“Yeah,” he said. “So, my dad was garbage, but my mom—she was amazing. And when I was a kid, I just thought, like, Okay, it’s us against the world. We’re stuck in this situation, but it’s not forever. And I kept waiting for her to leave him. I mean—I kept a bag packed with a bunch of comic books and some socks and granola bars. I had this vision of us hopping on a train, riding to the end of the line, you know?” When his eyes flashed toward me, the corner of his mouth was curled, but the smile wasn’t real.
It said, Isn’t that ridiculous? Wasn’t I ridiculous? And I knew how to read it because it was a smile I’d been practicing for a year: Can you believe I was so stupid? Don’t worry. I know better now.
A weight pressed low in my stomach at the image: Gus, before he was the Gus I knew. A Gus who daydreamed about escape, who believed someone would rescue him.
“Where were you going to go?” I asked. It came out as little more than a whisper.
His eyes leapt back to the road and the muscle in his jaw pulsed, then relaxed, his face serene once more. “The redwoods,” he said. “Pretty sure I thought we could build a tree house there.”
“A tree house in the redwoods,” I repeated quietly, like it was a prayer, a secret. In a way, it was. It was a tiny piece of a Gus I’d never imagined, one with romantic notions and hope for the unlikely. “But what does that have to do with New Eden?”
He coughed, checked his rearview mirror, went back to staring down the road. “I guess … a few years ago, I just sort of realized my mom wasn’t a kid.” He shrugged. “I’d thought we were waiting for the perfect time to leave, but she was never going to. She’d never said she was. She could have taken us out of there, and she didn’t.”
I shook my head. “I doubt it was that simple.”
“That’s why,” he murmured. “I know it wasn’t simple, and when I talk about this book, I tell people it’s because I want to ‘explore the reasons people stay, no matter the cost,’ but the truth is I just want to understand her reasons. I know that doesn’t make sense. This cult thing has nothing to do with her.”
No matter the cost. What had staying cost his mother? What had it cost Gus? The weight in my stomach had spread, was pressing against the insides of my chest and palms. I’d started publishing romance because I wanted to dwell in my happiest moments, in the safe place my parents’ love had always been. I’d been so comforted by books with the promise of a happy ending, and I’d wanted to give someone else that same gift.
Gus was writing to try to understand something horrible that had happened to him. No wonder what we wrote was so different.
“It does make sense,” I said finally. “No one gets ‘looking for postmortem parental answers’ like I do. If I watched the movie 300 right now, I’d probably find a way to make it about my dad.”
He gave me a faint smile. “Great cinema.” It was so obviously a Thank you and a Let’s move on now. As different as I’d thought we were, it felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.
“We should have a film club,” I said. “We’re always on the same page about this stuff.”
He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “It really was a beautiful dedication,” he said. “It didn’t feel like a lie. Maybe a complicated truth, but not a lie.”
The warmth filled me up until I felt like a teakettle trying hard not to whistle.
When I got home, I turned on my computer and ordered my own copy of The Revelatories.
AND HERE CAME the true montage.
I did surgery on the book. I ripped it up and stored the pieces in separate files. Ellie became Eleanor. She went from being a down-on-her-luck real estate agent to a down-on-her-luck tightrope walker with a port-wine stain the shape of a butterfly on her cheek, because Absurdly Specific Details. Her father became a sword swallower, her mother a bearded lady.
They moved from the twenty-first century to the early twentieth. They were part of a traveling circus. That was their family: a tight-knit group who ended every night smoking hand-rolled cigarettes around a fire. It was the only world she’d ever known.
They spent every moment with each other, but somehow told each other very little. There wasn’t much time for talking in their line of work.
I renamed the file, from BEACH_BOOK.docx to FAMILY_SECRETS.docx.
I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.
I gave them each a secret. That part was the easiest.
Eleanor’s mother was dying but she didn’t want anyone to know. The clowns everyone believed to be brothers were actually lovers. The sword swallower was still mailing checks to a family back in Oklahoma.
They became less and less like the people I knew, but somehow, their problems and secrets became more personal. I couldn’t put my father or mother down on paper. I could never get that right. But these characters carried the truth of the people I’d loved.
I was particularly fond of writing a mechanic named Nick. I loved knowing that no one except me would ever recognize the skeleton of Augustus Everett I’d built the character around.
Gus and I made a habit of writing at our respective kitchen tables around noon, and most days we took turns holding up notes. They became more and more elaborate. It was obvious that while some were spontaneous, others were planned—written out earlier in the day, or even the night before. Whenever inspiration struck. Those written in the moment especially became nonsensical as writing-madness took us over. Sometimes I would laugh so hard I’d lose muscle control in my hands and be unable to write any more notes. We’d laugh until we both laid our heads down on our tables. He’d snort into his coffee. I’d nearly choke on mine.
It started with platitudes like IT IS BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST THAN TO HAVE NEVER LOVED AT ALL (me) and THE UNIVERSE SEEMS NEITHER BENIGN NOR HOSTILE, MERELY INDIFFERENT (him) but usually ended with things like FUCK WRITING (me) and SHOULD WE JUST DITCH THIS AND BECOME COAL MINERS? (him).
Once he wrote to tell me that LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES. YOU REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE EATING AND THE CHOCOLATE MAP IN THE LID IS FUCKING ALWAYS WRONG.
I wrote to tell him that IF YOU’RE A BIRD, I’M A BIRD.
He let me know that IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM, and I wrote back, NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST.
Going through Dad’s stuff fell to the back burner, but I didn’t mind procrastinating. For the first time in months, I wasn’t flinching every time my phone or laptop pinged. I was making progress. Of course, a lot of that progress was research, but for every new factoid I gleaned about twentieth-century circus culture, it seemed like a new plot light bulb illuminated over my head.
At night, Gus and I sat on our separate decks, having a drink and watching the sun slide into the lake. Most nights we’d talk from across the gap, mostly about how productive we had or hadn’t been, about the people we could see from our decks and the stories we could imagine for them. We’d talk about the books (and movies) we’d loved (and hated), the people we’d gone to school with (both together at U of M and before that: Sara Tulane, who used to pull my hair in kindergarten; Mariah Sjogren, who broke up with sixteen-year-old Gus—a full three months into their relationship, he was way too proud to tell me—because he smoked a cigarette in the car with her and “kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray”).
