“Are you studying to be a nun?” She shook her head and smiled in answer.
“No, my dad died when I was fourteen, my mother died five years before that, so they let me live here. And now they’re my family.” He was intrigued by what she said and how at ease she seemed about it.
“Is it like an orphanage?” He felt sorry for her.
“No, just a convent where the nuns live. They’ve been really good to me for all this time.” It sounded weird to him, but she was a terrific girl, and he helped her carry her bags up the stairs and set them down in the main hall. Three of the nuns rushed over to welcome her home as soon as they saw her. Alex introduced Jack to them, and he disappeared a minute later. He liked her, and would have wanted to see her again if he hadn’t met Pascale in New York and fallen head over heels in love with her. But he wanted to be faithful to her now, and was hoping to get to Paris in the next few months.
—
The nuns were thrilled to have Alex home, and everyone stopped to talk with her during dinner that night. They wanted to know all about the job, the people she had met, her roommates, and if she liked New York and wanted to move there. She told them she didn’t want to go anywhere and was happy to be home, but it was easy to see she’d had a great summer, and had matured a lot. Mother MaryMeg thought it had done her good to get away from them for a while. Alex always returned from the dorm at Boston College like a homing pigeon, and they loved having her there with them, but one day she would need her own life, away from the nuns, and MaryMeg knew that day was coming. Alex didn’t want to think about it, nor did the sisters who loved her. Sister Tommy said over and over she had become her seventh child.
—
Alex met with Bert the first Saturday she was back in Boston. She showed him all the notes for her next book, and told him the direction she wanted to go in. He suggested a few changes, but not many, and she explained that she wanted it to be deeper, more psychological, and even more complicated than her previous books. The plot she had outlined so far was ambitious, but Bert thought she could handle it. He was happy to see her, the summer had seemed endless without her. He missed their conversations and Saturday lunches where he drank too much wine after they worked, and she scolded him about it. She knew him well enough now to do so and worried about him.
She started school two days later and was busy going to all her classes, meeting the professors, and organizing her work and assignments. She didn’t get a chance to work on the book until two weeks later, but she had set up a schedule that would allow her to do her schoolwork and write by staying up late and getting up early. It involved very little sleep, but she thought it was worth it. And it left no time whatsoever for a social life. She explained her schedule to Bert the next time they met, and he was concerned.
“Do you think that’s sensible? You’re only young once, you know. You need to leave some time for fun in there. This is your last year of college and your last chance to be a kid and kick up your heels and get away with it. You don’t have to be in such a hurry to get the book done.” It was her fifth book, a major accomplishment.
“But I want to,” she said seriously. The writing was what she loved most, and the work for school was her duty. Writing her book was all the fun she needed. She was singularly devoted with a burning desire to put words on the page and create a world of her own making.
“What if you meet a cute boy this year? Your whole schedule will go to hell in a handbasket,” he teased her.
“No, it won’t,” she said firmly, with a will of iron in her eyes. He had seen it before and been impressed by it. She knew what she wanted, and was willing to pay the price. Most people weren’t. Only real writers were willing to sacrifice everything for it, and he had met only a few of those in his lifetime. Alex was the most determined writer he had ever met. “The writing comes first, then school, and boys after. And too bad if they don’t understand that. And I haven’t met any cute boys anyway.” She still felt cheated by her experience with Scott, the teaching assistant who had been so jealous of her the year before. She didn’t want to run into another guy like him, although she’d be wiser now, and more alert to passive-aggressive behavior and manipulations. He had been her baptism by fire into the world of jealous male writers. And if he’d known about the book she’d published, he would have been infinitely worse. Bert was sure of that, and had warned her of it. But Alex had no intention of telling anyone about the books she wrote under the name of Alexander Green. She was determined that no one except her agent, Bert, and the nuns would ever know about them. They were her deep secret, the hidden life that fulfilled her.
Despite Bert’s misgivings, Alex managed her Herculean schedule for all of the first semester, and was getting great grades and making good headway on the book, even faster than the last one. Bert kept telling her not to rush it and to take her time, but she had a writing style that wanted to lunge forward with the story and was hard to put the reins on. She pulled the reader along with her at breakneck pace, as she whipped them through the story and surprised and confused them again and again. Her fans and the critics loved it.
She had just turned in her last paper before Christmas break when her second book, Darkness, came out, just in time for holiday sales, which Alex and her publisher hoped would help the book. She was packing some things to take to the convent with her when someone came to tell her that she had a call on the phone in the lobby of the dorm, and she rushed down a flight of stairs to get it. It was Rose calling from New York and she sounded breathless.
“I have a Christmas gift for you, Alex. Darkness is on the Times list a week from Sunday.” She knew because the list was released to the trade ten days early. “Number ten, but you’re on it. Merry Christmas!”
Alex’s face was wreathed in smiles as she tried to contain herself and could barely keep from screaming. At times of great excitement or elation, she turned into a kid again, and she could hardly wait to tell the nuns.
“Something important seems to be happening with this one,” Rose reported to her, “and I don’t think it’s just due to Christmas sales. The critics are all crazy about it. Publishers Weekly called it the best new read of the decade, and your publisher says sales are going through the roof.”
Alex was beaming.