“Code Emergency?”
He shakes his head, plunges his hands into his pockets. “Something else.”
“Mysterious.”
“I’m stuck on the ending,” he says as we tiptoe out of the room, down the hallway and then the stairs.
“Want me to read it?”
“Eventually,” he says. “I promise.”
45
BEN
DECEMBER
Amanda leaves for Boston early. Changes her shifts at the hospital so she can fly on the twenty-second, a few days sooner than planned. She doesn’t have to tell me that this is a giant fuck-you mostly to me, not that she wants more family time with her extended clan; she just wants less time with me. She’d asked me to come one last time a few nights ago, implored me to be spontaneous, grab a ticket and join her, but I was resolute.
“There’s Joey,” I said. “We’re going to get a new puppy too once they’re back from Hawaii.”
She crossed her arms and left the room. We’d both understood that this wasn’t just about spending Christmas back east; it was about starting new traditions and a new chapter. And we also both knew that because I was unwilling to do either, even if simply disguised as a last-minute plane ticket, that we were all but done.
She e-mails me from the plane to say that I shouldn’t call over the holiday, shouldn’t be in touch.
I e-mail her back to say: I understand.
She wrote back: I thought it would be different this time.
And I reply: I’m sorry. Because I am. Though I find that I am enormously relieved once I hit Send. It was a passive way to break up, I suppose, but I didn’t need fireworks, and she didn’t need the bullshit. We’d been through enough of that.
Then I return to my laptop to finish the manuscript.
I’d decided last week, after I left her on the night Monster died, that I was going to go for it: lay it out for Tatum, project what I hoped the ending would be, could be. I hadn’t been this bold in my writing in years, hadn’t had to pour any vulnerability or raw honesty into Code Emergency (obviously), hadn’t really had to on any of the other scripts either. When was the last time I wrote something just for myself? I hunched over my laptop and considered this. All the Men and One Day in Dallas, even though they earned me early accolades, the countless, uncredited rewrites on other people’s work, the Alcatraz series—none of them laid me bare like Romanticah, which I’d written to get over my breakup with Amanda, which I’d written because I allowed myself to be vulnerable. Since then, I’ve been so much less so in my work. Less human. Less open. Less brave.
Not unlike Tatum, I’d erected my own walls, placed myself in my own bubble. For different reasons, sure, but when you’ve burned everything around you and no longer have the protection of those safeguards, do those reasons even matter anymore? Tatum and I had both insulated ourselves from each other, and the only way, the only way, to find each other again is to stand there, bare, with the ashes of our wreckage at our feet, and acknowledge that we see each other’s nakedness.
And so I write the ending I hope for. Maybe she’ll see it as a cop-out, that I had to put it in writing rather than standing in front of her proclaiming my regret. And maybe she’ll reject me all the same because I have been a shitty partner, and I have cheated and been unsupportive and been petty and unkind. But I love her. I still love her, and now I can only hope that this is enough.
She and I are past words. Now we are on to promises.
So I’m finally writing something for her, the promise that I made too many years ago that has gone unkept.
I’m keeping it now.
I type faster than my brain realizes is possible.
A happy ending. That’s what I’m going to give us. I’m going to rewrite that day in November, Leo’s birthday, when I waited for her, hoped she’d come. I change it now: that I didn’t see her there, at the fence by the beach on the chilly morning, so instead she called to me—Ben! Ben!—and I glanced up toward her, squinted and then saw her clearly, and suddenly, she was there all along.
Not Amanda. Tatum.
She showed up that day, and I saw her.
I rewrite the truth of our history until we find ourselves happy again.
I hit Save.
I press Print.
Between Me and You.
I compile all the pages, find gift wrap in a kitchen drawer, tie it in a bow.
Maybe it will be something. Maybe not enough. But maybe it will be too.
46
TATUM
CHRISTMAS
I make Joey wait until Ben gets here to open his presents. He’s been up since five a.m., jumping on my bed, demanding that we start, but I insist. Instead, I make him pancakes (from a mix, but it’s the best I can do on my own), let him dump out his stocking, and log him in to Petfinder, where he keeps squealing that he wants to adopt all the dogs. All of them, Mom! All of them!
Finally, at eight, Ben, holding a tray of gourmet coffees, lets himself in with his key, and Joey races through the house into the foyer to throw himself at Ben.
“You’re finally here! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Mom was making me wait,” Joey shouts, then untangles his limbs and races into the living room.
“Latte?” Ben asks, holding out a cup.
“Necessary,” I reply. “He’s been up since five.”
“Ouch.”
Piper, Scooter, and Emily come down the steps, Piper with the new baby, Harry, on her hip.
“I’ll call Dad,” I say. “Tell him we’re starting.”
To Joey, I shout, “Hey, Joe, before you dive in full frenzied, are you packed like I asked?”
Joey doesn’t answer. Instead, he’s neck deep in gift wrap, in all sorts of toys that he certainly doesn’t need and that might go unused before Constance earmarks them for charity.
“I can check,” Ben says. “If you want to call your dad.”
“I gave him a list, told him to take everything out that he wanted to bring, and pack. Told him no allowance if he didn’t do it by this morning.” I’ve been trying to instill more responsibility in Joey. Remove him from his own bubble that we’ve inflated around him with the divorce, with the perks that are given to him because of my fame, the deference of being my kid, the special treatment.
“It’s Christmas, Tate, let’s give him a break.” He kisses my cheek. “Oh, before I forget.” He rests his coffee on the foyer table, reaches into his bag, removes a gift in silver wrapping, a white bow. “For you.”
“Ben . . .”
“I know I didn’t have to. I didn’t do it because of that. I wanted to.”
I meet his eyes and nod. “I have something for you too. It’s under the tree.”
I decided only last night to give it to him, the signed Love Is in the Air script. I’d tracked it down through three auction houses, had to place a special hold on it, spent a small fortune. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it at the time: Hope? Forgiveness? An apology for all the ways we wronged each other? Last night, though, I knew. Absolution. Maybe even a new start.
It had been sitting in my desk drawer emitting a muted radar signal that became louder, then louder still after the night Monster died. Do it. You love him. Show him. He was with Amanda now, yes, and so maybe it would be a gesture that meant only that we could be good for each other, kind to each other, in new ways. Not as spouses, but still as partners. I loved him. I wanted him. I had shown up on the beach in November to say that, to demonstrate. That he has moved on hasn’t changed how I feel. This was the surprising discovery I made last night while I was fingering the worn pages of the script, remembering how I used to read Ben’s drafts of his Reagan screenplay, how he’d pull a blanket over my legs, how he’d pace behind me waiting for my feedback. Because my opinion mattered, because we valued each other in so many ways. I shut the leather-bound script quietly, then retrieved the wrapping paper from the hall closet, and folded the corners, taped them just so, wrote a card that I
signed with love. I found a grosgrain ribbon in the closet and tied it in a perfect bow, which I’d learned years ago during a holiday season spent gift-wrapping at the mall for extra pay.
He’d been there for me when Monster died; he’d been there for me for so much more. Nearly two decades now. Just because he is with Amanda doesn’t detract from any of that. And so I padded downstairs and placed the script, wrapped in silver and gold paper, under the tree. I stared at it for a moment. It was luminous. The present, yes. But the choice I was making in giving it too.
“You got something for me?” Ben cranes his neck toward the tree and grins with such surprise that he reminds me of what he looked like when we first met, back at Dive Inn.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “I mean, not nothing. But I just saw something, and I thought of you.”
“Well, thank you. I can’t wait to see it.”
I start to undo the bow on his gift, slip my fingers under the seam of the paper.
“Wait, no, please don’t open it here.” He almost seizes it from my hands.
“What? Why?”
His cheeks turn crimson.
“I just . . . can you do it once I’m gone?”
“But you’re staying through dinner, right?” It occurs to me that I don’t want him to leave, not after we’re done unwrapping the gifts, not for a long while.
“I’m staying for dinner,” he says. “This is the only place I want to be.”
“I’ll open it on the plane.” A week in Hawaii with Joey, Piper, Scooter, Emily, Harry, my dad, and Cheryl. It should be enough, I think. All of their company, without Ben.
“That’s what I envisioned.” He smiles. “You opening it on the plane.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“You don’t have to,” he says. “Because I do.”
47
BEN
CHRISTMAS
I kiss all of them good night and wish them a safe flight. Tatum promises to call when they land.
“And after I open this mysterious gift of yours,” she says.
“Take your time with it,” I reply. “It’s OK. There’s no rush.”
She wrinkles her brow. “OK.”
“OK,” I say, and then kiss the top of her head.
Dinner had been perfect, like we were a family again. Daisy had started it, broken the tension. Told the story of how Tatum and I first met, over a bet, and Joey’s eyes got wide and then he laughed until apple cider came out of his nose.
“Mom, you bet Aunt Daisy that you could get three numbers?” He looked at her cockeyed. “No offense, Mom, but really?”
“I know you think I am over-the-hill,” Tate said, laughing. “And embarrassing and horrifying, but let me tell you, I could put on an act and pour a beer with the best of them.”
“She could,” I concurred. Tatum and I locked eyes, and we both remembered that this was the truth.
“And then I got the chicken pox,” Daisy said. “And maybe if I hadn’t, I’d be the Oscar winner and not on my gajillionth season of New York Cops.”
“But then you’d have had to marry my dad,” Joey said, rolling his eyes.
And I said: “Yeah, no offense, Daisy, but that wasn’t happening.”
And Tatum said: “Yeah, now that I think about it, why weren’t you into Ben back then, Dais?”
And Daisy laughed and said: “Uh, no offense, Ben, but nice guys were never my thing.” But she raised her eyebrows at the irony.
And Tatum snorted but in a funny way, and I laughed because we’d all gotten it wrong, and we raised our glasses to Daisy’s chicken pox.
I’d waited to open Tatum’s present to me until I was home. She’d asked me to. I sink into my couch and place it on my lap, then slide my fingers under the immaculately folded corners. I tug it from the paper and stare at it for a moment, then a moment longer, aware of the rise and fall of my chest, of how my hand has moved to cover my mouth in my astonishment: a signed script of Love Is in the Air, Reagan’s first film. It must have been nearly impossible to track down.
After so long, after all the scars we have inflicted, Tatum still knows me best. That even if I hadn’t penned the script about Reagan I’d hoped for, part of me would always be connected to that dream—of who I wanted to be when I first stepped foot out here, of who I hoped to be to make my father proud and, concretely, to make myself proud too. And Tatum. She’d never asked for me to win an Oscar; she’d never cared. She simply wanted me to keep dreaming. I’d stopped for a bit. I’d stopped a lot of things along with it.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket. The screen tells me that it’s Amanda, maybe regretting how perfunctorily we’d ended; maybe regretting we’d ended at all. I decline the call. I’ll try her back later, tell her the truth, even though the simple e-mail was easier. I’ll tell her that I wrote something for someone else, that I am dreaming now of something different, that I am dreaming now of Tatum.
Now, in my empty apartment, I ease my head against the back of the couch and squeeze my eyes closed. I’ve done everything else I can. There is nothing to do but wait.
48
TATUM
NEW YEAR’S EVE DAY
The beach is deserted now. It’s nearly sunset, and the families with little kids have taken them inside to tend to sunburns or to stave off full meltdowns; the retirees have returned to their condos for early dinners or, in my dad’s case, a nap. There are a few stragglers, a young couple who keep chasing each other into the water, a father and his teenage son still tossing a football. But mostly I’m alone. Something I’d grown used to, even if I resented the isolation I’d brought on myself.
I tug my Tisch baseball hat lower, hug my tunic closer as the wind kicks up. I reach for my straw bag and rest the script inside.
I’d opened it on the flight over. Everyone had fallen asleep, so it was just me, in a darkened cabin, with the overhead light aglow. He’d written a note on top:
For you, just for you, Tate. I should have done it years ago but maybe now was the only time I was ready. Take your time. Don’t rush. Be sure. But now you know how I feel, now you know, I hope, that I can still keep my promises.
I’m not sure if I breathed from the first page to the last. I must have, of course, but my heart was so tight, my pulse so quick, that I wouldn’t be surprised if I hadn’t. I closed the last page and stared out the window for I don’t know how long. The darkness of the night passing by, the ocean so far below us that it was impossible to see.
“Mom?” Joey poked me.
“Sweetheart, I didn’t realize you were awake,” I said.
“Are you OK? You’re crying.”
I pressed my fingers against my cheek. I was. Unlike so many times in scripts, in rehearsals, on screen, when I wedge myself into an emotion and play it out, this time I hadn’t even realized how deeply it had cut.
“I’m fine, love. Just thinking about something.”
“Monster?” he asked.
“Him. Lots of other stuff too.” I squeezed his hand, and he nodded, then closed his eyes and tumbled back to sleep. I turned back to the window and the vastness of the world we were cutting through.
Now, on the white beach in Hawaii, I’ve sat with it for five, nearly six, days now. It’s a masterpiece, of course, and it’s his masterpiece that he wrote for me. Or for himself. That’s not for me to say. But I know what he’s trying to say in these pages, and I understand that it is now up to me. He made his plea, he wrote down his version of us—all the ways we hurt each other, all the ways we loved each other too—and he got a lot of it right. The beginning when we couldn’t get enough of each other, the middle when we began to splinter, when we faced loss and triumph and should have used each other as both shelter and foundation but instead lost our way, and then the end, of course. The end was messy with his infidelities and regrettable with my own untruths.
He wrote it all down, and he showed me his nakedness.
He told me to be sure. So I’ve waited to ca
ll, waited, just as Tatum does in his script, to know that I’m certain, ready to be what we once were.
I watch that young couple fall on themselves as a wave crashes over them.
No, not what we once were. Because we were foolish and selfish and shortsighted. Can I believe that we can put all of this aside and evolve into something better? How can you ever be certain of that?
The couple emerges from the waves, and he says something that delights her. She throws her head back and laughs, and he reaches for her hand before they set off down the beach.
Maybe you can never be certain. Maybe all you can do is reach for the other’s hand and go.
I inch up from the chaise, let my feet sink into the warm sand, then stride to the water’s edge. I haven’t gone in this whole trip. The ocean has always scared me for reasons that I never really probed or even wanted to understand. Leo was always jumping in, diving under. Ben too. But I usually just sat and watched, called out to them if I thought they were swimming out too far. It was the unknown, of course. How the blue turned black, how it was shallow and then suddenly you couldn’t find your footing. How it is something bigger than you, and it always will be, no matter how big you get on your own.
I stare out to the horizon, the sky now a blistering shade of pink and fuchsia and orange and blue. I think of my mom, of how she told me I could be anything I dreamed of. I always thought she meant with my life; it only now occurs to me that she also meant with my heart, that there has to be room for forgiveness and second chances, along with everything else. If I dream of loving Ben that much, we can become whatever we imagine our dreams to be.
I have room in my heart for Ben. If I am brave enough to open up that sliver that remained there through everything, I can peel it back and find him.
I wade deeper into the water, up to my knees now, then to my chest. I push myself into discomfort; I push myself into my fear.
It’s a shame, I realize, that everyone has gone inside for the sunset.
They’ve given up, turned their backs right before they got to the best part.
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