“Mr. Warner, how you doing?” The deliveryman places the insulated bag on the glass-topped table. “I got two large supremes for you.” Larges? He must be planning on leftovers.
Michael turns to me. “I went ahead and ordered. Hope that’s okay?”
That’s when I notice that familiar, bug-eyed look on Jose’s face, who begins stammering, “You’re… you’re… you’re… you’re.” He’s hung, like an old vinyl record skipping on a piece of dusty lint. So I do what I always do in these situations, and smile graciously. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Wow, man, I thought so!”
Michael watches this entire interchange, a mixed expression of wonder and mild embarrassment on his face as he hustles Jose back out the gate. Once he’s gone, Michael begins to laugh, shaking his head. “You get that a lot?”
“Not nearly so much as when my show was on, but yes.”
“Andrea says it’s in reruns on TNT.”
“Oh, God. Please, please, do not watch it,” I blurt, feeling this bizarre burst of embarrassment at the idea of Michael and Andrea cozying up on their sofa together, watching me frozen in the time warp of syndication. It’s a strangely mortifying thought, as if I’ve just been discovered trying on my mother’s bra, or doing something that I shouldn’t be. In the rush of a moment I feel exposed, my current life and my former one having collided violently.
“Why not?” He’s watching me, confused by my reaction.
“Because it’s a stupid show, for one thing,” I announce firmly. “And because…” Because why? Because then Michael will know what I used to look like, and realize what a disappointment this damaged version really is? My face flushes with instant shame at that thought. “Just don’t, okay?” I reach for the pizza box, ready to help. But my hands are trembling slightly from the unexpected emotion of the conversation, and that’s when it happens. The stupid muscle in my hand—the one severed by Ben’s knife that took so long to heal—gives out on me, sending the pizza flying to the wooden deck floor.
“Dang it!” I cry, as my hand spasms painfully, and I drop to the ground to try and scoop up the pizza. Clutching at my palm, I rub my thumb across the center. “I’m so sorry! God, how stupid!”
“Hey, now. It’s okay. No big deal.” Michael squats down beside me, reaching for my hand in concern. “What happened?” he asks, trying to get a look at it, but I won’t let him, and jerk it back protectively against my chest.
“Just my hand, don’t worry about it.”
“No, let me see,” he presses, still reaching. “Is it all right?” No, it’s not all right. It’s shaking, and all tightened up on me, something that still happens every now and then. Just one more bit of my broken body that hasn’t healed quite right, and probably never will. Ashamed doesn’t come close to covering how I feel, cowering like this on the floor of Michael Warner’s deck.
“Please,” he urges, reaching gingerly for my hand again, and this time, I let him. I let him get a little bit closer than I have until now, as one by one he uncurls my coiled fingers. That’s when the silvered scar is revealed, jagged through the center of my palm, like a terrible brand. There’s nothing mystical or Harry Potteresque about it, I can assure you.
He massages the thick band of tissue, tracing and rubbing his thumb over the length of the thing, and neither of us says a word. Not until I whisper, “I tried to stop the knife.” I extend my other palm in front of my face, demonstrating. “Like that. It severed the muscle and a few nerves in my hand.”
He nods, then gently lifts my open palm to his lips and kisses my scar. Not one kiss, but a soft trail of them along the slash mark. Tears fill my eyes, unbidden—unexpected, just like his tender gesture. Because in kissing that scar, I understand that he wishes he could kiss away the pain—all the pain that I’ve had to live with, ever since that fortuitous day.
The tears blur everything. “I’m sorry I didn’t… tell you more. The other day. It’s just hard to talk about it, when someone’s tried to kill you.” Then, I have to laugh at how utterly fantastic that sounds out loud. Someone tried to kill me.
“You don’t have to talk about it, Rebecca.” He closes my smaller hand within his much larger one. “I want to know you, that’s all. Like I said.”
“I wish you could read my palm,” I say, the laughter dying on my lips. “You’d know everything that way.”
Staring down, he traces the scar with his fingertip. “It is kind of like a life line.” I’ve never thought of it that way, but it certainly puts an ironic spin on my near-death experience. We’re not so different, him and me, having gazed pointblank into the jaws of our enemy. That’s what I’m thinking when I notice the shiny glint of his commitment ring.
“How was Santa Cruz?”
His whole body reacts as his gaze darts upward to meet mine. I regret the spark of pain in his eyes, but not the question. Now that I understand what this weekend meant to him, I definitely need to know.
Continuing to massage my palm, he asks slowly, “How come you want to know about that?”
“Andrea told me you went to Alex’s grave.” It’s weird to speak of his dead partner by name, in such a personal way, but already I feel like I know him a little—as eerie as that seems.
“It was a year ago yesterday he died,” he explains hoarsely.
“Andrea told me that, too,” I say. “About the anniversary.”
“Reckon you’ll forgive me now? For not calling and all?” He’s trying to joke, but the smile fades on his lips before it even forms.
“Michael, you are so forgiven,” I assure him with a sympathetic expression. “I know how hard this weekend must have been.”
“Gotten used to going this alone, you know, but meeting you’s already playing hell with that idea. Not that I don’t understand being alone, ’cause I do,” he asserts, moody eyes shimmering. “Just not how I got here so easily.”
“Tell me, Michael,” I encourage, touching his arm. “Tell me what you mean.”
He blows out a heavy breath, looking up into the hills. “Well, Rebecca…one minute you’re in traffic, minding your own damned business, just driving home and looking forward to the weekend.” Hesitating, he gazes into my palm again, at the scar, tracing his thumb across it as he reflects, “Next, the phone rings and it’s all over. It’s over because some asshole stopped for drinks near your house, near your family, on an average Friday afternoon when you thought they were safe.”
“Oh, Michael, I’m so sorry,” I whisper, feeling his pain physically. “You’ve been through so much.”
“Yeah, well that’s the thing about life,” he says with a sardonic laugh. “It’s those average days that get you.” He closes my fingers, one by one, until my scar is hidden again, adding, “You know about that.”
And suddenly I’m thinking of my own average night three years back, when Ben followed me home from the set. I was hurrying up the walkway to my apartment, rushing so I could catch the end of ER—ironically enough. It was a taping day, and it had left me bone-weary, which was probably why I never knew what was happening until Ben’s knife came down on me, even though I’d seen him loitering outside only the day before. I’d seen him and been frightened enough to consider calling the police, but then decided I was overreacting, and chose to ignore the way he lurked there on my street corner.
That thought drives me back into myself, hard. “Your pizza’s ruined,” I observe, wiggling my hand out of his. Frantically, I begin scooping the errant toppings back onto our decimated pie: anything rather than meeting his probing gaze. See, I’m more than willing to talk about his pain, so long as we don’t turn the lens on me. For a moment, he seems taken aback, kind of just blinking at me in stunned silence.
“I’m really sorry about all this mess,” I rush to say, and hope he’ll know I mean far more than the pizza.
“Nah, we’ll make it work.” He gathers up wayward pepperoni and sausage and a random onion that’s dangling from the box lid. “Five-second rule.” He laug
hs, a little too cheerily, working to cover the sudden wall of awkwardness that’s fallen between us.
But I don’t quite get the joke, so he explains, “It’s a parent thing. With little kids, most everything hits the floor. You just dust it off, and hand it back all over again. We always called it the five-second rule, though I guess this is more like thirty.”
What a nice tenet that would be for the rest of life; if something ended badly or didn’t work, we could simply declare, “Five-second rule!” and start all over again—well, if only all those “average days” weren’t potentially out there lurking over the next hill, ready to change our destiny.
“Maybe we could say that about the past few minutes,” I suggest hopefully, rising to my feet. “You know, five-second rule about all the awkward stuff since I got here.”
“That’ll work,” he agrees, though I see wistfulness in his golden eyes. He smiles again, giving me an appreciative once-over, gallantly ignoring my stained dress, as he announces, “Great outfit! Very…Reese Witherspoon.”
And this time, smiling so broadly that I feel the numb side of my mouth pull a bit, I answer, “Thanks for the compliment!”
“You know, Rebecca,” he says, rising to his feet, “never thought there’d be anything good about this weekend. But you’ve managed to change that.”
I turn to him, surprised, and he gives me a winning smile, one that’s quirky and sexy and a little ironic without even meaning to be. When Michael Warner smiles, it reveals a world of intelligence, even when he’s silent. His expression changes, becomes curious, and then I realize I’m standing there, pizza stain and all, gaping at him.
“Good,” I say, brushing at my dress. “Now if we can just keep all those average days on our side, we’ll be doing all right.”
***
Five seconds after sailing through my office door on Monday morning, I’m still feeling a happy buzz from my date with Michael. That is, if it was a date, and I’m not entirely sure on that point. It’s the bisexuality thing rearing its ambiguous self again, which always leaves me wondering if maybe our whole deal isn’t only friendship. And once I go there mentally, then a host of additional anxieties come popping out from nowhere, so I prefer to be in my happy place, at least temporarily.
We’re going to the Dodgers game with his group of friends later this week. This seems like a fairly big deal, to introduce me to his circle—a crowd I know used to knot neatly around Alex and him—but I’ll choose not to be intimidated by that fact.
“My friend Casey’s got an extra ticket,” he explained, standing with me out in the drive last night. “Would you want to come?” Some part of my algebraic mind easily deduced that this “extra ticket” in Casey’s season package used to belong to Alex once upon a time, but I just smiled and said I’d love to tag along. Then there was an awkward moment when I sensed that he really wanted to kiss me goodnight, but neither of us could quite seem to make it happen. So we stood there, him scuffing his loafers on the concrete and me chattering too much about the Dodgers. Could we do a better imitation of being thirteen?
It’s not even 9:00 a.m. yet, but down the hall I can already hear Ed storming at someone on the telephone. As head of development at our production company, Ed rarely talks quietly. He projects. He furies. He dominates. At least two hundred and seventy-five pounds, and a solid six feet two or more, he’s one of the biggest teddy bears of a man I’ve ever met. His office is filled with so much cigarette smoke that it’s more like an incense-filled temple, and my eyes never fail to water whenever I enter.
Grabbing the Julian Kingsley proposal from my desk, I head decisively toward Ed’s office, where I wait outside the door for him to notice me. Glancing up from his phone call, he waves me in, saying to someone, “Well, don’t call me again until you got it figured out, okay? I’m serious! Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he grumbles at the person, and I wonder if it’s some arch-nemesis from the corporate side until he says, “I love you, too. Bye.” His wife. Check.
“Whatcha got?” he asks, leaning so far back that I momentarily fear his swivel desk chair might topple unceremoniously into the award-filled bookcase behind him.
I give a Cheshire Cat smile. “Something that’s going to make your Monday very, very happy.”
He lifts an eyebrow, goatee turning up at the edges in a devilish grin. I can’t help feeling a thrill as I hand him Julian’s proposal, the option recommendation on top, knowing I’m about to score major points with my boss.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” he declares, fumbling for his pack of Marlboros without looking. “How in hell’d you pull this off?”
Briefly, I wish I could take all the credit, but this is my best friend’s moment to shine. “Trevor, actually. He and Julian are old friends.” Ed’s black eyes lift upward. “Trevor was his assistant back in London. Kept all his correspondence, did research for his early novels.”
“Bosom buddies, eh?” Ed assesses caustically, his own particular conclusion about the matter already reached. He flips the pages of the proposal quickly. “Who else has this thing?”
“No one. Our exclusive ends today.”
“What’s it gonna take?”
Chewing my lip, I contemplate the figures I’ve been mentally crunching since Saturday. “Near as I can tell, Beautiful, But Me closed at a ceiling of almost a million. Just ballpark.”
Ed whistles loudly. “Damn, that’s a lot of money.” He drags on his cigarette for a contemplative moment, the Marlboro temple filling with a little more hazy smoke. “Ah, hell. Do it. I don’t want this one to get away. Start low, work your way up. Who you dealing with? TMA?”
“His literary agent’s in England, but yes, they’re co-agenting the film side.”
“Do it. Tell me when it’s closed.”
This stuns me; the other times I’ve optioned properties, Ed has been a control freak, obsessively watching over all my movements. “Are you sure?” I’m unclear about his motives, and feeling skittish about being offered this sudden freedom on such a big deal. He waves me off with his cigarette, leafing back through the proposal, this time ready to give it his true attention. “Yeah, yeah. You run with this one, babe. I trust you. Show me what you can do.”
Okay. This absolutely reeks of a power moment. He just lent me his knee, and hoisted me up the corporate ladder by a few critical rungs. And Ed can do that; he’s got enough muscle to make me if he so chooses. Raking a hand through his disheveled hair—it never ceases to amaze me that a slob like Ed can wield such a mighty saber—he glances up. “O’Neill, is there a problem?”
“No, not at all.” I shake my head. “I’ll get right on it.”
Is it my imagination, I wonder, stumbling like a zombie out of his office, or has my whole life just taken a fairly surreal direction? As if everything that was on a disastrous, or at least mediocre, course for so long is now completely going my way.
Only problem is that the heroine of every movie always has a sunshiny, riding-high moment like this one—right before the end of Act One, when her entire world goes to hell in a hand basket.
Still, I think I’ll keep walking on sunshine, thank you very much. I’ve had enough freaking trauma and rain to last all three acts.
Chapter Eight: Michael
“I don’t know why we have to keep coming here,” Andrea whines as we step into the small Burbank office where we meet our therapist once a month. The receptionist closes the door behind us with a hushed promise of the doctor’s imminent arrival, leaving us in silence.
“How come we do?” My daughter stares up at me like she half-expects a reprieve, a look I pointedly ignore. We don’t have a choice about being here today, and it’s not like I’m wild about it either. But I do want a breakthrough with her, which means I’m willing to put up with almost anything to get to that.
“So why, Michael?” Her breathy voice grows more impatient. “Why do we have to come?”
“Because it’s good for us,” I explain wearily, searching for
a way to rationalize dragging her here despite how useless it often seems. “Kind of like spinach. Not all that tasty, but it makes us stronger.”
The corners of her mouth turn downward into a scowl, forming what Alex always termed her “disagreeable face”.
“Spinach is yucky,” she announces, obviously missing my point as she flops on the sofa. “Totally yucky.”
I close my eyes, rubbing the bridge of my nose to subdue my tension headache. “Like exercise, then.”
Maintenance, that’s what Dr. Weinberger calls it. I just call it a joke: no matter how often we come, we never seem to make much progress. Honestly? I think maybe he gave up on us after the first six months. He tells me to be patient, but I never have been much good at that game.
Dropping onto the sofa beside her, I grab Variety off the coffee table, and slap it nervously against my knee. Andrea opens a copy of Highlights, flipping right to the picture puzzle. She traces her fingertip diligently over the page, searching out clandestine candlesticks and slices of bread. Too bad she can’t locate our good doctor. No sign of him yet, which means we’re left to our own anxious devices; perhaps time alone together in purgatory is part of Weinberger’s grand plan.
“I don’t like it here,” Andrea complains, not looking up from the magazine.
Trying to be the adult, I ask, “Why not?”
Through auburn lashes she pins me with an I-can’t-believe-you’re-such-a-dork gaze.
“Maybe he’ll have more of those rings,” I suggest, resorting to blatant bribery. “You know, those sparkly ones you like so much.”
She sighs, rolling her eyes intolerantly. “Michael, those are baby rings.”
“You didn’t think so last fall.” When we first started coming here, she collected them weekly, tucking them into her jewelry box like captured treasure.
“I’m a lot older now, Michael.”
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