Lucy sat with me. “Mr. Sanders told me that he’s willing to let the whole thing go.” I looked up hopefully. Maybe we could get out of here soon. But Lucy continued. “Unfortunately, it’s out of his hands. The Mr. Taco corporate headquarters is pressing charges for assault. I also had to give Mr. Sanders a check for the damage to the costume and the window. It was the last three hundred dollars in our checking account. I’m not sure how I’m going to bail Chuck out.” Lucy put her head in her hands and slumped over in the plastic chair.
A guy dressed in sweats and a T-shirt approached us. “I’ll get the clothes back to you,” he said to Lucy. He started to walk away but then turned back to her. “I might be out of line saying this to you, but be careful. That isn’t the first time Chuck has done something violent. He tried to deck a customer last week.” Shaking his head, he made his way out through the glass double doors.
Much later, Lucy and I jerked awake in our chairs at the sound of a buzzer. “The bail has been set,” the receptionist called over the desk to us. “It’s ten thousand dollars.”
Lucy gasped.
“Relax. You only have to come up with ten percent of it.”
“I don’t have a thousand dollars.” Lucy panicked. “I can’t leave him in jail! Bad things happen to people in jail!” She was working herself up to hysteria now and I couldn’t blame her. The stories about what happened to inmates were not pretty.
I did have a thousand dollars. Mom and Dad had sent it to me last week to pay for the winter trimester. The payment wasn’t due for another week or so, and right now my sister needed money.
“I can write a check.”
“No personal checks!” the receptionist said. “You gotta go to the bail bondsman and get a certified check. And there’s only one that takes personal checks without collateral.” She gave an address that was clear on the other side of town.
Jesus. We weren’t going to get home until nighttime at this rate. But we did it. We drove across town, got the certified check, drove back, gave it to the receptionist, and, finally, Chuck was brought out to the lobby. Nobody said a word on the way home. Only later, when Chuck had gone to bed and Lucy and I were having a late-night Tab, did I think to ask her about the girl.
“How did you know Chuck was seeing that girl?”
“If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else.” Then she went to join Chuck. I was sound asleep when someone pounded on the front door. I bolted straight up, my heart pounding in fright. After throwing on a robe and running down the stairs, I peered through the eyehole. It was a policeman. Had Chuck done some other heinous thing? Cautiously I opened the door, leaving the chain on. “Are you Ms. Thompson?”
“Yes,” I squeaked.
“Do you have a brother, Evan Thompson?”
“Yes,” I said, my heart racing.
“He called the station when he couldn’t get through on your phone.” I looked at him blearily, waiting for the bad news I knew was coming. “He wanted you to know that your father has had a heart attack. You don’t have much time to get home.”
Chapter Thirty-one
May 2006
The next three days were a nightmare. Aidan would not return a voicemail, email, or text message. I had even broken down and left a voicemail telling him that it was my sister Lucy at my house and not another man. Still, nothing.
The poster for TechnoCat had to be recalled, reprinted, and reshipped—none of which was cheap. The reaming I got from Rachael was nothing compared to what Esperanza put me through. Rachael forcefully told me that she was angry about the money, but even worse, that I had made our department look “scattered” and “stupid” at a “critical time.” Further, she questioned my judgment, implying that it seemed my head had been elsewhere for months now. Her last words were that the TechnoCat shoot had better be “fucking perfect.” Rachael didn’t swear much so I more than got the point.
Esperanza had turned my next hour and a half into a sobbing therapy session. She cried that no one liked her (I knew I didn’t). Her childhood had been a disaster: her parents forced her to take piano lessons instead of modeling lessons. And on and on, all while I tried to make soothing noises on my end of the phone.
As much as I had dreaded the flight to Prague for the TechnoCat shoot, I was secretly relieved to have hours and hours to myself with no way to talk to anyone else.
Almost as soon as I landed though, my phone rang.
“Jeannie, we have a problem,” Caitlin said as I balanced my cell phone between my cheek and shoulder. I was trying to grab my bag off the baggage carousel at the same time.
“What now?” I had just flown seventeen hours and I was wiped out. Since even I couldn’t be in two places at once, I had left Caitlin in charge of the Jet Fuel photo shoot.
“Jeffanie won’t get on the plane. They’re standing on the tarmac right now,” Caitlin said. “They said that there’s no Xbox to play video games on board.” Dropping my bag I switched the cell phone to my other ear. Maybe I hadn’t heard correctly.
“Jeffanie said that Danny had an Xbox on board his Air Force One plane. So they won’t get on the plane unless an Xbox is on board. They’re having their luggage transferred back to their limo now.”
I sat down on top of my bag and put my forehead in my free hand. “Caitlin?”
“Yeah?”
“Get them an Xbox.”
“What do I do if they won’t stick around long enough for me to get an Xbox installed?”
“Have them escorted back to the airline lounge and make sure they are entertained. Find them belly dancers. Sword swallowers. Whatever it takes,” I said. Then I added as an afterthought, “And start giving them liquor. Now.”
“Got it.” The trusty Caitlin hung up.
I had barely enough time to get to the hotel and shower before I had to take Stripe and the production team for the special shoot out to dinner. I was beyond tired, but protocol demanded such things. The others had arrived several days before to do the pre-production so they weren’t jet-lagged. I met them at the Balfy Palace. It was formerly an elegant old mansion. Now part of it was converted to a restaurant. The dining room was located in what used to be the ballroom. The ceilings were high, the chandeliers were extravagant, and the walls were painted robin’s-egg blue with gilt trim. The food was terrible, but so much wine was flowing that I doubted anyone else noticed.
Afterward, we wandered across the Charles Bridge to a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar called the Blue Light. Pleading jet lag, I left after the first drink. But, as I learned later, Stripe stayed for another tequila, then another, then six more—which matched the number of stitches he needed when he slid off his stool and hit the sharp corner of the bar. I was summoned from my nice, warm bed to pace up and down the gray hallway of a Communist-era hospital. It was now 5 a.m., and we were supposed to start shooting at 7.
“How are we going to prop him up on set?” I asked the producer who was waiting with me in the hall. “We can’t shoot without him.”
“Maybe the first a.d. or the D.P. can shoot it,” he suggested. I shook my head. We had been publicizing this trailer as a one-of-a-kind from the personal vision of Stripe. We had even built, at enormous cost, a set depicting twenty-third-century buildings on the streets of Prague. I couldn’t let the first assistant director or the director of photography shoot it. The publicity backlash would be too damaging. Finally, Stripe staggered out into the hallway with a gigantic bandage on his forehead held in place by a lot of white medical tape. We hustled him into a waiting car and got him to the set. The first shot was miraculously under control by nine. It was the only shot of the day to go off without a hitch.
Now it was 4 a.m., nineteen hours after we started. I had drunk fourteen cups of coffee to stay warm, eaten M&M’s, granola bars, cheese and crackers, pizza, and then more M&M’s off the craft services table, out of stress. Mostly I stood around, hunched up against the unseasonable cold, with the unit photographer, Action Jackson. His name was actually Jac
kson Jenkins. But at the age of fifty-five he was still wiry thin, and nervous energy vibrated off him, hence the name Action. His job was to shoot the still photography on a film set in case our publicity department wanted to use it.
“This one is a little different from the last one,” Action observed while bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“Yeah, about eighty degrees different,” I answered. We had last worked together on a film that was shooting in Hawaii. I fell silent as I watched the clock, and therefore money, tick by. Usually my job was pretty much done by the time we actually made it to set. I was just there to handle talent tantrums or to make sure nothing went seriously awry.
So far, a lot of things were going seriously awry. First it had started raining. Then the crane that had shown up for the overhead shot—the shot that Katsu and Stripe had added despite all pleading—was not the one originally promised. The new one was too heavy to be hoisted on top of the set, which meant that the set needed to be reinforced or we had to get a different crane, and on and on. Which meant time was slipping away. Which meant we were going way over budget. My stomach twisted as I wondered how to break this to the studio. Rachael had been more than clear about avoiding cost overruns and coming back with a “brilliant” trailer—neither of which was happening right now. I nervously considered the age-old question: “Can we save it in post-production?”
“Jeannie, I need you over here.”
I squinted through the glare of the spotlights that were currently illuminating the deserted street in Prague. I knew it was the producer by the color of his down coat, the hood of which was cinched tightly around his face. In the middle of the night, in pouring rain, everyone looked pretty much the same.
“Is it the crane again?” I asked miserably.
He replied, “No. I thought you’d better see this last shot.”
As I began to follow him my cell phone started ringing. I searched through pocket after pocket trying to locate it. When I did, I managed to open it without taking off my mittens.
“Hello,” I croaked.
“Jeannie?” I instantly smiled when I heard Aidan’s voice. He sounded so close I wished he were right there with me instead of six thousand miles away.
“Caitlin said you were in Prague when I called the office.” He sounded hesitant. “How’s the shoot going?”
“Awful, actually. But I’m so happy you called. I know I’ve been acting so strange, but—”
Aidan cut me off. “Look, Jeannie. I love you but this is not going to work. We need to end this.”
Now I stopped and headed in the other direction. I figured that the producer would realize at some point that I was no longer in tow.
“What are you talking about, Aidan?”
“I want to get married and you don’t. It’s really as simple as that. So the best thing for me is to break this off.”
I took off the mitten so I could get the cell phone closer to my ear. “Aidan, I—”
He interrupted me. “Jeannie, I love you. But you have way too many reasons why we can’t get married. I need to move on.” Then, as with all great moments, when something is really, truly important, the cell phone service cut out. I stared down at it willing it to ring back. When it did, I rushed to answer.
“Jeannie, we have a problem,” Caitlin said.
“Can it wait? I need to keep this line free.”
“Jeffanie set their hotel room on fire,” Caitlin went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “The curtains went up in flames from all those tea candles and it went from there.”
“Was anyone hurt?” My throat tightened.
“No, nothing like that. Apparently, Jeffanie went out to dinner and left the candles burning. The room is completely torched, but the sprinkler system put it out pretty fast. The Four Seasons is plenty pissed off, and the cost to fix everything is going to be incredible.”
“Does the studio know?”
“That’s why I’m calling. I wanted to warn you that Vincent and Rachael are on the warpath. They want to know why you would have thought that one thousand tea candles in a room with lunatics like Jeffanie would have been safe.”
Slowly, I hung up the phone. We had discussed all of this and they had given their approval. But, I realized, I was the one who had pushed for the tea candles. And I had unreasonably pushed because I was afraid that Katsu would crow that I couldn’t deliver.
Now, the studio could legitimately say this was my fault.
I stood dazed, letting the phone dangle in my hand until the producer found me again. “Jeannie, come on! We really need you.” Numbly, I followed him. We arrived at the video village. This is where the director, producers, and script supervisor can watch the video monitor and see what is being shot.
The producer asked for playback for me. I watched the shot of the gun firing in a close-up.
“Omigod.” My stomach flipped over. I turned to Stripe. “What are we going to do?”
He shrugged.
“You have been filming this man all day long and you mean to say you didn’t notice he only has four fingers?”
“So what?” The director was scratching his stitches by rubbing lightly on top of the massive bandage.
“He is a body double for the third-biggest male star in America. And the third-biggest male star in America happens to have all five fingers! Plus”—I gestured wildly at the video monitor—“the point of this entire concept is that he grabs the gun, then pulls the trigger! Not only that, it’s a close-up of his finger pulling the trigger! Tell me: which finger is missing?!”
Stripe ignored me. He turned his back on me and pretended I did not exist. Me, the one who had promised the studio I would deliver a great trailer. Me, the one who had just lost the love of her life. “Which finger is missing?” I repeated, stabbing his puffy down coat repeatedly with my forefinger. I got silence from Stripe. He kept his head turned away and began a conversation with the script supervisor about the unpredictable weather in Prague.
Freezing rain pelted around the tent, my heart ached, my feet hurt, and my butt was on the line for a million-dollar production that was about to be useless. Shoving my way between Stripe and the script supervisor, I reached up, grabbed a wad of medical tape, and ripped the jumbo-sized bandage away from his stitches.
“Ouch!” The director grabbed his forehead and doubled over in his chair. “Ouch! You fucking bitch!”
“One particular finger is needed to pull the trigger! And what finger is missing? His trigger finger!” I screamed at him. My throat started to close up then. I never yelled. I never ever, ever yelled. That was a no-no. Then I burst into tears. That was another big no-no.
Silence fell over the video village. Finally the producer cleared his throat and said, “We can find another body double. It’s a close-up on just the hand and the gun. No one will be able to tell that it’s not the same guy firing the gun.”
I nodded while heaving some kind of blubbering, snorfling assent, then stumbled around the corner of the set. Tears blurring my eyes, I moved out of the range of the lights and into the dark of the night. Standing in the mud among discarded planks of lumber and pieces of rope, I bent over and threw up. When I was finished retching, I sagged against a metal pole and watched the rain wash my puke away. It was then that I noticed I had not missed my coat. It was covered in long, chunky strands all the way down the front.
The last shot was completed thirty-two hours after we started. We had gone into twenty hours of overtime. It was 3:30 p.m. by the time I got back to the hotel and threw my muddy clothes in my bag. Then I checked out and took a cab to the airport. I found a 6:20 p.m. flight on British Airways to Los Angeles and I slumped aboard, heaving my bag into the overhead bin without help from any of the male passengers. After transferring at Heathrow, I ordered a cocktail from the stewardess but fell asleep before it arrived and didn’t wake up until we landed, twelve hours later. After making it through customs I took a cab straight to Aidan’s house. I fought that icky, dirty jet lag fe
eling and dabbed some blush and lipstick on.
Using my key I entered his house. “Aidan?” I called out. When I heard no response I checked from room to room. The house felt oddly empty. On a hunch I opened his closet door. Half of his closet had been cleared out. In the storage closet several of his suitcases were missing.
Aidan was gone.
Chapter Thirty-two
December 1986
Lucy and I drove the two hours to Muskegon in silence. Chuck didn’t come with us because he wasn’t supposed to leave the city limits until his mess was straightened out with the courts. I watched the bare trees fly by as we drove west on I-96. It was a grim, gray morning, which fit our mood. We had stopped once at a gas station to use the pay phone. Lucy had called General Hospital but Dad wasn’t there. That left Northern Hospital and that’s where we were going. I didn’t dare think about any other option. He just had to be at Northern and not at one of the funeral homes on Getty Street. As I hit the Holt city limits, I slowed down. I could hear Dad’s voice reminding me that the cops had a speed trap there. When we finally reached the hospital, I parked in a red zone and Lucy and I ran through the doors.
“Harold Thompson? Where is he?” Lucy blurted to the lady at the desk.
She shuffled through some papers for an agonizingly long minute. Then she said, “He’s still in surgery.” Still in surgery? I thought. It had been hours since we had gotten word that he had been taken to the hospital. The lady continued speaking. “I know your mom is in the waiting room.” She pointed down the mint green hall. We ran to the waiting room and Mom was immediately on her feet hugging us hard. I peppered her with questions but Evan pulled me away.
“Let’s go outside,” he said gently. We went into the hall and left Mom with Anna. Evan spoke firmly to Lucy and me. Elizabeth stood in all her big belly-ness next to him. “The county board brought up firing Dad at a meeting last night. It was about that dumpsite on Muskegon Lake that Dad has been trying to get moved. It was pretty brutal. Channel Thirteen was covering it and everything. Dad got home and started having chest pains, so Mom, Anna, and I brought him in to the emergency room. The doctors discovered a blockage in his heart. So the surgeon did an angioplasty. They ran a tube up an artery in his leg and tried to push the blockage against the walls of the artery to open it up.”
Born Under a Lucky Moon Page 30
