The Plot, Jean Korelitz [read e books online free txt] 📗

of her own daughter, then take it again, to live it herself? That was legend. That was the plot of a novel that could sell millions of copies and form the basis of a film by what Evan Parker had once called an “A-list director.” That was a plot someone’s mother would read in a book group in Clayton, Georgia, that would sell out a Seattle venue with 2,400 seats, that would get its author on the New York Times bestseller list and the cover of Poets & Writers. It was a plot to kill for, Jake supposed, though he himself had done no such thing; he had merely picked it up off the ground. A sure thing, Evan Parker had once called his story, and it absolutely had been that. But he might also have called it: the story of what my sister did to her daughter. He might have called it: the story somebody might come after me for telling, because it isn’t mine to tell. He might even have called it: the story it wasn’t worth dying for.

Jake paid the bill and left the Clayton Café. He got back in his car and found his way out to the cemetery, driving past the Rabun County Historical Society and then left on Pickett Hill Street, a narrow and overgrown road into the woods. After about half a mile, he passed a sign for the cemetery and slowed his car to a crawl. It was the last hour of light, and he felt lost in the trees. He thought of the places this unasked-for and unwanted adventure had taken him, from the tavern in Rutland, to the downmarket apartment complex in Athens, to the emptiness of this clearing in the north Georgia woods. It felt like the end of the line, which it was. Where could there be, after this? One way or the other, it came down to this plot of earth and the obliterated body underground. The track ended when he saw the headstones.

There were many graves, a hundred at least, and the first ones he came to dated from the 1800s. Picketts, Rameys, Shooks, and Wellborns, elderly men who’d fought in the world wars, children who’d lived for months or years, mothers and newborns buried together. He wondered if he’d already walked past Mike’s grammaw, or the graves of other recipients of Clayton’s generosity to the indigent and abandoned. The light was going fast now, leaving a deep blue above, and orange through the forest to the west. It was a peaceful place to spend eternity, that was clear.

He found it, finally, at the far edge of the clearing. The plot was marked by a simple stone, flat on the dirt and slightly reddish in color, with the name of the assigned occupant: DIANNA PARKER, 1980–2012. Simple, remarkably understated, and yet the horror it held rooted him to the spot. “Who are you?” he said out loud, but that was purely rhetorical. Because he knew. He’d known the moment he saw those old pineapples stenciled around the door of the Parker home in West Rutland, and everyone he’d spoken with in Georgia—the outraged attorney and the cleaner who hadn’t recognized Rose Parker from her high school field hockey photo, the defensive coroner who heard hoofbeats and thought horses—only underscored that knowledge. He wanted to fall to the earth and claw away at it until he reached her, that poor girl, the tool and inconvenience of her mother’s life, but even if he made it through that impacted Georgia soil, all the way to her donated coffin and beyond, what would he find but handfuls of dust?

In the last of the light he took a photograph of the grave and sent it to his wife, with only the corrected name of the occupant attached. More would have to wait until he got home, for a face-to-face conversation. Then he would explain what had really happened here, how a young person on the verge of escape had wound up in a burial plot in backwoods Georgia with her mother’s name on the headstone. Looking down into the dirt, as if he could possibly see the murdered girl’s obliterated and entombed remains, it occurred to him that this strangest of stories warranted a full retelling, and this time no longer as fiction. In fact, maybe writing Rose Parker’s real story was where this had always been heading, an unprecedented opportunity to write his book, his miraculous Crib, a second time, illuminating the real story even its author hadn’t known existed. Matilda, when she pushed past the discomfort of it, would be intrigued, then excited. Wendy would be thrilled from the get-go: a deconstruction of the global bestseller by its own author? A phenomenon!

And even if writing it required Jake to come clean about his late student Evan Parker, he’d still be able to control the narrative as he soul-searched and pondered the deep questions about what fiction was and how it got made, on behalf of every one of his fellow novelists and short story writers! Crib’s second telling would be a meta-narrative, destined to vindicate every writer and resonate with every reader, and telling it would render him brave and bold as an artist. Besides, what was the point of being a famous writer if he couldn’t use his unique voice to tell this story only he could tell?

In the cemetery, the last of the light died around him.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remained.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, page 280

She’d been renting a small house on East Whittier Street in German Village, about five miles from campus, a quiet neighborhood with not too many OSU students. She still did her bill processing for Bassett Healthcare but mainly at night, keeping the days free for classes: history, philosophy, political science. It was all pleasure, even the term papers, even the exams, even the fact that she was