In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel

by Shari Goldhagen

  E&E: Rising seemed to have specified in the production bible that any day Adam wasn’t feeling well, filming would take no less than fifteen hours, be physically demanding, and require copious quantities of water be dumped on his head. He couldn’t stop coughing and kept sweating through his makeup, which worked out fine because the whole last hour of shooting involved him and Cecily standing under a rain curtain. It didn’t help matters that the scene actively sucked (a lot of scenes had been actively sucking since the series creator had stepped down as show runner after season three), and Cecily kept tripping over a giant block of exposition about the off-screen destruction of Worlds 78 and 5. Her speech ended with an overwrought turd of a paragraph: “You destroyed those worlds, if not through intent, then through neglect. You were too busy waging your war on Bryce, and you weren’t watching the Neutrocon. The damage that you’ve done cannot be undone.”

  Though he considered Cecily one of his closest friends, her inability to spit it out was shredding his patience. The one time she came anywhere near getting it right, Adam couldn’t contain a coughing jag. He fully expected several outtakes from the day to end up on the blooper reel in the DVD extras.

  While Cecily complained to the assistant director between takes, the cute new PA brought Adam daytime flu medication. The recommended dosage of Sudafed was two pills; Adam tripled it. So in addition to feeling like he’d gone several rounds with Mike Tyson, he was oddly wired. He chugged half a bottle of cough syrup, hoping to level out.

  Perhaps in some other universe (maybe World 2 or 27—just not Worlds 78 and 5, as Rowen had apparently destroyed those with horrendous dialogue), the assistant slipped him the nighttime cold stuff, and when they finally wrapped for the day he simply hobbled back to his trailer and passed out on the couch before he even had a chance to dry off. Maybe in those worlds, he returned Phoebe’s call when he felt less like strangling every living creature in a ten-mile radius.

  In his world, Adam went back to his trailer and toweled away ubiquitous water. He contemplated crashing because he felt achy and awful, but was too hopped up on pseudoephedrine to sleep. The idea of walking through the actual rain (in four years of filming in BC, Adam swore, there’d been all of three sunny days) to his car and driving to the generic luxury apartment he rented seemed even more unpleasant. He’d already talked to Phoebe during the break for lunch, but she’d left a message saying she wanted to discuss something. It was after midnight, but he called her back figuring the downpour would stop by the time they were done.

  “Feeling better, sweetie?” she asked from twelve hundred miles away in sunny California.

  Adam told her he’d survive but didn’t try particularly hard to stifle another bout of hacking. “So what’s your big news?”

  “Poor baby, you sound terrible,” she cooed. “It can wait. You should go to bed.”

  “Pheebs, I’m fine,” he said, adding irrationally angry to achy and awful.

  “So I got into Michigan’s grad program.”

  “I thought you were going to USC?”

  She sighed and said that she’d already told him she was wait-listed there. “And Michigan is actually the better MSW program.”

  “Fucking Ann Arbor, really, Phoebe?”

  “It’s only a year and a half, and I think part of it can be done remotely.” She sounded unsure; that annoyed him more.

  “Like this isn’t hard enough already? Why did you even apply there?”

  On some level he realized he was being a jerk, and he did have vague memories of Phoebe mentioning Michigan (and, like, fifteen other grad programs) a few months ago. But his throat was raw, his head was killing him, and just for once he wanted a girlfriend who would be there to rub his temples and make him soup (or order—he would have been completely satisfied with a soup-ordering girlfriend). An actual flesh-and-blood girlfriend, not a disembodied voice on the phone who preread scripts and made sure that the electricity stayed on in his LA condo. Usually he tried never to play the fame card, but he was on a TV show. No, he had been TV’s sexiest bad guy. Scarcely a week went by without some lady (or dude—there really was a lot of homoerotic subtext in the series) propositioning him, slipping him a number, a note, a hotel room key. At sci-fi conventions women regularly asked him to sign their breasts. And not a single time since he journeyed to Chicago after Phoebe’s brother died had Adam taken any of them up on their offers. He’d pat their shoulders and say he was flattered but spoken for. Was it too much to ask that if Phoebe couldn’t move to BC, she at least go to a grad school in the same time zone?

  “I’m serious,” he continued. “You say you love me and are committed to this, but you really do a crap job of showing it.”

  “Adam, you’re never here anyway. You were in New Zealand all summer for that stupid slasher film.”

  This was true but seemed irrelevant in his mediciney head. And while for months he’d been regretting (rather loudly) his decision to star in the inauspiciously titled (and yet to be given a release date) Murder Island, he took offense at her calling it “stupid.”

  “It’s my fucking job, Phoebe.”

  “Mine, too,” she said quietly.

  Also true. Plus Phoebe’s work was about helping people, not making schlocky horror flicks and past-their-prime basic cable shows. Adam didn’t feel like conceding that point, either.

  “I’m not trekking across the country on a goddamned red-eye every weekend,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know, would you want to take a little break or something?”

  The sentiment was a gut punch.

  In some alternate E&E world, maybe he told Phoebe he didn’t want to lose her, that he was simply scared of how her new life could change things. In his world he felt like shit and was sick of the ever-present rain. Also, vulnerability had never been a great role for him in real life.

  “That’s probably a good idea,” he said calmly. “I slept with Cecily, anyway.”

  Phoebe wasn’t generally the jealous type, but Adam knew she didn’t love the fact that his best buddy was a flirty model whom he made out with several times a week as a job requirement. It was one of the cruelest things he could possibly say.

  Across the line there was a pause. Plenty of time for Adam to explain that he was lashing out and probably high on cold medication (didn’t Canada have different drug standards?), to say that while he and Cecily did spend a fair amount of time together, their interactions were entirely devoid of romance and/or seduction. That Cecily spent hours discussing her poop and would sometimes deliberately eat a pungent lunch on days when they had love scenes just to see if she could make him break character.

  Adam said nothing.

  “I don’t believe you,” Phoebe finally offered. “You’re only saying that to hurt me.”

  “Am I?”

  Mean was how he felt. A haunted echo of the time before they were in love, when he hated the exposed nerve of his feelings for her.

  “Maybe we should talk about this when you’re feeling better.” She sighed.

  “Oh, so we’ll be allowed to talk during our break?”

  “Adam—”

  “No, you’re right, we’ll talk when we talk.”

  He hung up.

  Whether it was the cold medicine or his anger, Adam was twitchy, muscles unsteady.

  He could have called Phoebe back and told her he was sorry. In some other world, he probably flew home for the weekend or insisted that she come to BC, told her how vital she was to him. Maybe whisked her off to Vegas and finally made good on the five-carat sapphire ring she’d been wearing for two years.

  Instead he dialed Cecily’s cell phone.

  “You out and about?” he asked.

  “I’m home in my jammies,” she said, but in a way that suggested it might not be a terminal condition.

  “Get dressed and let’s go somewhere.”

  “Weren’t you, like, hacking up a lung and moaning about your imminent death an hour ago?”

  “I’m
feeling better.” He chugged more cough syrup, trying to make it so. “We’ll just go to Polly’s, today sucked.”

  “It sure did.”

  “Come on, I know you need a drink as much as I do.”

  “Fine”—she sounded smiley—“but you’re picking me up, and you’re buying!”

  Because they’d been doing love scenes in body stockings together for four years, and Cecily sometimes called to tell him about a particularly glorious dump she’d taken, Adam had long ago forgotten how genuinely stunning she was.

  Quickly he remembered when he pulled up in front of her house and she bounded from the front door into his sports car, dodging the rain. She was wearing a short, tight dress made of lace, her hair tied up in a casual knot that showed off her freakishly perfect features.

  Over their first few drinks, they threw darts and complained about the rain curtain scene, as well as the decline of the show in general. His cough had largely subsided, but Adam finished the bottle of Robitussin in hopes of keeping it at bay.

  Though most Vancouverites were immune to all the actors filming American television shows in the area, a group of Midwestern tourists recognized them and sent over tequila shots. More shots ensued. At some point Adam switched from Jack and Coke to straight whiskey. Not long after, his darts began landing farther and farther from the bull’s-eye. A few actually hit the wall next to the board and fell to the floor. Picking them up, Cecily suggested they sit at one of the high tables.

  “So did you and Mother Teresa have a fight?” she asked.

  Usually Adam got mad when Cecily referred to Phoebe as any sort of do-gooder, but that night he laughed. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because normally about now you’re having phone sex with her, not getting hammered with me.”

  Despite all her glib jokes about Phoebe’s newfound charitable side, Cecily was a superb listener. Adam could have opened up, had her order him to call Phoebe and apologize. In one of those other universes, something along those lines likely happened.

  “Naw, I just wanted to come out and blow off steam,” he said. “That’s all.”

  Perhaps it was the Sudafed/cough syrup combination, but Adam realized he was wasted; he responded by ordering a triple. The American tourists who’d sent the shots finally became brazen enough to ask for cell phone pictures and autographs. Drink in his hand, Adam looped his arm around Cecily’s shoulders and blinked again and again against the flash.

  After that his memory of the evening is genuinely fuzzy.

  In bits and pieces he remembers the following things happening:

  His arm stayed around Cecily long after the tourists left the bar.

  Cecily went to the ladies’ room, and he followed her down the wood-paneled hallway to the bathrooms.

  Cornering her, his hands at either side of her head.

  Cecily’s brown eyes huge and confused.

  His lips on her neck.

  A voice, sadly he’s pretty sure it was his, saying, “Don’t pretend you haven’t wanted this for four years.”

  Then a sharp, searing moment of pain and clarity, when Cecily kneed him in the groin. “I don’t know what your deal is, Z,” she said. “But you’re being a total douchebag.”

  Adam likes to think he apologized, but he’s reasonably certain he just stood there, doubled over and panting.

  Things after that are hazy again:

  Cecily taking his keys and saying something about him being too sloshed to drive.

  Possibly puking in a puddle outside the bar.

  A sad semi-smile on Cecily’s face as she helped him into his car’s low passenger seat and buckled the belt, everything slippery in the dark rain.

  Half-formed wonder if Cecily knew how to work the manual transmission.

  Brief jerk when they stalled somewhere around Sixteenth Avenue.

  On the radio, that Coldplay song about the ticking clocks.

  He thinks he may have drifted off.

  Sensation of flying.

  Something wet in his eyes, different than the rain.

  Startling realization he was upside down.

  Cecily contorted and broken through a film of red.

  From that point on, everything is crystal clear again. Ascertaining that, despite being upside down, he was largely unharmed, Adam swatted the air bag out of the way and reached for Cecily’s shoulder. She moaned in a distant, disturbing way. Even in the poor lighting, he could see her face was covered in blood.

  Adam was searching his pockets for his cell phone, wondering if 911 was the same number in Canada, when a man outside started tapping on the window (Adam would later learn the guy was the driver of the other car). He could see the flashing bulbs of emergency vehicles already en route.

  Firefighters broke the glass and had Adam crawl out of the hatchback, while paramedics carefully secured Cecily to a litter and slid her out through the window.

  It probably didn’t matter, but Adam told the emergency workers he was Cecily’s fiancé and rode along in the ambulance. Someone gave him a blanket to throw over his wet clothes and a wad of gauze for his cheek (maybe he was still high on cold medication, but it struck him as hysterical that the cut was actually below his eye but blood had obscured his vision because they’d been upside down). As they were pulling into the emergency department’s bay, Cecily’s eyelids fluttered open, and she gave him a terrified glance. Adam took her hand.

  None of the doctors and nurses who scurried around Cecily were particularly forthcoming with information. The phrases “internal bleeding” and “spleen involvement” were said a lot. A blond woman in a lab coat insisted on taking Adam into the next room and putting three stitches in his cheek. As she was covering the sutures with a bandage, he started coughing.

  The doctor’s brow creased. “Have you been experiencing chest pain?” she asked. “You may have broken ribs.”

  Adam said he had a cold and remembered a few hours ago that had seemed a completely insurmountable problem.

  Cecily was out of it and still a mess—blood caked in her hair, nose twisted and swelling, IVs dripping fluids into her thin alabaster arm—but they let him spend a few minutes with his “fiancée” before wheeling her gurney to surgery for a spleenectomy. Adam held her hand and told her he was sorry; she made an unintelligible sound.

  A short nurse led him to an empty waiting area with an ancient television, depressing furniture, and a wall-mounted phone. She said someone would call and update him once they had a better idea of his fiancée’s condition. Even though he hadn’t told her his name, she called him “Mr. Zoellner” and smiled. As laid-back as Vancouver was about C-list actors, it was clear she knew exactly who they were. That seemed very, very bad, so he tried not to think about it.

  There was a pot of incredibly stale coffee, and he drank cup after cup because it was warm and gave him something to do. He knew Cecily didn’t get along with her mother but thought he should call her anyway. Scrapped the idea when he realized he didn’t know Cecily’s mother’s name.

  When Phoebe called his cell, Adam wasn’t sure if he’d been sitting there an hour or a day. He wondered if the nurse had tipped off PerezHilton.com or one of the celebrity weeklies and Phoebe had learned about the accident online.

  “Hey, I wanted to catch you before you got to work.” She sounded authentically optimistic. “I was going to surprise you—”

  In one of those parallel universes, he let her finish the sentence. In his world, he told her he had been in an accident and was at the hospital.

  “Oh, God—”

  “I wasn’t hurt,” he said before she could ask. “Cecily’s in surgery.”

  Phoebe took in an audible breath, but to her credit didn’t ask why Adam had been in a car with Cecily in the wee hours of the morning. “Is she gonna be okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The phone on the wall rang—the surgeons with an update. Adam told Phoebe he’d call her back and hung up.

  Cecily was okay … ish. />
  The doctors removed her spleen, and a few days later a plastic surgeon reset her nose, promising in a month no one would ever know the difference. They kept her in the hospital a week, and E&E: Rising’s producers were forced to postpone production for ten days. In one of the other worlds, Adam went home and made things right with Phoebe. In his world he stayed in BC.

  Perhaps because the hospital staff still thought they were engaged, no one asked him to leave. The short nurse gave him a pair of hospital scrubs to replace his torn and bloodied clothes, and the blond doctor gave him cold medicine. Both said how sweet it was that he was so worried about his betrothed.

  That first night/day/night—they all blended together—Cecily dipped in and out of confused consciousness. The hollows under her eyes were black and puffy, her lovely face distorted. There was a large bandage on her abdomen that he assumed covered a large scar. He thought about the ad campaigns she did, where she was nearly always undressed. It made him physically ill to think she might not be able to do that anymore, to think that her nose might heal wrong and she wouldn’t look quite so stunning, couldn’t get work.

  Blaming the accident on the rain, the police hadn’t cited either Cecily or the Volvo driver (apparently Cecily hadn’t been matching him drink for drink, and her blood alcohol level had been well within the legal limit), but that seemed a technicality of the highest degree. Adam was pretty sure blame could squarely be dropped on his shoulders.

  No one had bothered to clean the blood out of Cecily’s hair, so he dabbed it off with a wet cloth. Standing over her bed, he whispered over and over and over again that he was sorry.

  The spleen, he sort of remembered, had to do with the immune system and infections. He tried to look things up on his smartphone, but the hospital’s Internet service was spotty, so he ducked out of Cecily’s room long enough to call his mother in Florida. Leaving out details of the story, like the fact that it had been his car and he’d been too drunk to drive it, he said a “friend” had a spleenectomy and asked about complications. His mother confirmed everything he’d read about the greater potential risk for infections.