by Ike Hamill
“I saw Doubt with my wife. That was one of yours?”
Bob nodded. He squinted as he tested the heat of the joint with his solder.
“That was a pretty good movie. Didn’t you win an award for that?”
“Nominated.”
“Still—that’s pretty amazing. I had no idea that was you. Shouldn’t you be off making millions directing huge movies? What the hell are you doing here cleaning up your ex-brother-in-law’s shitty house?”
“I’m waiting on a couple of projects. You might be surprised at how little money an Academy nominated director earns. You spend so long between lucrative gigs and then as soon as you work on something non-commercial, it’s like they all think you’re not interested in making money. I’m lucky I can afford the copper we’re putting in.” He popped up his glasses to inspect the solder with his naked eye. “That should do it for these joints.”
“How long do you wait before you test it with water pressure?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try it out sometime before I put the new floor in,” Bob said. “Let’s take a break. My neck is killing me.”
Through the back door they passed under the deck to where Bob had a couple of rocks set up like little seats. They faced down the hill through the woods. There was nothing to look at, but it was serene and quiet. A cold fall damp had settled on the scattered orange leaves.
“I love the smell of this place,” Bob said.
“I was thinking the same thing the other day. It’s comforting somehow. You go outside and you just feel more at ease.”
“Reminds me of Thanksgiving and Christmas—holidays when you stay inside with family.”
“Where you from originally?” Alan asked.
“Ohio,” Bob said. “Right near the border with West Virginia. We used to go over to Pittsburgh all the time as soon as I was old enough to drive. That was where I really grew up.”
“Did you like it?”
“I guess,” Bob said. “That’s where we filmed Nevercome. Pittsburgh, I mean.”
“I didn’t see that one.”
“Not many people did. I held my ground and got in a fight with the studio. They recut it and left a lot of the good stuff out of the movie. If you take a plot like that and cut it down to ninety minutes, the audience has no chance of being entertained. It’s hard to tell what’s even going on.”
Alan watched a leaf making its way to the ground. A breeze caught it and it swirled in a tight spiral.
“What was the fight about?” Alan asked.
Bob didn’t answer. Alan glanced over and saw Bob scrubbing his face with his hands. Bob breathed out and hunched over.
“I took on that movie so I could shoot one particular scene. They wanted to cut it. We were in the middle of that battle when the actress from the scene died. You remember when I said that the female lead of my personal project passed away?”
“Yeah,” Alan said. Bob didn’t seem so much sad as exhausted by the topic.
“She was the lead in my personal project, but she was just a cameo in Nevercome. Her scene was crucial to me.”
Bob looked wearied by the topic, but he also looked like he had more that he needed to say. Alan debated letting it drop. His curiosity won.
“How come?” Alan asked.
“I had this concept. I worked on it for almost twenty years, can you believe that? Twenty years of work—I should have known how fragile it was. It’s foolish to count on anything that takes more than two months to develop and yet you have to keep pounding your head against walls for years to get anything done. You have to keep tap dancing because the floor is always shifting. It’s a shitty business to be in.”
“So what was the project?” Alan asked.
“Let me see if I can boil this down. You’ve seen movies that rely heavily on childhood flashbacks?”
“Of course,” Alan said.
“They always suffer from the same problems—it’s tough to make the old footage feel authentic, and it’s tough to cast look-alike child actors to play your leads.”
Alan nodded.
“It’s been done well a few times, but if you’ve got big names they usually come with unique looks. There’s only one George Clooney. They’re not making a whole lot of kids who look authentically like a small version of him. I got the idea to start from the other side. As soon as I had some money, I put together a research team. We started looking for parents who were likely to raise a movie star.”
Alan burst out with a startled laugh. Bob was clearly serious, but the concept was ludicrous.
“How?” Alan asked with an incredulous chuckle.
“Maybe not as hard as you think. Good-looking parents who already have one good-looking smart kid. The younger sibling has a chance of being attractive and outgoing. We filmed a ton of babies with their parents and played the odds. A bunch of that footage was shot for a movie called Summary of Hugh. It was one of my first films. A few years later we did a movie called Getaway River Drop.”
“I saw it. That movie was great.”
“Thank you. You remember the kids?”
“Those kids living in the cabins with their parents?”
“Yeah. That was the second piece of the puzzle. We used the same kids again. They were a couple of years older by that point,” Bob said.
“They weren’t a big part of the plot,” Alan said.
“No, not of that movie. I shot some extra footage that didn’t make it into the final cut though. I just snuck it into the schedule here and there. It’s tough to do with kid actors—the rules are strict on how much they can work—but we squeezed in enough to make it work. I had the footage from Hugh and Getaway and I squirreled it away, waiting to see which of the kids would go into acting.”
“I see—you started with a whole bunch of babies with Summary of Hugh and then put some of them into Getaway River Drop also?”
“Right, exactly. Some of the babies didn’t go into acting. A couple got too fat. We just let the process weed them down and cast whomever was left. That’s how I got the kids for Cry Under. It was a limited release indie about preteens who grow up in an abandoned amusement park. Really dark.”
“So you use the same kids over and over again in your movies. That’s pretty cool. Gives them a continuity I guess.”
“It’s more than that. Like I said, we used these films to shoot other scenes that weren’t meant for release. The whole point is, I’ve been filming this other movie that takes place over decades. I don’t have to try reproduce authentic settings and technology from fifteen years ago because I actually filmed the scenes fifteen years ago. And I don’t have to find look-alike actors, because I’ve been using the same actors the whole time.”
“Wow. What’s the other movie about?”
“It’s scrapped now, but it was going to be about actors who grow up in the industry and then become movie stars,” Bob said.
“That’s amazing.”
“Everything was going to plan. In fact, it was turning out better than my highest hopes. Hope was legitimately on her way to becoming one of the most popular actresses of her generation. Nigel’s career is just starting to take off, but I think he’s on his way also.”
“Hope?”
“When we first filmed her as a baby, her name was Hope Sanders. She changed her name to Ophelia Saunders about five years ago.”
Alan stood up from his rock. He braced his hands against his knees and hunched over. He turned to Bob with his mouth hanging open. “Ophelia Saunders? Ophelia Saunders was your female lead? She’s so famous.”
“She was,” Bob nodded. “She was.”
Alan felt a familiar mix of emotions at the mention of Ophelia’s name. He suspected that he shared the feeling with middle-aged men dating back to the invention of arousal. Ophelia had been gorgeous and magnetic. She had been the definition of sex, but she’d also been much closer to Joe’s age than his own. It was wrong to have such lust for a young woman who’d been born after he’d graduated fro
m college. That was a fact. His libido disagreed.
Something else occurred to Alan. “Wait, and Nigel? You mean Nigel Devons? Are you kidding? I didn’t even realize they were ever in a movie together. Talk about Hollywood elite. You discovered both of those actors?” Alan said. He lowered himself slowly back down to the rock. He sat facing Bob. Bob looked off into the woods.
“Yeah. Like I said—it was working out better than my highest hopes. Neither of them had ever had a starring role in one of my movies, but they were both there. A few scenes here and a few scenes there—the footage is out there. I was going to start Gaucho next year. It was going to be Hope and Nigel’s first real movie together as leads, and I’ve got a third of the story already filmed. It’s all in that extra footage from Summary, and Getaway, and Cry Under, and the rest. They were basically going to play themselves in Gaucho—how they met and grew up. Some of the scenes from Gaucho were filmed at the same time as scenes from the other movies.”
“Really?” Alan asked.
“You remember that car crash in Getaway River Drop? It’s near the beginning.”
“Yeah, that guy just had sex with his aunt’s friend in the back of the the YMCA. He’s late for his daughter’s recital or something?”
“And he hurries through the stop sign and hits Gretchen’s minivan,” Bob said.
“Yes,” Alan said. “That’s when we first see the kids from the cabins, right?”
“Yes, pretty much. You can see them in the title sequence, too, but that’s the first time they’re legitimately characters,” Bob said. “Behind those cabins, we had a second crew filming the kids from a different angle. They were doing a simultaneous scene about being child actors. They were told to play and act natural. During their dialog, you can see Gretchen’s minivan go by, driven by a stunt woman, and then you hear the accident.”
“So you see that whole iconic scene from a totally different angle? Like a behind-the-scenes view?” Alan asked.
“Yeah, exactly. And Hope is credited with her old name in that one. Devons was uncredited—he didn’t even speak and he slipped through without getting a mention in the credits. Some movies we filmed the kids as if they were working as actors, and others we filmed simultaneous scenes that are supposedly real life.”
“That’s crazy complicated,” Alan said.
Bob nodded. “It was ambitious to say the least. It’s the kind of thing that only a twenty-five-year-old director would attempt, but once it’s rolling, you can’t bear to let it go unfinished. And I kept it quiet, too. I used different crews as much as possible for the extra footage. I hid expenses and snuck around. I had one lawyer negotiate all the contracts so I could use the footage in the future. I think only ten people in the world know what I was up to. Eleven now.”
“Wow,” Alan said. “What a story. You should make a movie about that—about the process.”
Bob sighed. “I am. Or I was. I’m not sure. My wife said the same thing when we started, so we filmed a video diary of the process through the years. I was going to release that a few months after Gaucho and pull back the curtain. I wanted Gaucho to stand on its own first. I wanted startle everyone and make them guess at how I had put that movie together. I swore everyone to secrecy.”
“And then Ophelia overdosed?”
“Yup. Hope passed away. She was a bright young woman. You’d think I would have gotten to know her better after all these years, but I barely knew her. We started with sixteen babies for Summary—eight girls and eight boys. I swear, if you go back to that movie you can spot her. She pops off the screen like a beacon. Even that young you can see how compelling she’s going to be.”
Alan shook his head. Until that day, Bob hadn’t talked all that much. One of the things he liked about hanging out with Bob was that the two of them shared silence so well. But that story was so incredible. Bob’s quiet simplicity never suggested such depths.
“Sorry to burden you with all that,” Bob said.
“No—it’s no problem at all. That’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard in weeks,” Alan said.
“It’s hard to think about,” Bob said. “I end up feeling sorry for myself—all the time and effort I wasted—and then I feel guilty because I’m worried about myself when such a bright young life has been snuffed. What difference does my stupid movie make when her life was wasted like that?”
Alan thought of things to say, but he kept his mouth shut. Bob didn’t need any platitudes. He needed time to grieve for the young woman and for his own project.
Bob stood up and dusted off his pants.
“I’ve got a couple more hours,” Alan said. “What else is on your list today?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Haunt
OCTOBER 9
ALAN HAD his flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows. The old rake handle was carving sore spots in his hands as he pulled at the leaves. He heard the bus down the road winding its engine and beeping as it turned around in Gates’s driveway. Alan bunched up the last stragglers, and swept the pile of leaves out towards the center of the lawn. He would enlist Joe to drive the riding mower around, pulling the leaf sucker attachment.
“Hey, Joe,” he said.
Joe walked up and slowed as he approached the lawn. He had ditched his sweatshirt and jacket somewhere and only wore his t-shirt. That was fine this afternoon—it was almost hot out—but tomorrow morning would be cold.
“Where’s your jacket, Joe?” Alan asked.
Joe didn’t answer. He was looking up at the house. The sun reflected off the upstairs windows. Joe shielded his eyes.
Alan glanced up to where his son was looking. The sun dazzled his eyes.
“Who’s that?” Joe asked.
“Who?”
Joe pointed at the house.
Alan walked down the slope of the lawn to where Joe stood. He put his hand up to his own eyes and looked at the house. The big black front door was open to let in the afternoon air, but the screen door was closed.
“Where?” Alan asked.
“On the stairs,” Joe said. The house was fronted with wide stairs made from slabs of granite.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Last week you lost your hat. Then, somehow, you came home in gym shorts the other day because you’d lost your jeans. Did you leave your jacket at school, Joe? It’s going to be forty tomorrow morning. Are you going to wait for the bus in your t-shirt?”
“Dad,” Joe said. “Who is that?”
Alan looked at his son. Joe’s eyes were welling with tears.
Alan moved a little closer to the house. He could see better as he moved closer. The reflection from the windows wasn’t hitting his eyes. Through the screen door, he saw the house’s staircase that led up to the bedrooms on the second floor. Alan stopped. Halfway up the interior stairs, someone stood. Alan moved closer to the house.
He got to the granite steps and glanced back—Joe was still standing on the lawn, watching.
“Hello?” Alan called. “Can I help you?”
It was a woman on the steps. Alan could see the outline of her dress. She reached her hand for the bannister to steady herself. He couldn’t see her face. The sun streaming through the upstairs windows was lighting her from behind, leaving her face in shadow.
“Excuse me—this is a private residence,” Alan said.
He reached for the handle to the screen door. It was locked from inside. That afternoon the front hall had felt stuffy, so Alan had opened the front door to let a breeze in, but he’d never bothered to unlock the screen door. Somewhere in the mechanism, a little piece of metal was keeping Alan from confronting this woman.
Alan looked back at Joe and considered his options. He could run around the house and go in through the shed, but the woman might run away. He could send Joe around, but what if the woman was some crazy murderer? His cell phone was on the charger in the kitchen.
“Answer me, or I’m calling the police,” Alan said. The woman came down one step. Alan thought
if she just came a tiny bit closer, he might be able to see her face. He collected the other details so he could relate them to the authorities. Her hair was fairly short, making a backlit halo around her head. The dress came down to the stairs and the sleeves down to her wrists. It was pink, or maybe rose, and had lace at the neck and wrists. He still couldn’t see her face.
Alan clamped his teeth and tugged at the screen door. The latch held, but it felt weary. Alan tugged again, hoping that the handle would outlast the catch. The woman on the stairs raised her free hand to her mouth. Beneath the groan of the screen door’s latch giving out, he thought he heard the woman gasp.
The screen door pulled free and Alan swung it open.
He stepped up and through the door as his eyes darted up and down the stairs—she was gone. Alan reached out for the door frame to steady himself. The screen door banged shut behind him.
“Where’d you go, lady?” Alan called. “Hey.”
“Dad?” Joe asked from the lawn. “Dad come out here.”
“Hold on, Joe. Lady! Crazy lady in the dress? Come out here. The cops are on their way.”
“DAD!”
Alan backed through the screen door. He shut it and pressed his hand to hold it shut. When he turned, Joe was pointing.
“What?” Alan asked.
He turned slowly. Alan looked through the screen door again and saw her. She was crouching, still halfway up the stairs, and she was hiding her face in her hands.
“What the hell?” Alan whispered. He kept his eyes glued on the woman as he opened the door. As the metal door frame passed before his eyes, the image of the woman disappeared. It was like the screen was a magic lens, and without its aid, he couldn’t see the woman.
“Call Mom, Joe,” Alan said. He threw open the door and walked in. There was nothing on the stairs, but Alan strode up the stairs and swiped through the air. He expected to meet resistance. He found only air. There was no woman, no dress, nothing. Alan backed away. He stepped back through the screen door and closed it again. He looked through the screen at the stairs. There was nothing.