I saw that, at the foot of the bed, there were a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt laid out. The sweatpants were gray and fit well enough, thanks to the drawstring waist. The T-shirt was a dark blue, and across the front, in typewriter font, it read ASK ME ABOUT THE LUMINOSITY. I just looked at it for a moment, then gave up trying to figure it out and pulled it on.
I knew I should probably head right back out to help with Bertie, but I’d taken a quick shower, and I figured I probably had a few minutes’ cover before my absence seemed suspicious. I told myself I wasn’t going to snoop, or look through anything—I had a deep aversion to that, ever since I had returned from the bathroom during an interview two years ago to see the reporter poking through my bag—but I told myself it couldn’t hurt to just look around.
It didn’t take me long to realize that this was different from the guys’ rooms I’d been in before. Usually, there was a lumpy, hastily made bed, a pile of stuff in the corner, and clothes tossed around. Even Topher, who was pretty neat, had a room that was just a little in disarray, like he was always kicking off his shoes and tossing off his jacket, leaving someone else to deal with them.
Clark’s room wasn’t like that. There was a neat stack of books on the desk—a few thick fantasy books, but most of them seemed to be nonfiction, with titles like Breaking the Block, Jump-Start Your Imagination, Moving Beyond Writer’s Block, and Resisting Resistance. I glanced away from them quickly, feeling like I’d seen something that I probably shouldn’t have seen.
Through the open closet door, I could see three shirts hung up, and on top of the dresser, a neatly folded pile of laundry, tilting slightly to the right. The only thing that was slightly messy were two button-down shirts that were laid out on top of the dresser. I couldn’t help but wonder if Clark, like me, had gone through several outfits, trying to find the right one for our date.
I turned away, ready to leave his room. I really didn’t want to be in there any longer. It wasn’t that I felt like I was invading his privacy—it felt like the opposite, like it was invading in on me, showing me a side of Clark that I felt like I shouldn’t be seeing, not yet—or maybe never. I never really wanted to know these things about the guys I’d dated—their fears and insecurities. I didn’t want to know that Clark had spent time worrying and getting ready for our date. And I didn’t want to ask myself why the sight of his neatly folded T-shirts was making me feel something I didn’t even have words to express.
I was almost to the door when something on an end table caught my eye. It was a picture in a small silver frame, showing a little boy, around five or six, sitting on the shoulders of someone who was probably his dad. At first I assumed that it was a picture that belonged to the house, family or friends of the couple in all the pictures downstairs. But as I looked at it for another moment, I realized it was Clark. He looked basically the same, just without the glasses. The man—his dad, I was guessing, based on their resemblance—was looking up at him and smiling, while young Clark, midlaugh, stretched his hands up to the sky like he was trying to touch the stars.
I caught my eyes reflected back to me in the glass and suddenly realized what I was doing. I turned off the light and closed the door firmly behind me as I went. I walked back to the laundry room, tugging at the hem of the shirt, feeling weirdly exposed, even though the sweatpants and T-shirt covered more than my dress had.
“Hey,” Clark said, giving me a quick smile. “Are the clothes okay?”
“Fine,” I said, nodding, wanting to change the subject. I tucked my wet hair behind my ears, wondering why it suddenly felt like I had my armor down. That like this—in his clothes, without my makeup and with my hair sopping wet—Clark could see more of me than I wanted him to. “How’s he been?” I asked as I looked at the dog, who appeared not to have moved since I’d been gone.
“The same,” Clark said, patting his back gently. “I got him to drink a little more but didn’t give him any more of the soup. I didn’t think we should risk it.”
“Probably wise,” I said as I crossed over to sit on the other side of Bertie—and then, just to be safe, moved a few inches farther away. “So no change?” I asked, picking up my phone and pulling up the Internet, ready to go over the dangerous symptoms once again.
“Wait . . . ,” Clark said, starting to reach toward me, but not before I realized that I had actually picked up his phone—and on his screen, I was looking at the last page he’d had open. I blinked as I stared at it. My dad’s official portrait looked back at me from his Wikipedia page. “Sorry,” Clark said, and I could hear the embarrassment in his voice.
I nodded. I knew I should give him his phone back, but I kept looking down at the screen, at my dad’s factual information. I was there, under the personal-life section—Daughter Alexandra Molly Walker, 17. Wife Molly Jane Walker (deceased). “So did you learn anything?” I asked, looking at the photo at the top of the page. It was the one that always seemed to accompany any article about my dad—though I had a feeling it might soon be replaced by the press conference on our front porch. It was a picture of my dad taken five years ago. He was wearing a dark suit, and the president walked next to him. On his other side was Governor Laughlin. You could see me, a few steps behind him, in a black dress, my hair pulled back with a black velvet headband that had made my head feel like it was on the verge of exploding. I’d never worn it again after that day. The picture had been taken by the press that were waiting on the steps of the church after my mother’s funeral, and it had made the front page of the New York Times above the fold the next day. It was hailed by pundits and journalists as a seminal moment, a return to decency, people reaching across the aisle even in the middle of a campaign, putting aside differences in times of crisis, etcetera. It was seen by almost everyone as a symbol. And almost nobody who talked about the picture mentioned my mother, except in passing, like her funeral was just the setting for this larger, more important moment.
It was the way her whole funeral had felt—like it actually wasn’t about her at all. I watched as her friends and her students looked around at the Secret Service agents, at the president, and crumpled up the pieces of paper they’d brought with them, looking doubtful, not wanting to get up and talk about my mom—talk about who she’d really been—in front of the leader of the country. And so there hadn’t been any great or silly or funny stories about her. The words that were said could have been said about anyone, and the whole thing felt wrong, like I was letting her down. Like we all were.
“Sorry,” Clark said, still sounding embarrassed, and I started to feel bad. I closed out of the screen and handed him his phone back as he slid mine over the carpet toward me. After all, it was public information. If I’d had the time before Bertie had gotten sick, I would have no doubt been googling Clark and his books. “I didn’t realize your dad had run for vice president.”
“Almost,” I corrected, though a lot of people made this mistake. “He had to drop out before it was official.” I looked down and traced a circular pattern on the carpet.
“How’s he handling all this recent stuff?” Clark asked, and I looked up at him, fixing a smile on my face.
“Oh, just fine,” I said immediately, reaching for some of the lines Peter had written for me when everything was starting to fall apart. “Obviously, it’s a time of transition, which is always hard, but . . .” I looked at Clark, and it was like I suddenly realized where I was. In a laundry room, with a vomiting dog, wearing someone else’s clothes, with a boy who was not, to my knowledge, a member of the media. I could, I realized with what felt like a physical shock, tell him the truth.
It went against everything I’d been told my whole life—sometimes explicitly, but more often not. It was just what I’d learned, before I knew I was learning it. Stay on message. Don’t tell people what you really think or feel—unless it’s been vetted and approved. Keep people at arm’s length and your feelings to yourself. And I’d done it, for years now, until it was second nature. And where had it got
ten me?
“Well,” I said slowly, feeling like I was going against a lifetime of training, “I’m not sure. It’s been . . . weird.”
Clark was looking over at me, expectant. I knew other guys would have just nodded, maybe said “bummer,” and then we would have moved on—gone back to fooling around, or to safe, easy topics. Topher would have known what I meant and not asked any follow-ups, because none would have been needed. But it seemed like Clark actually wanted to know—that he was waiting for me to go on.
“He’s home,” I said, shaking my head. “Which he never is. And it’s really strange to have him there all the time. And he’s not allowed to work, so he’s been watching ancient basketball games. . . .” My voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about the terrible dinner we’d had and all our awkward silences, which were made that much worse because it was like my dad didn’t even notice them. “I think he’s waiting for the investigation to clear him, so he can go back to work.”
There was a small pause, and Clark nodded, then asked quietly, “And what if he can’t? I mean . . . if it doesn’t come back in his favor?”
This was the very question I had been trying not to ask myself since it happened. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, what did he do before?” Clark asked, then smiled. “I didn’t get that far on his Wikipedia page.”
“He was a public defender.” I could hear the pride in my voice when I said it. I had always liked the idea of it: my dad, helping out the people who couldn’t afford their own counsel, righting the wrongs of innocent victims—and a lot of scumbags, too, based on the stories I’d heard. “It was actually how my parents met.” I couldn’t quite believe I was saying this, but the words were out before I could stop them. The story that the media had was that my parents had met while working together, which was technically true, but without any of the details. “She was putting herself through art school working as a police sketch artist,” I said, feeling myself smile even as I had to swallow hard. “And my dad was furious that one of her sketches looked exactly like his client, and they started fighting about it.”
Clark leaned forward. “Did the guy do it?”
“Stabby Bob?” I asked, and Clark laughed. “Totally. But it was enough to introduce them.” At the farmhouse, a framed sketch of Bob—long white beard, tattoos, a gleam of crazy in his eyes—had hung in the entryway, startling almost everyone who came over. I had no idea where it was now. Like most of my mother’s art, it hadn’t been hung up in the new place. I assumed he was in storage somewhere, no doubt carefully wrapped, but put away, out of sight.
“That’s kind of how my parents met too,” Clark said, and I felt my eyebrows raise in surprise. “Well, minus the stabbing guy,” he acknowledged. “My dad went to audit a dental practice where my mom was working as a bookkeeper. She’d had the books so organized and could answer every question he threw at her, so he hired her away to work for him.”
“So both your parents are accountants?” I asked, and Clark nodded. “That must have been rough.”
“Tell me about it,” he said, shaking his head. Then he looked at me and gave me a smile, like he’d decided something, before going on. “This one time, I think I was eight, they’d sent me to the store and told me to bring back change. But when I was walking back, I saw a new Batman comic. . . .” As Clark went on, telling his story, I realized that I wasn’t trying to stop him, or control the conversation, or keep him from asking me something I didn’t want to answer. It was like talking to my friends—and I would just have to see where the conversation took me. And so, surprising myself, I leaned forward to listen.
• • •
“Explain it to me,” I said. Now that I was, apparently, spending the night in their house, I thought I needed to know a little more about the people who lived there. “Since you’re not Clark Goetz-Hoffman.”
Clark winced. “That’s a pretty terrible name,” he said, and I silently agreed. “My publisher is Goetz. Her soon-to-be ex-husband is Hoffman.”
“Got it.” I looked at Bertie’s water dish, at the B. W. that was painted there. “Then what’s the W for?”
“Oh,” Clark said, giving Bertie a gentle pat. “That’s his middle name.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. “The dog has a middle name?”
“Bertie Woofter Goetz-Hoffman,” Clark said, raising an eyebrow at me, letting me know he thought this was ridiculous too.
“Woofter?”
“Yeah,” Clark said with a shrug. “It’s from a book they liked. The character is Bertie Wooster . . . so it’s like a pun.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding, remembering the framed book cover I’d seen the first day. “So the dog has four names,” I said, still trying to get this to make sense.
Clark gave me a small smile. “I don’t get it either.”
• • •
“So you write books,” I said, shaking some Skittles into my hand. I’d found a half-full bag in my purse, and we’d been sharing them. We were both starting to get tired, and I’d decided we needed some sugar. “That’s so weird,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, you’re my age.”
“Just a little older,” he said, turning so that he was facing me a little more fully, both of us sitting cross-legged on the carpet. “I’m nineteen.” He held out his hand, and I tipped the Skittles into his palm.
“But still,” I said around my candy. “That’s weird. You have a job.”
“You have a job,” he pointed out. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here right now. You’d be off somewhere not reading.”
“But you have a career,” I said as Clark gestured to me for more candy. “Isn’t that weird?”
Clark laughed. “I guess not to me. I’ve been doing this for five years now, so publishing books is just . . . what I do.” As I watched, his smile faded, the wattage of his dimples dimming slightly. “It’s what I did, at any rate.”
“So you need to give them your third book?” I asked, and he nodded. “Well, when is it due?”
“Two years ago,” Clark said, and I felt my eyes widen. “Yeah. That’s pretty much everyone’s reaction. There are a lot of people who are really not happy with me at the moment. But it’s coming together. I just need to finesse some things, pull some threads together.”
I nodded. “Okay.” I was still trying to process the two-year delay. “So do you have a plan? A schedule worked out for when you’re going to turn it in?”
I saw something pass over Clark’s face, but before I could really see what he was thinking, it was gone, and Clark was giving me a smile. “It sounds like you’re pretty organized.”
I nodded, taking that as a compliment, even though he might not have intended it as one. “It’s the coin of the realm in my family.”
Clark stared at me. “The what?”
I realized a second too late what I’d done. It was an expression my parents always used, and I’d used it enough around my friends that they no longer thought it was strange. But I sometimes forgot that not everyone had heard it before. “Coin of the realm,” I repeated. “Something that carries the most value.”
“Oh,” Clark said, nodding, like he was turning the phrase over in his head. “I like it.”
“You still haven’t answered the question.”
“Busted.” Clark paused for a moment, like he was gathering his thoughts, then said, “If it were as easy as just getting organized or sticking to a schedule, I’d have done it years ago. But you can’t rush these things, even though I know I’m holding things up. Everyone wants the new book. My publishers keep putting it on the calendar. I’m getting pushback from the people who want another movie. . . . At this point, I don’t even think it would matter if it was good. As long as there was something they could put out.”
“But what’s the problem?” I asked, beyond glad that medicine didn’t have any of these issues. You didn’t take an extra-long time to do a heart bypass, or tell someone you weren’t feeling inspired
to fix their brain hemorrhage. You did your job, that was all.
“Well . . .” He cleared his throat. “In terms of where I am with the third book . . . It’s complicated, because in the last one . . .” He paused and looked at me for a moment before saying, “I wrapped up Tamsin’s story at the end. Pretty definitively.”
“Oh,” I said, then paused. “But wasn’t she your main character?”
“Ah,” he said, pointing at me. “Now you’re beginning to see what the problem is.”
• • •
“Biggest fear?” I asked around a yawn, leaning back against the wall. Clark had gone and gotten us pillows after the Skittle sugar buzz had worn off and we’d both started to crash. I had a pillow behind my head and one underneath me. We’d tried to get Bertie out to a more comfortable location for us—like one with couches—but he’d just curled more tightly into a ball and made a little moaning sound when we tried to move him, so we decided to leave him where he was. Now that most of the adrenaline and panic had left the situation, I was feeling how late it was. It was starting to feel like two a.m. at a slumber party, when everyone is sleepy and a little bit punchy (and usually hopped up on sugar) and you’re too tired to tell anything but the truth—that fuzzy half-awake, honest feeling. It was how we’d found out Bri had kissed her second cousin—by accident, she swore—last summer at a wedding.
“Haunted houses,” Clark said around a huge yawn, half-muffled by the hand he raised in front of his mouth.
“Oh,” I said, a little surprised. But I supposed it stood to reason that if you wrote fantasy novels, you believed in things like ghosts. “Well, I guess that makes sense.”
“Not actual haunted houses,” Clark said dismissively. “I don’t believe in those. I mean the kind they have at Halloween, that you can walk through and people jump out and scare you.”