The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [81]
Frequently she had the feeling that he was standing just behind her, his breath tickling her ear like it used to when he came prowling over to seize her waist while she was cooking. All the same she did not speak to him.
Instead, like everyone, she accumulated letters that would never be answered. I don’t understand how this can be my life, she wrote, and What am I going to do? and occasionally, late at night, when she could not sleep, something longer such as Do you know what it feels like? Shall I describe it for you? It feels like the two of us got on a boat together, and the deck tossed me into the water, and you went sailing away without me. Thrown overboard—that’s how it feels. So I want you to tell me, because I really need to know, why did I spend my whole life waiting to fall in love with just the right person if you were just going to leave and it would all be for nothing?
That first summer, immediately after he died, she had barely been able to pick up a pen, but by the time the earth split open a year later, she had amassed three heavy baskets of letters. One afternoon, she went to the parched field where the fair sat in the autumn and the soccer team practiced in the spring and dropped them into the deepest opening she could find. The ground swallowed them as neatly as a pay phone accepting coins, except for the last page, which continued to show through the dirt until gravity gave it a tug and it slipped out of sight. That was where her heart was, she thought, cradled underground with the roots and the bones.
As she stood in the dust listening to the insects buzz, she dashed off one last note and let it go: Are you even out there?
The next morning, she received her answer.
The streets seemed to quiver and spark in the rain, and water cascaded from the roofs of the old Victorians, and the gray ash of the sky made the inside of the bookstore appear lustrous and unfamiliar, saturated with color, like a movie theater where the film has snapped and the seats have been engulfed in light, and in the bathroom, where Nina went to disinfect her mouth with Listerine, the walls were covered with photos of third-tier pop stars in unflattering poses, bizarre headlines clipped from tabloid newspapers, and when she stepped back into the store, she saw that the Newbery displays had been taken down and replaced with chairs and a microphone, and to the seven people who had braved the San Francisco weather to hear her read, she presented “A Fable for the Living,” coaxing each syllable carefully past her open sore, which was even worse than it had been in Portland. Every time someone entered the building, she could hear the storm drumming and resonating on Haight Street. Then the door swung shut, and the noise softened to a rustle, and once again they were all sealed together in their bright and cozy den. She kept waiting for John Catau to come slouching out from behind the survival guides, wearing a sly look of guilty satisfaction, as if by following her across three states he had allowed her to defeat him in some subtle contest of expectations, but it soon became obvious that he was not there. She was not prepared to feel so disappointed.
Though the audience was small, the weather must have put them at their ease, because they posed an uncommon number of questions: “Do you go into an office every day? A coffee shop? Or do you write from home?”
“I have a spare room with a desk and a computer. That’s where I do most of my work. Except the revisions—those I finish by hand, usually at the kitchen table.”
“Are there any words you feel you overuse?”
“Strange, great, little—I heard an interview with an editor who was asked about her pet peeves, and she named those three words, I suppose because of the way they adjust a phrase’s rhythm without actually changing its meaning.