Book Lover, The (2 page)
Authors: Maryann McFadden
Tags: #book lover, #nature, #women’s fiction, #paraplegics, #So Happy Together, #The Richest Season, #independent bookstores, #bird refuges, #women authors, #Maryann McFadden, #book clubs, #divorce, #libraries & prisons, #writers, #parole, #self-publishing
Table Of Contents
PROLOGUE
S
HE SLIPPED OUT OF BED WHILE HER HUSBAND SLEPT, careful not to wake him. She’d hidden the letter in a stack of coupons and circulars in the basket on the counter, where she knew David would never look. It wasn’t like she didn’t know what it held. Her name and address in her own handwriting on the outside of the envelope was a guarantee: another rejection.
Slipping a fingernail under the flap, she opened the envelope and there it was.
Automatically her hands reached for her cropped hair, her fingers pulling, until she turned and caught her reflection in the glass patio doors—a small woman in an oversized t-shirt, her dirty blonde hair sticking up in comical rooster spikes, looking every one of her thirty-nine years. Looking more like a tired punk rocker than an author. Or the wife of an attorney.
She set the letter on the counter, poured herself a glass of chardonnay, and pulled a cigarette from the pack hidden in her tea canister. She opened the French doors, stepping out onto the patio. A blast of damp night air hit her. It was cold for November in St. Augustine, yet a crimson riot of bougainvillea still covered the concrete walls that surrounded their small yard. Most people didn’t realize northern Florida had seasons, not like southern Florida, which was subtropical and what David preferred. But she needed seasons. A semblance of home.
She sipped her wine, then put the cigarette between her lips, tossing it in the bushes a second later as a movement caught her eye. The glass door opened and David stepped out in bare feet, then instantly stepped back in.
“Lucy, what are you doing? It’s freezing out here.”
She almost told him about the letter. That she was going to shelve her novel this time, as she’d promised. That he wouldn’t have to see her heart broken again. And for a second, she felt a spark of relief. She had to admit, although writing had brought back so much joy these past five years, the constant rejection had also dimmed something inside of her. But if she told him, there’d be no turning back.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said instead, which was partly true.
He looked at her for a moment, then closed the door.
Long ago, Lucy had learned that sometimes little white lies were the easiest way to avoid conversations which were not going to end up in a happy place. She knew David would never get how two cigarettes a day, just two, could somehow still her insides, blowing all her stress out on a long, thin stream of smoke.
David also no longer understood her need to write. How stories popped into her head, and characters had conversations as she showered or walked. How in those last moments of consciousness before sleep, when your mind was at its most pure, a thought would come and you simply had to get up and write it down. David had never experienced that moment of magic when you finally finish writing and a story falls into place like a jigsaw puzzle and your heart soars with satisfaction. You have created characters, an entire little world that rings as true as if it really existed.
As she thought it did in her novel,
A Quiet Wanting.
Only now she was packing it in after thirty-eight rejections from literary agents, each one a little bullet in the heart. They were all different, but in essence, all said the same thing.
You’re just not good enough.
And without an agent, she had no hope of getting a publisher.
She waited a long moment, sipping her wine, the scent of the bay just a few blocks away drifting to her as the air shifted, rustling the leaves of the magnolias and palm trees. When she was certain David was back in bed, she quietly opened the door and grabbed an afghan and the box in the closet of the spare bedroom, then returned to the yard.
Sitting at the table again, she lifted the lid off the box and picked up the top page:
You need to capture me on the first page and you failed to do so.
The next letter took an entire paragraph to praise her beautiful writing and well-plotted pages, ending with:
Alas, I just didn’t fall in love with this.
In the pile there were standard form rejections.
Of course another agency may feel differently,
these letters always ended, but so far, no one did. None of the letters gave her any clear reason why her novel wasn’t deemed good enough. Many even contradicted each other. Hope, her heroine, was too nice, therefore not realistic. Then, another telling her Hope was a well-drawn character, but the story too quiet. There was too much description; there was not enough description.
But today’s letter was the final straw because she’d really thought this was it. This agent had actually called her, something almost unheard of. Of course Lucy agreed to the three-week exclusive read, in which every day was an unbearable, endless stretch of minutes and hours of fevered anticipation—was the agent reading at that moment? Was she loving it? Was she crying at the end, when Hope leaves her house for the last time, as Lucy herself cried every time she polished that scene? She picked up that letter now and reread the opening sentence.
This is a wonderful book, but I was hoping there would be some humor.
Had she ever mentioned there would be humor? It was enough to make you crazy and she knew that sometimes David thought she was. If he knew about today’s letter he’d say once again:
Why do you keep torturing yourself?
Because the other writers in a fiction workshop she used to belong to
really
loved it. And there were the raves from her boss’s book club. And anyone else she’d had the nerve to share it with.
Where’s your book, why isn’t it published?
She heard that all the time. And finally, there was just that belief in her gut.
She pulled out the entire stack of rejection letters and set them on the table, and there underneath was her manuscript. She pulled it to her chest, remembering the long nights while the world slept and she’d buried herself in these characters’ lives. This book had saved her, when she didn’t think she could be saved.
Just then the wind kicked up again, tossing the pile of letters in the air. And in that long moment as they floated magically about her, then slowly fluttered to the ground to lie at her feet like a pile of ghostly white leaves, a thought that had been lurking in the back of her mind suddenly came into focus.
Lucy stood, scooping up the pages. Then she walked to the old fire pit on the side of the patio and tossed them in. She took the lighter and clicked it, touching the edge of a letter. It lit immediately, flared, and in an instant the rest of the letters ignited in a whoosh of flames. She began to laugh as every rejection she had received over the past three years burst into a raging bonfire, lighting up the entire yard.
Stepping back from the sudden heat, Lucy turned at a noise, relieved it wasn’t David again. Once more she saw herself in the glass door, a deranged-looking woman smiling beside her towering inferno of rejections. Maybe she was a little crazy. But she was damned if she was giving up. There was no way she could keep that promise.
She would surprise David. She needed him to believe in her again. Besides, she’d already given up on one dream. How could she give up on this, too?
As she watched the fire burn out, the ashy remains of the rejections settling into a gray heap, she had no idea that the decision she’d made that night, a tiny splash, really, in the world at large, would in time send a ripple a thousand miles north of St. Augustine—would touch the doorstep of someone she’d never met before. Someone she would come to love. But who in the end would turn on her, because of a little white lie.
