No one had ever asked me that before. “My grandpa smoked a pipe. The tobacco smoke smelled like cherry vanilla. Every night, after dinner. It’s the most delicious and comforting smell, and you’d smell it as soon as you walk into my grandparents’ living room. And anyway. He died. He had a heart attack two years ago. It sucked.”
“Oh yeah. Nico told me about that. Sorry. Your gram’s really cool. But she seems sad sometimes.”
“I know. It still smells like my grandpa’s pipe in her living room. It makes her happy-sad. She doesn’t always want to feel happy-sad, which is partly why she offered to come out here with Nico. But that smell reminds her—and me—of Grandpa more than anything. It’s instant. It’s like he’s there. That’s how I know how important smells are. And I want to make them. I want to make important smells that make people feel things.”
“That’s really interesting, Willa.”
“Thanks.”
“Well, they’re gonna call me to set soon.”
“Okay.”
“Hang on. I’m gonna sit down to write on this. It’s W-i-l-l-a, right?”
“Yes.” I loved how important it was for him to spell my name right.
He sat down cross-legged on the floor, placed the magazine on top of his script on his thigh, uncapped the marker, and began writing and doodling on the magazine.
I sat down right next to him, close enough that my knee touched his. The scent of a metallic Sharpie marker would always remind me of him. He smelled like soap and spearmint, some hair product that I didn’t recognize, and Tide detergent. Cute Guy smell.
The rest of the cast had only signed their names, but he was writing other words too, on both pages of the article.
“Yo! Superstar! They need you on set.” My brother jogged over.
“Be right there.” Shane put the cap back on the pen, closed the magazine, and handed them to me. I was surprised by how serious his expression was. He stood up and then held his hand out to help me up. I took his hand, and he lifted me up, his index finger touching the inside of my wrist. Right on the pulse point. In the time it took me to stand, I didn’t see our future life together, but I felt it. It felt comforting and exciting and romantic and light and important, and there was a home and kids and…I swear I felt it all in that moment.
I didn’t know if he felt it too, and I didn’t care. That tiny touch of his finger fired up my pulse, and if I had been anywhere near the same height as him, I would have kissed him on the mouth. But I was a foot shorter than him, so I did the next best thing.
Or the worst. Depending on how you look at it.
Before he let go of my hand, I lifted his hand to my mouth and kissed the back of it. I didn’t make a kissy sound or anything, I just kissed his hand like I was some actor in a Jane Austen movie. I had never done anything like that before, but it just felt like the thing to do. I wasn’t even embarrassed about it. I let go of his hand, looked up into his stunned face, shrugged my shoulders, and said, “Okay well, bye.” Because I knew I’d see him again. We’d have our life together, eventually.
“Yeah,” he said, cocking his head to one side and staring at me quizzically. “Okay. Bye.”
He turned and jogged away, past my brother, swatted him on the arm with his script, and disappeared from my view as he was surrounded by makeup and costume people and other crew members.
My brother was now the one who couldn’t move. Because he was doubled over laughing so hard. He covered his face and shook his head. “That was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” He sighed and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “I am never introducing you to my friends again.” He finally walked over and patted me on the back. “But that was awesome. Let’s get Grams, and then I gotta do a big scene, and we will never speak of this again.”
I didn’t care what he thought, or if we never spoke of it again.
I clutched the magazine to my heart and waited until I was alone in the foot doctor’s waiting room to read what Shane had written.
He had drawn a cartoony speech bubble above his photo, and the words inside it said, Hey Willa, you’re cool and you smell nice! with his autograph below, near one of his legs. He drew an arrow that pointed to the other leg and wrote, Faded blue jeans. Fave color. On the other page, he wrote Nice to finally meet you! Hope you always get the smell you want when you mix things together. Is that weird? You know what I mean ;-)
It was weird. And I did know what he meant. He meant that he knew he was meant to be my boyfriend too.
* * *
I may have re-lived that encounter one to five thousand times for a year—or five—afterwards. I wore nothing but faded jeans for the next few years. I only told a couple of my friends about meeting him, once I’d gotten home. It felt like every time I talked about it, it became less real.
So I’d kept it to myself, knowing that we were a match—the performer and the perfumer.
I knew that I would see Shane again.
But I didn’t.
Six years later, when I found out that Nico was going to be the best man at Shane’s wedding to his costar from that CW show, I burned the Tiger Beat magazine and gave away my V-card to the idiot who’d taken me to prom. Then I was off to college, and I never spoke the name Shane Miller out loud again.
Still, part of me believed that his marriage to Margo Quincey couldn’t possibly last.
When I heard that he had become a father, I tried so hard to make all thoughts of him disappear. I had met him one time. It was just an adolescent girl’s celebrity crush. He was just being nice to me, the way he was nice to everyone. But it’s like trying to remove the dried-down middle and base note scents of an oriental perfume from your skin once it has been absorbed at a pulse point. Even when you can’t smell it anymore, others can. I wore my heartache like an invisible veil.
When I heard that he had gotten divorced, well…I was in France. I was just starting to mix things and make them smell the way that I wanted them to. But the heat of my body still emits activated molecules of Shane Miller where he touched me, twelve years later.
It wasn’t love, but it was my imagination about what love could be that came alive when he took my hand. It bloomed and reacted with the warmth of my body, and suddenly I felt like the girl that I wanted to be. It’s chemistry. I’d tried to smash against the molecules of others, but they’d all been volatile top notes that faded and evaporated almost in an instant.
“Yo. Earth to space nerd.” My brother snaps his fingers in front of my face, bringing me back to the conversation.
I suddenly realize that I’ve been absentmindedly sniffing my wrist and the palm of my hand like a weirdo. “I just meant that I’d almost forgotten you guys were friends,” I say to Nico. “I haven’t thought about him in so long. But I’ll hang out with you guys, sure. Whatever.”
3
Shane
The kitchen is now clean-ish, and I didn’t fall asleep facedown in hummus once, so that’s a win.
I still have to Skype my ex-wife and deal with the nanny situation, get in touch with my agent, get groceries, and maybe—maybe—I’ll have time for a grown-up shower and a nap before picking up the kids.
It’s around seven at night in Warsaw, so I might be able to catch Margo. There was a time in my life, long ago, when I couldn’t wait to Skype with her if we were in different cities. Right now I’m dreading it. We get along well, but she’s so predictable. I always know exactly how our conversations are going to play out before I start talking to her. It’s like that with most of the women I’ve dated, to be honest.
One thing I did not predict from Margo when we were dating—that she’d get pregnant. We had just found out that our CW show Twice Bitten would not be renewed for a third season, and it was clear—in an unspoken way—that our relationship would end once the show did. Then one day I was summoned to her trailer, found her sobbing, listened to her explain to me that she had made up her mind and I could be as involved or not involved as I wanted to be, b
ut she would be having this baby. Then I calmly explained to her that I would be as involved a father as legally possible. That meant marrying her.
Was I just trying to do the right thing? Yeah. Were we in love with each other? No. Were we both hoping that at some point maybe we’d both magically fall in love with each other after saying our vows and enduring the trials and tribulations of parenthood? Probably. But we both hated the dating scene in LA, loved the idea of playing house, and to be honest…we did not mind that being young married parents would help casting directors to see us as more than just teenage vampires.
Once the babies came, we grew the fuck up almost overnight and not much else mattered. We both fell head over heels in love with these little people we had created, but…it wasn’t enough to keep our marriage together.
We tried.
No breakup is easy when there are kids involved. There’s always guilt. But we really did always want what was best for everyone.
I think people have this idea of child actors growing up wild and spoiled rotten, completely out of touch with reality, in and out of rehab. Obviously there are a few of those out there, but every single one I’ve known is extremely disciplined and maybe even a little hungrier for a stable life than most people—and protective of what we have once we’ve found some semblance of it. Which is why my ex and I are on the same page when it comes to raising our kids with as much consistency as possible.
We didn’t get to have a normal childhood, so it’s more important than anything to both of us to give our kids as stable an upbringing as we can. Not that there’s anything stable about the life of an actor. Not that there’s anything even remotely sane about the lives of two actors who are co-parenting five-year-old twins.
But we try.
Even when Margo fell in love with a very wealthy producer, we tried “nesting” for a few weeks after deciding to end our marriage. Margo tossed the words “conscious uncoupling” around like glittering Hollywood confetti. I lived in the guest room of our former home in the Hollywood Hills, but every time Landon Gold came over when I was there, it was awkward as fuck. A guy wants to be the king of his castle, and I needed my own castle, no matter how hard it was not seeing the twins every day when I was in town.
But it got easier, eventually. Summer and Lucky were two years old, so I don’t think they even remember what it was like before they split their time between us. It was never a question that we’d have shared custody. And the truth is, Landon is a good guy. He’s a much better match for Margo, he’s good enough with the kids, and he isn’t trying to replace me. So all I’ve had to do was focus on getting my shit together and figure out how to deal with my ex-wife as a parent.
My shit is pretty together, aside from the fact that I’ll probably never sleep or have a significant relationship with a woman again for the rest of my life. Here’s what I’ve figured out about how to deal with my ex-wife as a parent: I just have to pretend that I don’t think she’s an overly ambitious, mildly self-centered, phony boho-hippie flake, and remind myself that she’s a nice person, a good mother, and even a pretty good friend—in her own way. But there always comes a point where I need to put my foot down, and this is one of those points. The foot’s coming down.
I find my laptop and try my luck at initiating a video call with Margo. She accepts the call after three rings. The camera of her phone is pointing up at a very high ceiling. I can hear giggling, rustling, and movement.
“I’m here! Hang on!…Owww! You stuck me with the pin that time.” The phone moves, and when Margo’s hand pulls away, I see that she’s in the middle of a costume fitting. “Hi. What’s up? We’re almost done here.” She’s wearing a Victorian-era dress and holding her arms up while getting poked with safety pins apparently.
Am I jealous that she’s doing a period film that started getting Oscar buzz before they even began shooting it? A little. I’ll never get cast in a period film because I have what’s referred to as “a modern face and manner.” Whatever. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can suck my thoroughly modern balls.
“Do you have a minute? I need to talk to you about something.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They’re fine. I just need to talk to you.”
A middle-aged woman with measuring tape hanging around her neck comes into view for a second. “I’ll pop out for a bit,” she says. “Not to worry.”
Margo’s voice gets deeper as soon as she’s alone. The phone’s propped up against something, and she can barely move with a corset on, but she tries to lean in closer to the camera. “What’s going on? How are they? You look tired.”
“The kids are great.”
“Yeah? They’re doing okay without Paloma?”
“They’re doing just fine without Paloma. They sleep, they get up when they’re supposed to, one of them brushes his teeth all by himself while the other makes a fucking mess in the kitchen, and they magically get to class exactly on time.”
“You still aren’t sleeping?”
“Only from the hours of six thirty to seven thirty in the morning on school days, it turns out.”
“Did you try the valerian root tea?”
“It smells like sweaty socks.”
“You really need to try meditating again, and I mean, if you would just practice yoga even for ten minutes a day, it would change everything.”
“Really? Will it bring Paloma back? Will it change the location of your shoot from Poland to Vancouver, British Columbia? They have mountains there too, and it’s only a three-hour plane ride away.”
“No, but it would change your perspective and your response to these things, because that’s really the only issue here.”
“Is it, though? Is that the only issue?”
“We’ve been over this—it’s not like I love being on the other side of the world from my kids. There weren’t any neo-baroque castles in Vancouver, last time I checked. God, you’re grumpy. I’m going to look up which flower essences would be good for you.”
“Fantastic. While you’re doing that, I’m going to hire a temporary nanny to help me out until you get back.”
“Shane, no.”
“Margo, yes.”
“Did you talk to your housekeeper?”
“Consuelo has two grandkids to look after when she isn’t cleaning houses.”
“Can your mom come stay with you for a bit?”
I knew she’d ask that. My mother is a saint. She lives in Sedona, Arizona with her boyfriend, but they’re currently driving across the East Coast in their Airstream. When I was a kid, we lived in Flagstaff. On the weekends, she’d drive me two and a half hours away to Scottsdale to meet with agents, audition for commercials, shoot commercials. When I booked the Disney Channel show, she moved with me to Burbank while we shot the episodes, stayed with me during the hiatus when I starred in such stellar straight-to-dvd classics as Spaced Camp and The Santa Blahs. She continued on with me in LA until I turned nineteen, after my ABC Family show was cancelled, and never blamed me for my dad’s affair with his secretary and the inevitable divorce that ensued. So as much as I’d love to just call my mom up and whine that I could really use her help over here—I think she’s earned her road trip with a guy named Hank who’s seven years younger than her.
“She’s traveling for at least a month” is all that I say. “What about your parents?”
“They’re both in rehearsals for the Tom Stoppard play. On Broadway. You know that.”
“Which is why I’m going to have to hire someone.”
She tries to angrily cross her arms in front of her chest, but she can barely move them and just ends up in some stubborn Victorian lady Incredible Hulk pose. Do I laugh at her? Yes. Yes, I do.
“It has to be someone we both agree on. You promised.”
“It’s not like I’m going to drag someone in off the street. I’m gonna start making calls. I’ll keep you in the loop. Skype ya later when the kids are home.” I end the call before she ca
n complain.
I’m about to kill two birds with one stone by calling my agent and asking if his wife can recommend someone, when Nico Todd’s annoyingly handsome smirky face shows up on my phone and I realize he’s calling me. “Yo.”
“You on your way?”
“On my way where?”
“To meet me for coffee.”
“Oh yeah.” Shit. I haven’t seen Nico in ages. Between us living on opposite ends of LA, me having kids, my shooting on location in Maine and him being on tour, we’ve only seen each other twice in the past few months. Which is crazy because he’s my best friend.
There goes my grown-up shower and nap.
“Yeah. Leaving now. Where am I meeting you?”
“You totally forgot, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m having sleep issues and I’ve had a shit week. Listen, I need to buy groceries and I have to pick the kids up at three, so can we multi-task?”
“Doesn’t your nanny do that?”
“She did before she quit.”
“Can’t you just order online?”
“Yes, but I’d have to be at home to put the cold stuff away when it’s delivered—just meet me at Erewhon.”
“Which one?”
“On Beverly.” Nico and I always meet up midway between his place and mine because it takes a fucking year to get between the Palisades and downtown. I know exactly what he’s thinking right now—there are always hot women at Erewhon. Organic cold-pressed green juices plus overpriced superfoods and gluten-free donuts equals starlets in tight little tank tops and yoga pants. It’s basic LA math.
“Okay, but I’ve got my sister with me.”
“What?”
“My sister. She’s crashing with me.”
“Not willingly!” I hear her mutter in the background.
I get a surprising shiver up and down my spine. I remember Nico’s sister. Quirky. Adorable. So far, she’s still the only person who has ever kissed me on the back of my hand. She was so young, but how could I forget her? “Hey, Willow!”
Sleeper Page 3