by C. D. Reiss
“Lock it.”
We said together: “Put it in your pocket.”
He kissed me in the dying light of the day. I felt nothing, heard nothing, tasted nothing but his lips.
“We needed to get away from everything. Just change geography. Go where no matter what, I’m me and even if they don’t get it, they love me. I think this trip was right. I’ve done everything wrong, and this feels right.”
“What have you done wrong? You conquered Hollywood. Five years ago you were nobody.”
He didn’t reply right away.
“There’s a lot you don’t know.”
I shrugged. Of course there was.
“Well, I know you like to peek into a girl’s shower.”
“True.”
“And you like to show off your ass when you’re losing an argument.”
He laughed and squeezed me.
“You’re a voyeur and an exhibitionist already. How bad could the rest be?”
“Well, now you know where I’m from. I should have warned you first, but I was afraid if I did, I’d chicken out. It’s rednecks and old Harleys. My house ain’t much, but I paid off the mortgage. Dad hasn’t mowed the lawn, and it looks like a weed farm. My sister’s got four kids from three guys. I guess that’s the worst of it.”
“I think that’s the best of it. You’re so real, Brad. I think you’re better equipped to handle fame than most people. You’re whole.”
He tucked a bit of hair that the wind had taken on a ride. The wind immediately reclaimed it.
“I’m not,” I continued, “I wanted you to know. I was meant to have children and I can’t because I rejected the first one.”
I’d never said that out loud. I had to turn away.
“Seeing your family . . .” I continued. “Even for a few hours . . . I like you even more, but I know this isn’t a permanent thing we have, and I’m okay with it. I can’t offer you what you need. So you don’t have to try and impress me or prove anything to me. You need to have a full life, and I’ll keep you from that.”
Maybe most women would have been afraid he would have agreed and reiterated that temporary was the best kind of relationship. But not me. I was afraid that he’d deny it. He’d either say I was whole and fine because he didn’t want to think of us as temporary, or because he was lying just to make me feel better.
He did neither.
“A full life’s not just for people who don’t have problems, teacup.” His phone buzzed against me and plinked a banjo tune. “That’s Mom,” he said. “We’d better go.”
He stood and pulled me up. It was night already, and the crickets squeaked loudly, competing with the ringing phone. We kissed for a moment, softly before I pushed him.
“Answer when your mother calls.”
He took the call.
“We’re coming back now,” he said without preamble.
He listened, rubbing his eyes. His body went slack. “Okay, I’ll take care of it when we get in. Bye, Mom. I love you too.” He tapped off. “Gotta get back.”
“Is Nicole all right?”
“Yeah. She’s fine.” He sounded distracted and unsure. “It was something else. Come on. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 54
BRAD
“I had to go. I had no choice. No. Fuck this. I had a choice. Stay and wear you down until you were nothing but a fucking piece of a woman or . . .”
I stopped. Mom had texted that Paula had been calling. We’d had a session I’d forgotten about. I couldn’t keep putting the script off.
“What?” Paula said from the screen. The Skype from my parent’s old computer was delayed and grainy, and I could hear dinner happening through the door, but I had to take an hour out to review the script or I was going to make a fool of myself on set. Too bad my brain was everywhere it shouldn’t be. I was out of my element. I was distracted. I wanted to be at the dining room table more than I wanted to be working.
“I forgot it,” I said. “Can you—?”
Nicole burst in with a paper crown and a donut.
“Daddy, I brought you a dessert.”
She jumped on my lap and stuck the donut in my mouth. I took a bite and gave it back.
“Thank you, pumpkin.”
She tried to put it in my mouth again, but I turned away and gave her a stern look. I wanted to get back to work.
“Yes, thank you.” Paula smiled a mile wide from the screen. “You’re cute as a bug in a banana split. Is Cara there to help out?”
Nicole aimed the donut for my mouth again, making airplane sounds.
“Enough,” I barked. She started crying.
A little square at the bottom of the screen held the image of me with my daughter on my lap. Behind me, Cara stood in the door.
“Is she all right?” Cara asked. “I can take her.”
“Daddy doesn’t want my donut!” She held up the arc of crumb-dropping cake.
“Save it for me,” I said, wiping her tears away with my thumb.
“Cara, honey,” Paula said from the screen.
“I have her,” Cara said, getting her hands under Nicole’s arms, but I wouldn’t let go. If she was crying, I wanted to be the one to tell her it was all right. She was my job, and I needed to be the one to wipe her tears.
“Both of you are going to have to cool it!” I said to the other two adults in the room. Cara stood behind me, and Paula pressed her mouth closed while I spoke to Nicole.
“You.” I pointed at my daughter. “Sometimes you have to let Daddy work. Sometimes you have to save the donut for later.”
She sniffed and nodded. “Okay. Can we play the card game after?”
“Yes. Now go with Miss Cara.”
After a tiny pause she held her arms out to the woman behind me. Cara picked her up, and with the child on her hip she patted my shoulder.
Absently, I squeezed her hand before it slipped away. The door closed behind me, and I turned my attention to Paula.
“All right, we were on page eighty-seven?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t move. Her face was full and round and expressionless.
“What?”
“Are you . . . I hate to have to ask this. It’s terribly impolite.”
“We’re past that, Paula.”
“Are you having physical relations with that woman?”
She smiled when she asked, as if she were on an interview show asking the president what happened with the intern. It took me a second to catch up to the fact that I’d squeezed Cara’s hand on the screen because it was almost as if Paula wasn’t there. But she was, and I’d been stupid.
“Are you on page eighty-seven or not?”
“I’m serious, Bradley.”
“I’m sure you have your own business to mind.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said. “I know you don’t. You tell me everything and if you try and distract me again, it’s as good as a split-tongued lie. And you . . . you can’t lie to me. I’ve given you everything so don’t. Just don’t you lie to me, Bradley Sinclair. I deserve better.”
I couldn’t see much detail on the crappy screen, but I could tell she was upset.
“It’s not about lying. I’m not ready to talk about it. I’m ready for page eighty-seven.”
A last-ditch, pathetic attempt to salvage the session and my friendship. But I’d pushed it off a cliff before I mentioned the page number. I’d carelessly touched Cara’s hand in front of Paula.
“You’re a liar,” she said. “I have a list as long as my arm.”
They say the truth hurts more than a lie.
This hurt bad. More than Paula’s uncharacteristic rudeness, her words hurt me. There wasn’t any subtext to them. They just went right for the throat, and I reflexively put up my defenses.
“Tell me why it matters,” I said. “It never did before so tell me why it matters now.”
She closed the script.
“You brought her home. To Redfield. She’s going to meet Buddy and Susan. She’s go
ing to Warren’s drugstore. The creek. The high school. She’s going to see all of it. They’re going to know her.”
“Why is that a problem?”
I’d baited her now. Smooth move, asshole.
“I can’t tell you without opening my heart.”
She flipped the edges of the script absently, looking just off camera. Maybe looking at her own little square in the corner and wondering if she could see herself telling me the problem.
“You don’t have to,” I said, trying to protect her from herself. I knew what she was going to say, and I wanted to protect her from my response. She wasn’t going to like it.
She either didn’t hear me or didn’t believe me. Maybe she needed to get it off her chest.
“Those are our places, and I don’t want to share. You trot her out all over Redfield and you sully them.”
“I’m not understanding.” Maybe I expected something more straightforward.
“I don’t know what’s not to understand unless you’re thick as a brick. We have that place together. You and me. All them girls only know one part of you and the other was mine. You bring her into my town, and that just says something about you. It says you don’t care about propriety or what people say about us.”
“Us? Paula, there hasn’t been an us for years.”
Her face fell again. I thought she couldn’t look any more upset, more angry, more sad, all jumbled in a bunch of bright dots.
“Not to you. But I was the last one you were with there, and that was mine. I was the girl they talked about, now I’m being replaced by what? A nanny? How am I supposed to show my face at Warren’s come Christmas? All them feeling sorry?”
“Wait a minute—”
“You don’t know people. You don’t know what a star you are there. You don’t have any idea what they all think. Now I have to quit or the talk is going to burn my ears straight off.”
“Were you telling everyone we were together? That’s a lie.”
“They all asked when you were gonna wake up and marry me, and what was I supposed to say?”
“That you can do better.”
“That’s a lie.”
She could do a ton better than me, but instead of hanging my argument on her intrinsic value, which would have saved the friendship, I got more aggressive.
“And saying I was waiting to marry you isn’t a lie?”
“Don’t you talk to me about lies, Bradley Sinclair.”
Her arm moved and the screen flicked to black.
I shut the computer. I was shaking because she and a few others protected a lie I told every day.
I stood up to get away from the computer. I depended on her friendship and support, and she’d depended on me for hope. Having removed the hope from her life, I would have to live without the friendship and support.
CHAPTER 55
BRAD
Any fourth-grader will tell you lies are like snowballs rolling down a hill. But I was told early on that if I was honest about my dyslexia, no one would hire me. I’d be too much trouble. It was hard for me to manage on-the-fly script changes. I couldn’t read dialog without struggle.
If someone read it to me and I repeated it, I could learn it easily, but I was no one in the business. I was broke, inexperienced, anonymous. One of a few million flowing in and out of the city every year. Casting directors were looking for reasons to disqualify talent so they could narrow down to the winner and move on to the next. Dyslexia made me unemployable.
So when I had auditions, I recorded someone else reading the sides and listened until I had it. Paula did it first, Michael did it when he was in town, and then Paula again. I trusted them to keep it under wraps. And when I got my first full-length feature, I still didn’t tell the director. I wanted to just do the work. Then I’d tell them.
But I got my next picture before shooting had wrapped on the first, and I didn’t want to lose that.
So, there we were.
“And here we are,” I said to my father on the front porch. Almost everyone had left. Cara was with Mom and Susan in the kitchen. Nicole and her cousins were watching TV. Dad sat in the aluminum and blue plaid chair he always sat in, and I was on the swing. Our beers were mostly empty and warm as a hand, but we held them like security blankets. “I’m really good at memorizing. And I can flow with changes on just a few repeats. But fuck if I didn’t lean on Paula. I don’t even know if I have a flight to Thailand. I have forty messages on my phone from the preproduction team, and all I want to do is sit on the porch and drink beer.”
“You’ll figure it out. You were always real smart.”
“Is that why everyone called me retarded?”
A spark and zzt came from the blue bug zapper that hung from the ceiling beam.
“We don’t use that word no more.”
“Never took you for PC, Dad.”
He shrugged and put the bottle to his lips with his three-fingered hand. “Things change. If you don’t get on the train, it just leaves without you.”
“I liked the way things were.”
Zzt. The humidity was cloying, thick, a heavy density against me.
“God doesn’t care what you like, but he will send you what you need to figure it out. Like this girl you brought. She helps you. We can see that. You needed her and God sent her.”
“Yeah.” I tapped my bottle on the edge of the swing.
“And you love her.”
“No. Jesus Christ, Dad.”
“Watch your mouth. That particular train hasn’t left the station.”
“Sorry.” I felt as if I was ten all over again, rolling my first cuss around my mouth before letting it fly. “I was surprised you said it.”
“I know you live different out there. You all have your nannies and staff for your family and handle the career yourself. We always knew Paula wasn’t your future, no matter what she said or didn’t say. You came home one Christmas with her, and all you did was work. But this one.” He jerked his thumb inside. “You love this girl no matter how much you cuss our Lord over it.”
I don’t know what made me think I could hide anything from my parents. These are people who found out I was cutting school even though my grades were no worse whether I went or not. Neither Buddy nor Arnie ratted me out. Mom and Dad knew just because they knew.
“I do, and I have no idea how to make her mine.”
“You could start by telling her you love her.”
“You have no idea how complicated it is.”
He planted his feet wider and leaned back, putting the beer to his belly.
“How complicated could it be?”
“She’d have to stop doing what she loves. So what, right? She’d just . . . what? Take care of Nicole because she’s my daughter? And if it doesn’t work out, what then? Nicole loses her. I lose her. She loses her career. She loses her anonymity. I can’t be with her and protect her at the same time. But I have to be with her. I have to. She’s like glue. She holds everything together.”
He nodded, looking out into the front yard. The crickets were loud, and the bug light zapped more mosquitoes than it had ten minutes before.
“First, you better tell her about the reading problem.”
I shook my head and sipped my beer. “She thinks I’m this really honest guy.”
“Then you better get to it.”
“Yeah. Before we leave for Thailand. Or before I leave.”
“Atta boy.” He tipped his beer to me and we sat in silence, listening to the zzt of sparking mosquitoes.
CHAPTER 56
CARA
Brad got more disconcerted as the next two hours passed. He said he had a fight with Paula and acted like it was nothing. He drank a little, laughed less, hung out with his father on the porch but kept looking into the middle distance as if his mind was back in Los Angeles.
I helped clean up the bottles and dishes. Brad’s mom washed and I dried. Apparently, the dishwasher worked but was still not trustworthy with the good chin
a.
I was just hanging up the house phone with the Disney hotel. They’d confirmed they’d mailed my phone to an Arkansas address for an ungodly amount of money. Erma fiddled with the silverware and asked a question that must have been on her mind.
“Is he a good father?” she asked.
I hadn’t thought about it. I didn’t think of parents as good or bad. They did their best or they didn’t. So I took my time answering.
“I’ve worked with a few dads in the business, and I have to say . . . he’s great.”
She didn’t respond. I hoped she believed me, because when push came to shove, he tried harder than the rest of them, and that mattered. He made plenty of mistakes, but Nicole would grow to see a man who was present for her.
“I had a feeling,” she said warmly.
His parents had set up Susan’s old room for me and Nicole, putting their famous son on the couch for the night. His childhood room was now his mother’s sewing room, and his room as a teen had been in the garage. It was used for storage.
“Honestly,” his mother said, “why would you come back here with that mansion you live in?”
“But that couch is for midgets,” he complained.
“You’re not too big for the floor, young man,” his dad replied with an eyebrow raised. “Unless you want to get one of your fancy staff to make you a reservation over at the Sleepytime Motel on Route 46.”
Brad snapped up a pillow and tossed it on the floor.
“I sleep late, Dad. Don’t step on me in the morning.”
So we settled in. I slept in Nicole’s bed.
“Where’s Daddy?” she whispered in the dark.
“Downstairs.”
“Is he coming? I can’t sleep without him and you. I’ll be scared.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“No! I—”
As if on cue, the door opened and Brad slipped in. I got up on my elbow, adjusting to the hallway light.
“Daddy!” Nicole sat up and turned down the sheets on his side.
“Shush,” he said, getting in fully clothed.
“You’re going to get in trouble,” I said.
“What are they going to do? Ground me?”
We squeezed into the twin bed, as usual. With his daughter curled up against him and the blue light on his face, I knew I hadn’t lied to his mother while drying dishes. We stayed silent for a few minutes, sharing a long pillow, existing in space together, until Nicole’s breathing got slow and regular.