She’d thought her car was on the second level but can’t find it when she gets there. Walks up two flights along the sloping ramp, then back down. Realizes she doesn’t really even recall what kind of vehicle it was, or the color—something generic and compact in a gold, or was it beige?
Late January, it’s already getting dark, which casts a film of creepiness over the concrete walls splotched with grease and occasional graffiti.
Up and down the floors in her five-inch platform boots. Each time a little more panicked, a little more hurried, until she’s actually running. Her breath comes in ragged gasps, her skin covered in a sickly cold sweat. Up and down and up again.
Tripping over uneven stone, she twists her ankle and falls, catching herself hard on her wrists.
And then she just sits on the cold floor, studying the rainbow in a puddle of motor oil until her ass is numb.
Dips her finger in the indigo.
After what might be a very long time, a woman in a Lexus honks behind her.
Sharon pushes herself up, gives the driver a dirty look, and almost immediately finds her own car—a Chevy Impala in metallic gray.
Starting the engine, she begins the eleven-hour drive home. Ninety minutes outside Detroit, exhaustion hits. All at once she’s so drained that keeping her eyes open is positively Herculean.
There’s a billboard for a cheap motel chain, boasting rooms for thirty-nine dollars a night at the next exit, so she turns off the highway.
An ancient-looking innkeeper behind bulletproof glass slips her a metal key through the slot and informs her there’s a vending machine by the stairs. Fleeting thought of the room at the Marriott she needs to cancel.
Her unit, which opens onto a wooded area reminiscent of every horror film, is a smoking room, and the ghost of burned things is so overwhelming she actually coughs. She recalls her parents’ house before her dad gave up cigarettes twenty years ago, how all the curtains and carpets were yellowed. Tries to remember if she’s talked to her family since Christmas and realizes she’s in the Midwest and hadn’t even thought to stop by.
The scratchy, threadbare coverlet is just begging for a Dateline black camera investigation to reveal semen and other bodily fluids, but she doesn’t care, collapses on top of it. A TV chained to the dresser gets only four channels, and she settles on the one airing a Law & Order marathon. Slipping into oblivion, Sharon remembers that no one knows where she is, wonders who Briscoe and Greene will investigate when she ends up murdered in the middle of nowhere Michigan.
* * *
Pain and the pressing need to puke wake Adam.
Getting to the bathroom isn’t artful. The crutches are a useless hassle, and hopping exacerbates the nausea. He won’t admit it later, but some hands-and-knees crawling is involved.
Once again, his mother in pink scrubs beams into his head telling him not to take Percocet without food, so clear he can almost see her in the toilet water.
After twenty minutes perched over the bowl, Adam determines he’s not actually going to vomit, just going to be stuck with his stomach doing a weird slurry thing for God knows how long.
For good measure, he manages to smack his head against the side of the commode when he starts to get up.
Dizzy and sick and feeling sorry for himself, he just sits there for a while … a long while.
Finally he tries to pull himself up on a glass shelving unit. The piece (picked out by Terri Minerva) is designed to give the illusion of floating, so it probably shouldn’t stun him quite so much when the whole system comes away from the wall.
Crashes and crashes and crashes on travertine tile, and he’s covering his face with his arms as the glass shatters.
The noise stops, and he opens his eyes.
Dangerous-looking icebergs all around him, a half-dozen bloody nicks on his arms. Two steel beams and chunks of drywall have fallen on his leg, essentially pinning him down. Probably the only reason it’s not excruciatingly painful is that his big honking temporary cast is acting as a buffer.
Brushing stray shards from his pants, he cuts his hand. Then he actually does throw up, more on the side of the toilet than inside the bowl. He wonders if he’ll die in the bathroom before Elena comes back the day after tomorrow.
For some inexplicable reason, he thinks of Sharon Gallaher’s wind-tousled black hair and the shape of her mouth.
Pulling his phone from his pocket, Adam scrolls through the e-mails for her number. Even as he’s dialing, he doesn’t think he’ll go through with it.
It’s complete melodrama. He knows this. His phone is chock-full of people he could call. Yes, some of them do work for him, and some might be more responsive if he’d remembered their names after they’d fucked. But there are at least ten real people in his contacts list who could be here, helping him off his ass in fifteen minutes.
“Sharon Gallaher,” a voice says before the end of the first ring.
Who answers the phone like that after midnight?
“Hello?” she says when he doesn’t respond.
Is hers a voice he heard on campus years ago?
Would his whole life be different if he’d been standing behind her in line for the falafel cart and stopped to say something about her eyes or how she looks like someone he knows from somewhere? He could have stayed in the city, waited for her to graduate, maybe done a few more Law & Orders, branching out to an SVU or Criminal Intent. She could have moved into his apartment on MacDougal and Bleecker, taken to writing in the pink tub in the middle of the kitchen, chewing her pen caps, twisting her fingers and pressing them to her chest when she got frustrated. She could have switched from novels to screenplays for male leads with engaging smiles and gray eyes (no sci-fi, no villains, never a Murder Island sequel). The two of them could have forged the kind of partnership of legends. Sure, he might have strayed with a costar or seven in a big spectacular made-for-Star-magazine kind of affair, but he and Sharon would have worked it out for the sake of the children—Zach and Zelda. And he wouldn’t be alone and miserable on overpriced flooring.
“Hello,” Sharon says, again. “I can hear you breathe.”
* * *
“I can hear you,” Sharon says, flipping off the television.
She realizes any other person would have hung up on Breather thirty seconds ago, or more accurately, any other person wouldn’t have answered a call at three in the morning from an “Unknown” number in the first place. She could argue that she was awake anyway, watching Law & Order and eating Doritos from the vending machine. Could say she knows, more than most, that a middle-of-the-night phone call can be important—that an unfamiliar number could be a police station or a hospital. It could be Kristen at 26 Federal Plaza, hysterical because the FBI did come after her for giving out the actor’s e-mail. Heck, it could be Adam Zoellner himself calling to say he’d love to give her an interview, or maybe act out some of those fan fiction stories.
None of those reasons is what made Sharon pick up or stay on so long. Sharon always answers in case it’s the call she’s been waiting for for seven years. Even if it’s simply a phone call in a dream or some flirtation with an alternate universe, it would be worth it, as long as she can say the things she never got the chance to say.
“Chase?” she asks, tastes salt, and realizes she’s crying. Crying like she didn’t after running out of the Madison Plaza, bleeding and wet and cold.
“Is that you?” she asks inaudibly between sobs. “I love you, and I’m so sorry.”
The person on the other end makes a wet sound, like he’s crying, too.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, or something close to that. It’s hard to make out through his raw and haggard pants.
“I know,” she says. “It’s all right.”
“So sorry.” And it might not be her dead boyfriend, but there’s something she recognizes about his voice, even so muddled.
“It’s all okay,” she says. “We’re gonna be all right.”
She keeps the lin
e open until his breathing stabilizes, until her breathing stabilizes.
“I’m going to hang up now,” she says. “Everything is going to be okay.”
* * *
Adam holds the silent phone in his hand and wipes his eyes with the shoulder of the running shirt he’s still wearing.
She’s the first person listed on his phone’s “Favorites,” even now. Taps on her name and calls.
Twenty minutes later she lets herself in with old keys and follows his voice to the half bath by the den.
And it’s so clear, Adam can’t believe he ever missed it. The hair color and the set of the mouth, something about the forehead. Sharon Gallaher seemed familiar because she looks a little like Phoebe Fisher.
* * *
Wiping her eyes, Sharon looks around the shoddy motel room, mere minutes off the highway but completely silent at night with the television off. Her phone’s clock says it’s 3:30 A.M.
No traffic if she leaves now. Maybe the rental place will even give her a break and charge her for only two days if she makes it home before nightfall.
Gathering her things takes all of twenty seconds (though she’ll almost certainly leave something behind, as always), toothbrush and makeup kit stuffed back in her bag. She pulls her blue knit dress back over her head and stabs feet back into boots. Grabbing her notebooks, she notices the printout from the E&E convention Web site with information and a thumbnail print of the stars, including Adam Zoellner dressed in Rowen’s black robes. Feels herself laughing, head so clear it hurts.
Nearly two decades ago, she’d skipped school and walked to the mall to see the Eons & Empires movie; twenty years and she’s still chasing Captain Rowen.
Leaving the convention info for some other person to find, she grabs her cell from the bed, is about to shove it back in her bag when she remembers Oliver’s message from hours earlier.
It’s the time of night for booty calls or drunken maudlin ramblings (even if she’s never participated in these things, she’s heard about them from Kristen), but she’s sane, sober, and stable when she sends Oliver a text: Yes, I would really like that.
* * *
Getting Adam off the bathroom floor is a more challenging task than Phoebe initially anticipated. The larger glass chunks are unwieldy and treacherous. Even finding a broom to sweep up the thousands of shards takes longer than it should, because he doesn’t know where the housekeeper stores supplies, and nothing is where it used to be when she lived here.
Perhaps the greatest impediment to the cleanup is the weird formal air between them. For so many years they shared everything—she used to squish the tiny whiteheads on his nose, and he knew her tampon and laxative preferences—and yet it’s somehow incredibly awkward for the two of them to occupy the same space, a space that used to be theirs.
Hesitant salutations. He thanks her for coming. She asks if he’s hurt.
Phoebe starts to pick up a piece of glass, but Adam stops her. “You should be wearing gloves or something.”
Of course, the only gloves he has are four-hundred-dollar Gucci leather ones far too long for her stout fingers, but he insists she wear them.
Blood from one of his myriad mini-cuts gets on the thumb.
“I seem to be having an O. J. Simpson moment,” she mumbles.
A laugh comes out his nose.
And things are a little better.
“So how exactly did this happen?” she asks, and he tells her about a run gone epically awry, followed by pain medication/food mismanagement.
Phoebe clicks her tongue sympathetically. “That stuff always makes you sick.”
“I know.” His smile is so much sadder than she remembers.
When they’ve cleared a safe patch of floor tile, Adam starts to push himself up on the edge of the toilet. Taking off the gloves, she extends her hand.
A pause before he takes it.
His skin on hers.
Adam can’t stand on his broken foot, and his right leg has fallen asleep, so he lumbers into her. Everything familiar, the feel of his weight, the smell of his sweat—she’s twenty-five again, helping Adam out of a different bathroom.
“I’m sorry.” Letting go of her, he balances on the wall. “Can you get my crutches?”
It would probably be as easy for him to lean on her, but she does what he asks. Watches him limp to the sleek leather couch in the living room and helps prop his leg on the table. As he catches his breath, Adam repeatedly thanks her.
There really aren’t many reasons to stay and so many to go—it’s two in the morning, she has work the next day, her husband whom she loves—but leaving seems horribly wrong, too.
“Can I offer you a drink?” Adam asks, and they both laugh.
She sits on the sofa, a safe three feet between them.
When she first arrived, she’d been far too concerned about Adam to notice how different the condo is. Looking around now, it seems not a single piece of furniture, window treatment, or floorboard remains from the time she lived here. All gone are the things they’d picked out together, when they suddenly had lots of disposable income, when they were at long last really together. Something about that stings, but it’s not her place to say anything.
Adam plucks a glass splinter from the Ace bandages around his leg.
“Maybe I should take you to the emergency room?”
“Not much they can do.” The melancholy smile again. “Ankle’s already broken.”
“Well, you probably weren’t supposed to hurl shelving at it during this phase of recovery.”
“I have to go back on Tuesday. I’m sure it’ll be okay for a few days.”
“Fine, I’ll take you then,” she says before she realizes it. Remembers their lives aren’t linked that way anymore. Possibly there’s a friend or that new assistant who does these kinds of things? Or a woman? Even though Phoebe doesn’t like to dwell on it, it would make sense that there’d be a lady in Adam’s life. “I mean, unless, you’d rather…”
Gray eyes serious, Adam tells her that would be nice. “Thank you.”
He’s in desperate need of a shower—still dirty from the jog, the million little bloody scratches—but he’s probably not supposed to get the plaster wet, and she knows bathing isn’t something she should help him with. So she gets a damp washcloth from one of the bathrooms not full of glass and destruction.
As she hands it to him, Adam’s stomach audibly growls.
“Did you eat anything today?” Phoebe asks, overwhelmed by how easy it is to ask the kinds of things she used to ask all the time, when they were together, when it was required they take care of each other.
“At some point, I think I meant to.”
Suggesting they order takeout, she makes a mental list of places they used to call, narrows it to the few still open this late. “Matzo ball soup from Selma’s?”
What she says makes him look up sharply. “You’re ordering me soup?”
“If your stomach’s still messed up, it’s probably the best thing.”
“That would be great.” A wince, as he looks away.
“Hurts?”
Still not looking at her, he nods. “Yeah.”
It’s not until she’s merging on the 405 an hour later that Phoebe realizes Adam might not have been talking about his broken bones.
The sun is starting to crack the sky by the time Phoebe gets back to Los Feliz, but Cole is bopping Cassie up and down in the living room.
“You were gone awhile,” he says, too casually. “We were starting to get a little concerned.”
It takes Phoebe longer to respond than it should, because it’s so staggering to think that her husband (bed rumpled and lovable in pajama pants and bare feet) and child (the world’s most delightful six-month-old) exist in the same world as Adam—these two different lives never having intersected.
“Sorry. I would’ve called, but I figured you went back to sleep.”
“No biggie. Everything squared away?”
Phoebe s
tarts to explain, but in the breaking dawn it seems absurd she felt the need to blindly rush over in the middle of the night. That Adam, a legitimate movie star (even if he did go on a broadcast rant about his last movie) living in a full-service building, didn’t have anyone to call other than the ex-girlfriend he hadn’t spoken to in more than a year.
“He broke his ankle and wasn’t doing so great.”
“You get him fixed up?”
“Yeah.” She pauses. “Actually, I said I’d take him to the doctor Tuesday morning. Is that all right?”
“Why are you asking my permission?” Frustration percolating in his question.
An honest answer seems unwise. Poor form to tell Cole she misses Adam the way she misses her brother—a persistent, hovering ache. Probably shouldn’t say she felt physically ill after reading the horrible Murder Island 3 reviews, knowing how upset Adam would be. Not mention that thirty minutes ago, she almost kissed Adam good-bye—not because of any overwhelming passion but because that’s what she always used to do.
“It’s a little weird, right?” she finally offers.
“He’s your friend. If he needs help, I trust you.” Cole doesn’t sound thoroughly convinced of this, lifts his shoulders in what’s probably meant to be an unfazed shrug but comes off as simply uncomfortable.
She offers a reassuring caress of his triceps as she takes a sleepy Cassie from his arms.
“Besides,” he says, “you already chose me over the famous actor, remember?”
Playfully, she bumps her nose to his because this is also true. “I did, didn’t I?”
* * *
Adam is having pants difficulties and calls out a warning that he’s not entirely clothed when Phoebe lets herself in.
“Please, you helpless and half naked sums up a decade of my life,” she jokes. But there’s a flush on her cheeks, eyes darty, when she peeks into his bedroom.
Finding scissors Adam had no idea he owned, she cuts the leg on a pair of track pants so he can pull them over the temporary cast.
At the orthopedist’s office, Phoebe has zillions of questions about cast materials, future surgeries, and activity restrictions, and Adam is amazed and grateful. He can’t believe he hadn’t thought to ask such basic things like whether or not he can drive (he can, as long as the car is an automatic) and what kind of workouts are off-limits (pretty much any exercise that doesn’t involve sitting).
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 30
