Chapter 21

Lucretia, Mia, and Roberto continue to stare at her without speaking. Mia is the first to break the silence. “When were you diagnosed?”

Saoirse rubs her temples. “Seven years ago. About two years after Jonathan and I were married.” She can’t say anything else about that time, the nightmare her diagnosis led to. She won’t. “Now that I know how to manage it, it’s not that big of a deal,” she says. “I get dizzy or lightheaded if I try to work out, but I’ve never been much into sports. My doctor back in Jersey reviewed my medications regularly, and I was honest with her about how well I was complying with my treatment.” She glares at Lucretia. “But I wasn’t typically being slipped unregulated hallucinogens without my knowledge.”

Lucretia looks as if she’s going to be sick, and Saoirse is opening her mouth to berate her further when a knock comes at the door. “That would be the food,” Saoirse says dryly.

Lucretia looks down at the floor then back at Saoirse. Tears well in her dark eyes, magnified by her thick glasses. “I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for the food, and we’ll leave,” she whispers. When Saoirse says nothing, Lucretia stands. Mia and Roberto get up to follow.

“Wait,” Saoirse says when Lucretia’s at the living room door. Before she can think about what she’s doing, she continues, “You don’t have to go. I’m not happy about what you did, but against all odds, it turned out okay. My physical health is fine, and, well”—she lets out a disbelieving chuckle—“it apparently worked, because I’m writing again. Better than ever, in fact.”

Lucretia grips the doorframe. “You’re not mad?”

“Oh, I’m mad. And I’m never eating anything that comes from your kitchen ever again. But—” She sighs. “Like I said, everything turned out okay.” She looks at each of them in turn. “And I like you weirdos.” The shock of Lucretia’s admission has Saoirse feeling bold. “I like the séances. I like who I am when I’m around you.” She doesn’t say she hasn’t had real friends since before Jonathan, doesn’t say she hasn’t had her own personality with which to make friends since their wedding.

Lucretia expels a huge sigh of relief. “Oh god. Thank you, Saoirse. Thank you for not being too angry with me. I promise you, I did it out of love. And I won’t do anything like that ever again. No more secrets.”

Saoirse looks down at her lap. If they’re committing to no more secrets, she should do the same. But before she can consider saying more, Mia pushes past Lucretia in the doorway. “I’m going to pay for the food before the delivery guy decides there’s no one here and takes off.”

Once they’re situated around the kitchen table with various cartons, Saoirse considers returning to the previous conversation, considers telling her friends the whole truth. But where would she even begin? Hey, do you want to hear what happened after I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy? Do you want to know what my husband did when I told him I didn’t want to risk having children with a heart condition?

Mia looks up from her curry. “You’re seeing Emmit tomorrow?”

Saoirse recalibrates her thoughts. “I am. He told me we could do whatever I wanted to in the city. Any ideas?”

Mia ignores her question. “What’s he like? Aside from being really into you, which is great, of course.”

Saoirse puts down her fork. “He’s thoughtful, in an almost preternatural way. Intelligent, obviously. And intuitive, even putting aside all that premonition bullshit. He’s confident but not arrogant.” She takes a sip from a can of seltzer. “Why?”

“No reason.”

Roberto scoffs. “Like Mia ever pries into anything without reason.” He looks at Mia. “But seriously, why do you ask? What could Emmit Powell be like, other than a literary genius?”

Mia glowers at him. “It won’t mean anything at this juncture of their relationship.”

“What won’t?” Saoirse pushes.

Mia studies her. “Have you ever googled him?” she asks.

Roberto scoffs again. “Who hasn’t?”

Saoirse ignores Roberto. “Maybe when I read Vulture Eyes last year? I can’t remember. But not after meeting him this past week. Why?”

Mia sighs as if something is paining her, and annoyance flashes through Saoirse like electricity. “No more secrets, right?” she says. “If you have something to say, Mia, please, say it.”

“If you were to google him,” Mia says slowly, as if against her better judgment, “you’d be met with all the things you might expect. A Wikipedia page touting his writing credentials, descriptions of his work, a bibliography. You wouldn’t see a ton of details beneath the headings of ‘early life’ or ‘personal life,’ but that’s not out of the ordinary.” Mia pauses, and Saoirse resists the urge to shout, Get to the point!

“But if you google, say, ‘Does Emmit Powell look familiar?’ or ‘Is Emmit Powell a pen name?’” Mia continues, “you’ll find some increasingly odd entries. A blog post by an independent horror author who swears she was in a writing group twenty years ago with a man who looked like Emmit Powell but whose name was Willem Thomas. References to a series of now-deleted tweets that attempt to discover if ‘Emmit Powell’ is a pen name, to no avail. Reference to another series of now-deleted tweets by a reporter from Entertainment Weekly attempting to track down Emmit’s aunt and uncle, also to no avail.”

Saoirse doesn’t know what to say, but it doesn’t matter; Lucretia speaks first: “Maybe Emmit Powell is a pen name. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is, he’s said in numerous interviews that he doesn’t use a pen name.”

Saoirse shakes her head, wondering if the bewilderment she feels is written on her face. “When did you do all this googling anyway? I only just told you I’d spent time with him.”

Mia waves her hand. “Lucretia said he ran into you on Brown’s campus this past Saturday.”

“And you immediately cyberstalked him?” Saoirse pushes her chair back and stands. She never expected one of her new friends to leave her feeling like she does after a conversation with her father: Exposed. Foolish. Attacked. “Why are you acting like he’s some sort of criminal with something to hide?”

Mia levels her gaze at Saoirse. “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t what?”

“Cyberstalk him.”

“You just said—”

Mia cuts her off. “I didn’t google him to find out the things I just told you. I knew them already. From a woman named Josephine Martin. She was a student in Brown’s Literary Arts program last year. Emmit was her professor. The instant Lucretia told me you’d gone to Carr Haus with Emmit, I recalled what Josephine told me about her MFA last year.”

With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Saoirse sits back down.

“Josephine didn’t want any MFA; she wanted an MFA from Brown, and she applied five years in a row until she got in. Her first semester was, in her words, ‘like a dream,’ and she felt like she was making tremendous progress. Then, her second semester began, and she was paired with her new mentor.” Mia pauses and smooths her already-sleek hair.

“Josephine and I don’t know each other well,” Mia continues. “We met at a Halloween party of Roberto’s.”

“I throw a killer Halloween party,” Roberto adds in a stage whisper.

Mia rolls her eyes. “Anyway, Josephine and I talked that night and realized we had similar interests, explored similar themes in our work. We stayed in touch, beta reading for one another occasionally. When I asked her to exchange work with me last year, she said she would look at what I had, but had nothing to send in return because she’d stopped writing.

“I asked her what had happened. She wrote to me about her second semester mentor, Emmit Powell. Except, he wasn’t Emmit Powell, Josephine said, and because she knew that, she wasn’t invited back. A letter she received from the dean said it was due to the lack of growth she’d shown, but Josephine swore that wasn’t the case.”

Saoirse wraps her fingers around the seltzer can and squeezes. “She knew that he wasn’t Emmit Powell. What the hell does that mean?”

Maddeningly, Mia nods, as if acknowledging the bizarreness of the story she is telling. “Josephine had been in Providence for the five years she’d spent applying to Brown. Working in restaurants, honing her writing. But she was from Virginia. She’d gone to high school at a place called Massanutten Academy, a military school in Woodstock. Apparently, Massanutten is one of two private schools in what has the distinction of being the biggest hick town in Virginia.”

“Meee-ahhh.” The singsong voice Roberto uses barely covers his impatience. “What does any of this have to do with Saoirse’s new boy toy?”

Mia gives Saoirse an apologetic look. “Josephine swore to me that the man whose novel won a Pulitzer Prize, the man who was mentoring her at Brown, was Willem Thomas, someone she went to high school with at Massanutten Academy.

“There’d been some drama with him and another girl at the school—something about Emmit, or, Willem, pushing this girl further than she’d wanted to go in the relationship because it inspired him to write more meaningful poetry—but Josephine said it was mainly gossip, had hardly reached the level of scandal. He was a nerdy Goth kid, nothing more, nothing less. At least, she’d always thought he was nothing more, until she found herself sitting across from him at Brown.

“She didn’t say anything right away, just continued with their one-on-one sessions. She wondered if she could somehow be mistaken—his hair was fuller and darker, his skin clear and his eyebrows more sculpted than in high school—but eventually she couldn’t deny it. At one of their sessions, she said something along the lines of, ‘Willem, I know it’s you, but don’t worry, I get it. If I had your talent, I wouldn’t want to be associated with our white-trash town either.’

“She said Emmit smiled strangely at her but didn’t confirm or deny what she said. They completed their session, and not long after, Josephine received that letter. In addition to ‘not showing growth,’ the letter claimed one of her professors had cited ‘severe derivativeness and increasing ineptitude as a writer.’”

There’s silence for several seconds. No way any of this is true, Saoirse thinks. Then, Please don’t let it be. She grits her teeth. “So, I’m supposed to stop seeing Emmit because some girl you barely know thinks that Emmit is a hick from Virginia in disguise?”

“No,” Mia says. “That’s not what I’m saying. I would never tell you to stop seeing him. To stop seeing anyone. You’re an adult, and you’ve been through a lot. You deserve to make a new life for yourself. You deserve to be happy. I just wanted you to know what I know. That, maybe, he is not who he says he is. And to be careful.”

“Emmit said things like this happened a lot,” Saoirse says. She knows she’s being irrationally defensive, but every nerve in her body is tingling, electric, utterly on edge; for, if Emmit has been hiding something from her, it means she must face two terrible truths: Jonathan—with his mocking, derisive, maddeningly prudent observations—has been right all along, and the quiet, half-buried voice of her own, the one that says she should have listened to her dead husband, is intuitive rather than belittling.

“What happens a lot?” Mia asks, looking confused.

“That students tried weird things all the time to get into the program,” Saoirse clarified. “How do you know this Josephine girl was even a student at Brown? How do you know she’s not some crazy ex, or just plain crazy? And speaking of crazy, let’s say she’s right. That Emmit really is Willem Thomas, who graduated from Hicksville, USA. So what if he wants to shed that identity and start fresh? Do you think the New York Times or USA Today would pay as much attention to a man whose formative experiences growing up included—or was likely even limited to—tipping cows?”

“But if that were the case, why not just admit to it?” Mia asks. “And swear Josephine to secrecy? Why expel her from the program? Why punish her?”

“It seems less a punishment than a threat,” Roberto says, then shoots Saoirse a regretful look. “Like, ‘Admit you know who I am, and see what happens.’”

Saoirse feels her frustration growing. But is it frustration with Mia or with herself? Has she known Emmit isn’t who he appears to be all along and has been trying to prove otherwise? If so, to whom? Herself? Her dead husband? How ludicrous is that?

The thought makes her even more indignant, and she spits out, “So Emmit is in the business of threatening his students? That sounds like some conspiracy theory bullshit to me.” She glares at Mia, knowing she shouldn’t verbalize the thought forming in her mind, but she feels cornered. “Or like the hypervigilant-bordering-on-paranoid opinion of someone who’s been burned by a shitty partner in the past.”

She feels horrible the minute the words leave her mouth. Mia closes her to-go container and looks up. Rather than anger, there’s sorrow on her face, or maybe worry. “If that’s the case, would it be so bad?”

It’s worse that Mia has met her lash-out with kindness. Lucretia’s eyes are on her as well, but when Saoirse turns to look at her, there’s nothing to indicate she’s upset with Saoirse for bringing up Mia’s past.

“I’m sorry,” Mia continues. “I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s just that, if the situation were reversed, I feel like you’d have wanted me to know. Especially considering the weirdness with which this whole thing started: seeing him at the Ath and the coffee shop, his overall intensity. I’m just trying to look out for you. We’re friends.”

Are we? Saoirse wants to ask. Does a friend dump all over another’s happiness at the very moment they’ve grasped it? But there’s still nothing but concern on Mia’s face, and Saoirse feels her frustration, her defensiveness, diminishing, then disappearing altogether. Of course Mia’s only looking out for her. How could she be so nasty in return? And Mia’s right; if Saoirse had known something like what this Josephine girl had said, she would have said something too.

“It’s okay,” Saoirse says. “I’m not going to say anything to him, but I’ll keep my guard up. Who knows, if there’s anything to tell, maybe he’ll relay it without me even asking. Until then, I am going to keep seeing him. I think it’s good for me. It feels good.”

They clean up and move back to the living room, where Lucretia and Saoirse talk about writing and take turns throwing a little mouse toy with a bell inside for Pluto. Mia plucks one of the leather-bound gold-leaf books from the shelves in the corner and thumbs through it, and Roberto lies on the settee and closes his eyes. Eventually, he stirs, stands, and yawns dramatically.

“Time for bed,” Roberto says. “If you two leave with me, I’ll walk you home. Any later, and you’re on your own.” The two women stand without argument and follow Roberto to the foyer, Saoirse trailing—and yawning herself—behind.

They leave with hugs and farewells. No mention of heart conditions, residual hauntings, or literary identity fraud. When she’s shut and locked the door and climbed the stairs, Saoirse checks her phone. Almost midnight. Too late, now, to be tempted to call Emmit, though that doesn’t stop her from wondering what he’s doing. After washing up, she checks her phone again and feels a jolt at the sight of a new text message. She opens the app and feels another, stronger jolt: the text is from Emmit, and it’s long.

... thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,

The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

Are Holy-Land!

I long to see you again, to kiss your face

To hold your hand.

I think it’s time for you and I

To slip between the gravestones

And back in time.

Though she knows the first part of the poem is Poe’s “To Helen,” a quick Google search tells her the last lines were composed by Emmit. Using another man’s words to prove his love to you, Jonathan whispers from her head. And you’ve somehow convinced yourself that the man is not a liar?

Saoirse doesn’t dignify this with a response, though Jonathan’s words linger longer than she’d like. Eventually, she forces them away, like a gust of wind dispersing a tower of chimney smoke. The thought that clears her mind enough for sleep is that it doesn’t matter if Emmit Powell really is Willem Thomas from Virginia. Not if she’s going to keep seeing him.

For she, Saoirse White, carries a secret far larger than a duplicitous name.