“She won’t know you,” Gail says, smiling for the first time. “Too late for that, too. I promised your father I would write, but I didn’t think you’d show up. I told him you wouldn’t,” she says with satisfaction, letting the implications of those words sink in.
“You’re a bitch, Gail. As always.” I will ask her nothing, tell her nothing, give her nothing that her meanness can feed on.
Just then a young man shuffles into the kitchen. He’s wearing boxers and a dirty T-shirt, and his gut is trying to find a way to poke out of the place where the two meet. He smells like cigarettes and dirty sleep. He pats Gail sort of half on the ass, half on the hip, and asks what’s for dinner.
She brushes his hand away. “Look who’s here,” Gail says. “It’s your long-lost sister.”
He looks up and shakes his floppy bangs out of his eyes. “Carly May?” He sounds doubtful. “Jesus.”
“Get dressed,” I say. “I’ll take you out for something to eat.”
He looks at Gail. For permission? A mama’s boy and a loser, it looks like. Way to go, Gail. “I won’t stand in your way,” she says.
His eyes slide back to me. “All right,” he agrees. “I’m down with that. Gimme five minutes.” He retreats.
“He’ll tell you anything you need to know,” says Gail, then she disappears to the back of the house, too. She sort of flounces away, like she thinks she’s making some kind of dramatic exit.
* * *
Eddy’s calls itself a bar and grill, but it’s not really much of either. It sells cheap beer but would probably frown upon anyone who drank more than two or three in a sitting, and practically all the food on the menu is fried. I take Jaden there because there’s nowhere else to go but the diner, and that would be less private. At Eddy’s we slide into a dark booth. I wipe a few crumbs off the table. Hardly anyone else is here. I remove my sunglasses and suddenly laugh at myself, feeling like an asshole. As if anyone would recognize me—or give a shit—after more than a decade.
“I’ve seen you in the movies,” Jaden says, surprising me. “Braden and I used to watch you all the time.”
I try to get my head around this. “You knew, then? Did Daddy know?” All these years I’ve thought I was a mystery to them. I assumed my new life as Chloe Savage was a secret, and not a very hard one to keep.
“Yeah,” says Jaden. “I guess we’ve known for a while. Not in the beginning, I mean, when you first left, and Ma wrote that book. At that point it really was like you had just totally disappeared. But then after—I don’t know, a few years—we started seeing you sometimes. We do have TV in Nebraska, you know. Movies, even.” He sounds slightly reproachful that this has not occurred to me. “Dad made Ma promise not to spill the beans to the media,” he adds. “Otherwise she would have outed you forever ago.” Had it been arrogant to assume that my planet was so far from theirs that I could remain undetected even if my face were splashed across millions of screens? Not Carly’s face, I defend myself. Chloe’s. Which is different. Carly doesn’t exist. How did I ever persuade myself to believe they wouldn’t find out? Suddenly my confidence in my anonymity seems downright delusional.
Jaden doesn’t look accusing; in fact I revise my impression of him slightly now that he is fully dressed and seems to have brushed his teeth and at least splashed water on his head. He used to be a pretty cute kid. I can see traces of that early promise in the parts of his face that aren’t puffy and sprouting tufts of half-assed facial hair. Maybe he’s not as much of a lunk as I first thought. But. I didn’t come here for some sentimental guilt trip.
“Tell me about Daddy,” I order.
Between bites of his hamburger, he does.
First it was just depression, he explains. Then a series of little things. Dizzy spells, memory lapses. Then they sold the farm (“Why?” I demand, and Jaden says, “Because Ma said they didn’t need it anymore”). Soon afterward he was diagnosed with Alzheimers. “Early something—”
“Onset?” I suggest.
“Yeah. Early onset.”
He also had arthritis, weird nerve issues, chronic colds—he was always a little sick, said Jaden, though not enough to be really worried about. Minor things. Without the farm he sat around and read all day, became more and more withdrawn. He would try to start little projects around the house and then abandon them. His memory got worse and worse. He was on all kinds of drugs, Jaden said, for a million different things. And that was what had happened: A million different drugs. An accidental overdose. A miscalculation on someone’s part, probably his, definitely not Gail’s.
“Could he have done it on purpose?” I ask, trying to sound completely neutral, like it makes no difference.
Jaden looks shocked. “Of course not,” he says, flushing, looking a little pissed off for the first time. “Jesus. Why would he do that?”
Because Gail took his farm away. Because he was bored to death. Because I deserted him. Because he felt like hell. Because he was lonely. Because he lived in a fucking pink house on the same plot of land where the house he grew up in used to be, after his mother was shipped off to the old folks’ home. “Have dessert,” I tell Jaden, as if buying him a shitload of cheap, crappy food will make up for something I haven’t done. Or for the tiara incident, maybe. I watch him devour his chocolate brownie sundae, vaguely grossed out.
I learn that he graduated from high school, doesn’t have a job yet. That Braden went to Iraq and came back in one piece except for the fact that his brain was shaken loose by a roadside bomb that left him otherwise intact, apparently unharmed. “He’s totally fucked-up,” says Jaden with feeling. I can’t tell what feeling exactly. Braden lives with his equally fucked-up girlfriend in a trailer outside of town. Grandma Mabel doesn’t know her own name, much less anybody else’s. You can go see her, but she’s rude to visitors. She likes two of her nurses and no one else. She talks to people no one else can see, and doesn’t seem to like them much, either. I decide not to go see her after all. Gail is “writing” another book. He starts to tell me what it’s about, but I don’t even want to know.
Lois
I turn my head to the window and look down. Clouds bulge and billow miles below us. I open my laptop and try to write, but Gary won’t cooperate. I’m almost relieved. I have no choice but to read the novel I bought at the airport, dozing on and off. My mind is strangely quiet.
I like being nowhere. I wish I could stay longer.
In Seattle, where I have a brief layover, a text from Sean intrudes upon my unfamiliar sense of peace: You’re getting closer, aren’t you. I shiver, wishing I had never given him my number. Could he possibly know where I am, what I’m doing? I imagine him lurking near my house, watching me load my luggage into my trunk early this morning, drawing conclusions. But even if he saw me go, how could he know where? Closer to what? It’s a bluff, surely. I delete the message, push it from my mind.
I rent a car in Vancouver and make my way to the tiny town where I’ve decided I can hide out for a few days. Carly-Chloe and the other cast members will be staying at a lovely inn ten miles outside of town; even if it weren’t booked solid, it wouldn’t suit my purposes. In a week or so I’ll check into the charming bed-and-breakfast the movie people have secured for me, but for now I’m here and not here. I get a room in a decent-looking but decidedly unassuming motel just off the mountain highway that runs through the middle of town. At first I feel oddly conspicuous, worried that people will suspect me of some illicit purpose; I invent a plausible story about my vacation plans in case anyone is suspicious enough to ask what I am doing here. At the same time, I realize that I’m being absurd; why would anyone notice or care? You’re not the center of the universe, Lois, I hear someone reminding me. My mother? No. It’s him. Zed. But he had gone to such trouble to find me. His messages were mixed, to say the least. We were the center of the universe, Carly May and I. For a summer.
Chloe
I drive to Omaha, leave my car in long-term parking, and book a flight to BC
. I’m sick of driving, sick of watching the stupid fields go by. I’ll figure out later what to do with the car. A germ of a plan occurs to me: I could pay Jaden to pick it up and drive it out to LA. If I want a brother. Do I want a brother? I’m not sure, and in no mood to think more about it. At the airport I sit in a sports bar and drink wine and read magazines. On the plane I sleep. It feels like it’s been a while.
Lois
I’m pleased to find an old-fashioned diner within easy walking distance of my motel. I go there for an early dinner. (I plan to leave the evenings free for writing.) I order a grilled cheese sandwich with fries, though I haven’t had much of an appetite lately. Brad asked if I had lost weight and I denied it, but later I stepped on the scale and found that it was true. I didn’t have much to spare, to be honest; I never have. I suspect that if I were so inclined, I could live on pizza and macaroni and cheese, and I would still be a wisp of a person. I nibble a french fry, thinking maybe I should try to gain some weight, maybe even attempt to exercise regularly.
And then I catch myself, surprised that such mundane thoughts have overtaken me, momentarily driving aside the worries that have preoccupied me for—how long? Sean. Gary. My sequel. The movie. And Carly May, above all. Or Chloe. What if Chloe Savage is an utter stranger—someone I don’t know at all? What if she has eliminated every trace of the scrappily arrogant, willful, precocious Carly May? What if I am absolutely the last person in the world she wants to see?
No, I remind myself, my peace shattered. Chloe Savage requested this meeting. She chose to do the movie. She hasn’t forgotten, no matter how hard she has tried. She’s curious. I can feel it. That might not be all she is, but at least there is that. Which is a place to start.
Start what? What if she hates you? My mind spits this possibility at me without warning. What if she has always hated you? Not true, I fire back. Way too simple. But she could hate you for the book. I know her better than that.
Hate: Hetaera, houghmagandy, halieutics. Hebetate. Hadeharia (constant use of the word hell; who requires a word for this?). Hyalopterous.
I eat too slowly; my grilled cheese ungrills and reconstitutes itself as a solid slab. I push my plate away and dig in my handbag for my wallet. It’s too bright in here. That’s the worst thing about diners everywhere: they drench everything in a glaring light.
Back at the motel I sit at my little desk, open up my laptop, and tap it awake. The only source of light in the room is the computer; I keep the room dark enough that the window gives me a view of the parking lot rather than throwing my own reflection back at me. The last thing I need to see is my own pale, tired face, thinner than usual. On the screen is a list of files in the folder in which I keep the novel. The files include earlier versions of the beginning, a rough outline that stops well before the end, lists of ideas, characters, sections I cut but couldn’t bring myself to get rid of—and, of course, my working draft. Why my eyes stray to the right, past the file names to cryptic columns of information about KBs and dates last modified, I’m not sure. But what I notice suddenly, as the cursor hovers over the draft icon, is the time signature:
Date modified: 6/25/2012 2:50 PM
June 25 is … today? Yes. I haven’t been paying much attention, but that much I know. At 2:50 I was on the runway in Seattle, about to take off. My electronic devices were appropriately turned off and stowed.
And yet. My file was accessed—and not just accessed but modified—at precisely that moment.
My laptop never left my bag. My bag was under the seat in front of me.
Which means it was accessed remotely.
Now I remember the text message from Sean that hinted at a disturbing awareness of my activities. Now I remember that day I opened my draft and found that the font and the margins had been altered. I had blamed the changes on some sort of computer glitch. My Gmail calendar charts my itinerary. E-mail records correspondence with my agent. How much could Sean have seen? I know nothing about computer hacking. My vague notions of what is possible are informed by movies and TV shows in which bespectacled computer geeks can hack into anything they put their minds to, from the Pentagon to the secret ravings of would-be serial killers. Sean doesn’t strike me as that clever, but who’s to say? I have underestimated him before.
So let’s just say it’s possible. What does it mean?
I have no idea. I find myself strangely at a loss to speculate.
I change all my passwords, though I have no idea if that will make a difference. I disable the calendar function. I shut down my Facebook account for good measure, though I seldom use it.
I sit in the dark and think.
Chloe
I feel like hell by the time I land in Vancouver. Rinsing my face in the ladies’, I give myself a good hard look in the mirror. There are shadows under my eyes, which isn’t exactly shocking. There’s a fine line just above my left eyebrow and the faintest echo of another just above that. My left is the eyebrow I raise. I’m being punished with wrinkles for all the snotty, skeptical looks I’ve ever given anybody. I don’t think a casual observer would see the lines. The cameras are the first to notice when you start to fall apart.
I haven’t gone down the Botox road, but my time will come. I’ve already held out longer than most people I know. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m trying to prove. No one’s going to be impressed by my virtuous attachment to aging naturally. I’m not Helen fucking Mirren. Chloe Savage can’t afford much in the way of professional virtue. And no one would expect it of her.
I smear concealer on the shadows and scowl at myself in the mirror. Some people practice their prettiest looks in the mirror, and I won’t pretend I’m above that, but these days I prefer my grim face, my pissed-off face. Since no one else is in the bathroom I bare my teeth at myself, just for a second. As I turn away, I think I see a shadow of a dark wig in the mirror—stiff and cheap, not one of the many wigs I’ve stuck on my head as an actress, but the original wig, the abduction wig. I remember trying to charm myself in the ugly gas station restroom mirror, dark fake bangs cutting sharply across my forehead. Everything has changed since that day, every single fucking thing I can think of. One of my hands goes up to my head, and I almost expect to feel plasticky doll-hair. But it’s my own, soft and fine and needing a wash.
I’m a cop now, I remember. I scrape my hair back into a ponytail and replace the lipstick in my purse, unapplied. I stump through the airport toward baggage claim like someone who has a complicated relationship with her authority, her power, the gun in her holster. Well, no gun in the airport, obviously, but generally, in her everyday life. I look warily from side to side; I make my face half-cocky, and then I let it slide back to shrinking insecurity. I need to believe in this cop.
My designer luggage doesn’t help.
Who the hell would want to be a cop?
I could have had someone pick me up, but I rented a car instead. I want to be operating under my own steam here.
I also want a drink, cop or no cop.
* * *
The inn where most of the cast is staying is pretty far out of town. Deep in the woods, for obvious reasons. I start to panic when I first see it, but then I notice that it has a pub on the first floor. Smart innkeeper-in-the-middle-of-nowhere. I’m staying in a private guesthouse behind the main inn. It looks rustic from the outside, but it’s actually nicely appointed. I run a bath, stuff my clothes in drawers, scatter my possessions reassuringly around the room, turn on the TV for company.
I treat myself to a tiny bottle of whiskey from the minibar and slip into the tub. Lulled by the voice of a female news anchor in the background, I try to think of nothing. I have a feeling this will get harder and harder from here on out.
Beside the tub is a large window that looks out on the dark woods behind the inn. There’s a shade, but it isn’t drawn. Stupid place for a window. Not that there’s any reason for anyone to be back there, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything to stop them, either. I imagine a face
appearing there—suddenly, out of the trees, peering in at my naked self in the bath. It’s a good setting for a horror movie. I yank the shade down. Then I take a swig of whiskey. Don’t start getting jumpy, I tell myself. God knows you’re annoying enough already. I dunk myself beneath the water so that for a minute I can’t see a damned thing and all I can hear is the rush of water drowning out my thoughts. Drowning out whatever makes me me. I wish to hell there were easier ways to do it.
Later I head over to the bar. I am half Chloe, half Mandy the cop; it’s a necessary compromise. Mandy has such god-awful taste (in clothes, hair, everything) that I can’t bring myself to risk meeting my fellow cast members (who aren’t even here yet, I’m hoping, but you never know) as a fashion-challenged small-town policewoman. That’s not a first impression you could recover from. Inside, though, I’m still playing Mandy, which is why I sit, not at the long, curving wooden bar, but at a small table in the corner of the low room, all dark wood and pale stone and exposed beams. From here I can see everyone, but it’s hard for them to see me. I’m here to watch, not to be watched; to see, not to be seen. What a weird feeling.
I drink wine, which is another compromise: I intend to limit my Canadian martini consumption but can’t fully embrace Mandy’s beer-swigging ways unless I want to spend half my life on the treadmill. (I assume there’s a treadmill here. I picture hiking through the actual woods, and my blood runs cold. My revulsion is so strong that it surprises me.)
I’m on my second glass of sauvignon blanc when I notice a man across the room situated, like me, in a corner, his back to me. He’s wearing jeans and a flannel shirt that has a distinctly designer look, and he’s in the process of growing out a really expensive haircut. He has set himself apart from the other patrons—cheery vacationers, mostly well-heeled Canadians who look as though golf and tennis courses are their native realm.
An actor. Suddenly I’m convinced, without even seeing his face, that I know who this is. Turn around, I tell him in my head. Not because I want him to see me, because for once I don’t. I want to get a look at him.
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