The Plot полностью

Jake was, he supposed. By now he’d sat in any number of chairs just like this one, and smiled genially at any number of local blowhards. He listened to Randy Johnson opine about unleashed dogs on the streets of Seattle for a while, and then heard what he understood to be his own introduction. “Okay, so our next guest is probably the hottest writer in America at the moment. Am I talking about Dan Brown or John Grisham? You’re probably getting pretty excited out there, am I right?”

He glanced at the woman beside him. Her sharp jaw was set and her eyes down on the clipboard.

“Well, too bad. But let me ask you something. Who out there’s read a new book called The Crib? Sounds like it’s about a baby. Is it about a baby?”

The host was silent then. After a horrified moment, Jake realized he was expected to actually answer this question.

“Uh, it’s Crib, not The Crib. And nothing really to do with a baby. To ‘crib’ something means to steal it, or purloin it. And … thanks for having me on, Randy. We had a great event in Seattle last night.”

“Oh yeah? Where?”

He couldn’t remember the name of the actual hall. “Seattle Arts and Lectures. It was at the symphony. Gorgeous place.”

“Yeah? That’s big. How big is that place?”

Really? Jake thought. Now he was expected to answer trivia questions about the host’s own city? But in fact he knew the answer.

“About twenty-four hundred, I think. I met some amazing people.”

Beside him, Anna held up a piece of paper, but to the host, not to Jake. FULL NAME: JACOB FINCH BONNER it read.

Randy made a face. “Jacob Finch Bonner. What kind of name is that?”

The kind I got at birth, Jake thought. Except for the Finch, of course.

“Well, everyone calls me Jake. I have to admit to adding the ‘Finch’ myself. After Scout, Jem, and Atticus.”

“After who?”

It was so hard not to shake his head. He had to fight against it.

“Characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. It was my favorite novel when I was a child.”

“Oh. Yeah, I think I got out of reading that by watching the movie.” Here he interrupted himself with his own approving laughter. “So you got this hot first novel, everybody’s reading it. Tell us what it’s about, Jake Finch.”

Jake tried for a laugh of his own. It came out sounding far less natural. “Just Jake! Well, there are things in this book I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t read it, so let’s just say it’s about a woman named Samantha who becomes a mother at a young age. Very young. Too young.”

“She was a naughty girl,” Randy commented.

Jake looked at him in some disbelief. “Well, not necessarily. But she sort of gives up her own life to have her child, and the two of them live together in a kind of isolated way, in the house Samantha herself grew up in. But they’re not close. And it gets worse between them as the daughter, Maria, becomes a teenager.”

“Oh, you mean it’s like my house,” he said delightedly.

Anna held up another sign. MORE THAN 2 MILL SOLD, it said. And under that: SPIELBERG DIRECTING MOVIE.

“So, Jake! I hear Steven Spielberg is making it into a movie. How’d you hook the big one?”

It was a relief, at least, to move the subject away from himself and even his book. Jake talked a bit about the film, and what a fan of Spielberg he’d always been. “It’s amazing to me that he connected so powerfully with this story.”

“Yeah, but why? I mean, the guy probably has his pick of every film project that’s out there. He picked The Crib. Why, do you think?”

Jake closed his eyes. “Well, I guess there was something in the characters that must have spoken to him. Or—”

“Oh, so like my daughter, who’s sixteen, and my wife, who start screaming at each other when they get up in the morning and don’t stop till midnight, I could get Steven Spielberg to make a movie about them? Because I’m down with that. My producer’s right here. Anna? Can we get Steven Spielberg on the phone? I’ll tell him whatever he’s paying Jake, I’ll sell him my wife and daughter for half.”

Jake stared at him in horror. He turned to look for Otis. No Otis. Not that Otis could have done anything.

“Okay!” Randy said with a flourish. “Let’s take some calls.”

He stabbed his console with a forefinger, and a woman with a low voice asked if she could ask Jake a question.

“Sure!” said Jake, far more enthusiastically than he felt. “Hi!”

“Hi. I love the book so much. I gave it to everyone in my office.”

“Oh, that’s so nice,” Jake said. “Do you have a question?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to know how you thought of that story. ’Cause I mean, I was really surprised.”

He searched in his cerebral file for the most appropriate of his prepared answers.

“I think when you’re writing a long story, like a novel, you don’t think of every part of the story at once. You think of one part, and then the next, and the next. So it sort of evolves—”