all the bedding and the towels from the racks in the second upstairs bathroom and carried them down to the laundry closet on the first floor, dumping them into the washer before sitting down to write.

The mist had finally burned off and the house was hot and sticky once again, so I’d opened the windows and doors and turned on all the fans.

I’d gotten glimpses of Gus over the last three days, but they’d been few. As far as I could tell, he moved around while drafting. If he was working at the kitchen table in the morning, he was never there by the time I poured my second cup of coffee. If he was nowhere to be seen all day, he’d appear suddenly on the deck at night, writing with only the light of his laptop and the swarm of moths batting around it.

Whenever I spotted him, I instantly lost focus. It was too fun imagining what he could be writing, brainstorming the possibilities. I was praying for vampires.

On Friday afternoon, we lined up for the first time, sitting at our tables in front of our matching windows.

He sat at his kitchen table, facing my house.

I sat at my kitchen table, facing his.

When we realized this, he lifted his bottle of beer the same way he’d mock-toasted with his coffee mug. I lifted my water glass.

Both windows were open. We could’ve talked but we would have had to scream.

Instead Gus smiled and picked up the highlighter and notebook beside him. He scribbled on it for a second, then held the notebook up so I could read it:

LIFE IS MEANINGLESS, JANUARY. GAZE INTO THE ABYSS.

I suppressed a laugh, then fished a Sharpie out of my backpack, dragged my own notebook toward me, and flipped to a blank page. In large, square letters, I wrote:

THIS REMINDS ME OF THAT TAYLOR SWIFT VIDEO.

His smile leapt up his face. He shook his head, then went back to writing. Neither of us said another word, and neither of us relocated either. Not until he knocked on my front door for our first research outing, a steel travel mug in each hand.

He gave my dress—the same itchy black thing I’d worn to book club—and boots one slow up-and-down, then shook his head. “That … will not work.”

“I look great,” I fired back.

“Agreed. If we were going to see the American Ballet Theatre, you’d be perfect. But I’m telling you, January, that will not work for tonight.”

“IT’S GOING TO be a late night,” Gus warned. We were in his car, heading north along the lake, the sun slung low in the sky, its last feverish rays painting everything to look like backlit cotton candy. When I’d demanded he pick out my new outfit and save me the trouble, I’d expected him to be uncomfortable. Instead he followed me into the downstairs guest room, looked at the handful of things hanging in the closet, and picked out the same denim shorts I’d worn to Pete’s bookstore and my Carly Simon T-shirt, and with that we’d set off.

“As long as you don’t make me listen to you sing ‘Everybody Hurts’ twice in a row,” I said, “I think I can deal with a late night.”

His smile was faint. It made his eyelids sink heavily. “Don’t worry. That was a special occasion I let a friend talk me into. Won’t happen again.”

He was tapping restlessly against the steering wheel as we pulled up to a red light, and my eyes slid down the veins in his forearms, up along the back of his bicep to where it met his sleeve. Jacques had been handsome like an underwear model, perfectly toned with a winning smile and golden-brown hair that fell the same exact way every day. But it was all of Gus’s minor imperfections—his scars and ridges, crooked lines and sharp edges—and how they added up that had always made it hard for me to stop looking at him, and made me want to see more.

He leaned forward to mess with the temperature controls, his eyes flicking toward me. I jerked my gaze out the window, trying to clear my mind before he could read it.

“Do you want to be surprised?” he said.

My heart seemed to trip over its next beat. “What?”

“About where we’re going.”

I relaxed. “Hm. Surprised by something disturbing enough that you think it belongs in a book. No thanks.”

“Probably wise,” he agreed. “We’re going to interview a woman whose sister was in a suicide cult.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head.

“Oh my God,” I said through a shock of laughter. All at once, the tension I’d imagined dissipated. “Gus, are you writing a rom-com about a suicide cult?”

He rolled his eyes. “I scheduled this interview before our bet. Besides, the point of this outing is helping you learn to write literary fiction.”

“Well, either way, you weren’t kidding about staring into the abyss,” I said. “So the point of this lesson is basically Everything sucks, now get to work writing about it?”

Gus smirked. “No, smart-ass. The points of this lesson are character and detail.”

I faux-gasped. “You’re never going to believe this crazy coincidence, but we have those in women’s fiction too!”

“You know, you’re the one who initiated this whole lesson-plan element of the deal,” Gus said. “If you’re going to make fun of me the whole time, I’m happy to drop you off at the nearest suburban comedy club open mic and pick you up on the way back.”

“Okay, okay.” I waved him on. “Character and detail. You were saying …”

Gus shrugged. “I like writing about outlandish scenarios. Characters and events that seem too absurd to be real, but still work. Having specificity helps make the unbelievable believable. So I do a lot of interviews. It’s interesting what people remember about a situation. Like if I’m going to write a cult-leading zealot who believes he’s an alien consciousness reincarnated as every great world leader for centuries, I also need to know what kind of shoes he wears, and what he eats for breakfast.”

“But do you really?” I teased. “Are the readers honestly begging for that?”

He laughed. “You know, maybe the reason you haven’t been able to finish your book is that you keep asking what someone else wants to read instead of what you want to write.”

I crossed my arms, bristling. “So tell me, Gus. How are you going to put a romantic spin on your suicide-cult book?”

His head tilted against the headrest, his knife-edged cheekbones casting shadows down his face. He scratched his jaw. “First of all, when did I say this interview was for my rom-com? I could just as easily set aside all my notes from this until I win our bet, then get back to work on my next official novel.”

“And is that what you’re doing?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “Trying to figure out if I can combine the ideas.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Tell me the specifics. I’ll see if I can help.”

“Okay. So.” He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “The original premise was basically that this journalist finds out his high school sweetheart, a former drug addict, has joined a cult, so he decides to infiltrate it and take it down. But while he’s there, he starts moving up through the ranks really quickly, like waaaay past the woman he went there to save. And as he does, he starts seeing all this stuff, this proof, that the leader’s right. About everything. Eventually, the girl was going to get scared and try to back out, try to talk him into leaving with her.”

“So I’m guessing,” I said, “they leave, honeymoon in Paris, and settle down in a small villa in the south of France. Probably become winemakers.”

“He was going to murder her,” Gus said flatly. “To save her soul. I hadn’t decided if that was going to be what finally brought the cult down—got all the leaders arrested and everything—or if he was going to become the new prophet. I liked the first option because it feels more like a closed loop: he wants to get her out of the cult; he does. He wants to bring the cult down; he does. But the second one feels more cyclical in a way. Like every damaged person with a hero complex could end up doing exactly what the original leader of the cult does. I dunno. Maybe I’d have a young man or woman with a drug habit show up at the very end.”

“Cute,” I said.

“Exactly what I was going for,” he answered.

“So. Any ideas for the not-terrible version of this book?”

“I mean, I liked that south-of-France pitch. That shit’s fire.”

“Glad you see things my way.”

“Anyway,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. A cult rom-com does sound like a thing. What about you? What’s your book?”

I pretended to puke in my lap.

“Cute,” he echoed, flashing me a grin. Speaking of fire, sometimes his eyes seemed to be reflecting it, even though there wasn’t any. The car was nearly pitch-black, for God’s sake. His eyes shouldn’t be allowed, physically or morally, to glint like that. His pupils were disrespectful to the laws of nature. My skin started burning under them.

“I have no idea what my book was,” I said when he finally looked back to the road. “And little idea what it is. I think it’s about a girl.”

He waited for me to go on for a few seconds, then said, “Wow.”

“I know.” There was more. There was the father she adored. There was his mistress and his beach house in the town he grew up in, and his wife’s radiation appointments. But even if things between Gus Everett and me had warmed (the fault of his eyes), I wasn’t ready for the follow-up questions this conversation might yield.

“Why did you move here anyway?” I asked after a lengthy silence.

Gus shifted in his seat. Clearly there was plenty he didn’t want to talk to me about either. “For the book,” he said. “I read about this cult here. In the nineties. It had this big compound in the woods before it got busted. There was all kinds of illegal shit going on there. I’ve been here about five years, interviewing people and researching and all that.”

“Seriously? You’ve been working on this for five years?”

He glanced my way. “It’s research heavy. And for part of that time I was finishing up my second book and touring for that and everything. It wasn’t like, five uninterrupted years at a typewriter with a single empty water bottle to pee in.”

“Your doctor will be relieved to hear that.”

We drove in taut silence for a while before Gus rolled down his window, which gave me permission to roll mine down. The warm whip of the air against the open windows dissolved any discomfort from the silence we’d fallen into. We could’ve just been two strangers on the same beach or bus or ferry.

As we drove, the sun vanished inch by inch. Eventually, Gus fiddled with the radio, stopping to crank up an oldies station playing Paul Simon.

“I love this song,” he told me over the wind cycloning through the car.

“Really?” I said, surprised. “I figured you’d make me listen to Elliott Smith or Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ the whole way.”

Gus rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “And I figured you’d bring a Mariah Carey playlist with you.”

“Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.”

His gruff laugh was mostly lost in the wind, but I heard enough of it to make my cheeks go warm.

It was two hours before we got off the highway and then another thirty minutes of ice-damaged back roads, lit only by the car’s brights and the stars overhead.

Finally, we pulled from the winding road through the woods into the gravel lot of a bar with a corrugated tin roof. Its glowing marquee read, THE BY-WATER. Aside from a few motorcycles and a junker of a Toyota pickup, the lot was empty, but the windows, illuminated by glowing BUDWEISER and MILLER signs, revealed a dense crowd inside.

“Be honest,” I said. “Did you bring me here to murder me?”

Gus turned off the car and rolled up the windows. “Please. We drove three hours. I’ve got a perfectly good murder spot back in North Bear Shores.”

“Are all your interviews at spooky dive bars in the forest?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Only the good ones.”

We climbed out of the car. Without the fifty mph wind, it was hot and sticky out, every few feet punctuated by a new cloud of mosquitoes or fireflies. I thought maybe I could hear the “water” the bar’s name referred to somewhere in the woods behind it. Not the lake itself, I didn’t think. A creek, probably.

I always felt a bit anxious going to neighborhood spots like this when I wasn’t a part of the neighborhood, but Gus appeared to be at ease, and hardly anyone looked up from their beer or pool tables or trysts against the wall beside the old-school jukebox. It was a place full of camo hats and tank tops and Carhartt jackets.

I was extremely grateful Gus had encouraged me to change my outfit.

“Who are we meeting?” I asked, sticking close to him as he surveyed the crowd. He tipped his chin toward a lone woman at a high-top near the back.

Grace was in her midfifties and had the rounded shoulders of someone who’d spent a lot of time sitting, but not necessarily relaxed. Which made sense. She was a truck driver with four sons in high school and no romantic partner to lean on.

“Not that that matters,” she said, taking a sip from her Heineken. “We’re not here to talk about that. You want to know about Hope.”

Hope, her sister. Hope and Grace. Twins from northern Michigan, not quite the Upper Peninsula, she’d already told us.

“We want to talk about whatever you think is relevant,” Gus said.

She wanted to be sure it wasn’t for a news story. Gus shook his head. “It’s a novel. None of the characters will have your names or look like you, or be you. The cult won’t be the same cult. This is to help us understand the characters. What makes someone join a cult, when you first noticed something off with Hope. That sort of thing.”

Her eyes glanced off the door then back to us, an uncertainty in her expression.

I felt guilty. I knew she’d come here of her own volition, but this couldn’t be easy, scraping the muck out of her heart and holding it out to a couple of strangers.

“You don’t have to tell us,” I blurted, and I felt the full force of Gus’s eyes cut to me, but I kept my focus on Grace, her watery eyes, slightly parted lips. “I know talking about it won’t undo any of it. But not talking about it won’t either, and if there’s anything you need to say, you can. Even if it’s just your favorite thing about her, you can say it.”

Her eyes sharpened into slivers of sapphire and her mouth tightened into a knot. For a second, she was stock-still and somber, a midwestern Madonna in a stone pietà, some sacred memory cradled in her lap where we couldn’t quite see it.

“Her laugh,” she said finally. “She snorted when she laughed.”

The corner of my mouth inched up but a new heaviness settled across my chest. “I love when people do that,” I admitted. “My best friend does it. I always feel like she’s drowning in life. In a good way. Like it’s rushing up her nose, you know?”

A soft, wispy smile formed on Grace’s thin lips. “A good way,” she said quietly. Then her smile quivered sadly, and she scratched her sunburned chin, her sloped shoulders rising as she set her forearms on the table. She cleared her throat.

“I didn’t,” she said thickly. “Know anything was off. That’s what you wanted to know?” Her eyes glossed and she shook her head once. “I had no idea until she was already gone.”

Gus’s head tilted. “How is that possible?”

“Because.” Tears were rushing into her eyes even as she shrugged. “She was still laughing.”

WE WERE SILENT for most of the drive home. Windows up, radio off, eyes on the road. Gus, I imagined, was mentally sorting the information he’d gotten from Grace.

I was lost in thoughts about my dad. I could so easily see myself avoiding the questions I had about him until I was Grace’s age. Until Sonya was gone, and Mom too, and there was no one left to give me answers, even if I wanted them.

I wasn’t prepared to spend my life avoiding any thought of the man who’d raised me, feeling sick whenever I remembered the envelope in the box atop the fridge.

But I was also tired of the pain inside my rib cage, the weight pressing on my clavicles and anxious sweat that cropped up whenever I considered the truth for too long.

I closed my eyes and pressed back into the headrest as the memory surged forward. I tried to fight it off, but I was too tired, so there it was. The crocheted shawl, the look on Mom’s face, the key in my palm.

God, I didn’t want to go back to that house.

The car stopped and my eyes snapped open.

“Sorry,” Gus stammered. He’d slammed the breaks to avoid plowing into a tractor at a dark four-way stop. “Wasn’t paying attention.”

“Lost in that beautiful brain of yours?” I teased, but it came out flat, and if Gus heard, he gave no indication. The more animated corner of his mouth was twisted firmly down.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He was quiet for another beat. “That was pretty intense. If you want to talk about it …”

I thought back to Grace’s story. She’d thought Hope was doing better than ever when she first fell in with her new crowd. She’d gotten off heroin, for one thing—a nearly insurmountable challenge. “I remember her skin looked better,” Grace had said. “And her eyes. I don’t quite know what about them, but they were different too. I thought I had my sister back. Four months later, she was dead.”

She’d died by accident, internal bleeding from “punishments.” The rest of the trailer compound that was New Eden had gone up in flames as the FBI investigation was closing in.

Everything Grace had told us was probably great for Gus’s original plot line. It didn’t leave a lot of room for meet-cutes and HEAs. But that was sort of the point. Tonight’s research had been for me, to take my brain down the trails that led to the kind of book I was supposed to be writing.

I couldn’t understand how people did this. How Gus could bear to follow such dark paths just for the sake of a story. How he could keep asking questions when all I’d wanted all night was to grab Grace and hold her tight, apologize for what the world had taken from her, find some way—any way—to make the loss one ounce lighter.

“Have to stop for gas,” Gus said, and pulled off the highway to a deserted Shell station. There was nothing but parched fields for miles in every direction.

I got out of the car to stretch my legs while Gus pumped the gas. Night had cooled the air, but not much. “This one of your murder spots?” I asked, walking around the car to him.

“I refuse to answer that on the grounds that you might try to take it from me.”

“Solid grounds,” I answered. After a moment, I couldn’t hold the question in any longer. “Doesn’t it bother you? Having to live in someone else’s tragedy? Five years. That’s a long time to put yourself in that place.”

Gus tucked the nozzle back into the pump, all his focus on twisting the gas cap closed. “Everybody’s got shit, January. Sometimes, thinking about someone else’s is almost a relief.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Let me have it.”

Gus’s eyebrows lifted and his Sexy, Evil mouth went slack. “What?”

I folded my arms and pressed my hip into the driver’s side door. I was tired of being the most delicate person in the room. The girl drunk on purse-wine, the one trying not to tremble as someone else poured their pain out on a high-top in a crummy bar. “Let’s hear this mysterious shit of yours. See if it gives me an effective break from mine.” And now Grace’s, which weighed just as heavily on my chest.

Gus’s liquidy dark eyes slid down my face. “Nah,” he said finally, and moved toward the door, but I stayed leaning against it. “You’re in my way,” he said.

“Am I?”

He reached for the door handle, and I slid sideways to block it. His hand connected with my waist instead, and a spark of heat shot through me.

“Even more in my way,” he said, in a low voice that made it sound more like I dare you to stay there.

My cheeks itched. His hand was still hanging against my hip like he’d forgotten it was there, but his finger twitched, and I knew he hadn’t.

“You just took me on the world’s most depressing date,” I said. “The least you could do is tell me a single thing about yourself, and why all this New Eden stuff matters to you.”

His brow lifted in amusement and his eyes flickered in that bonfire-lit way. “Wasn’t a date.”

Somehow, he managed to make it sound filthy.

“Right, you don’t date,” I said. “Why is that? Part of your dark, mysterious past?”

His Sexy, Evil mouth tightened. “What do I get?”

He stepped a little closer, and I became hyperaware of every molecule of space between us. I hadn’t been this close to a man since Jacques. Jacques had smelled like high-end cologne by Commodity; Gus smelled smoky and sweet, like nag champa incense mixed with a salty beach. Jacques had blue eyes that twinkled over me like a summer breeze through chimes. Gus’s dark gaze bored into me like a corkscrew: What do I get?

“Lively conversation?” My voice came out unfamiliarly low.

He gave a slight shake of his head. “Tell me why you moved here, and I’ll tell you one thing about my dark, mysterious past.”

I considered the offer. The reward, I decided, was worth the cost. “My dad died. He left me his beach house.”

The truth, if not all of it.

For the second time, an unfamiliar expression fluttered—sympathy? Disappointment, maybe?—across his face too fast for me to parse out its meaning. “Now your turn,” I prompted.

“Fine,” he said, voice scratchy, “one thing.”

I nodded.

Gus leaned in toward me and dropped his mouth beside my ear conspiratorially, his hot breath pulling goose bumps up the side of my neck. His eyes flashed sideways across my face, and his other hand touched my hip so lightly it could’ve been a breeze. The heat in my hips spread toward my center, curling around my thighs like kudzu.

It was crazy that I remembered that night in college so vividly that I knew he’d touched me just like this. That first touch when we met on the dance floor, featherlight and melting-point hot, careful, intentional.

I realized I was holding my breath, and when I forced myself to breathe, the rise and fall of my chest was ridiculous, the stuff of Regency-era erotica.

How was he doing this to me? Again?

After the night we’d had tonight, this feeling, this hunger in me shouldn’t have been possible. After the year I’d had, I hadn’t thought it was anymore.

“I lied,” he whispered against my ear. “I have read your books.”

His hands tightened on my waist and he spun me away from the car, opened the door, and got in, leaving me gasping at the sudden cold of the parking lot.