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

“Define accident.”

“Well, she told the coroner she might have knocked over a propane heater while she was leaving the tent in the middle of the night. By the time she got back from the bathroom the whole tent had gone up.”

Anna nodded. “Okay. That would be an accident.”

“The coroner also said she was hysterical. His word.”

“Right. And hysteria can’t be faked.”

He frowned.

“Go on.”

“So after the accident happens, she thinks: This is terrible, but I can’t bring her back. And there’s a scholarship waiting and nothing to go back to. And she thinks, No one knows me in Georgia. I’ll live off campus, take classes, figure out what I want to do with my life. She knows she doesn’t look young enough to say she’s the daughter of a thirty-two-year-old woman, so maybe she says she’s the victim’s sister, not her daughter. But from the moment she drives out of Clayton, Georgia, she’s Rose Parker, whose mother died in a tragic fire.” Burned up.

“The way you put it, it sounds almost reasonable.”

“Well, it’s horrible, but it’s not unreasonable. It’s criminal, obviously, because at the very least we’re talking about theft. Theft of identity. Theft of her daughter’s place at a university. Theft of an actual monetary scholarship. But it’s also an unanticipated opportunity for a woman who’s never managed to live her own dreams, and by the way who’s still young. Thirty-two is much younger than we are. Doesn’t it still seem possible to make an enormous change in your life when you’re thirty-two? Look at yourself! You were older than that, and you left everyone you knew and moved to the other end of the country and got married, all inside of … what, eight months?”

“Fine,” Anna agreed. She was filling Jake’s glass with the last of the Merlot. “But I have to point out that you seem to be making every excuse for her. Are you really this understanding?”

“Well, in the novel—” he began, but she interrupted him.

“Whose?” Anna said quietly. “Yours? Or Evan’s?”

He was trying to remember if Evan’s Ripley submission had covered this. Of course it hadn’t. Evan Parker had been an amateur. How far beneath the surface could he really have gone into the inner lives of these women? Unfurling his extraordinary plot that night in Richard Peng Hall, Parker hadn’t troubled himself to describe or acknowledge the complexities of Diandra (as he’d called the mother) or Ruby (as he’d called the daughter); how much better would he have done over the course of an entire novel, even assuming he’d been capable of completing one?

“In my novel. Samantha is a thwarted person, and bitterly unhappy. Those things can corrupt you every bit as much as some predisposition toward evil. I always thought of her as a person who’s fallen into a hole of terrible disappointment, which over time—and as she watched her daughter prepare for her own departure—just worked on her, with devastating results. And then when it happened it was a kind of accident, or at least not something planned or prepared for. It’s not like she was a—”

“Sociopath?” Anna said.

He felt genuine surprise. Of course he understood that this was the predominant view amongst his readers, but Anna had never said as much about the character.

“And that’s where the dividing line is?” his wife asked. “Between something any of us might do under the circumstances and something only a truly evil person would do? Planning it?”

He shrugged. His shoulders felt impossibly heavy as he lifted them and let them fall. “It seems like a good enough place to put the dividing line.”

“Okay. But only as far as your made-up character is concerned. It has no bearing on this actual woman’s life. You can’t have any idea what was going on in her head, or what else she might have done, before or after this unplanned act. I mean, who knows what else this Dianna Parker got up to? You said yourself, nobody seems to get sick in her family.”

“That’s true.” He nodded, and his head felt fuzzy as it inclined forward. He had written an entire novel around this one terrible thing, and he still couldn’t fully accept there was a real mother out there who’d been able to do it. See her child die like that and just move on? “I mean,” he heard himself say, “it’s incredible. Isn’t it?”

Anna sighed. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Jake. Do you want more soup?”

He did, and she went to get it, bringing him back another brimming, steaming bowl.

“It’s so good.”

“I know. My mother’s recipe.”

Jake frowned. There was something he wanted to ask about that, but he couldn’t think what it was. Spinach, kale, garlic, essence of chicken; it was certainly tasty, and he could feel the warmth of it spreading inside him.

“This plot you sent me a picture of, it looked like a pretty place. Can I see it again?”

He reached for his phone and tried to find it for her, but that wasn’t as easy as it should have been. The pictures kept shooting forward and back as he scrolled, refusing to land on the right one. “Here,” he finally said.

She held the phone in her hand, and looked intently.

“The stone. It’s very simple. I like it.”

“Okay,” said Jake.

She had picked up the single gray braid of her hair, and was twisting the end around and around her fingers in a way that was almost hypnotic. He loved so many things about the way she looked, but that silver hair, it occurred to him, he loved most of all. Thinking of it swinging loose made a kind of weighty thump inside his head. He had been traveling for days, and worried for months. Now, with so many of the pieces finally in place, he was deeply tired, and all he wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that she was leaving tonight. Maybe he needed