and started to write. And when he wrote the first letter, it was like throwing a switch. The words started to come with reckless abandon, for as he wrote a sentence he could scarcely remember the one that came before, didn’t know the one that would follow. The sentences disappeared behind him as if he were viewing an incredibly long, straight fence that sank into a dot in the distance, and when he turned the other way, the way he was heading, he saw pieces of a fence that hadn’t yet been built.
All he knew was that he was a cistern filled with words and that he had to get them out, and the faster he wrote the quicker he emptied. And he had to reach empty.
When he was like this, he barely had room for thoughts of anything beyond feverishly transcribing the story. But tonight, in the midst of it, it hit him that he hadn’t felt this way even once when writing The Buffalo Hunter. And while the article was progressing nicely, no amount of nonfiction could work the magic either.
Under the table, Thor snored in time with the music, and it was all just noise to CJ. Even so, a page later he found he’d written a dog into the story. It was like transcribing jazz. Writing prose like jazz, he wondered if he ought to write a book about that.
He was writing about Eddie, although he didn’t call him that. And his father was in there too. Beyond these, a darker character lurked. Formless for now, but not void. Graham would work his way into the story in his time.
In the living room, the song changed.
Julie turned out the light. Ben had preceded her to bed by a good hour but she hadn’t been tired. Even now, she wasn’t sure she would fall asleep, but she had to try or else she’d be a zombie trying to see Ben off to work and Jack and Sophie to school.
She exited the living room and started down the hallway, but when she reached Jack’s door she opened it a crack and peered inside. He was a lump under the blankets and from somewhere inside came the sound of light snoring. Knowing how he slept, confident she wouldn’t wake him, she gave in to the impulse to open the door and go in. For a teenage boy, Jack kept his room pretty neat, although she knew some of that came from the discipline Coach Carter instilled in the kids. Before football, she’d have tripped over a half dozen items before making it a few feet into his room.
But perfection was a fleeting animal; she bent down and picked up his shirt.
The moon shone brightly around his shades; she could see everything in her son’s room clearly. He’d been writing earlier, and while she knew she shouldn’t, she crossed silently to his desk and bent down to inspect the handwritten pages. Jack was turning into a talented writer, and she loved that at the same time as she hated it. It reminded her of CJ, even as it teased her with the knowledge that, aside from the Baxter blood, her son had nothing in common with the boy she’d loved so long ago. Of late, many of the things happening in her life had that particular duality.
Ben, of course, encouraged Jack’s interest in writing. And unlike Julie, he didn’t seem at all bothered by how this interest reminded his wife of someone else. When he’d married her, Ben had made a promise that the past would stay the past. Not once had he broken that promise.
He wasn’t dumb. He knew how hard the last few weeks had been for her—how confusing it was to have CJ here. All he’d done was give her the space she needed so that she could figure out how to handle things. The problem was that she didn’t know how to do that. How did a person deal with emotions that had at one time been successfully dealt with when the one dealing with them anew was a different person? Not necessarily a better person, but certainly different.
She stayed in her son’s room for a long while but she never did read any of the words he’d written. When she left the room she knew she wouldn’t sleep. Back in the living room, she searched for some Mark Knopfler amid the CDs, popped in Shangri-la, and turned the volume down so it wouldn’t wake Ben