She couldn't concentrate on anything else. When Marcus called, she was evasive about her work and asked him so many questions about school, his grades so far, that he got angry and said, “God, Mom, get your own life and stop bugging me about mine.” That night she couldn't even sleep. All she could think about was The Hospital Was Haunted.
Finally she stopped resisting and started writing again where she'd left off. From here on out, she would write without lowering herself to St. John's level. Refusing to think of it in baseball terms, she'd finish the book and polish it until it shone.
She reached the end in three weeks, writing fast and easily, not even looking back as she went. She worked in two extra murders and a romantic but steamy sex scene between Rose and Rusty, who, with those skilled hands, was as brilliantly accomplished in bed as he was in the operating room. But while they were in bed, someone else died, and Rose, tormented by guilt, vowed not to have anything to do with Rusty until the murders were solved. The streets of St. Lucent ran with blood. But at least this murder exonerated him, freeing the two of them to pursue the raping ghost together. This unity went against St. John's original outline — which kept the reader convinced of Rusty's guilt until the very end — but Karin no longer cared. In her version, all fingers pointed to the custodian until the penultimate chapter, when — surprise, surprise, and she hoped Mitchell understood how magnanimous she was being — he was cleared of suspicion. The actual murderer was the lesbian nurse. Karin felt a little bit bad about this, not wanting to marginalize the gay character, but she endeavored to make clear that there was no connection between lesbianism and homicide. The nurse was a frustrated lover, that was all; the knowledge that she couldn't have Rose had driven her insane. It was the perfect ending, because you wouldn't suspect a lesbian nurse of being a raping ghost.
In the final pages, Rusty and Rose vowed to leave St. Lucent together and establish a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, where the sun always shone. Every last plot strand was sewn up.
For a week or so after finishing, she was on a high. Food tasted better, and she slept long, satisfied hours. She baked cookies and sent them off in a care package to Marcus. She finally completed some of the other work that had been piling up and sent that off. She even cooked for herself, dishes with gourmet ingredients accompanied by a glass of wine.
When she was ready, she e-mailed the entire thing to Donald St. John. Then she moved on with her life, not waiting to hear back.
It took him three weeks to reply. One day she came home from the grocery store and found an envelope from him in the mail. Dear Karin, I'm terribly sorry to say that I don't think that it's going to work out. Enclosed is an additional payment in recognition of all your efforts. Best wishes, Donald St. John. A check fluttered to the ground.
Without even pausing, she got back in the car and drove to his half-glass house. She almost expected him to be standing naked on the second floor, waiting for her, but he wasn't. When she rang the doorbell, Corazón took a long time coming to the door, and her hair was disheveled, her cheeks flushed.
Karin looked at her. “Is the master of the house home?” she said.
Corazón nodded and let her in. Standing in the living room, Karin heard her go upstairs and then come back down, evidently alone. Minutes passed. He couldn't just ignore her by hiding upstairs. She looked at the art on the walls, bad oils of strangely colored fruit in misshapen bowls, the kind of thing you saw in suburban coffee shops. Glancing at her watch, she saw that fifteen minutes had gone by. It was ridiculous.
“St. John, I'm coming upstairs,” she called. “I'm coming to your office and I don't care what you're wearing.” There was no answer. She started up the stairs. The door to the office was closed. There was no sign of Corazón. She pushed through the door without knocking, and St. John was sitting at his desk, wearing a gray V-neck sweater over a white shirt, with his hands poised over the keyboard, like a photograph on a book jacket.
“Karin,” he said, “I'm sorry. I just wanted to finish this one section before we spoke. Forgive me — you know how it is when you get in the groove and don't want to lose it.”
She sat down across from him at the desk.
“I'll just be a moment, I promise,” he said. His white hair was standing up all over.
Her own hair, she realized, was a mess, too — she'd left the house in sweatpants, without giving her appearance any thought at all — but she didn't care. She only wanted to know what he was writing, if he was redoing The Hospital Was Haunted to suit his own horrendous taste. She darted around behind him, and before he swiveled in his chair and stood up to block her view of the monitor, she read: Dear Mother, I hope you are recovering well from the operation on your hip.
“What on earth are you doing?” St. John said. His voice had risen, in perplexity or anger, and practically squeaked at the end of the question.
“Where's the manuscript?” Karin said, and started searching the office, opening and closing folders and filing cabinets. She thought surely he would have printed it out, as he had the last time, but she didn't see it anywhere. Perhaps it was already gone, already sent off, under his own name, to his agent or editor or whoever he sent these things to. He had taken it away from her. He'd seduced her with the project and then robbed her of its satisfactions.
“Corazón?” he called. “Can you come up here, please?”
Corazón ran up the stairs and stood there watching the two of them, unsure of what to do.
The master of the house, Karin thought, with a woman at his beck and call. What a life he had, this Donald St. John. “You,” she said, “are a raping ghost.”
“And you are a very disturbed woman,” St. John said. “I think you'd better leave my house before I call the police.”
“I want my book,” she said.
“Karin, my dear, it was never your book. It was my book and always will be. I realize that you became very invested in it. But surely you've understood all along that this is my work. You can't simply step in and take over, my dear.”
“Stop calling me my dear,” she said, shaking her head. She saw the movement reflected in the glass behind her, her crazy halo of graying hair, her desperate and ghostly eyes. Donald. St. John made a beckoning gesture with his hand and Corazón came and stood beside him, frowning, for the first time, at Karin. She saw that he was genuinely afraid of her. He thought she was going to attack him, and Corazón, this silent little woman, was the only protection he had. “Did you even read it?” she asked him.
“I began to,” he said slowly. “I'm afraid I didn't quite finish.”
You couldn't afford to, could you? she thought. You knew it would be better than anything you've ever done. She took a deep breath and something slowed inside her, a quiet tectonic settle marking the ebb of her rage. She felt a great wave of pity for him, for the gigantic emptiness of his life. “I'm going to leave now,” she said. “I'm going to leave you to think about what you've done.”
In the car she was tempted to turn back — to go to his computer, find the copy of her book on his computer, delete it, wrest it from him — but she fought the urge. Whatever he did with it, she thought, whether he published what she'd written or did it over himself, she would be there in its pages. Some shade of her would remain.
The dog greeted her happily when she got home, licking her hand, and she stroked her head and led her into Marcus's room. She lay down on his bed and the dog curled up on the rug beside her, no sound but their breathing, measured, rhythmic, ever calmer. On the wall was a poster of a rock band whose music she'd yelled at him not to play so loud. On a shelf stood his cross-country running trophies and a collection of marbles in a glass jar. She closed her eyes and thought of Rose and Rusty, their work at the clinic in Tucson, the adobe house they lived in behind it. They were happy together in the desert sun. Still, Rose sometimes woke in the night, listening to the sounds of the darkness. Of course, after everything that had happened in St. Lucent, she knew that ghosts didn't exist. But another part of her understood that every house was haunted.