Between Me and You

by Allison Winn Scotch

  I can see a monstrous, foreboding plume of smoke rising from each tower, like a death knell, like the black plague. My dad’s firm is on the ninety-ninth floor. I lean over and squint, trying to assess where the planes hit, if he’d know anyone inside.

  The commentators are saying things like intentional and terrorist, and they already have a reporter on the ground. There is debris flying and terrified New Yorkers running, and though the reporter is trying to stay calm, her voice is quavering, and she is coughing into her elbow.

  “Get out of there!” I shout to the screen, as if I know her, as if she can hear me. Then I remember: Tatum. She’s downtown in class, not too far from the Towers. She doesn’t have a cell phone because she is foolish (and tells me she doesn’t want another bill to pay). I call her beeper number. I call it again. I try Daisy, but they’re not sharing a course load this semester: Daisy is focusing on stage, Tatum on film, and their schedules rarely overlap now.

  The CNN anchors press their fingers to their ears. “We are hearing that these were not small planes,” one of them says. “They were major airliners. We are talking about a possible hijacking situation.”

  I feel my stomach rise to my throat, my pulse quickening in my neck.

  My dad is on a major airliner.

  No. No, no, no, no, no. I just spoke to my mom, and she said he was fine.

  I call Tatum’s paging service again. Where is she?

  I rise and open the front door, poke my head out, looking for . . . I don’t know, someone, Tatum, a neighbor, to confirm that this is real, this is actually happening, and I’m not completely losing my shit. I should call Leo. I close the door. I should call Leo, and he will tell me that I am being overdramatic and paranoid, because Leo is never overdramatic and paranoid, and he’ll make me laugh because I’m such a worrywart of a baby. I’ll probably wake him. Fucking college students and their ability to sleep until noon. But I’d promised my dad over the weekend that I’d call him anyway, have a heart-to-heart about his future, try to “get his head on straight.”

  “He’s barely pulling Cs; Bs if he’s lucky,” my dad said. “Forget about the LSAT, a decent law school.”

  “That’s just Leo,” I replied. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m trying to get him an interview on the trading floor at Merrill.” He sighed. “Calling in some favors. He needs to have a plan. He’s graduating in nine months. He can’t live on our dime forever.”

  “No law school at all?” I asked. My dad had always wanted him to come on board his firm, especially when it became clear that I wouldn’t.

  “Maybe a year or two as a trader, then he can transition. He needs to grow up, Ben.” I could picture my dad shaking his head like he couldn’t imagine how Leo had gotten this far in life without being drafted into clown school.

  “He’s all right, Dad.”

  He was silent for a beat. “I know,” he said finally. “Of course I know that.” He didn’t sound like he did, though. “I know I push you hard, Ben, and I know you don’t always appreciate it . . .”

  I laughed, but not really in a joyful way.

  “Anyway, you’re making something of yourself,” he said. “That’s why I do it. And now it’s time for your brother to do the same. He’s slid by for too long.”

  “It’s because he’s so fucking charming,” I said.

  My dad laughed at that, but this time with true glee, because it was the truth.

  I grab the phone now, sink back onto the couch. Just as I start to punch in Leo’s number, the CNN reporter starts shouting, running; then a black cloud like nothing I have ever seen rushes toward the camera and overwhelms it. I drop the phone, cover my mouth, let out a scream that bounces off Tatum’s small studio walls.

  No.

  The first tower falls, crumbling like a fragile set of pick-up sticks. I sit there, paralyzed, completely disbelieving what my brain is attempting to register.

  Tatum. I need Tatum so very much right now.

  The door unlatches behind me, and she steps over the threshold, as if she could hear my spirit calling out.

  “Jesus,” she says, which comes out more like a wail. “Jesus,” she says again, this time crying for real.

  The phone rings on the couch where I’d left it. I look at her, she looks at me.

  “I don’t know who it is,” I say. “I’d only been trying to reach you.”

  I free it from the cradle.

  “Ben,” my mom shrieks. “Ben! It was his plane! It was his flight!”

  “What?” I say, my mouth dry, my stomach already lurching through my throat. “What?”

  “Your dad,” she screams, a piercing pitch that I’ll dream about for years into the future. She breaks down into unintelligible sobs. “He was here this morning. And now he is gone.”

  32

  TATUM

  NOVEMBER 2014

  Ben wants to spend the day at the beach, Leo’s favorite spot, a little north of the lifeguard stand that’s just below the drop-off of the cliff near our very first place together. That one-bedroom bungalow on Ocean Avenue.

  It’s a Thursday, so Joey is at school, and I’m due in the edit bay in the afternoon, tweaking and honing the footage we shot in September and October for Love Runs Through, my second directorial feature. Directing means endless hours of prep, of hand holding, of decision making, of administration, of imagination. It distracts me from Ben and Joe, and I know it makes me less of a partner, but the studio offered, and I couldn’t say no. Didn’t want to say no; I accepted as soon as they called, on the call, in fact. Only later that night, when I shared it with Ben—uncorking a bottle of Bordeaux that the agency sent over—did I realize I’d said yes before asking him. He paused, and his jaw flexed in a way that signaled his displeasure, but he raised his glass all the same and said:

  “To Tatum. Who always said she would light the world on fire.”

  He waited until the next morning to ask me how, logistically, this was all going to work, that he knew—and thought I did too—that directing again was going to turn our schedule on its head and that he didn’t think it was too much to consult him first.

  He was right. Of course he was right, and I was stupid and impulsive and selfish and caught up in the moment with the offer. But part of me was also still angry about the affair with Amanda, though it had been a year, and I checked his e-mails from time to time, and it really did seem to be over. And yet, I bruised him in ways that I knew I could, when I could.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “This isn’t the sort of decision you get to make unilaterally.”

  “I know.” I thought of Amanda, and how he had made that decision unilaterally, without me.

  “Directing is such a bigger commitment than acting, Tate, and I’m working now too.” On Code Emergency, which he doesn’t care about, not in the way I care about making an impact as a female director in a male-driven industry.

  This was an unkind thought, truly unkind, and I blinked, literally blinked, to usher it away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and moved to him. “I got caught up in the moment, and I screwed up.”

  But today I have my morning, something that I’ve tried to hold sacred even as the days and years mounted into chaos. Just like all those years ago when Joey was a baby, and I was shooting nights or rushing to a fitting or an audition or a meeting to charm a director into giving me a part, I still did the mornings. Breakfast with Joe, then, when the paparazzi aren’t swarming outside the driveway, a drop-off at school.

  I hadn’t forgotten it was Leo’s birthday, and I hadn’t forgotten that this was Ben’s ritual, and I wanted to be there to support him. Show up. That’s what he always needed from me. And I’d failed him in ways both big and small, but we’re trying again, because if I dig through our chaos, I find that I still love him. Want to keep building a life with him. Love at this stage of marriage is less concrete, more routine. Not the heady stuff of constant humping and platitudes. It’s a pulse inside of
me that quickens if I think of being without him, not day to day, but in the grand scope. Of passing Joey off on weekends, of returning to an empty house, of not sharing my joy of landing a gig, of not reading the drafts of his work.

  And Ben seems happier too, like sleeping with Amanda exorcised his anger at all the ways his life had diverted from his plan. I’d made a concession to myself that if this is the worst of our betrayals of each other, I could live with it. I’d betrayed Ben in my own way too: by accepting jobs without considering his needs, by stowing the secret of Leo’s relapse, by contemplating (albeit briefly) leaving him without ever confronting him about Amanda. I already know why he did it; I understand probably better than most given my profession, given my rocky teen years with my mother’s cancer: I understand how healing it can be to slip into another life, another reality, and Ben slipped into his by screwing Amanda.

  Piper, whom I told at her baby shower when she caught me crying in the bathroom, couldn’t forgive him. Daisy, whom I told when we landed back in LA, suggested that I ride it out, wait for Ben to return to me. “No one can get through life without vices,” she’d said as if that made perfect sense, which, to me, it had.

  “So don’t confront him?” I’d said.

  “I’m not married, Tate, I don’t know what line I’d draw.”

  I thought about that long afterward, the lines we all draw in all of our relationships, not just our marriages. How I’d drawn a firm line with my dad and how we’d redrawn it over the years, expanding our boundaries until the original line had all but disappeared. How I’d drawn firm lines with my career and how I’d had to redraw plenty of those too: flirting with scummy directors for parts, appearing on shitty TV shows just to launch myself out of P. F. Chang’s. How my mother had drawn and redrawn her line with my father until she finally ran out of ink. Who’s to say that my own pen had to be dry simply for Ben’s one indiscretion? Who’s to say that my own line with Ben wasn’t pliable too? I hadn’t screwed around with anyone on set, but I hadn’t confessed about Leo, and I hadn’t explained why I’d pressed Ben for a second baby, though we’d been unable to conceive. I said it was because Piper’s ebullience at her shower was infectious, that I wouldn’t mind some downtime as a family. But it had really been because of Amanda, because I thought that another baby could bring Ben back to me. So it wasn’t like I hadn’t shifted my own lines; it wasn’t like they weren’t plenty malleable too.

  Today I let Ben drive because the photographers don’t follow his car like they always do mine, and we find a spot not too far from the steps that cross the Pacific Coast Highway and take us right to the sand’s edge.

  “I just like coming here to remember him,” he says. “I want to do it every year.”

  “OK,” I say. “We will.”

  I think: I like the sound of that, every year. Our future.

  He hands me his keys, then his phone, and strides ahead of me and reaches the water first. The waves are choppy and bleak, uninviting, which is maybe how it should be, though I think Leo, who was brighter than the shiniest star in the galaxy, would want it some other way. Ben wades in, to his ankles, to his knees, then all the way to his chest. Everyone else out here is in a wetsuit, if they’re brave enough to venture in at all.

  “Ben!” I shout, though I can hear my voice dissipate in the whoosh of the sea winds. “Ben, come on!”

  He arcs his hands above his head and dives under. If he hears me, he doesn’t flinch.

  I let him sink for as long as he needs to. He’ll return to me when he’s ready.

  He’s been out there for fifteen minutes and must be half frozen when his phone buzzes. On instinct, I glance at the screen. Not because I mean to, not because I’m snooping. It simply vibrates in my palm, and I uncurl my hand, and there it is.

  Thinking of you today.

  Then:

  I’m here if you need me.

  Blood floods my heart and everything speeds up: the rush of the waves, the sound of the ocean, the footsteps of the jogger behind me, the sway of the palm trees that lurch as I spin around and race to the concrete boardwalk, which may provide surer footing. It can only be one person; this can only mean one thing. I fold myself in half, trying to abort the crest of nausea, the dizziness in my brain.

  Ben didn’t come back to me like I thought. I inhale and exhale and try to stop the vertigo.

  I right myself and draw a line in the sand with my toe. And then I kick it away, gently at first, then angrily, furiously. When I calm myself, I’m surprised to discover that, upon further examination, there is no trace of the line at all.

  He heads straight to a warm shower when we get home. Into the cavernous white bathroom that is just off our cavernous white bedroom of the new house we moved into three months ago that was supposed to be our enclave, our safe haven to protect me from that stalker and from the rest of the outside world too. I sit outside the closed door in the nook where he usually writes—his laptop is open, and I consider checking to see what he’s been drafting, if he ever got around to writing that bullshit script for me, if he ever even was honest about that. But instead, I simply sit, and I wait. If I don’t say something now, even on Leo’s birthday, I worry that it will get swallowed up like Ben might have underneath the waves today.

  I curl my hands into balls, a familiar release from way back when—from my mom, and Aaron, and my drunk dad, and all the failed auditions and paltry tips at P. F. Chang’s and everything in between—and I squeeze my eyes shut just as tightly. I can become anyone I need to be, just like I do in front of the camera, though my pulse beats loudly in my neck and a thin film of sweat forms underneath my armpits, in the crooks of my elbows. Despite my expertise, however, I find I cannot become a woman hiding all these secrets any longer.

  He stays in the shower for minutes on end, and it’s gotten so late that I nearly run out of time. I won’t be late for the edit bay; my work won’t suffer for this. It never has. It simply won’t. I will tell him. I will compartmentalize this. And then I will go about my day because that is what I’ve trained myself to do.

  “Shit!” Ben yelps, when he opens the bathroom door and sees me on the loveseat. An oversized white towel is knotted around his waist. He’s still in shape for forty, still built like he was a decade ago, though everything beneath that exterior has changed. It’s a startling realization for me. Every actress constructs her career on matching her insides to her outsides: play a kind prostitute and you wear trashy makeup, ask wardrobe for an extra push-up bra, ensure that your pink manicure is chipping, which might make viewers empathize with your heart of gold. Play a hardened lieutenant but still-loving mom in Army Women, and you train until your body fat is down to 8 percent and you dangle a gold necklace with your kids’ initials atop your army fatigues.

  What we see is always about telling a story until one day you realize that it’s not.

  “Sorry, shit.” Ben holds up a hand. “You just startled me.”

  “I know about Amanda,” I say, quickly, tersely, like it is just another fact that belongs to someone else’s life.

  “What?”

  “I know about her.” I stand. “I have since Piper’s shower. Back in Ohio. She texted you today, and well . . .” My hands find my hips. “I thought you should know.”

  “I don’t . . .” He opens his mouth, then closes it. “It’s over. I mean, it’s been over since . . .” He shakes his head. “It’s been over since May.”

  “Don’t lie to me after all of this, Ben, please, just don’t.”

  Ben sinks onto the loveseat, the towel splitting into a V atop his legs. He drops his head in his hands. “No, I’m not . . .” He raises his head, his tearful eyes finding mine. “Sometimes she texts me. That’s it. It’s over, Tate. I . . . I don’t even know why I did it.” His head returns to his palms.

  I want to say: I do. I get why you did it, and it’s for all the reasons my own lines got blurry with you and everything else. Instead, without thinking it through, I say:

>   “I knew Leo had relapsed. I ran into him in New York, and he was high, and he promised me he’d get better.”

  Ben’s face flies up, the rest of his body following.

  “What? Wait, you what?”

  “I knew Leo had relapsed.” I press my lips together, offer a small, defiant shrug. “I guess we both had our secrets.”

  “You what? I could have fucking helped him, Tatum!”

  “You couldn’t have.”

  His face morphs from angry to astonished and back to angry again.

  “How could you know that? How the hell could you know what I could and couldn’t have done?”

  “You don’t get it,” I say. “We can’t save other people. They can only save themselves, we can only save ourselves.”

  I turn to go.

  “You are not just leaving now,” he yells. “After dropping this bomb on me.”

  I glance back, and see him frozen in rage. My hand mimics dropping a grenade.

  “Boom.”

  33

  BEN

  DECEMBER 2000

  Amanda calls just before I slide on my coat to leave for New Year’s Eve. Caller ID alerts me to the 415 area code, and I check my watch because I don’t want to be late. I can spare three, maybe four minutes. Despite my better instincts, I press the Talk button.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “It’s me,” she replies.

  “I know.”

  The clock on the microwave in my parents’ kitchen tells me it’s 8:23. I told Tatum I’d pick her up by nine, so we could wedge our way into Times Square by midnight, which I still can’t believe I’ve agreed to.

  “This is practically highway robbery,” I’d said when she proposed it. I’d stopped at the bar to thank her for her work on Romanticah, and she’d said: “Well, as payback, you have to come to Times Square with me for New Year’s.”

  “Like a date?” I’d grinned.

  “I might let you kiss me if you’re lucky,” she said, then her eyes widened, and she laughed her machine-gun staccato and slapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, sorry, I don’t even know where that came from.”