“I apologize,” she said, “for my stupid questions. I know I have a lot to learn, and you’ve already—”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “I want you here, asking me these things. These are the only questions. We can talk and talk. Why do you keep your journal?”
“Because there’s too much,” she whispered. “There’s too much, and it wants to come out. My heart, whatever it is, maybe not my heart, but it feels like my heart is full, and I write it down. I have to write it down.”
“What is it like when you read it later?”
Wendy sat back in the chair and folded her arms. “It’s not the same. I mean I’m glad I wrote it down, but it doesn’t have the feeling. Like when I read about Cameron. That’s you, right?”
“I guess,” Jimmy Brand said. He decided not to stand on a lesson; this was a new place long past where a lesson about point of view or persona or anything but the true writing would suffice. She was a shape now, a silhouette in the shimmering gray light.
“Where Cameron goes back to the reservoir that night into the cottonwoods and everybody’s gone, and he goes to the campsite on the shore where they’d parked the boat. The wind is warm, remember, and he finds Mark’s knife by the campfire stones, and he puts it in his pocket. When I read that scene and then reread it, it pulls me apart. He wants to go back and have the day over again and prevent the accident, but he wants to go on, leave town, leave for the future. No one will know, ever”—here Wendy leaned toward him, her hands woven together—“ever know”—and she dropped her voice—“what is in his heart. Sometimes I want to leave so badly.”
Jimmy sat still in the bed. It was a blurred waking dream, and he had both worlds in his heart, what had happened so long ago and what he had written, and both were alive to him.
“How did you write that?”
He was whispering, “What do you want to write?”
She stood and said, “I’ll go and let you rest. Thank you for speaking to me.”
“What,” he said again quietly, “do you want to write?”
“I don’t know, but I know I do. More than anything.”
“More than being with Wade?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yes, I know I’m sure. I went to Dallas last summer, a month ago, for the Spirit Club convention. It’s our service group. And the whole time I felt something calling me, not calling but something that wouldn’t let me sleep. I went to the roof of the hotel in the middle of the night and looked at the city, and the day we left I went up there in the afternoon, and I was all alone and no one knew where I was, my folks, Wade, no one, and then I thought, no one knows my heart, what’s in it. Not even me.” She stood up, frowned, sat down. “You think I’m a schoolgirl.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s a good heart, Mr. Brand. There’s stuff in it. I want to write. I’m sure people who read your books have said they feel like they know you, because that’s the way I feel. But I came over today because I feel that you know me. The wind at the reservoir and Cameron’s decision. The New York stories.”
“You read them.”
“I read them all. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Jimmy Brand said. He closed his notebook and leaned back into his pillows. He could feel the familiar friction in his eyes building to a headache. “Do you want to write a story?”