donswaim.comdonswaim.com/donahue-submission-7-16-19.docx · Web viewHe goes to Henry’s house,...

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life”

Hey, writers. This is it—the final chapter of this novel. Thank you in advance for reading, and thank you doubly for your insights and suggestions along the way. I have rewritten the previous few chapters, but I won’t ask you to read them again.

To summarize, here’s how the previous chapters now differ: Sid goes to murder Steve Schuff with the highly venomous taipan, but he does not. (The gun does go off, shooting out the glass of Steve’s truck and riddling the door with bullets.) He leaves with Holly and suggests everything will be all right now, and she rejects him, leaving him standing in the parking lot of a shuttered auto mechanic. As he stands there, thinking about what happened, he loses it. He batters his car, pounding the window with his fists, kicking in the doors. He wants vengeance, and he thinks of Henry Wilk, his former boss and the man who will soon tear down his sanctuary, the woods behind the Lea at Barrows.

He goes to Henry’s house, planning to release the taipan in Henry’s truck, only to find it locked. Rather than putting a hole in the glass, through which the snake could easily escape, he remembers he has a key to Henry’s house from when Sid used to live there after Lydia kicked him out. He goes to the back door, keys his way in, and goes to release the taipan in the kitchen. As he’s doing so, the kitchen light flicks on, and in walks Henry’s wife, Maria (nearly nine months pregnant). Sid has a vision of two caskets—one for an adult, one for a small child—and something comes undone in him. As Maria screams, Sid goes to refasten the rubber band around the pillowcase holding the taipan (which Sid names Vishnu the Destroyer, by the way). Henry then bowls him over.

In the ensuing scuffle, Sid sees the broken rubber band on the floor as Maria reenters the kitchen. The snake slithers out and backs Maria onto the counter. Sid frees himself from Henry and scrambles toward the snake. He grabs its tail with his bare right hand, and it strikes. It bites him twice on his gloved left hand, and the third time its fangs sink into the leather. He closes his fist around its head, capturing it, and has an emotional breakdown in the kitchen.

Maria calls the cops but Henry tells her to hang up. Henry and Sid talk, with Sid admitting he just wanted to scare Henry (suggesting it’s a nonvenomous snake), and they settle their differences after some harsh words. As Sid leaves the house with the taipan secure, a cop car pulls up to the house and starts asking questions. Henry emerges and assures everything is OK. As the cop grows suspicious, Maria emerges from the house and proclaims she’s going into labor. The cop calls an ambulance and Sid leaves the scene.

He goes to a lot where he expects his life to end. He inspects his left hand and sees a pinprick in his pinky finger—an entry wound large enough to admit the venom to stop his heart. He rolls down the

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windows, lights off, listening to the sounds of night. He awakes hours later, alive, the snake’s fangs either having delivered a dry bite (no venom) or not having pierced the glove. He then disposes of the gun and then the snake, which is free to live out its days (or at least until winter) in a remote woodland.

In the next chapter, where Sid and Holly meet in the coffee shop, there are no significant changes other than to clarify that the coffee shop is located down the street from Holly’s new home, thereby explaining her appearance at said coffee shop, where has Sid gone to waste time while his daughter is touring Hilliard Academy.

Again, thanks for the time and perspective. Much, much appreciated.

BD

###

Chapter 23: The Miracle of Resurrection

April 27, 2019

Bones crackled and tendons popped as Sid knelt into the soft earth. He drove

the spade into the dirt and dug down four to five inches, just enough to

provide a suitable home for the purple and yellow pansy—“a flower with a

face,” as Caroline liked to call it. He squeezed the seedling out of its plastic

casing and gently broke apart the clump of roots. He then placed the delicate

root bundle into the hole and filled in the cavity with a handful of loose

garden soil. He would have to repeat the sequence ten more times to

complete the row of purple and yellow he intended as a counterbalance to

the dull fescue, just starting to green up in late April.

He reached into his back pocket and checked his smartphone. No

messages, no texts. His finger depressed the volume button to make sure he

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had the ringer on full blast so he didn’t miss the call. He turned on the vibrate

setting, too, as his hearing wasn’t nearly as good as it used to be.

As he went to drive in the spade to plant his last pansy, something

stopped his hand. His eyes had caught sight of something familiar: a pattern,

a shape, a telltale curve. He scanned the dirt, and there it was: a small snake,

coiled at the base of a buttonbush. He reached down and retrieved the snake,

pushing his glasses down his nose so he could see it more clearly. No more

than five inches in length, dark gray, a yellow ring at the back of its head—a

ring-neck snake. Its belly gleamed a brilliant orange. Too much time had

passed since he last saw a snake in its natural habitat. Either he had gotten

bad at looking or they had gotten better at hiding. Worse, he thought, maybe

there were fewer of them, the result of pollution and the changing climate

and the destruction of their habitat to accommodate man’s fetish for

mutilating the natural world with new roads, housing developments, and

office parks.

He placed the snake back where he had found it, at the base of the

buttonbush, and smiled as it slithered away.

The buzzing at his back pocket stirred him. He retrieved the phone and

squinted at the screen. It was Murrelet, his daughter. His pulse quickened. He

steeled himself as he answered.

“Hey, Murray Bird.” He waited a beat, careful not to sound too worried,

and added, “So what’s the verdict?”

“Bed rest, Dad,” she told him. “The baby’s okay, but the idiot doctor says I

have to be on GD bed rest for the remainder of the pregnancy. Until D-Day.”

3


“Well, that’s all right,” he told her. His heartbeat slowed. He wanted say it

could have been a lot worse considering Murray’s last miscarriage, but he

knew better. “It’s just a precaution. Hundreds of thousands of women go on

bed rest every single day.”

“But not this woman,” Murrelet said.

“Since when is my daughter a worrywart?”

“It’s not me I’m worried about. I just want to make sure your first

grandchild is safe and sound.”

“Welcome to parenthood,” he told her. “You’ll never stop worrying from

this day forward. Even when you get to be my age and your babies are

having babies of their own.”

“Thanks, Dad. You’re getting wise in your old age.”

“I’ve always been wise; you just never listened,” he joked. “Did you tell

your mother? She’ll want to know. Your brother, too, I imagine.”

“I wanted to let you know first.”

Murrelet ended the call, and Sid heard a muted click in his ear. He pulled

the smartphone away from the side of his face and eyed the blank screen. He

then thumbed through his contacts list and wondered if he should call Lydia

himself. No, he’d let Murray do the honors, because it was her news to share,

but maybe he would call Lydia later to commiserate, to make sure she wasn’t

too worried for their daughter and their forthcoming grandchild. Besides, he’d

see Lydia soon enough—just two more months until Murray’s delivery date,

and he’d make the trip from his home in Paw Paw, West Virginia, to Roanoke,

Virginia, where Murray and her husband, Gilbert, called home. He was looking

forward to it, in fact, not just seeing Murray and Gil become first-time

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parents, but also checking in on Lydia. Age had softened her demeanor, even

as the rest of her hardened. She’d had to suffer the indignity of watching her

second husband, Peter Michael Peer, wither and then pay good money to

have him put in the ground. Her health had taken a turn, too. Emphysema

and perhaps the early stages of Parkinson’s, according to Murray, but Sid

didn’t want to pry.

He would have called Tern, if only he had known his son’s phone number.

Careful to avoid the ring-neck snake, Sid tiptoed away from the garden

and went inside to share the good news with Caroline, his wife. He opened

the screen door at the back of the house and saw her sitting at the kitchen

table, busily peeling apples.

“Murray called,” he told her.

“And?”

“She’s okay. Baby’s okay. Bed rest from here on out.”

“Oh, I’ll bet she’s thrilled about that. The girl never sits still.”

“She’ll get used to it. You know her. She’ll be back running marathons by

time the baby’s done teething.”

Sid lips touched the crown of Caroline’s head. He then climbed the stairs

so he could relieve his bladder in the privacy of the master bathroom. The

stream came slowly at first, even painfully, until a jet of bright yellow hissed

against the side of the bowl. Like Lydia, certain parts of him were beginning

to show hints of betrayal. As he shook off the remaining drops, he thought he

heard Caroline call his name. A moment later, while he was washing up at the

sink, she came up behind him.

5


“You’ve got to get your damn hearing checked,” she said, huffing a little.

“I’ve been calling your name, shouting my lungs out, for a full minute.”

“Well, you found me.”

“Phone call.”

“Who is it?”

“I didn’t ask.”

He followed Caroline down the stairs and into the kitchen. The phone’s

receiver was on its side next to Caroline’s cutting board and paring knife, the

plastic slick with the juice of freshly butchered apples. He’d have to yank the

phone line out of the wall someday soon. In 2019, he could think of no reason

to have a landline, barring some sort of apocalypse that undid civilization and

sent humanity reeling back to the Stone Age, which, based on the bottomless

sea of excrement he read on his daily newsfeed, seemed all but inevitable.

He brought the receiver to his ear and introduced himself, saying simply,

“This is Mister Carver.”

“Siddhartha Carver?”

He nearly choked. Since his mother’s death, and even before then, since

she had lost the ability to speak and had probably forgotten his name

anyway, almost no one but Lydia had called him by his given name—and this

wasn’t Lydia. He didn’t recognize the woman’s voice. He responded

affirmatively.

“My name is Loretta Kerlitch,” she said. “Forgive my asking, but is this the

same Siddhartha Carver from Barrows, Virginia?”

“Once upon a time, yes.”

“You once lived next door to Holly Tithe?”

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His legs suddenly weak, Sid leaned into the wall. He coughed hard.

“Sir?”

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m sorry. Who is this?”

“Loretta Kerlitch. Doctor Loretta Kerlitch. I’m calling about Holly Tithe. Did

you know her?”

“Of course I know Holly,” he said. “Is … is everything all right?”

“Not particularly,” Loretta said. “I’m afraid she passed.”

Memories flooded in.

He saw her face.

He smelled her unmistakable scent.

He felt her skin against his.

“Are you all right, Mister Carver?”

“Please,” he said. “Call me Sid. How?”

“Excuse me?”

“How did she die?”

“That’s not important.”

“When? When did it happen?”

“About a month ago. I’m calling because she wanted you to have

something. Can we meet?”

“Of course,” he said. He wanted to paint the inside of the toilet bowl with

his vomit. “Forgive me, but how do you know Holly?”

“We were partners.”

“In business?”

“No.”

“Oh. Oh.” The realization hit him fully. “I’m so sorry for you.”

7


“Kind of you to say.” She paused. “I’m in New Hampshire. Judging by the

area code, I imagine that’s a far drive for you. I can forward a package, if

that’s easier. I just need to know where to send it.”

“I can meet you,” he snapped. “Would I be coming to where you and Holly

lived?”

“Yes.”

The idea of standing in Holly’s house, of being so close to her, thrilled him.

“I’m in West Virginia now.” He wanted to check a calendar. “Today’s

Saturday. I could be there by Monday, I think.”

“That’s fine. Monday afternoon would be just fine. I can text you the

address.”

After he hung up, he hurried into the powder room and sank to the floor.

His forehead kissed the toilet seat. He wanted to cry, to scream, to put his fist

through something, but all he could do was sit there, immobile, his head

resting on the hard plastic, his callused hands clasping the cool porcelain

base.

Time passed without him thinking to consider the clock, or anything else.

Knuckles rapped against the powder-room door.

“Sid?” It was Caroline. “Everything okay in there?”

He emerged a moment later, and the look on his face must have let

Caroline know something horrible had happened.

“It’s Holly,” he said. “She died.”

She embraced him, knowing what Holly had meant to him, knowing her

death must have hurt. Caroline knew everything, or almost everything.

8


He had moved to Paw Paw for the insurance job and quit after two weeks,

no longer having the stomach for office work. He’d seen a sign for part-time

help at a tree farm owned by Caroline’s family—Fromme’s Famous Nursery

and Garden Center—and part time became full time after a month. He and

Caroline had been a good pair from the start, she a kind boss and he a hard

worker. Over the course of the three-year courtship that followed, he had told

her all about himself, about his sins, about Holly. Day by day, he leaked small

details, sharing everything there was to tell about the brief window of time he

had Holly Tithe in his life.

Holly’s name had come up often in the years since, and Caroline never

once complained or, as far as he could tell, felt threatened. In turn, Sid didn’t

begrudge Caroline the opportunity to share stories from her past, though she

rarely did.

“She has something for me,” he told her. “I have to pick it up.”

“Who has something for you?”

“Holly.”

“But …”

“I know. It’s a long story.”

“Where do you have to go?”

“New Hampshire.”

“Do what you have to do, dear.”

“I’ll leave tomorrow morning.”

Caroline hesitated and then asked, “What is it, you think? What did she

leave you?”

9


All he could think of was the obscene mannequin from Holly’s apartment

in Barrows, the one with the tiger-striped merkin and the black X’s taped over

the nipples.

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

###

It was a few minutes past three a.m. when he decided sleep was a lost cause,

so he leaned over to his dozing wife and kissed her on the cheek. He then

descended the creaking stairs and brewed a pot of coffee.

Forty minutes later, his morning ablutions complete, he grabbed his

overnight bag and stepped into the crispness of early morning. Bluish-white

stars dotted the cloudless sky, the fat moon dangling in place. He filled his

lungs with one more breath of cool Paw Paw air and climbed into his Ford

pickup.

His destination: Rumney, New Hampshire. The GPS suggested the trip

would take ten hours, more or less, taking him through Pennsylvania, New

Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and then up into New

Hampshire until he reached the edge of White Mountain National Forest.

Miles passed as darkness gave way to dawn, a hundred memories and

worries scrolled through his mind. All this time and she had evaded him.

When Internet search engines had taken over, he tried to track her down,

without success. Again, when social media had sprouted out of nowhere to

become “a thing,” he got a few nibbles on Facebook, but nothing substantial.

He found only two women who went by the name Holly Tithe—one in

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England, another in New Zealand—both under the age of thirty. In his mind,

she had made a herculean effort to hide from him. In reality, he figured, she

had likely just forgotten all about her former neighbor.

Now, in a way, they would be reunited after so many years apart.

At nine a.m., he dialed the number for Loretta Kerlitch. If it wasn’t too

much trouble, he told her, he would arrive a day early—by late afternoon, in

fact. She seemed all right with the change of plans. He kept the accelerator

pressed to the floor for hours on end, stopping only to fill the gas tank, empty

his bladder, and load his gut with microwaved burritos plucked from the

warmers of truck-stop counters.

You don’t want this.

Holly had once spoken those words to him, during their only romantic

encounter—the same encounter he had been dissecting and re-dissecting for

the past twenty years. He had struggled to understand exactly what she had

meant, not even sure if she had been talking to him or to herself. Now he

knew it was the latter, because it seemed she hadn’t wanted any man, let

alone him. Such knowledge lent some clarity to her unfathomable dalliance

with Steve Schuff, a belligerent jerk who had likely mistreated her in more

ways than Sid would ever know, though she had refused to acknowledge such

mistreatment until the very end. He wondered if, by spending so much time

with such a miserable human being, she was giving herself permission to

swear off men completely and follow her heart. It hurt to think of how she

must have suffered under the crushing weight of doubt and self-loathing. He

wondered if her struggle had ever seemed like too much to bear.

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Through it all, she always seemed to wear a smile. Her shield, he figured.

He wished he could have helped her through it. He wished she would have

trusted him to help her through whatever hell she needed to endure to

become the person she needed to be. If she had told him, he probably would

have loved her even more.

At a few minutes before four p.m., he pulled into a serpentine driveway of

a home bearing the Rumney address Loretta had texted. At the end of the

quarter-mile gravel stretch sat a lovely cottage with a cheerful red door, the

property girded by a ring of hemlock, aspen, and birch. An endless span of

jagged peaks—the White Mountains, he supposed—loomed in the distance.

The truck’s tires stopped against a log sunken in the earth, a primitive

bollard. He put the truck in park and turned off the ignition, inhaling and

exhaling slowly as he eased out of the cab. His bones creaked, and his

buttocks ached from so many hours sitting down. He ambled up to the front

door and hesitated, his hand just inches from the red paint. His mind had

gone blank. He grasped for the questions he wanted to ask the woman who

had phoned him with the worst news he had received since the hospice nurse

called to tell him his mother had slipped away “to another plane of

existence.”

The door opened to reveal a tall, sweet-looking woman with long gray

hair, a rail-thin frame, and a kind face. The first word that came into Sid’s

head: proper.

“Mister Carver, I presume?”

“You must be Loretta.” He removed his hat. “I wish it had been under

better circumstances, but I’m happy to meet you.”

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“Do come in.”

She led him into the brightly lit living room and welcomed him to have a

seat in a tufted fabric recliner. Instead, he roamed the room and studied the

art adorning the walls: landscapes and woodcuts, mostly. Rectangular

sections of discolored paneling suggested some pictures had recently been

taken down. Throw rugs hid all but a few slats of the gleaming wood floors.

The room felt warm, comfortable, safe—a place where memories had been

made. Loretta returned a moment later with two cups of tea.

“You must be tired, having come so far so quickly,” she told him. “West

Virginia, was it?”

“Glad to have made the trip.”

“I have to tell you, I wasn’t sure if Siddhartha Carver was a real person.

You know Holly and her nicknames.”

“Skin Carver,” he said, tapping his chest.

“Lolita Hairlip,” she said in return.

“Well, that’s mean.”

“You know Holly. Please. Sit.”

He settled in the chair directly across from her.

“Was this Holly’s chair?”

“Sometimes,” Loretta said.

He could almost feel Holly’s presence, as if she were in the house and had

just left the room. He imagined her in the kitchen preparing a meal, or

freshening up in the powder room. He relished the anticipation of her

imminent return.

Neither dead nor alive, Holly had become, in a way, immortal.

13


“I imagine you have some questions,” Loretta said.

“Almost too many. Your call was … unexpected. I suppose the only thing

to say is that I’m crushed.”

“You meant a lot to Holly. It was important to her that you know that.”

“What happened?”

“Breast cancer. Stage four by the time we found out, meaning it had

spread. The diagnosis came ten months ago, at a hospital down in

Manchester. Doctors said surgery and chemo might have gotten her another

three to five years. Maybe longer. ‘No promises,’ as doctors like to say. She

didn’t want to live that way, being taken away piece by piece. Nine months

after that initial diagnosis, almost to the day, she was gone. April third,

around six a.m.”

“Did she suffer?”

Her expression went dour.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” he said.

“All that matters is what she left behind.”

“Memories,” he said. “The good things she did.”

“And notebooks. More than a hundred of them—I’d estimate five or more

for every year of her adult life, each page filled with her scrawls and

scribbles. She had a lot to say.”

“I had no idea.”

Or did he? Images of Holly flashed through his mind: bathed in the orange

glow of the fire pit; standing in the doorway of 3A of the Lea at Barrows;

sitting in a beam of sunlight at a coffee shop down the road from Hilliard

14


Academy, his daughter’s alma mater. In all three scenes, each one plucked

from a distant memory, she clutched a notebook.

“Before she died, she went through all her things, including her inventory

of notebooks, and figured out what she wanted done with all of them,”

Loretta said. “Most she wanted me to have. Some of them went to her

parents, both of whom are still alive and kicking, somehow, both in their early

nineties, clinging to what’s left. Holly’s mom is blind, deaf, bound to a

wheelchair, but her dad still gets around all right. He took her death very

hard.”

“I can only imagine.”

He thought of Tern, still very much alive, though father and son might as

well have been dead to each other. Other than the pictures he had seen on

Tern’s Facebook page, Sid hadn’t seen his son’s face in more than a decade.

The pictures suggested Tern looked busy, happy, successful, and Sid

supposed knowing this was enough. It would have to be.

“That was a fun phone call to make, let me tell you,” Loretta continued.

“Holly and her parents hadn’t been close since she left New York. They didn’t

understand who she was, what she was, but I suppose early on she didn’t

quite know either—until she did. Last time they spoke to each other was nine

years ago, at her brother’s funeral.”

“Too many funerals,” he said.

Loretta sipped her tea. Sid mirrored her.

“Some of the notebooks were marked for the ‘Burn’ pile, so I obliged,” she

added. “You might have already guessed, but Holly’s notebooks have

everything to do with my call, with why you’ve come all this way. She wanted

15


you to have the ones from the time you were in each other’s lives—eight of

them, I believe.”

“Eight? I knew her only a year. Far less than a year, in fact.”

“What does time have to do with anything? Some people you can make a

lifelong connection with in the matter of an instant. Others, you’ll never bond

with no matter how much sand flows through the hourglass.”

She had a point.

“I haven’t read the ones with your name,” she added. “They’re about you,

I suppose, about the two of you together. I’m guessing she wanted to explain

the person she was, and to say the things she either didn’t or couldn’t say to

you directly.”

Sid suddenly felt awash with guilt he could not explain.

“How did you two meet?” Sid asked.

“At the university in Thylacine. I was a professor there. She worked in

admissions. We just clicked. Other than a few stops and starts, we’ve been

together ever since. Had been together. Does that trouble you, that she loved

another woman?”

“Trouble me? No. Surprise me? Maybe a little. I just hope she was happy.”

“Except when she wasn’t.” She paused. “She was going to tell you. She

didn’t think you’d understand.”

“I would have, in my own way.”

“You loved her. She loved you, too. In her own way.”

“Kind of you to say.”

Sid wanted to tell Loretta that he had succeeded in getting over Holly,

that the deep wound had scabbed over, even though memories of her crept

16


back in from time to time. In truth, Holly had never left him. Not for a single

day.

“It’s too nice an afternoon to be locked inside, staring at the floor,” Loretta

said. “Would you join me for a walk?”

###

“You’re a doctor,” Sid said as he kicked a stick off the leaf-strewn trail.

“A professor, yes,” she explained. “Ph.D., in history. Holly always made

sure to remind me. If we were out trying to meet new friends or together at a

university function, I would introduce myself as Doctor Kerlitch. She would

always add a disclaimer: ‘She’s not that kind of a doctor.’ She didn’t want my

head to get too swollen, I think.”

“Sounds like Holly.”

Sid watched as Loretta squinted into the drooping sun. He thought he saw

the traces of a smile tug at her lips.

“Forgive me for asking,” Sid said, “but did she talk about me?”

“Not at first. I think she thought I would be jealous. Over the years,

though, your name kept popping up. Just little stories, here and there, about

things you told her, places you had gone, things you did together. She told

me about the reptile show. Always going on about that damned reptile show.

She never could understand your fascination with snakes, but she liked that

you liked them. She told me you were good to her. She told me you were

kind. She didn’t forget that.”

“Stories,” he repeated. “What did she say?”

17


“Nothing inappropriate. Nothing incriminating.”

Loretta knows everything.

She would know about his failed marriage, his messy affair with—what

was her name, the girl down in Creedmoor, North Carolina? The young

woman’s name had been scrubbed from memory. Loretta would also know

about his harebrained plot to do away with Steve Schuff as punishment for

mistreating Holly.

No matter. He no longer had room in his life for something as useless as

shame.

“We were never intimate in the biblical sense,” Sid felt the need to say.

“Our lips barely touched.”

“I don’t know why that matters.”

“I wanted more from her. Some people, you never want to let go. She was

one of them. I never knew how she felt.”

Tears gathered in the corner of each eye.

“I loved her,” he said. “I always will.”

“That makes two of us.”

Loretta leaned into him and placed an arm around his waist, her palm flat

against his back. She gave his spine a gentle pat.

“She knew everything about me—where all the bodies are buried, so to

speak,” he added. “I have to tell you, and I hope you don’t think me a loon:

Holly has stayed with me all these years. After she moved away, after she

was out of my life, her voice stayed in my head, like she had planted it there

and it took root. I’d walk in the woods or go for a drive somewhere, alone,

and have in-depth conversations with her, telling her what was on my mind,

18


what I was afraid of, asking her what I should do about this, that, or the other.

She would always answer. Even now, even today, I can hear her.”

“Isn’t that lovely.” She said the words kindly enough, but to Sid it sounded

as though she were humoring a four-year-old with juice-stained cheeks who

had just exclaimed, “I like bugs.” She squeezed the bicep of his left arm, as if

to reassure him.

Sid could see what Holly had seen in Loretta Kerlitch.

“I met Holly at the worst point in my life,” he said. “If I’m happy in my life

now, and I am, it’s in large part because of her and the things she taught me.

I wouldn’t be where I am today, or who I am, if we hadn’t met.”

“I saw you once, you know, from afar,” Loretta said. “At the fairgrounds in

Lynchburg.”

The fairgrounds—the last time Sid and Holly had seen each other, two

months after their encounter at the church-turned-coffeehouse. He had been

wandering the aisles of a flea market on a dreary Saturday morning, low

forties, steel-gray clouds blanketing the sky. He had gone there looking for

nothing in particular, eying other people’s junk he had no intention of buying.

In truth, he had gone only to bask in his misery, to relive the day he had

taken Holly to the fairgrounds for the Lynchburg Reptile Expo. While perusing

water-stained cardboard boxes stuffed with dusty books and warped record

albums, he lifted his chin to see Holly standing two feet away from him. She

had been just as surprised, it seemed, even frightened by his presence. They

shared an awkward hug and exchanged a few awkward pleasantries. He

couldn’t restrain his smile, thrilled to see her, but she clearly felt otherwise.

The fibers that had once connected them had frayed completely. She seemed

19


preoccupied, checking over her shoulder, looking for an escape. After less

than a minute, he obliged.

He had done his best to strike that run-in from memory. There were too

many better times to remember.

“I was there with her, at the fairgrounds,” Loretta added. “I guess you

could call it a date, if that’s the right word for it. Seemed like a long distance

to travel for a lousy flea market.”

Sid and Loretta walked in silence. Leaf litter crunched underfoot.

“Holly and I tramped this path nearly every day for the past fifteen years,”

Loretta said. “It’s been months since I’ve been out here with another human.

The past few months have been … difficult.”

Sid said nothing in response, knowing the greatest kindness he could offer

at that moment was to simply let her talk.

“I think Holly would have been happy to know that we met, you and I,”

she said.

The sun had begun to dip behind the tallest peak to the west.

“You’ve come quite a distance,” she said. “We should turn back so you

can have some dinner and collect what Holly left for you. You’re welcome to

stay in the guest cottage.”

“I couldn’t impose.”

“Nonsense. It’s already made up for you. Besides, the sky on a clear night

is extraordinary. It’s what Holly loved most about this place. She’d want you

to see it.”

He smiled.

20


“Tomorrow I have to be on campus in Holderness for an early meeting, so

I’ll say my goodbyes now,” she added. “When you’re ready to go in the

morning, please do me the favor of closing the cottage door behind you and

waiting to hear the lock click. We have some industrious raccoons here. If

they find an unlocked door, the little buggers will barge in and wreck the

place.”

Sid nodded in agreement, though his thoughts had wandered to the

unread pages of Holly’s notebooks.

“I hope this trip has been worth your time,” Loretta said.

He had no idea what to say in reply.

###

Sid sat on the edge of the creaking bed of the guest cottage, eyeing the stack

of eight notebooks on the pine desk: three green, two black, one red, one

blue, each of them spiral bound, as well as a thick perfect-bound journal with

the Japanese woodblock print known as The Great Wave on its cover. He

wanted nothing more than to sit down at the desk and start thumbing

through the pages, but his exhausted body had other ideas. As he leaned

back on the quilt, his eyelids fluttered until he could no longer fight.

He woke before dawn, peed in the high grass behind the cottage, and

gathered his overnight bag. The sun’s first rays greeted him as he merged

onto the highway south. The stack of notebooks sat beside him, waiting for a

reader.

21


He was back in Paw Paw by dusk on Monday. As he pulled into the

driveway, he saw an empty space where Caroline’s SUV should have been.

Still tending to business at the nursery, he supposed.

He had endured plenty of hardships in his fifty-eight years, and he

couldn’t remember ever having felt so spent. He had traveled more than a

thousand miles in two days’ time, but the hours upon hours behind the wheel

accounted for only a fragment of his exhaustion. He eyed the notebooks next

to him on the front seat, numbered one through eight.

The flesh-and-blood Holly had been missing from his life for twenty years,

but she had never abandoned him. Now that her living body no longer walked

the earth, he wondered if his connection to her would somehow fade.

Impossible, he thought. She would stay with him forever.

With Holly’s notebooks tucked under his left arm, he keyed his way into

the darkened house. He dropped the pile onto the kitchen table and made a

pit stop at the powder room. His bladder freed, he stepped into the kitchen

and poured himself a glass of Johnnie Walker. He then retrieved the pile from

the table, and descended the stairs into the cellar. There, he created a nest

of sorts. He turned on the radio Caroline listened to when she did the laundry,

placed a folding chair beneath the white bulb dangling from the center of the

room, and eased onto the cushioned seat.

The notebooks showed their years in touch, sight, and smell—brittle,

yellowed, and reeking of dust. With a deep breath, he picked up the one at

the top of the pile, labeled in black marker with a pound sign and the number

one. He closed his eyes and opened the green cover. A grainy Polaroid was

stapled to the inside cover. It took him a moment to process what he was

22


seeing: a snapshot of Sid as a long-haired idiot in his early twenties—a stupid

kid who had earned the nickname Psycho Sid-o—blood pouring from his nose

and mouth as he punched the strings of his bass guitar, likely on a stage in

some seedy club, long since shuttered and remade into something as

unremarkable as a bank or a drugstore.

He remembered the photo, remembered having had it in his possession,

vaguely remembered having once shown it to Holly, but he couldn’t imagine

how she might have seized it from him. Had she simply swiped it when he

wasn’t looking? Had he given it to her as a memento of sorts? Even after so

many years, after countless hours analyzing the days she had been in his life,

so much about her remained a mystery.

Now, thanks to the kindness of Loretta Kerlitch, he hoped to solve the

riddle.

He plucked the photo off the page and beneath it found a purple Post-it

bearing a date from nearly two months earlier. The note told him: SKIN

CARVER, I HOPE THE CHAOTIC WATERS HAVE CALMED AND YOU’VE FOUND

YOUR PEACE. I HAVE. LOVE, H.

He recognized the scrawl as Holly’s, though the writing looked thin and

soft—her hand weakened by age and disease, perhaps.

Scribbles of blue ink filled the first page, margin to margin. He started

reading the words, borne of Holly’s pen, Holly’s mind, Holly’s heart.

A smile brightened his face at the first mention of his name.

He lost the thread of Holly’s narrative when something brushed his

sneakered foot. A black rat snake slithered between the legs of the chair and

disappeared beneath a wire shelf crammed with water-stained boxes of

23


Christmas decorations, cans of old paint, and unopened jugs of laundry

detergent. The surprise nearly sent him toppling from his chair.

An omen.

A new thought nudged its way into his brain. Perhaps Holly was here with

him, right now, in this dungeon-like room, standing just behind him, off to the

side, looking over his shoulder and eager to re-read her words, to relive the

stories of the woman she used to be.

A tear dappled the yellowed page. The damp spot merged with the

scribbles of blue ink. The effect gave new life, movement, to Holly’s words—

the miracle of resurrection.

With all the care in his trembling hand, he took the page’s corner between

the tips of his thumb and index finger and turned to the opening spread. A

mixture of fear, sadness, and profound joy filled him, as he realized every line

would help to answer questions that had dogged him for too many damned

years. Time, space, and circumstances had separated them, but these

notebooks—totems, talismans—gave him something to see and touch, and

he would hold them close until the end.

As he smoothed the first left-hand page flat to the inside cover, the paper

tore free of the spine. The ancient notebook suddenly seemed brittle,

vulnerable to human touch, on the verge of disintegration. He knew the

feeling.

####

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