Thirty-Two

Thirty-Two

Four Months Later

Helen flies into Bob Hope Airport in Burbank when she returns to LA in August for the press tour and premiere. It’s a much smaller airport than she expects, possibly the smallest airport she’s ever been to that still deserves the name. The walls have a sandy beige carpeting to them that looks like it’s been there since the days of Mad Men and hasn’t been cleaned since. There’s exactly one kiosk with no good food options, and she thinks better of buying a five-dollar bottled water at the last second. But she gets from her gate to the baggage claim in under a minute and it’s an easy shuttle ride to pick up her rental car from the structure up the street. She probably could have walked, honestly.

It’s a good airport and she’s glad she specifically requested it. She’s in LA for just two weeks—the studio is covering her expenses and they’ve given her a packed ten-day itinerary of interviews, photo calls with the cast, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and drinks with people (executives, publicists, actors). She barely has time to think about Grant Shepard at all, and when she does, her thoughts always seem to cluster around the Ivy Papers premiere night (next Wednesday, August 24, seven p.m., the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel) and whether or not he’ll attend.

Helen tries to focus on things like what she’s wearing (Nicole convinces her to work with a stylist), what she wants to say to the room at large (she writes a speech, a short one about gratitude and dreams come true), and what she’ll do with her hair (what would Grant like more? she wonders, then ignores the thought, then decides to wear it down—no, up).

She wonders if he’ll bring someone to the premiere, then viciously reminds herself this is what you wanted for him. She isn’t foolish enough to think someone like Grant Shepard would stay on the market for long (You’re getting me for below market price, at great value, he once told her). If this happens, she will smile and nod and be friendly.

Over the next week and a half, as she’s driving to meetings and walking up to alfresco dining establishments, she has entire conversations in her head with Grant and his fictional date.

It’s so great to meet you, she tells this faceless, effortlessly perfect creature. Grant’s so lucky to have you in his life.

Yes, Grant and I knew each other in high school, she confirms to this woman who definitely exists. No, we didn’t talk much back then. We got to know each other a little better in the room, though. What a funny way to run into someone from your past.

No, I’m not in love with your future husband, she tells this feminine paragon who has the face of Natalie Portman and the charitable nature of Mother Teresa. If you invited me to your wedding, I would totally come.

I’m so happy for you, she tells Grant in her head over and over and over. Me? I’m doing really well, actually.

She never gets the delivery quite right. Maybe she should try something else.

Me? I’m not sure I know how to feel things anymore.

Helen is doing well, though, if anyone asks anyone else. Her New York life has resumed as she once hoped. Going away to Hollywood and returning has made her something of a prodigal friend in her old author circles, and Helen has found it surprisingly easy to revert to an earlier draft of herself.

Helen gazes out a window overlooking Hollywood Boulevard now, on the eighth floor of the historic (and supposedly haunted, her publicist noted conspiratorially) hotel where they’re hosting the Ivy Papers press junket. She mentally maps the familiar streets she’d take to get to Grant’s house from here. She’d drive down that long stretch of boulevard lined with palm trees and billboards, and in just fifteen short minutes, she’d be there.

But then the elevator dings its arrival, the doors open and she heads toward the press junket on the mezzanine floor instead.

Wednesday, August 24, 8:15 p.m.

It’s the night of the premiere and Grant is on his second—maybe third? fuck, who cares—glass of scotch. It’s been four months since that day on the train, and he’s spent every day since telling himself to move the fuck on, that Helen Zhang clearly wants nothing to do with him, that someday he’ll probably see she’s gotten married to some nice, normal guy her parents probably love and Grant will be happy she got what she wanted after all, because he’s healed and moved on too. And every night before he drifts off to sleep, he resolves, I’ll try harder tomorrow.

He thinks maybe he was holding out his last, barely there thread of hope for this night. He’s sitting in his home office, wearing a tailored suit he put on two hours ago with every intention of walking out the door in. He still might.

He had received the emailed invitation to the Ivy Papers premiere party weeks ago and given it a few moments’ consideration before thinking fuck it and RSVP’ing for one. He had watched as that bulleted event on his calendar drew closer and closer—that looming green dot on his iCal was a better jolt of wake up! than caffeine. He watched Helen’s Instagram stories like a shitty montage of self-inflicted misery, from her touchdown at Bob Hope Airport on Sunday to her whirlwind press tour reposts to vague snapshots of meetings and lunches at various Beverly Hills restaurants and rooftops, all in the wrong goddamn direction.

Grant reminds himself this was part of the deal, that they would cut off direct contact once everything ended. The days passed with nothing to contradict this in his inbox.

He couldn’t sleep last night—he blamed it on a third act problem he was having in the new pilot he was breaking. He’d gone into his office, stared at the Scrivener document where he kept all his notes and outline drafts organized, and then suddenly remembered the only reason he even knew about Scrivener in the first place was because of a time he and Helen had been working at a coffee shop together. He’d been tabbing back and forth between an outline in Google Docs and his script in Final Draft and noticed she was using writing software he had never seen before.

He feels a weird itch to delete the program from his laptop now.

Grant loosens his tie and stares at his shoes across the room. Get up and put them on, he tries to mentally command himself.

Instead, his brain decides to play its new favorite game—what scene comes next?

Grant tries to redirect his thoughts, but the movie starts anyway—

INT. SOME FANCY FUCKING VENUE – NIGHT

Grant enters. He sees Helen right away. She sees him too.

GRANT

Helen. I know what you said in that hospital, and I know you ignored my call that day on the train, and I know I haven’t heard a goddamn word from you since, but . . . I’d let you break my heart a thousand more times in exchange for just one more night.

Helen reaches out and places a hand on Grant’s heart. She smiles at him sadly. He covers her hand with his.

A beat. She smiles, he frowns, and she pushes her hand farther, farther, until there’s a POP and a CRUNCH and her hand is in his fucking chest.

HELEN

Does this hurt? Sorry.

Helen pulls out Grant’s bleeding, still-beating heart with a triumphant smile. She holds it between them, then spikes it on the ground.

Grant snorts. He sips his scotch and mentally switches to the next film reel.

INT. / EXT. GRANT’S HOUSE – NIGHT

The doorbell rings. Grant opens the door. It’s Helen. They stare at each other. Words aren’t necessary.

They move toward each other at the same time—lips meeting, hands searching, bodies crashing. He pulls her into his house and out of her clothes.

The rest of this movie goes full NC-17.

Grant glances at the door stupidly, hopefully. Nothing.

He glances at the clock. It’s a quarter past nine p.m.

The screening’s over. They’re probably at the after-party by now.

His phone dings and his heart leaps and it’s the old writers room group chat, resurrected by photos of Owen, shirtless, wearing sunglasses and a shit-eating grin. Happy premiere night from Bali xx, the text reads.

Grant thinks about chucking his phone off a cliff. But that would require getting up and walking out the door.

He tries one last scenario—

INT. GRANT’S OFFICE – NIGHT

Grant sits at his desk, replaying every memory he’s ever had of Helen, drinking away the taste of her.

He texts the group chat—looks like a hell of a party, sorry to miss it!!!

He looks up the hotel where they’re hosting the premiere. He sends her roses, without a note.

Grant pours himself another drink. He gets mind-numbingly drunk alone. Tomorrow, he will download Hinge and swipe until he fucking feels something.

He decides to go with the last one, in the end.

Wednesday, August 24, 9:30 p.m.

looks like a hell of a party, sorry to miss it!!!

Helen stares at the text in the old group chat—the first contact of any kind from Grant since that missed call in the New York Public Library—and an awful, drowning sensation floods her chest, overflowing from that one locked room of unwanted memories and useless emotions. She looks around at the loud, glamorous party that’s celebrating the culmination of so many years of hard work and mind over matter and productive uses of personal pain.

They’re in a ballroom that’s hosted nearly a century’s worth of glittering, glamorous parties, and the vintage dress she’s wearing is a constricting, beautiful thing made from layers of cinched black tulle and tiny hand-sewn crystals. It felt perfect when she put it on hours ago, and it feels utterly pointless now.

The room is decked in a fortune of florals and ice sculptures and she has the strangest thought just then, that they’re all dancing on a sinking ship and she’s the only one who knows. A waiter passes by with a platter of oysters, and the disco ball above the dance floor casts tiny, rippling reflections of the blue party lights. Helen realizes with sudden dread, maybe it’s too late and we’ve already sunk.

What else did you expect?

She searches for a way out of this mental spiral and discovers instead a small, secret compartment of hope she must have deliberately ignored these last four months—some tiny part of her that must have whispered this whole time, maybe just seeing him again will fix everything.

She hates herself for her own inconsistency. Foolish, stupid Helen, she admonishes herself. Haven’t you already filled your quota of pointless regret?

Across the dance floor, the lead actors are having a dance-off with Suraya, Tom, and Nicole, while Eve and the rest of the cast hold up comically large scorecards from the sidelines. The blue-purple party lights cast an otherworldly glow on the bizarre scene, and Helen thinks she could probably go over there and smile and laugh and dance and ignore this numbing dead feeling growing inside her for another fifteen or twenty minutes.

But what if it’s too late by then?

If she ignores her feelings for another moment, she might never feel anything again. Helen suspects she knows this because she’s done it before, and the long stretch of time between Michelle’s funeral and those first thudding starts of emotion with Grant were marked by a vast stretch of nothing, nothing, nothing.

So she slips off her designer heels and heads for the elevator, dodging overly familiar producers and curious strangers as she goes. The elevator doors open, then close, and she finds herself trapped in a mirrored box gasping back sudden tears as the floor jerks upward in that slow, creaking way old elevators have. The doors open again, and a wall of framed black-and-white photographs of the not-so-distant Hollywood past blurs as she rushes down the carpeted hallway to her room at the end of the floor.

There are roses and a bottle of champagne waiting outside her door, along with a note.

Congratulations on a job well done!

With love from,

Suraya, Grant, Owen, Nicole, Saskia, Tom, Eve, and the entire Ivy Papers family <3

Helen isn’t sure why this note is instantly the bleakest thing she’s ever read in her life, and she hastens to open the heavy mahogany door before anyone sees her ugly cry over absolutely nothing. She opens the champagne and drinks straight from the bottle. She takes the bouquet of roses, opens her window, and viciously deheads them one at a time—fluttering red bombs of petals onto the boulevard below. He hates me, he hates me not.

She opens her laptop and pulls up the document she’s been working on for the last four months—the one she still hasn’t told her agent about in case it all falls apart.

Letters You’ll Never Read.scriv.

It’s a working title, a placeholder for a pithier, more audience-tested title, if she ever reaches the finish line. When she reaches the finish line. Each chapter is a letter to Michelle, the completion of an old therapy prompt (and what would you say to your sister, if you could talk to her now?) that Helen resolutely rejected for the last fourteen years as she combed Michelle’s hard drive looking for a suicide letter instead.

She’s written of old gossip and future plans, catalogued childhood memories and collected lessons learned into a rambling one-way correspondence to be edited into something resembling a book later.

But she doesn’t have an ending.

Helen opens her Scrivener file to the blank last chapter, labeled—Here’s Where I Leave You. It’s the one she’s been putting off.

Why not now, why not here. Helen takes another swig of champagne.

Her cursor blinks back at her.

Then she starts typing.

Dear Michelle,

I’ve finally given up on hearing from you first.

Dear Michelle,

More than an afterlife, I hope someday I’ll turn a corner and there you’ll be. I’ll get everything right this time.

Dear Michelle,

Before I say goodbye, I want you to know that I’ve been doing just fine without you. I don’t feel any guilt at all because it wasn’t my fault, and fuck you one more time by the way, and I refuse to miss someone who didn’t want to be here in the first place.

I want you to know all of that, but I’m starting to suspect it’s my own bullshit that I have to get better at detecting.

I’m not fine. I haven’t been for a while, and I blamed you for so long because the last thing you ever did was teach me how much loving can hurt.

I loved you and you left anyway. I tried not to dwell on it, tried not to ask myself how I could have done everything better, tried not to feel anything. And then two months after you died, I went to college and I told a boy I loved him, a week after we met. He was embarrassed, and I laughed out loud and told him I didn’t mean it of course, it had just felt like too perfect a moment to pass up saying it out loud. I never had before, not even to you. I wasted my first I love you, and after that I didn’t want to say it to anyone else, ever again.

Then I fell in love for the first time, for real.

It made me want to fix something I’d been pretending wasn’t broken: my own barely beating heart.

The problem is, I don’t know where to begin.

If I was writing one of those science-fiction novels Dad used to read to us, I’d start by inventing time travel and going back to our last fight in my bedroom. I’d come knock on your door and I’d tell you I’m sorry, and I love you.

And then I’d push that lever back even farther, and I’d find our grandparents and I’d teach them how to say those things to our parents first.

And then I’d come back to the present day to see what was different.

Maybe nothing.

Since this isn’t a science-fiction story, I’ll start here instead:

I’m sorry for all the ways I hurt you while you were living, and I wish you could be sorry for all the ways you’ve hurt me since you died. If I had a second chance, I would do so many things differently. But I couldn’t get behind the steering wheel of your life that night and force you to stay, and I’ve been mad at you for so long without it changing a damn thing.

That’s suited me fine up till now. You’re the demon I don’t want to exorcise. If I heal and move on, I’m worried I’ll finally lose you for good. But I want to be healthy. And I want to be happy, though I’ve never trusted happiness. To me, happiness is a fleeting, heartbeat-to-heartbeat experience that comes and goes and hopefully comes back. I worry happily-ever-afters don’t exist for people like us.

So here’s the ending I’ll try to write instead:

The kind of ending where I don’t have to leave you behind even as I move forward, because you’re always a part of me—even if that part feels like a hole in my heart. (Loving can hurt, and I want to do it anyway.)

The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.

I’ve always found endings harder than beginnings, goodbyes harder than hellos. When I was a kid, I had this idea—a hope, really—that life and death were two sides of the same door, and that when you died, there would be a long hallway in the afterlife where you would walk past the doors of all the lives you’d lived before. My theory was that in that hallway, you’d be able to remember every single life you’d ever lived, and if you concentrated all your effort on it, you could take a single intention or lesson with you, before opening the next door and starting your next life.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again. I don’t have much faith in heaven or an afterlife these days. But I’ve been wrong about many things in this life so maybe I’m wrong about that too. I don’t think anyone living can know, and I’m not in a rush to find out.

Still—I hope this is the kind of story where there’s an epilogue. One day I’ll turn the last page, and suddenly—there you’ll be. And I’ll walk up to another chance to get everything right, this time.

I’d start by telling you, “I love you.”

I’ll keep hoping for the both of us.

Helen

Helen hits export on the document and attaches it in an email to her agent before she can think better of it.

To: Chelsea Pierce

Subject: I’ve been writing

could be something, could be nothing. wanted to write it anyway.

Helen pauses, then clicks forward email.

To: Grant Shepard

I don’t want to surprise you later, so I’m sending you the manuscript I’m working on now. The last chapter is relevant. If there’s anything you’d like me to take out, I’m happy to have a conversation.

Will be in town through the rest of the week, if that’s helpful to know.

Yours,

Helen