The Last Chapter

The Last Chapter

Category Prompt: A story about a Lost Manuscript

By Jim Kokoris

So it was good. More than good. Sitting on the dusty floor of the attic, his back against the dusty wall, he had to admit that. Accept that. While reading the first four chapters, his surprise had turned into amazement, before morphing into full throttle astonishment. Mother’s book about a young Southern woman living on a plantation in post-Civil War Alabama was Gone with the Wind excellent.

Its mere existence defied belief. He knew, of course, that Mother wrote. He had read her trite poems and essays in the community newspaper, the Beverly Review, when he was a boy. Melancholy tropes about bare trees in winter, dead moths stuck behind screens, grey April mornings.  He remembered one essay or short story or something about a half cup of cold coffee that had somehow won a writing contest.

But this was different. This was a novel. Four-hundred and three pages. An entire book. He vaguely recalled her disappearing into this very attic after he returned from college, remembered hearing her typing away late at night.  She must have written it here, in this cluttered space.

He took a deep breath, carefully stood, making sure to keep his head bent forward to avoid the low ceiling, and stepped slowly down the wooden ladder and into the bright light of the upstairs hallway, his quest to clear and organize the attic in preparation for the estate sale forgotten.

                                                         ***

He woke the next morning to Amy’s soft sobs. This was not alarming since she had a habit of crying over small things: a Hallmark movie, a dead squirrel on the road, a Lifetime movie.

Propping himself up against his pillow, he asked, in an even, detached voice, what was wrong now. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and sitting in the Queen Anne armchair he had planned to sell at the sale.

“That book,” she said.

He cleared this throat. He had had too much to drink the night before and thought he might still be drunk. “What book?” he thought to ask.

“The book. Torn and Frayed. It’s beautiful. I mean, I was up all night reading it at the kitchen table.”

This took time to register.  And when he did respond he simply said, “Oh, yeah, that book.”

“Tyler, is this what you’ve been working on for so long? Is this it?”

He studied her pale white skin, her red hair tied back in a ponytail to reveal freckles on her forehead, her beautiful innocent, naïve face, full of hope and belief. Belief in him.

“Yes,” he heard himself say.

                                               ***

“What happened to Born Again?” Amy asked as they waited in his Jetta at the Starbuck’s drive-thru.

“What?” Tyler had been thinking about Mother’s book.

“The first in a series.”

“Oh, yeah. I took a break from that a while ago. There’s a lot of zombie books out there. Market is saturated.”

“How long did it take you to write it?”

“Awhile. I’ve been writing it, you know, off and on for a while.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Well, I love this one. It’s so different from your others! I kept waiting for a zombie to show up.  This one will make it for sure. I just know it. Tyler Stanton, New York Times Bestseller!”

He offered a tight smile. While her naivety had been one of the things that had attracted him to her, it could, at times, be annoying. There was, he was beginning to conclude, a fine line between sweet naivety and simple stupidity.

“I just can’t wait to see how it ends.”

He moved the car up a few feet. “So you didn’t finish it?”

“I read everything! But there’s no last chapter.”

“There isn’t?” Tyler had read barely a third of it.

Amy’s face clouded into confusion. “No, where is it? Are you still working on it?”

Tyler took a deep breath, processing. He then lowered the window. They were next in line.  “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

                                               ***

After dropping Amy off at the school where she taught English, he called in sick and spent the rest of the day finishing Torn and Frayed. If possible, it got better as it went along. The prose rich and textured, the dialogue real, the history about the post-Civil War era seemingly accurate, the setting both beautiful and stark. And the sex scenes? Mother? He was almost too embarrassed to read them. To be sure, she had more or less grown up in the South, Louisville, and she did have a degree in English from the University of Kentucky, but where she got the sex stuff from, well, he didn’t want to know.  His father had been a bland, balding accountant who collected stamps.

He spent the rest of the day and well into the night ransacking the attic, then the other rooms in the sprawling old house looking for the final chapter but found nothing but a box of her old poems and another of medical reports detailing the progression of his father’s cancer. He was about to give up, when his hand touched something on a top shelf in the closet of the third story bedroom. Paper! Papers! He pulled a chair over, stood, carefully scooped them up then sat down on the bed and organized them. There weren’t many pages, less than a dozen, but that didn’t matter.

“Why I Love The Goo-Goo Dolls,” the title page read. By Annie Stanton, seventh -grade critical composition. Illustrations included!

“Fuck me!” he yelled.

                                                       ***

The urine smell wasn’t as pungent as usual. Someone had blessedly opened a window. He approached Mother’s bed tentatively, quietly, as he usually did. If this had been his normal weekly visit, he would watch her sleep for a few minutes then just leave.  He hated talking to her. She made little or no sense anymore. Of course, even before the Alzheimer's, she hadn’t made much sense.  She had spent most of her life walking around in, what his father had once called, “a flighty daze.”

“Mother,” he whispered. In an instant her eyes flashed open as if she had been waiting for him. She struggled to sit up.

“Nicholas,” she said.

Nicholas was Tyler’s older brother. Hated, rich, condescending older brother. “It’s Tyler.”

She smiled.

“How are you today?” he asked.

“Did you bring the lamb chops?”

“What?” He had no idea what she was talking about. “No. I didn’t bring any …meat. Maybe next time.”

He pulled a chair over to her bed, glanced at the time. They would be coming with her dinner soon so he had to get right at it.

“Mother, do you remember writing a book called Torn and Frayed?”

Her eyes cleared, bright sun breaking through storm clouds. “Yes, yes. Of course! I worked so hard on that.”

Tyler’s heart leapt. He inched the chair closer, noticed her chin whiskers, gray and soft and suppressed a gag. With all the money they paid here, you think they could at least deal with whiskers! “How did it end? The book.  Do you remember? Who did Clara end up with?”

Mother looked away, out the window at the growing twilight. It was September and the days were shortening. “Lamb chops,” she said. “My mother used to make them. I could smell them from my bedroom.”

                                               ***

Jackson, the agent at Ink, loved the book. Tyler had retyped and submitted the first three chapters along with a brief summary and was shocked at the quick response, less than four weeks.

“Very impressed! Would love to see the completed manuscript! Please send when you can!”

He stared at the email, thought of the many rejection notes he had received over the years, his work, science fiction meets goth horror, failing to make even the smallest dent in the literary universe. Now this. A note from a prominent agent. A note with two exclamation points.

He spent the next three days retyping the rest of the manuscript on his laptop then sent it to the agent. All but the last chapter. “I’m still tweaking it,” he wrote.

                                                ***

“Mother,” he said “the book, Torn and Frayed. Did you finish it? The last chapter, did you finish it?”

He watched her gnaw at one of the lamb chops he had broiled that morning. He worried she would pull her dentures out.

“The book, Mother. Who did Clara choose? Midas Johnson, or Wilbur Montgomery Kenter? Do you remember? Midas had been a former slave.” Tyler pointed to his mouth. “He had a scar on his upper lip. From the rebellion. The slave rebellion that he led.”

Mother put down the lamb chop, now mostly bone and quietly and slowly licked her fingers.

“Is Nicholas dead?” she asked.

He sighed.  He hadn’t spoken to his brother in two years. “No, he’s fine. He’s making his crappy movies.”

“Is Annie dead?”

Annie was his equally condescending sister. He did keep in touch with her though. She was an investment banker and managed Mother’s dwindling estate from London where she had escaped to after graduating from Duke, leaving him alone with Mother.  “She’s fine too. Her cancer is gone. Like a miracle or something, she says. I don’t know if she even had it. You know her. Always with the drama. Stage-four my ass. Probably stage-three, if that.”

Mother had no response to these updates. Instead, she earnestly took his hand in both of hers.

“Are there any more lamb chops?” she asked.

                                               ***

When he got back to the house, he saw that Jackson, the agent, had sent yet another email. The guy read fast. Maybe this is why he was so highly regarded.

“Last chapter?? PLEASE!!!” Then, “I let our film division take a peak, and they ARE. IN. LOVE.  A steamy, stormy Gone with the Wind. Their words. Please hurry!”

Four exclamation points, Tyler noted. Four. He closed this laptop and felt his heart race.

                                                           ***                            

Tyler moved his chair closer to her bed and watched her eat another chop, pulling at the meat with her front teeth like some kind of deranged, carnivorous rabbit.

When Mary Anne, the memory care nurse, called him that morning and said Mother was having one of her “good days,” he broiled two chops and came right over along with a copy of the contract Jackson, the super-fast reading agent, had just sent him. He planned to read it if Mother was sleeping.

“These taste different,” Mother said chewing hard.  “Not as flavorful.”

Tyler looked away guiltily.  They were pork chops, not lamb. Lamb was too expensive. He hadn’t thought she would notice. He remembered reading how Alzheimer's might deaden taste buds.

“Well, I made them the way you like. With oregano and lemon,” he said, lying. He had put nothing on them.

He watched her chew.  He had already begun drafting the final chapter on his own, but was struggling. Amy hadn’t liked what he had written so far and this was troubling. She liked everything Tyler wrote.

“There’s, I don’t know, something different,” she had said.

“Well, it’s just one chapter. The other twenty-two are good.”

“But it’s a pretty important one,” she said. “There are lots of loose ends.”

“How is Mr. Larson doing?” Mother asked.

Boy, she was really sharp today. On. Her. Game.  Mr. Larson was the headmaster at the private high school where Tyler taught English. Had taught English.

“I don’t see him much right now. I took some time off to write.” He had actually quit his job in anticipation of a sizeable advance, but she didn’t need to know this.

“Tell him hello.”

“So Mother, that book, Torn and Frayed. You remember it?”

“Of course I do,” she smiled. “I loved working on it. Every page just flew by. I couldn’t keep up. I’m so glad you found it! Please bring it to me! Working on it sustained me after your father’s death. It kept me going.”

Tyler’s spirits soared. “Great!! Is there a last chapter somewhere? I’ve looked everywhere for it. Everywhere. You have to have a last chapter. You couldn’t have just stopped.” A new and sudden fear jolted him. What if there were more than just one chapter out there? What if there were two or three or even four more chapters? What if additional and exciting twists and turns had been written, twists and turns that could propel the book into classic status?  Another fear: once the book became a best seller, Random House or whomever, might demand a sequel. A two-book deal was almost a certainty. Maybe three. Do they have three-book deals? He would worry about that later.

“Mother, please think! How did the book end? Please, it’s important. Please. I’ll bring more lamb chops if you remember.”

Mother had no reaction. He feared he was losing her. He switched gears. “Okay, what were you, at least, thinking? Did the Roscoe family lose the plantation to those people, the carpet baggers? And the lawyer, Clyde, who killed him?  And who did she marry at the end? Clara, who did she marry? The slave or, or the other guy."

 Mother said nothing.

 “Please, Mother, please. I need to understand how everything ties in. So much is left unresolved.”

Mother finally spoke. Apparently, she had been registering his questions after all. “Well, I really don’t recall how it ended. It was so long ago.”

 “You must have some idea. Did they lose the land?”

“The land?”

“Was Clyde, the lawyer, able to save it? His backstory mentions he had experience with land trusts. Before the war.”

“Back story?”

    He slumped forward, his face in his hands. So much for her good day. “Why didn’t you finish it?” he snapped. “You were so close. It makes no fucking sense. There has to be a last chapter.”

“You mean for the book?”

He shook his head. “Yes, Mother, for the book.”

“I didn’t write the book, Tyler.”

He sat up. “What? What do you mean?”

“I just typed it, that’s all.”

He stared into her watery, misty grey eyes and felt his throat tighten. “What are you talking about?” He suddenly feared where this was going.

“Nicholas, your brother. He wrote it. Why don’t you ask him? It was his book. He wrote it before he was hired to write for the movies.”