Yeah, me too. “Thanks Tara.”
She continued talking, but Dennis didn’t say much. All he could do was look around his desk, which happened to be clean. Far
too clean for his liking.
Cleanliness wasn’t next to godliness, not in his book, not for a writer. Cleanliness only meant he was blocked.
And he had one more week to get unblocked.
But in the midst of Lucy’s battle with cancer, his battle with writer’s block seemed lame, almost ridiculous. He refused to
let it affect him or them.
And that’s how it started. That’s how it had come to this a year later, a book later, with still no words of his own accounted
for.
One sentence.
A whole morning and afternoon and evening and all he had managed to come up with was one sentence.
It was the opening line of the novel, and it wasn’t even very good.
Despite what everybody told him, Jackson refused to believe she was gone.
He didn’t have to come up with “Call me Ishmael” or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” or anything that
great. He didn’t even have to get this past an editor’s eyes. Greatness only came when the following three hundred pages of
sentences built into a crescendo that served to magnify that opening line.
It was eleven at night. And even though he sat in a four thousand square foot home, he felt trapped, crammed in, stifled.
The rock music from his iMac blared, tunes no longer helping to inspire, just serving to block out this silence. He glanced
at the sentence on his computer again. It looked as bare and lifeless as a skeleton in snow.
Refused to believe she was gone.
He looked at the photos on his desk. A wedding shot of Lucy. Pictures of him and Lucy with Audrey, one when she was a newborn,
another when she turned ten. All around him were memories of Lucy and her life and her loveliness.
Refused.
She.
Gone.
Dennis shut off the music and set his computer to sleep mode. He shoved away the thoughts. They were ludicrous.
I know she’s gone, and I’m not going to write about her.
He went to the kitchen to get some milk before going to sleep.
This isn’t life imitating art or art imitating life or any of that. I just can’t start it up this time.
Standing in his kitchen, he refused to believe that his block was solely based on losing Lucy. There was more to it. He just
had to figure out what.
As he rinsed the glass in the sink, looking out the window that overlooked the lawn and the river, something caught his eye.
In the darkness, somewhere over the river, straight down from the house, something…
What was the word?
Glowed, he thought.
He rubbed his eyes and kept looking, but the image didn’t go away.
Dennis headed to the back door.
The wet, recently cut grass stuck to his feet and ankles. It was still warm enough to wear shorts, which was fine by him.
If heaven existed, though he knew it didn’t, it would be a place where you wore shorts and flip-flops all the time. Wait a
minute—that was Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffet’s version of heaven. Either one was fine with him.
The wide backyard sloped downward, flanked by trees on each side that served as privacy barricades for the neighbors. The
family who lived on the south side of his house was a friendly gang with three children ranging in age from junior high to
high school. On the north side, however, he wished there were a few more trees and perhaps a few more miles between houses.
He didn’t know the full story on the elderly couple living in the small, run-down house, but he did know they were unsocial
and had a knack for littering their lawn with garbage that often blew over into his yard.
The sky was clear, and he gazed up as he often did when walking down toward the river. He remembered similar nights when he
had taken Audrey down to the river’s edge and looked up at the stars with her. It was a cliché, but it was so utterly true:
time did flash by. You do blink, and they’re grown up. When he was in his thirties, still changing diapers and getting up
to soothe cries and finding Cheerios in the strangest of places, Dennis never thought it would happen. Everybody told him
he’d blink and she’d be grown up and gone, but he never truly believed it.
There were other things I wouldn’t believe too.
He didn’t come out here at night to get caught up in the melancholia of life. He didn’t have any room in his life for that.
Yes, he missed Audrey and Lucy, and yes, it was a normal emotion. But he knew how to control those feelings, right? He told
himself this over and over even as he found himself pining away for his deceased wife and grown daughter every single time
he saw a sea of stars.
I came out here because I saw something.
At the edge of the river, he tried to spot what had been glowing. There was nothing. He waited and watched for several moments.
Someone on the river perhaps? Occasionally someone decided to take a boat down the river at nighttime. It wasn’t all that
dangerous. There were spots that were tricky and certain places you couldn’t pass. But he doubted someone was actually out
there at this time of night.
There were no sounds, no teenagers with flashlights, no helicopters hovering above.
I know I saw something.
Dennis waited. They had moved here back in 2002, a couple years after the publication of Breathe, when things were really
getting interesting with his publishing career. It had always been Lucy’s dream to live in Geneva along the Fox River, so
Dennis surprised her with this. He knew the house was one of those she loved to look at when they drove by. You could just
see the top of the Victorian house back then; now, because of the trees and landscaping, not to mention the fence, you couldn’t
see their house at all from Route 31.
Seven years should’ve felt longer. But it felt like they had moved into this house just yesterday. And now it was just him,
outside trying to find what he had seen on the water, trying to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.
Give me another ten, fifteen years, and that’s when I’ll be going senile, he thought as he turned back toward the house. But
not yet. I’m not crazy just yet.
He heard a shuffling in the bushes and walked over to see what it was. A cat jumped out and scampered across the lawn. For
a second he thought it was Buffy, the cat Audrey had brought home a month after Lucy passed away, the cat she had left behind
after going to college. But the color told him otherwise.
This cat was white and seemed to glow in the dark.
It must belong to his elderly neighbors. They probably hadn’t fed it in a week or two.
Maybe it was walking on the water, Dennis thought. Right. That would explain it.
He stared up at the heavens before shaking his head and gritting his teeth.
He’d give anything to know she was up there watching him.
Anything.
It had been last year, the night before the benefit in New York, when Dennis found the novel.
He still had nothing of his own to read to the gathering, not even a brief section of a chapter. And his conversation with
Maureen earlier that week still resonated in his head.
“Who’s going to be there?”
“Spielberg, for one.”
That’s just perfect. Is it possible to option a book that doesn’t exist?
“Any other big names?” Dennis asked the familiar voice on the other end of the phone.
“Lots,” Maureen said, rattling off a list of who’s who that would be attending the fund-raiser. With each name, Dennis winced,
glad he wasn’t talking to her in person.
It was around lunchtime, and Maureen was returning his call. He hoped she would have some kind of solution for him when he
told her he had nothing to read, but the literary agent was unusually silent and offered no ideas to help him out.
“You can read just a portion of it,” she eventually said, her tone asserting that surely he had a portion to read.
“I don’t think I can,” was all he would reveal.
Again, Dennis got the silent treatment. He could tell Maureen was alarmed. Finally she cleared her throat and seemed to regain
her composure.
“Just read anything—they’ll enjoy it,” the New Yorker said. “Don’t you have an old short story laying around? The start of
a novel you never finished?”
“Lots of literary crap,” Dennis said, “but nothing like my last nine novels.”
“You have a few days—you can do it.”
I don’t think you understand, Maureen.
As with the last three books he had written, Dennis had not given the publisher an outline or a synopsis. That’s how much
they trusted him. They knew the story would be in the same vein—that’s what they wanted and cared about. No creative diversion.
Readers wanted something to scare the snot out of them, to keep their eyes open after slipping under the covers, to give them
second thoughts about opening a closet or going down to the basement or even turning off the light. Even if it made them terrified
of what was under the bed, readers still wanted something scary to put on their bed stand at night.
“What’s this one about again?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s a romantic comedy,” he joked. “About a man searching for his missing wife and discovering this whole underground…
thing.
” Dennis laughed.
“Thing?” Maureen asked.
“Yeah—you know, cults, witches, all that fun stuff. Evil.”
“Sounds perfect.”
The two of them often laughed about the amazing success of his books and the reading public’s appetite for horror. He had
done everything, from his haunted house story to his ghost story, even to his demon-possession story, which people often said
should have been another sequel to The Exorcist because it was so frightening and disturbing. This was his missing-persons
story. And as much as he might have liked to do something else, to tell a story that didn’t have severed limbs and evil spirits
and lots of blood, he had to take this idea and weave it into the Dennis Shore world. So that meant it wasn’t just a missing-persons
story. Evil rested at the heart of the book, at the heart of each of his books, and readers would be sucked in and become
too invested to stop reading when the horror got turned up.
“What are you calling this again?”
“Empty Spaces,”
he said.
“Is that another Floyd song?”
“Yep. Keeping the chain.”
“It’s worked this far.”
“The writing’s not working. Nothing’s coming. Nothing at all.”
“When you say nothing, Dennis, do you mean—”
“Yeah, I mean nothing.”
“Okay. Let’s see.” Maureen was quiet, surely thinking through the ramifications of what “nothing” meant. “So you write a scene
between now and Saturday. No problem. It doesn’t even have to be the beginning.”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“And that chapter can jump-start the writing. That’s all you need.”
“Sure.”
“You can do this in your sleep. It’ll be great. Now, how long are you going to be in New York? I have a few people who want
to meet you, and I was thinking we could go to this great restaurant—”
Reliving this pep talk from the previous week did him no good now that it was the night before he was supposed to go to New
York. Those who sold and marketed art didn’t know how difficult it was to actually create it.
Dennis sat in the squeaky writing chair he had owned for fifteen years, ever since he started writing. He had penned four
unpublished novels sitting in this chair, those dreadful things that still sat in his closet and that truly were unpublishable.
He had tried too hard to be the next Hemingway or Faulkner and failed on all accounts. All four of those books were terrible.
He had written his first two published literary novels in this chair too, the two novels that garnered his best reviews… and
that sold under five thousand copies each. And that’s when he had made the fateful decision, again in this chair, to do his
best Stephen King impersonation. And what happened was Breathe, a ghost story that sold millions and made him a household
name.
As he sat rocking back and forth in the chair, he stared at the words he’d scrawled after talking to Maureen:
One chapter. One scene. Any scene. Several thousand words.
He looked at the words, then added an exclamation point at the end.
In only eight hours he would be boarding a limo to go to O’Hare and fly to New York, where he was supposed to give a reading
to a special VIP dinner of more than five hundred people.
Like Jerry Seinfeld and Oprah and a hundred different big-name actors, actresses, musicians, athletes, and authors.
That’s all. No pressure.
“Spielberg for one,”
the voice of his agent said again.
Standing in front of people didn’t bother him, and celebrities didn’t intimidate him. But reading something that wasn’t entertaining—that
horrified him.
I could just read them something from one of my older novels. Stephen King loves to read the puking scene from Stand by Me.
I’ve been in the audience twice when he’s done it.
But people wanted something they hadn’t heard before. Something exclusive to make it worth their while.
He had made a promise. And he had his agent and publisher to think about, both of whom would be there, sitting at the table
with him.
That’s why it was nearly two in the morning, and he was going through his closet, searching for something, anything.
A scene never seen before. A chapter never typeset. But Dennis knew it was impossible. He wasn’t going to find anything.
Seinfeld would deliver hilarious one-liners and Oprah would talk about saving the world. Would they really care what Dennis
Shore the horror novelist was writing about? Why should he care what he read out loud?
Why is it so hot? Why am I sweating?
The stereo pumped in the loud rock music. He went by his desk and finished off his Diet Coke. It didn’t matter what time it
was. It felt like it could be ten in the morning or two in the afternoon. He was wide awake, and he suddenly felt like he
couldn’t breathe.