Twenty-Eight
The biggest fucking joke of all is that they start prep on his episode the next morning, so Grant scrubs his face raw, puts on clothes and shoes and aftershave like it’s a normal day, and goes into work.
He stops by the production office to introduce himself to the prepping director, who he knows a little because she worked on another show he did a few years ago.
“It’s a great script,” she says with that air of friendly distraction all episodic directors seem to carry, a million plates spinning in their minds. “It’s gonna be a fun one.”
“Yeah,” he says, and laughs at himself. “It was a love letter. To the books.”
She waits for him to say something else, anything else, and he realizes he’s keeping her from her work. There are giant blueprints of all their standing sets on the walls behind her, and he’s alarmed to find them starting to swim and blur in his field of vision. He rubs his eyes and clears his throat.
“There’s, um, a thing at the top of the third act, that’s setting up something later in the season, not sure if it’s obvious, but I’m sure it’ll come up at the tone meeting,” he says, mostly for something to say.
“Great.” She nods. “I’ll keep an eye out for it, then.”
“Great,” he says stupidly, and walks away.
He spends the rest of the morning reading through incoming notes from Suraya about revisions on Owen’s script that she doesn’t have time to do, so could he please take care of them, and Saskia’s new draft, and emails from his agent sending him books for his consideration to adapt, because apparently working on The Ivy Papers has proven he can work around intellectual property and that opens a whole new world of doors.
He doesn’t go to set with the director for her initial walk-through of their soundstages, because he isn’t sure if Helen’s parents will still be there. Helen herself almost certainly will and he can’t tell if that makes the decision harder or easier. He tries not to search for her every time he looks out his window at the studio lot below, and is irritated by the fact that he’s a little devastated every time she’s not there.
He’s partially relieved when Suraya swings by his office at lunch to tell him she doesn’t need him to cover his own episode on set, that she’d rather have him take charge of the closing weeks of the writers room.
“You got it, boss,” he says, reminding himself who he works for.
He turns on the video feed to the soundstages at the end of the day, because they’re still filming and some surviving idiotic thread of hope in him insists, because maybe, maybe she’ll walk in front of the camera during a rolling reset and he’ll get to see her.
She doesn’t, of course, but he finds the familiar sound of production soothing anyway.
“You can forget about this, right?” a pouting, blond mean girl says to her mousier costar. She leans forward and grows hazy, then her face breaks into a nervous smile as she looks into camera. “Sorry. Totally blew past my mark.”
The bell rings and the screen goes to black as the camera cuts, only to return again, the same setup, take two. The crew’s moving fast now; everyone wants to go home.
“You can forget about this,” the actress repeats. “Right?”
Grant has never liked this line. He thinks Suraya has a tendency to write the subtext of a scene into dialogue, a leftover habit from a decade of working on the most networky of network procedural dramas. She hits a note, then she hits it again, and then one more time for good measure, though he’ll grant that sometimes it works for dramatic effect, in end-of-episode closing monologue montages paired with good needle drops.
“I’m sorry, is it my line? I thought she had more. . . .” The other actress glances over her shoulder at the camera and he knows Suraya’s probably thinking about ways to rewrite the finale so they can murder her.
“No, I do, I was just taking a lil dramatic pause,” the blond actress says with a self-deprecating eye roll. “We can take it back from the top.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” a voice says from off camera, and he knows it’s the director, but he still listens closer anyway, in case he can hear anyone else.
You can forget about this, right?
Helen’s mother doesn’t come to set on the second day, but her dad does.
He’s quietly supportive and smiles and nods at the crew members who welcome him back for another round at the circus. He’s on a first-name basis with their craft-services department and he brings Helen a cup of tea when they’re going into hour thirteen of their longest shoot day yet.
“Thanks, Dad,” she murmurs, and means it.
He nods and sits back down in a black folding chair, his knees cracking as he does.
They haven’t spoken about dinner last night, but Dad tells her between setups for the last shot of the day that Mom will be there tomorrow.
“That’s good,” Helen says, and manages a smile.
There have been at least two more emails from production today that contain the name Grant Shepard—she knows he’ll be at the table read tomorrow at lunch and in the tone meeting afterward, and she’s dreading it almost as much as she’s looking forward to it.
She thinks maybe she can bear it, if she can catch glimpses of him for now, before she has to give him up forever. They won’t even be in the same room; production is shooting on location tomorrow so everyone will just be Zooming in from trailers and offices across town. She wonders if he’ll be in his office or working from home. She wonders if he’ll keep his camera on.
Part of her can’t believe her life is this dramatic—more dramatic, it feels, than even the scenes of the soapy teen drama they’re filming. Or maybe that’s just how it feels right now and she’ll be able to look back on this time with some kind of detached fondness someday. That even this keen sense of missing him will be something she grows to appreciate, because it throws every moment of this time in her life into sharper relief and maybe she’ll even be grateful because it found its way into the art somehow.
It would be such a fucking waste if the art was bad too, after all this hurt and drama.
So she focuses on the work. She nudges Suraya when she thinks a phrase could be tweaked to help the actors, she sends references of random micro-influencers to the costume designer, she creates a whole Pinterest board for a single location that’s being used only once for the production designer.
“Don’t work too hard,” Jeff, the gaffer, calls out to her after they wrap, and she knows now it’s his daily send-off to everyone. “We need you here tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” she says, and gives him a little salute as she packs up.
“Good day,” Dad says as they walk out the giant barn doors of the soundstage. It’s always jarring, leaving the fake afternoon light and walking into pitch darkness. “You got a lot done.”
Helen laughs at the way he says it, as if she’s the only one responsible for it.
“Yeah, well,” she says. “I work with some great professionals.”
“Everyone is working very hard,” Dad agrees. “Your mom will be glad to hear about it.”
Helen lets out a soft “ha” at that. She has no idea what kinds of private conversations Mom and Dad have within their marriage. She’s never seen them kiss or flirt or drop so much as an I love you. She imagines they must hold some kind of love for each other she doesn’t understand, for them to still be together after all this time and all this pain. But she doesn’t want that kind of love for herself, and then she stops thinking about it because she can’t bear to contemplate what kind of love she would want.
She drops Dad off with the sleek black shuttle to take him back to the hotel and he gives her a gruff, one-armed hug. It’s probably the third hug he’s ever given her in his life—she remembers one at her college graduation, and another awkwardly coached one by a photographer at one of her book events. They’re just not the hugging type. But she smiles, pats him awkwardly back—anyone watching would think he was an old favorite professor of hers and maybe that describes her relationship with her father the best—and waves as he’s driven off.
As she walks to her car, she briefly considers the dinner options waiting for her at home—she stupidly left all the takeaway sushi at Grant’s house last night and she doesn’t have the energy to cook something from scratch.
She isn’t ready for it when she sees his familiar gray convertible in its designated parking spot across from hers—he’s still here. She looks back toward the building containing the writers room and wonders what’s keeping him here so late. A last-minute meeting with Suraya, maybe, or revisions ahead of the table read. She tries not to think of all the late nights they’ve spent here, flirting across a table, or playing a game where he tries to distract her as she works.
Some traitorous part of her tugs at her feet and she takes a half step toward the building.
But then the rest of her—mind over matter—wrestles back control of her disloyal limbs and she gets in her car and drives off the lot.
She has a long enough drive back to Santa Monica to talk herself into and out of various drive-through options, finally concluding that the leftover chicken salad in her fridge will have to do, and she probably has a protein shake in there somewhere too.
She’s still vaguely entertaining a left turn into an upcoming McDonald’s—she would like fries with this sadness, please—when there’s a thundering boom that makes her think for a moment of a theme park roller coaster, a slow-motion surrealness as her surroundings seem to spin away from her, and then her world flips upside down once, twice, and then there’s a horrible, metallic screech, before it all crashes into splintering black and crunching glass.