Every day was routinized, until one morning I woke up and found those routines resembled a life. I got closer with my father, weirdly, or he wanted to. If we would never have working for Goldman Sachs in common, we now had divorce. My mom had left him for some photographer she’d met on the charity gala circuit. Edward Van Huysen had continued to date decades below him, women he would mention to me like I knew them, “Josie” or “Samantha,” and who would be gone from his life by Thanksgiving. I got disjointed texts from him with oddly specific words of “wisdom,” which eventually turned into requests for book recommendations and, even unlikelier, congratulations on selling Refraction, until he died a year ago.
Through everything, writing was my nourishment. It helped me feel human, the way it had when I discovered the craft in high school. It made me feel like myself. If I no longer had something larger I was living for, the comforting context of my life with Melissa, I had enough to keep me living. The earnings from Only Once, and each empty page in front of me.
Everything eventually returned—except dating, which happened only in fits and starts, noncommittal and evanescent. Danielle, blonde and dimpled, knew this going into our whatever-it-was. We’re over now.
Still, memories of her are the perfect distraction to keep me from facing Katrina downstairs.
Chris. Of course Chris is behind Katrina’s willingness to collaborate. It explains everything. The only reason Katrina would return to writing is if her fiancé pushed her to. I know Chris well from when he represented me—he’s not a very good man. He’s not a very good fiancé or agent, either, if he’s pushing his wife-to-be and client into this collaboration. Her dream is writing, not writing with me.
I rub my eyes and open them, the tiles taunting me. If I really want this prison sentence to be only two months, I can’t keep hiding in the shower. Plus, I feel my stomach growling. I turn off the water and walk into the bedroom in my towel, the humidity keeping me from drying off. Every inch of the room is hatefully familiar. The ubiquitous white shutters, the bed in the center with the blue comforter, the cream-colored wardrobe. I figure Chris bought the furniture with the house to keep everything the way Katrina remembered, and Katrina, having no interest in this place, never bothered to change it.
Pulling clothes from my suitcase, I dress quickly. While I do, I counsel myself in my head. Working with Katrina will be difficult. But writing? Writing is like breathing. I can put down three thousand words in a day when I need to. Right now, I need to. Which means there’s only one thing to do.
Keep breathing.
These thoughts push me out of my bedroom with some semblance of vigor. When I walk downstairs, I ignore memories of the last time my footsteps thudded down them. I ignore the glimpse I get of the fireplace in the living room, its ominous mouth open like it’s mocking me.
Entering the kitchen, I catch the scent of seawater from the open sliding doors. The back of the house opens onto the deck with the swimming pool and then, past it, the ocean, the grass of the yard ceding unevenly to sand and surf. I remember looking up from our computers, watching the moonlight shimmering on the waves. It’s nighttime now, and the moon is nowhere to be found, obstructed underneath clouds. There’s only the endless inky roll of the water.
Katrina’s sitting at the bar, her back to me. She’s eating frozen pizza she must’ve heated up while I stalled in the shower. It’s the kind we shared dozens of times on the nights while we wrote Only Once.
Something in the simple, solitary meal is disarmingly human. She’s not the figure I’ve shaped in my head to near-mythic proportions, the knot snarling the strands of my life. She’s just Katrina, having dinner. Her hair unruly in the humidity, her blouse untucked from her white shorts.
Hearing my footsteps, she waves in the direction of the pizza on top of the stove. “Help yourself,” she says.
I remember the cupboard that holds the dishes. Which is vexing. I’ve lived in my condo for two years and still I find myself opening the wrong drawers on occasion. Here, every detail is inscribed into instinct. I pull down one of the ceramic plates with the blue trim, serve myself two slices of pizza, then turn, leaning on the far counter to face Katrina. The kitchen island is the breaker in the ocean between us.
I say nothing, waiting for her to speak.
Finally, she does. “Let’s get the planning out of the way.” Her face is expressionless. She’s got remarkable eyebrows, perfect dark curves prone to twitching up when she’s joking or bunching when she’s thinking. Right now, they do neither. They’re unmoving, just like the round, bee-stung lips she’s pursing while her brown eyes watch me. “I assume your writing process hasn’t changed?”