by Emma Dibdin
There have been wildfires further north in California, but now the blazes have moved close enough that a layer of smoke has been unfurled over the city, choking the air with a burned wood smell and raining a light smattering of ash onto cars. This frightens me, the notion that such a thing is even possible, but the newscasters seem calm, the experts earnestly explaining that this has been an unusually dry winter and an even drier spring, and as a result grass and foliage have become like kindling, ripe for ignition. The air quality is not dangerous, they say, but those with asthma or other lung conditions should stay indoors, which sounds like an admission of at least some danger.
I go to the airport much earlier than I need to, eager to seal myself into a hermetic cube away from this airborne toxic event. The security line at LAX is chaotic, three distinct lines with no clear labelling leaving everyone to ask each other what they’re in line for. Children whining, couples passive-aggressively muttering to each other, people frantically choking down the beverages they forgot they couldn’t take through security. An airport employee yells something incomprehensible at the line miles ahead of us, and I close my eyes and mentally run through the order in which I’ll put my things onto the security belt – roller bag first; jacket, shoes, bag of liquids in one bin; laptop in another bin; handbag in a third bin, or do shoes go directly onto the conveyor? I can never remember this, and it feels important that I get this right, because I’m not sure I can handle a security employee yelling at me this evening.
While I’m waiting at the gate, I pace back and forth and make a call to the number David gave me for Shelly Brook. I get an assistant’s voicemail and leave a message, already feeling discouraged. I send the intern, Karen Daniels, a LinkedIn message. None of this feels promising.
I try to sleep on the red-eye flight, but my mind won’t slow down for long enough, jolting me back every time I begin to drift. When the wheels hit the tarmac, the first blush of sunrise is creeping onto the horizon, and by the time I make it into Manhattan it’s fully light, too overwhelmingly so for sleep to be an option. No matter how tired I am, daytime naps always leave me feeling worse. So, a quick shower, an obscenely tall black coffee with two extra espresso shots, and I’m back out, feeling blurry but newly determined, walking New York streets while I make calls because the pace of the city feels fitting, spurring me along.
And I need to be spurred, because things are not starting well. Shelly Brook’s assistant answers the phone this time, and before I’ve even got through my third sentence she snaps, ‘Do not call here again,’ and hangs up. I briefly think I’ve found a website for Bridget Meriweather, the costume assistant, but when I click the link from Google it’s a dead end: This website has expired or the hosting has been removed.
Later, Karen Daniels responds to my LinkedIn message: ‘I’m not able to talk about anything relating to my time on Reckless 2. Sorry that I can’t help.’ The stiffness of her language, the implication of some external force preventing her from speaking, unnerves me. But I’m just tired and wired and reading too much into a polite, formal, two-line response.
By now, I have walked all the way from my hotel near Times Square down to the general vicinity of Carol’s building. Chelsea is a strange neighbourhood, at once moneyed and almost completely without character, or at least that’s my impression from an hour spent walking its streets. The building itself is a nondescript beige block, a converted fabric factory that, since the nineties, has become known as one of Manhattan’s most exclusive addresses. Having run out of leads on my actual story, I spent much of the plane ride reading up on the history of the building, because being armed with useless knowledge is better than no knowledge.
But now that I’m here, I realize that I don’t have anything like a plan. I had a vague mental image of going up to the reception desk and asking them if they could call up to Carol Conrad’s apartment, tell her a guest was waiting downstairs, but this is clearly insane. This is not the kind of building where a random person can walk in off the street and ask to speak to a tenant, not unless they want to be escorted out and permanently barred. I do know that Carol is in the city; candid photographs of her leaving a Soul Cycle class in this neighbourhood emerged just yesterday, and she is also on the guest list for an exhibition opening at the Met tomorrow evening, the press release for which landed in my inbox by chance. But there is no chance I’ll be able to get near her at that event, and so for now I’ve resorted to my best bad option: lurking in the coffee shop opposite her apartment building, hoping to spot her coming or going through the revolving doors at the front of the grand marble lobby. Hoping, too, that the doorman waiting just inside can’t tell that I’m staring.
With one eye on the doorway across the street, I scroll through Shelly Brook’s social media accounts, which are surprisingly active for a forty-something woman whose acting career is intermittent at best. Her Instagram is full of food pictures, inspirational quotes written out in pretty fonts, and group shots of her with a rotating cast of women, three of whom I identify as close friends by the regularity of their appearances. Two of them, Susan and Mel, have work email addresses that are easy to find online, and so I send a message to both.
Bridget Meriweather does not have a social media presence of any kind, and so at this point she’s a dead end. I make a list of crew members from the productions that Shelly, Bridget and Karen worked on, and Google all of them for contact information. Many of them have websites listing their credits and skills, so it’s easy enough to find email addresses, and by the end of the day I’ve sent out probably seventy-five cold emails asking them to contact me if they want to talk. I tell myself that I’m not wasting my time; I am casting a wide net.
That night, I dream about Bridget, her features vague and indistinct based on the single low-quality photograph I was able to find online. She is striking, though, and stands on a vast and verdant mountaintop looking out at the sky, on a precipice but in no clear danger. It’s only when I wake up that I realize this is my subconscious brain’s rendering of New Zealand, based entirely on the Lord of the Rings movies.
This is the connection I was too tired to make yesterday, the link that I missed. Bridget’s expired personal website had a New Zealand domain. The production on which she overlapped with Clark was filmed just outside of Wellington. Bridget is the woman Clark was talking about when he confessed his secret to me; she is Skye’s real mother. She has to be.
While I’m brewing subpar coffee out of a pod, my phone rings, and I feel a pulse of adrenalin as I see it’s an unknown number.
‘Is this Jessica?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Susan Watson.’
‘Hi!’ I try not to sound too eager. ‘Thank you for calling me back.’
‘Yeah, I’ve got a few things to say.’
‘Does Shelly know you’re talking to me? Can you get her to call me?’
‘No, she can’t talk to you. And this has to be anonymous, I don’t want my name anywhere near this.’
‘Okay.’
‘Something bad happened, with her and him. They had a fling, and then it got ugly.’
She’s just jumping right in, while I’m still scrambling to find my notebook and also putting her on speakerphone so that I can record this.
‘Ugly how?’
‘I think you can fill in the gaps.’
‘I really can’t.’
‘I mean, he’s Clark Conrad. He can do whatever he wants. He came on strong, she said, like a lightning storm, and when someone that handsome and powerful and wanted wants you, you don’t say no. But she knew he was married, she felt bad, and she knew her reputation would suffer way more than his if people found out, because people love to scream home-wrecker at the woman and forgive the man for everything. So she ended it, told him she couldn’t do it any more.’
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘but—’
‘He wouldn’t let it go. Harassed her, humiliated her on set, threatened her future on the show. He had an exec producer
credit by then, so he was in the writers’ room whispering in their ear, getting them to cut down her screen time, planting the seed that she was difficult.’
‘Right. I remember the stories about her being a diva.’
‘It’s so insulting. Shelly was always such a hard worker, took her character seriously, had nothing but respect for everybody on that set. But he wanted her off the show. Didn’t want her around as a reminder of something he’d failed to control, is how she put it.’
I feel a chill.
‘But he wasn’t abusive to her? I mean, he wasn’t violent? Not that I’m diminishing what actually happened, but—’
‘Not that she ever told me,’ Susan replies. ‘But he is not a good guy.’
‘So he forced her off the show?’
‘By this time, she wanted out of there just as badly as he wanted her gone. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him, so they agreed to let her out of her contract, but they were worried about what she’d say afterwards. They tried to pay her off to keep her quiet, offered a lump sum in exchange for signing an NDA, which didn’t work.’
‘But she never did talk about it, did she? I remember all these fans trying to figure out what had happened, reading all the interviews she ever did, but she just never mentioned it.’
‘Nope. They found a way to muzzle her. And honestly, this was a dumb move on her part – I could have told her so. She did need money, is the thing. Clark had badmouthed her so much that I guess word had spread, and people did not want to work with her now that she was known as difficult. So she sold her story to The Daily Reporter. They promised her this big exposé, spent hours interviewing her, and then they stuck the story in a drawer and never returned any more of her calls, because Conrad is buddies with the publisher. There’s some name for it, apparently it’s a thing tabloids do when they want to protect someone. They buy your story just to bury it, make it impossible for you to ever talk about it in public.’
‘Is that even possible, to sell away the exclusive rights to your own story?’
‘It sure is. And if you violate that exclusivity deal, you’ll be sued for millions of dollars by a company that has lawyers on retainer just waiting for an opportunity like this. That poor Amabella girl who’s gone radio silent? I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the same thing to her.’
‘What about Bridget Meriweather? Do you know anything about her?’
She pauses, for long enough that I fear the line has gone dead.
‘Hello? Susan?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Do you know anything about Bridget?’
‘I have to go,’ she says abruptly, and though I persuade her to let me call back, I have a sinking feeling she won’t answer. This was lightning in a bottle, I just happened to catch her at the right moment, and so I write down everything I can and force myself not to consider the implications yet. It’s just information. That’s all.
When I pick my phone back up, I’m jolted to see that there’s a message from Clark waiting on the screen, which must have arrived while I was talking to Susan: ‘I miss you.’
I don’t reply.
What I do is Google Bridget Meriweather again, and this time I go deep, searching only for articles published before 2005. Bridget’s last credited job is from 1998, as costume assistant on a straight-to-video movie I’ve never heard of, and after that there is nothing. Somewhere in between Skye’s birth in 1997 and that final credit, Bridget vanished.
And finally, down in page 8 of the results, I find the obituary. There’s no picture alongside it, but the moment I read the details – twenty-three years old, aspiring costume designer, based in Wellington, New Zealand – everything falls into place. She died in February 1998, less than a year after giving birth to Skye, and all that remains of her now is this single, sad, two-paragraph article. No cause of death listed.
Anxiety is making me nauseous, my pulse too loud in my ears, and not even a hard six-mile run up to Central Park and back is enough to restore my calm.
The rest of the morning is a wash; no more calls, no replies to my emails, and coming all the way to New York for this is beginning to feel insane. But I’m back at the coffee shop opposite Carol’s, watching the doorway closely, and when I see her coming out of the entrance I have to strain my eyes to be sure I’m not hallucinating. Then I throw myself out of the door and sprint across the street so fast I don’t notice the red hand sign, and a truck horn blares as the driver narrowly avoids running me down.
‘Excuse me, Carol?’ I say, ignoring the driver yelling abuse at me. She’s already looking at me, startled, having seen me almost get pulverized. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, I’m—’
‘I know who you are,’ she says, not angry and not surprised. ‘Trying to get yourself killed?’
‘Yeah. I mean, no,’ I say, breathless, laughing. I can’t believe it’s really her. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to intrude, I just didn’t have any better way of getting hold of you, and I need to speak to you. If you’d be willing.’
‘Depends on what you mean by speaking.’ Her voice sounds different to her on-screen roles, twangier, the vowel sounds more pronounced, and then I remember that she’s from the South originally. Her accent flattened out over the years, as tends to happen when your job is to be a chameleon. ‘Speak to you as a reporter? No. Have a cup of coffee? Sure.’
I didn’t expect this, and my face must show it.
‘Let’s get out of this area, though.’ Her eyes dart around, searching, and then she nods westward. ‘Walk with me this way, we’ll go to the water.’
The Hudson is glittering in the early summer sun, a taste of ocean salt in the air, and I wish I were able to enjoy this as we walk. I’m too conscious of my heartbeat, pounding in my ears, flooding me.
‘How did you know who I was?’ I ask her.
‘When someone writes a puff piece about my ex-husband – never mind two of them – I make a point of knowing who they are.’
I busy myself with taking out my notebook, trying to act unaffected.
‘That’s not what I agreed to,’ Carol says sharply.
‘If I can just take a few notes—’
‘Do you take notes during most of your regular conversations?’ She’s immensely polite, smiling, but steely. ‘I meant what I said. I don’t speak to the press, I don’t give interviews, so let’s just cut the illusion that that’s what this is.’
‘What is this?’
‘You’re not really here as a journalist. You’re telling yourself that, but the truth is you’re here as a fan.’ Before I can open my mouth to respond, she adds, ‘and as someone in love.’
‘I’m here to get the truth.’
She looks at me, her impossibly blue eyes piercing, and I hold her gaze defiantly.
‘If you want the truth from me, you’re going to have to return the favour,’ she says. And I think that there’s nothing to gain from lying to her.
‘Okay. Yeah, we’re involved. It’s all been pretty sudden.’
‘It always is with him. Ice and fire and nothing in between.’
‘But there are these stories. Rumours about more allegations, the LA Times supposedly has a piece, and I just— I’m trying to figure out what to believe.’
‘You’re trying to absolve him.’
I don’t answer, and she sighs.
‘Look, I signed an NDA as part of our divorce agreement. I don’t talk about our marriage, and he gave up his visitation rights to Sarah, agreed to stay away from us. But he’s not holding up his side of the deal.’
‘In what way?’
‘We’ve had to move twice, because he was having us followed. Our emails were hacked, there were strange black cars parked across the street 24/7, he’d have flowers sent to the apartment on a regular basis. No card, no reason, just a reminder that he knew where we were. It’s always about control with him.’
I wonder if she knows that Clark moved me into an apartment he owned.
‘He still knows w
here you are,’ I tell her. ‘I got the building description from him.’
‘I know. We’re not exactly off the map here. We were renting a brownstone before, because I thought it’d be more anonymous, and he found us within days. So did the paparazzi. The building where I live now, it’s not low-key, but they have a twenty-four-hour security staff. That’s better.’
‘What are you worried he’ll do?’
I expect her to laugh this off, say that she’s not worried so much as irritated by Clark’s persistence, his refusal to respect her boundaries. I expect her to reassure me that Clark does not pose a threat, that the suspicion laced through my dream is nothing but paranoia.
‘I don’t know,’ she says instead, and for the first time she sounds hopeless.
‘He told me the truth about Skye. That you’re— that she has a different mother.’
She looks intently at me.
‘What exactly did he tell you?’
‘That he had an affair, while he was on location in New Zealand, and that she got pregnant, and that you agreed to pass off the baby as your own.’
‘That’s all he said?’
I’m nonplussed. ‘That’s not enough?’
Carol pauses in her tracks, her mouth twisted over to one side like she’s trying to hold something in.
‘At the time, all I knew was she was young, troubled, came on to him, and he couldn’t resist. He said she got herself pregnant deliberately, because she couldn’t bear it when he ended the relationship. He said he offered to pay for an abortion, and she refused. He said he was worried she’d hurt the baby, and so we had to adopt her. He said, he said, he said.’
‘What about her? What did she say?’
‘She said that Clark raped her.’
I feel weak, my limbs suddenly heavy.
‘I dismissed it. It was so absurd, and so far away from anything I’d ever seen in him, and she was on another continent. I wanted to forget that she had ever existed. And that’s exactly what we all did. Pretended that I’d been quietly pregnant and then quietly given birth – people bought it, back then.’