The Ghostwriter(7)

Three months left. That’s what the doctor said. Three months, and a book that will easily run three hundred pages. I close my eyes and do the math, giving myself forty days to write, forty to rewrite, and ten days leeway for sickness. I’ll need to write 8 pages, two thousand words each day. My stress rises. Ten days off in three months is a crazy schedule. And two thousand words a day is daunting, especially for me, who takes a year to produce a normal manuscript.

This will not be a normal manuscript. This is a heroine who will be closer to me than any other. A heroine whose shoes I filled, whose steps I took, decisions I made, sins I committed. Once I write her story, she will be real, she will be exposed, dead to edits but open to everyone’s eyes. On their tablets, in their hands, grubby fingers and manicured nails skimming the pages faster-faster-faster until they reach The End and move on to the next. Done with that heroine. Done with that story.

I’m terrified at the thought. Thousands of words of truth and life, published and out for them to digest, creating the chance, the very small chance, that no one will buy her. Or that they will read her words and pick at them, reviewers typing away, their lips chit-chattering, musing about her motivations and her weaknesses and her actions and whether she is deserving of her fate.

I don’t know what is worse, if they hate her or if they don’t read her at all. She could end up in a clearance bin, a flashy 99￠ sticker plastered to her front.

I can’t do that to her. I can’t do that to me.

Maybe that’s why I’ve waited until now, the moment when I won’t be around to see the carnage, to deal with the police, the consequences, the judgement.

Two thousand words a day. Three months that are already whittling down. My stomach heaves, and I open my mouth, inhale deeply, a panic attack rising, my body suddenly hot, this office stuffy, the glow of the computer’s screen too bright.

I can’t do it. There is no way, not enough time, not enough hours to dedicate to what is the most important novel of my entire life.

I almost reach for the phone, dial Kate’s number, and ask for help.

Instead, I lean forward, dropping to the floor, hand yanking at the plastic trash can beneath my desk, and vomit.





The summer I met Simon, I lost Jennifer. It was as if a hole opened in my heart, and he stepped right in, his hand where hers had once been, his smile replacing hers. Granted, they were different. She was eleven, he was twenty-two. She ran away…





I delete the last line, and then the entire paragraph. Lies. I am forgetting that this is not an ordinary novel, that I can’t take fictional liberties, can’t provide clues, or lead the readers down a path I didn’t travel.

There is no Jennifer. Maybe if there had been, then I would be in a different place now. Maybe if I had had a friend, even an eleven-year-old one, then Simon wouldn’t have been my everything.

I try to picture a friend of the twenty-year-old me, a girl whose interests had been singularly focused on reading and writing, her days spent at a notebook or computer, her mind preoccupied in thoughts of fictional characters and strange cities. Girls in my high school had seemed like foreign creatures, the boys leering villains. Another writer would have been my best bet. Or possibly a librarian, though none had ever given me the time of day.

I think of Marka Vantley, of our seven-year war, and make a face. Maybe another writer wouldn’t have been my best bet. Then again, most writers aren’t buxom supermodels who write trashy smut.

My gaze drifts over the stack of books beside my desk, all but one of my novels present. Missing is Blue Heart. The worst book I ever wrote. It was about a girl who gets a heart transplant as a child and—either due to the medical procedure or her God-given personality—is unable to love. Critics loved it and readers rushed out to purchase it, a million copies sold in the first year. Marka Vantly sent me a scathing email that spoke the truth. It said the book was terrible—flat and insipid, my attempts at matchmaking weak.

She had been right.

I hadn’t responded well, reading the email and then pushing the laptop off the counter’s edge. Simon had come home to find bits of the screen dotting our kitchen floor, punk music blaring through the house—an unsuccessful attempt to drown out her words.

I never responded to her email. I hadn’t known what to say, my footing weak and unfamiliar. I’d solved the problem with a big sleeping pill, topped off with Chardonnay and hostility toward my husband. That email had been the spark that had started Marka’s and my rivalry. The kindling had been our constant competition on the bestseller ranks, every week a new scorecard, our print runs and sales figures a giant tally that anyone with a Publishers Weekly subscription could access. That email had been the first of many, each release bringing another, my competitive nature unable to resist similar pettiness, barbs exchanged with increasing hostility.

I’d always told myself that it didn’t matter what Marka Vantly thought. I’d convinced myself that she wrote trash, and couldn’t tell intelligent talent from the smutty garbage she vomited out. But honestly, her prose isn’t trash. If anything, behind all of the ass slapping and handcuffing and screaming orgasms… it’s fairly good. What I hate—and what I can never confess in my emails to her—is that she is wasting such writing on smut. I write sex. I write, in the majority of my novels, a fair amount of sex. She can write sex and still write a great novel. And that’s what infuriates me about the woman, even more than her perfectly pouty lips and incessant publicity. She’s wasting her talent. She could be giving us more.