The Next Time You See Me (47 page)

“Well, maybe. Eventually. Even though you told me how it ends.”

“That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to get you to read something, is telling you how it ends.”

“You know, that’s true,” Ronnie said. “I guess I don’t like not knowing. I don’t like the stress of it.” She popped to a stand and wiped the grit of the porch off her bottom. “All right, I guess I’ll take off. I think I’ve hit my family bonding quota for the month.”

“Thanks a lot,” Susanna said. “I thought you were going to help me with dishes.”

Ronnie groaned. “Do I have to? I’ll do them at Christmas, promise. Or better yet, get Dale to do them. He needs something to distract him from being a prick.”

“You realize that the two of you are just alike, don’t you? It’s occurring to me for the first time.”

Ronnie bent down and kissed the crown of Susanna’s head. She was already cheering up—she’d just needed to get into motion, to decide to change the scenery. “That’s pretty sick, Sis.”

“Can you at least give Mom a ride home?”

But it was no good. The restlessness, when it took hold of her, was sudden and decisive, and she felt like she might jolt apart into halves if she kept herself rooted in this spot even a moment longer. “There’s no time, hon. I’ve got to get to Fort Campbell by six o’clock. I told Sonny we’d hang out.”

“You never mentioned this before.”

“I’m mentioning it now.”

“Are you even going to tell Abby good-bye?”

“Give her a kiss for me,” Ronnie said. “OK? Tell her I’ll have a surprise for her the next time she sees me.”

“All right, Ronnie.” Her voice was tired. “Just be careful.”

“I’m always careful,” Ronnie said.

In her Camaro, on the road, with the window down and freezing air blowing in and her left hand making little waves as she raced along, she could be herself, finally. She would rather be leaving than coming, driving than arriving; she lived better in the in-between than she ever had sitting still. Which was why she didn’t belong in any photograph. She had looked through the camera’s lens and seen not her family but her own absence, and it had seemed to her for a moment that she was a ghost, that she didn’t really exist and wouldn’t be missed.

When she cleared town and made it to 79 she popped the clutch,
shifted into fifth, and laid down on the gas. Stubbled cornfields rolled out on either side of her, and she passed a farmhouse that was already decked out in Christmas lights, cheerful against the beige-colored gloom. She didn’t know if Sonny would be home or if he would be glad to see her, but the day was so full of possibility right now that it almost didn’t matter. The drive was enough.

Acknowledgments

Warmest thanks to this book’s readers, who offered me insights and support across the various drafts: Erin McGraw, Danielle Lavaque-Manty, Jolie Lewis, Risa Applegarth, Matthew Loyd, and Francis Kelly.

Thanks also to Mary Lou Stevens and Polly Duggan of Triad Bloodhounds, and their dogs, Otis and Ellie, who helped me understand canine search-and-rescue operations. What I got right was their doing; what I got wrong was mine. The same goes for my father-in-law, Larry Jones, who is my go-to expert on all matters pertaining to law enforcement.

I am honored and lucky to still be working with Gail Hochman and Sally Kim, who are, respectively, the wisest, kindest, and most endlessly patient agent and editor I could hope for.

To the communities of colleagues, students, and fellow writers I’ve made at home in Greensboro and summers in Sewanee, thanks for the friendship, inspiration, and stiff drinks.

Finally, as ever, to Brandon: I love you so much. I could not do this without you.

Touchstone Reading Group Guide

The Next Time You See Me

By Holly Goddard Jones

In
The Next Time You See Me
, the disappearance of one woman, the hard-drinking and unpredictable Ronnie Eastman, reveals the ambitions, prejudices, and anxieties of a small southern town and its residents. There’s Ronnie’s sister Susanna, a dutiful but dissatisfied schoolteacher, mother, and wife; Tony, a failed baseball star-turned-detective; Emily, a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with a dark secret; and Wyatt, a factory worker tormented by a past he can’t change and by a love he doesn’t think he deserves. Connected in ways they cannot begin to imagine, their stories converge in a violent climax that reveals not just the mystery of what happened to Ronnie but all of their secret selves.

For Discussion

1. Emily’s initial shock at discovering Ronnie’s body develops, over time, into an intense fascination and a sense of connection to the corpse. What do you think drives Emily back to visit the body? What motivates her to keep it hidden?

2. How does Ronnie’s disappearance force Susanna to question her own life decisions? Do you think she was aware of her own unhappiness before Ronnie went missing?

3. Christopher experiences a range of emotions about Emily, from disdain to empathy to attraction. What do you think draws Christopher to Emily? In what ways are they similar?

4. Discuss Susanna and Dale’s relationship. What do you make of Dale’s treatment of his wife? Do they both share the blame for their unhealthy relationship?

5. Susanna’s mother tells her,
“If you’re going to leave what you’ve got, you better know what you’re getting.”
Compare and contrast how the characters in the novel are defined by their comfort zones: Emily, Susanna, Christopher, Tony, Wyatt. In what ways do these characters find satisfaction and/or disappointment by taking risks?

6. Ronnie is a polarizing character, one that Holly Goddard Jones depicts primarily through the lens of other characters. What is your take on Ronnie?

7. Jones writes of Mr. Wieland, Emily’s science teacher,
“He didn’t like to think that had he been Emily’s peer rather than her teacher, he’d have been one of the students pelting her with his lunch. But he wondered.”
In what ways do the characters in
The Next Time You See Me
discover their capacity for cruelty, particularly Christopher and Wyatt? What is the point that Jones is making about the dark side of human nature?

8. Wyatt is a sympathetic character in many ways, despite his mistakes. How did your opinion of Wyatt evolve as you learned more about him?

9. What do you think provokes Wyatt to attack Sam? Do you think he blames Sam for his own actions?

10. When Emily’s mother expresses her remorse about advising Emily to
“try to be normal,”
Susanna responds, “I don’t that’s such bad advice.” Do you think that Susanna is being sincere? What do you make of Emily’s behavior throughout the story?

11. Tony and Susanna’s brief affair ends abruptly once Ronnie’s body is found. Was her disappearance the only reason they were drawn to each other?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Several characters in
The Next Time You See Me
relate to
A Separate Peace
by John Knowles. Read this novel for your next meeting and compare and contrast Susanna, Ronnie, Emily, and Christopher to Gene and Finny.

2. Discuss which character each member of your book club related to most. Then have each member select their ideal cast for the movie version of
The Next Time You See Me.

3. Read Holly Goddard Jones’s short story collection,
Girl Trouble,
which also takes place in a small Southern town. How are the stories in this collection similar to
The Next Time You See Me
? How are they different?

4. Learn more about the author at
www.hollygoddardjones.com
,
http://www.facebook.com/HollyGoddardJones
, and
https://twitter.com/#!/goddardjones
.

A Conversation with Holly Goddard Jones

You come from Kentucky yourself. How much of this story is autobiographical?

When I was a little girl, a phone line repairman found a murdered woman’s body in an abandoned shack on a property near my neighborhood. It’s a cliché to say this, but that was a different time, and I spent much of my summer days unsupervised, and the subdivision I lived in was lined on a couple of sides by undeveloped wooded areas where I wasn’t supposed to go but often did. I thought it was thrilling to explore those woods, and I was fascinated by the idea that death had happened so close by—that it might have been me to find the body, under other circumstances. So that was the germ of the idea with Emily Houchens, her discovery, how entangled that discovery gets with her games of make-believe. But Emily’s story obviously isn’t mine, though we share some commonalities, such as having a father who works at a factory. And Emily isn’t me, thank goodness. I wanted there to be a disconnect in her, something missing. For all her sensitivity, she’s a character who has a hard time understanding the experiences of others, which is what I think her mother was actually talking about when she encouraged Emily to be “normal.”

The Next Time You See Me
depicts the intricacies and the dark elements of a small community. Why did you choose to write about small town life?

Well, the short and easy answer is that I understand small towns—I’ve lived the majority of my life in them. But a small town is also an excellent backdrop for tragedy, because a death like Ronnie’s reverberates in a way that it wouldn’t in a city. You can see how her story touches all kinds of people, how it ignites the best and the worst qualities in each of them. I like setting fiction in small towns, too, because it gives me the opportunity to write about so many different ways of life. In a town of 10,000, the rich kids and the poor kids, the black kids and the white, are all going to go to the same school. Their parents are going to shop at the same grocery store.

What is your writing process? How was writing a novel different from writing your short story collection,
Girl Trouble
?

My writing process is “any which way I can,” and what that has often meant for me is fits of creative energy alternating with quiet, fallow periods, in which I’m thinking about the characters but not necessarily sitting down and making sentences. That method works better with short story writing, because I can draft a piece in a handful of those intense sessions, then focus on revision. A novel resists fits and starts—it doesn’t offer the same kinds of immediate payoff. With my stories, I’m often carried through the home stretch of a draft by the sheer emotional intensity of the experience, but you can’t live for years that way. So learning to write a novel was partly, for me, about learning to live more happily in the quiet writing moments, when I’m not necessarily worked up into an emotional lather.

I think it’s also easier in a story collection to leave your characters’ lives in shambles, and I couldn’t have seen my way to the end of this book if I didn’t think there would be light at the end of it, even if that light is very faint and distant.

Why did you choose to set the novel in the early 90s? How would it be different if it was set in the present day?

I wanted to write about a woman’s disappearance in a time that wasn’t yet complicated by cell phones, internet, and Nancy Grace—and I wanted to write about a kind of childhood that is perhaps harder to find now, even in small towns like the one I grew up in. When I realized that Tony was black—and this wasn’t something I immediately knew about him—it made sense, too, because I could capture his story at a time when he would have been able to have the illusion of equality, but the racism would have been less coded.

Which was your favorite character to write? Which was the most challenging?

I loved writing about Sarah, mostly because I just loved Sarah. She’s a person I wish I could know in real life: kind but no pushover, witty, and, at least until Wyatt enters her life, content with the person she has become and the life she has made for herself, even if that life is not everything she had hoped and dreamed as a girl it would turn out to be. Ronnie was also a lot of fun to write. I have to admit that I kind of admire her reckless pursuit of pleasure.

Wyatt and Emily presented a similar challenge. On the one hand, I knew a lot about them—certain aspects of their personalities and their ways of living were remarkably clear. That introductory section about Wyatt, his morning rituals and habits, came to me almost fully formed, as if he really existed and I was just putting down the facts about him. Ditto many of the passages about Emily. But demonstrating how these familiar and sympathetic characters could be capable of such acts of darkness was very hard. With Emily especially I struggled with what I wanted the reader to assume was true about her. She has ranged over the various drafts between merely lonely and pathetic and something closer to sociopathic.

Tony was a challenge, too, because I felt a heavy responsibility to do justice to a character outside of my race. My realization that he was a failed athlete, a baseball player who had come very close to success, made him finally click for me. I could see him through the lens of his ambitions and his disappointments as well as his race, and that helped me to write frankly about the real ways that his race affects his experiences in the world without making that his central defining characteristic.

Why did you choose to set the last chapter a year before the rest of the action in the book? Did you always know that you would end the story with Ronnie’s perspective?