Page 2

Chapter Two

I follow a flock of crackling grackles to the expansive deck offering breathtaking views of Lake Michigan. My grandmother had it updated and expanded before she passed, and now a sandy-colored Trex deck blends into the bluff and beach below it, arcing and edging out forever, making you feel as if you are floating in the air.

The guests murmur, stunned at the unobstructed views.

“It looks just like the ocean,” a woman says to me.

“But better,” I say. “No salt, no sharks.”

Grey Grayling moves to the front of the deck and raises her glass of champagne. The crowd instantly quiets. I’m convinced Grey could part Lake Michigan right now if she simply lifted her hand.

Grey was my parents’ first big literary find a decade ago.

Let me rephrase that: she was my parents’ only literary find.

She hit the list , as they say in publishing circles, with her debut about postpartum depression following the birth of her first child. Grey was a child star and later a model, and the world believed her life was perfect, but she descended into unfathomable depression after the birth of her baby, and she wrote a compelling roman à clef that garnered interviews with every major media outlet.

Grey, not surprisingly, left The Mighty Pages with her second book to earn a few million dollars at a competitive publisher for an advance my parents couldn’t match. I know they were crushed, but they never let it show, knowing they would need her influence in the future.

Like today.

“The world is an illusion,” Grey begins, “of beauty, power, love—and there is only one writer today who can shatter that illusion with the power of his words… Phillip Page.”

Grey—who, of course, went gray before it was in vogue, her perfect locks tossing in the wind—holds up a copy of my father’s new book and continues.

“ The Boy and the Ball is a masterpiece for the ages.”

The crowd erupts in applause.

I smile and nod because I can feel Jess watching me.

Everything, it seems, is a masterpiece these days—Super Bowl commercials and halftime acts, the latest Mission: Impossible movie. Why can’t something simply be quality entertainment?

“Ladies and gentlemen, New York Times bestselling author Phillip Page and his equally extraordinary publishing partner in crime, author and wife, Piper Page!”

The crowd lifts glasses of champagne.

“Hear! Hear!”

My mother and father are a gorgeous duo, no doubt about it. They look like those couples you see photographed at polo matches in Town & Country magazine, or at a Hamptons soiree in Social Life .

Ooops, they are.

“What a day!” My mother gestures dramatically behind her to the lake and then to my father. “I don’t know which is more breathtaking!”

The crowd titters.

She holds up my father’s book. The cover is of a baseball glove catching a ball that looks like the world on fire.

“You’ve hit another home run, my dear!”

The crowd applauds.

My father’s latest novel is about a young boy who catches a home run ball in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Seven of the World Series to give the New York Yankees the title. When the Yankees star slugger comes to retrieve the baseball, the boy hands it to him, and the crowd goes wild, thinking the child—as we think of all children—to be a saint. A TV replay later reveals that the boy was actually holding a regular old baseball in his hand when he caught the historic homer with his glove, and that simple ball was the one he returned to the player. As media attention spirals out of control, the boy demands a fortune to return it. He’s both revered and reviled for his action, and becomes a cult hero. Angered, the team and slugger refuse to pay his price. As years pass, time turns him into a pariah and further deems him an outcast when the former slugger dies tragically. The team barred the boy—now a man—from attending games. He is chased on the street and forced to move from his beloved New York to a rural town in the Midwest. My father’s book celebrated the boy’s bravery at living life as an outcast.

A select few literary journals were hailing the book for its nihilism. The trouble is, no one outside of publishing circles actually reads these reviews from critics who tend to love anything that is cold and cruel, any literature that sees life and the world as dark and unrelenting.

But the masses, as usual, have not embraced it.

My father’s Amazon and Barnes & Noble rankings are dismal, lodged between two books about raising goats.

I hated his novel.

It was depressing, not to mention the boy used words a boy wouldn’t use. I mean, a nine-year-old kid with the vocabulary to say metonymy or tautology as easily as he would say soda pop or bike ?

Dad, c’mon.

Moreover, my father knows nothing about baseball. He hates sports. When my grandma would listen to the Tigers or watch the Lions games, my dad would switch off the radio.

“Mindless entertainment,” he would say.

“That’s the whole point, son,” GiGi would reply.

My father felt the same about movies and TV. His nose was always in a book—long before he founded The Mighty Pages or wrote his first novel—and he rarely let us watch television or go to the theater when he was present. But when he left the house, Jess and I would mainline TV just like we did popcorn and Milk Duds.

He knew it, though. He’d look at our viewing history, or see the movies we paid to watch.

So we played this game, my dad and I.

“Did you love The Lord of the Rings ?” he might ask.

“Yes!” I’d gush.

He’d hand me the J. R. R. Tolkien book. “Read it.”

And then my father would say, as he did every time—no matter what we’d watched, “The book, Emma. The book is always better.”

The crowd claps again, and I am back in the present.

“My wife, business partner, literary muse and New York Times bestselling author…”

Again.

I love my mother, I really do, no matter how insane she can make me, but she has gone out of her way to erase her history because she’s obsessed with what other people think of her. I’m all history. I am who I am because of all those who came before me, of all that happened to get me to this place, right here, right now.

Speaking of right here, my mother was a boarder at Eyebrow Cottage, one of the endless stream of people who came and went through that screen door, a girl of meager means working summers at a bookstore in town to earn enough money for college. That’s how she met my father. She was reading a book in a bikini. My father was intrigued by either her taste in literature or swimsuits, and they fell in love.

How’s that stand up to the Bechdel Test?

But isn’t hers an amazing story? A universal story of overcoming a horrible childhood, working her way through college and to make a better life, finding love? One that should be shared, written, shouted from the rooftops?

And yet it’s the plot my family despises more than any other. So ashamed of their past for reasons I can never understand and which exacerbate my mouth and behavior.

Now my mother’s entire existence is a carefully curated fifty-word bio that always includes the five most important words in the world to her: New York Times bestselling author .

No one can really confirm how she or my father achieved this status, and no one really asks anymore. It’s a mystery as long and convoluted as The Da Vinci Code .

My mother has written three novels-—quirky, dark, character--driven books about depressed women. Cumulatively, I think they sold a few hundred copies.

My father’s novels have sold a few more, but not many.

I know this sounds like it may simply be a facetious remark, but I wonder in all seriousness: How did they achieve that bestseller status when their sales were so modest?

I don’t think my parents would lie about this status. That would be certain death in the literary world, but I also don’t know how it was achieved either, as I’ve heard my parents scream about titles that have been omitted from the list for years and know how the process works. Maybe it was easier back in the day, or perhaps my parents earned this bestseller status solely by writing the foreword for Grey’s memoir, a combined five hundred words.

All I know is that they wear this single moniker like a royal crown, actually, a shield, and that deflects any questions or criticisms. My mother knows how to weave an image, though. She even learned, when asked where she went to university, a way to gloss over the word Western so that people only heard the word Michigan .

“Michigan?” they’d gasp. “Impressive.”

Whatever happened to owning our own stories? We’re now social media snippets and pretty pictures on Instagram that never tell the true tale.

We all give our lives a good copy edit these days, don’t we?

My father finishes thanking my mother.

“And to our secret weapon, Jess and her Swans,” he says, gesturing to my sister to take a bow. “And, of course, to our ethereal spirit, Emma, who just graduated from Michigan-—”

My mother smiles and ducks her head.

“-—who dreams of being a writer—”

“Yes! Of course!” the crowd murmurs.

I wave, face red, and sip my drink.

“This is a story as old as time,” my father says, holding up his book.

I listen to him, rapt like the crowd. He is an amazing speaker, drawing you in, talking about the inspiration for the book, his writing process.

He worked on this novel for four years. I remember him telling me he stopped at page fifty for two years.

“Why did you continue if it didn’t call to you?” I once asked.

He never answered.

“What makes a great book?” my father asks the crowd. “The protagonist. The hero. The antihero.” He glances around the deck. For a brief second, we catch each other’s eyes. He continues. “Sometimes they can be the same thing.”

I smile at my father.

He looks away.

I’m by no means perfect. And the people surrounding me are not demons. If you’re reading it that way, I need a rewrite. But somehow, in our own memoirs, we lose who we are, the person we wish to be, and we become an illusion of ourselves, a bloated pretense of the skeleton story we started long ago.

In the distance, a girl screams, her cry carried in staccato beats along the pulses of wind off the lake.

* * *

When I was ten, I got caught in a riptide.

One minute, my grandma GiGi was reading to me from Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I was splashing near the shore pretending I was a gull who could catch a fish and then fly to the lighthouse. The next, I was being pulled farther into Lake Michigan by the current.

I panicked and began to swim as hard as I could toward the beach, yet it only grew smaller.

I paddled and paddled, my arms flailing in the water, but quickly began to lose strength. My head bobbed. I was underwater, the next moment my face was in the sun.

Just a blink ago, I was safe.

My grandma GiGi always said there were times in life you should never take for granted.

Like the smell of a new book, puppy or baby.

The way you feel when you jump into the lake on the first summer day after a long winter.

The feeling of the sand on your legs when it trails from the pages of a really good book you’re reading on the beach.

The breeze on the screened porch on a hot summer day.

The creak of the cottage in a thunderstorm.

Every day after you turn sixty.

When your family is together and happy.

A simple day at the beach.

As I went underwater, I knew, even as a girl, I was going to die.

I knew that life was shifting like the sand and as treacherous, deep and dark as the lake.

That’s when I saw a gull circle above me.

“Jonathan?” I mumbled.

It caught my eye and squalled at me. It seemed more than a simple bird, more than—as my grandma had just been reading to me—“bone and feather, but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all.”

This gull was an angel of white.

And then he was off, flying higher and higher, until he melted into the sun.

I mimicked this grand gull, spreading my arms out and rolling on my back. The lake rocked me, up and down, and I was no longer in my body, no longer a girl. I was a bird. I, too, was free and soaring toward heaven.

Suddenly, I felt GiGi’s arms around me.

“I got you! It’s okay.”

“You can’t fight the riptide,” she yelled to me over the waves. “You’ll just exhaust yourself. You have to swim parallel to shore until you’re out of its pull and then the waves will carry you back. It’s hard to realize when you’re in the middle of a maelstrom, but patience is the answer. Always remember that.”

I began to cry.

“It’s okay, Emma,” she soothed. “You’re okay now. But you leave all those tears out here in the lake because when we get to shore, I’m going to tell everyone you saved me .”

“Why?”

“It’s a good story,” GiGi said. “And the world always needs a good story whether it’s true or not. That’s the magic of fiction.”

She kissed my wet head.

“That world needs to see how strong you are.” She paused as we floated. “You need to believe in your own strength.”

“I fought, GiGi.”

“I know you did, sweetheart. That’s why you’re still here.”

My grandma cried once, a horrible shudder of relief, and then it was over.

“And I saw Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” I said to her as we neared the shore. “He helped save my life.”

She didn’t say another word, just stared toward the shore, where a crowd had gathered, their attention riveted on our return, cheering.

Just to their left, before GiGi’s cottage on the lake, I saw my parents and sister sitting under umbrellas in their beach chairs, noses in their books, oblivious. For a split second, they lifted their heads in unison—as if all of this commotion were merely some summer annoyance like a squawking seagull—and then returned to their mighty pages, where the real drama and emotion of life should remain.

“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you,” my grandmother said to me, a quote I wouldn’t realize until later was from Richard Bach’s book. “All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know, and you will see the way to fly.”

As we neared the shore, GiGi said, “Remember, Emma, you’re the hero in this story.”

And, slowly, the waves carried us back home.

* * *

Another scream, a happy one, and I see two girls in the distance playing on the beach.

What do we remember of our pasts that is truly accurate? How much is filtered through our own sun-blinded lenses? Why do we bury our pain deep inside?

“I’m a plotter,” I hear my father say. “I believe in knowing exactly where I’m going before I even start writing.”

I think of the novel I’m finishing, the secret GiGi knew, the one my family does not.

I may act strong, but I am so, so weak. I worry I would crumble like a sandcastle beneath my family’s judgment and disapproval.

I am different from my father in almost every way. As a writer, I’m known as a “pantser.” As in, flying by the seat of my pants. I don’t like to outline. It feels like work. I like the character to lead. I want her to surprise me with where she’s going every single day. Otherwise, it feels a bit too much like forced finality.

And what fun is it knowing how it’s all going to end, right?

That’s what makes a great book.

I do agree with my father on one thing: you have to know where you’re headed.

But you can only do that if you know where you’ve been.

On the golden shore, white gulls gather and squawk as my father speaks.

He doesn’t acknowledge the drama, nor raise his voice. Instead, the crowd moves toward him.