They had a good crowd. That was what the bookstore owner said. From the podium at the front of the room, Thaddeus surveyed the gathering of strangers, deciding for himself if it was a good crowd. What made a good crowd? The number of people who showed up? The level of enthusiasm? The number of pretty women in attendance? Some combination thereof? In all his travels promoting his bestselling memoir, he still wasn’t sure.
Maybe a good crowd was one that made him forget his guilt for a while, kept his focus on what he’d written, not on what he’d left out. Thaddeus put his hand in the left pocket of his jeans, feeling for the object he always kept there. He rubbed his index finger across its solidness, then withdrew his hand.
“I’ll take questions now,” Thaddeus said, his stomach clenching with nerves as he segued from the reading to open the floor. The Q&A was always a crapshoot. He hoped the good crowd had some good questions, though he’d likely been posed all the questions possible at this point. He’d been touring so long the questions ran together like the faces and locations.
His initial book tour had been slated for a few weeks, but as sales escalated, so did requests for more dates. Months later, he was tired of being on the road, yet hesitant to come off it. Because, what then? What next? Until he could answer that question, he would keep saying yes to whatever his publicist sent his way. A rotary club in LaCrosse, Wisconsin? Yes. A ladies’ luncheon at a country club in Savannah, Georgia? Yes. What about a short tour in the UK? Hell yes.
A few tentative hands went up.
“Yes?” he asked, pointing to an older woman three rows back. She wore a dark, pilling sweater and a concerned expression.
She glanced around before speaking, as if making sure it was indeed her he’d designated. He gave her an encouraging nod.
“I wondered,” she said, “how your family feels about the book?”
This question was not unexpected, but a little early. Usually the crowd warmed up to asking about his family. But he did not falter; he had his answer, a reassuring half-truth at the ready.
“My family is supportive of the book and proud of its success—that so many people are interested in Davy’s story. While what happened is a tragedy, they’re glad I’m sharing the message”—he leaned forward as he always did and scanned the crowd, making eye contact with as many people as he could—“That you can move forward from tragedy. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.” He eased back to his former stance, relaxing a little. “Though I’m the only one standing here, I speak for my family when I say hope is Davy’s legacy.”
He watched as heads nodded and found himself nodding along with them, caught up in his own rhetoric. Though what he said about his family’s support wasn’t completely true, he wanted it to be. And didn’t that count for something? Never mind that his mother hadn’t read beyond the first few chapters. Never mind that his sister had discouraged her book club from selecting it because it was “just too painful.” Never mind that, while his father had read the whole thing, the note of praise he sent mentioned his disappointment in the chapter on the hotline.
“It seemed you laid the blame for the divorce squarely on my shoulders,” he’d written, effectively negating all the nice things he’d said prior. His mom, dad, and sister just didn’t understand. It was his memoir, his memories. Or a version of them, the only version he dared to share with total strangers.
He slipped his hand back into his left pocket, this time pressing his index finger hard against the object’s sharp edge, just enough to hurt.
“Next question,” he said.
For the next twenty minutes he answered the usual questions: What led you to write this book? Did you always want to be a writer? What are you working on next? How did you get published? And one he’d never had: Did you listen to any music while writing?
“I did, actually.” He smiled at the memory of being in that cabin in Wyoming with the fellowship he’d landed, music playing, words flowing, alone but not lonely. It was as if Davy had come back to him there, had given him his blessing. And wasn’t that the only blessing he needed?
“I listened to hits from 1985,” he told them. “The music really took me back to that time. And the Back to the Future soundtrack, of course.” Anyone who’d read the book knew how much Davy loved that movie, which had come out the summer before he disappeared.
To his right Thaddeus caught the eye of a beautiful woman with long red hair. She smiled at him in that way some women smiled at him now. More than a smile, it was an invitation of sorts. He gave her a brief half smile in return. He was always a sucker for a redhead. She raised her hand.
“Someone asked about your family’s response to the book,” she said. “But I want to know, what about the girl next door? Has she reached out at all since the book was published?”
He rolled his eyes as he did anytime someone asked this question, and the crowd laughed as the crowd did anytime he answered this question. Larkin. He hadn’t named her in the book. He was too much of a chicken to do that after all the years of silence between them. But she’d been part of the story, part of that night, part of the before, and the after. He did not name her, but he could not have left her out either. So he’d referred to her as “the girl next door,” which she was. But of course, she was so much more than that—his first love (though he hadn’t understood that until it was too late), an eyewitness to his family’s pain, and the one who got away.
“No,” he said, making his voice sound wistful, gathering sympathy from the onlookers. Was it manipulative to do so? Did he deserve their sympathy? He couldn’t answer that; the show had to go on. “The girl next door has not reached out.” He shrugged. “I have no idea if she’s read the book or not. I kind of hope she hasn’t.” He gave a dramatic grimace that made everyone laugh again.
In the back the bookstore owner held up her arm and pointed at her watch, the signal that it was time to invite the crowd to form a queue at the signing table, where he would answer more questions, scrawl his name over and over, and make the joke about the signature adding another quarter to the value at a garage sale in the future. That joke always worked.
He thanked the people for coming, remarked on them being a good crowd, then made his way over to the table, where he sank into the chair the store had provided and picked up the black Sharpie pen laid out for him. His back ached from standing, and he felt the nagging weariness that crept in whenever he was still. He watched with a kind of detachment as the line formed, snaking all the way back into the store’s shelves.
Off to the side the bookstore owner gave him a thumbs-up. Just behind her, he spotted the beautiful redhead who’d asked the last question of the night, standing with a friend. The redhead kept looking from him to the line that had formed and back again before finally tugging on her friend and pulling her to a spot at the very back of the line.
Thaddeus bit back a knowing smile as he asked the first woman in line how she spelled her name. There were just so many different ways to spell Cindy. And didn’t she know it.
* * *
Thaddeus always attempted small talk in the mornings, offered breakfast, coffee, a shower, a ride. The one that particular morning said yes to the offer of coffee, wrapping herself in the sheet demurely as she accepted the cup and took a grateful sip. He’d forgotten her name and could not think of a polite way to discover it without asking directly. He could tell she felt bad; she never did this kind of thing, etcetera. He didn’t want to make her feel worse.
When she excused herself to go to the bathroom, tugging the sheet free of the mattress and awkwardly clinging to it as she shuffled into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, he attempted to riffle through her small handbag to find her license. He was not above this sort of desperate act. He just hoped she didn’t catch him at it.
Voilà! He filched the license from a handy little card slot right inside, squinting through the hangover headache that was as much a part of his morning routine as the coffee he’d offered her. (They went together actually, the coffee and the headache, always joined by their old buddy, ibuprofen. He usually swallowed four at a time. Thaddeus was not kind to his liver.) He heard the toilet flush as the name on the license swam into view: Elizabeth.
He frowned in confusion as he shoved the card back into its slot, then quickly took a seat at the little table in front of the large window in his hotel room. The bathroom door opened and he sipped his coffee as though he’d been there the whole time, staring out at the view of—what city was this? Oh yes, St. Louis—instead of trying to determine the name of the stranger he’d hooked up with after the signing last night.
Elizabeth didn’t sound familiar. He tried to picture himself signing her book or talking to her later in the bar, tried to recall when her friend said goodbye (there was always a friend). Had the friend called her name? It was all a blank. The only thing he could recall about their time together was the way she’d listened to his stories with such interest and intrigue, which predictably turned to desire the longer they talked, the more they drank. That was the way it always was after his signings. No one had warned him this would happen. Sometimes Thaddeus wondered if that meant he was unique. But there was no one to ask.
He decided to go for broke. “Everything ok, Elizabeth?” he asked, trying out the name even though it didn’t sound right.
She returned to the bed, took a seat in the space where she’d slept—if you could call it sleeping—and gave him a quizzical look.
“Elizabeth?” She used her free hand to smooth the sheet she was wearing.
Damn. Wrong name. He hadn’t thought to look at the photo on the license. Maybe she’d grabbed the wrong purse and it was her friend’s and not hers, which would mean it was her friend’s name. And not hers. Internally, he chastised himself. Who did he think he was? He was not cool. He was not suave. He was not a ladies’ man, no matter how often his book tour readings got him laid.
“We’re being awfully formal this morning, aren’t we?” She gave a little laugh that failed to cover up her nerves. “Last night it was all Lizzie this, Lizzie that, and this morning I’m Elizabeth?”
He managed to keep himself from exhaling his relief aloud. Instead he smiled at her.
“I was trying it out.”
She wrinkled her adorable nose. Something else he recalled from last night: thinking as they talked that she had a very cute nose. The woman from the last reading had a rather large nose that he’d somehow managed to disregard until the morning after.
“Well, let’s drop the Elizabeth, please,” she said. “It’s my given name, but I’ve never gone by it. It feels like a stranger’s name.”
Her words were Thaddeus’s opening, the inevitable moment when he had to clarify what was happening between them. Which was, essentially, nothing. He had to help each woman realize that this was not the beginning of a great love affair. This was a fling in the truest sense of the word. He’d once looked up the meaning out of curiosity: Fling (noun): a short period of enjoyment or wild behavior.
Time to make sure Elizabeth/Lizzie knew she had just engaged in a short period of enjoyment (for both of them, he liked to think). Though some of his flings did involve wild behavior (he let the women lead; he never wanted to be accused of anything criminal—the press would have a field day if something of that nature got out), this one had not. But it didn’t matter. Enjoyment was enjoyment. A pleasant evening was had by all concerned. Now it was time to decamp, so to speak. He felt bad saying what came next, but it had to be said.
“Well, isn’t that what we are, Elizabeth? Strangers?”
The hand holding the sheet over her breasts tightened so much that he could see the white of her bones through her pale skin. When Elizabeth/Lizzie’s hand had gone up last night to ask the question about Larkin, he’d been pretty sure she was the one he’d have this scene with. Though, of course, he hadn’t pictured it happening exactly this way.
He had learned to spot the patterns: the woman’s lingering position at the back of the book-signing line, her efforts to keep the conversation going to the point where he said he was hungry and could they continue talking at the bar/pub/restaurant nearby, the friend who had to be dismissed with assurances that a cab would be called later and everyone would be safe. The women were different, the questions were different (though not much), the food or drinks were different.
But one thing was consistently the same: the moment he understood that this particular woman wanted the same thing they all did. People came to his book events to get close to tragedy, to experience it as firsthand as they were comfortable with, to feel it in a way they could not merely by seeing photos and words in a book, newspaper, or magazine. They came because they wanted to see him in real life, to hear his voice, to watch as he held the pen that wrote their names.
There was always one who found that wasn’t enough. One who discovered that the closer she got to him, the closer she wanted to get. She found herself wanting to taste him, to smell him, and then, with a kind of surrender, to take him in, convincing herself she was getting as close to his pain as anyone ever had, never knowing she was nowhere near the only one or that none of them had come close to the pain he carried, buried so deep that no one had reached it. Not one single time.