by Riley Sager
“You should have pulled the trigger,” she says when Charlie steps into the room.
Charlie stops a few feet from the bed. “Hello to you, too.”
“I mean it,” Marge says. “I’m probably going to die in this place. I might never leave this hospital bed. That’s what the doctor said.”
“Doctors have been wrong before.”
It wouldn’t surprise Charlie if Marge stuck around for longer than two months. She’s still got some toughness to her. She must, or else she wouldn’t have lasted through the night. Firefighters found her still sitting by the swimming pool, long after the lodge had collapsed in on itself. Although suffering from smoke inhalation, second-degree burns from flaming debris that hit her during the collapse, and the onset of hypothermia, she was still kicking.
“I’m assuming the police came by,” Charlie says.
“They did. I was surprised by what they had to say. I didn’t know we went to the lodge just to reminisce. And that the fire was an accident. And that I apparently hadn’t shot anyone, let alone two people.”
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Charlie says.
Marge starts to reply, grasping for the right words. When they refuse to arrive, she simply says, “I’m sorry. What I did was—”
“I’m not here for an apology,” Charlie says. “And I’m sure as hell not here to seek your forgiveness.”
Marge peers up at her, curious. “Then why are you here?”
“To say that we’re square.”
Charlie approaches the tray beside the bed. She reaches deep into her pocket, pulls out something small and ivory, and sets it down on the breakfast tray.
Marge stares at Robbie’s tooth, the corners of her mouth twitching upward into what Charlie can only guess is a smile. Sinking back into the pillows, she closes her eyes and lets out a long, satisfied sigh.
“Good girl,” she says.
INT. HOSPITAL ROOM—DAY
Charlie’s final stop is another hospital room, just a few doors down the hall from Marge’s. Unlike her, Josh is sound asleep and lightly snoring.
No, not Josh.
Jake.
True to her word, Marge had indeed moved him someplace safe, dragging him out of the lobby and putting him in the back seat of the Cadillac. When the portico fell with the rest of lodge, the roof of the Caddy bent but didn’t break. A couple of firefighters found him inside and unconscious as they were loading Charlie into the ambulance. Josh was loaded in right along with her. Charlie held his hand the entire way to the hospital.
Now she sits by his bed, watching him sleep. When he wakes, his eyes flutter open in a way that Charlie can only describe as cinematic. And even though she shoved a knife into his side, he still smiles when he sees her. Not even pain can dim that megawatt grin.
“You stabbed me,” he says.
“You kidnapped me.”
“I also tried to save you.”
Charlie gives a nod of thanks. “You did.”
Josh tries to sit up, groaning with effort. Most of his body has been wrapped in bandages. Some are for the stab wound. Others are for the gunshot wound. And still others might be from when Charlie accidentally rear-ended the Cadillac while he was inside.
“The Mummy,” she says. “Nineteen thirty-two. Boris Karloff.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Josh says. “Some film nerd told me he was in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
Charlie grins. “That film nerd must be a very smart girl.”
“She is,” Josh says. “Although she must not be too smart to be sticking around this place.”
“I just came by to thank you for saving me.” A lump forms in Charlie’s throat. She swallows it down. “I-I’m not sure I deserved it.”
“You did,” Josh tells her. “You need to stop being so hard on yourself.”
“I know.” Charlie pauses. “And you need to find a different job.”
Josh laughs until it starts to hurt. Clutching his side, he says, “That I do. I think I’d make a great chauffeur. Maybe I should move to Hollywood. Be a driver to the stars.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me.”
“Speaking of driving.” Josh gestures to his clothes, neatly folded on the nightstand beside the bed, almost as if they’d just come from a cleaner who’d forgotten to tackle the bloodstains. “Reach into the front right pocket of my jeans. There’s something inside I want you to have.”
Charlie does, dipping her hand into the pocket and finding a set of car keys. She pulls them out by the plastic fob, the keys jingling together below it.
“It’s yours,” Josh says.
“I can’t take your car.”
“You need to get to Ohio somehow. Besides, you’re only borrowing it. Go home, spend some time with your grandmother, bring it back to me. I’ll probably still be here.” Josh touches his side. “And when you do, maybe we can, I don’t know, go see a movie or something.”
Charlie curls her fingers around the keys, a sign she’s considering it. Not just borrowing Josh’s car, but all of it. For one, she feels indebted to him. He came to her rescue, in spite of what she’d done to him. That needs to be acknowledged and appreciated.
Then there’s the fact that she likes this version of Josh. It’s the one she got brief glimpses of during the long, strange trip of the previous night. Now that all suspicion is gone, she thinks it might be nice to meet the real him.
But the bedrock truth is that surviving the night has left Charlie feeling lonelier than ever.
Maddy’s gone.
Robbie, too.
Now more than ever, Charlie’s in need of a new friend.
“Maybe,” she says as she stuffs the keys into her coat pocket. “As long as I get to pick the movie.”
EXT. LODGE—DAY
Charlie has to take a cab to get to the Grand Am, which is still parked at the base of the ridge where the Mountain Oasis Lodge had once sat. The cabbie, kind enough not to mention the way Charlie looks and smells, only gets as far the sign for the lodge before being stopped by a police barricade.
Forced to walk the rest of the way, Charlie eventually gets to the bridge in front of the waterfall. The chunk of railing she’d taken out with the Volvo is now covered with police tape—clearly a symbolic gesture and not an adequate replacement.
The Volvo itself still sits in the grass beside the ravine. Although Robbie’s body had been removed and carried away hours earlier, Charlie gets a chill when she sees the car. It reminds her not only about how close she had come to death but about how little she knew Robbie.
And how, when pushed, she was capable of anything.
As she crosses the bridge, Charlie wonders if there had been warning signs that she missed. She assumes there were. She also assumes it’ll take years of therapy to figure out what they were.
That and maybe some little orange pills.
Charlie knows that the movies in her mind need to stop. She can’t spend parts of her life in a dream state. She suspects that’s one of the reasons she had so spectacularly misjudged Robbie. He was too handsome, too smart, too perfect for real life. The flaws were there, but she had overlooked them in favor of preserving the movie-version boyfriend she wanted instead of looking for the real-life one she needed.
That’s the tricky thing about movies. They can be wonderful and beautiful and amazing. But they’re not like life, which is wonderful, beautiful, and amazing in a different way.
Not to mention messy.
And complicated.
And sad and scary and joyful and frustrating and, very often, boring. Charlie knows the night she’s just had is the exception rather than the rule.
She reaches the Grand Am, which had been left unlocked. Sliding behind the wheel, Charlie grabs the keys Josh gave her and starts the car. She then grabs a cassette and pops i
t into the stereo. She presses play and a familiar song starts to blast through the speakers.
“Come as You Are.”
Charlie bobs her head in time to the music. She can’t help herself. It’s a great song.
As the music plays and the Grand Am’s engine hums and the sun rises over the mountains, Charlie shifts into gear.
Then she drives like hell.
Fade out.
Screening room.
The middle of the afternoon.
The middle of somewhere.
The lights come up on the audience of movers and shakers scattered throughout the theater. Charlie doesn’t know who half of them are or why they’re here or what they think of the movie they just watched. But she knows the important ones.
The director, a Tarantino wannabe wearing a thrift-store bowling shirt and a ten-thousand-dollar watch. He kept his tinted eyeglasses on the entire screening.
The actress, a few years older than Charlie was at the time but far prettier. So pretty that it was impossible to hide. Throughout the movie, she was radiant in her sadness, radiant in her madness, radiant in her rage. Rather than feeling jealous about that, Charlie’s delighted that a better, more beautiful version of herself now exists. The world will see it and, hopefully, think that’s what she was really like back then.
The leading men are the opposite. They just can’t compare to their real-life counterparts, even though both are bona fide teen idols. The bad boy on that hit WB show leaning into type as Josh and the good boy from that other hit WB show playing against it as Robbie. Having seen the real deals, Charlie can’t help but be unimpressed.
After a smattering of applause, the director stands and turns to her, rubbing his hands together and giving her a smile that’s meant to be warm but comes across as predatory. Charlie knows the score. He thinks exploiting her ordeal is going to solidify his career. Maybe it will. Charlie’s long given up on trying to understand modern moviegoers.
Her main focus now is preserving the past, which is part of her job duties as an archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She loves what she does. Getting to be a gatekeeper of honest-to-God film history is her dream job. She even gets to attend the Oscars every year, although way back in the cheap seats. And when she goes home at night, she leaves it all behind. No more movies in the mind for her. Those ended the night depicted in the real movie she just watched.
“What do you think?” the director says.
He wants her to say she loves it. Charlie can see it in his eyes, which blaze bright even behind those tinted lenses.
But here’s the rub: she doesn’t know how she feels.
Charlie’s issue with what she just watched is that it ironically does everything she normally likes about the movies. It’s life, made bigger, if not better. The trouble lies in the fact that it’s her own life that’s been enlarged. This isn’t the story of that night. Not the true one. And she has a hard time seeing past the liberties that were taken.
For one, it was spring. There was no chill, no picturesque snowfall, no red coat, although that Charlie can forgive because the color pops beautifully on-screen. Most of the locations were also invented or altered. There is no Olyphant University—that was changed because the real college wanted nothing to do with the production. The Skyline Grille was less of a diner and more of a truck stop, its Formica tables colored a sad brown, its booths worn dull by the backs of slumped patrons.
As for the Mountain Oasis Lodge, Charlie almost burst out laughing when it appeared on-screen. It was so over-the-top as to be absurd. The work of a production designer with a lot of money and a penchant for exposed timbers. The real lodge was a glorified motel—one central building with a smattering of cottages forming a horseshoe shape around the swimming pool.
But some of the embellishments she likes very much. The fire—which didn’t happen—added some much-needed punch to the third act. The waterfall—which didn’t exist—added a great backdrop to the scene of the sinking Volvo.
That, by the way, did happen. Right down to the satisfying click of the handcuffs around the steering wheel.
Yet Charlie’s favorite part of the movie was the denouement, mostly because it showed what could have been. Marge died at the Mountain Oasis Lodge. According to police, she climbed into the pool, fished out the gun, and pulled the trigger.
There was no hospital room conversation.
No unspoken truce between them.
No triumphant moment with a tooth.
Watching all of that on-screen made her wish it was true. In this instance, she doesn’t mind the Hollywood ending. In fact, she cherishes it.
Movie magic. It’s a palpable thing.
And Maddy would have loved it.
Which is why Charlie smiles back at the director and says, “I adore it.”
After that, she’s free to go.
The screening room is located in a downtown building and not a studio lot. A shame, really. Charlie loves it when she gets to visit them for her work. They’re magical and mundane at the same time. Factories where dreams get made.
The upside about her current location is that a Lincoln Town Car is waiting for her outside. Rather than climb into the back, she slides into the front passenger seat.
“Hey,” she says.
The driver flashes her a killer smile. “Hey yourself.”
That part of the movie, as improbable as it may seem, is true. Josh did let her borrow his car. Charlie drove it straight to Ohio and Nana Norma. When she returned the car two weeks later, Josh did indeed ask if she’d like to go to the movies.
Her answer was simple: “I never say no to a movie.”
They went. Josh paid for the tickets.
They went the next night. Charlie returned the favor.
By their third movie, Josh had learned that she preferred to sit in the middle of the sixth row. By the fourth, Charlie had learned that Josh liked to put Raisinets in his popcorn. By their fifth, she finally learned to start calling him Jake.
That was six years ago.
“How was your day?” she asks.
“Good,” he replies. “I got to take Sharon Stone to the airport.”
“How’d she look?”
“Like a Hitchcock blonde.”
“Exactly what I wanted to hear.”
He waits a beat before asking the question she knows is at the forefront of his thoughts. “And how was the movie?”
“Not bad. Not great, but certainly not terrible. It was a typical movie. But real life—” Charlie exhales a sigh of contentment as she reaches for her husband’s hand. “Real life is so much better.”
END CREDITS
While it would be appropriate to compare writing a novel to a long, lonely drive through darkness, it’s not quite the truth. Getting a book published is a team effort, and I have many people to thank for helping me reach my destination.
To Maya Ziv, for being a fantastic editor and, even more, all-around joy.
To Emily Canders, Katie Taylor, Christine Ball, and literally everyone at Dutton, for helping me do what I do. I’m so lucky to have found such an amazing creative home, and I’m astounded daily by all your enthusiasm and support.
To Michelle Brower, for being an incredible agent, a fierce advocate, and a wonderful human being.
To everyone at Aevitas Creative Management, for keeping the business side of things running like clockwork and letting me focus on the writing.
To Mike Livio, for, well, everything.
To the Ritter and Livio families, for their encouragement, support, and bringing quiet normalcy to a sometimes crazy world.
To Sarah Dutton, for being the best first reader a writer could ever have.
To Ben Turrano, for answering my many questions about driving a late-eighties Pontiac Grand Am.
To the filmm
akers whose work inspires me and that I return to again and again—Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Vincente Minnelli, Wes Craven, Brian De Palma, Walt Disney.
Finally, Survive the Night is a love letter to the movies, yes, but also to a specific time period. In November 1991, I was a senior in high school, which was a particularly fraught, magical, memorable time in my life. And if you’ll forgive one final bit of nostalgia, I’d like to thank the people who were so special to me then: Jenny Beaver, Jason Davis, Christine Fry, Marta McCormick, Marsha McKinney, John Paul, Sarah Paul, Brian Reedy, Jeff Richer, Seema Shah, and Kelly Jo Woodside. Thank you all for the many night drives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Survive the Night is the fifth thriller from Riley Sager, the pseudonym of an author who lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Riley’s first novel, Final Girls, was a national and international bestseller that has been published in more than two dozen countries and won the ITW Thriller Award for Best Hardcover Novel. Sager’s novels The Last Time I Lied, Lock Every Door, and Home Before Dark were New York Times bestsellers.