by Gail Bowen
It was impossible for me not to hear Georgie’s end of the conversation, and I was struck by the intimacy in her voice and by the fact that she closed off the call by saying, “I really enjoyed our dinner last night. Next time, it’s my turn.”
After she slipped the phone back in her bag, she gave me a half smile. “So now you know about Nick and me.”
“I do,” I said. “And I’m happy for you both. Nick’s a terrific guy. He and Zack go way back.”
“I know — Chloe’s told me all about it.”
“So you’ve met Nick’s daughter.”
“Actually, Chloe brought us together. Nick came into the office one day and saw me scrapbooking.” Georgie shot me a warning look. “Don’t say a word. Scrapbooking is a great antidote to stress, a commodity that is never in short supply around here. Anyway, it was just before Valentine’s Day and Nick said he wanted to get his fourteen-year-old daughter a special Valentine’s gift, and he thought she might be interested in what I was doing. I volunteered to help her get started. After work that day, Nick drove me out to the east end to pick up some supplies and then we went to his house to surprise Chloe. Jo, she was so excited. As soon as I took off my boots and jacket, she and I started making Valentines. We stopped to eat and then went right back at it. Nick couldn’t stop smiling.”
“He’s absolutely devoted to Chloe,” I said. “And finding activities that work for her is tricky. She’s very creative, but she becomes frustrated if she can’t get the result she hopes for.”
“And with scrapbooking she can choose her own pace,” Georgie said. “Before I met Chloe, Nick explained the situation.”
When she was seven, Chloe had been in an accident that caused traumatic brain damage, and she still struggled with her limitations.
“But Nick said she thrives on challenges, so he keeps trying new things.”
“The demands on Nick are heavy,” I said. “Not that he ever complains. Zack says a lot of people think he’s sacrificing his life for Chloe, but Nick doesn’t see it that way. He sees Chloe as a blessing.”
“She’s a lovely girl,” Georgie said. “And my friendship with her has been a godsend. The only people I knew when I arrived here in February were Roy and Ainsley, and by then, Roy was sinking, and Ainsley was obsessed with keeping him from going down for the third time. The rumours that Sisters and Strangers would be postponed indefinitely had started. And once the competition smells fear, you might as well hang up the sign that says, ‘Welcome, sharks, it’s feeding time.’”
“It’s the same in politics,” I said. “When the knives come out, it’s hard to retain a sunny view of humanity.”
“I guess that’s why my relationship with Chloe is so important to me,” Georgie said. “She makes me remember I’m human. Just watching how proud she is of learning to scrapbook makes me feel good. And she needs me. The school she attends has support for special needs students, but Chloe has all the urges of any fourteen-year-old, and she didn’t know who to talk to about them.
“Her teachers at school didn’t seem to be an option. She didn’t want to talk to Nick because he worries so much about her already, and their housekeeper, Mrs. Szabo, is terrific, but she’s well into her seventies and very old school, so Chloe was shy about asking her. Chloe is menstruating, so she understands that, but she has questions about the new feelings in her body, and I try to give her serious answers.”
“I’m glad you’re there for her.”
“So is Nick and so am I, but right now, you and I need to get to work. Let’s go to the Courtyard. We can have coffee, and with all the plants around and the light from the skylights, life always seems brighter there.”
“We could use an infusion of brightness,” I said. “But we need privacy and the Courtyard’s always crowded.”
“Not today. We gave everyone an extra day off for the Easter weekend. I’m trying to store up some good karma with our employees for when we start shooting, and the seventeen-hour days start.”
Charlie D’s text came just as we’d settled in with our coffee at one of the glass-topped café tables in the area where the staff of Living Skies ate and visited. I glanced at the text. “The interview airs at eleven,” I said. “Charlie D says he did the intro, then played the interview with Roy and cut it just after Roy started to crash. Charlie wrote and delivered the closing himself and he thinks we’ll be okay with it.”
“Fingers crossed,” Georgie said. “Are you going to tell Taylor to listen?”
“Like the rest of us, she and Vale are hurting. They should hear the interview. I’ll text her, and then you and I can get started.”
For the next hour and a half, Georgie made notes as we talked through the shining threads Roy had started to bring together in episode three, and we floated ideas about how to pick up the strands and continue weaving the narrative to a conclusion. At eleven o’clock, we tuned in to the show, just in time to hear Oliver Jones’s cool and carefree “Tippin’ Home from Sunday School,” the music that introduced the second hour of Charlie D in the Morning.
Charlie D’s dark honey voice announced that the second half of the show would be devoted to an interview he did a few weeks earlier with Roy Brodnitz, the mercurial and prodigiously gifted writer of the Broadway hit and upcoming film The Happiest Girl and of the six-part series Sisters and Strangers, the flagship for MediaNation’s new dramatic programming. Then he said simply that Roy loved life, and that he had fought the good fight against his demons, but that in the end, his demons won out, and the night before, Roy Brodnitz had died of a massive heart attack.
The interview opened with Charlie D asking Roy about how The Happiest Girl came into being.
When Georgie and I heard Roy’s gentle and expressive baritone, we looked quickly at each other and then just as hastily averted our eyes.
“If you believe in such things — and given what happened to me — I guess I have to,” Roy said, “a year to the day after my husband of fourteen years died, I found the gift that saved me. For twelve months, I’d struggled with the black dog of depression. I’ve read that depression colonizes us, replacing what we were with more and more of itself until there is nothing left of us to hear the birds sing. There was nothing good ahead of me, and that day, I’d decided the time had come for me to jump off the carousel. I was taking a final walk along West 25th Street in Manhattan, when I glanced at the front window of a small art gallery and saw Aurora, the painting that changed my life. The canvas was large, 160 by 130 centimetres, and luminous with the shimmering, pulsating, radiant colours of the northern lights. That afternoon Aurora was delivered to my loft in Tribeca. For hours I sat watching the changing afternoon light play on the painting’s vibrant bands of colour. Suddenly I realized I was hearing the birds sing again. That’s when I sat down at my desk and began writing The Happiest Girl.”
For the next forty minutes, Charlie D led Roy through the world of wonders he and Ainsley Blair encountered in the year after The Happiest Girl opened. When Roy described his ecstasy the morning he first saw Sally Love’s Flying Blue Horses and heard the story behind it, Georgie buried her face in her hands, and I swallowed hard.
The interview was almost over when Ainsley Blair appeared at the entrance to the Courtyard. Hair awry, eyes still swollen with sleep, she seemed dazed. “I can’t find anybody,” and then hearing Roy’s voice, she startled. “That’s Roy.”
Georgie went over and embraced her. “It’s a radio interview MediaNation put together.”
Ainsley was beyond comprehending. “How could they do an interview? Roy’s dead.”
“It was taped weeks ago,” Georgie said softly.
“Turn it off,” Ainsley said. “Please.”
When Georgie did as she’d asked, Ainsley became even more agitated. “How did Roy seem in the interview?”
“He seemed fine,” Georgie said. “Very upbeat, very excited about
Sisters and Strangers.”
Ainsley reached out to steady herself on the back of one of the café chairs, and Georgie said, “Why don’t you join us?” When Ainsley remained frozen, Georgie guided her gently onto the chair.
“I’ll get coffee,” I said. I went into the office and poured another cup from the carafe.
After I returned with the coffee, Georgie said, “Ainsley was just telling me that she spent the evening at the hospital filling out forms. She walked along the riverbank near the hospital till it was daylight and then she drove back to Regina in one of the vans the company rented for the trip. I’m trying to convince her to let me take her home, so she can eat something and get some sleep.”
Ainsley’s eyes widened. “I can’t go back to the duplex,” she said, and there was an edge of hysteria in her voice. “Roy’s things are still in his place on the main floor, waiting for him.”
The duplex in which Ainsley and Roy had been living was another example of Gabe Vickers’s forethought. He had purchased the attractive two-storey apartment building across the street from the sound studios. He and Ainsley were to occupy the apartment on the second floor, and the space on the main floor would be offered to someone working in a Living Skies production whose stay in the city would be lengthy. Gabe and Ainsley were scheduled to take possession on January 1, but by then Gabe was dead, so Ainsley had moved into the second-floor apartment and Roy was occupying the space on the main floor.
Georgie took out her phone. “Kyle Daly texted me that he and some of the other members of the crew took the early plane from Saskatoon, and he’s already at the production studios. I’ll text him and ask him to clear out Roy’s belongings.”
Ainsley seemed numb. She shook her head as if to clear it. “Tell him not to throw anything out or give anything away. I want to be able to go through Roy’s things myself and decide.” She frowned. “There’s so much to decide.”
“You don’t have to make all the decisions today. And you don’t have to make them alone,” Georgie said. “Right now, just drink your coffee.”
Ainsley tented her fingers and stared at them for a worryingly long time. “Roy faced a hard and cruel struggle,” she said. “He did his best.”
“He did,” I said. “Our family will always be grateful that he was part of our lives. He opened new worlds for us, and he will open new worlds for every person that sees his work. He’s leaving a rich legacy, Ainsley.”
Ainsley’s face was carved with pain. “But he didn’t finish Sisters and Strangers.”
“We’ll make certain it’s completed,” Georgie said. “And Ainsley, the series will be what Roy wanted it to be. I promise.” She turned to me. “Jo, I asked Kyle to meet us here, but Ainsley needs to eat something and get some sleep. I’m going to take her to my hotel. Would you mind waiting here for Kyle?”
“Of course not, but he’ll need the keys.”
“I don’t know where Roy’s keys are, but I have a copy,” Ainsley said, and she began pulling items out of the tooled leather satchel she always carried. As the pile of business and personal care items grew, and the key did not appear, Ainsley was beside herself with frustration. She was known for her ability to remain cool and controlled in the midst of the crises that occur with regularity on film sets, but that morning she was reeling.
Finally, Georgie took the satchel from her and pulled out the keys. “Always the last place you look.” Then she helped Ainsley to her feet. “Time for us to go, kiddo,” she said. “Jo, I’ll give you a call. Kyle won’t be long. He’s always Johnny-on-the-spot.”
Kyle Daly was the production designer for Sisters and Strangers. After Roy and I agreed to collaborate, I found myself dealing with people whose titles were grand but meaningless — a phenomenon I was familiar with from political life. When I checked online for descriptions of positions in movie and TV production, I learned that the production designer’s responsibility was “to facilitate the artistic director’s creative vision for all locations and to produce sets that would give the film its unique visual identity.”
Bafflegab. So I closed my laptop and kept my eyes open. It didn’t take long to discover that Kyle’s job was to identify what needed to be done and make it happen. He ran the ground game, which was exactly what I had done in dozens of political campaigns.
A slight thirty-year-old with dark blond artfully spiky hair, a broad forehead, keen eyes and a pleasing manner, Kyle was liked by everyone including me. He picked up on details that seemed minor but contributed to Roy’s vision of bringing viewers into the Sisters and Strangers world. When we watched the Ellard/Love home movie together, Kyle noticed that the Ellards used Fiesta dinnerware for everyday meals. He ferreted out a place where he could buy original Fiesta dinnerware in mint condition and promised me that when the movie was shot, the dishes were mine.
That day when Kyle arrived in the Courtyard, he was obviously distraught, but once again, he was sufficiently in control to have identified a need and taken care of it. “I asked one of our set guys to remove Aurora from the writers’ room and take it over to Ainsley’s. Everyone knows what that painting meant to Roy, and she’ll want to keep it close,” he said.
“Good thinking,” I said. “And here are the keys to Roy’s apartment. Do you need the address?”
“No, I’ve got it, but thanks.” Kyle had always struck me as unflappable, but that morning he was agitated. He ran his fingers through his spiky hair several times as if to rid himself of unwelcome thoughts. “I can’t believe any of this is happening,” he said. “When Ainsley and I came upon Roy, I couldn’t take in what I was seeing — I couldn’t make myself understand that the frantic, filth-covered man Ainsley was trying to embrace was Roy. We all knew he was having emotional problems, but he was always courteous and articulate — and, of course, he was always immaculate.” Kyle’s handsome features contorted with grief. “No matter what was going on inside him, he never stopped being Roy Brodnitz.”
“It’s hard to conceive of something happening that could completely break the man we knew.”
Kyle shuddered and walked away without responding.
* * *
My phone had been turned off all morning, and as soon as I got back to the house, I scrolled through the messages. I texted Charlie D telling him how much Georgie, Ainsley and our family appreciated his sensitive edit of the interview. I knew Zack would be in court, so I left a voicemail saying all was well, but that tonight would definitely be a night to forget the world, sit on the deck and catch up on the goings-on of the birds and small animals with whom we shared life on the creek.
When I called Taylor, the sadness in her voice was palpable. She and Vale had listened to Charlie D’s interview with Roy, and they had both been grateful that Charlie D had not aired Roy’s account of his breakdown. Vale had been in Vancouver filming when Roy’s depression returned, but Taylor had been in Regina. As the darkness closed in and Roy distanced himself from us all, Taylor had tried repeatedly to get through to him. Finally, she was forced to accept the fact that Roy was beyond our reach, and all we could do was wait and hope. By the time he died, Taylor had already begun to mourn the loss of the gentle, gracious man who took such pleasure in being her confidante as she embarked on a career in the arts as he had done when he was her age.
But like all of us, Taylor had held out the hope that the Roy who had treated our family with such kindness would return. Now that hope had been dashed. Before I broke the connection, I needed reassurance. “Taylor, I know this has been a terrible blow. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “Lawyers’ Bay is always so peaceful, and Vale’s here. That quote from Ernest Lindner Charlie D read at the end of the interview really helped. It seemed to express everything we were feeling.”
“Georgie and I didn’t listen to the end of the show,” I said. “Ainsley came in. Hearing Roy’s voice upset her, so we turned off
the program.”
“The quotation is from that book I loaned Roy,” Taylor said. “I guess Roy must have mentioned it to Charlie D. It doesn’t matter. What Ernest Lindner said about there being no end to anything — there is only change — was exactly the right way for Charlie D to end the interview.”
“It was,” I agreed. “At the end, I think Roy was searching for answers to questions Ernie had already struggled with.”
“Jo, after the interview was over they played k.d. lang singing ‘Hallelujah’ — all six minutes and sixteen seconds of it. You and Dad should listen to it tonight. It will help.” Taylor paused. “Vale and I are coming back to the city Friday morning. Vale says she needs to clear the air with Ainsley before they start work on Sisters and Strangers.”
“This might not be the right time.”
“I pointed that out to Vale, but it’s her decision. She says that if she and Ainsley are to do their best work, Ainsley needs to understand that the relationship between Vale and Gabe had nothing to do with emotion, at least not on Vale’s part. She’s certain that if she’d turned down the ‘arrangement’ Gabe offered her when she auditioned, she would not have been cast as Ursula, and she knew that Ursula would be her breakthrough role.”
