Page 71 of The Deepest Lake
Now her fans thought she was eight months pregnant. In reality, she was one month past losing Adhika.
“I considered everything,” says Eva, who has been squeezing my hand so hard it’s gone numb. “I was staying up all night, researching adoption. I thought I’d get that arranged, then come clean about the death, but still manage to write about it all in one package—including my brief inability to tell the truth—but it would have a happy ending. My fans would understand. We hate a person, we decide she’s beyond forgiving—and then we do forgive. Hate the sin. Love the sinner. We feel better about ourselves for being so generous. It’s sunshine after a storm. Everyone feels clean again. My beautiful new adopted child would be the focus. It would be fine.”
“But you didn’t adopt.”
“It’s not so easy,” she says, spitting out those words with a final burst of venom. “And Jonah didn’t want to adopt. I would have gone ahead without him, but with the time pressure and everything else going on . . .”
That week, Richard sold the unfinished memoir at auction with six publishers bidding. He knew everything, but he wasn’t concerned. One thing at a time. The recent articles and essays and Eva’s solid follower numbers sealed the deal.
She kept blogging about the end of her pregnancy. And about the birth itself. And about the first days after the pregnancy.
She blogged about her decision not to post baby photos, much as she claimed she wanted to, because she had considered the matter in depth and taken inspiration from Uma Thurman and other Hollywood actors who keep their babies out of the media.
I’m losing track of it all, stuck in Eva’s hall of mirrors.
She gets a dreamy look. “The responses! People loved that I was opening up.”
“But you weren’t opening up. You were inventing.”
I can’t reconcile this complicated deceit with the author who guided me through my adolescence. Those candid, heart-breaking stories had to be true. The idea that any place or event or even something simpler—a face in the crowd, an emotion, even a smell—was invented makes me feel not only distant from her but from my own younger self, the girl who felt trapped in suburbia and lost her virginity in a sandwich shop and would have given anything to be Eva Marshall, mascot of the punk era, living it up in her teens and then, decades later, still refusing to take shit when her dream was on the line. I couldn’t bear to lose that version of Eva. I couldn’t bear to lose that hopeful version of myself.
“But all this you’re telling me now, it’s all true?”
“Of course it’s true! Why wouldn’t it be true?”
Eva is pulling so hard on my right arm that it’s impossible to sit up straight. I’m awkwardly hunched, my back aching, my expression frozen.
Even now, she talks about the death of her baby at home, as if it were real.
“So you didn’t find her that way. You weren’t at home. You didn’t sit down and start writing the book with her next to you.”
“But that’s what I would have done. And even that tender portrait of a mother’s grief was enough to make people write terrible things online. Imagine if they knew those last three months had never happened. Imagine if they knew where I was living when I . . . when I . . .”
Wait. “Where you were living?”
We’re back to that question again.
I try to remember scenes from the later chapters of her book. I recall the vague outlines of a beautiful house, a brightly lit kitchen with oil lamps and a blue ceramic bowl filled with local organic pears. I picture evergreen trees visible out the window, light and fog. Was this her California house? Her other one in Maine? Or maybe it was Vermont.
Pears or pine cones in a decorative bowl. Cypresses or spotted cows visible through her kitchen windows. Such beautiful, concrete details in everything Eva writes. But the details don’t matter. None of it happened.
Eva presses the heels of her hands against her cheekbones, blotting the tender, damp skin. “People are always asking me where I am, wanting to send me wine from their vineyards, or goddamn fruit baskets. And those cookies! When my biggest fans heard I was in the hospital, they deluged me. ‘DM me your address. I won’t share it with anyone else. I just have this wonderful thing to send you, to make you and Adhika and Jonah feel better.’ This was when I was at the hospital, spotting.”
In real life she was bleeding heavily. In real life, Adhika was stillborn. In real life—I am putting it together, finally, including why her location mattered so much—hospital records might be traceable. Individual records are private, but what if someone could determine that in a certain small town or county, not a single infant died on a certain day, week or even month?
“That video you asked me to delete, when I asked about where you were, when you wrote In a Delicate State, and just before . . . ?”
“That’s right.” She sniffles. “It all got so complicated. It wasn’t my fault!”
The lake is a shiny black mirror beyond the bluff. A band of bright stars is visible through a break in the cloud-streaked sky. We’ve been talking for over an hour.
I smell cigarette smoke. I know someone is nearby, but I’m focused on Eva. I have no idea what to say. I don’t feel sympathy. I feel robbed.
“I wrote my first book without anyone watching,” Eva says, straining to control the tremor in her voice. “No one cared. I was already at the end of the experience. I had time to figure out the story and tell it on my own terms. But now, in today’s publishing climate, with today’s technology, a book can get away from you. And then, what do you do? Return the advance? Pay back the royalties? Apologize to every reader personally?”
“But,” I wade in carefully, “you got away with it. Right?”
“Got away with it?” Her shout veers alarmingly into a sobbing, animal-like grunt. “I still don’t have a goddamn baby!”