Beach Read(37)

“I guess …” He tugged at his hair anxiously. “Well, my mom died when I was a kid. Don’t know if you knew that.”

I wasn’t sure how I would have, but even if I didn’t outright know it, it fit with the image of him I’d had in college. “I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” he said. “So, my dad was garbage, but my mom—she was amazing. And when I was a kid, I just thought, like, Okay, it’s us against the world. We’re stuck in this situation, but it’s not forever. And I kept waiting for her to leave him. I mean—I kept a bag packed with a bunch of comic books and some socks and granola bars. I had this vision of us hopping on a train, riding to the end of the line, you know?” When his eyes flashed toward me, the corner of his mouth was curled, but the smile wasn’t real.

It said, Isn’t that ridiculous? Wasn’t I ridiculous? And I knew how to read it because it was a smile I’d been practicing for a year: Can you believe I was so stupid? Don’t worry. I know better now.

A weight pressed low in my stomach at the image: Gus, before he was the Gus I knew. A Gus who daydreamed about escape, who believed someone would rescue him.

“Where were you going to go?” I asked. It came out as little more than a whisper.

His eyes leapt back to the road and the muscle in his jaw pulsed, then relaxed, his face serene once more. “The redwoods,” he said. “Pretty sure I thought we could build a tree house there.”

“A tree house in the redwoods,” I repeated quietly, like it was a prayer, a secret. In a way, it was. It was a tiny piece of a Gus I’d never imagined, one with romantic notions and hope for the unlikely. “But what does that have to do with New Eden?”

He coughed, checked his rearview mirror, went back to staring down the road. “I guess … a few years ago, I just sort of realized my mom wasn’t a kid.” He shrugged. “I’d thought we were waiting for the perfect time to leave, but she was never going to. She’d never said she was. She could have taken us out of there, and she didn’t.”

I shook my head. “I doubt it was that simple.”

“That’s why,” he murmured. “I know it wasn’t simple, and when I talk about this book, I tell people it’s because I want to ‘explore the reasons people stay, no matter the cost,’ but the truth is I just want to understand her reasons. I know that doesn’t make sense. This cult thing has nothing to do with her.”

No matter the cost. What had staying cost his mother? What had it cost Gus? The weight in my stomach had spread, was pressing against the insides of my chest and palms. I’d started publishing romance because I wanted to dwell in my happiest moments, in the safe place my parents’ love had always been. I’d been so comforted by books with the promise of a happy ending, and I’d wanted to give someone else that same gift.

Gus was writing to try to understand something horrible that had happened to him. No wonder what we wrote was so different.

“It does make sense,” I said finally. “No one gets ‘looking for postmortem parental answers’ like I do. If I watched the movie 300 right now, I’d probably find a way to make it about my dad.”

He gave me a faint smile. “Great cinema.” It was so obviously a Thank you and a Let’s move on now. As different as I’d thought we were, it felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.

“We should have a film club,” I said. “We’re always on the same page about this stuff.”

He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “It really was a beautiful dedication,” he said. “It didn’t feel like a lie. Maybe a complicated truth, but not a lie.”

The warmth filled me up until I felt like a teakettle trying hard not to whistle.

When I got home, I turned on my computer and ordered my own copy of The Revelatories.

AND HERE CAME the true montage.

I did surgery on the book. I ripped it up and stored the pieces in separate files. Ellie became Eleanor. She went from being a down-on-her-luck real estate agent to a down-on-her-luck tightrope walker with a port-wine stain the shape of a butterfly on her cheek, because Absurdly Specific Details. Her father became a sword swallower, her mother a bearded lady.

They moved from the twenty-first century to the early twentieth. They were part of a traveling circus. That was their family: a tight-knit group who ended every night smoking hand-rolled cigarettes around a fire. It was the only world she’d ever known.

They spent every moment with each other, but somehow told each other very little. There wasn’t much time for talking in their line of work.

I renamed the file, from BEACH_BOOK.docx to FAMILY_SECRETS.docx.

I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.

I gave them each a secret. That part was the easiest.

Eleanor’s mother was dying but she didn’t want anyone to know. The clowns everyone believed to be brothers were actually lovers. The sword swallower was still mailing checks to a family back in Oklahoma.