The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry(40)

“Every time I see her with A.J. and Amelia, I’m sick. She should be ours.”

“What?”

“Maya,” Ismay says. “If you’d done the right thing, she’d be ours. But you, you can never do anything hard. And I let you be that way.” She looks steadily at Daniel. “I know that Marian Wallace was your girlfriend.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Don’t lie! I know that she came here to kill herself in your front yard. I know that she left Maya for you, but you either were too lazy or too much of a coward to claim her.”

“If you thought that was true, why didn’t you do something?” Daniel asks.

“Because it isn’t my job! I was pregnant, and it wasn’t my responsibility to clean up after your affairs.”

Another car speeds past, nearly sideswiping them.

“But if you’d been brave and come to me, I would have adopted her, Daniel. I would have forgiven you and I would have taken her in. I waited for you to say something, but you never did. I waited for days, then weeks, then years.”

“Ismay, you can believe what you want, but Marian Wallace was not my girlfriend. She was a fan who came to a reading.”

“How stupid do you think I am?”

Daniel shakes his head. “She was a girl who came to a reading, and a girl I slept with once. How could I even be sure the child was mine?” He tries to take Ismay’s hand, but she pulls away.

“It’s funny,” Ismay says. “Every last bit of love I had for you is gone.”

“I still love you,” Daniel says. At that moment, headlights catch the rearview mirror.

The hit comes from behind, knocking the car into the center of the road so that it is crossing both lanes of traffic.

“I think I’m okay,” Daniel says. “Are you okay?”

“My leg,” she says. “It might be broken.”

More headlights, this time from the opposite side of the road. “Ismay, you have to drive.” He turns in time to see the truck. A twist, he thinks.

In the first chapter of Daniel’s famous first novel, the main character is in a catastrophic car accident. Daniel had struggled with the section, because it occurred to him that everything he knew about horrible car accidents had come from books he’d read and movies he’d seen. The description he finally settled on, after what must have been fifty passes, never much satisfied him. A series of fragments in the style of modernist poets. Apollinaire or Breton, maybe, but not nearly as good as either.

Lights, bright enough to dilate her eyes.

Horns, flaccid and come too late.

Metal crumpling like tissue.

The body was not in pain but only because the body was gone, elsewhere.

Yes, Daniel thinks just after impact but before death, like that. The passage hadn’t been as bad as he had thought.

PART II

A Conversation with My Father

1972 / Grace Paley

Dying father argues with daughter about the “best” way to tell a story. You’ll love this, Maya, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go downstairs and push it into your hands right now.

—A.J.F.

The assignment for Maya’s creative-writing class is to tell a story about someone you wish you knew better. “My biological father is a ghost to me,” she writes. She thinks the first sentence is good, but where to go from there? After 250 words and a whole morning wasted, she concedes defeat. There’s no story because she doesn’t know anything about the man. He truly is a ghost to her. The failure was in the conception.

A.J. brings her a grilled cheese sandwich. “How’s it going, Hemingway?”

“Don’t you ever knock?” she says. She accepts the sandwich and shuts the door. She used to love living above the store, but now that she is fourteen and Amelia lives there, too, the apartment feels small. And noisy. She can hear customer downstairs all day. How is a person to write under such conditions?

Out of desperation, Maya writes about Amelia’s cat.

Puddleglum never imagined he’d move from Providence to Alice Island.

She revises, Puddleglum never imagined he’d live in a bookstore.

Gimmicky, she decides. That’s what Mr. Balboni, the creative writing teacher, will say. She has already written a story from the point of view of the rain and the point of view of a very old library book. “Interesting concepts,” Mr. Balboni had written on the library book story, “but you might want to try writing about a human character next time. Do you really want anthropomorphizing to become your thing?”

She had had to look up “anthropomorphize” before deciding that, no, she didn’t want it to become her thing. She doesn’t want to have a thing. And yet can she be blamed if it kind of is her thing? Her childhood had been spent reading books and imagining lives for customers and sometimes for inanimate objects like the teapot or the bookmark carousel. It had not been a lonely childhood, though many of her intimates had been somewhat less than real.

A little later, Amelia knocks. “Are you working? Can you take a break?”

“Come in,” Maya says.

Amelia flops onto the bed. “What are you writing?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I thought I had an idea, but it didn’t work.”

“Oh, that is a problem.”