I had lots of help along the way, especially when it came to getting the facts about Poultney, Vermont. To that end, I would like to extend my appreciation to Kitty Galante, who is without a doubt Poultney’s most ardent fan; my dearest friend, Kemi McShane (who checked on the maple syrup statistics at least three times); and all the fabulous patrons at Perry’s Main Street Eatery, especially the Table of Knowledge. (Let’s hear it for creamed chipped beef!)
Roland Merullo gave me invaluable advice when I was stuck, something that I return to again and again. Thank you, friend. Rachel VanBlankenship read at least eight drafts of this book—and found new ways to encourage me every time. You’re one in a million, girl.
My final—and most important—debt of gratitude goes to someone I met only once. Let me explain:
Two-thirds of the way into this book, I lost it. Literally. My bag, which contained my bright blue flash drive (which contained the only draft of the book), was stolen out of my car. In less than five minutes, my wallet, driver’s license, a small chunk of money, my high school students’ grade books (all 109 of them), and 256 pages of the newest novel I had promised my agent had disappeared. I wept and ranted, swore and cursed. I called the police department and filed a report. Over the next two days, I wrote down as much of the plot as I could remember (not as easy as one might think) and all the bits of dialogue I could still place. (Again, not so easy.) I prayed to Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things. And I made a promise to myself to back up everything I wrote in the future on my hard drive.
On the third day, I received a phone call from the police department. They gave me the name and phone number of someone who had found my bag in a ditch. It had been rummaged through, and it was wet, but the caller said that it looked as if everything was still in there. I drove to the address like a bat out of hell. A shoeless older man, dressed in a blue flannel shirt and jeans, opened the door. He had a lazy eye and a garbled voice. His name was Thomas. He walked every morning across the mountain behind his house and then back again. Yesterday—he pointed to my bag—he had found this. I leaped toward it, yelping, and pawed through the contents. Every single thing was in there—except the bright blue flash drive.
I turned to Thomas, desperate, and begged him to take me to the place on the mountain where he had found the bag. If I could just look around myself…maybe the flash drive had fallen out. Maybe, somehow, I could find it. Thomas—who I guessed to be in his late seventies—had never heard of anything called a flash drive. He had no idea what one looked like. But he said he’d take me. He had a red beat-up truck. Between us, chunks of foam peeked out from beneath the split upholstery and Doritos bags littered the floor. We drove eight or nine miles along a rutted, desolate road without talking until he finally stopped and pulled over.
It should be noted here that later on, as I relayed this chain of events to a few family members and got to this part of the story, they gasped and shook their heads. What was I thinking, getting into a strange man’s car and driving up the side of a mountain on a deserted road? I could have been murdered! Chopped up into a million little pieces! And no one would have ever found me! In hindsight, I guess they were right. But at the time all I could think was this: my book was out there. Somewhere. And I had to find it.
We got out of the car. The sky was a sheet of white above us. It was so cold that I could see my breath. I wrapped my arms around my waist and ducked against the wind. In my haste to get to Thomas’s house, I had run out without my winter coat. Thomas pointed to the ditch running along the left side of the road. It was filled with decaying diapers, rusted doorknobs, Burger King bags, and split tires. There was even an iron buried under a pile of weeds. Side by side, we looked for a tiny, ChapStick-sized instrument, kicking garbage over with our feet, pawing through mounds of dirt and leaves. After twenty minutes, I was shaking so badly from the cold that I told Thomas we had to go back. By then, something had resigned itself within me. I had my skeleton of retrieved notes back at the house. A few salvageable pieces of dialogue. As hard as it was going to be, I would just have to start over.
I said good-bye to Thomas, thanked him profusely for everything, and went home.
I worked until very, very late that night, trying to get the story started again. It was a laborious, agonizing process, made even more difficult by the fact that Julia and Sophie seemed to be a hundred miles away. My head was crowded with other things, namely an old man who took long walks and didn’t speak very much. I stopped trying to find the girl’s voices that night and began to write about him instead.