One September Morning (44 page)

Paris, France
April, 2008

A
pril in Paris.

Abby Fitzgerald opens the top button of her sweater to the afternoon sunshine, soaking in the light that glances off the cobblestones, the wrought iron table, the warped glass and turquoise windowpanes of the Montmartre café behind her. In this City of Light, even the breeze carries color and luminescence.

Flint peels off his leather bomber jacket—which Abby suspects he’s had since college—and drapes it over the back of a chair. “Why don’t you order us some coffee and croissants? I’m going to go find a newspaper in English.”

“Suffering withdrawal?” she teases.

“It just seems like a Hemingway-esque thing to do, sip coffee and leaf through the paper in the sunshine.”

She waves him off. “Go on, Ernest. I’ve got this covered.”

At times like this, Abby wishes she could paint. To capture the panorama of a day in Montmartre, the colors, the balance, the textures…it seems like a sumptuous way to spend an afternoon. She’s glad Flint pushed her to accompany him on this brief assignment in Paris, a trip that is a landmark for Abby in so many ways: the end of her internship at Seattle General, the beginning of a new facet of her relationship with Flint, and the fulfillment of a promise to John.

The breeze sweeps through again, ruffling the carnation in its small vase on the table. As it washes over her, Abby recalls the way the gentle wind carried John’s ashes into the Seine early that morning.

She had planned to go it alone. “Go back to sleep.” She had leaned in to kiss him, almost falling back into the white duvet and downy pillows as her lips brushed over the stubble on his cheek. “I just want to do this while there aren’t too many people around.” There were rules about scattering a person’s ashes, some fairly strict, but Abby had turned a blind eye to them and pressed on to do what she knew in her heart was right.

“I’ll go.” In a second Flint was out of bed and pulling on his jeans. “I don’t think it wise for a young lady to be walking around Paris alone in the dark. I promise, I’ll stay out of your hair.”

You could see your breath in the cool air as they walked along the Seine, mists swirling along the surface of the river. Tucked in an inner pocket of her coat, John’s ashes were sealed in a Ziploc bag. The sun had not yet risen in the rosy sky.

“This is perfect.” Abby chose an empty stone bench that overlooked the river. It felt like a block of ice, but Abby smoothed her trench coat to cover her bottom and sat down quietly. Flint stood behind the bench, watching the river pensively.

Minutes passed as Abby sat and watched Paris arise: people hurrying by on their way to work; cabs growling past, spinning around corners; the scent of fresh rolls baking; and the yellow ball of sun chasing away the red hues of dawn.

And just like that, it was a brand-new day.

Sensing that the time was right, Abby rose, moved to the ledge along the river, and opened the bag. A breeze coursed over the water, tugging at her hair and wooing John’s ashes away from her as the words from the minister at his funeral sounded in her head:
Remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.

This time there were no tears, no anxiety, no worry over doing the right thing. Instead, Abby felt a sense of joy that today, John’s life was coming full circle in the way he had intended it to end, his ashes spread in Paris.

When the bag was empty, she looked up, glad that Flint was with her, confident that John would have been glad to have him be a part of his final return to the earth.

Now, while Flint is off at a kiosk on the boulevard, Abby, at a sidewalk café, struggles with her high school French, trying to order two croissants and coffee.
“Deux croissants et deux cafés au lait, s’il vous plaît.”

There. It may have sounded hackneyed, but at least she got it out.

As the waiter heads inside to the kitchen, she hears a familiar voice asking if he can join her for a second. She looks up and—

It’s John. Healthy and glowing again, eyes laughing. She wants to reach across the table and touch him, but she knows that he’s a ghost and it might be a mistake to mess with things and make his image pop off.

“You look good,” he says. “Happy. I always knew Flint had a crush on you.”

“Really? I was too in love with someone else to notice.”

When the waiter returns with two white mugs and croissants, Abby has to bite her lip to keep from laughing as John nearly topples a croissant from its plate. “Is this Flint’s roll?” John says. “I’ll just rub it around in the dirt a few times. Kidding. I like Flint. Always have. It’s just that I liked you more, and he wasn’t about to make a commitment to anyone back then, was he?”

It’s true. Abby nods at him as the waiter struggles to lower the pastry to the table intact.
“Merci,”
Abby says, waiting for the waiter to leave before she continues talking with the apparition.

“So I guess I can get out of your hair now,” John says. “You’re gonna be okay, Abs. And good job taking down Charles Jump. He was a menace to society.”

“You helped me figure that out,” Abby says, thinking of the teardrops on John’s photo, the freezing temperature in her apartment when Jump was around.

He stands, moves toward her, and she feels her breath catch in her throat at the sight of John Stanton, so strong, aglow with health. Was he really this tall, his shoulders and chest so broad?

“I couldn’t leave until I knew you were okay.” He moves behind her and her scalp tingles as he slides a hand over her head, finally resting his thumb in the crook of her neck.

She cannot see him anymore but she can feel his touch, that steady pressure on the spot his thumb would always find. She closes her eyes and savors this last moment with him.

And then his touch fades and disappears.

A few minutes later, Flint returns, walking tentatively, with his eyes on the headlines. “Remind me never to check how the stock market is doing when I’m supposed to be on vacation,” he says, folding the paper and slapping it on to the table beside his coffee. “Hey, what’s up with you? You feeling okay?”

Abby takes a deep breath and removes her hand from her throat. She’s ready to move on now. She’s ready to live.
“Oui,”
she says, meeting his gaze and melting under the warm caramel of his eyes. Flint, in his leather jacket and Yankees cap. The second great love of her life. How lucky is that?

“I’m fine now.” She pushes his warm coffee cup closer to him and their hands brush in that electrifying stir that always makes her smile.
“Très bien.”

Please turn the page for a special conversation with Rosalind Noonan.

What first sparked the idea for
One September Morning?

There was a gut-wrenching moment in my local coffee shop in September 2004. I had moved from New York City to the Pacific Northwest a few months before that, and I was still feeling tender from the terrorist attacks of 9-11. The conversation moved to recent news events, including the war in Iraq, where the death toll of U.S. soldiers had reached one thousand that week. “One thousand…” A friend of mine shrugged it off. “It’s not really that high.”

I was aghast. How could this normally kind person minimize the deaths of others with such ease and alacrity? Whether or not he approved of American involvement in Iraq, did he really think one thousand lives were dispensable?

That got me started. I’m an advocate of non-violent solutions, but I also have the utmost respect for people who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. I grieved the loss of those soldiers, Americans trying to do the right thing, lives ended prematurely. My heart ached for the families of those one thousand service members as I tried to imagine their grief and pain, one thousand times twelve, times twenty, times fifty…

That day I knew I wanted to write a story that lent support and paid tribute to people who had chosen to serve our country in the military, both the soldiers and their families. I wasn’t sure precisely what the storyline of characters would entail, but my creative search started there.

Were any of these characters based on you or people you know?

A piece of me exists in every character I write. To do a character justice I need to get under her skin for a while, imagine a typical day in his life, and identify her dreams or his worst fears, even if those things never come to fruition in the story. That said, a writer has to use what she knows and feels as a springboard and launch the imagination from there. I could feel Abby’s pain, though I was never married to a soldier. I have not worked as a journalist or visited Iraq, so I had to incorporate research and imagination to create Flint’s experience as an embedded reporter.

Sometimes, for a minor character, I’ll use a friend’s name and one or two personality traits. For example, while reading over the proofs, I noticed that I used the childhood nickname for one of my husband’s friends—Killer Kelly—when referring to one of John’s football buddies. We never meet the character in the book, but I did crack a smile when I saw the reference.

Was John’s character inspired by Pat Tillman, who left a career in professional football to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces?

When I started writing
One September Morning
there wasn’t a lot of information available about Pat Tillman—which was frustrating for me. I couldn’t get the facts—probably because the truth was still hidden at that point in time—but I was alarmed by witnesses’ accounts of his death in Afghanistan and moved by the shining purpose that drove the man. I tried to capture Tillman’s commitment to doing the right thing—that was a source of inspiration for me. Also, by making John Stanton a celebrity it helped raise the profile of the incidents within the novel, raising the stakes.

In the years since, more of the details of Pat Tillman’s death have been revealed, in large part thanks to the steadfast persistence of his mother Mary and his brother Kevin, who served in Afghanistan with Pat. Some of them correspond to the plot of my novel, others diverge. From everything I’ve read, I admire the diligence of the Tillman family, who pursued the truth despite many obstacles. A few readers have asked me why I didn’t contact the family and try to tell Pat Tillman’s story, which is rich and moving and heroic in its own right. The truth is, I’m a fiction writer, not really worthy or experienced enough to do his biography justice.

The villain of the novel is absolutely chilling. How did you come up with his character?

My husband expressed interest in a nonfiction book he was reading called
The Sociopath Next Door
by Martha Stout, which I snagged as soon as he was finished. Although nonfiction is not usually my thing, I found this book riveting, well-documented, well-researched, and yet insightful and entertaining. As I tend to look for the best qualities in a person and I want to believe that humans are a benevolent race, Ms. Stout’s work helped me understand that there are people in the world who have a completely different moral compass—or none at all. She defines a sociopath as a person who does not feel guilt or remorse, a person who would kill to reap some personal benefits as long as he thinks he can get away with it. This profile of a sociopath stuck with me as I was fleshing out the villain of
One September Morning.

After I read Ms. Stout’s book, I realized I had come dangerously close to a few sociopaths during my lifetime. Only a few, but even one is enough, don’t you think? It’s a very creepy thought.

How do you approach the process of writing a novel?

Since I was fired up with an overall idea for this book, certain scenes came to me right away—such as Abby opening her door to two soldiers who notify her that her husband has died in combat. Other scenes eluded me until I was doing rewrites.

As I was writing, I was very pleased with the way certain characters came alive, particularly the Stanton family. I enjoyed writing Madison’s defiant, youthful voice. Jim Stanton’s point of view and backstory grew richer with my research of the Vietnam War. And Noah Stanton’s story was a gift. There was the obvious juxtaposition to the lives of his father and brother, but beyond that Noah’s voice was strong in my ears. I had to work a little harder with Sharice, who’s a bit of a control freak, but by the end of the writing process I was feeling her pain, too.

When I first had an idea, I sent my editor a one-page story pitch or concept, which he thought was worth pursuing. Then I developed it into an outline, a rather detailed chapter by chapter description that ran over fifty pages. Once the outline was approved, I began the actual writing, which also involves some expansion.

For example, the outline included an otherworldly element that had John actually speaking to Abby in a ghostly voice, warning her about the man who was trying to hurt her. My editor advised me to take this out—sage advice—as he thought it gave away too much of the story and might be a little weird it its actual execution. On the other hand, in the outline Jim Stanton didn’t have much of a backstory or a voice, so as I was writing I explored his past and gave him some scenes of his own that tied into John’s story. Of course, the novel varies from the outline. In the end, the outline is a framework—a road map for what becomes an amazing adventure, but a road map, nonetheless, so that the publisher and the writer share a sense of where the book is going.

The book immerses us in the lives of military families. Were you an army brat as a kid?

My father served in the Signal Corps, but he was a civilian by the time I was born. When I was in fourth grade an army family moved on our block, and I quickly befriended the captain’s daughter Julie, who was a year older than I was. Their family of nine had just come from an assignment in Panama, and the neighborhood kids were mystified by such an exotic background. In the ensuing years Julie and I became best friends, and I fell into her family. I worried when her father was deployed to Vietnam. Her mom took us everywhere, so I was exposed to activities on the local army base.

Then, when I was in high school, my father took a position with the Department of Defense, working outside Stuttgart, Germany. Although our family lived in a small farming town, we were allowed certain military privileges at the military bases—the commissary and PX, the officer’s club and subsidized APO mail. My siblings and I attended the American schools on base. During the summers I worked in the base library and for the Red Cross, which had a presence on base to serve soldiers and assist in international communications. It was a rich experience, diminished only by the fact that I was a senior in high school, and an extremely introverted individual.

How has your research for
One September Morning
changed the way you view daily news stories?

First, I cannot allow myself the luxury of not reading about the developing situation in Iraq or walking away from the
Today
show when they’re doing a segment involving an American soldier or combat situations overseas. By nature, I have always been a news wimp, preferring to avoid stories that are disturbing or unpleasant, and I have had to overcome that secret desire to live in a bubble.

My research has also diminished any desire I might have had to be a journalist. I worry for any people venturing into war zones and unstable nations. I held my breath when Meredith Vieira traveled to China to cover the 2008 earthquake. Any longings I once had for international adventure are now lost to a latte and a good book by the fire!

Who are some of the authors you admire? What are some of your favorite reads?

I’m smiling because recently I was asked that question by someone I’d just met at a party and my first answer was that I love everything by Anna Quindlen. She turned to me, grabbed both my arms, jumping up and down and shouting, “Yes! Yes!” I was right with her; we spoke the same language, having lost and found ourselves in Ms. Quindlen’s fiction and nonfiction work.
Rise and Shine, Blessing, Black and Blue, One True Thing—
Anna Quindlen’s novels captivate me from beginning to end. My only complaint is that she doesn’t write enough.

Other writers that get me in trouble because I cannot put their books down are Lolly Winston, Lisa Jackson and Nora Roberts. I admire Jodie Picoult’s love of a controversial dynamic, and Alice Hoffman’s ability to portray the spiritual and otherworldly as organic facets of life. Their work entertains and pulls the reader into their stories through their characters. These writers really get inside a character’s skin. I’m in awe of their talents.