# Untitled The page count was 1,431. She had begun the morning meaning to finish, which was what she had begun every morning meaning, for a long time now. Outside the north-facing window the light was the color of wet paper. The beach stone held the printout in place. The index cards along the wall, in her own hand, gave the names of people she had been thinking about for fifteen years — Edith, Mr. Halloran, the woman who came in every Thursday for a paperback mystery, the boy who delivered bread to the bookshop in the autumn of 1979. She set her hands on the keys. The trick to finishing, she had once written, was to know which sentence the book had been waiting for. The sentence the book had been waiting for was always shorter than you thought, and almost always a sentence you had already written somewhere else. *What to Cut* was the title of the essay. They taught it in MFAs. They quoted the paragraph about how the cut sentence is the one the reader feels most. She had written that essay at thirty-four. She had been short and exquisite then. Two novels, slim as missals, the kind you could read on a single train. She typed: *In the spring he had begun appearing at the door of the shop, never crossing the threshold, only standing.* *He* was new. There had been no he. The novel did not have a he in this position. She would have to insert him. She would have to go back to chapter four and seed him. She would have to give him a wife or a house or a reason to be a he. She kept typing. By midmorning the new he had a name — Mr. Bender — and ran the hardware store. He had a niece who was getting married. The wedding required two paragraphs of dress. The dress required a memory, and the memory required a season, and by lunch she had written eleven pages and the page count was 1,442. When the book was done, she would. The thought had a shape now, the way a coastline has a shape, and she could trace it with her eyes closed. *When the book was done, she would* — and the thought trailed off into white, which was the only honest place for it to go. Because she had had the other thought, the one underneath, and she had been carrying it around like something fragile in a pocket. She had had it in the writing room a year and a half ago, in November, on a Tuesday afternoon. The thought had arrived, complete: when she finished the book, she would die. And if she never finished the book, she would not die. It was nothing she could explain. It was not a feeling. It was a fact about the world that no one else had been told. She had written it down once, in the small notebook in the lower drawer of the desk. *If I finish this book I will die.* The handwriting was hers. She had not opened the drawer in months. The notebook was still in there, with the sentence at the top of an otherwise empty page. By mid-afternoon she had written another nine pages. She did not delete any of them. Mr. Bender had a brother now. The page count was 1,451. --- She had been at this for fifteen years. The two early novels, slim and prizewinning, had been written quickly in her early thirties. She remembered nothing about writing them. They had felt like things she had shaken loose. The current book she had been shaking loose for fifteen years and what came loose now was always more book. The first decade her mother had read every draft. The second decade — well, she was in the second decade. Her mother no longer could. People still asked. At dinners, at the rare reading she still gave, at the hallway outside the seminar room — *And the new novel?* They asked it tenderly, like asking after an ailing relative. *Almost done,* she said. *Almost.* They smiled with a kind of held breath. The novel had become a fixture of her reputation precisely because it did not exist. Some part of her — she was not stupid — knew this. The unfinished book had given her a name no finished book ever could. She was the woman who was almost done. She was the woman with the masterpiece in the next room. She had stopped traveling. The workshop was the last thing she still went out for; the dinners and panels and short residencies had peeled off, one by one, in the years before the insight, and after the insight they had simply not come back. Paul had stopped expecting her at supper years ago. He ate at six. She came down at nine, or she came down at eleven, and he had left her a plate. There were nights she did not come down at all and she would find the plate in the morning, covered, in the refrigerator, with a note in his hand about how to reheat it. They had been married twenty-five years. There was a renovation, ten years ago. The writing room had been gutted to the studs. She had taken the older drafts and the boxes of correspondence and the trial chapters and the notebooks, and she had driven them to her mother's bungalow and stored them in the closet of the back bedroom. She had meant to bring them home when the renovation was finished. She had not gotten around to it. The boxes, in her mind, were still at her mother's, filed in a kind of mental cabinet labeled *to be retrieved.* She had not retrieved them. --- Her mother had been dying since spring. She had been sick longer, but spring was when the word *hospice* had moved into the house, and after that the word stayed. The bungalow had been arranged around the sick bed: the bed downstairs in what had been the dining room, the dining-room books re-shelved in the kitchen, the hospice nurse arriving Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. Her mother was lucid in the mornings. By three o'clock she drifted. She still wanted to read. Her hands, lately, had been having trouble with weight. Helen visited Tuesdays. Sometimes Saturdays. She brought her mother things from the bakery, picture books from the library when reading novels became too much, and once a small radio. Her mother had been Helen's first and most patient reader for thirty years. She had read every draft of every book Helen had written. She had read the slim novels in the nineties, in galleys, before anyone else had. She had read the early drafts of the current book. She had loved Edith, the woman who ran the bookshop. She had loved the autumn of the bookshop. She had loved the small Pennsylvania town. She had been waiting for fifteen years to read the finished book. She had not asked, lately. That was the thing that frightened Helen most. --- The Tuesday after Mr. Bender, Helen printed the manuscript. The printer took most of the morning. She had to feed it new reams twice. The bricks of paper accumulated on the floor by the desk, four of them, then five. The number on the cover page when she finally ran the title sheet was 1,481. She put the bricks into a banker's box, the only thing she had that was big enough. The box was heavy in the way a child is heavy. She had to set it on the kitchen counter to put on her coat. Her mother's house was a fifteen-minute drive across town. Helen carried the box up the front walk in stages — to the porch, to the doorbell, then setting it down to ring. The hospice nurse, Marisol, opened the door. Marisol looked at the box and then at Helen and said *oh,* and then Marisol smiled. *She'll be so pleased,* Marisol said. Helen carried the box into the dining room. Her mother was propped up against three pillows. Her eyes were closed when Helen came in. She opened them slowly. *Sweetheart,* she said. The dining room smelled of toast and something medicinal and wool. Helen set the box on the foot of the bed, near her mother's blanketed feet. She lifted the lid. *Oh,* said her mother, the same syllable as Marisol's, in a different key. She put both her hands out and Helen lifted the top brick of pages from the box and laid it on her mother's lap. Her mother almost could not hold it. Her arms went down with the weight, slowly, until the pages were flat against her thighs, and she laughed — a small dry laugh — and she said *what have you been feeding it.* *I'll give you a little at a time,* Helen said. *No, no. Bring me all of it. Marisol, can you bring the side table closer.* Marisol moved the side table next to the bed. Marisol moved the brick from her mother's lap to the side table and arranged the rest of the bricks beside it. Her mother put her hand on the top of the stack. *Helen,* she said. *Helen.* Her hand was the smaller hand it had been in middle age, with new lengths of vein along the back. *Thank you.* Helen drove home. She did not put the radio on. --- She came back the following Tuesday. Her mother had been reading. Helen could see this immediately: the topmost brick had a bookmark a third of the way through, and there was a pen on the bedside table and a sheet of paper with notes in her mother's penciled hand. Her mother had taken notes on her novels for thirty years. The notes had always been small and reader-like — *I wonder why he says this here,* or *I cried at this,* or *Edith's hair is brown in chapter three and I think it was red before.* *How is it,* Helen said. *It's lovely,* her mother said. She said it the way she had always said *it's lovely* to a thing she meant. Helen sat in the chair by the bed. Her mother put her hand on the bookmark and her mother frowned, very slightly, the frown that had always meant she was finding her way back into a book. *Tell me again,* her mother said. *Who is Mr. Bender.* *The hardware store.* *The hardware store.* *Yes.* Her mother's eyes went away briefly, and came back. *I haven't met him.* *He's new.* *Did he used to be in there?* *No.* Her mother took her hand off the bookmark and put it on the blanket. *Where has the bookshop gone, Helen.* There was a long pause. Helen heard Marisol moving in the kitchen, the soft hard sound of a cabinet closing. Her mother was looking at her without any expression at all. Her mother was looking at her with the patience of a person who had read every book Helen had ever written, who had loved them, who had waited fifteen years for this one, and who was now telling her the most polite truth available. *It's still in there,* Helen said. *Of course it is,* her mother said. Her mother shifted the bookmark slightly. *I'll keep going,* she said. *I'm sure I'll find it.* And she looked down at the pages on her lap and her eyes welled, very small, the way a person's eyes well when they are not going to cry but the body has not been told. Helen went home. --- That night Paul was at the kitchen table with a roll of plans spread out and the lamp pulled down low. The kitchen was small and warm and smelled of the soup he had made for himself. Through the window above the sink she could see the maple at the side of the yard. It had lost most of its leaves and the bare branches reached into the streetlight in a way she had not noticed for some weeks. She had not been looking out of windows. She poured herself a glass of water. *Long day,* he said, without looking up. *Long.* He was tracing something with a yellow pencil — a roof line, she thought, or a ceiling. He had finished a small house that month for a couple in their forties. He had told her about the house, briefly, the previous Sunday. She had not retained the details. He drew houses for clients and the houses got built and the clients moved in. This was what he did. He had been doing it for as long as she had been writing the book. *Did you eat,* he said. *I'll have something later.* He nodded without looking up. There was a pencil eraser between his teeth. He took it out. He said: *Did you know your mother stopped driving last spring?* He said it without looking up. He said it the way a person says *did you know it's supposed to rain* — a piece of information that has been around for a while. Helen set the glass of water down on the counter. *I — * *Marisol mentioned it,* he said. *I went over there to fix the washer in May. Your mother asked me, while I was there, if I would drop the car at the dealer for her. She wasn't going to drive again.* *You didn't tell me.* *She asked me not to.* He looked up then. He had a pencil mark on his cheek where he had rubbed it. He looked at Helen the way he had been looking at her, she realized, for years now: with patience, and without expectation, and without any sharpness, just the long slow gaze of a man who had been with a woman who was not mostly there. He went back to the plans. She did not ask him anything else. She went up the stairs and into the writing room and shut the door. She did not turn on the lamp. --- In the morning she sat down at the desk and tried to delete Mr. Bender. She put the cursor at the start of the chapter. She held shift. She moved the cursor to the end. The fifty pages went blue. She put her finger over the delete key. She could not. She sat for a long time with the chapter highlighted in blue. The blue, she noticed, was the blue of an old computer error. It was the blue of being told something had gone wrong and to please reach out for assistance. After a while she let the cursor go and the blue retreated to a single line. She closed the file. She opened a new file. She began a chapter about Mr. Bender's brother. The page count, by night, was 1,512. When she went down to the kitchen, Paul had put a plate in the refrigerator for her. She did not eat it. She went up to bed. He was already asleep. She lay next to him in the dark for a long time. If she finished the book, she would die. If she did not finish, she would not. She had been correct about this, she felt, for a year and a half. She had been correct about it from the moment of the thought. The world had not contradicted her since. Her mother was dying and she was not. The book was not finished and she was not. In the dark she could hear Paul's breathing, slow and shallow, and she could hear the maple's branches where the wind moved them, and she could hear, a long way off, somebody's dog. --- She drove to her mother's the following Tuesday. Her mother was thinner. Her mother said *come here, come here,* and pointed at the closet of the back bedroom and said *there's a box of pictures in there I want, the brown shoebox, on the second shelf.* Helen went into the back bedroom. She turned on the light. She opened the closet door. The closet smelled of cedar and her mother's old wool coats. The coats had not been worn in five years and one of them was the green one Helen had given her in 1996. The shelves climbed up to the ceiling. On the second shelf, behind a hatbox, was the brown shoebox. Helen lifted it out. As she did her elbow knocked something. She looked down. On the floor of the closet, half-hidden by the hem of the green coat, was the cardboard box from her renovation. The top flaps were still folded. Her own writing was on the side, in black marker, in a hand from ten years ago: NOVEL DRAFTS — DO NOT DISCARD. She brought the brown shoebox to her mother. Her mother put her hands on the lid and did not open it. *I'm tired,* her mother said. *Let me look at these later.* Helen went back into the back bedroom. She closed the door behind her and she sat on the floor and she pulled the cardboard box across the carpet and she opened the flaps. The first thing in the box was the printout of the novel from 2014. The cover sheet said *NOVEL — DRAFT 11.* The page count below the title was 312. She held it in her two hands and she could feel that it was a different object from the brick she had given her mother. It was a book. It had the weight a book has. It said *NOVEL — DRAFT 11* and the next page said *Chapter One,* and *Chapter One* began *Edith opened the bookshop on the first Tuesday of October.* She read it on the floor of the closet for a long time. She stopped only when her legs went numb and she had to stand up. She took the draft to the kitchen and she sat at the kitchen table and she kept reading. The hospice nurse came in at four to administer something and to say something kind, and Helen looked up and nodded and looked back down. By six she had read all of it. It was the book. It was the book she had been writing, for fifteen years, except that it was the book before she had started writing it. It was already there. She had been writing past it. She did not drive home that night. She went into the living room and she lay on the couch and she pulled an afghan over her shoulders. She could hear her mother breathing in the next room. The breath was a long breath in and a long breath out and a small interval between. The current draft, on her laptop, was 1,512 pages. The 2014 draft, on the floor by the couch, was 312. --- In the morning she put the kettle on and she carried her laptop and the current printout and the 2014 printout to the kitchen table. She set the three things side by side. The kettle whistled. She made coffee. She sat down. She reached, by reflex, for something to weigh the printout against — there had always been the beach stone on her own desk — and her hand closed on a saucer. She set the saucer on top of the pages. The hospice nurse came in at eight and went past her into the dining room and did not interrupt. There was a pen in Helen's bag. There was also, as she remembered when she put her hand into the bag, the small notebook with the sentence in it. *If I finish this book I will die.* Her own handwriting. She did not take the notebook out. She put her hand on the pen. She began. The first thing she cut was Mr. Bender. She found the chapter. She highlighted the chapter. She held the delete key down. The chapter went away. Mr. Bender's brother went away. The wedding went away. The dress went away. The page count, when she had finished, was 1,463. She had cut almost fifty pages and the manuscript was still ridiculous. She kept going. She cut the chapters in which Edith remembers her mother. There were three of them. They were good chapters. They were chapters she had been proud of. They had nothing to do with the book the book was. She held the delete key down and she watched the pages go. The page count went to 1,287. Her hand was shaking and she did not notice. She cut the historical aside about the founding of the town. It had been in there for five years. Mary Ellen, her editor, had once written *we should talk about this passage* in the margin of the 2018 draft, and she had not talked about it with Mary Ellen, and she had defended it, in her head, ever since. She held the delete key down. The page count went to 1,178. She cut the subplot about the customer's affair. The page count went to 980. She cut the year-long flashback to Edith's college roommate. The page count went to 893. She cut the second-person interlude. The page count went to 845. She cut, also, the chapter where Edith goes to the city, which had been in every draft for a decade and was not in the 2014 draft. The page count went to 740. She picked up the pen. She marked, on the printout, sections to cut by hand. Whole pages got slashed through with the pen. Whole *chapters* got slashed through. She moved fast now. She was aware that she was moving toward the moment she could not move past, and she felt the moment ahead of her like a shape in low water. The page count went to 651. She kept going. She cut the dream. She cut the second dream. She cut the long dialogue scene with the priest. She cut the chapter that retold a chapter. She cut the chapter that retold the chapter that retold a chapter. The page count went to 580. She did not stop. She cut the weather. She cut the war. She cut the thing about the girl on the bicycle. She cut the long passage about Edith's mother's house, which she now understood was about her own mother's house and which she had no right to. She cut, when she found it, the entire description of the bookshop's back room, twelve pages, written in 2017 in a single feverish night, that she had loved more than almost anything she had ever written and that the book had not asked her to write. The page count went to 512. She sat back. Her shoulder was a knot of pain. The kitchen smelled of the coffee she had made and forgotten. The hospice nurse passed through, looked at the table, did not say anything, went out through the back door for a cigarette. From the dining room came the slow long breath of her mother, the in and the out and the small space. She took the pen and she went through the printout one more time and she cut the last hundred pages by hand. The page count was 412. She had cut as much as she could cut. What was left was the book without its ending. She picked up the pen again. The pen was a Bic Cristal, blue, the kind they sell in plastic sleeves of ten. It had been in her bag for years. On the back of the title sheet she wrote, by hand, in her own handwriting, the final sentence. It was a short sentence. She did not say it out loud. She set the pen down. She listened. The refrigerator hummed. A car went past the house and then was gone. In the next room her mother breathed in, and breathed out, and waited a small moment, and breathed in again. Death did not come. She sat with her hand on the table for a long time. She watched her hand. The hand was the hand it had been that morning. The kitchen was the kitchen it had been. Through the window, in her mother's small fenced yard, the late light fell on a folding chair that had been left out. She picked up the printout, and she picked up the laptop, and she went into the dining room. --- Her mother's eyes were closed. Helen sat in the chair by the bed. *Mom,* she said. Her mother's eyes opened. They were the watery clear they had been all year. Helen turned the printout right-side up on her lap. *I finished it.* Her mother smiled with one corner of her mouth. *Read it to me,* she said. *I can't hold it.* Helen read. She read the last forty pages aloud, which was the ending she had cut to and the new sentence she had written. Her voice was the voice she used to use, in the bedroom of the bungalow when she was twelve, reading to her mother who had been ironing in the next room. Her mother lay with her eyes closed and her hand on the blanket. Twice her mother smiled, very small. Once her mother lifted a hand and let it fall. When Helen got to the last sentence she read it slowly. She set the pages down. The room was quiet. Her mother kept her eyes closed for a moment and then opened them. *I always wondered,* her mother said, *what happened to Mr. Halloran.* Helen put her hand on her mother's hand. Her mother's hand was very warm and very light. *I did too,* Helen said. Her mother closed her eyes. *Now I know,* she said. She held Helen's hand. After a while her hand slackened in Helen's, and she was asleep, and Helen sat with her for an hour without moving. --- Her mother died on Friday morning, before light. Helen had spent the night on the couch in the living room. Marisol came in at six and went into the dining room, and Marisol came out a few minutes later and sat down on the couch beside Helen and took her hand. The two of them sat together for a while. The light came up slowly behind the curtains. After a while Marisol said *do you want me to call anybody,* and Helen said *Paul.* Paul came. They stood in the dining room. Helen said the things you say. Paul made the calls. By noon the people had come who came when somebody died, and by evening they had gone. Helen drove home in her own car, behind Paul's, with the box of cut pages on the passenger seat and the printout of the finished book on top of the box. The 2014 draft she had left on her mother's kitchen table. --- The house was warm when she came in. Paul had turned the heat up. She set the box on the floor in the entry hall. She walked down the hall to the kitchen. She did not open the door of the writing room as she passed it. The door was closed. Paul was at the counter, with the kettle. He looked up when she came in. *Do you want to eat,* he said. *Yes,* she said. He made an omelet. He made one for himself and one for her. The eggs were good, plain eggs from the farm down the road they had been buying from for years. He put the plates on the kitchen table and they sat. Through the window above the sink the maple was bare, every leaf gone, the branches at this hour holding nothing. She tasted the eggs. She tasted the salt and the butter and the thin thread of pepper at the back. She had not tasted food in some time. Paul ate slowly. He set his fork down. He drank his water. He looked at her. *Are you warm enough,* he said. *Yes,* she said. She was. She ate her eggs.