Oh! You Pretty Things (35 page)

W
e're still kind of floaty and giggling when we walk into Donna's room. We immediately stop short and Megan grabs my hand. Two nurses are standing at Donna's bedside, making awkward eye contact with each other over Donna's lifeless body. It's like they're mentally playing rock-paper-scissors to see who has to tell me the news that is completely evident.

“Holy shit, Boof, she died during intermission,” Megan whispers.

Megan is the only person on the planet who could say that to me—in the room where my mother's body isn't even cold yet—and get a laugh.

“She would have hated dying offstage,” I say, and the nurses side-eye each other awkwardly. One murmurs that they'll give us a few minutes as they shuffle out of the room.

Dr. Mark Ruffalo comes skidding in like Kramer on
Seinfeld
. “I tried to have someone find you in the cafeteria. I'm so sorry you weren't here.”

“It's fine,” I say. “I already said my good-byes.”

He frowns and I realize that I sound flip, but I don't have the energy or the inclination to explain.

“Well, take all the time you need,” he says. “Then there are forms to sign and a couple of people you need to talk to.”

“Sure,” I say, and walk to the edge of the bed.

Donna looks like she's sleeping. I've watched enough hospital deathbed scenes to know I should say something, but I meant it when I said that I'd already said my good-byes. I've been saying them for years.

I sign a half dozen documents and field condolences from an equal number of hospital staff, then stumble with Megan into the halogen-lit parking lot, blinking and disoriented.

“Wow,” I say. “I'm having a
Groundhog Day
moment.”

“Huh?”

“Here I am, again, square zero. Jobless, clueless, and now Momless.”

Megan glances at me. “Jobless?”

“I'm done with Eva,” I say, suddenly certain.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I'm done with all that. But what am I doing now?”

“What are
we
doing now, you mean?” Megan says. “We're going home.”

“You mean
home
home?” I ask. “We don't technically live there anymore. Also? The walls are sandalwood.”

Megan opens the car door. “We'll repaint.”

T
here's a picture on hollywoodhookups.com of Eva and JJ sitting on the hospital bench on that first day, their denim-covered legs barely touching. JJ is smiling at someone out of frame while Eva taps on her phone, chestnut hair falling across her face like a theater curtain. The picture must have been taken from behind the reception desk, either by the nurse in the vegetable scrubs or the one who looked like Thor on
Nurse Jackie.
One of them got paid the equivalent of a couple long shifts changing IV bags and reassuring relatives.

There's a close-up inset in the corner of the photo, one of those rectangles the tabloids overlay to show the grainy detail of a starlet's engagement ring or cellulite ripple. But this close-up shows Eva's sleek Prada-clad foot twined behind JJ's ankle in the sea of blue linoleum.

My big toe, with its chipped blue-black nail polish, hovers just inside the frame, marring the perfect symmetry of the shot.

I
'm a late bloomer. If late blooming was a booth at a carnival, I would totally win one of those giant stuffed pandas they keep all the way at the top. I don't have an MFA; I didn't study writing in college. In fact, I didn't go to college at all. Or high school, for that matter, at least not past the first half of the tenth grade. But books,
books
! Books have been a constant—often the only constant—in my life from the moment I learned to read, some (mumble) forty years ago. Books saved my life and gave me a soft place to fall in a childhood with some really hard edges.

When I was a kid, I read everything on my mother's bookshelf, from Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens to Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, and the
I Ching
. Also
Dianetics
, which was seriously confusing, and the Reader's Digest Condensed Books series, for which I still blame my incomprehension of Pearl S. Buck books. But by the time my teen peers were writing papers on
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
Catcher in the Rye
, I was busy selling Quaaludes to Nikki Sixx in the parking lot of the Starwood and reading books by Jackie Collins. Don't judge.

I guess my long-winded and convoluted point is that my journey to publication has been unconventional, and there certainly wasn't a clear path from there to here. People often ask me how I did it. They don't necessarily mean it the way I usually hear it, which is, “How did a girl like
you
figure out how to write a book?” At least I don't think they do. Whatever. Haters to the left. Anyway, here's how: I read and read and read, and then I wrote and wrote and wrote, and then a lot of amazing people and venerable institutions rose up to meet me and shepherd me along the way. Herewith, my undying gratitude and thanks to:

Patti Carmalt, for showing me, again and again (and again) until I finally got it, that I could grow beyond my dark and twisty upbringing. Yep, I'm the girl who just thanked her therapist. I would be facedown in a ditch somewhere with bugs in my eye sockets without her.

Samantha Dunn, my first mentor and friend for life, for putting the machete in my hand and telling me to start hacking out my own path, because sure as shit no one else was going to do it for me.

The amazing fellowships and residencies who extended their hospitality despite my brash and often inappropriate applications: the MacDowell Colony, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Writers @ Work, among others, and, last but certainly not least, the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices program. An important part of my education happened in those cabins and dorm rooms and living rooms and barrooms, around dinner tables and Ping Pong tables and on walks in the woods and on van rides into town to get whiskey. Thank you, Andrew Solomon, Nam Le, and William Finnegan, for making me feel as though I already had a place at the table. George Singleton, for so much beer and even more laughter. William Giraldi, you delicate flower, for being kind to me when the discussion of Baudelaire went completely over my head. Abigail Thomas, for just being so fabulous.

My indefatigable and quite glamorous agent, Wendy Sherman, who plucked this manuscript from the slush pile and worked with me tirelessly as it morphed into the book you're holding in your hands. Wendy, I love you more than pie.

Joel Ross, who read every word of this book a thousand times and made me get up and run when I was sure I couldn't. For giving me a place to stay when I was in a face-plant after setting my first book aside and for buying me the world's best breakfast sandwiches while I cried and made lists of alternate careers that included sign twirler and world's oldest waitress.

My writer tribe, the people I've sidled up to in all those places I mentioned (and others) and begged/wheedled/forced to be my friends, whom I've stayed in touch with across miles and years and who have read endless drafts of all my work before this book and then this book, plus a bunch of scrawled illustrations on cocktail napkins about what our writer commune will look like someday. These people talk me down from the rafters when I'm ready to throw it in and gossip madly with me when schadenfreude seems like the only reason I have to go on: Jennifer Pashley, Eileen Cook, The Hydra (Teri Carter, Suzy Vitello, Averil Dean, Amy Gesenheus), Allison Burnett, Polly Dugan, Libby Flores, Betsy Lerner, Jim Ruland, Haven Kimmel, and some other very important people I'm blanking on right now, which means you'll probably be getting flowers or chocolates or something from me in the near future.

Scott Hoffman, for believing in me when I was just a baby writer with thirty pages ripped from my journal. Your years of encouragement and cocktails and dinners were invaluable. Plus you can sing the hell out of “Black Dog” at karaoke, and who doesn't need that person in their corner?

Denise Roy, my brilliant editor at Dutton, who loved my book so much she made me cry the first time she talked to me about it and then cry even harder when she acquired it.

Rachelle Mandik, for copyediting all my bad habits and tics into oblivion.

Plus a cadre of people at Dutton I haven't met yet because these things happen with such a long lead. But I love you anyway, you beautiful book people.

And, finally, and most important, my husband, Chris, who didn't even blink when I came home in 2006 and said I was finally ready to try. “Fly, little chicken,” he said.

And I did.

S
hanna Mahin is a high school dropout who rallied late despite her ninth-grade English teacher's prediction of a lifetime of wasted potential. Her writing fellowships include the MacDowell Colony, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and PEN Center USA Emerging Voices, among others that she will tell you all about over a glass of wine. Just like her character, Shanna is third-generation Hollywood, but any other similarities are strongly renounced, at least until the statute of limitations expires.

Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!