“Well, if you really need the excuse, I’m sure whomever is sitting next to me will gladly switch for your reclining seat with extra leg room.”
Trevor doesn’t laugh at my joke. Instead, he eyes the queue. A handful of passengers are lined up, though probably not the number needed to fill the front cabin of the massive plane tethered to gate. He grabs his rolling suitcase and points at me with his free hand. “Look after that book for me. Be right back.”
Trevor grabs an attendant’s attention. He points in my direction twice during the conversation, erasing any doubt as to what he’s doing. Embarrassment at my unintended role as an upgrade beggar encourages me to open a blank document on my laptop and pretend to work. I should think of something to say on my panel, though I have little idea what made my first book so much more “believable” and “gripping” than my others. Even after I wrote it, I’d largely faked my way through the bookstore tour. I’ve always felt as though another version of me penned the novel or that I’d been a conduit for some outside storytelling intelligence that had quickly moved on, leaving me with a bestseller and no concrete idea of how to repeat it.
The story itself wasn’t that novel. Drowned Secrets told the tale of a young girl whose alcoholic father had been sexually molesting her. The mother finds out one summer and hits him in the back of the head with a shovel beside their pool. He falls in, concussed, and drowns. Later, the mom buries the murder weapon beneath the bushes. There aren’t too many twists and turns. No gotcha moments. The perspective, I think, was what hooked the readers. My narrator was Bitsy, the abused twelve-year-old. Reviewers crowed about how I’d really gotten into her head.
Trevor’s step has added swagger as he returns. I pick up the Hall novel and hold it out to him, a lead weight in return for his trouble. For the first time I notice the cover: a Southern gothic image of a house with a child waiting on the porch. I wouldn’t have wanted to read it before Trevor’s scathing review.
“Will you be needing this?”
“I was able to upgrade you, sans charge.”
“That never works for me. It’s the accent, isn’t it?”
He winks. “Gets you Americans every time.”
*
The business-class seats are wide and deep. No one tells me not to recline before takeoff or to stow my electronic devices. Instead, the flight attendant assures us that the food service will start as soon as the cabin doors close and asks for cocktail orders.
Remembering how violently three drinks had mixed with my medication, I am about to say, “Nothing for me,” when Trevor orders a red wine. I must look shocked by the hour because he clears his throat and says, “Conferences make me a bit nervous. So much selling.”
His sentiments so agree with my own that I tell the flight attendant to “please make that two.”
As we wait for the drinks, Trevor and I gush over the latest releases from mutual favorite crime writers who, in our humble opinions, deserve all the money they’ve made. My editor is the only man I’ve ever met that enjoys fiction as much, if not more, than I do. He’s the Calvin Johnson of literary references. It’s impossible to make a quote that he won’t catch. When the wine appears, conversation moves on from respected writers to overrated hacks. We trade names, hipster teens pitching pebbles at the popular kids. Trevor is mean in his straight-man British monotone. He’s always had an uncanny ability to cut with bluntness.
Two minibottles of Barolo arrive that I am sure would never have made it to the back of the plane. As I sip my drink, Trevor turns the conversation to my book. “How is the writing coming?”
He probably wants to hear that I’m a third done. But I can’t deliver that line with a straight face. A more responsible person would have declined her editor’s offer of first class and sequestered herself in steerage, laptop open on the dining tray. “The setup is taking me a bit longer than I thought.”
I glance over Trevor’s shoulder into the aisle. The flight attendant’s backside sticks into the walkway as she passes a bag of chips to a passenger. If Trevor is going to grill me about my story, I need a clear head. Water not wine.
“I wanted to apologize for being so negative about your idea before.”
I stop trying to make eye contact with the airline employee. Trevor looks at me from beneath half-lowered lids. His dark gaze draws me in, like the mouth of a cave. “I think affairs are a sore spot for me after the divorce.”
“I always meant to ask what happened with Kyra. But I wasn’t sure you wanted to talk about it.”
I’ve already heard the story. Manhattan is a small town of eight million. A friend with a son in Trevor’s daughter’s pre-K class shared that there’d been a scandal with a mom trading her husband for another parent. The drama had coincided with Trevor’s separation.
Trevor scratches his scalp and shifts in his chair. His wounds have not healed. “I’m not sure that I know what happened, really. Maybe she got bored. She started picking at everything, saying I didn’t do enough around the house, give her enough attention. My head was always buried in a book.” The hand that had fussed with his head falls to his tray table. “Anyway, not long after we separated, she shacked up with one of the dads at Olivia’s school.”
I try to act surprised, dropping my jaw and shaking my head, mimicking how Trevor performs shock.
“She swears nothing happened beforehand. Still, there’s emotional infidelity, isn’t there?”
I squeeze Trevor’s hard shoulder. The gesture is a common platonic show of support. It’s supposed to be safe. But the truth is, I don’t feel safe around this man anymore. His confession—or maybe the show of vulnerability—stirs something in my subconscious. It’s as though he understands me in a way that no one else has or ever will. Part of me aches to tell him this. The other part of me knows that I’ve consumed too much wine, am pissed at David, and am on a cocktail of hormones.
“Want me to kill her off in a book?”
Trevor smirks, a devilish half smile that sets fire to his eyes. “Well,” he chuckles, “somebody always has to die.”
*
I don’t see Trevor after check-in. He has multiple panels to moderate, more famous authors to ply with alcohol. I, on the other hand, am not expected anywhere until my three o’clock slot at the signing table. How to kill the time?
A check-in packet lies on my hotel bed. The spiral-bound book weighs as much as Trevor’s maligned novel and includes a twenty-page outline of the various author discussions happening every hour, on the hour, for the next several days. I don’t look at it. After a decade, the panel topics are all choppy remixes of the same ol’ tunes. Most veteran authors tour the city until called upon for their own promotional activities.
I pull back the long blackout curtains and look outside. The view is of downtown New Orleans, though not the famous French Quarter. That section of town, with its painted buildings and wrought-iron balconies, is too small to host a gathering of MWO’s size. The convention hotel is on the waterfront, between the city’s main expo center and a warehouse selling Mardi Gras supplies. If I press my head to the glass and look left, I can almost see the Mississippi.
The buildings beyond look far away. Foreboding. The king-sized mattress, on the other hand, appears inviting, made up with bleached-white linens and mint chocolates on the pillows, penned in by the four walls surrounding it and the door to the en suite bathroom. My laptop rests on the nightstand. A pink chaise sits to the right of the bed. I angle it toward the window and grab my computer.