Thirty
Grant has three weeks off between his last day covering The Ivy Papers and his next show, a high-budget Netflix reboot of one of his favorite hard-fantasy book series from childhood. He’d been genuinely excited when he first landed the job, and he remembers taking Helen on a trip to his favorite bookstore in Los Feliz to buy her a copy of the first book.
He’d spent the better part of their lunch afterward trying to explain the complex mythology of it. She’d asked follow-up questions and wrinkled her nose at a few outdated plot points they would obviously fix in the adaptation, and by the time they got to his car, he’d said, “You’re not gonna read it at all, are you?”
She’d laughed, smiled up at him in that way that made him feel like he could do anything, and said, “I’ll just read your version of it.”
It’s not going to be his version, though. He’ll be the number two, but he’s pretty sure if he does a good job on this one, he’ll be able to leverage it into some kind of development somewhere.
“You’re always creating so many extra steps for yourself,” she’d said in passing. “Why don’t you just tell your agent you want to take some time and develop something of your own?”
It had stopped him in his tracks, just for a beat. Of course Helen would think that—she always seemed so sure of her next steps. Graduate high school. Major in creative writing. Write a novel. Sell it. Turn it into a bestselling series. Have writer’s block? Turn the series into a TV show and negotiate a spot in the writers room. She always had a solution, and once she’d unlocked how to apply that skill in the writers room, she’d been pretty damn magnificent to watch work every day.
He had felt a bit like a fraud, standing next to Helen. He’d picked his college because California was as far away from New Jersey as he could imagine getting, and he signed up for a screenwriting course only because he’d had to fulfill an English elective requirement. LA was an industry town, so everyone had just assumed he was an aspiring screenwriter and he went along with it because it had seemed easier than coming up with a whole dream of his own. Eventually, it did become his dream, and he discovered the terrifying feeling of wanting something for himself and not being sure he would ever get it.
He’s always been so sure his next job could be his last job that he’s said yes to practically every meeting, every new show submission Fern has sent him. He thinks maybe he’s spent more time on the craft of getting the job than on the craft of writing itself, and every time he hears himself pitched as good in a room, he feels the sting of what it implies.
Good in a room, but not a creative genius by any means.
Good in a room, if you need someone to fill an empty seat for a while.
Good in a room: he’ll win you over and convince you just how much you need him, when really, he’s the one who needs you.
He isn’t even sure which of his own ideas he would want to develop into something real. He has old pilot samples that, combined with his list of credits on other people’s shows, have been good enough to get him meetings. He remembers being excited about those pilots once, years ago, when he wrote them. But when he scans them now, they feel like an outdated snapshot of his brain and he isn’t sure he could re-create that version of himself if he tried.
He knows he has the kind of career now that if he showed his IMDb page to his twenty-two-year-old self, that Grant Shepard would think he could drop dead tomorrow and have achieved his life’s ambitions.
But that was before her.
Before he’d had the maddening, exhilarating experience of loving someone who casually thought he could and should do better, that he hadn’t reached the peaks of his potential yet.
“It’s a curse,” Helen had said to him once, when he had expressed admiration that she always seemed to create new goals for herself as soon as she achieved them. She’d smiled, a little wistfully. “I’ll never truly be happy. I know as soon as I have the thing I want, there’ll be something just . . . peeking into view over there, that I want just as desperately.”
He thinks of their Forest Falls trip, back in early November, and how she’d called up to Suraya, “I hate hiking anyway.”
Helen is a mountain climber if he’s ever known one, and he thinks he would have been happy to climb mountains with her for the rest of their lives. He would have reminded her to stop sometimes, to look back on how far she’d come and take some time to enjoy it. And she’d have helped him to keep walking past the familiar peaks he’d already climbed and circled before, urging them both onward. Come on, there’s a better view just around the corner.
He wonders if maybe he could do that for himself. If loving Helen—even if it was never really his right to love her in the first place—means he gets to carry some version of her with him forever. She hopes he’ll get over this. He doesn’t want to get over this, over her, at all. He wants to hold on to this hurt and wrap it in plastic and store it somewhere safe, because it’s probably all he’ll ever have left of her.
The last day his badge gives him access to the lot, Grant packs up his laptop and walks through the soundstages on his way to the parking lot. The main unit is filming on location somewhere else and the scent of sawdust is thick in the air, as the art director oversees the construction of a new set for the last six episodes of the season.
They’re tearing down a coffee shop set they built weeks ago for his episode to make room for it, and his footsteps leave a trail in the sawdust as he walks through the space. On the other side of the now defunct coffee shop is a bedroom set for the main character of the series—it’s Helen’s favorite of their standing sets. He remembers her hitting him on the shoulder the first time the writers room did a walk-through of the soundstages and they reached the bedroom.
“It’s so good,” she kept saying. “It looks exactly like how I pictured it. They’re so good.”
And the art team is good. He’s pretty sure they’ve won their fair share of Emmys in the last decade.
But he thinks it’s also a credit to Helen, that when she pictures something—a bedroom, a goal, a future, she finds a way to turn it into a reality. He wishes she’d been able to picture a future with him in it. If she’d wanted it enough, he’s certain, somehow, they would have found a way to make it work.
He sits down on the floor of the fake bedroom and listens as the walls of the coffee shop fall down on the other side, the buzzing chain saws filling the air with even more sawdust.
His phone rings then, and it’s his mom.
“Grant, sweetie, you’ll never believe what’s happened.”
He listens and reacts appropriately as she tells him that the sale on the house closed very suddenly over the weekend, and they have some contractors (she Yelped them this time!) coming to do some work, and so she has just three weeks until she’s off to Ireland. The sheep farm isn’t even ready for her, but it’ll give her a chance to explore all the parts of the country that aren’t close by.
“Now, I still have some boxes of your stuff, if you want them, or I can put them in storage, it’s no problem. There’s just some things that are too heavy to ship, you know? Like your nightstands and the couch in your bedroom, which I tried to donate but, honey, no one wants them.”
He’s about to tell her not to bother, to just toss it, when it suddenly occurs to him that he might never see his childhood home or have any reason to return to Dunollie, New Jersey, ever again after this.
“No,” he finds himself saying. “I’ll come pick them up. I’ll drive.”
The next day, he leases a fuel-efficient SUV he’s been contemplating purchasing for a while and puts his convertible up for sale on a used-car group. He packs a week’s worth of clothes and realizes Helen still has his favorite T-shirt. He decides she can keep that souvenir.
He opts for the faster, slightly less scenic route that takes him through the red rocks of Arizona and reminds him of Saturday-morning cartoons, watching the Road Runner meep meep through desert landscapes and roads that seem to stretch for infinity.
He sees the signs for the Grand Canyon and impulsively makes a detour, because he can’t remember the last time he saw it with his own eyes. He buys a disposable camera at a gas station and has a mental image of himself asking random strangers to take his solo photo at the Grand Canyon, and them looking at him with pity. They don’t know I was homecoming king in ’08, he thinks, and laughs to himself.
He forgets the camera in his car when he gets there, but it doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t think photos would do the scene justice anyway. He sits on a craggy rock and stares out at the sweeping vista, full of burnt reds and blue-purples and the slightest hints of green peppering the carved valley below him.
He decides he’ll either get over Helen by Chicago or buy a plane ticket and move to some remote island in Greece that’s accessible only by boat and build cabinets for the rest of his life.
Neither of those things happens, of course.
He thinks about calling her when he takes a wrong turn in Oklahoma and ends up driving late into the night through the flat plains of Kansas. He doesn’t, but the thought keeps him alert and awake enough to make it safely to his hotel in Wichita. Thanks, crackerjack, he thinks, and it barely even hurts that time.
He gets on the road early and, after ten hours of driving, reaches the apartment of Julie Swain, a college friend who moved to Chicago for the improv scene and offered up her couch when she saw him posting scenes from his cross-country trip on Instagram.
They run down the block to a convenience store so Julie can pick up some toilet paper—he thinks it’s for him and insists on paying for it, but it turns out it’s for her sketch comedy group that’s meeting tomorrow. She buys a six-pack of beers and they put on a nature documentary in the background when they get back to her living room.
“So what’s next for Grant Shepard?” she asks as he twists open a second bottle for each of them.
“Well, I was thinking about finishing this beer and then using some of that toilet paper I bought your sketch comedy troupe.”
She laughs and shoves him on the shoulder. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I know, I’m such an avoidant bastard, aren’t I?” Grant grins and sips from the glass bottle. “No, I have stuff lined up. This big Netflix thing I signed so many NDAs for I may have sold them my left nipple somewhere in the mix. And then after that, I don’t know. Something’ll come up.”
“That’s great,” she says, and their shoulders touch lightly.
He thinks maybe there’s a world where something could have happened between them once, back in college. But enough time has passed and they’ve settled into something easier and more comfortable—the companionship of old friends. He wonders if enough time will ever pass for him to have a conversation like this with Helen.
“What’s up?” she asks, looking sideways at him. “You’re, like, a million miles away.”
“Nothing,” he says, then thinks better of it. “Can I ask a weird favor?”
She nods, and maybe it’s the beer, but he plows ahead: “Can I borrow your phone to make a call, and if they call you back tomorrow, just say it was a wrong number or try to sell them car insurance or something?”
Julie stares at him for a beat, and he detects a pitying note when she silently pulls out her phone and hands it to him.
He takes the stairs up to the roof to make the call, even though it’s still cold enough in late March for there to be puddles of melting snow up there. He knows Helen doesn’t answer unknown numbers, so he’s surprised when he hears a laughing “Hello? Shhh—I’m on the phone! Hello?”
He swallows hard and listens to the sound of music—“cooking with friends,” probably—and her breathing in the background. He stands there for what feels like forever, stupidly grateful to hear her existing at the same time as him, before the phone clicks and she hangs up.
His call log tells him the call was four seconds long.
Helen hangs up, and there’s a funny feeling at the back of her neck when she sets her phone down.
“Must’ve been a wrong number,” she tells Nicole.
Defying all expectations, her parents left LA the day after Helen got out of the hospital. She hasn’t called them since, and they haven’t called her. It’s been almost five weeks. She isn’t sure what to make of the silence and she gets an uncomfortable feeling of shame and guilt in her stomach when she thinks about it too much—like she did whenever she made a messy spill as a kid and tried to hide the results from her parents.
She hasn’t heard from Grant either, not since the writers room officially ended and there was no reason to look forward to seeing his name in her inbox every day, even if it was just on a distro list for the daily prep schedule. She hasn’t talked to him since that day in the pink hospital room and her heart still speeds up just thinking about it.
She knows he’s on a cross-country trip and is somewhere in Chicago eating tacos with someone named “Julie” right now. It’s embarrassing how much she knows. She’s been watching his Instagram stories from the official Ivy Papers account and she thinks she’ll probably always associate tapping to log into that shiny, pre-verified account with stalking Grant Shepard.
Nicole has all but moved into her condo to help her around as she heals. At this point, Helen can mostly get everything she needs for herself but Nicole insists on staying anyway.
“Your place is nicer than mine and I can’t come over if you accidentally slip and die in the bathtub,” she says, and Helen’s honestly grateful for the company. She hasn’t had a roommate in seven years and she’s forgotten how nice it is to have someone to share chores and meals and thoughts with.
Nicole tells her about the new show she’s writing on, some godawful mockumentary about suburban parents in a competitive e-sports league, but the people running the show are really great and her reps think it’ll establish her more firmly in the comedy space, which she’s been trying to break into since, oh forever.
“Not that I don’t appreciate our dramarama time together.” Nicole pats Helen’s arm. “It brought me to this condo.”
Helen laughs and wonders what she’ll do next month, when production’s over and she has to either find a place of her own in LA or move back to New York. Or move somewhere else? She isn’t sure at all where she’s going next and thinks randomly of Lisa Shepard and her Irish sheep farm plans.
“How do you feel, when you think about New York?” Nicole asks, when Helen mulls over her impending decisions out loud.
“Well, it’s where I lived for so long. And it’s a great city,” Helen says. “There’s always something happening, people living their lives out in the open right in front of you. It’s kind of relentless but also kind of good, if you’re a writer? And it’s beautiful in the fall, and at Christmas. Walkable, which LA isn’t.”
“I didn’t ask for facts. I asked for feelings,” Nicole says. “Like how do you feel, in your body?”
This is the kind of LA hippie question Helen’s New York friends probably would have laughed at, then written into a novel, alongside references to green juice and hiking. But Helen tilts her head and closes her eyes.
“I feel . . . even,” she says. “Like something’s tugging down a little, and up a little, and I’m right . . . here.”
She touches her chest, opens her eyes, and feels slightly embarrassed. But Nicole nods, like this makes perfect sense.
“How do you feel when you think about staying in LA?”
Helen’s breath gives an involuntary shudder and she closes her eyes tightly. She can feel the frown and tries to smooth it, but somehow that makes her think of Grant. She takes a heaving breath then, and swallows, and it feels like too much, like her chest is full and her head is too tight and she wants to gasp for air, and then she does and she’s crying suddenly, out of nowhere, and her eyes aren’t even shut anymore but she can’t see anything, all she can see is the floral pattern on Nicole’s navy pajama pants, and Nicole says, “Oh, honey,” and strokes Helen’s hair soothingly like an anxious pet in her lap.
“I loved him, I really did,” she babbles stupidly into Nicole’s pajama pants.
“I know,” Nicole says softly.
“I loved him, and he loved me, and it’s over now, and I’ll never get it back,” she cries.
“You don’t know that,” Nicole says.
“I do, though,” Helen says. “He hates me now. And I hate me now. I’m such a stupid—dumb—crying mess.”
“Yeah,” Nicole says sympathetically. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe don’t hate yourself.”
“The worst part is I think he meant it,” she says. “I think he would take me back if I asked, but eventually, he’d meet some cool LA director chick who really gets him and doesn’t come with the—the family and the history that I do and he could be happy with her and he wouldn’t really even consider it but I would know deep down I was keeping him from who he was really meant to be with, and, and . . .”
Helen takes a few deep, shuddering gasps.
“This is some wild fanfic you’re spinning, babe,” Nicole says, and rubs her back gently. “I can’t wait to hear where it goes. And?”
“And it would kill me,” she says. “Knowing I was standing between Grant and his happily ever after.”
“Well, that’s why you did what you did,” Nicole says.
“I never told him I loved him back,” Helen says.
“He knows, though.”
“But I never told him, why couldn’t I tell him?”
Helen knows she isn’t making any sense and she cries for the loss of her good words and him and how just out of reach everything feels, and eventually she runs out of tears and Nicole brings her a mug of tea and says gently, “So it sounds like New York takes the lead.”
Dunollie, New Jersey, in the spring is mostly muddy gray skies and fog, especially at the top of the mountain, but Grant finds he doesn’t mind it so much.
“I was hoping you’d bring the California sunshine with you,” his mom says as she kisses him on the cheek. He feels like he’s been stooping lower for her kisses lately and the thought makes him sadder than anything about closing up their big old house for good.
The house is covered in cardboard boxes and awkward lengths of leftover Bubble Wrap, and he has no idea how Lisa Shepard intends to be out of here completely in two weeks. When he goes downstairs to check the basement, though, he’s startled.
“Wow,” he says involuntarily.
“I know,” she says next to him, and they both stare at the empty space.
Grant used to be jealous of his friends with finished basements, where they could hang out and their feet would stay warm because they had carpeting and recessed lighting in the home theater section. His own basement was a cold, always slightly damp room, where everything his parents didn’t want to find a home for ended up. His old bicycles, Dad’s old receipts, Mom’s boxes and boxes of family photos and the ghosts of Christmas party decorations past.
It looks like a blank space now, and maybe the next family to live here will add carpeting and heating and a home theater of their own. He frowns, and some homesick feeling pings in his chest.
“Who bought the house?” he asks, his voice coming out scratchy and unfamiliar.
“Oh, this charming couple,” his mom says, and leads the way back upstairs. “Newlyweds, and so obviously in love. They met in college and broke up and got back together and it all sounds very tortured but they make it sound so funny now, I think their kids will be stand-up comics.”
Grant nods and follows her up past the boxes to the second floor.
“I put all your boxes in your room.” She waves a hand at the second door on the right. “I sold your bed, because I didn’t think you’d be coming back. But there’s the couch, and I still have your old sleeping bag somewhere.”
“From when I was in seventh grade?” Grant lifts a brow.
“Point taken,” Mom says.
Grant ends up driving to the local A&P to buy himself a blow-up mattress, figuring it’ll be useful enough to take back with him. Mom sends him out with a list of short-term groceries—frozen pizzas, rotisserie chicken, that kind of thing. He remembers hanging out in the parking lot of this A&P with Lauren DiSantos his last summer in Dunollie before college, and he suddenly wants to get out of New Jersey as soon as possible.
“Excuse me, can you get that cake mix for me?”
Grant looks down and the sight splashes over him like a bucket of ice water. It’s Helen’s mother, and she looks equally surprised to see him, standing here in the lazy baking aisle of their local A&P. He remembers then that he’s wearing a baseball cap and wonders vaguely if he should apologize for accidentally hoodwinking her.
He reaches up for an angel food cake mix on the top shelf. “This one?”
He looks back at Helen’s mother, half expecting her to be gone. But she just nods mutely. He hands it to her, and she takes it. She doesn’t look up at him, but stays rooted to the spot, staring at Betty Crocker’s name. She opens her mouth and shuts it a few times, and he’s not sure if she’s gasping for air or trying to say something.
How is she, he wants to ask, but doesn’t.
Helen’s mother puts the box in her cart and turns around sharply, leaving him alone in the cake mix aisle.
He thinks maybe this is the first time he’s heard her real voice.
He blows up the mattress in his bedroom and stares at his couch for so long, he thinks he could summon the ghosts of his and Helen’s past selves if he tried hard enough. He swallows when he thinks of that night—it’s one he’s revisited so many times in his memory, it’s probably haunting him all the way back to LA.
The following Monday, he decides to take a train into the city, and his mom stares at him in surprise.
“But you hate the city,” she says, and she’s not wrong.
When he exits Penn Station, his feet start walking automatically up Seventh Avenue. He takes a right at Times Square, passing tourists and comedy show promoters and Broadway marquee signs, and keeps walking until he reaches the green picnic tables at Bryant Park.
“I used to write at the public library next to Bryant Park,” Helen once said on a podcast, which he had listened to out loud to annoy her because he’d loved the embarrassed pink tinge on her cheeks. “Then I’d take lunch breaks in the park and watch old men play chess.”
He buys a sandwich from a kiosk, even though it’s only a quarter till eleven and barely any old men are playing chess. He wonders if there’s any world where their paths could have crossed differently. He’s been to the city half a dozen times in the last six years for work, usually against his will, hating it the whole time. He’s even been to Bryant Park, sat at these very picnic tables. But would he have recognized her in the crowd? And if he had, would he have done anything about it? What if they hadn’t known each other at all in high school, what then? Would some essential part of him still have recognized some essential part of her?
He spends the following hour in the library next door, wandering from floor to floor of the labyrinthine building, wondering which spots were Helen’s favorites. He can see how their show was inspired by these Beaux Arts marble halls, the gilded ceilings, the church-like atmosphere that has everyone speaking in hushed tones as soon as they cross the front doors.
A librarian informs him there isn’t a young adult section in this research library, so he buys a tote bag and a magnet from the gift shop downstairs and walks out the door to a depressingly modern lending library across the street. He looks for the Ivy Papers on the shelves. There’s only two volumes from the four-book series available on the shelf, and the corner of his mouth lifts at this. She’s in demand. He plucks the thicker of the two available options, the second book (her least favorite), and heads in search of an open chair.
He spends his afternoon reading Helen Zhang’s writing. He thinks he can hear her voice sometimes in the best friend character, and her love interest. It feels like the most he’s held of her in a long time and he savors the feeling, though it aches too.
The sun is low in the sky by the time he leaves the library, and he walks slowly back toward Penn Station.
He’s about to drift off to sleep on the train, when he looks out the window and his heart stops.
Standing there on the platform, just disembarking from an opposite train—surely it isn’t, except yes, it is—it’s her.
Helen, in the flesh. She’s wearing a familiar gray wool coat and a sling for her arm. Her hair is down and she looks annoyed and he knows in his gut it’s her.
The train whistles and she looks up in his direction just then, as if she knows exactly where to find him. He registers the surprise on her face, the way her mouth drops a little, and her brow furrows.
He stands immediately and moves down the train compartment.
She walks toward the train too, and the motion is so smooth, he realizes the train is already leaving the station. He feels a certain panic rise, that he might never see her again, that she’s not really even there and this is just an apparition of her he’s conjured up from haunting her old haunts.
But she sees him too, and he knows it’s real. He slams the window when he reaches the end of the train and watches as she reaches the end of the platform. She grows smaller and smaller, and he thinks he sees her pick up her phone, and he looks down to see his own has no signal. A voice on the intercom tells him “This is the 4:13 p.m. Raritan Valley Line, bound for Secaucus.”
When they leave the tunnel and the electric-blue light of the sky filters into the train, he pulls out his phone and dumbly stares at it, waiting for bars of reception to appear. Nothing. As the train carries him farther and farther away, he becomes less and less sure he saw her at all. He doesn’t have any missed calls or voicemails or texts appearing with his increasing signal. By the time he reaches Westfield and has three full bars of reception, though, he doesn’t care anymore and—fuck it—calls her.
“Hello, this is Helen. Please leave your message after the tone.”
He registers the fact that it rang twice before it went to voicemail and feels the brutal sting of rejection. He swallows.
Enough.
When he gets off the train at Dunollie, he deletes her number from his phone.
Helen shoots an apologetic look to the librarian of the New York Public Library, then checks her phone. Missed Call—Grant Shepard.
She hasn’t seen the shape of his name on her phone in so long, she almost has a heart attack. It was him, on that train on the too-hot platform with too many people and too many millimeters of glass for her to be sure she hadn’t just seen a ghost. She shoves her notebook into her bag with a trembling hand and fumbles with her coat. She walks out of her favorite library in the world as fast as she possibly can, which, as it turns out, isn’t very fast at all.
By the time she’s finally on the ground floor, her breath is coming out in panicked spurts and when she gets outside to Fifth Avenue, people glance at her like maybe they need to call someone for her.
She pulls up her call log and her thumb hovers over his name.
He’d pick up, she’s sure of it. She’d call, and he’d pick up, and she’d tell him she’s moved back into her old apartment in New York that doesn’t feel like home anymore, and she misses him so much her heart hurts all the time, and she loves him so much she sometimes can’t fathom a world where she’s ever truly happy again. He’d come back and she’d blow off her plans for a reconciliation dinner with her parents tomorrow, and she’d be able to touch him again, and—and—and . . .
. . . she would make it impossible for either of them to move on.
Let him go, she reminds herself sharply. He deserves a happy, normal life with a happy, extraordinary someone.
The kind of woman who deserves Grant would have found him on the right coast, the one he calls home, and he would have opened his arms and she would have fallen into them for the first time and known it was her favorite place in the world right away. She wouldn’t have had to fight a terrible, confusing mixture of compulsions to flee and burrow at the same time, choosing ultimately to flee. The kind of woman who deserves Grant would have known what she had when she had it, and wouldn’t have waited until weeks later to weep and wallow over the loss of him in a bathtub for so long, she now knows what her toes would look like if she drowned. The kind of woman who deserves Grant would be capable of the kind of love that keeps little sisters alive.
Grant Shepard deserves a Hollywood movie ending, with swelling music and sweeping camera movements and kissing in the rain. This movie would have an epilogue with warm lighting and dad jokes and family dinners in a summer garden over the end credits.
And Helen Zhang has never been built for that kind of uncomplicated happily ever after.