Another Mother

by Kim Hartfield

  I snorted, and Jim stopped short of clapping the board. “If we could have silence, please. No one should make a sound while we film.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Jim clapped, and Richard and I launched into our dialogue. He had skills, and we got through the whole conversation in one perfect take.

  “That was great,” Jim said. “Let’s do it again.”

  “Again?” Emma screeched from the sidelines. “Why?”

  Sarah put her hand on her shoulder. “Sweetie, they have to do everything a few times. Could you be patient, please?”

  We ran the scene again, doing things slightly differently so the film editors would have different options to choose from. Richard flubbed a line, so we had to start over again, drawing another sigh out of Emma.

  “Is it my turn now?” she asked, fidgeting on her feet.

  “Not quite,” Jim said with an impatient glance at Sarah. “Now we need to go over that scene two more times, doing a close-up of each of them.”

  “What?”

  Sarah picked Emma up, hefting her easily onto her hip—she was stronger than I would’ve expected. “C’mon, kiddo, let’s take another look at the snack table.”

  *

  After a while, we paused for lunch, and a while after that, we broke for the day. The one good thing about having a kid on set was that there were laws about how long she could work. She could be on set for eight hours, of which she could work no more than five. Jim could always keep the rest of us for longer, but there was only so much we could do without Emma, so we wouldn’t have any sixteen-hour days.

  We ended for the day around five, which wasn’t bad since we’d started at nine. It felt almost like having a nine-to-five job, something I’d never experienced. I headed to the parking lot, keys in hand. I was ready for a long nap, then a bottle of wine, and perhaps a bit of swiping on Tinder to see if any pretty girls felt like having some fun.

  “Good job today,” Richard called as I headed for my car.

  “You too, buddy.” Noticing Cole and Autumn, the twenty-somethings playing my neighbors’ teen children, were also in the parking lot, I waved at them. “You guys, too. Really good.”

  I wondered if they could see the bitterness under my smile. They were only a couple of years younger than me, so why were they playing teens when I was the mom? I put the thought out of my head.

  As I clicked my key fob, Sarah and Emma passed me. I nodded to Sarah, then to Emma. One of the few things I remembered clearly about my childhood was the feeling of being ignored, as if being smaller than the grown-ups meant I didn’t deserve any acknowledgment at all. I’d always hated being babied or talked down to.

  Because of that, I tried to treat kids like adults—although sometimes that got me in trouble, because that included swearing and talking about sex in front of them. Or the mishap with me being curt to Emma yesterday.

  “How was it being back on set?” Sarah asked. “I know you haven’t acted for a while.”

  Oh God, she was going to drag me into a conversation now? Couldn’t she have nodded back to me silently with no more than a “have a good night,” like a normal person?

  Remembering I’d wanted to get in her head, I forced a smile. “It felt funny. I haven’t worked this hard in years.”

  “But today was fun,” Emma said, bouncing from her heels to her toes.

  I looked at her flatly. She’d found that fun? She could’ve fooled me, given how much she’d complained. “It’s fun, but it’s work,” I finally said.

  “Fun work,” she repeated. “Furk.”

  I traded a glance with Sarah, who looked way too proud of her daughter’s cleverness. I was pretty sure my face showed dubious sarcasm instead.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I haven’t really worked at all in years. I made enough from Great Takes Eight that it took me a while to blow through my savings, and believe me, I was trying.”

  Sarah frowned. “What about Trail Mender?”

  Now I wished she hadn’t heard of that. “I did that more for fun.”

  In reality, I’d been trying to take my career in a new direction. Great Takes Eight had just finished, and I’d wanted to show my skills at serious acting. When it flopped, my career went down along with it.

  I could’ve kept trying, but I hadn’t seen the point. I’d put my all into that movie, and no one had cared enough to buy a ticket. The general public wanted to see me spouting off scripted one-liners, not delivering impassionate speeches or breaking down in tears.

  I was eighteen at the time, and I’d just finished high school with the tutor who worked with me on set, so I’d applied to college. Of course, I’d had no idea how to interact with people my own age, especially when they all recognized me from TV. I’d dropped out after a semester and a half, saying I’d take courses online.

  What I’d actually done for the next six years was… not much. A lot of it was too blurry to remember.

  Sarah was still looking at me curiously, almost with concern, so I forced a smile. “I should get going.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  “Bye, Katie,” Emma called.

  I watched out of the corner of my eye as they headed to their car. Of course Sarah drove a station wagon. How could I have expected anything else?

  Five – Sarah

  “What’s going to happen in September, Mommy?” Emma asked one Monday over breakfast.

  “With your school, you mean?” I was surprised she hadn’t worried about this earlier. “You won’t be able to go to school during the normal hours. I’ll be homeschooling you on set instead, and you’ll go back to school in December.”

  I omitted the part about how I was going to have to carve out some time in the day for my own work. Although I could transcribe court proceedings at the studio, like I’d been doing so far, I was going to have a lot less time when I was homeschooling Emma. I imagined I’d have to stay up late every night to get a decent amount done, as well as working on the weekends.

  It’d be stressful, but I was determined to keep my income steady to support Emma. There was the child support from my ex, too. Every cent Emma made herself was going straight into her college fund.

  Her mouth dropped open. “What about my friends? I won’t get to see Julie and Ellie and Cee?”

  “Haven’t you been seeing them lately?” Wrong Headed had already been filming for two weeks, and I’d just taken her to a pool party the other night.

  “It’s different when it’s school time,” she said with clear dismay. “They won’t want to hang out with me when they’re busy.”

  “Of course they will, sweetie. They love you, and they’ll understand you have to miss some school.” I poured her some more orange juice. “Didn’t you stay in touch with Yvette when she moved to a new school?”

  “It’s not the same.” She pouted.

  I did feel bad that her normal childhood was going to get interrupted. But that was all it was, right? An interruption? I didn’t expect her to become a full-time actor, although it was possible—Jim always said she was doing so well. Either way, even if the show had more seasons, the episodes were only twenty minutes long, so a nine-episode run only took four and a half months, and part of that would be during the summer.

  If she did happen to keep acting, things would get even harder. I’d only be able to homeschool her for so long—the math curriculum in particular got pretty difficult after the fifth or sixth grade. I’d need to hire her a tutor, and where was I going to find the money for that?

  “Maybe you could ask Katie what it was like when she was a child actor,” I said. “You might be able to relate to her.”

  “I don’t like Katie.”

  “You don’t? I thought you two were friends now.”

  Emma pursed her lips. “She was mean to me on Friday. She told me to shut up when I was just talking.”

  I winced. I did recall Katie asking Emma to be quiet, but to be fair it’d been the end of the day and Emma had been getti
ng on my own nerves as well. “She was a little nicer than that,” I said.

  “Not that nice.”

  I toyed with the strips of bacon on my plate. “I think you have to be patient with someone like Katie,” I said. “She’s trying, but she’s just not a happy person, and when you’re like that, it can be hard to make other people happy.”

  “Why isn’t she happy, Mommy?”

  I sighed, knowing I’d taken the conversation to an awkward place. How much of what I’d observed about Katie could I really explain to an eight-year-old? “She seems to be lonely,” I said. “Have you ever heard her mention her mom or dad? Or a girlfriend, or even a friend?”

  Emma’s eyes widened. “No.”

  “I think because she was a child actor, she might have a hard time connecting with other people.” I’d Googled her a bit, just out of idle curiosity, and I’d learned that each season of Great Takes Eight had around twenty episodes. She must’ve spent most of the year on set.

  In more recent years, there was no mention of her marrying or even dating, although there were a few deeply-buried articles about her partying at exclusive nightclubs. Most of the commenters thought it was sad that she’d let her career slip away, and their conclusion was that early success had gone to her head.

  One “Where Are They Now” article had the most information. It talked about her dropping out of college and becoming estranged from her parents. I had to assume she resented them for putting her in that position, and I hoped I’d never make Emma feel that way.

  “But I’m a child actor now,” Emma said slowly. “What if I have a hard time connecting with people?”

  “You’re not Katie. It’s a whole different situation.”

  At least I was telling myself that.

  *

  I sat at the back of the boardroom, listening absent-mindedly to the read-through for the second episode. I’d been up late working since I knew I wouldn’t be able to transcribe during the morning while they were rehearsing in here. Now I fought the urge to simply doze off.

  “Oh my God,” Aaron, the actor playing the dead woman’s husband, read. “Wake up, honey, wake up. You can’t be gone!”

  “Step aside,” Richard said. “I know CPR.”

  “And what is CPR going to do when she’s already bled out?” Katie demanded.

  “I’ve seen CSI,” Emma said. “She’s clearly in rig—rig—”

  I peered over her shoulder at the script. “Rigor mortis,” I said. “Say it with me. Rig-or mor-tis.”

  Emma did her best, but she was still stumbling over the line after a few tries. I pursed my lips, wondering why the screenwriters had given a child such a complicated Latin term. Of course Emma was going to have a hard time with it.

  “We’ll work on it some more later,” Jim said.

  In her spot across from me, Katie rolled her eyes. My eyebrows shot up. Was that woman really going to sit there and judge Emma for messing up one line? My blood boiled. Whether or not she was a happy person, her attitude was getting on my nerves.

  They read on for a while, establishing that the Charlotte character was in fact dead. After panicking and trying to get out of the snowed-in cabin again, they re-established that their cell phones and Internet service didn’t work.

  “Archer and Ivy step into their bedroom so they can speak privately,” Jim read.

  “We’re going to have to keep her body in the snow until the cops can come,” Richard said quietly. “We’ll carve out a spot for her, and that’ll keep her fresh, as it were, so they can tell what happened to her.”

  “What do you mean, what happened? She killed herself, clearly. What else would they need to find out?” There was panic in Katie’s voice.

  Just hearing her, even without her costume or body language, I could believe she was a wife whose best friend had just violently died, and that she was trying desperately to convince herself it’d been suicide.

  “She couldn’t have,” Richard said. “The knife was on the ground, not in her stomach. Someone killed her.”

  “No, they couldn’t have. The knife—the knife must’ve fallen out.”

  Autumn, who played the dead woman’s daughter, let out a wail. “Mom was murdered! Dad, somebody murdered her!”

  “Shit, I didn’t realize she could hear us,” Katie muttered.

  “You’re missing the point,” Richard said brusquely. “And they don’t seem to understand, either. We’re snowed in, and she was killed. The murderer is one of us!”

  *

  During filming the next day, I worked in the boardroom during the parts they didn’t need Emma for. She skulked around the room, picking pens up and putting them down, then sitting down and heaving a sigh loud enough that I could hear it through my noise-canceling headphones.

  “Why don’t you go find something to do?” I asked, sliding the headphones off. “You can watch them film, or—or—well, you can watch them film.”

  She gave me a hard look. “It’s boring, Mommy.”

  She’d watched them film every day, and I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to do it any more. There was nothing for her to do here, either, and I couldn’t spare the time to entertain her.

  “Here,” I said, pulling my Kindle out of my purse. “Why don’t you read the new Captain Underpants again?”

  Her lips twisted. “I’ve already read it, like, five times.” But she accepted the e-reader and sat down, opening it with a huff.

  Luckily for both of us, it was only a few minutes before a production assistant knocked on the door. They needed Emma now, so I went along with her.

  The camera operators set up their angles, and Jim had the actors run through the scene once, making sure everyone knew how to move and where to stand. I cringed when I realized this part contained the line Emma had so much trouble with yesterday. I’d been so busy, I’d forgotten to practice it with her when we got home. I could only hope she wouldn’t hold up the filming too much.

  “Oh my God,” Aaron said, bending over the prop dead body. “Wake up, honey, wake up. You can’t be gone!” His voice pitched higher and higher, so that he was practically howling by the end.

  “Step aside,” Richard said, grabbing his shoulder. “I know CPR.”

  Katie pressed her hands to her heart. “And what is CPR going to do when poor Charlotte’s already bled out?”

  “I’ve seen CSI,” Emma said, her brow furrowing as she concentrated on her line. “She’s clearly…” She hesitated. “Clearly…”

  “Cut!” Jim called. “Emma, the line is ‘she’s clearly in rigor mortis.’ Want to try it again?”

  Richard and Aaron looked impassive, but Katie’s irritation was visible as the actors went back to their original positions. Once Emma had repeated the line a few times, they tried again.

  “She’s clearly in rigger morta,” she said.

  “Cut!” Richard came up to kneel in front of her, putting his face at her eye level. “It’s rigor mortis, Emma.”

  “Rigor mortis, sweetie.” I stepped onto the set and put my arms around her. “You can do this.” I saw Katie looking at us with an inscrutable expression as I let her go.

  A third try, and then a fourth. Emma couldn’t seem to get the line down. Richard and Aaron were completely professional and patient with her, and I was impressed by how they summoned the same depths of emotion for one take after another. Katie was equally good at that, but when the camera wasn’t rolling, she rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “Let’s take a quick break,” Jim said after the fifth take, when Emma bit her lip and blinked several times in a row. “Sarah, if you could…”

  I didn’t know what he thought I could do to get Emma to learn the line, but I nodded curtly. “I’ll do my best.”

  Katie got between me and Emma. “Actually, I’ll try to help her, if you don’t mind.”

  I glared at her. Was she implying she could help Emma when I’d failed? Reminding myself she was an actual actor, and a former child star, I gritted my teet
h. Maybe she did have a trick or two up her sleeve, and even if she was rubbing me the wrong way personally, I owed it to Emma to let her try. “Sure,” I said.

  “Listen,” Katie said, “what I always used to do is break words into their parts.” She stood with her arms hanging awkwardly, looking down at Emma from a few feet above her. “So for this one, it’d be rig, like an oil rig… er, like you’re saying ‘or’ fast… mor, like ‘more,’ and tis, rhymes with ‘piss.’”

  Emma giggled, and Katie slapped her forehead. “I mean, rhymes with ‘miss.’”

  Had she done that on purpose? She definitely wasn’t much of a kid person… but she had Emma smiling and laughing when a second ago, she’d been on the verge of tears.

  “Ready to try it?” Katie asked. “Rig…or… mor…tis. Rigor mortis.”

  “Rigor mortis,” Emma repeated slowly. She looked over to me. “Mommy, I did it!”

  At least she hadn’t completely forgotten about me now that Katie had swept in and taught her what I couldn’t. “Let’s try the whole line this time,” I said, moving to stand beside Katie. “I’ve seen CSI. She’s clearly in rigor mortis.”

  Emma repeated the whole thing after me, sounding very much like she didn’t fully grasp what the line meant. Still, she burst into a proud grin when she was done.

  “All right, break time’s over!” Jim yelled, and the other actors reassembled around us.

  “Thanks for your help,” I told Katie before I got off the set. “Really.”

  She gave me an all-too-attractive smile. “No problem at all.”

  Six – Katie

  On Monday morning, I showed up to the studio in sunglasses and a baseball cap. I hadn’t been able to sleep, so I’d ended up staying up until the early hours, drinking half a bottle of wine by myself.

  Normally I would’ve been out with my friends—drinking buddies might’ve been a more appropriate term—every weekend. We were a ragtag squad of D-list celebrities and our hangers-on, who went out and got shit-faced every weekend, or sometimes during the week. Most of our time together was spent dancing or making out with whoever was around for the night, and our conversations revolved around how much we were drinking and who we’d been hooking up with.