The In-Between Hour

by Barbara Claypole White

Will imagined silence. The silence of snowfall in the forest. The silence at the top of a crag.

I rewrote and rewrote these lines to capture Will's voice and mindset when the novel opens. The forest is his nemesis; the top of a crag is his church.

Another day when he’d failed to resuscitate his crap work-in-progress; another day when Agent Dodds continued to dangle from the helicopter; another day without a strategy for his hero of ten years that wasn’t a fatal “Let go, dude. Just let go.”

When I wrote, "Let go, dude. Just let go," I knew I had captured Will's voice.

Four foot ten, magical and mad, Angeline Shepard had ruled the house with more mood swings than a teenage despot.

Angeline was never diagnosed, which gave me the freedom to write her mental illness only from her family's point of view.

But since his dad had started calling to unleash rage ten, fifteen times a day, Will’s psyche had slipped into battle-fatigue mode.

The premise for this novel came from real life. An aging relative was trapped in a loop of psychotic breaks and called constantly to accuse us of awful things, screaming obscenities. Then he forgot, and all was fine until the next call. On New Year's Eve, when it was particularly bad, my husband snapped and screamed back. Our young son overheard. As he huddled in my lap, crying hysterically, I thought, "We're in hell. This couldn't get any worse." Then my writer brain said, "Aha, but what if … "

His favorite dream in which he glided like an owl above the forest had contorted into a nightmare. In his subconscious state, Will didn’t drift on air currents anymore—he stumbled through the woods on Occoneechee Mountain. Searching for, but never finding, escape.

Will's spirit guide is an owl. (He just doesn't know it!)

Jacob twisted his hands around the phone. Some thought—just out of reach. Where you hidin’, thought?

Jacob's voice came to me easily, thanks to all the interviews with John Blackfeather Jeffries, the retired Chief of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. John let me into his memories and his stories. And wow, his is one incredible storyteller. If I close my eyes, I can hear, see, and smell everything as we sat in his shed, him in a rocking chair, talking and talking. Me? I just listened!

When Angeline disappeared into one of her spells, he would listen for the rumblin’ and the whistlin’ of the trains—sounds as soothin’ as real heavy rain on a tin roof.

One time when I was interviewing John in his shed, it was raining. This is my memory adapted for Jacob.

Heck of a woman, his Angeline. Loved a good adventure, yes sir. Best smile in Orange County. Woo-wee! Sweet sixteen and she’d had her pick of the menfolk. Day she stood by his side and spoke her marriage vows, he had to pinch hisself into believin’.

Jacob's whole life can be defined through his love for Angeline. He stood by her and never judged.

Tomorrow were gonna be a real fine day. He had a project and it didn’t involve sittin’ on his ass in the arts and crafts room with tissue paper and a pair of safety scissors.

This two sentences still make me laugh.

All summer, with Orange County cycling through murderous heat and once-in-a-century drought, she’d prepared for brush fires like a general perfecting frontline strategy. Even her contingency plans had backups. But while she was busy figuring out how to rescue her animals, the real threat in her life had built. Silently.

I deliberately worked a drought into the background for tension. When you live in the forest, as we do (in Orange County, N.C.) the fear of fire can be overwhelming.

Parenthood started with such optimism: your child would achieve his baby milestones, collect gold stars, maintain a good grade point average, hang out with the crowd that didn’t drink and drive. And then, when you weren’t paying attention, it all stripped down to one horrifying truth: you just wanted your son to find the will to live.

There is much of me in this paragraph. My son has battled darkness; I know how Hannah feels.

Once dawn came, however, they would hike up to the Occaneechi Path, the historic Native American trading route on the crest of the hill.

Saponi Mountain is inspired by our corner of Orange County. The old trading route run along the ridge behind our land.

Soft-soled moccasins had packed the soil tightly day after day, month after month, decade after decade, treading memories into the land. Sealing them in forever.

Again, this reference comes from the land behind our property. I did several fascinating walks with local groups who took me onto private land and introduced me to its history.

Two months earlier the loss of her scarlet ruellias—a gift from an aging client who couldn’t afford her vet bill—would have caused genuine pain.

I'm a huge gardener and steal from my gardens constantly when describing imaginary gardens. I love my scarlet ruellias!

But Galen? The worst thing he ever did was stay up till 3:00 a.m. on a school night writing poetry.

My poet son totally did this in high school. I gave up stressing and at some point accepted that he needed to write at night, when the world was quiet.

Through the darkness, a flush of blooms hovered over her mutabilis rose like brightly colored butterflies. How wrong she had been to assume all roses were high maintenance. This old-fashioned plant had thrived in her parched garden, and now it burst open with a second round of buds and flowers the color of apricot, baby pink and crimson. As petals unfurled in drought and sometimes opened at dusk, hope grew in unexpected places.

100% autobiographical!

Lying once about Freddie’s death had been an unforgivable lapse of judgment, and yet Will was now stuck in the middle of that lie—a spider caught in its own web.

This is Will's dilemma throughout the story.

Already, he was reading the route, decoding the puzzle, figuring out individual moves. He could climb left of the roof, but no, he would not avoid the crux. He would face the obstacle and crank it. A deceptive 5.6, pitch three demanded more skill than less-experienced climbers realized. He strode past the large flake to the right and arrived at the base of the climb. He cracked his knuckles and stared up at the rock. No doubt, no thought except for one: I can do this.

I will be forever grateful to my amazing editor, Emily, for suggesting I add a scene with Will on the rock face. I'd done a ton of research on climbing, but am terrified of heights. Working on this chapter took everything about Will to a deeper level. Figuring out the choreography with a climber was tons of fun.

A bloated deer lay on the grassy verge, its flesh ripped open to expose bone, and unidentifiable chunks of roadkill littered the painted lines dividing the lanes. To his right, a barn—roofless and caving in on itself—struggled to rise out of the undergrowth only to be tugged back by wild vines. To his left, a regiment of transmission towers flattened everything in their path as they marched over the horizon like metal warriors.

THE IN-BETWEEN HOUR is a novel of place, and the N.C. forest is almost a character. Will, Hannah, and Jacob relate to it in very different ways, and as Will heads toward it on the Interstate, he's seeing one thing: danger.

Precision and balance, Will. A climber who rushed, who didn’t strategize, was a dead climber.

Will moves through life as a rock climber.

Fantastic, exhaustion was dragging him down the primrose path to overused clichés.

Will the writer!

“You think there’s an expiration on grief?”

Strange, how moments of heartbreak didn’t announce themselves, they just ambushed you. Shouldn’t there be an earthquake measuring nine point five on the Richter scale when the plates of your life shifted? But outside this room with the cheap print of Jesus and the bed with hospital corners, traffic continued to speed through the forty-five-miles-per-hour zone. And in the time it took to inhale, the cycle of grief regenerated.

It always amazes me how the world keeps turning when you want everything to stop and echo your grief.

“When we was kids, Mother only let us play on the rivers and creeks. And on Occoneechee Mountain. It ain’t now like it was then. We was labeled colored and segregated in church, in school and in the movies, but they couldn’t segregate us in the woods. That’s how I met your mama. ’Course, she were only a little bitty thing first time I spied her.”

This came directly from one of my interviews with John Blackfeather.

The forest were his real home: his daddy and his mama, his ancestors and his past, his present and his future. ’Course, he didn’t have much future. His flame were goin’ out. But to finish his days in the forest? Now that might give him some peace of mind.

… And this is Jacob's relationship to the forest.

His blood were all over that mountain. Heck, his skin, too. One time he banged up his right knee real bad sleddin’ down on the back of an old rockin’ chair. Woo-wee. Flew like the wind and ended up in the Eno.

Another memory from John Blackfeather!

Well, he never. And an owl at the edge of the forest! Lots of Lumbee Elders, they said the owl were a bad omen, that if he hooted four times in a row, death were comin’. But he respected the all-seein’ night owl. Could set a man to thinkin’. No matter how great you thought you was, that ol’ rascal

The main characters keep seeing this owl because he's Will's spirit guide.

Hannah followed half-buried signposts of time: a wagon wheel and two rusty mule shoes. There was living, breathing history in this forest, history that was tangible, history that endured.

Another autobiographical paragraph, because this novel is also my love letter to our little corner of North Carolina. As a history major, I feel the beat of the past in old buildings and on historical land. I also sense it in the woods behind our house. And yes, I've dug up mule shoes and wagon wheel rims.

So much in life was transitory, but not the connection she felt to this piece of land.

This is Hannah's relationship to the forest.

The air tightened as if sealed in an invisible container, and the squirrels and the birds fell silent. Hannah closed her eyes through another wave of dizziness, her hands digging into the bark of the oak. A door slammed, the car drove off and a crow cawed. When she opened her eyes, she was alone with the dogs. And in the bough above, there was an owl.

From the beginning I imagined a weird, almost supernatural connection between Hannah and Will. They both sense it, but don't understand it until much later in the novel.

“And my characters?” Damn, his ego had to ask. “You seem to enjoy exploring broken minds.” Not so much enjoyment as an inability to escape total psychos.

Everything for Will comes back to his mother.

A bond that transcends even death. Grief stirred in his stomach, moved up through his esophagus, threatened to spew out of his mouth in a macabre chant of He’s dead, my son is dead.

Will is so broken and lost when the novel starts. Every day, he's just trying to hang on to the rock.

How perfect, she had used the word senescent. Will loved to be surprised by people’s word choices. Words held such power and such beauty. And such escape. As a young boy, he chose magical not mad to describe his mother. As an adult, he chose alive, not dead, to describe his son.

Seeing the world through Will's POV as a writer.

So many damaged creatures had passed through Hannah’s life in the past twenty years and most of them had come from Poppy. Now her friend had brought her a bestselling author and his grieving dad.

At it's core, THE IN-BETWEEN HOUR is the story of two broken families coming together to heal.

Coincidence spoke of connection, and renting the cottage to an aging widower was nothing short of symmetry.

I love Hannah's perspective on life.

Treating pets often means treating owners. You’d be surprised how many clients ask for help with minor ailments.

I had so much fun interviewing a local holistic vet for Hannah research.

Interesting how different white could be. White in Hannah’s hands seemed to be warm and calming. White in his apartment was cold and sterile.

There is so much push and pull between Hannah and Will …

He would never start a climb without a strategy for descent, and yet in this situation he was behaving like a frantic novice about to bomb.

Back to Will thinking as a climber …

Will slid down the wall to the pale gray carpet and watched the man with his white hair tugged half out of its ponytail. The man who had taught him to hunt and fish, to whittle wood and identify animal bones. The man who had been a devoted husband and yet had failed to teach his son how to love a woman so she loved him back.

Writing this paragraph tore at my heart.

As with every aspect of his writing, he’d grown lazy, choreographing action around backdrops rather than exploring the psychological impact of setting on character. After all, a patch of forest could brand you for life.

Amen, Will. Setting tattoos character.

Branches snapped all around him, and Will glanced over his shoulder, half expecting a pack of saber-toothed tigers to leap from behind the oaks and shred him with six-inch razor fangs. Reduce him to gristle and bone. Less than two days in Orange County, and he was back in the forest. It was nothing more than a Pandora’s box of the past, and unlike his dad, Will wanted that part of his life to remain in storage.

Will is terrified of the memories hiding in the forest.

He’d always planned to live up in the mountains and the caves. Be self-sufficient. That were his dream after his dear, sweet Angeline crossed over. But what kind of a daddy and a granddaddy would he be if no one could ever find him?

Typical Jacob!

Last week Galen had been like a bulimic—binging on anger, then vomiting despair. This new emptiness manifested as emotional evisceration.

The sad reality of depression …

Hannah had always believed that what happened in life was less important than how you handled it. Every action, every reaction, was a chance to grow.

I agree with Hannah here!

How was a parent meant to bury his child and resume his daily word count?

This goes to the heart of Will's state of mind.

Will raised his face into the long shadows that crept from the forest. Vapor trails slashed the sky, and the tops of the trees blazed molten gold. He used to love this hour, when the light connoted hope. Hope that his mom would seek help, and when he abandoned that fantasy, hope that he could escape. Now the gloaming was simply a reminder of his son dying at the close of day.

Back to the significance of the gloaming, the in-between hour. (The working title for this novel was THE GLOAMING.)

She stepped forward; he stepped back. She crossed one foot over the other and moved to the left; he moved to the right. Then she circled ninety degrees around him to open the fridge.

When I wrote this scene, I imagined them dancing.

“Listening’s part of my job. But with your father, it’s the joy of hearing him reminisce. His knowledge of plants and herbs is a bonus.”

Pure Hannah.

I’m a pushover for people who are lost. Metaphorically speaking.”

More Hannah!

A whisper in his subconscious said, Tell her about Freddie. She’ll understand. But if he did that, he’d be expanding the parameters of his lie. And even lies needed boundaries.

Will is trapped in between day and night, life and death, fiction and truth.