Mo’s grandmother, in the moment of her death, is more surprised than anything else. Was she expecting a visitor?
Here she is in the kitchen of her house in the middle of the night, holding a mug of Bengal Spice tea. It is late summer, and the roses in her garden are giving off their perfume. There is another smell. Someone has a wood fire going, which is the first strange thing. Who starts a fire in August? She is a sixty-six-year-old woman in a silk head wrap and a housedress embroidered with pink and purple peonies, wondering if she should call the fire department, and then she is her twenty-three-year-old self in an office supply store. Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her blouse is polyester and has a bow at the neck. The tea is too hot and it burns the roof of her mouth. She did not hear a knock on the door. She buys two reams of paper and a secondhand IBM Selectric. She is going to write a novel. It will be a love story. She is in her parents’ driveway beside the mailbox, opening a letter. The day so hot she can smell the road as it melts back into tar. The letter informs her she has won first place in a contest run every year by the magazine Young Miss. The title of her essay is “Why I Love Love.” It is 1967 and she has never been in love. She is holding her newborn daughter. Surely nothing will ever be as hard as this is. But here is her reward. She smells her daughter’s soft, clean head. She will never find out what has happened to her grandson, Mo. The band plays six encores. The drummer keeps smiling at her. Afterward, she is at the bar and then there he is beside her. He’s still smiling. There are cracks deep in his palms where the calluses have split open. She takes one of his hands in her own to see. She’s a recent graduate of Red Bank High School, she has a full scholarship to Baylor. Here she is in the dorm room, only three months later, packing up her suitcase to go home again. She does not want to be in school. She is too shy to raise her hand in class although she knows the answer almost every single time. She is carrying the drummer’s child. A daughter. Her daughter, Cara, is dead. Her heart has failed her, the body left behind lying in a morgue somewhere in Lower Manhattan. Can she come and identify the body? Is this your daughter? Yes. This is Cara. Here is your baby. A healthy baby girl. Who will take care of her son? I will. The man she has been seeing for the past few years has driven her down to New York. In two days, he will drive her and Mo back to Lovesend. He carries Mo, who is nine years old and asleep, upstairs to the room that used to be Cara’s. He comes back downstairs and lets her cry on his shoulder. Then he says, I don’t think I can do this. I’m too old to raise another child. I’m sorry. Oh, she’s sorry, too. She has had other lovers, but this man’s heart was kind. Sometimes she wonders what it would have been like to grow old with him. To raise a child with him. Maybe in a different life. A kind heart.
Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy.
She is sitting down to start work on a new book. What is the year? Oh, a good year, this one. 1990. Her rose garden is spectacular. But dinner is burning. She has forgotten to take the casserole in its ceramic rose dish out of the oven. She was busy thinking about her new book. A romance novel, but the heroine will be a Black girl this time. Someone like her. Only braver, happier, luckier. She will call it Ashana’s Heart. She has a Brother AX-28 now. It’s 1971 and she has a job at the Chattanooga Bakery, famous for its MoonPies. She does not particularly enjoy MoonPies. The flavor is waxy. Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy runs in families. When Cara dies, Maryanne and Mo are both tested for the gene. She has it. Mo does not. Here Maryanne is on her lunch break, sitting on a bench on the bank of the Tennessee River. She reads romance novels. She likes the happy endings. Some of them are so bad that she thinks, I could write a better book than this. But even the bad ones are reliable in the end. Love conquers all. Hand in hand. She’s a fast reader. She’s a fast writer. In forty-two years, she writes seventy-three books. She writes every day. Ten pages every day. Every second book is a book about Lavender Glass, and later she moves on to Lavender Glass’s beautiful daughters. Maryanne is in labor. In the twenty-first hour, they cut her open and take Cara out. Sometimes when she is writing, she reaches down and touches the little pucker where a doctor closed her up. Time is a row of small and hateful stitches. No one slips through that door once it has been shut. Here Maryanne is, typing the first sentence of the first Lavender Glass novel on the Selectric. I would die for love, Lavender Glass thought, looking down at the sea. Maryanne Gorch has never seen the sea. Maryanne Gorch drives east until she comes to the Atlantic Ocean and then she drives north until she finds a house on a cliff above the ocean. Gulls nest in the cliffs below her house. One day she will have a rose garden here, below the pine trees. She and Cara move into the house before there is even furniture. They have sleeping bags. Cara has a toy ukulele. Every weekend, Maryanne rides the Chattanooga Incline to the top of Lookout Mountain and then walks down the trails in the Chickamauga National Park. She loves high places. The name of the town is Lovesend. I love love. The ending is always happy. When Maryanne writes, she is not unhappy. Her mother says, Who will ever buy a romance novel by a Black girl? They won’t know I’m Black, Maryanne says. She submits the manuscript under the name Caitlynn Hightower. Who wants to read a romance novel written by someone named Gorch? Write what you know: well, fine, a thing that Maryanne Gorch knows is romance novels. Terrible things happen at the start and in the middle, but the ending is always happy. Hearts are mended. Lavender Glass is a red-haired and not particularly bright firebrand with freckles, milk-white skin, ahistorical and conventional middle-class dreams and aspirations, not particularly shocking sexual proclivities. There is no one in Lovesend whose skin is darker than Maryanne Gorch’s. Cara likes to lay her arm along her mother’s arm. She asks if her skin will be darker when she is older. Later, when Maryanne reveals that Cara’s father lives in a suburb of Cairo, Cara gets a middle-grade biography of Cleopatra out of the Lovesend library. The ending makes her cry. Endings shouldn’t do that.
Maryanne Gorch is paid an advance of two thousand dollars for the first Lavender Glass book. It goes back to print five times in six months and sells more than 500,000 copies in that year. The contract she signed is pretty standard for romance novels, which means it’s pretty awful. She gets an agent. They work together for almost forty years. The first time they meet, her agent takes her to a famous steak house. Her agent likes her porterhouse well done. The third time she sends it back to the kitchen, it comes back so burnt that Maryanne almost feels ill smelling it. Something is burning. The phone is ringing and her agent calls to tell her sales of Ashana’s Heart are not what they had hoped they would be. She is sitting with a reporter, a Black woman, in her office. The woman wants to talk about Ashana’s Heart. About being a Black romance writer before the Black romance genre blew up. I’d rather not, she says. What is the perfume you’re wearing? Is that Rose Absolue? Excuse me, I think something’s burning.
Mo, where have you gone? Why must I lose my daughter and then lose you, too? She has offered money for information. She has so much money. Perhaps it was a kidnapping gone wrong? But then, why take that girl, Laura, and the other boy? Daniel. Why has there been no ransom note? For a while, suspicion falls on Daniel’s stepfather. Because he is not white, she thinks. She is not white, either, but she is famous and old and rich enough to pay for private investigators. Daniel’s stepfather is blameless. His heart is breaking, too. It is the hardest thing to lose a child. Laura’s sister, Susannah, comes to Maryanne’s house. Stands on the porch but does not ring the doorbell. Maryanne does not go out to her. She does not want to grieve with the other families. She does not care if their children come home. She only wants Mo. They have other children. Mo is all she has. She writes every day. The lovers in her book say the usual things. Come back to me. Let the rest of the world burn. Only come back to me.
Oh, there has been happiness in her life. Lovers who made her laugh. Cara putting down one instrument and picking up another. She can play the piano with one hand and pick out a line of melody on her toy ukulele at the same time. Surely her life will be unlike anything Maryanne can imagine for her. There is a kind of satisfaction, certainly, to being the Black woman who gets to make all the decisions about the life of a rich, spoiled white girl who lives an imaginary life in an imaginary castle. There is a queasy pleasure in inhabiting Lavender Glass’s white skin. Sometimes when she sits down to write, Maryanne pictures a glass of skim milk. And then, of course, there is the other one. Caitlynn Hightower. Or does she mean Maryanne Gorch? No one knows much of anything about that girl now. Caitlynn Hightower and Maryanne Gorch’s partnership as long and complicated as many marriages. Every line of that first author bio a lie. I love love.
Here is her little yellow Datsun with the Greenpeace bumper sticker. She hasn’t thought of that Datsun in years. She can afford a new car, but she wants to wait until she gets to wherever she is meant to be. Her new life. The Datsun is in good enough shape to get her and Cara there, but you can barely see out the back window. There are Hefty bags full of clothes, liquor-store boxes full of books. Cara’s toys. Everything else gone to Goodwill, all except for the penciled lines on the frame of the kitchen door to mark Cara’s height on each birthday. That must be left behind. She’s marked up a map of coastal towns above New York City. They have names she likes. Watch Hill. Goosewing. Lovesend. She wants a high place and the ocean below it. The Datsun is on a pretty street in a neighborhood called the Cliffs. Cara is crying in the back seat because she left her stuffed bear in a hotel room somewhere back on Long Island. They can afford a new bear. A bigger bear with brighter eyes and plusher fur. They can buy a whole menagerie, bears and rabbits and wolves, if Cara wants. A house, too, because Maryanne is tired of driving and hotels and Cara is tired of being in cars and Lovesend is a pretty town and if you go much farther east you’re going to get your feet wet. Maryanne will have a room for writing and Cara will have whichever bedroom she likes best. Here’s a for-sale sign in front of a house as ornamental as a wedding cake. There is a rose garden in the back. They move in before the water has been turned on.
By the time Maryanne has picked out furniture she likes, Cara has spent three weeks sleeping on the floor and roller-skating around the empty rooms. Eating off paper plates on parquet floors. When men bring the bed up to her room, she screams so much she loses her voice for a week. For two whole months, she insists on falling asleep on the floor and not in her lovely canopy bed. Every night, Maryanne picks up her daughter and puts her into the bed, and every morning she comes in to find Cara on the floor again. Secretly she’s proud of Cara for knowing what she wants. Mo is such a good child. He climbs into Maryanne’s bed at night when he wakes up after a bad dream. He plays with his mother’s old toys. Maryanne gets out the coin collection she started when she was nine. Here is a peso from Mexico. Here is a dinar. Where is that from? Iraq. I can’t open this, Nana. No, the catch is hidden. Like a piggy bank but just the one coin. Where is it from? I don’t know. Egypt, I think. It’s not valuable. Just a curiosity. What does that mean? A souvenir. Something you have a question about. Someone I used to know gave it to me. A man.
What time is it, though? There is a man in her kitchen. She didn’t even hear him knock. Do you smell that? she asks the man. Something is burning. Mo says, You sit down. I’ll open a window. We’ll throw this out and we’ll get takeout. You feel like pizza or Chinese? A woman has been standing on the sidewalk for almost a half hour now. Maryanne watches her take a picture. She’s a middle-aged white woman in a floral print halter dress. She comes up the walkway toward the house and rings the doorbell. When Maryanne opens it, the woman’s big smile falters. She has a copy of Maryanne’s latest book, I’d Drink the Sea Dry for You, in one hand and her camera in the other. She says, I’m sorry. Is this Caitlynn Hightower’s house? I thought…You have the new book, Maryanne says. Did you like it? The woman smiles uncertainly. She says, Oh yes. I cried so much. You’re Caitlynn Hightower? I didn’t know you were…Black? Maryanne says. The woman blinks several times. Home, she says. I didn’t mean to bother you. Maryanne says, It’s no bother. Just a surprise. No one’s ever come to my house before. Did you want me to sign your book? Yes, please, the woman says. To Bonnie Miller. So Maryanne signs the book. She wonders if Bonnie wanted to take a picture, too, but Bonnie just takes the book back. Studies the signature. She says thank you and goes back down the walkway again, turning to look back at Maryanne still waiting patiently on her porch. How puzzled she looks. Have you read my books? she asks the man in her kitchen. Although he doesn’t really look like much of a reader. Surely wolves don’t read books.
And now it’s morning and Cara is in her bed, and, oh my God, for a minute Maryanne thinks her daughter is dead because she’s still in her bed and she’s so very still. You can hardly see the rise and fall of her chest. But she’s just asleep, she’s breathing, and she’s slept the whole night through in a bed, and after that, Cara stays in her bed the way she ought to and doesn’t sleep on the floor. It takes time, but you get used to things. You can get used to anything except for the things you don’t know. The things you don’t understand. Sometimes at night Maryanne comes into Cara’s room. No, now it’s Mo’s room. Mo is a restless sleeper. He kicks all the sheets off, so she places her hand against the tender sole of his foot. Tucks him back in again. You aren’t Mo, she says to the man. Who are you? He’s the handsomest man she’s ever seen. So handsome Maryanne knows he isn’t a real man at all. Your happy ending, he says. Well. Your ending, anyway. Do you know me? Yes, Maryanne says. Yes, I think I do. But I can’t go yet. I’m waiting for Mo to get home. He isn’t home yet. Shall I sit with you a while then? the man asks her. Shall you and I stay here? Maryanne thinks about that, and she says, a little sadly, No. I don’t think that would be a good idea. No, the man says. It wouldn’t be a good idea. It might be fun, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. He holds out his hand. Oh, the smell of roses. There is something about her kitchen that is troubling Maryanne. She thinks that maybe it isn’t really her kitchen. She is somewhere else now. The investigator says, I’ll be honest with you. Something about this stinks. We’re missing something here. Something crucial. Do you know where he is? Maryanne asks the man in her kitchen. Is he here? Wherever this is that we are? She can’t help asking. The man smiles. Does not say anything. Still holds out his hand. Maryanne doesn’t want to take it, but she does. Oh, his hand is so cold it burns! His nails are too long and there’s dirt under them. What is that smell? What is burning here? It’s better looking at his handsome face than at the hand that is gripping hers so tightly. Tell me about my father, Cara says. His palms were like horn, Maryanne says. Hard as horn. Cracks in the skin. The hard bits peeling back. I could have stuck my pinkie in between. What happens next? Maryanne says. Everyone always wants to know the same things, the man says. But Maryanne, my love, surely you know better. You know how it goes. You don’t know how a book ends until you turn the last page. Maryanne wants to argue with this because the ending is always happy and you know that from the start, but now the page is turning and Cara is curled up beside her in bed while they read, and she says, Oh, Momma, this is my favorite part Nana let me read this part he says and surely Mo will be home soon now and Maryanne is in the kitchen in Chattanooga because these days she sits at the little Formica table with the crack shaped like a Y where her daddy once dropped a wrench and writes while dinner is forgotten in the oven and she turns off the Selectric and says to no one at all, Well, that’s it. I think I’m