Fear Not

She had spent so long, so many years, thinking about him. She was afraid to tell him, though. Not afraid of what he had written or might write; afraid of what he might do. No, that was wrong; she wasn’t afraid of what he might do. It was another reaction that she feared: it was what he wouldn’t do. To put it more clearly: she was scared that he would say nothing and would then just walk away, as if he hadn’t heard her or as if she didn’t matter. As long as she said nothing, she could hope. It was the classical situation where one decided to live in limbo. Limbo, after all, was better than hell.

Something, however, led her to decide to end the not knowing. Neither of them was getting any younger, although she thought he rather was improving with age. Don’t misconstrue her thoughts: by improving with age she wasn’t thinking about his physical appearance, which didn’t matter a whit (as her mother used to say, in her archaic English). No, what he looked like mattered nothing. It was what he wrote. And let’s not forget she had been hanging off his words for years. Her life would not have been the same without him.

It had started even before she knew who he was, before he knew who he was. That was natural, because they had grown up in two different states that didn’t even share a border. Maybe six hundred miles separated them. Nevertheless, even then they had a bond, she thought. She read voraciously, but he was probably even better at devouring books, comics, magazines, because she spent time with her crayons and sipping cherry cokes that were all she could afford. He couldn’t afford much either, she’d come to find out.

She still remembers her selfish little self up in a pink wallpapered bedroom with an antique table she liked to call a desk. She still remembers sitting there and reading every last word of Poe. Not that she had her own copy of his complete works. That would come later, because most of the time her parents couldn’t afford books unless they cost 25 cents through her school book club. She read Poe’s poetry and his prose. Alone at the desk, she lived and died every agonizing moment. She didn’t know much about the life the author had lived, but the haunting of his mind and body she thought she understood. And so it began.

The Poe affair led her to fall in love with Edward Reynolds even before she knew much about him. Moving to Maine was what did that. Before she left for her new residence, somebody said,

“Oh, you’re going to Bangor? Like in the song ‘King of the Road’ and like the place that’s the setting of all the horror novels.” 

Bangor was never called that in the books, of course. It was Derry (Durham?) or Castle Town or anything but its true name. She hadn’t realized that fate was driving her in his direction, even when the first novel of his she read was about a motorcycle named Jolene that symbolized a teenage inferiority complex and was completely unbelievable. He had hooked her, using Poe and maybe Lovecraft as the bait.

So there she was, living on the eastern Atlantic and still reading as if her life depended on it, which it did in a way. Reading shut out all the demons and vampires that had always been there and helped her continue with her life. But she still yearned to meet him. This wasn’t a lustful yearning; she knew he was married and that wasn’t the point anyway. She wanted to listen to him and it wasn’t the same listening in a Bangor bookstore like Book Marc’s or a reading in the civic center with hundreds of people present. (She only ever went to one concert, and then only because she’d been invited, but a literary reading was different.)

She hadn’t planned it, but a couple of times there had been a close encounter with him and Tammy at a basketball game. She knew he hadn’t noticed her and that was fine. He wouldn’t recall they’d sat at the same tiny booth in snowy Vermont eating a hamburger, both very shy. (It had been on a bus trip to a basketball game and the return had taken hours.) He didn’t need to remember that; it had been an awkward moment and yet she held it close. She knew if she tried to explain her feelings, what she wished for from him, the bubble would burst. 

Then she gave in and knew she had to tell him. Time was running out. She planned everything carefully and months in advance. She would ask to meet him. If necessary, she would present herself as his number one fan, knowing she could never compete with Kathy Bates (although she could say her nickname had once been Kathy) and not wanting to! She meant him no harm! It was just that she had so many questions for him, yet she wasn’t a book reviewer nor a literary critic nor a journalist. She had no interview planned. She just wanted to ask him about his writing process.

No, that sounded stilted, stodgy. What she wanted to do was tell him how much joy his writing, even the works mistakenly termed of the horror genre, had brought to her life. She never had been afraid of what he wrote because she felt she understood it, as if they were on the same wavelength, ridiculous as that term was. When she was deep inside one of his books, she left the unreal world of everyday life and walked the same streets as he had to produce such things. She didn’t believe for a minute that he was warped or weird, that his books were somehow unhealthy. She knew he felt the pain of everyday life and instead of going crazy or becoming an impotent criminal, he always fought his way out of life’s paper bag by putting it all on paper. She wanted to understand how he did that. He was a genius.

That he had stuck with with writing about evil things instead of giving in to evil itself was a decision she admired. That was what she wanted to tell him, with no other purpose than a quiet ‘you are incredible’ or something like that, hopefully not as mundane as that. She knew he had once read, or tried to read, a book a day. That habit she too had known. She had always found life, not isolation or death, in reading, even if the stories included demons, blobs, mummies, or a swinging pendulum. She wanted to tell him that she understood, and if he wrote out of angst, that she was both sorry and grateful.

She was grateful to have Edward Reynolds in her life, if only in deferred form (his books), so she wrote to him to tell him just that. She wrote a story, almost like a letter and not very polished yet from the heart, to tell him. To tell him that his Corinne had been on target, that the elderly living underground in Durham had made a lot of sense, that she had not lost any sleep reading a novel about insomnia. That when she was reading him, she never felt alone. Never felt anything close to desperation.

Most of all, she wanted him to know that she admired his ability to get America’s evils down on paper with such skill that Americans didn’t notice. Most of them didn’t realize the needful things were really people whose happiness depended on acquiring some stupid object they couldn’t afford or had no place to put. They didn’t realize the dark side of a writer is the dark side of everybody who is trying to make a living in a capitalist system.

Edward was way above her, but she knew she needed to tell him what his writing had meant to her over the years. Tell him that his characters were so much more than bags of bones. Tell him that she’d chuckled when she saw the name of a professor she knew personally in a book with the title Bloody Stuff or something like that. 

Tell him he was much more than a writer. He was good, and had made a lot of money off people’s thirst for gore, guts, and grime. She only was interested in how he got to the essence of things, if he had really read a book a day, if he heard or saw his characters while he was writing, if he was happy.

She hoped he was happy, and not feeling trapped.

Because what he wrote was real, and she knew that.

And she loved Holly. Above all, she wanted him to know that.