Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 5. Whole No. 855, November 2012

The Void It Often Brings with It by Tom Piccirilli

Tom Piccirilli is the author of more than twenty novels, including The Last Kind Words, which received a starred review from Booklist and was called “perfect crime fiction” by best-selling author Lee Child. He is the recipient of two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, and has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award, the World Fantasy Award, Mystery Readers International’s Macavity Award, and Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.

Professor Chadwick wants us to call him Hal, and Hal is telling us again why he’s a genius. His voice has the mocking quality of arrogance even while he’s trying to sound humble and compassionate. The rest of the class, especially the freshman girls, are hanging on his every word as he leans back against his desk, sleeves rolled up halfway, tie loosened, dimpled chin pinched between thumb and forefinger, azure eyes bleeding sincerity.

“All great literature,” Hal says, “is about love or the absence of love. In my novels I write about the truth of love. Its pain, its dulcet desolation, and the void it often brings with it. That’s my power. That’s my gift.”

The girls practically coo as they daydream about Chadwick babies and Chadwick money. Cocktail parties on the balcony of an Upper East Side penthouse apartment. The beach house in the Hamptons, the French maid Fifi with downcast eyes, the chauffeur Franz who always tips his cap. The red-carpet premieres, the cable entertainment-show interviews. The Real Housewives of Academia.

Hal has managed to parlay three of his bestselling novels into major Hollywood deals. Unlike the other professors here, Hal isn’t losing sleep, desperate for tenure. He doesn’t need to lean against a desk and behave in a nurturing manner, attempting to mold our young eager minds. He’s doing it, he says, so he can give back. Sometimes he says he’s paying it forward. Back or forward, I don’t know, but I’m in awe of his people skills.

Jerry the Jock, who came in hoping for an easy “C” so his GPA wouldn’t drop below 2.0 and he could stay on the football team, has started a novel. It’s about an overbearing father rabbit forcing his bunny son to fatten up on corn beef hash and become a linebacker when the baby bunny would rather be a figure skater.

It’s called I Never Tackled Hard Enough for My Father: A Fable.

He read a chapter of the bunny book today and Hal actually commended Jerry for his sensitivity. The jock’s eyes got a little smoky. The guy sitting behind him patted him on the back. The girls murmured appropriately.

I’m failing the class. I don’t participate enough. I refuse to critique my fellow students. I flop on the in-class exercises. My writing doesn’t contain enough of an “emotional and personal component,” Hal says. I write about dark things without enough poetic resonance to connect to the reader. Hal says I’m full of literary fireworks without any grounding in realism. He doesn’t like my sword-and-sorcery tales. He doesn’t enjoy my dark fantasy pieces about witches and midnight sacrifices. He smiles sadly at my crime stories about good men forced to do bad things because of debt, stupidity, and beautiful women.

He suggests I start more simply, with a plot centering on the worst day of my life. I hand in a twelve-thousand-word novelette about a goblin king lost in a hospital looking for the maternity ward so he can steal children and repopulate his underground realm.

The girl sitting in front of me is Beth Moore. I’ve been crushing on her for six weeks, since the beginning of the semester. She walked into Creative Writing 102 and turned her gaze on me, and we both knew, right then, that I was already infatuated with her and would do nothing but stare at the side of her face all semester long. She wasn’t going to speak to me or look in my direction or encourage me in any way. We both understand that the great literature of my life is going to be about the absence of love.

I tried living in the dorms my freshman year and couldn’t get any work done. Between the stereo wars, parties, and binge-drinking roommates bounding in at three A.M. with faceless drunk girls crashing across bed springs, my nerves went from bad to shot. Now I have an off-campus apartment, a mother-in-law room in back of the two-floor walk-up. My landlandy, Mrs. Manfreddi, bakes me cakes and pies and doesn’t chase me down for the rent if I’m a few days late. She spends most of her time with her spindly, diseased tomato plants in the yard, cursing at them in Italian.

I write, submit to the top magazines, and collect rejections. Sometimes the mailbox is so full that the postman has to bundle my manuscript-stuffed envelopes with twine.

My insomnia is worse now than ever, but at least it lets me stay busy. When I’m not writing I’m working at one of my plethora of part-time jobs. I work the drive-through window of Cabo Wabo Cantina. I rent skates at the Boogie Paradise roller rink and shoes at the Top Tier bowling alley. I pick up extra shifts and bartend at three bars on the weekends.

This is a small college town. I see Beth Moore and her friends practically every night somewhere on Main Street. She either doesn’t recognize me or pretends not to know me. Her laughter is breezy and inspiring. I give her extra Wabo fries for free and don’t charge her for the skates. I pour her top-shelf scotch. She says thank you with a sweet tremolo of a giggle, but says it turning away, as if she’s speaking to someone beside me instead of me. I wave to her back as she heads out onto the rink, the lane, the dance floor.

I head home and study chemistry and calculus and ethics before trying to sleep. But every night ends the same. With me at my desk, staring at the page, being willful and fake. My losers quip dialogue like heroes and my heroes have the maudlin voices and doomed destinies of losers. I type “The End.”

In an effort to encourage us to do even better work, Hal suggests we hold a contest. The most popular story written in class from now until the end of the semester will win signed copies of his three novels and passes to the movie version of his current bestseller The Secret Chambers of My Heart. My classmates respond with smiles and giggles and sighs and hell-yeahs. They speak to him like they’re his children, and he speaks back to them like he’s their father. A humble, compassionate, arrogant, genius father.

They already have his books. And they all had their copies signed on the first day of class, forming a lengthy line around his desk. He touched girls on their wrists very lightly. He shook hands and clapped guys on their shoulders. I sat in my seat and watched the proceedings with a kind of awe. Hal kept asking, “And who shall I make this out to?” One after another they said their names. Hal managed to repeat each name and make it sound solemn. When they were done he glanced at me and with a chuckle asked, “And who are you?”

It’s a good question. I figure I’ll get back to him on it someday.

Fruggy Fred doesn’t like anybody watching him while he reads his story. He asks us not to turn in our seats. He’s back there behind me, clearing his throat, the pages in his hand flapping as he trembles. Some people might think his fear is part of his passion. Some people would be wrong. Hal tells him to relax and take his time. Hal promises that everything is going to be all right.

I shut my eyes and listen.

Fruggy’s worked hard to lose his holler accent. He sounds New York born and bred. He sounds like everyone else. I can hear him sort of dancing in his seat as he reads his story. All three hundred pounds of him swaying in his seat, heels shuffling, kicking my chair. I know he’s got the echoes of a jug band in his head, but he won’t let anyone else know it.

He wants everybody to understand that the fat white trash feel love. The fat can be heroic, the fat want to have children, the fat white trash can say the right words at the right times. A throb of sorrow works through his voice. He swallows tears.

I want to slap him. I want to shake him. I want to haul Fruggy to his feet and ask him, How the hell has this happened? Fruggy, how did they get you?

He’s settling for the thinnest self-description there is. Fruggy Fred doesn’t write about singing Ozark backwoods songs or playing the banjo, which he does extremely well. He doesn’t discuss how he came up out of the Missouri holler on a music scholarship. How his mother cooks crank, how his sister was killed in Afghanistan. How his daddy died from eating poisoned squirrel. The years at college have murdered his concept of himself. The rush and patter of his classmates has deformed him, made him forget who he is. Fruggy Fred used to be my roommate three years ago when I lived in the dorms. So much has changed.

He goes on about fat. He goes on about pretty girls not liking him. His voice is flat, without melody. There’s nothing mellifluous about it. Maybe the jug band is dead in his head. Maybe he can no longer pluck a banjo. They’ve done it to him. They’ve filled him full of doubt and fear, something nobody in the holler could ever do.

The fat guy in his story watches the pretty girl turn away from him and walk away into a sunset.

The pretty girls in class are crying. Hal claps his hands. The rest of them follow suit. Soon, the applause is deafening. I finally turn in my chair. Our eyes meet. Fruggy Fred is smiling so widely I can practically see his tonsils. I wonder if he’ll ever visit his sister’s grave again.

I see Beth Moore every night that week. She’s dating a few different guys and these guys all have a taste for Wabo burgers. I take their money and hand them their orders and always let my gaze linger an extra moment on Beth in the passenger seat, snuggled up beside the beau. The beau turns and hands her the fries and she plucks at the box daintily, pinching a fry between two fingers. She eats slowly, letting the fry hang from her mouth the way kids do when they’re pretending to be smoking cigarettes. She lips the fry and I tell the beau, “Thank you for visiting Cabo Wabo Burger. Please come see us again soon.” The beau ignores me. Beth ignores me. The french fry ignores me.

I watch the car speed out of the parking lot and make a squealing left turn. The brake lights blaze for an instant and then vanish. I shut my eyes and still see the burning red points for a moment, a soccer mom with a bunch of crying kids already at the window. She looks at me as if she wants me to take all her pain away. I’m looking at her with the same expression. We’re like that for a while.

The following week, Beth writes about her family. She lives her life and then lays it out across the pages without dramatic tension. Her narrative voice lacks confidence. She’s repetitive. Her dialogue is unnatural and when she reads she tries on voices. They all sound like her, especially her mother.

But the truth is there, as clear as a bell tolling vespers. She discusses her father, a cop over on Oceanside who’s nearly put in his thirty and is ready to retire. She explains how the burden of battling evil on a daily basis has taken a severe toll on her old dad. Her brother is also a police officer, and she’s witnessed him change from a moderately self-centered punk into a resentful, hard engine of fury and justice. She doesn’t have a good relationship with either of them. They drink too much. Her parents argue. Occasionally her old man slips and begins to discuss some terrible event like walking into a bodega after a hostage-crisis situation and having nothing to do except help clear away the bodies. Her brother is getting a divorce, and her three-year-old nephew wonders why Daddy isn’t coming home anymore.

She falters as she reads. Hal tells her to take her time.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and then tries to clear her throat. It doesn’t help. Her chin drops and her shoulders begin to quiver. A quiet mewling breaks from deep inside her chest.

I know that noise. I’ve heard it a thousand times before. I’ve made it a thousand times before. I start to slide from my seat but Hal is already moving to her. Of course he is. He takes her in his arms and hugs her. Of course he does. He shushes her gently as she cries against his collar. He presses his lips to her forehead.

I close my eyes and I make the noise, silently, and let it go around and around inside my head.

Hal tells us, “You must find your muse. Seek her out no matter how difficult the journey. She may be fickle. She may be shy and hide when you call to her. She may embrace you when you least expect it. But it’s your duty to discover her. It’s your obligation to provide her with whatever it is she needs.”

I think about my muse. I wonder who she is. Maybe Beth. Maybe the first girl I ever pined for. Perhaps some bully chick from first grade who haunts me under my skin whose name and face I’ve forgotten. The drive is there. It makes my hands strong. I don’t use a computer. I type on an old manual Underwood. I want to feel the foot-pounds of pressure when I hit a key. It’s work. Writing for an hour on a manual burns up more calories than three games of racquetball. I eat one of Mrs. Manfreddi’s homemade pies a day and there’s still not an ounce of fat on me.

My writing courses through my system. It has impact. It changes me. My muse, whoever it is, knows this.

I try to imagine what it is she needs. What sacrifices must be made in the name of passion, creativity, and success.

Hal has given a name to his muse, and calls her Pandora. He thinks he’s being cute. He always thinks he’s being cute. He says, “Pandora loves no man, not even me. But she understands who and what I am.”

What the hell. I steal the name.

Pandora, you’re my muse. We need to get back to work. You don’t love me but you know what I am.

Beth and tonight’s beau are bowling. The beau is pretty good, has a nice steady throwing style that rolls along the edge of the gutter and then rockets back into the sweet spot with a thunderous crack. After every strike Beth stands and jumps in place, bringing her hands together for an instant as if in prayer, and then clapping energetically. He holds his arms wide and grabs her, lifting her off her feet, twirling. It would look very romantic except for the silly bowling shoes.

I close my eyes, hearing the action in all the alleys. The spares being picked up, the strikes, the gutter balls. The kids crying, the geriatrics doing their best to stay active. The drunks in the bar arguing over the game on television. I listen to Beth’s clapping.

After their last game, the beau pays me and they turn in their pairs of shoes and while I’m handing the guy back his change, Beth stands barefoot on tippy-toe and licks him beneath the ear. He meets my eyes with a vain expression. I can’t blame him. If she was licking me under the ear I’d be looking at every working-stiff doofus the same way. Still barefoot, the two of them traipse across the carpeted floor toward the front door. I stand there with the disinfectant about to spray their shoes.

Mrs. Manfreddi calls me out to the shed. The fence at the back of her property has fallen over and she needs me to help drive in new posts. Dead trees dapple the area. Rotting roots have caused the earth to settle. She tells me that the grade of the back lawn has always been off, and twenty-seven years of heavy rain flooding the fence line have created a sump. She hands me a rake, a pick, a spade, a chainsaw, the Rototiller, a root-grinder, and suggests how I should cut down the trees and stack the cordwood. How I should turn and level the soil. It shouldn’t take more than four or maybe six weeks, she says. After I get the first tree down, she’ll have a nice blueberry pie waiting.

I yank the cord on the chainsaw, give it some gas. Sawdust spits into the wind.

Woody Wright is full of myth and warriors and gods. He writes about sorcerers and barbarians in the distant past who battle in stone temples at the tops of black cliffs. Evil tentacled beings slither in the skies and at the bottom of volcanic pits. His heroes are always men who take what they want, pillaging and using two-handed broadaxes to cleave the skulls of enemies who don’t immediately acquiesce. The women are all dancing slave girls trained in the ways of love. He uses the term “red ruin” ad nauseam. Men’s faces are constantly being turned into a “red ruin” by swords and maces.

Woody’s voice is high-pitched, but he has a sense of drama. He speaks with a growl. He acts out his battles as he reads, wielding invisible weapons overhead. Black veins bulge in his throat. When the horses fall in battle he whinnies and neighs and strikes his desk. His head must be loud with screams because he reads louder and louder, as if he’s deaf to himself. Sweat is slathered across his top lip. He raises a hand to shield his eyes from the torches of his enemies setting fire to his village. He cries for his murdered father. He chugs down a goblet of wine with the slave girl he has freed. He’s run through by a spear but still manages to kill his own murderer, an enemy tyrant king of Lemuria whose death means freedom for a hundred different nations.

With a gurgle, Woody whispers, “And so my name... passes into chronicles of the great ages... gaahhh... ack...”

Hal is impressed. So am I. Woody’s face is a red ruin of hope and relief. He slumps across the desk and, completely slack, drops to the floor, unconscious.

The paramedics ask us what happened. They’ve got an oxygen mask on Woody and are strapping him into a gurney. The class looks at one another in silence, and then we all start talking at once. Hal’s voice slices through the din like a battle-ax.

“The boy... he’s a master storyteller who gave his all.”

The girls nod. Jerry the Jock drapes the back of his hand across his eyes and wipes away tears.

The paramedics look at us like we’re all out of our heads.

I never work the front counter of Cabo Wabo Burger, but somehow I’m working it tonight when Fruggy Fred walks in. He spots me immediately and nearly turns around. We’ve been doing this dance for three years, since I moved out of the dorm. He took it personally despite my explanation that I just couldn’t take the noise. Maybe that’s where his self-doubt began. Maybe it’s all my fault, what’s happened to him.

“You got a minute?”

I’m working the front counter of a fast-food joint, but he’s caught me at a lull. There’s no one else around so I say, “Sure.”

Fruggy has a light step. He writes about the fat a lot but he doesn’t look bad, doesn’t seem to be uncomfortable. There’s a liveliness there, or at least there used to be. The years on campus have taken a toll on him. He’s gotten a touch sophisticated, his eyes don’t carry the same amused glint.

“What are you doing?” he asks, almost angrily.

“Me? I’m covering the counter.”

“No,” he says. “What are you doing?”

I know what he’s talking about, but I ask, “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I mean. What are you doing to yourself?” He looks me up and down. “I see you all over town, working all these loser jobs. You’re rail thin, man. You’ve got black bags under your eyes. When was the last time you ate a real meal? When was the last time you got a good night’s sleep?”

More good questions. Everybody has them. “Why don’t you play the banjo anymore?”

“How do you know I don’t? It’s been three years since we were roomies.”

“You never would have used a word like ‘roomies’ before. Where’s your accent?”

His face is all creases and flat, blunt planes. His tongue juts and he licks his lips. He’s got more to say but I jump in.

“You never used to give a damn what anyone thought of you. The world got to you, Fruggy. You let it eat you up.”

“We all care. I just didn’t let anyone know that I did.”

Maybe it’s true. Maybe I care as much as he does. It doesn’t feel that way.

I head back to the counter, get a few fresh burgers, a couple orders of fries, bag it, and hand it to him.

“Thank you for visiting Cabo Wabo Burger. Please come see us again soon.”

Despite all the jobs and the work I do in Mrs. Manfreddi’s yard, shifting tons of earth and lumber every day, sleep continues to avoid me. I have hours after midnight to burn through. I’ve tried to find a job as a security guard, but there’s nothing available in our small town. It leads me out onto the street. I walk the neighborhoods. I circle the entire town. I walk past Professor Chadwick’s house two or three times, then lean against a tree down the block and stare at his front porch. The hedges behind me are high, the moon only a sliver.

I watch Hal moving across the brightly lit rooms, the windows without a speck of dirt or dust. His Ecuadorian maid spends an hour every morning washing them down.

He has homes in Manhattan and Los Angeles, and a cabin right on the beach in Martinique. But Hal spends most of the year right in our small town. Giving back and paying forward.

I’m immensely patient. I stand there as the cool night continues to pass. Hal’s at the computer, on the phone, watching television. He pops in a DVD and I wonder if he’s watching one of his own movies. He’s done the commentary to them. He’s got cameos in all three flicks.

I wait in the darkness. I let it pass through me. I dream on my feet, writing in my head, thinking of the next tree that’s got to fall.

At two A.M. Beth turns the corner and comes walking up the street. I fade back even farther into the hedges. Beth is beautiful, draped in silver moonlight. The nerves in my fingertips burn to touch her. If not her, then my typewriter keys.

Beth steps up the walkway to Hal’s house and knocks on the screen door softly, too softly. Then she thumps with the side of her fist and is embarrassed at the harsh noise. She rubs her hands together and then tightens her arms around her belly, hugging herself. She turns back to face the street as if checking to see if anyone is watching. She’s nervous. She trembles in the chill breeze. Her bangs flap one way across her face and then the other.

Hal comes to the door. He doesn’t look happy to see her. How can he not be happy to see her? I say it aloud, whispering, “How?” He’s anxious and a touch angry. They quarrel for a moment and Hal stands in the doorway and crosses his arms over his chest. He shakes his head and Beth nods vigorously and he shakes his head some more.

Beth breaks down and begins to cry. I take a step toward her. It’s all I can do. She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t want me. All of my love isn’t worth a foot-high stack of ink-stained paper to her. I drop back and watch Hal lift her chin so that she faces him. He stares at her tear-strewn face and something in him softens. He reaches out and pulls her into his arms, where she begins to sob uncontrollably. He leads her into the house and the door swiftly shuts.

I stand in the dark thinking, Oh God.

The next day, Beth isn’t in class.

Hal has a slight scratch on his cheek.

We’re sliding into finals. Beth’s been out of class all week long. We have projects. We have our contest. Jodi writes about her father. Matt writes about his mother. Georgie is a rocket man, he tells us what’s happening on distant planets, where astronauts are pursued by alien dinosaurs and intelligent man-eating plant life. Phil, he’s got this ’50s jazzy bop prose thing happening, talking about sweet rides and hot chicks and life on the streets smoking J and blowing ax in darkened gin joints off St. Mark’s Place. Frieda, she’s into parables and world views and heavy themes. She writes about seekers and wanderers and women who climb mountains to find answers from starved Hindi who can hold their breath for six hours. Behind her, Eloise discusses her memoir. She tells us about Atlantis, which resides on the moon, and is the place where all the souls of the dead go to rest while awaiting the Apocalypse. She knows this because, she says, she was born with a caul, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and she has mystical abilities. She allows that some of us might not believe her, but that’s our choice.

Hal discusses each story, whether it’s fiction or not, at length. He praises syntax, lyricism, passionate richness, heartstring reverberation, depth of character, the wellsprings of imagination. The class applauds one another. The class applauds itself.

Hal asks me, “Do you have something to submit for the contest?”

“I do,” I tell him.

He’s surprised. He gives me a smug grin and holds my gaze a few seconds too long. There’s hate there. I don’t mind. He’s not the only one I bring it out in. Eloise glares at me. So does Jerry the Jock. So do others. I smile and try to turn up my charm. It doesn’t help. Hal holds his hand out for my story. I hand it to him and he flips through the pages. It’s a holographic manuscript, full of tiny holes from where the keys have punched through. It clearly hasn’t been written on a computer screen and shot from a laser printer.

“It’s short,” he says.

“It’s not finished yet.”

“Then how can you submit it?”

“Consider it a special instance.”

He cocks his head at me and frowns. For the first time his smarm is gone and there’s something else in his expression, a kind of heat. “Wonderful. Please read it.”

Unlike the others who stand beside their seats and read facing Hal, I walk to the front of the class and turn my back to him. I clear my throat and say, “The title of my story is ‘The Void It Often Brings With It.’ ”

Then I begin.

I recite, “Professor Ferdnick wants us to call him Bill, and Bill is telling us again why he’s a genius. His voice has the mocking quality of arrogance even while he’s trying to sound humble and compassionate. The rest of the class, especially the freshman girls, are hanging—”

Afterwards, the class is quiet. They keep checking Hal for a reaction so they’ll know what they’re supposed to feel and say. But Hal has no reaction. His face is pale and utterly empty. I’ve taken a little wind out of his hair. A mean swirl of darkness appears in his eyes and he hikes his lips into a bitter smile. He says, “Please come see me during my office hours.”

“Sure.”

His office hours are only a half-hour long, directly following class today. I give him a head start up the corridor and then follow.

When I get there his door is shut. He’s going to make me knock. Hal needs his petty victories.

I need mine as well. I walk in without knocking. Hal is in his chair, feet up on his desk, azure eyes glistening. His mind’s racing with contingencies, plot threads, possibilities. His hands are trembling. He’s capable of anything at the moment. His expression is at once playful, lethal, and petrified. I notice that the top desk drawer is open. I wonder what he’s got within easy reach. A letter opener, rat poison, a pearl-handled snub .32? Maybe nothing more than a checkbook. I imagine that Hal has gotten rid of a lot of troubles by handing over a check.

He waits for me to put the touch to him. He wants to know how far I’ll go. I let him see it in the set of my lips. I’m going to go all the way. I think of Beth crying and Hal shaking his head. He reaches out and pulls her into his arms, where she begins to sob uncontrollably. I want to kill him.

Hal cracks and asks, “What do you want?”

“What makes you think I want anything?”

“Everybody wants something.”

“True enough. Why don’t you use your writer’s acumen and make a guess at what I’m after?”

Hal reaches into his drawer and my belly tightens. He withdraws a short wedge of cash. Maybe five hundred dollars. Silly money, for him. He nudges it over to my side of the desk. I don’t take it. Our eyes meet again, our gazes clashing with such violence that I can almost see sparks flying.

I can’t hurt him, and he knows it. I can only inconvenience him a bit. I already have. Some of the freshman girls weren’t looking at him quite as perkily after I finished my story. I’ve pulled a brick from his ivory tower. That’s all it takes to start the whole thing falling down around his ears. Words have power. Rumors and suspicions can destroy a man. His hand dangles in the drawer.

“Pick a number,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I’ve got a better idea.”

“Such as?”

“For you, as my trusted mentor, to introduce me to your agent and some of your Hollywood contacts.”

I’ve got the manuscript for my latest novel in my backpack. I pull it out and hand it to him. He looks at me with some surprise, but not much. He reads the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page. Then he grins, and the grin grows wider until it’s a beaming smile, and then he starts to chuckle, and that becomes wild and resentful laughter.

He’s frightened. He might be the most terrified man I’ve ever met, because he’s got the most to lose.

I wonder what that’s like.

“Congratulations,” he tells me, beaming. “You’ve won!”

The next day, in front of the class, Hal presents me with the three signed books, the movie tickets, and a colorful certificate suitable for framing that he printed out which declares me the winner of the First Annual Chadwick Creative Arts Competition. My classmates are astonished, stunned into silence, and sit in their seats clapping sluggishly. Fruggy Fred’s jaw hangs practically to the desk. Jerry the Jock begins to cry. So does Woody Wright. So does Eloise. The rest fume and glower.

I bow and make a little speech about how proud and grateful I am to Hal and my fellow students, who inspired me to greatness.

Hal’s word is good. His agent calls that very afternoon and says he loves my novel. It shows great emotional resonance, he says. The publishing world moves rapid fire. Hollywood is even quicker. By the end of the weekend Hal’s agent — my agent — has secured a three-book deal and managed to swing a sizeable film option with a major studio. He calls me baby and talks money. This is going to be a hell of a ride, baby, you’re aiming for the top. He says a number and the number is so high that it’s barely conceivable to me. I hold the phone to my chest, listening for my heartbeat, but there’s nothing except the tinny voice of the agent going, Baby, baby.

I whisper, “Thank you, Pandora.”

I drive over to the Moore house.

I can hear her parents arguing upstairs. Beth’s name erupts from deep in her father’s chest. It’s a prayer, a hymn, and a curse. He could be dying on his deathbed, crying out one last time. I climb the porch steps, knock at the front door, and wait. No one answers. I knock and wait again. Her father rips open the door and stands there in all his anger and pain, his face mottled, lips twisted. His daughter’s been missing for more than two weeks.

“What the hell do you want?” he asks. His voice is loud but full of cracks, as if his very next word will shatter like defective crystal.

I say nothing. I hand him my story. My name’s not on it, but I feel like I’m giving over my life’s accomplishment. He’ll recognize the characters. He’s trained to be suspicious of everyone and everything, and his daughter is missing. He looks like he’s about to throw the pages back at me but something in my eyes stops him. He frowns and a black vein throbs in the center of his forehead.

He begins reading the first sentence of my tale. His wife eases up beside him and cocks her head at me. I think I might be crying. I can’t be sure until tears flick across the lenses of my glasses. I walk away while Beth’s old man shouts for me to stop. I stumble up the sidewalk blindly.

Six days later, on the front page, Beth’s father seems almost serene compared to how he looked that evening on his porch. His expression is one of controlled rage and semi-satisfaction. Hal is being led away by the sheriff, who grips Hal tightly on the shoulder. Beth’s cell-phone bill has been recovered. The cops cracked her text messages. She had a lot to say about Professor Chadwick and the way he made her feel. The things he whispered. The caresses in the night. She wants to know when he’ll marry her. She wants to know what they’ll name the baby.

I watch the news. He’s a little disheveled but it only adds to his looks, giving him a sense of wildness. He claims not to know where she is. He says that she visited him in the early hours of the morning more than a week ago and left a couple of hours later. He swears he didn’t hurt her.

They book him on a couple of trumped-up charges. Really, they have nothing, except possibly inappropriate behavior between a teacher and a student. Beth was eighteen. They can’t hold him for long. He’s got top-notch lawyers. The cops want to go through his yard with methane probes but Hal’s attorneys are way ahead of the curve and block the police at every turn. He’ll be out in a day or two. He’ll be done at the college, but what does Hal care? He can give back and pay forward in a lot of other ways, at a lot of other universities.

No one knows where Beth is.

I can afford a much better apartment now, but I don’t want to move. I wait here in the dim corner of the room, standing at the window, and stare into Mrs. Manfreddi’s dark backyard. She still curses her tomatoes, but maybe not as much lately. The work continues. The fence is almost finished, the ground leveled. The moonlight pools across the soil, silver on black, and it makes me want to run out there and dive and go swimming.

Hal’s career is still riding high, but not as high as it had been. The agent wants a new book from me as soon as possible.

I sweat over the manual typewriter, taking the time to discover my muse. She’s fickle. She’s shy and hides when I call to her. She embraces me when I least expect it. I provide her with whatever it is she needs.

Pandora waits with me in the darkness. I am a red ruin. The great literature of my life is the absence of the woman I love. I’ll never heal. I’ll never leave. She’ll haunt and hate me forever. She’ll warm me on the bitterly cold nights. I miss Beth.

In my stories I write about the truth of love: its pain, its dulcet desolation, and the void it often brings with it.

Copyright © 2012 by Tom Piccirilli