The Pages That Match

The Pages That Match

The green line blinking on the screen went straight into the middle of my head.

I typed back fast, my fingertips catching the wrong keys:

"Who are you? How do you have that manuscript? Did you get into my computer?"

The chat window went still. The head icon next to GhostInk went out and turned gray. He had logged off.

The room was quiet in a way it had not been a minute earlier.

I took my hands off the keyboard and put them in my lap. The rain on the roof came up louder, the way sound does when everything else stops. I counted the drops coming off the gutter for a while and then lost the count.

I leaned forward and shut the laptop hard.

Crack.

The plastic made a sound the dark room was too small for. I had closed it the way you close a lid on something.

The room went dark.

I sat where I was. One minute. Two. Seven minutes went by before I moved anything but my chest.

The rain held the rate it had held since nine o'clock, about four drops a second off the gutter over the window. I counted to 120 twice and quit. My thumb found the split in the vinyl on the right arm of the chair and stayed in it, and the radiator behind me ticked 11 times and went quiet.

My watch read 11:47. I had shut the laptop at 11:40 and I remembered looking at it then. The whole stretch had gone by in about the length of one long breath. The machine under my palm was still warm, warmer at the end of it than when I closed the lid.

The questions came in a stack. What did he suspect? What did he actually know? Or had he been standing behind me for years without my knowing it?

No. There was an explanation for this. There had to be a mistake somewhere.

I stood up fast enough to knock the chair back. I went to the old suitcase in the corner, pulled the clothes out of it, and dug out the dusty external drive at the bottom, the one I had brought up to Milton to go through for material.

I plugged the drive in and opened the laptop again.

The screen came back up green on my face. I went into the locked folder and opened the file called Milton_Draft.docx, 22 pages I had quit on years ago.

Then I opened the sixth manuscript, the one GhostInk had just emailed me.

I dragged the two documents side by side on the screen.

Then I started comparing them. I sat close to the screen and went through it line by line, word by word.

Mine: Elm Street lay under the thick fog of the Northeast. His: Northeast fog swallowed the houses along Elm Street.

I read both lines again. Then I scrolled down to the passage about the weather.

Mine: The first rain of the season came down at three in the morning and brought the smell of rotting leaf mold with it. His: The smell of rotting leaf mold came up with every burst of rain at three in the morning.

Two of them now. Coincidence had stopped covering it. I scrolled faster, looking for the private things, the ones nobody else had ever read.

In chapter two the woman came in.

In my old draft she had a dark brown birthmark shaped like a maple leaf on her left side, and every morning the man made her a slice of toast burned a little along one edge.

I looked over at GhostInk's window.

Page 8, line 14: "...a dark brown birthmark shaped like a maple leaf, low on her left side." Page 9, line 22: "...the smell of toast burned dry along one edge coming through the kitchen."

"No. No, that isn't possible."

I said it out loud, in a voice I didn't recognize.

The street name. The weather. The maple leaf. The burned edge of the toast.

I wiped my hands on my pants and put them back on the keyboard.

Mine: The hallway thermostat was set to 81 and the house stayed hot until morning. His: Somebody had run the hallway thermostat up to 81, in a house kept at 66 since the first week of October.

Three of them. I found a pen and wrote them out in a column on the back of the publisher's envelope, item on the left, source on the right, the way the report had laid out its own list 31 years ago. Street name. Weather. Thermostat. My handwriting stayed even the whole way down.

I kept scrolling, and then I stopped being able to explain any of it.

There were details in it. I had never typed them. Not into a file, not onto that drive, not onto a sheet of paper I had torn up and thrown away.

They existed in one place. In my head.

The weak lavender smell of fabric softener on the girl's old sweater. The way she set her teeth and bit down on her lower lip when she sat counting out tarnished change.

All of it was there in GhostInk's manuscript, word for word.

That ruled out a hack. It ruled out somebody coming into the study and going through my desk. There was no safe explanation left.

His manuscript ran longer than mine. He had not stopped at page 22. He kept going from the exact place where my dream cuts off, and he put down three things I had never known:

The victim's full name: Mia Calloway. The name of the town: Blackwood. And a date, set in bold, about five weeks out from that night.

The manuscript had a name for the date: "The Last Chapter."

I counted it out against the calendar in the corner of the screen. Thirty-six days. It fell on a Thursday. I read the date four more times and then checked it against the one on my phone, which gave me the same day and the same number.

I closed the comparison windows and opened the chat with GhostInk. I typed without stopping to read what I had written:

"What the hell are you? Answer me. How do you know about Mia Calloway? How do you know things that only exist in my head?"

"Say it. You set this up from the start, didn't you. Who are you?"

His icon lit up. No panic. No denial and no explanation. GhostInk answered the way he always did, polite and unhurried, the humor running cold under it:

"That's a lot of questions at once, James. A writer your size should know how to put them in order."

"Don't play with me. Where did you get it?" I hit the keyboard hard enough to move it.

GhostInk was quiet for a few seconds, and then a line came up with a condition in it:

"I'll tell you where I got it. You answer one question first."

I sat there looking at the screen with my hands off the keys.

"Ask."

His line came up a word at a time:

"There was a chair at your dining room table that nobody sat in. Do you remember what color it was?"

The muscle under my left eye began to jump and kept jumping for about 20 seconds.

I did not answer. The empty chair at the table. The Parcheesi board left half played, four yellow pieces still on the start squares. The rooms of that house in Milton that I had spent 31 years getting rid of.

It was the chair with arms. My mother wiped all six down with the same cloth on Sunday afternoons and did that one last, and the cushion on it was tied at the back with two lengths of cord cut off the same roll. I had not thought about the color in 31 years, and I did not type it.

He had more than the pages. He had my childhood, the part of it I had never handed to anyone.

I read the question four more times. My hands stayed where they were and I did not type anything back.

Then somebody knocked on the door.

Tap. Tap.

I shut the laptop. Then I pulled the stack of contract pages across the desk and covered the corner of it.

The study door came open. Emily was holding a glass of hot milk, still steaming.

"James? You're still up?"

For the first time in my life, the lie was ready before the question finished:

"Not yet. I'm... I'm going back through some contract terms from the publisher. Almost done."

It came out level, with nothing moving under it. A second later I put it together. I had just done the thing I hand to the liars in my books, the steady face and the sentence that costs nothing.

I looked at Emily. Then I started reading my wife the way I read a character on a page.

She stood there with the strap of her silk nightgown off one shoulder. Her thumb and index finger were turning the wedding ring on her other hand, which was what she did when something was bothering her. Her eyes went to the closed corner of my laptop for about half a second, and then went somewhere else.

"Don't work too late," she said, setting the glass on the corner of the desk without looking at me. "You're pale."

"I know. I'll be down in a minute."

She nodded and went out, and the room was quiet again.

The study went back to the sound of the rain on the roof. My father's Underwood was on the shelf behind the desk where it had been since I got to the house, and the dish towel that had been over it was folded on the shelf beside it. A sheet of paper stood in the platen, rolled down to the last third of the page. It was blank.

Nobody talked in the bedroom that night.

The bedroom was the one at the back, over the porch roof. On Emily's nightstand were her reading glasses, a glass of water she never drank, and the small brown bottle with no label on it. She had carried that bottle into every room we had ever slept in, and she bought it four at a time.

Emily lay down next to me, turned her head, and offered what she had offered most nights for years:

"Want me to work on your shoulders and put some of the oil on? Your neck's gone stiff again."

I moved back toward the edge of the bed, away from a hand that already smelled of musty herbs and cold mint.

"Not tonight," I said. "I'm tired. I just want to lie here."

Her hand stayed in the air for a few seconds and then came down. She turned over and pulled the blanket up to her shoulder.

On the nights I said yes it went the same way. She started at the base of my neck and worked out to the shoulders with both thumbs, and the oil came up musty herbs and cold mint. It took about 20 minutes. I had never once stayed awake past the second shoulder, and I had never once heard her cap the bottle or reach over and turn out the lamp.

I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. The rain was still hitting the window at the rate it had kept all night. The thought spread out slowly, the way ink spreads on a blotter.

My Milton nights ran 11:00 at night to 7:00 in the morning and came back to me in one piece with nothing in the middle of them. No dream. No waking at four, no walk down the hall for water, no hour of lying there listening to the house. Eight hours went in and came out about a second thick, and I had been calling that sleeping well for years.

Then, in the quiet of that Milton night, a question came up that had never come up in 11 years of sleeping next to her:

Why is it that on the nights she rubs the oil into me, I don't dream?