Good News for a Change

Last week I got the nicest note from a reader. This practically never happens, and with all the bad news here lately, it was nice to get this in my inbox:

At the gym today I picked up an Alfred Hitchcock Magazine that somebody had left and I began reading ... I couldn't believe how good the writing was ... one of the best, most enjoyable piece of short fiction that's engaged me since the last blue moon. You were right there with the reader. "Of course it was him." Thanks. President Street, wow.

This reader is referring to "Button Man," my first story for AHMM, which appeared in March 2013. I talked about the story here and here. President Street refers to my protag’s home address in Brooklyn, New York, of the 1950s. I’ve since published the story on its own.

The day after I got this note, I received a contract via email, informing me that Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine had accepted one of my short stories. I don’t usually take the time to announce here when I’ve sold a story, but EQMM is special. Cracking that market has been a goal of mine for nearly, oh, forty years. I first started reading EQMM as a kid, when I got hooked on the old Ellery Queen TV series, starring Jim Hutton. The Queen novels were among the first adult books I ever read. And the first rejections I ever got as a kid writer were from EQMM. So it means a lot to me to finally appear in their pages. I don't want to talk about the story they bought just yet, but I'll definitely let you know when it runs.

Two great pieces of news in the middle of a bleak winter. Not bad.

Five Windows

There are five windows in Mom’s bedroom. Five windows that let in the morning light and allow her a glimpse of the woods and river behind her condo building. There’s a small dam upstream that guarantees white noise nearly every hour of the day. The river flows south to become the Congaree, the larger tributary that rushes past this old southern city of walled burying grounds, grits mills, cotton bale warehouses, and confederate printing plants.

Mom’s decline has been slow yet awful. One morning recently she struggled to get from one side of her bed to the other, her eyes fixed on the bits of the river she could see through the glass. “I just want to get to the edge of the river,” she kept saying. And then she winced, because that isn’t what she meant to say at all. The bed. The bed. The edge of the bed. By now we get it. We know what the potent mix of disease and painkillers is doing to her brain. She confuses words all the time.

That morning, Denise went to prep the morning meds and I was alone with Mom as she sat by the window and watched the river. “Tell me something, Joe,” she said suddenly, grasping my hand. “Is this the end?”

Frankly, I didn’t know how to answer her. I assumed she was wondering if her doctors had told us something that we had not shared with her. (They haven’t.) I said we didn’t know; no one knew. And nervously, I prattled on about how she didn’t have to worry about any of us anymore—her daughters, her son-in-laws, her friends. We could take care of ourselves. I was hoping to relieve what they say dying people always worry about—unresolved issues with their friends and family.

But what the hell do I know? Comes down to it, I know precious little about death. I write about it almost exclusively, but I’ve seen very little of the real thing up close. I absorbed a lot of Catholic theology and schooling in my childhood, but if you tied me down and forced me to tell you what happens after death, the closest I could come to telling you could be summed by this scene in the Cary Grant film, Houseboat. I don’t know when I saw the movie, but this scene made an impression.

And yes, I’m well aware of the stupidity of basing one’s spiritual life on a scene from a Technicolor movie, but my next closest source would probably be several fantasy trilogies I read as a kid. I know my lack of religion disappoints my mother, who is devout. I think I was always a little like my father, who I suspect treated church as an obligation, not an opportunity, and who was more galvanized by the possibility of such things as psychic phenomena. 

But no matter. As I spoke, Denise’s mom gripped my hand tighter and wept. Denise came in and the moment between us passed.

I’ve spent most of the time since then kicking myself for not coming up with a more profound, chipper response. “No,” I could have said, “this is just the beginning,” or something else that would have reinforced Denise's mom’s personal cosmology. She is also devoutly religious. Friends visit from time to time to pray with and over her. One friend, with a beautiful voice, sings hymns. The pastor from her congregation is a welcome sight, too. Some mornings, when the pain has been intense, I’ll find Mom curled up on her side of the bed, clutching her purple plastic crucifix. It comforts her greatly.

Earlier this week, Mom had another question for me. Again, we were alone. (Maybe she waits for her daughters to leave before springing these on me?) She was sitting up in bed, looking heavily drugged and confused. “Hey Joe,” she said, “can you get me out of this?"

This time, I went with the humor. “What do you want me to do, smother you with a pillow?"

She smiled.

“I can’t get you out of this,” I continued. "None of us can. Who can?"

She pointed at the ceiling.

“So ask Him,” I said.

“I do, I do,” she said.

I hope she receives her answer soon, and from a guy who has the answers.

Lockdown

I guess I spoke too soon. The other day I was telling you how we'd happily found a university library to work in, thus breaking the monotony of hanging out at mom's condo. The very next day we went, the University of South Carolina locked down on reports of shots fired. Denise immediately Tweeted a photo (shown above) of the steel gate that slid down, effectively trapping us inside the special collections library, where we'd gone to access some research materials. Within seconds, she was contacted by a reporter at CNN, asking for an interview. Another reporter from ABC wrote to ask if they could use the photo. Weird world we live in.

Wi-fi was still up, so I poked around trying to get more info, but it was sparse. Police and SWAT had closed off major streets in the city surrounding the School of Public Health, where the shooting took place. Students all over the campus were doing the same thing I was doing—taking to social media to describe their experiences. 

From my seat in the special collections reading room, I could peer through the gate into the central floor of the main library. Moments earlier, it was packed with students; now it was deserted.

And then, about an hour later, the cops and university gave the all-clear sign, and school was back to normal. Students flowed out of the elevators and resumed their positions with their laptops, phones, coffees, and sandwiches. I gather they had all been ushered to "safer" rooms on other floors, away from the library's glass entryway.

By then the media was reporting that a murder-suicide had occurred. A few of my Tweets ended up Storified in the Charleston Paper's coverage. The Columbia city paper detailed the slaying of a professor by his former wife.

I was impressed by how quickly the university acted. I've never been in a situation like that. Hope it's the last.

Postcards announcing the university's latest high-profile acquisition.

Sidenote: This library recently acquired Elmore Leonard's papers. I'm told they're not yet accessioned. I'm working on getting a peek.

Letter From Home

A quick update on a couple of things:

* Big Weed, the marijuana book I ghosted, landed two sweet reviews this week, one from Publishers Weekly, the other from Kirkus. The PW review is a starred review, which is quite nice. The author is happy, so are the publishers. The book is out in April.

* I'm driving home Friday to interview mystery writer Jamie Mason this Friday at our local bookstore, Malaprop's, for the launch of Mason’s second book, Monday’s Lie. I liked her first book, Three Graves Full, but Monday’s Lie is something special. The main character was raised by a mom who was a covert ops asset, and who taught her a variety of cool skills. Years later, Mom’s long gone, and our protag must call upon those skills to confront something terrible that’s cropped up in her life. Mason has a beautiful way with the language. A true stylist. If you’re in town, I hope you’ll come check out our “In Conversation With.”

* I just put up a new website. I hope you’ll stop by to look it over, and more importantly, shoot me a note if you spot any embarrassing bugs. From now on, my blog posts will originate at the new site, and be pushed out to Tumblr and Twitter. If you’re already following me on Tumblr, there’s no need to migrate over. The pushes are nearly instantaneous.

* * *  

Thanks for the kind response to my last post. Yes, our family is still hunkered down in Denise’s mom’s condo, acting as her daily caregivers. I don’t think this little apartment was made for five adults and a dog, but we’re determined to wait out this disease to its inevitable, sad conclusion. We are grateful for the friends who’ve stopped by to cheer us (and mom) up. We’ve left up the Christmas tree, thinking it makes nice touch to see those lights from time to time. But since the the holiday season is long gone, it’s a little hard to use that annual break as an excuse for procrastinating on our work. So we’ve staked out the corners of the condo that feel quiet enough to work, and started plugging away again. The nearby university has a great library; we escaped there for a few hours this week and it was awesome. Hope to go again if we can manage it.

As this horror progresses, I’ve been reminded of one of the doctors I once profiled. His story is told in the The Scientist and the Sociopath, but you can read it free here. The doc became closer with his mom following the death of his father and other family members, all in a single year, when he was a child. I was touched that the doc trusted me enough to report how he felt back then:

The mother did not know, and the boy did not tell her, that at night in his bed he bargained with God. He had attended five funerals in little more than a year, and they had terrified him. Over the graves of his loved ones he learned the words of the Lord’s Prayer for the first time. At night, he prayed: Please, God, don’t let my mom die. Please don’t take her from me.

His prayers were answered. She lived long and prospered. When she died four years ago at the age of sixty-nine, she was a wealthy woman. When she took sick with lung cancer, he gave her the greatest gift he could. He shut down his practice and cared for her 24/7 for the last seven months of her life. “It was the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done,” he says.