Love Beyond Words (City Lights, #1)(39)

He told her of how his father, Kristoff, had been afflicted with wanderlust from a young age, and how he’d landed in Colombia where he met Alaina. Three years of nomadic bliss, before she became pregnant and wanted to settle down, something Kristoff could not, or would not, do.

“He was gone for long stretches of time, wiring money when he could or was inclined to. And then one of those stretches kept stretching until it was clear he wasn’t coming back. The wires stopped. We didn’t hear from him for six years. And yet my mother refused to let anyone speak a sour word about him in my presence. She believed it was a sin to blacken the impression of a parent in the mind of their child. But I knew. From my earliest years, I knew. I could hear her crying at night.”

Julian took another sip of wine, hardly tasting it, and spoke of the day his father came back, ill and ashen. “I was ten years old, and I thought it meant we’d be a whole family again, but he wasn’t well. A month later, his heart gave out and he was gone.”

“Fast, like lightning,” Natalie murmured. She gave him her hand and he squeezed it gratefully.

“During my father’s long absences and after his death, my mother worked in housekeeping at various luxury hotels in San Juan. She kept long, hard hours while I went to school, and she was determined that I get good grades and go to college. I came home from school to our shabby four-room apartment, did my homework, and then wrote. I was alone most afternoons and into the evenings, and so I created worlds that were not so empty. By the time I was in middle school, it had become evident that I was—”

“A genius?” Natalie put in, with a small grin.

“I was going to say ‘ahead of my class’,” Julian said. “But my mother couldn’t afford a private school, and scholarships for children of that age were few and far between. The public school I went to wasn’t a terrible one, anyway. One benevolent teacher —Mrs. Ruiz, in the sixth grade—bought me a stack of black and white composition books and I’ve never used anything else for the first drafts of my novels. I can’t. It may sound strange but I don’t want to change much of what began when my mother was still alive. I don’t want to lose any more of her than I have already.”

Natalie wiped her cheek. “That’s not strange at all.”

Julian nodded, cleared his throat.

“I didn’t stay in school long. I took the GED as soon as I was able so that I could work. We were living in Tampa Bay at the time and until then, she had forbidden me from working, saying I needed to concentrate on my writing. It was evidence of her encroaching illness that she did not protest when I finished school to work, but patted my hand and told me I was a good son to her. But I felt I wasn’t doing enough.

“I’ve heard you shouldn’t write—or make art—solely for the money. I understand the gist; writing is something I have to do. I would do it for free. But not that first book. That first book was both a story I needed to tell and a way to make money we desperately needed. Or so I hoped. That’s when I wrote Above.

“I worked all day at a grocery store, bagging groceries and stocking shelves, and at night I wrote obsessively, furiously, through blisters and burning eyes and headaches; fueled by resentment toward my father for leaving us and a panic that time was slipping away. And it was. When it was finished, my mother’s cancer had progressed to the point where doctors begin speaking in weeks instead of months. It was in her lungs despite the fact she’d never touched a cigarette in her life.”

Julian heard his voice grow hard with bitterness.

“I walked into the offices of Underhill Press in Tampa and slammed the five notebooks on the desk of the man who is still my editor to this day, and I said, ‘How much will you pay me for this?’ Naturally, he thought I was insane. I was seventeen years old, wearing a grocer’s apron and had dirty fingernails. But Len—Len Gordon is his name—told me later he saw something in me that intrigued him. I left him the books and my phone number and walked out.

“Len called me that same evening, at the hospice, and offered me a contract right there, over the phone, provided I could prove I wrote it myself. I quoted him whole passages at his discretion and he was sold. Or rather, Above was sold.”

“For a huge pile of money, I hope.”

“Huge to my mother and me. Len came over two days later with a contract. Underhill Press offered me a thirty thousand dollar advance—an astonishing sum for a debut novel by today’s e-book-friendly standards, and enough to give my mother a few weeks’ or months’ peace and luxury.

“Between the contract signing and the release of the book, I took her to the Bahamas. There, she sat by the beach or the pool in a fancy hotel reading Above while others waited on her, hand and foot. It was the best and worst time of my life, as I could see she enjoyed the sun and rest, but it was too little too late. She didn’t have the strength to stay longer than a handful of days. We returned to the hospice and she…”

Julian felt as if he’d been suddenly dragged backward through time. He saw everything clear as day; the dingy room, the smell of the air freshener the hospice used to cover the scents of disinfectants and illness but never could manage to conceal entirely, and his mother’s bone-thin body on the too-big bed. He heard her every word, echoing across ten years, in a wasted voice that had once been rich and full.