Twenty-Six
The night before the first day of filming, Helen can’t sleep.
“That’s normal,” Grant tells her sleepily, when she shows up on his porch at one a.m. “It’s like Christmas, or the night before open-heart surgery.”
He won’t be on set in the morning; he’ll be in the writers room still, as they finish breaking the last episode of the season. For the best, probably—ever since his birthday, it’s felt like they’re on borrowed time and she’s trying to get used to the idea of not having him around always. It’s almost March—and in a few weeks, he’ll be done and ready to move on to a new show and it’ll be the most convenient time to let him go. But she can already feel herself coming up with more excuses—why not wait until they’re done with production in late April—even as she knows it’ll only hurt more the longer they wait to break things off.
She starts crying when he hugs her and he laughs into her hair.
“You really hate being comforted that much, huh,” he says, and she nods into his shoulder.
He kisses the side of her face first, then the salty tears off her cheeks, before he reaches her mouth. “Helen, I’m not trying to comfort you. I’m trying to seduce you.”
She laughs and kisses him back, her arms twining behind his neck as he lifts and carries her into the bedroom. She has to be on set at seven a.m., and she lets him keep her up until almost three in the morning—laughing, gasping, touching.
When she slips out of bed at six a.m., he’s still half sleeping, his hair tousled and a slight frown on his face from the early-morning light.
“You’re always leaving me,” he mumbles, and she walks off before the squeezing in her heart makes her do something foolish, like stay.
Helen calls as she drives home from set—it’s just after six p.m. and they wrapped almost an hour early their first day.
“That’s a good thing, right?” she says anxiously. “It means the director knows what she’s doing? Or is it, I don’t know, leaving things on the table . . .”
“It’s a good thing,” Grant says. “Production can be brutal if you’re going a full twelve hours every day. Wrapping early on your first day sets a good tone.”
She tells him about meeting the crew and how she thinks the first assistant director hates her but she has an ally in the director of photography, how the wardrobe team had questions for her that she was able to answer (surprising!), and how the cast looked so different in costume and full hair/makeup, she was thrown.
“It was like they stepped out of my brain and into reality—it was so weird in a good way. I felt like I was starstruck by my own characters.”
Grant smiles at this and feels a strange sense of pride. A memory from high school randomly comes online—Helen, standing at the front of their AP English classroom, reading her essay to the class at the request of the teacher, as an example of good writing. He remembers no one paying much attention, himself included, and feeling a little bad about it. It had obviously meant a lot to her to be chosen.
He thinks people will pay attention this time, when the show comes out. It’s a good one, and they’ve done a lot of work to keep what’s special about her books in the series while letting it grow into its own thing. One of his favorite storylines isn’t in the books at all, and Helen had surprisingly agreed it was one of her favorites too.
“Good first day, then?” he asks, when he opens the door and she’s on the porch, still on the phone with him.
“Mm.” She nods, and falls into his waiting arms. “Missed you, though.”
He smiles into her hair and wonders how much longer they have.
Helen hits the stop button on her phone alarm, telling her it’s time to drive to LAX.
She’s spent the last six hours obsessively cleaning her apartment, scrubbing the floors and checking through her closets and laundry, making sure they’re free from any trace of anything. She doesn’t think her mother will go through all her individual drawers looking for drugs under the vague pretense of missing a sweater like she did in high school, but Helen checks through them all herself just in case anyway (there’s nothing, of course), just as she did then. Her mother had always seemed so certain Helen was hiding something, that sometimes Helen herself wasn’t sure she wasn’t.
“Next time you fly, there’s an easier airport to pick you up from, in Burbank,” she tells them as her parents load their suitcases (twenty years old and “They work just fine!” despite a broken wheel and stuck handle) into her car. “LAX is kind of chaotic.”
“Next time, next time, what next time,” Mom grumbles, looking out the window at construction signs and closed-off traffic lanes. “You are only in LA a short while.”
Helen ignores the growing tension headache and drives them to a Radisson hotel nearby.
“A car will come and take you guys to set in the morning,” she says. “There should be a drive-on pass for you at the gate, but you can call me if you have any problems.”
“I don’t know any of the words you are saying,” Mom says. “My head hurts.”
“Are you hungry?” Helen asks. “We can go get food.”
“Yes, we should get food,” Dad agrees. “Unless you already ate.”
“I haven’t eaten yet.”
“You haven’t eaten?” Mom’s brows snap together. “It’s almost eight p.m.”
Helen wants to smash her own forehead into the steering wheel. “Let’s get food,” she says, and grips the wheel as she maneuvers them out of the hotel parking lot.
She takes them to In-N-Out and thinks about explaining the secret menu to them, but thinks better of it. When they sit down to share their meal, Mom unfolds herself happily, taking out napkins and packages of nuts she got on the plane from her purse.
“Thanks, Mom,” Helen says wearily.
“So,” Mom says, eating a plain french fry. “How are things?”
“They’re good,” Helen says automatically. “The first week of production went well. I was nervous at first, but everyone’s doing a really good job and the showrunner’s really happy.”
“I don’t understand why you don’t run your own show,” Dad says, biting into his burger.
“Because I’ve never done it before,” Helen explains for the millionth time. “But Suraya’s really great. It’s like we’re two brains in a pod.”
It’s a play on a familiar expression that’s almost certainly gone over their heads. Helen often wonders how much of her relationship with her parents has been lost in translation and how different things would be if they’d never moved to this country. But then maybe she wouldn’t have become a writer, or at least this kind of writer, telling these kinds of stories, with these specific people, at this specific time in her life, and she finds herself familiarly grateful that her parents made the decisions they made.
They go to her condo afterward (“just to have a look”) and Helen feels a small surge of pride when Dad looks out the window and says, “You have a nice view.”
Mom pats down each couch cushion to inspect its softness before she sits down, then bounces up and down slightly as if she’s testing wares at a mattress store.
“The studio pays for all of this?”
“Yep,” Helen says. “Until production’s over.”
“Very nice,” Mom says approvingly. “This is very nice.”
And it is nice, Helen thinks—letting her parents see her thrive on another coast.
See, she tries to silently communicate, you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll survive.
They stay for exactly one pot of tea, Dad quietly walking from room to room while Mom starts doing dishes even though Helen protests she has a dishwasher for that.
She had felt slightly itchy and nervous about having her parents in this space—imagining them moving within the scenes of her California life played slightly wrong in her brain, like a poorly done double exposure. But as she listens to Mom gossip idly about their old friends while toweling off plates and Dad flicks lights on and off in various rooms, she feels a sense of home wash over the condo, and finds she doesn’t mind it as much as she thought she would.
She walks them down to the lobby to wait for their Uber, because Mom insists it’s too late for Helen to drive them to the Radisson and back, and Helen’s grateful because it is getting late.
She waits until their car is out of sight before she calls Grant.
“How’d it go?” he asks, his voice low in a way where she can tell he’s lying in bed.
“Good,” she says. “They came to the condo, like I said they would. They liked it. They came dangerously close to saying they were proud of me out loud.”
Grant chuckles and she thinks, I would keep this feeling, if I could.