that night. No one had read a word of what she’d written, she hadn’t told anyone about it, and as usual, Liz was scared. Maybe this book was the final sign that she had no talent, and was losing her mind. It wasn’t a novel, it wasn’t a children’s book. It was a fantasy that had leaped straight out of her head onto the page. And she worked furiously as the sun came up, the day she was leaving on the trip.
Sophie and Carole had come out from the city the weekend before, packed their clothes for the boat, and left their suitcases with her. Liz had packed her own bags then too. And six suitcases were standing ready by the door. She was meeting the girls at the airport at ten that night, with all their bags, for a midnight flight. She had to leave the house in Connecticut at eight. And much to her own amazement, she had worked for fifteen hours straight when she stopped at seven. It had been like that for six weeks. She was being driven by the book. She had thought about asking Sarah to read it on the trip, but what if she hated it? Liz couldn’t stand the thought of another failure.
Sarah had been writing literary novellas and short stories for years. They were of a high intellectual caliber, and were published by an academic press. No one had ever heard of them, but Liz had read them and they were good. Her style was reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates, who also taught at Princeton and was Sarah’s literary idol. It would be hard for Liz to show her little fantasy book to Sarah, but she didn’t know what to do with it, and she hadn’t had the guts to call her agent, and maybe never would. But when she stopped writing at seven o’clock that night, she knew that she had done all she could. She printed it out and stuck the manuscript in her hand luggage with her laptop and then went upstairs to take a shower. She had an hour to get ready and leave the house. An airport shuttle was picking her up.
As she stood in the shower, she thought about what she’d written and prayed that it was good. It probably wasn’t, but she knew that she had done her very best. That was something at least. In her dreams, she wrote a book that people cared about and understood, that was as meaningful to them as it was to her. Maybe this was it. The terrifying part would be showing it to someone else. She hadn’t even told the girls what she’d been doing. She’d had too many false starts, stories that went nowhere, outlines she never followed, half manuscripts and unfinished poems that lay in drawers. This time at least she’d finished it, and in a mere six weeks. The story had poured out of her like falling pearls, scattered everywhere and then gathered up in her hands like gems.
The girls had helped her pick her clothes for the boat, and shared some of their own with her, since all three of them wore the same size. She had two old bikinis she always wore, and her girls went topless in Europe, like everyone else their age. Liz could have too, and had the body for it, even at forty-four, but she didn’t think her mother would approve. Having two babies at a young age had left no mark on her. But at her age, she knew she was expected to be respectable, no matter how fit and trim her body was. And there would be lots of crew around. For the rest of what she’d brought, they were either old summer clothes of her own, or things she’d borrowed from her girls. She had nothing fabulous with her and didn’t really care. As usual, Amanda would be their fashion plate, which seemed like too much trouble to Liz. But she knew that her brother liked having a wife he could show off.
Liz was ready right on time, and then realized she had forgotten to leave an outfit out for the plane. She looked in her own closet and found nothing, and then headed to Sophie’s, and looked through the things she still kept at home and hadn’t packed. She found a pair of old white shorts, a white cotton shirt in her own closet, and an old pair of sandals she’d forgotten that