The Illumination

me, because I really need to know, why did I spend my whole life waiting to fall in love with just the right person if you were just going to leave and it would all be for nothing?

That first summer, immediately after he died, she had barely been able to pick up a pen, but by the time the earth split open a year later, she had amassed three heavy baskets of letters. One afternoon, she went to the parched field where the fair sat in the autumn and the soccer team practiced in the spring and dropped them into the deepest opening she could find. The ground swallowed them as neatly as a pay phone accepting coins, except for the last page, which continued to show through the dirt until gravity gave it a tug and it slipped out of sight. That was where her heart was, she thought, cradled underground with the roots and the bones.

As she stood in the dust listening to the insects buzz, she dashed off one last note and let it go: Are you even out there?

The next morning, she received her answer.

The streets seemed to quiver and spark in the rain, and water cascaded from the roofs of the old Victorians, and the gray ash of the sky made the inside of the bookstore appear lustrous and unfamiliar, saturated with color, like a movie theater where the film has snapped and the seats have been engulfed in light, and in the bathroom, where Nina went to disinfect her mouth with Listerine, the walls were covered with photos of third-tier pop stars in unflattering poses, bizarre headlines clipped from tabloid newspapers, and when she stepped back into the store, she saw that the Newbery displays had been taken down and replaced with chairs and a microphone, and to the seven people who had braved the San Francisco weather to hear her read, she presented “A Fable for the Living,” coaxing each syllable carefully past her open sore, which was even worse than it had been in Portland. Every time someone entered the building, she could hear the storm drumming and resonating on Haight Street. Then the door swung shut, and the noise softened to a rustle, and once again they were all sealed together in their bright and cozy den. She kept waiting for John Catau to come slouching out from behind the survival guides, wearing a sly look of guilty satisfaction, as if by following her across three states he had allowed her to defeat him in some subtle contest of expectations, but it soon became obvious that he was not there. She was not prepared to feel so disappointed.

Though the audience was small, the weather must have put them at their ease, because they posed an uncommon number of questions: “Do you go into an office every day? A coffee shop? Or do you write from home?”

“I have a spare room with a desk and a computer. That’s where I do most of my work. Except the revisions —those I finish by hand, usually at the kitchen table.”

“Are there any words you feel you overuse?”

“Strange, great, little—I heard an interview with an editor who was asked about her pet peeves, and she named those three words, I suppose because of the way they adjust a phrase’s rhythm without actually changing its meaning. And soul probably. Terrible. And also lambent, but I love that one.”

“Do you read your work out loud when you’re writing?”

“No. Never. The truth is I’m embarrassed by the sound my voice makes in an empty room, that grand pronouncement effect. And there’s something else”—and it hurts, it hurts—“which is that, in my experience, and this might sound completely absurd, but stories have a certain power the first time they’re read out loud, don’t they? An energy, or an honesty. The way the words cut through the air. And it seems a shame to squander that power when there’s no one else around to hear it.”

“This isn’t a question. I just want to say that I enjoy listening to you read, the care you take with your pronunciation. Have you ever considered reading your own audiobooks?”

“Thanks, and no, but nobody ever suggested I should until now.”

“If Twin Souls were made into a movie, who would you cast as Mary Ruth?”

“I get people wondering that all the time, but I never know how to answer. Why, did you have someone in mind?”

In a theatrical, almost moony, tone of voice, the girl who had asked the question said, “I think Julia Krukowski would be perfect,” which made the friend sitting next to her stifle a smile. Nina nodded as if at the essential rightness of the idea, though she had never heard of Julie Krikowski. She suspected the name might be invented—if not, in fact, the girl’s own. More and more, though, she found that she was required to take the stardom of certain people on faith. The world presented an endless sequence of celebrities replacing celebrities replacing celebrities, like cheap wooden nesting dolls, each bearing a tinier and less persuasive likeness than the one that had come before. It exhausted her.

“My son says it would make a good anime film. So are there any more—” She felt an itch in her sinuses and turned her head. A sneeze tore at her lips with a startling photographic flash. She gasped and closed her eyes, waiting for the pangs of light to subside, for the blood to stop beating in her jaw. Make me better. Maybe if she never ate or drank or spoke or laughed or smiled or kissed anyone ever again— maybe then she would be all right. “Are there any more questions?”

The audience took pity on her. She thanked everyone for coming, signed a few books, and phoned for a taxi. Before she left, the manager gave her one of the trading cards he had printed to publicize the event, number 1,972 in the series, with her photo on the front and a description of the book on the back: “In The Age of Girls and Boys, Nina Poggione has crafted an elegant collection of love stories and fantasies, unique, lyrical, and haunting. Whether in the award-winning ‘Small Bitter Seeds,’ with its gifted physician struggling to retain his practice after losing his voice to cancer, or in the daring title story, in which the children of a world sinking into infertility attempt to transcend the circumstances of their lives, she evokes the souls of her characters with compassion and an exquisite clarity.”

She relied on the cabdriver to find her hotel, a narrow brick and stone structure, latticed with balconies, that she recognized from her Twin Souls tour the instant she saw the waxed wooden floor that stretched across the lobby in a sunburst of multiple browns. She had gone directly from the airport to the bookstore, so she had to check in at the front desk before she could ride the elevator to the third floor, unlock her room, and open her night-stand. It held a phone book and a Gideon’s Bible, but was otherwise empty. Two years before, in the same hotel—though not, surely, the same suite—she was searching for a stationery pad in her bedside drawer when she discovered a journal someone had left behind. The cloth had been razed from the cover, revealing a kidney-shaped patch of gray board, and a buckle ran through the first thirty pages or so, as if they had been dipped in water. It was filled with handwritten love notes, she discovered, page after page of them, I love thises and I love thats stacked tight as bricks against one another. I love the “bloop” sound you make whenever you drop something. I love remembering the evening we sat on the roof at your parents’ and watched the sunset reflecting off the windows of that old church. I love your silver chimneysweep charm, the one you wear around your neck for good luck. That night, she lay in bed and read the whole thing. Slowly a pair of personalities emerged from the sentences, taking on mass and texture. The man’s name was Jason, the woman’s Patricia, and at first Nina felt like a spy, eavesdropping as he turned the most quotidian details of their life into endearments, but after a while she might have been their closest friend, sitting between them as he cupped his hand to Nina’s ear and whispered all the beautiful things he wished her to relay to his wife. Maybe the words weren’t meant for Nina, but they were wonderful all the same, if not I love you then at least Somebody loves somebody.

The next morning, before she left, she asked the concierge if there was a Jason Williford registered at the hotel. He tapped on his keyboard. “No, I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“A Patricia?”

“No. No Patricia Williford either. Perhaps they’ve already departed?”

“Maybe so. Could you find out for me?”

“No Jason or Patricia Williford for the last… six months, at least. I’m sorry.”

So she kept the journal, taking it home with her, and one day, when she was running a fever from the cluster of sores under her tongue, five or six of them scattered along the midline, and the shining vitric crater of an ulcer on her hard palate, she took a Stanley knife and excised a page from the book. Immediately, she felt ashamed. What was she thinking? Why had she done it? Rather than tape the page back in place, though, she folded it in quarters so that she could carry it in her pocketbook.

And now, as she did every so often, she took it out and read it: