The arguments started to come closer together, and even at my tender age I knew one big reason why—they were drinking too much. Hot breakfasts, which my mother used to make twice or even three times a week, pretty much ceased. I’d come out in the morning and they’d be sitting there in their matching bathrobes, hunched over mugs of coffee, their faces pale and their eyes red. There’d be three, sometimes four, empty bottles of wine in the trash with cigarette butts in them.
My mother would say, “Get some juice and cereal for yourself while I get dressed, Jamie.” And Liz would tell me not to make a lot of noise because the aspirin hadn’t kicked in yet, her head was splitting, and she either had roll-call or was on stakeout for some case or other. Not the Thumper task force, though; she didn’t get on that.
I’d drink my juice and eat my cereal quiet as a mouse on those mornings. By the time Mom was dressed and ready to walk me to school (ignoring Liz’s comment that I was now big enough to make that walk by myself), she was starting to come around.
All of this seemed normal to me. I don’t think the world starts to come into focus until you’re fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just take what you’ve got and roll with it. Those two hungover women hunched over their coffee was just how I started my day on some mornings that eventually became lots of mornings. I didn’t even notice the smell of wine that began to permeate everything. Only part of me must have noticed, because years later, in college, when my roomie spilled a bottle of Zinfandel in the living room of our little apartment, it all came back and it was like getting hit in the face with a plank. Liz’s snarly hair. My mother’s hollow eyes. How I knew to close the cupboard where we kept the cereal slowly and quietly.
I told my roomie I was going down to the 7-Eleven to get a pack of cigarettes (yes, I eventually picked up that particular bad habit), but basically I just had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks—yes, I still see them—and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I’d pick the dead folks.
Any day of the fucking week.
15
My mother spent four months writing The Secret of Roanoke with her trusty tape recorder always by her side. I asked her once if writing Mr. Thomas’s book was like painting a picture. She thought about it and said it was more like one of those Paint by Numbers kits, where you just followed the directions and ended up with something that was supposedly “suitable for framing.”
She hired an assistant so she could work on it pretty much full time. She told me on one of our walks home from school —which was just about the only fresh air she ever got during the winter of 2009 and 2010—that she couldn’t afford to hire an assistant and couldn’t afford not to. Barbara Means was fresh out of the English program at Vassar, and was willing to toil in the agency at bargain-basement wages for the experience, and she was actually pretty good, which was a big help. I liked her big green eyes, which I thought were beautiful.
Mom wrote, Mom rewrote, Mom read the Roanoke books and little else during those months, wanting to immerse herself in Regis Thomas’s style. She listened to my voice. She rewound and fast forwarded. She filled in the picture. One night, deep into their second bottle of wine, I heard her tell Liz that if she had to write another sentence containing a phrase such as “firm thrusting breasts tipped with rosy nipples,” she might lose her mind. She also had to field calls from the trades—and once from Page Six of the New York Post—about the state of the final Thomas book, because all sorts of rumors were flying around. (All this came back to me, and vividly, when Sue Grafton died without writing the final book of her alphabet series of mysteries.) Mom said she hated the lying.
“Ah, but you’re so good at it,” I remember Liz saying, which earned her one of the cold looks I saw from my mother more and more in the final year of their relationship.
She lied to Regis’s editor as well, telling her Regis had instructed her not long before he died that the manuscript of Secret should be withheld from everyone (except Mom, of course) until 2010, “in order to build reader interest.” Liz said she thought that was a little bit shaky, but Mom said it would fly. “Fiona never edited him, anyway,” she said. Meaning Fiona Yarbrough, who worked for Doubleday, Mr. Thomas’s publisher. “Her only job was writing Regis a letter after she got each new manuscript, telling him that he’d outdone himself this time.”
Once the book was finally turned in, Mom spent a week pacing and snapping at everyone (I was not excluded from said snappery), waiting for Fiona to call and say Regis didn’t write this book, it doesn’t sound a bit like him, I think you wrote it, Tia. But in the end it was fine. Either Fiona never guessed or didn’t care. Certainly the reviewers never guessed when the book was crashed into production and appeared in the fall of 2010.
Publishers Weekly: “Thomas saved the best for last!”
Kirkus Reviews: “Fans of sweet-savage historical fiction will once more be in bodice-ripping clover.”
Dwight Garner, in The New York Times: “The trudging, flavorless prose is typical Thomas: the rough equivalent of a heaping plate of food from an all-you-can-eat buffet in a dubious roadside restaurant.”
Mom didn’t care about the reviews; she cared about the huge advance and the refreshed royalties from the previous Roanoke volumes. She bitched mightily about only getting fifteen percent when she had written the whole thing, but got a small measure of revenge by dedicating it to herself. “Because I deserve it,” she said.
“I’m not so sure,” Liz said. “When you think about it, Tee, you were just the secretary. Maybe you should have dedicated it to Jamie.”
This earned Liz another of my mom’s cold looks, but I thought Liz had something there. Although when you really thought about it, I was also just the secretary. It was still Mr. Thomas’s book, dead or not.
16
Now check this out: I told you at least some of the reasons why I liked Liz, and there were probably a few more. I told you all the reasons I didn’t like Liz, and there were probably a few more of those, too. What I never considered until later (yup, there’s that word again) was the possibility that she didn’t like me. Why would I? I was used to being loved, almost blasé about it. I was loved by my mother and my teachers, especially Mrs. Wilcox, my third-grade teacher, who hugged me and said she’d miss me on the day school let out. I was loved by my best friends Frankie Ryder and Scott Abramowitz (although of course we didn’t talk or even think about it that way). And don’t forget Lily Rhinehart, who once put a big smackeroo on my mouth. She also gave me a Hallmark card before I changed schools. It had a sad-looking puppy on the front and inside it said I’LL MISS YOU EVERY DAY YOU’RE AWAY. She signed it with a little heart over the i in her name. Also x’s and o’s.
Liz at least liked me, at least for awhile, I’m sure of it. But that began to change after Cobblestone Cottage. That was when she started to see me as a freak of nature. I think—no, I know—that was when Liz started to be scared of me, and it’s hard to like what you’re scared of. Maybe impossible.
Although she thought nine was old enough for me to walk home from school by myself, Liz sometimes came for me instead of Mom if Liz was working what she called “the swing shift,” which started at four in the morning and ended at noon. It was a shift detectives tried to avoid, but Liz got it quite a bit. That was another thing that I never wondered about then, but later (there it is again, yeah yeah yeah, right right right) I realized that she wasn’t exactly liked by her bosses. Or trusted. It didn’t have anything to do with the relationship she had with my mother; when it came to sex, the NYPD was slowly moving into the 21st century. It wasn’t the drinking, either, because she wasn’t the only cop who liked to put it away. But certain people she worked with had begun to suspect that Liz was a dirty cop. And—spoiler alert!—they were right.