by Leah Stewart
She lowers the binoculars. She can see him now without help. He is sitting in the sand cross-legged, with his chest bowed forward over his legs and his face lifted like he just this moment picked it up. “I see him! He’s there, he’s there, I see him!”
“And the others?”
“No, no, nothing. I think you’re right. I think they’re gone. I think you’re right, Mystery.” She turns to the other woman with an impulse to embrace her, but Mystery is driving the boat, and her eyes are narrowed, scanning the shore, and her mouth is a flat, tense line. Josie sees that Mystery has not been certain, has not been certain at all, faked enough certainty to carry them both here. Mystery is a good actress. Josie feels a rush of anger and relief and bitterness and gratitude—for faking it, for tricking her, for pretending long enough to bring her here.
She herself feels now all the certainty she couldn’t conjure before. There he is. There he is, he is still alive, he is still alive, and she was right to come and get him. Any minute now she will be able to touch him. She is so impatient that she jumps out of the boat before it reaches the shore, splashing through the water, leaving Mystery to bring the boat the rest of the way in.
Charlie gets slowly to his feet as she splashes toward him, slipping in the water in her sandals. She’s worried he’ll fall back down, he looks so shaky, and she tries to get to him faster, before that happens. He isn’t coming toward her, just standing there, and she doesn’t know if that’s because he’s too weak to move or because he doesn’t believe she’s real.
He doesn’t believe she’s real. He sees a woman coming toward him who appears to be Josie. But that is not possible. She came from Mystery’s boat. He sees Mystery behind her, pulling the boat out of the water. He is dreaming. He is hallucinating. He has lived so long in imaginary circumstances that he has gone mad. He is dead, and this is the final, merciful vision offered by his mind to his mind. Isn’t it remarkable that the mind speaks to itself. Offers comfort. Offers a last beautiful thing, Josie running toward him up the beach.
“Thank you,” he says, when she reaches him, speaking not to the real Josie, of course, but to his mind, so he says it with a heartfelt, melancholy calm that throws her. His tone is one of parting rather than reunion.
“What?” Her fingers and her eyes are everywhere on him, checking for damage, and also just touching him, touching him, touching him. “Are they gone?” she asks with urgency.
He nods. He catches her hands in his and he feels the bones beneath her skin and the hard metal of the ring she always wears—it belonged to her grandmother—and he sees, up close, that she doesn’t look quite like his image of her, that she’s fuller in the face and there’s a bruise on her jawline and the circles under her eyes have never been so dark. That’s when he knows she’s real. He staggers with the shock of it, and she puts a steadying hand on his arm. “Sit down, sit down,” she says. “You’re all right. I’m here. You’re all right. We’re going to take you out of here.”
He obeys her, sinking back to the sand, and she drops to her knees beside him. “Josie?” he says.
“Yes. Yes.” She touches his cheek. “Yes, it’s me. Yes.”
“How did you get here?”
“Mystery brought me.”
He looks past her at Mystery, standing at a respectful distance with her face averted, her eyes on the trees behind them.
“I’ll explain everything later. I know it seems crazy. Let’s just get you out of here.”
“Okay,” he says, but he can’t quite stand up again, not yet. “Just a minute,” he says, and then he says it again and again, though he can’t get the words out for crying so hard. She is here, she is here, and all his possibilities reawaken. He can’t tell the difference between pain and joy.
Four.
Denise stops, holds out her hand. “Listen,” she says.
Adan obeys. He hears nothing.
“It’s her,” Denise says. “It’s Mystery.” She increases her pace and almost immediately stumbles over a root, sprawling forward, losing some of her supplies. Adan helps her up though she fights him, snarling imprecations. He sees her knee is bleeding, but she ignores his attempts to point this out. She seems furious now. He doesn’t know if it’s the fall or his attempts to help her—she hates to be seen at moments of vulnerability, she hates to have them at all—or if the fury is all for Mystery, who almost made her give up.
Her knee must be painful because she walks more slowly now. He can see she’s trying not to limp. But she still projects her furious purpose. Which is what, exactly? To inflict something on someone. He keeps pace behind her, his dull, trudging disappointment giving way now to an agonizing dread. He had hoped Mystery would never come back. He had hoped they’d reach the beach and Charlie would be gone and Denise would turn around again. He has been Denise’s prisoner, he thinks, as much as Charlie has. But, of course, there is that crucial difference. Even now he could turn around. Even now he doesn’t.
Denise does not expect to find that anything has changed with Charlie. She assumes he’ll still be lying in the hammock where they left him, pathetic coward that he is. So she is astonished when they emerge from the jungle to their campsite and his hammock is hanging there limp and empty. So astonished that she actually walks up and touches it to confirm this new reality. She squeezes the flimsy material of the hammock in her hand and only then, when she cannot deny its emptiness, does she step out of the shelter of the trees to look toward the beach. She does not hurry. How is she to know she has any reason to hurry? It is one of Denise’s failings that she must at all times insist on her own power even—especially—to herself. She has lived so long in the belief that fear is the only motivator. She assumes Charlie heard the boat, rolled out of his hammock, crawled down the beach to beg for scraps like a dog. She assumes that Mystery would never do anything to betray her. She has already erased from her mind the defiance of Thomas’s departure.
She sees the boat, she sees Mystery, Mystery sees her. Why does her mouth open wide, as if to scream? On the beach is something strange: someone else besides Charlie. A woman with bright red hair. Oh! Denise understands. She understood the moment she saw the look on Mystery’s face, though it took her another moment to recognize that. Mystery has changed her allegiance, brought the redhead here to steal Denise’s prize. Oh no. That is not how this will end.
When Mystery screamed, Josie looked up to see a woman, high on the beach, where none had been before, a woman who is now running toward them, her braids swinging, a gun in her hand. Josie has stood before a gun many times, has many times held one, but never until this moment has she understood what a gun is. A gun is death in someone’s hand. It is no trivial thing to hold a gun or face one, and the wonder flashes through her mind that she’s ever been insouciant while doing either. She cannot stop this woman, cannot stop her from taking Charlie from her right at the moment she’s regained him. She does not have a gun, and if she did, would she use it? What is better, yes or no? Yes, yes, yes, we say. Shoot! Shoot! Josie has shouted it at the screen herself. The qualities we detest are the ones we consider most heroic. Willingness to kill. Willingness to die.
She half rises, flings herself around Charlie, against his back, between him and what’s coming. He tries to turn to look at her, but she presses him down with all her weight. Normally that would not be enough to hold him, but he is weakened, and she is strong right now, she is very, very strong. She closes her eyes. She opens them again when she hears the shots and realizes she didn’t die.
She sees the woman on the ground, sprawled on her back. What Josie sees most clearly are the dirty soles of her boots. Now she sees a man behind her, and for a moment, she thinks the man shot her, but wouldn’t he still be standing there holding the gun? She looks over her shoulder at Mystery. Mystery is the one with the gun. She keeps it raised now, pointed at the man, who pays it no mind. He drops to his knees beside the body of the woman, t
ouches her, leans in close to her face, looks at the blood on his hand. He rocks on his knees. His mouth is open like he’s making a terrible sound of pain, but if he is, Josie can’t hear it over the ocean. Then there is a gun in his hand, and Josie braces herself, waiting for him to shoot her, for him to shoot Mystery, for Mystery to shoot him. But he places the barrel of the gun to his own temple. “No!” Josie shouts, but the sound is drowned out by the report of the shot and the waves.
Five.
In the boat, Josie cradles Charlie’s head on her lap. He is in and out of consciousness. When he wakes, he wakes with a start, looks for her face. She says something soothing—it doesn’t matter what—and he closes his eyes again. Mystery has not said a word. Not while she and Josie half helped, half carried Charlie into the boat, not when they pushed it into the water, not when they climbed in themselves, not when she started the motor and pulled away. They left the two bodies on the beach, the bodies of those two people, one of whom Mystery killed.
Josie looks at her from time to time to see if she’s still crying, and every time she is, crying silently, a steady stream of tears. The crying seems to be a thing separate from her. Her face is blank, her cheeks are wet, she blinks and more tears fall.
She says nothing, still, when they reach the dock, when she ties up the boat, when she helps Josie help Charlie out. With arms around both their shoulders, Charlie makes it to where Josie parked her car. Mystery holds the passenger door open while Josie helps Charlie inside. As soon as Charlie is in, she kisses his forehead and turns to say something—she doesn’t quite know what—to Mystery. Thank you, certainly, and something else, something comforting, something to say that what Mystery did was necessary. But Mystery is walking away. Josie takes a few steps after her, but Mystery does not want to be followed, does not want Josie to speak, so Josie won’t. Mystery does not want to play one last scene. So Josie watches her walk away.
Josie takes Charlie to the hospital, where doctors and nurses treat his injuries and hook him to an IV for rehydration and calories. When they ask what happened to him, she says he was hiking, he got lost, he fell. They exclaim their sympathy and alarm, but Josie thinks she also sees in their manner annoyance with a tourist who did a stupid thing. “He was hiking alone?” they say. “Oh, you should never hike alone.”
Once Charlie is asleep and the nurses have told her several times that she should leave and get some sleep herself, Josie goes back to her hotel. But she doesn’t intend to stay there. She can’t bear the thought of Charlie waking and thinking she has disappeared. She packs her things, assuming that once Charlie is released they’ll go to his cottage. While she is packing, her phone rings. Her agent says, with cheerful annoyance, “We’ve been trying to reach you!”
“We?” She hears other voices then and understands that her manager is also on the phone, and everyone who works for them on her behalf, the whole team.
“You got the part!” they say.
“What?” For a moment, she cannot think what part they mean. They have to remind her. She sits down on the bed. “You’re kidding,” she says. “I totally blew that audition.”
“Apparently not,” her agent says. “Whatever you did, they liked it.”
“They want to know if your speech about not getting the part was an act,” her manager says.
“What do you mean?”
“To show them you could do the meltdown stuff.”
“What meltdown stuff?”
“Didn’t you read the script?”
“Yeah, I just can’t, I can’t . . .”
“The character has a public meltdown. That’s why she goes home.”
“And also,” her agent chimes in, “are you pregnant?”
“What?”
“They said there was a rumor that you’re pregnant.”
“Oh.”
“They said it’s okay if you are. They said they’ll write it in. Raises the stakes.”
Josie laughs. “Okay,” she says. “Tell them to write it in.”
They don’t go home for a week after Charlie’s release despite increasing anxiety on the part of Josie’s people in LA, who are coping with the increasing anxiety of the people who have just cast her as the lead in their show. Charlie needs to heal. He doesn’t want to be photographed at LAX with bruises and scratches on his face. But neither does he want to be on the island anymore, so they take a boat to a neighboring one, smaller, far less populated, with one boutique hotel. Even there Charlie doesn’t feel safe. Only Josie leaves the hotel, and only to get food. Mostly they stay in their room with all the doors locked and think of baby names. She doesn’t ask questions about his time in captivity, but sometimes he tells her things.
“We can never tell anyone what happened,” he says one day. “In case they look for her. Just in case.”
“Okay.” They are, as always, on the bed. After a moment, Josie says, “They’d love you again if they knew.” She says this as fact, not argument.
Charlie is silent, and she thinks maybe he hadn’t thought of this before she said it, and she wonders if she shouldn’t have. She did not mean to suggest that he prostitute his trauma or that she suspected that he would. Then he says, “I know. I don’t care.”
He doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, and yet the truth is more complicated, and perhaps more to his credit, than that. If Josie asked him to, he’d willingly swear any self-abnegating vow she wanted, because his intention right now is to quit the internet, quit it forever, never give another interview, never read another review, never care what anyone but Josie thinks of him, never again run a search for his name. He thinks—here in the safety and comfort of this bed, Josie’s warm body pressed against his—that he no longer wants their love. If that were true, keeping such promises would be easy. But he does want their love. Of course he does! He wants it, and can deny himself.
XI.
For every moment of real feeling on the stage there is a response, thousands of invisible currents of sympathy and interest, streaming back to us.
—CONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKI, An Actor Prepares
Josie’s day starts as it always does, as it seems like it always has, with the sound of the baby crying. She walks down the dark hallway with her hand on the wall for support, already shushing him under her breath. Through the slats of the crib, the baby’s white-clad arms are visible, waving in the air. Josie grasps and lifts the solid weight of him, feels his wet face snuffle against her neck. She carries him back to their bed to nurse, Charlie warm on one side of her, the baby on the other. The baby will fall asleep again, and Josie, too, will doze a little longer before she has to force herself to slip out of bed around him and get ready for work.
An hour later, Charlie’s day starts as it always does, as it seems like it always has, with the touch of the three-year-old’s fingers on his face. “Daddy,” she says. She thinks she’s whispering, but she doesn’t know how to whisper, so her voice is breathy and loud. “I’m hungry,” she says, like this is a new and perplexing discovery and not one of the first thoughts she voices every day.
“Okay, honey, I’m coming,” Charlie says. He touches Josie’s shoulder, making sure she’s awake, before going down the hall to pour cereal.
Josie showers, dresses, and brushes her teeth, checking from time to time that the baby is still asleep securely in the middle of the bed. He’s on the cusp of learning to roll over, and she doesn’t want him hitting the floor. When Charlie comes back to shower, Josie joins their daughter in the kitchen. While the little girl chatters, Josie eats breakfast quickly, watching the clock, and then she scoops the child into her lap and reads her a book, reaching the last page just as the nanny arrives. On cue, Charlie comes in with wet hair and the squirming baby in his arms. The baby looks as if he’s considering a long crying jag, but he brightens and smiles when he sees his mother. Josie takes him, squeezes and kisses him, and then passes him to the nanny. H
e loves the nanny when Josie’s not there, but now he’ll cry until Josie leaves, which makes her hustle to get out the door.
Charlie kisses both children good-bye and walks out to the porch, where Josie’s waiting for him. They’re both number one on their call sheets, due on the set early almost every day. Josie’s show is a critical success, and Charlie’s is enjoying a ratings resurgence now that his character and his costar’s are finally on the verge of consummating their romance. As well as things are going, both Charlie and Josie still worry that the work will stop. They no longer say that they’re going to quit acting even on their worst days. Let’s live truthfully in imaginary circumstances, but let’s not pretend. There are worse things to lose than a part or a prize.
They linger on the porch for a few minutes, talking about the kids—whether the little girl ate enough breakfast, when the baby will grow out of his separation anxiety. Josie got script changes last night and is holding the new lines in the back of her mind to run through once she’s in the car. Charlie’s nervous about his first scene of the day because someone will point a gun at him, and he knows he’ll become shaky and sweaty and have to retire afterward to his trailer. He plays such scenes very well if they’re meant to be raw with emotion, but he can no longer do them any other way. He doesn’t say anything about his nerves to Josie, but she knows. Normally they part with a quick, exhausted kiss, but today she hugs him hard.
“It’s just make-believe,” he says in her ear.
“I know,” she says. Good actors that they are, they both pretend that’s true.
In the car, Josie finds that she has brought Charlie’s anxiety with her, so she can’t focus on her new lines. She remembers the first few months after their return from the island, when Charlie attempted to reclaim ownership of his life by risking it, speeding a racecar around a track, skydiving. When he came back alive from his third time leaping out of a plane, Josie, then eight months pregnant, cried so hard and long that he promised never to do anything like that again. He said the need was finally out of his system. But she’s never fully believed it.
