Gathering Lies. Meg O'Brien

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      It was the spring of the Great Seattle Earthquake, and life had been bad enough without the ground opening up beneath our feet. But there it is. Life has a way of taking over, of running amok, and there’s not much point in fighting it—any more than there’s any point in fighting it when a man leaves, betrays, lets one down.

      At first you ask yourself, was it my fault? Did I wear the wrong outfit, have the wrong shade of hair? Should I go shopping for something younger, perkier?

      Buy a bottle of Clairol Midnight Brown?

      I remember Ian saying once that he’d been in love, at twenty, with an Italian girl whose dark brown hair fell in waves to her waist. His pet name for her had been Sophia, he told me, as in Loren. His first love, he said, the one and only true love of his life.

      He said this the day he broke it off with me, and I’ve always wondered if it wasn’t just what he told himself, to excuse the fact that he hadn’t had a lasting relationship in all the years since.

      Or, again, maybe it was me. Am I too blond? Too amenable? Or conversely, too argumentative?

      Life also has a way of burdening one with questions that have no answers, at least none one wants to hear. Therefore, regardless of the fact that I’d been to college and was thought to be a relatively bright woman, with a career I’d been excellent at, those are the kinds of crazy-making thoughts that went tripping through my brain on the day the Big One hit.

      It happened while we were at Thornberry—I and the other women. I didn’t, at that point, know the real reason I’d been lured there—for that’s the way it turned out, I was lured there. Nor did I know, in my mind, why I’d accepted the invitation. I only knew I was on the run: from a broken heart, a lost job, and a life that was in shambles.

      The invitation to Thornberry, a writer’s retreat on a tiny, private island in the San Juans, came by way of a friend at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, near the rather humble apartment I had lived in for years. When Bill Farley told me the invitation originated with Timothea Walsh, my response was immediate and positive.

      “I know Timothea,” I said. “I spent summers on Esme Island as a teenager. My parents and I stayed at her bed-and-breakfast.”

      “She’s turned it into a writer’s colony now,” Bill told me. “I hear she likes helping beginning writers, and most of the time they have to apply. This is something new she’s starting, where she invites women only, published or not, for one month out of the year. Everything’s paid for, room and board. All you have to do is show up.”

      “But she can’t have asked for me, specifically,” I said, puzzled. “How did she know I was writing a book?”

      “Maybe she read about it somewhere?” Bill said, a brow rising. “The papers, maybe?”

      Good point, Bill. I’d been a high-profile public defender in Seattle until my arrest in January for drug possession. The local media made that hot news, splashing it all over the papers and television—which made sense, since my defense was that I’d been set up by a cabal of crooked Seattle cops. In the midst of all the media furor, someone had leaked the information that I was going for revenge by writing a book blasting the justice system, and the Seattle police in particular.

      That “someone” was almost certainly my agent, Jeannie Wyatt, not that she’d admit it in a million years. Shortly after that, though, СКАЧАТЬ