Happily Ever After: A Novel (17 page)

“Why?” she asked. “So that you may have him for yourself? That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Clarissa reeled back. How dare Evangeline suggest such a thing? But her sister just kept going.

“You love him,” Evangeline hissed. “You have from the very day you suggested this game. I can see it on your face. But it’s too late. He loves me. He’s said as much!”

Clarissa howled in fury. The walls of the house shook. Evangeline was right. About
everything
.

Chapter 30

J
ason sits on the edge of his chair, his lips parted ever so slightly.

“Well?” he asks, eyes wide.

“Well what?” I say. I’ve sorted my notes into little piles, arranged by size. Not the most efficient approach, but at least they look tidy now.

“What
happened
?” Jason shouts. “What happened to the sisters?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I never finished.”

“Why didn’t you finish?”

“I didn’t know what to do next,” I say. “Plus I think I met Roger in there somewhere and got pregnant with Allison, and, you know, I got distracted. Plus paranormal isn’t easy. I know. I tried.”

“Is this going to happen a lot?” Jason asks, leaning back in the chair and wiping his sweaty forehead on his shirtsleeve. He could be talking about so many different things I’m actually afraid to answer. “Because I’m not sure I can take it. Stories without endings, without resolutions. It might drive me crazy.”

“Do you finish every book you start?” I ask.

“Always,” he says.

It’s funny how when a relationship seems to have long-term prospects, you examine the details through a different lens. When Jason was simply my Friday morning lay, I did not care if he finished his books or remembered every detail of every event in his life. But now I do.

And I just don’t have the heart to tell him I can come up with a new concept for a novel while standing on line at the grocery store and have already discarded it as shit by the time my items are bagged up and ready to go. This happens a lot. When it finally stops happening, that will be the day I become a CPA or a personal trainer.

“You don’t?” Jason asks.

I shake my head. If a novel hasn’t grabbed me in the first fifty pages, I move on. I’m getting older every day. I have no time to waste on books I don’t like.

“Not always,” I say.

“Okay,” Jason says, shaking off this conversational thread like a dog does water. He flips through a small notebook he has taken from his pocket. He runs his finger down the page.

“You took notes?” I ask.

“The win is in the details,” he says. He’d make a fine editor if he ever grows bored with the law. “The cop, Perkins, he twirls his hair?”

“Yes,” I say. I take a piece of my own frizzy mop and demonstrate.

“And he has a scar?”

I nod, my eyes fixed on him as if he is going to reveal the secrets of the universe any minute now.

“And he”—Jason pauses—“smolders? Is that the word?”

Yes. Taken out of context, many of the best erotic descriptors sound funny. But Jason doesn’t laugh.

“Sadie?” he asks.

“Jason?”

“Are you
still
not thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

A flash of exasperation. “The man in your guest room,” he says. “Coincidence, or do you just like them that way?”

No. I like them like you. Just like you. And, more important, there cannot be any coincidences. If there are, your plot has holes big enough to swallow your story. I want to leap across the table and hug Jason because he’s detail oriented and nice and all of a sudden, pretty hot, and not because of the weather.

“Aidan is recycled too,” I say, breathless. “He’s the cop!”

Jason gives me an exaggerated head nod. “Sure sounds like it to me,” he says.

I’m amazed a manuscript I abandoned without a thought has clung so tightly to me for so many years.

“Clarissa is here to reclaim the cop she lost to Evangeline.” I speak rapidly. I’m a little afraid of myself. “She thinks he belongs to her, but she has to get Lily out of the picture and out of his system. Is that right?”

“Could be,” Jason says.

“Oh my god, Jason,” I say. “So now what?” My hands shake. I feel weak. And here I thought recycling was supposed to be good for you.

“We still need the spell,” Jason says. “If we can send them back, their story has a chance of being finished as you intended, without Clarissa.”

And maybe the happily ever after is not a total loss.

Jason plucks a Chinese take-out menu from the pile of notes and reads the words I squeezed between the wonton soup and the egg rolls.

So, till the judgment that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

“That’s good,” Jason says.

“That’s Shakespeare,” I say. To this day, writing bits of Shakespeare or 1980s song lyrics is my way of doodling.

“Oh,” Jason says. “Okay. Moving on.” I adore him so completely at this moment, I feel almost drunk. Although judging by the empty bottles, actually being drunk is a distinct possibility.

Working our way through the notes, we find seven possibilities. I finally settle on the one that seems most likely to have cast lovers into a cold and unwelcoming alternative universe.

Be not afraid of what draws near,

Lady Love is wicked, as you know,

And now she takes you, just as you are,

To a distant and unfamiliar shore.

Jason stops, pen poised above his notebook, and looks up.

“Shakespeare was the master,” I say in self-defense.

“It’s not bad,” Jason says.

“It’s not good either,” I say.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he says with complete confidence. “Because it’s the one.”

“How do you know? What if it’s the wrong one?” I ask. “What if it doesn’t work? What if it makes things worse? What if we all disappear?”

Jason clicks his pen closed and slides both it and the notebook into his pocket. He smiles.

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

I do. Absolutely and completely. What a strange experience.

“Yes,” I say.

“Then there’s only one way to find out,” he says.

I was afraid he was going to say that.

Jason stands, takes my hand. and pulls me toward the stairs. On our way to the guest room, we make as much noise as possible in the hope that Aidan and Lily will hear us coming, get dressed, and sit on opposite sides of the room.

This time, I knock.

“Hello in there,” I say. I sound ridiculous. Jason hides a smile. I punch him in the biceps. “You’re not helping.”

“Yes?”

“Aidan,” I say. “It’s Sadie. Can I come in?”

There’s shuffling, murmuring from inside.

“One minute,” he says.

When he finally opens the door, he’s moderately disheveled, his hair tousled just so, his shirt inside out. His eyes gleam, and his lips are slightly swollen, probably from all that mashing. I blush, suddenly wishing my imagination were a little less vivid. Behind him, Lily sits on the edge of the bed. She’s back in the orange dress, running her fingers through her hair. There’s a hairbrush in the guest bathroom, brand-new and wrapped in plastic to prove it because that is the way Greta rolls. I’m about to mention it to Lily when I reconsider. This situation is awkward enough.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I say. Jason appears next to me. He peers into the bedroom.

“Aidan,” I say, “this is my friend Jason. You guys met last night at the fund-raiser. He’s a lawyer. I thought he might help us sort through this situation.”

“Wasn’t he with your neighbor?” Aidan eyes Jason but speaks to me.

“Yes,” I say. “They were on a date.”

“But he’s with you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re complicated, Sadie,” Aidan says.

“Only after you showed up,” I shoot back.

“Nice to see you again, Aidan,” Jason interrupts. “Sorry about barging in on you earlier.”

“And that’s Lily back there,” I say. Lily half-waves but continues running her fingers through her snarled red curls. If you want to know if someone just had sex, look at the hair. It doesn’t matter if you do it standing up, afterward, the hair is always a mess.

“So?” Aidan asks. He acts as if I’m intruding.

“I found a spell,” I say. “I want to try it.”

Lily leaps from the bed and runs to us.

“To send us back?” she asks, eyes blazing.

“Yes,” I say. I think so. I hope so. But really I have no idea.

Aidan opens the door. “Please come in,” he says.

Jason and I squeeze into the small bedroom. It smells of lust and sweat, and my armpits immediately go damp. There are too many of us. Jason retreats to a corner. Lily sits on the bed, Aidan beside her. I stand front and center, feeling exactly how Professor Marvel, the mysterious traveling fortune-teller, must have in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. Totally full of shit.

“How do we do it?” Aidan asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe you guys hold hands and I say the spell?”

“Are you serious?” Lily asks.

“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” I say. She’s awfully tense for a woman who just had a roll in the hay. I’d hate to see her after a few months of celibacy.

“No,” she says. “I just thought there’d be more ritual or something.”

I’m sure there is. I’m sure I’d do better if I had a magic wand or a fancy hat or any clue what I was doing. But I don’t.

“Hold hands,” I say. I wave my arms around in front of me for good measure. I am sure I look ridiculous. “Be not afraid of what draws near, Lady Love is wicked, as you know, And now she takes you, just as you are, To a distant and unfamiliar shore.”

I close my eyes. I fill my mind with a haze of purple smoke. I wait. Nothing happens.

“That was the spell?” Lily stares at me, incredulous. “It sounds like it was written by a fifth grader.”

“I’m not Shakespeare!” I shout.

Jason slides his hands over my shoulders.

“Let’s try again,” he suggests. “This time, Aidan, you say the words, okay?”

Aidan nods. I think he’d don a gorilla suit and dance a jig in Grand Central Terminal if I told him it might get him out of here. The two sit back on the bed and take each other’s hands.

“Close your eyes,” Jason says. He sounds so confident, so authoritative, like he knows what he’s doing. I find it incredibly sexy. “Now, say the words. Whisper them and don’t stop until I say to.”

Aidan does as he’s told. I can barely hear him, but I see my silly verse falling from his lips. He and Lily hold hands so tightly their knuckles turn white. Jason watches them closely. His fingers dig into my shoulders. He’s nervous, captivated.

A pale yellow light fills the room. It’s soft and warm, like concentrated sunshine. The dust is iridescent in its glow.

“Don’t stop,” Jason whispers. “Keep going.”

The air grows thicker. Aidan and Lily keep their eyes shut tight. Jason and I step back so we are flat against the wall.

The image is faint, floating in the middle of the room as if projected from a camera mounted on the ceiling. It’s Clarissa, still dressed all in black. She holds something in her hands that is not quite clear, and she laughs, the same agonizing cackle we heard from her in the park. It’s an awful sound, and I instinctively raise my hands to my ears.

“Sadie?” Jason asks.

Yes. I nod. This is Clarissa.

“Wow,” he says. Indeed.
Wow
is one word for it.

“I know they’re hiding,” the ghostly Clarissa says. “I know they think they can figure out how to get back and live happily ever after. But don’t they know? There is
no
happily ever after. Not for them. Not for anybody.”

My back is pressed so tight against the wall I fear I may push right through it and end up falling two stories into the garden. Aidan and Lily remain on the bed, unaware of the apparition in the room with us.

Clarissa turns slowly, spinning above the floor. I cannot tell if she can see us or if this is a one-way mirror.

“Excuse me,” Jason says quietly. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m standing right here.”

“Not you, Sadie,” he says. “That.” He points at Clarissa. She does not respond to his question, but she turns in my direction.

Our eyes don’t meet because she gazes at a point well beyond me.

“There is so little time left,” she says, almost thoughtfully. “And I want to be there to claim my prize when the clock runs out.” At her words, my stomach clenches, and daggers of pain spiral down my legs. Clarissa gives a wicked smile as if she can see my agony painted in bright colors across the room. She takes a step forward, right to the edge of the projection that contains her, and holds up the item in her hands.

It’s a hardcover novel. I recognize it instantly. It’s one of my recent Sadie Fuller romances, about a cowboy and a city girl who, against all odds, fall in love. Clarissa caresses the book. It’s as if her hands are on me. She starts to laugh again.

I fall to my knees, consumed by blackness.

Chapter 31

S
adie. Sadie! Open your eyes.” Jason’s voice drifts toward me over what feels like a great distance. I struggle to focus, but my head hurts. When I finally will my eyes to open, I find three faces staring down at me, a deep look of concern etched on at least one of them.

“What happened?” I ask. I try to sit up, but I’m dizzy. Jason eases me onto his lap.

“Do you remember?”

A sudden surge of bile in my mouth indicates that yes, I do remember.

“The cowboy book,” I whisper. It’s not my favorite, but it’s sold well. Romance reviewers claimed I took a cliché and made it fresh. I wanted to send each and every one of them a bottle of champagne, because deep down, I was worried it was just about as fresh as three-day-old kitty litter.

“Yes,” Jason says. He has a strange look on his face, part shock, part amusement.

“So she knows where I live,” I say, flatly. “It’s on the book jacket.” I guess the last time Clarissa and I crossed paths I still lived in New York City. It did not take her very long to figure out I’d moved.

“And your spell didn’t work,” Lily sniffs, sitting back on her heels.

“Well,” Jason says. “It worked. It just didn’t work as we intended it to work.”

“But now we know she’s coming here,” Aidan says. He’s ragged, his face pale. If I could see into him, I’d see his heart racing, consumed by the anxiety of powerlessness.

“She wouldn’t miss the end,” I agree. “That’s the best part.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lily wails. “I just want to go home. I want to sit on my couch and watch TV. I want to drink a latte, look out the window and see
my
reality. Is that so much to ask? Do you have any more spells we could try?”

Aidan puts a comforting arm around her. She pushes him away. I’m beginning to wonder what he sees in this girl.

“I thought this one was it,” I say. “We must be missing something. A clue. We just need to be smarter.” And we need to do it fast because the witch is on her way.

I try to get to my feet. I sway. I stagger. Jason props me up. I loop my arm through his and hang on. The sound of a throat clearing draws my attention to the door. There stands Greta. Her hands are on her hips, and she taps one leather loafer.

“Greta,” I say, attempting a normal smile.

“I heard a noise,” she says, “from outside.” I must have made quite a thump when I hit the floor for her to hear me in the rose garden. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I say with a smile that hurts my face.

Greta flicks an invisible bit of dust from her sleeve. “I’m preparing cold ham and pasta salad for dinner,” she says. We are hot and disheveled, and there is a good bit of unspoken dialogue occurring in the room. I’m sure right now Greta is wondering why she decided to throw in with me all those years ago. She turns and leaves without another word. In twenty minutes, she will have dinner made and the table set. There will be wine and linen napkins. And she will not ask us what the hell is going on. Ever.

“Get the laptop from downstairs,” I tell Jason. “Meet us back in my office.” I can’t stand to be in this guest room for another second.

The three of us enter my office. My sanctuary. It’s painted pale green, and the walls are decorated with poster advertisements for my various books. The shelves overflow with my favorite novels, those I can’t bear to live without. I tend not to reread things, but I like the security of knowing I can if I want to. This is where I come to be myself, as authentic a self as I am likely to achieve.

Jason places my laptop on my desk. I sit in front of it. I scroll back through the passages I did not write. I read the part where Clarissa offers Aidan the deal outside the restaurant.

“I’ll give you forty-eight hours to find your Lily and figure out the magic that will get you two back here. If you succeed, you get your Lily and my life. But if you fail, I own you forever. Will you accept my terms?”

The room is still. They all stare at me.

“The magic words,” Aidan says finally. “A spell. We already knew that.”

But that is not exactly what it says. It says “magic.”

“We might be misreading,” I say.

“Sadie,” Jason says. “It
has
to be a spell. That’s the only possibility we have of figuring out the riddle. If it’s just a bunch of random words or actions, we’re screwed.”

He’s right. An unsolvable mystery would never make it past a good editor. I sigh. This is worse than writer’s block. But then Lily speaks up.

“Maybe Sadie’s onto something,” she says, crossing her arms against her chest and spreading her feet as if she is preparing for a physical blow. “Maybe magic means something else.”

Her voice is not exactly like that of the woman I trailed out of Grand Central on a day that seems to belong to another lifetime. It’s a bit higher and certainly more steely. My Grand Central gal had a lilt. Her voice was melodious and I could see her using it to great effect lulling a fussy baby to sleep at some point in her unknown future. The Lily standing in front of me owns her voice. It belongs only to her.

The rules say that the reader must identify with the romantic heroine. The story does not belong to the hero. He is simply a vessel by which the heroine can reach her full potential and her joy. She is the focus.

I’ve been approaching this situation from Aidan’s perspective because he showed up first and I think I like him more. But there is no doubt
Stolen Secrets
is Lily’s story, told in her voice. She is the driving force.

“Lily,” I say. “This may sound weird, but you need to tell us about yourself.”

“What?”

“Backstory,” I say. “Maybe what we’re looking for is in there somewhere.” Yes, I should know her history inside and out, but I’m afraid since her arrival here it has changed in ways I can no longer see. Will the magic we are trying to find reveal itself if we take a closer look? It’s worth a try.

“I hate talking about myself,” she says.

“Please,” I say. “Can you try?”

“If you think it will help,” she says. I don’t know if it will, but I’m running out of ideas.

“It might,” I say.

With a shrug, she gives us her story.

Lily was raised down south, in a lonely and run-down suburb of Memphis. She lived in a small ranch house that was always in a state of disrepair. The screens had holes in them and the front door creaked loudly on its hinges. In the winter, she had to sleep in her cheap down jacket, otherwise she ran the risk of freezing to death during the night. There was never any money for heating oil. There was never any money for anything.

Lily never knew her father.

“Love will just break your heart, Lily. Don’t do it if you don’t got to.” And that was all her mother, Gloria, would say on the subject of her father.

During the day, Gloria worked in the plumbing department of Home Depot. She knew her shit and she looked hot in the uniform, so the plumbing department never seemed devoid of customers. Men would come in and buy just a little of this or a little of that so they could spend time with her.

At night, she worked as a cocktail waitress at a local roadside bar. She wore short skirts and low-cut shirts and did pretty well when it came to tips. But as her loveliness faded so did the tips. Times were hard.

Occasionally, Gloria would bring a man home from the bar. She never brought home a customer from the Home Depot. The Depot was serious business. The Depot was health insurance and a steady, if small, paycheck. The Depot was their lifeline, a fact of which Gloria was all too aware.

The men from the bar smelled of whiskey and cigarettes, and would disappear with Gloria into her tiny bedroom. Lily would hear giggles and moans through the paper-thin walls and would don her cheap headphones to cancel out the sounds. On her bed, with music blasting, she’d work her algebra sets or read her history textbook while her mother had sex with a stranger not ten feet away.

But it was okay, Lily thought. The guy, whoever he was, would always be gone by morning and Gloria, dressed for another day in plumbing supplies, would be at the electric stove frying eggs for Lily’s breakfast.

But while Gloria accepted her life, she had another one in mind for Lily, one that went beyond roadside bars and DIY superstores. She would launch her beautiful daughter out of this hellhole no matter what it took. She was strict about schoolwork and bedtimes and forced Lily to participate in any number of after-school activities to keep her busy and out of trouble. She lectured her on the dangers of boyfriends and sex and drugs. The focus was on the future. The present was simply a step on the way. Gloria’s only child would go to college or Gloria would die trying to get her there.

And Lily was a natural. Beautiful, smart, and able, she coasted through high school, heeding her mother’s advice, getting good grades, and making an impression on the dilapidated tennis courts that ran alongside a municipal park in town.

She attended the University of Wisconsin on scholarship and worked three jobs to make ends meet. She ate ramen noodles twice a day, bargained for used textbooks, and walked everywhere, even in the blinding snow. After graduating at the top in her class, she made a beeline for New York City and never looked back.

When Lily was growing up, Gloria always made it clear that men served only to sidetrack women from their goals.

“Men come along, get you knocked up, and leave,” she used to say. “Then you got a kid to feed, and everything you thought you were, none of that matters anymore.”

So Lily carried with her a wariness of men and their intentions. She focused on her career, thinking success had to feel at least as good as sex and was much less risky. The first time she experienced the hot little fingers of lust was in the elevator with Aidan Hathaway.