by Gail Bowen
“And Vale was prepared to let Gabe use her body that way?”
Taylor’s voice was edged with anger. “She knew she could play the role of Ursula, and she knew that if she didn’t agree to let Gabe Vickers use her body to perform the only sexual act he was capable of, she wouldn’t get the role. Love was not a part of what Gabe did to her; neither was intimacy. The sight of Vale’s body aroused him. I know it’s disgusting, but don’t judge her.”
“Taylor, I’m not judging her. Truly, I’m not. Your dad and I are very fond of Vale, and we know how happy she makes you. She’s a significant part of your life, and we want to understand her — that’s all.”
“Then just accept her as she is,” Taylor said. “You did that with Dad. I was there in the months before you two got married. Everybody thought you were making a huge mistake. Even Mieka and Pete and Angus were worried, but you loved Dad and that was enough. And being married and being part of a family changed Zack. I’m hoping being with me can change Vale, make her see that she’s more than just her talent.”
“I hope that too, but Taylor, you can’t count on Vale changing.”
“I know, that’s why I’m just going to do what you did. Accept the person I love the way she is and hope for the best.” Taylor paused. “This being an adult isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” she said, and her wry acceptance of the slings and arrows was so much like Sally’s stoic determination to meet life head-on that my throat closed.
* * *
I tried to work on the script, but it was difficult to concentrate, so I drove to Lakeview Fine Foods, and bought fresh asparagus, new potatoes and six of Don’s best bone-in pork chops. As I started putting the groceries away, I realized I’d bought dinner for three. I swallowed hard — then froze two of the pork chops.
When Georgie phoned in late afternoon, she sounded tired but decisive. “Turns out Living Skies has a doctor on call. He came over, talked to Ainsley and prescribed something that seems to have done the job. She ate a bowl of soup, showered and she’s now fast asleep. The cleaners are coming to Roy’s place on Wednesday. As soon as they’re finished, I’m moving into the lower floor of the duplex. It was my suggestion. The idea of Ainsley living alone over Roy’s empty apartment was just one horror too many.”
“How are you doing?” I said.
“I’m sad,” she said. “Roy was too young and too good to die, but I’m hanging in. How are you doing?”
“When someone asks how he is, an Irish friend of mine always says, ‘Very similar.’”
Georgie chuckled. “Very similar,” she said. “I like that. Sometimes ‘very similar’ is the best we can hope for.”
Chapter Five
Georgie and I both had reasons for deciding against working in the writers’ room at the sound studios. Georgie’s reason was pragmatic. Although she was now officially working solely as a writer on Sisters and Strangers, she had been executive producing for almost two months, and if she was at the production studios, people would be seeking her out with production questions. My reason was personal. For me the writers’ room was filled with memories, not only of good times but also of times of confusion, anger and uncertainty. I knew I needed to start afresh in a new space.
On Tuesday, April 3, Georgie and I met in the home office Zack and I had organized over the Christmas holidays. The room had been the previous owners’ games room, the showcase for an old and beautiful billiards table that Zack hoped they would leave behind. But the previous owners took their treasure with them, and the former games room became the repository for everything our family couldn’t decide what to do with. The room was spacious; it had good natural light, and it was worth reclaiming. I called an online group that connected people with items they no longer needed to people who might use them. Within a single day, the room was bare, and Zack and I set to work.
For sentimental reasons, I had placed Sally Love’s old work table in the middle of the room — not as a barrier between Zack’s area and mine but as a workspace that was accessible for either or both of us when we needed to spread out. That afternoon, Georgie and I definitely needed space. She’d arrived with her laptop and a satchel that she emptied onto the table, papers and notepads spilling across the surface.
“This is everything Roy wrote for Sisters and Strangers, including random scrawls and notes.” Georgie picked up one of the daily planner notepads Roy favoured for scriptwriting. “You heard Roy’s voice when he talked about the beginnings of this project. A professor of mine used to say, ‘Poetry tries to tell us what cannot be said.’ Roy was happiest when he was on the brink of being able to show an audience something that could not be said in words. That’s how it was for him when he wrote the first two episodes.” Georgie handed me a copy of the script. “So let’s start here — with the cold open.”
“The teaser before the opening credits,” I said.
Georgie slipped on her tortoiseshell reading glasses. “You read the stage directions and Joanne’s lines and I’ll read Sally.”
1. EXT
Mist rising from a lake in cottage country. A dab of red, pale through the mist, grows in size and intensity as the camera moves in to reveal a red raft upon which two girls are lounging. We hear their voices before the camera moves in close enough for us to see them.
2. EXT. RAFT
SALLY LOVE, 14, perfect tan, wet blond hair hanging loose, yellow bikini
JOANNE ELLARD, 15, slightly sunburned, wet dark hair tied in a high ponytail, modest two-piece navy suit.
JOANNE
Panting with desire, he bent to brush my lips with his . . .
SALLY
Bruise your lips — brush is lame.
JOANNE
Okay. Panting with desire, he bruised my lips with his.
That’s kind of violent, isn’t it?
SALLY
He’s a boy about to have sex. He’s out of control.
JOANNE
Gasping, he moved his tortured body towards mine.
SALLY
You still have your bathing suits on.
JOANNE
He tore off his trunks and then pulled off the bottom of my bathing suit. Gasping now, he moved his tortured body towards mine.
SALLY
That’s good.
(they’re both laughing)
JOANNE
So what do I do next?
SALLY
(exasperated)
You grab his thing and help him put it in.
JOANNE
I don’t want to touch his thing.
SALLY
Then I’ll help him.
JOANNE
Where did you come from? Isn’t it supposed to be just me and the boy?
SALLY
I’m your best friend. I’m always there when you need me.
JOANNE
Do you ever think about your parents having sex?
SALLY
Des and Nina? No! I’m pretty sure she’s frigid.
JOANNE
They would have had to do it once or you wouldn’t exist.
SALLY
Maybe that’s why Nina hates me.
JOANNE
She doesn’t hate you. Nina wants you to love her the way I love her. Give her a chance.
SALLY
You may be school-smart, but you don’t know beans about people. Anyway, the heck with Nina and the heck with your witch of a mother. We don’t need them. You and I are going to lead fantastic lives. It’s like Miss Boucher tells us at the end of every Latin class.
JOANNE
“Amor fati, girls. Embrace your fate!”
Joanne holds out her hand to Sally. Both girls stand and move hand in hand to the edge of the raft.
JOANNE and SALLY
(TOGETHER — loud and defiant)
Amor Fati! We embrace our fate!
Sally and Joanne jump off the raft. Th
e opening credits roll against the image of the empty red raft bobbing in the waves.
“Nice scene,” I said.
Georgie nodded. “And effective. It does what it has to do: introduce Sally and Joanne, reveal their closeness, give the audience insight into their characters, establish the tone and the style of the series, tease a little and lay the groundwork.”
“All that in a little over a page.”
“And the way the camera moves in on what appears to be just a pale red splash in the mist with tiny dots of yellow and navy establishes the theme. Nothing is static. Everything is changing. The lives of Joanne and Sally will take shape before the audience’s eyes.”
As Georgie and I read through episode one together, I found my confidence growing. Roy had not given us a template, but he had given us a solid base on which to stand. Georgie and I were wholly engrossed in making notes when the doorbell rang. I left Georgie to the work and went to answer the door. The visitor was Kyle Daly, and his expression was grave.
“Come in,” I said. “Georgie and I are just working on the script. We’re about due for a coffee break if you’d like to join us.”
“Thanks, but I can’t stay,” he said. “I’m not finished packing up Roy’s things, but there’s something I thought you and Georgie should see.”
“We’re working down the hall,” I said. “Follow me.”
When she saw Kyle, Georgie half rose. “What’s happened now?”
Kyle took a book from his bag and handed it to me. It was the one about Ernest Lindner that we’d given Taylor. “This was on Roy’s desk,” he said. “I opened it and saw that it belonged to your daughter.”
I looked inside. Every page was dense with multicoloured scribbling: exclamation and question marks, numbers, symbols, stars. Nothing made sense. I passed the book to Georgie. As she leafed through the pages, her intake of breath was audible. “My God. What’s this supposed to mean?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “It must have meant something to Roy. He put so much pressure on the pens he used that they’ve ripped through some of the pages.”
“I’ve ordered another copy of the book for your daughter,” Kyle said. “The best I could get was ‘used,’ but the seller lists it as being in good condition.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Roy was very dear to Taylor. Seeing this would break her heart.” I looked again at the defaced pages. “It breaks mine. Roy was such a gentle man. It’s hard to imagine him doing this.”
“It is,” Georgie said. She frowned. “Kyle, you said that book was in Roy’s apartment. That means that the ‘incident’ on the island wasn’t the first one he’d had. But Friday when Roy arrived at Emma Lake with the location crew, he was fine, and when he called Joanne around noon, he was perfectly rational.”
Kyle was clearly agitated, and he responded quickly. “Maybe he was trying to keep his condition private.”
“Roy wouldn’t have done that,” I said. “We’re all assuming he was perfectly normal on Friday morning.” I held out the book. “If this was on his desk, he would have seen it, and he would have been horrified at what he’d done and sought help.”
Georgie’s face was troubled. “Joanne’s right. Kyle, the man you and Ainsley describe finding on the island had lost all sense of himself — people don’t simply drift in and out of a state like that.”
“I guess when drugs are involved, all bets are off,” Kyle said.
“So you believe drugs caused the state Roy was in when you and Ainsley found him?”
Kyle’s pain at confronting that possibility was palpable. “As Georgie said, rational people don’t simply drift in and out of insanity.” He started for the exit. “I should let you two get back to work. Joanne, I’ll take the book with me. I’ll make certain it’s destroyed, and I’ll get the replacement to you as soon as it arrives.”
I tightened my grip on the book. “Thanks but I’m going to hang on to this.”
Kyle extended his hand towards me. “But Taylor . . .”
“I’ll do the right thing for Taylor,” I said. “I promise you that.”
When I returned after seeing Kyle out, Georgie shot me a questioning look. “Why did you insist on keeping the book?”
“The idea that Roy would leave the book he had defaced out in plain view doesn’t make sense. It’s a loose end, and Zack always says, ‘Never let go of a loose end until you’re certain it leads nowhere.’”
Chapter Six
In the next few days, a semblance of order seemed to assert itself in our lives. Without explanation, Ainsley rejected Fawn Tootoosis’s offer to organize a private memorial gathering for Roy’s friends and colleagues. Later in the week she sent an email saying that when she could get away she would take Roy’s cremains to Lennox, Massachusetts, where he and Lev-Aaron had had their summer home and where they had already purchased a niche in a columbarium.
As planned, Georgie moved into the duplex on College Avenue. She told me that when she’d praised Ainsley for her strength, Ainsley said that for thirty years her greatest fear was losing Roy, and now that she had lost him, she had nothing more to be afraid of.
Normally school holidays gave Zack and me a chance to spend extra time with our granddaughters, but this spring break, the girls were in New York City with their parents, and judging from the torrent of pictures that flowed into my phone, they were having a great adventure. I missed them, but having my days free meant that Georgie and I were able to establish a work pattern.
She arrived at our house at nine o’clock, we worked till noon, had lunch and then resumed work until three o’clock, when Georgie went to the sound studios to meet with Fawn, who had gracefully accepted the prospect of Buzz Wells being brought in as executive producer and carried on working on production details. I used the time to grocery shop, monitor the progress of the bedding plants my granddaughters and I were growing from seeds, make dinner and read everything I could find online about scriptwriting.
My relationship with Roy had been strictly that of researcher to writer, but Georgie had begun educating me about scriptwriting. She was a gifted teacher. As we read through the two scripts Roy Brodnitz had completed, Georgie pointed out that each of the episodes was self-contained, and each had its own theme. As a series, Sisters and Strangers would be greater than the sum of its parts, but each episode could stand alone.
Georgie showed me how each episode has three storylines: A, B and C, with A and B being of equal importance and C of less. She took me through each storyline, explaining how a sixty-minute script like ours would have approximately thirty-five beats, or scenes. Georgie said to imagine each scene summarized on notecards. The entire stack of cards would be the plot, but the way we lay them out would be our story arc.
Roy had begun the three strands in episode three, “Mothers and Daughters,” and Georgie and I had wrestled with scenes that would lead each story arc to a logical and powerful conclusion. Nothing seemed right, and we were growing increasingly frustrated. When we came back after lunch Thursday, Georgie pulled her tortoiseshell reading glasses from their case, sighed and dropped them on the script we’d spent the morning working on. “Time to concede defeat, rip up what Roy did and start again?”
“Let’s give it one more try,” I said. “Have you read The Power and the Glory?”
“Graham Greene?” Georgie said. “Read it and loved it when I was in college.”
“A line in that novel has always stuck with me,” I said. “‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ I think the moment that happened in Joanne’s life will get our characters where they need to go for this episode.”
Georgie raised her arms. “A glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel,” she said. “Lay it on me.”
“Hold the celebration till you hear me out,” I said. “For Joanne, I think the moment comes the first time she realizes that
Sally has been telling the truth about her mother — that Nina Love is a manipulative egotist who will go to any lengths to get what she wants.”
Suddenly the memory of that moment was there for me in all its ache and concrete details. Without realizing what I was doing, I slipped from the third to the first person. “My need for Nina’s love was so desperate that even when I saw the truth, I closed my eyes to it, because I couldn’t face a future without Nina. Denying the truth about her became a pattern I repeated until she died. When I finally faced the fact that Nina was a monster, she had killed Des. She had killed Sally, and she had killed Taylor’s father, Stuart Lachlan.”
Georgie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Jo, if this is going to be too much for you, we can find another way.”
“No, Roy promised we would give our audience Sally’s and Joanne’s lives honestly told, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
“In that case, it appears we have found our lynchpin,” Georgie said. “But where does it begin?”
“It’s a simple scene,” I said. “Nina delighted in al fresco dining, elegant meals served outdoors, especially if there was a guest. I always loved being with Nina, no matter what she was doing, but watching her set perfect tables and serve lovely food was a special joy.
“On this particular day, Izaak Levin, who was a major figure in the New York art scene, was coming for lunch, and Nina had set a round table in a clearing overlooking the lake. Every detail was perfect: the snowy damask cloth had been sewn so that its edges touched the new-mown grass and at every place setting there was a crystal goblet filled with purple pansies, the exact shade of Nina’s extraordinary eyes. She’d prepared lobster salad, my favourite, and she’d sent me down to the lake to let Sally and Des know that lunch was being served.
“For Des and Sally, food was simply fuel they needed so they could get back to doing what mattered to them: creating art. They spent hours and hours on the beach working with sand. The structures they built were amazing: massive and fanciful, but always structurally sound. Des not only taught Sally about art, he taught her the principles of engineering — of how to work artfully to bring something about.
