Page 66 of By the Book

Maybe it was the horror in my voice that made my mom laugh again. “He clearly cares about you. The way he looks at you, Dash…” She trailed off, and when she spoke again,I couldn’t decipher the note in her voice. “I’m not sure you understand the burden it is, to have someone love you like that. And I think you love him too.”

“I do. I worry—I mean, what if it doesn’t work? What if this is a plot hole or a dead end? I love him so much, but we’re so different. With Hugo, we shared the same interests, we liked the same things. On paper, it was perfect.”

“And look how well that worked out,” my mom murmured.

In spite of myself, I grinned, but it didn’t last long. “I guess I’ve been thinking about that lately. About how different Bobby and I are. How we handle things. I don’t know. I want it to work, but what if it doesn’t?”

“If it doesn’t,” my mom said, “then you still tried, and you worked hard, and you will have learned something. But I think you’ll be surprised. You were never like this with Hugo, Dash. I can’t speak to your feelings or to his, but I can say from the outside, it looks different. It feels different. I’m very happy for you.” That attempt at briskness returned to her words. “And he survived meeting your terrible, selfish parents and hasn’t run screaming, which I think speaks highly of him.”

Again—there was so much I wanted to say. But what came out of my mouth was “Dad told me your father is dying.”

“He is. Apparently, for real this time.” She touched her hair, and the tiny, iridescent pearls of moisture that the fog had put there trembled. Her voice grew distant. “My parents were not easy people to live with. They were both functioning alcoholics, althoughhowfunctional was up for debate. My father made a great deal of money without any appreciable skill that I could ever detect. My mother was exactly what he wanted her to be—until they opened the gin. When I left that house, I promised myself I would never go back. I wasn’t going to live that life for another day. And when I had my own children, they’d never have to know what it was like. It was a relief when my fathercut me off—he wanted me to join a sorority, meet a nice man, and get married to someone who would make a great deal of money without any appreciable skill. When I wanted to work, when I wanted to live, he went insane. No more money. No more contact. I would never be welcome under his roof again. All I could think was ‘Thank God.’ Because it was over.”

A splash from nearby suggested a fish breaking the water somewhere out in the dark. And then something moved through the fog—a dark vee that resolved itself, a moment later, into the silhouette of a bird skimming over the waves.

“I didn’t know any of that.”

“I didn’t want you to.” My mom sighed. “And now he’s dying, and all I can think is that I did everything wrong. Everything. I tried so hard not to do what he did, and I still did it all wrong.”

“You didn’t do everything wrong. Dottie and I have great lives. We’re happy and healthy. You’ve got your first grandbaby. We’re even reasonably well-adjusted adults.”

For some reason, that made my mom laugh and wipe her cheeks. But then she shook her head. Her shoulders turned in, and she looked washed out, thin. Exhausted, I thought. And then, more clearly: grieving.

Maybe that was enough. She’d always been so private about her feelings, and the rawness of this grief seemed too intimate to intrude on. Maybe she wanted privacy. Maybe she wanted time to compose herself.

But maybe not.

I scooted over and slipped an arm around her. Her body felt stiff at first, and then she relaxed, and her head came to rest against my shoulder. We sat in silence, listening to the waves. Far off, a bell was ringing, and I thought someone had won one of the games on the pier again.

“You were right to be upset,” she said. “I’m sorry for overstepping. I’d like to think that I really was trying to help,Dashiell. That I wanted what was best for you. But I don’t trust my judgment right now, and I suspect that, like most people, what I did, I did because I wanted to do it. Because I do want you to be successful. I want you to be happy. I want you to have whatever you want in life. That was one of the things I promised myself: I’d never stand in the way of my children’s dreams. But I suppose I should have tried to figure out what those dreams were, first.”

“If I’m being totally honest,” I said slowly, “there’s this part of me that doesn’t want to share my writing with you and Dad because—because for so long, I wanted you to pay more attention to me. And now, when you want something from me, I can say no. And that is so petty and pathological and…” I groped for a word and settled on, “Cuckoo.”

It made both of us laugh.

When the laughter faded, my mom said, “I’m sorry we weren’t there for you.” And then, her voice thin and catching, she continued, “I didn’t know. Didn’t want to know, I suppose. It was convenient to believe that you were fine because I wanted you to be fine. Convenient to believe that I wouldn’t have to make any sacrifices. Or at least, no big ones. But that is a lie we all tell ourselves: that we can have everything, no matter the price.” She took my hand, and her fingers were cold. “What do you want, Dashiell?”

“This,” I said. I didn’t even have to think about it. “I want this life. What I’ve got right now, with Bobby and my friends. It’s not what I thought I wanted, but I’m happy here. Of course, I need to get a job and figure out how to, you know, pay the bills, but one thing at a time.”

“Your father and I—”

“No,” I said. “Thank you, but no. I think—I think it was good, you know? A wake-up call. If this is the life I want, then Ineed to start doing my part. Like you said, it’s all about making sacrifices.”

“But your writing.”

“I’m going to keep writing. For the first time in a long time, I’m excited about this manuscript. It’s not going to be perfect, but I’m going to finish it, and I’m going to be proud of it. And then I’ll see if anybody wants to publish it. If they don’t—or even if they do—I’m going to write the next book. And the next. Maybe nobody will ever want to publish my stuff. I don’t know. Maybe what I write is too weird or too niche or not to market. That’s okay, though. Because if someone does buy it, it’ll be because I worked for it. And it’ll be mine.”

My mom’s fingers tightened around mine. I waited for the argument, for the protests, for one last-ditch effort to convince me to work with Phil to land this book deal. But what she said was “Writing has so much more to offer than publishing, Dashiell. I wish I’d said that to you a long time ago. Publishing is about many things. It’s about turning a story into a product. And yes, it’s about the opportunity to share your work with the world, to have other people see your writing, know your characters—”

“To make money,” I murmured.

“That too.” She fell silent, and when she spoke again, there was a thrill to her voice I wasn’t sure I’d heard before. “Writing is so much more than that, Dashiell. Writing is an opportunity to know our own minds better. To learn about ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t have, if we hadn’t tried to put one word after another after another. It’s an opportunity to create something beautiful, even though it will always fall short of what we want it to be. It asks us to do one of the most complicated things the human mind is capable of, to order our thoughts in symbols, to chain everything together with meaning. You know the rush you get when you write something good—something really good, something you know is right or true, or whatever word you wantto use?” She waited until I nodded. “There’s something to that. Something I’m not even sure how to put into words. Writing isn’t magic. It can’t fix everything. On its own, it does not make us whole. And, as you have reminded me tonight, art should never take the place of life, and of the people we love. But writingcando something. And whatever it is, it’s different for each of us, and thatismagic.”

I knew what she meant. Or maybe I just understood it, because I loved writing, and she loved writing. And I thought maybe I loved it because she did, and that was a gift she had given me.

After clearing my throat, I tried for lighthearted. “I guess all my unfinished drafts were good for something after all.”

“Of course they were. No writing is ever wasted. The writing itself is what matters—to have made something, and in the making, to have known yourself, changed, become something more. A book, even an unpublished one, is tremendously valuable, even if it’s not valuable in the way you hoped it might be.”

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