Four
“I like your name,” the hostess says as she flashes Grant Shepard a smile across the check-in stand.
Helen thinks she might have to turn around and get back in her car immediately. She’s standing on the sidewalk outside the alfresco restaurant in Mid-City where they agreed to meet and Grant is flirting with the hostess.
“I can’t take credit for it,” he says with an easy grin. “But thanks. I like yours too.”
“We need another menu,” Helen says irritably.
Grant and the hostess-with-the-name-he-likes (Rose, her name tag reads) both glance in Helen’s direction, as if they’ve just remembered her.
“Of course,” Rose the hostess says, shooting Grant a sympathetic look as she grabs another menu. “Right this way.”
They’re seated at a patio table that overlooks the street, under the shade of a vining bougainvillea. Helen is suddenly aware of how visible they are and regrets agreeing to this meeting. His (no subject) email had been short and unexpected—Would like to connect before the room starts, if you’re open. Lunch?
She had forwarded the email to her agent’s assistant, who understood the tacit assignment and coordinated a time and place without fuss or direct contact between them.
“So,” she says, after the waiter has offered them both still and sparkling water, read off the day’s specials (beef tagliata, Italian wedding soup), taken their lunch orders, and left.
Finally.
“So,” Grant agrees, with a hesitant kind of smile. She imagines this must be his best weapon in any argument.
“What did you want to talk about?” Helen asks.
Grant pauses, as if considering his options.
“I didn’t hear from Suraya after the welcome drinks night,” he says, tapping his sunglasses on the table. “Just her assistant confirming my drive-on access details for Monday.”
Helen looks out toward the street. She hopes he doesn’t think she’s forgiven him.
“If you don’t have the decency to quit, that’s on your conscience,” she says. “I’m not going to sabotage the room with last-minute problems, even if I should have known about them sooner.”
She sends him a look of pointed disgust. Grant’s mouth twitches, like he finds this funny somehow. She hates that she always feels ridiculous trying to wear her own anger—like it’s the wrong size after too many winters spent at the back of her closet.
“That’s the thing about Hollywood,” he says, pouring them both a refill of water. “Very few truly decent people left in our industry.”
She gets the impression that he’s laughing internally at her—poor Helen and her silly morals—and finds herself craving that feeling of bloodthirsty victory over him again.
“I bet you think you’re decent,” she says idly, as he lifts his glass for a drink. “Sorry I killed your sister, let me buy you lunch.”
Grant’s glass freezes on its way to his mouth. He sets it down and she watches the veins on his neck work rather spectacularly.
“Helen,” he says quietly. “I think we should set some ground rules.”
“Ground rules,” she repeats slowly. The shape of his words feel strange on her tongue.
“If we’re both going to be in the room, it’s in the best interests of the show for us to be . . . friendly,” Grant says. “Writer to writer.”
You’re too good-looking to be a writer, Helen immediately wants to say out loud. You didn’t have an awkward teen phase that forced you to develop a rich interior life to compensate.
His tousled dark brown hair looks almost chestnut in the sun and the dappled light casts just enough shadow to call attention to the sharp, attractive planes of his face. She thinks it’s bitterly unfair that they share a profession, when he has that face. She remembers Grant Shepard the boy as handsome in a vaguely unattainable way.
Grant Shepard the man is painfully compelling.
“Friendly,” Helen says. “Sure. Professionally, anyway.”
If he notices the addendum, he doesn’t seem to care much. He taps the linen tablecloth, thoughtful.
“We talk a lot about our personal lives in the room,” Grant says. “Your books are set in high school—they’ll probably ask about our shared experiences back then.”
What shared experiences? They never spoke all that much before the accident and they certainly didn’t speak afterward. She thinks that might have been by design, that their teachers and peers carefully steered them in opposite directions those last three weeks of school, as if afraid Helen would one day take out her carefully packaged grief and let it explode all over him inappropriately.
“It’s supposed to be a safe space for discussion,” he says, watching her carefully. “I want to know if there are any topics we’re avoiding. For instance, I wondered how much from your own life you were pulling, with the sister—”
“Michelle is off-limits,” Helen says abruptly. “I don’t want to talk about her. Ever.”
She swallows. She rarely says Michelle’s name out loud these days.
He nods, curt—understood.
The familiar ghost of a thought drifts through her mind—What was it like for you, afterward? It’s a thought she’s always redirected herself from as quickly as possible—because the wondering would inevitably turn to imagining, and the imagining would turn to a moment of voluntary empathy, it must have been fucking terrible for you, and that empathy would mature into guilt—guilt that he even had to think about this thing that Helen herself absolutely refused to let determine more of her life than it already had. And then she would resent the guilt, because she wasn’t the one responsible for him having that memory, and she’d find her way back to anger and the slammed door of her sister’s suicide and who are you really angry with? and the unhealthy spiral would continue and continue until the past and the present blurred into the same reality, reliving instead of reflecting, as her therapist once called it. And so she always resurfaced back around to the general rule that it would be better not to wonder about Grant Shepard at all.
Grant Shepard in the present seems to be waiting for more and Helen tries to clear the haze of old ghosts long enough to find her place in the conversation again.
“Everything else . . . I guess . . . is fair game if it helps the show,” she says.
Grant lifts a brow. “Everything?”
Helen shrugs. “Sure.”
“Who’d you have a crush on in high school?” he asks, leaning back with a frown.
Helen shakes her head and laughs. “No one in your orbit.”
“You’ll have to do better than that, once we’re in the room,” he says, and she feels like she’s just been judged in a competition she wasn’t aware she’d entered. “Specifics are helpful.”
“I know,” she says, annoyed. “I am a writer.”
The food arrives then (handmade pasta for him, a self-conscious salad for her), and she feels him watching her as the waiter sets down a fresh bread basket on the linen tablecloth between them.
“You don’t think we need a safe word for when we’re talking about high school stuff?” he asks, and she isn’t tricked by his easy tone at all—there’s a tense thread of something careful in his entire posture. “What if my feelings get hurt?”
It’s not his own feelings he’s worried about, she thinks, and stabs a crouton.
“I bet you’re tougher than you think,” she says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten the job.”
He barks out a laugh and picks up his fork.
“You know, I am good at my job,” he says, taking a bite of pasta. “Some might argue you’re getting me for below market price, at great value.”
“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have you at all,” Helen reminds him, and wonders how much longer they both have to endure sitting here before they can call the waiter for the check.
If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have you at all.
Grant resists the urge to drag his hand across his face in case it catches and pulls off his mask of pleasant, barely restrained politeness to reveal how he really feels—like a hideous monster, whose own therapist felt the need to remind him, “There are things we can do, but it’s good to ask ourselves if we should do them.”
He knows he should quit. Helen had demanded it so regally of him that first night, he’d briefly imagined himself going down on one knee to kiss the ring and beg forgiveness.
But he’s also pretty sure he can do a good job—a great job, even—and he muses philosophically that while he should have done a lot of things, he’s here now, they’re careening toward inevitability, and wouldn’t it be more of a net positive for everyone involved if he started putting his energy into being helpful?
“Who’s your favorite character?” Grant asks, hoping to put them back in safe territory.
Helen shrugs. “All of them,” she says.
“I like to think I’m a Bellamy, with a Phoebe rising,” Grant quips.
She frowns at him. “You’re not,” she says bluntly.
He’s a little exasperated by this response. We aren’t talking about how you feel about me—we’re talking about the art of adaptation! he wants to say, like the pretentious artist he suspects he secretly is, under the Clark Kent disguise of this Hollywood hack. He has to find a piece of himself in someone else’s work, that’s the entire assignment. He’s developed a talent for it—reading and quickly identifying that part, that’s the shard of glass reflecting back a piece of me. The strangest thing about reading Helen’s book was that he already knew what he was looking for, what he was hoping for, before he ever cracked the spine. But she doesn’t want to talk about that with him.
“The word of god herself.” Grant lifts his water glass, all deference. “Who do you think I am, then?”
“No one,” Helen says, watching him with an unreadable expression. “You were never in the book.”
“I guess I should be grateful for that,” Grant says dryly.
Helen looks back out toward the street, silent.
It was in the early days—when he first started college—that Grant thought about Helen the most. It had been strange to know someone connected to the same tragedy as him was also going through the same off-to-college rituals as him—orientation week and moving into a new dorm and meeting her new roommate and learning her new city. He had wondered how all these experiences looked through her eyes, if she thought about that night as often as he did, or if she could suppress those memories better. Grant had no siblings of his own to fulfill the role of confidant. When he thought of who he’d want to confide in about the aftermath of that night, his thoughts always drifted strangely to Helen Zhang. He remembers one particularly stupid creative writing assignment, for which he had written out all the conversations he wanted to have with her as poems.
Somewhere on an old hard drive, he has shitty poetry about this woman.
Grant studies Helen from across the table now and thinks of how many more mirrored experiences they must have had in the last thirteen years, for them both to end up here. He has the impression that she holds all her real thoughts and feelings behind a shiny, impenetrable wall and it might take all the pickaxes in the world to chip a single hole.
He swings back a mental pickax and tries: “How do you feel about the first day of school on Monday?”
He thinks he catches a glimmer of humor behind her eyes.
“Fine,” she says simply.
He wonders what it would take to make her laugh.
“I know you hate me,” Grant says, stabbing more pasta on his plate. “But this could be fun, if we let it.”
“Stop it,” Helen snaps, and he looks up. She’s angry and he’s surprised by its vehemence as much as its sudden appearance. “I know what you’re doing. You’re being . . . charming, homecoming king, class president Grant Shepard, and I am the one person—the one person—that is not ever going to work on.”
Are you sure about that? he wants to ask, just to get a rise out of her. What if I try really hard this time?
“Okay,” he says instead. “No charm for Helen. Noted.”
He sips his water and starts mentally counting down how many weeks they have left (twenty, give or take a few holiday breaks) until they can walk out of each other’s lives again.
Helen’s mom calls as she drives her rental car back to the west side.
“Oh, you can hang up and call me back when you are not driving,” Mom says, then proceeds to ask twenty “just before you go” questions about how it’s going in LA, does she need one of Mom’s friends in Yorba Linda to come check up on her, what grocery store is she buying her groceries from?
By the time Helen opens the door to her condo, she’s giving a half-hearted account of her trip to 99 Ranch and listing Chinese vegetables while her mother grunts in approval or disapproval.
“You will need to make the water spinach soon,” Mom says. “I will send you a recipe.”
“Okay,” Helen says. “Thanks. Is that everything?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. Helen feels a touch of guilt, spooling from New Jersey to catch her all the way at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
“Just call us back when you can. We know you are busy.”
“Okay, I will,” Helen promises.
She hangs up and rests her forehead against her cabinet doors.
She hasn’t told her parents he’s working on the show.
She knows Mom and Dad have already experienced a few lifetimes’ worth of undeserved pain. Sometimes it feels like she’s spent her entire adult life carefully steering them away from sharp objects and despair.
Helen remembers the feeling of freedom when she finally left for college—she’d spent the summer ferrying food and water between her father, who watched Chinese soap operas nightly in the living room with dull, expressionless eyes, and her mother, who spent days at a time sobbing quietly in the master bedroom between her manic episodes of cleaning the house for the steady stream of visitors coming with food and condolences. Helen herself had stared at the closed door of Michelle’s room every morning and every evening—willing it to open, for Michelle to reveal this had all been some sort of sick goodbye prank. Come out, I dare you.
College was Helen’s first chance to write her own story from scratch. She had thrown herself into meeting new people, finding new routines, discovering new vices, and she had resolutely ignored the strange pang in her chest every weekend when her roommate would Skype with her brother.
She remembers with some embarrassment the first time she told a boy she loved him—they’d met the first night of orientation. They had been walking around campus in large packs, a bunch of teenagers trying on new adulthood for the first time. They heard the roar of a distant crowd and Helen had wondered aloud, “What’s going on over there?” The boy next to her had said, “I dunno. Wanna find out?” and hoisted her above his shoulders, like something from a rom-com meet-cute.
That had been the start, when her weary heart had sputtered to life for the first time in what felt like forever.
She remembers being surprised by the intensity of their friendship, how they both insisted it feels like time passes differently here than it did back home. She learned more about him in a week than she felt like she knew about anyone from high school—his name was Ethan, he was from Pittsburgh, his parents were professors who never had time to teach their own son, he had a high school sweetheart going to school three hours away, he was the best-looking boy who had ever smiled at her.
“I love you,” she had blurted out one night, just a week after they’d met. They had been sitting outside on the grass after exploring the campus after dark, as they had every night since the first night. She had told him about her parents, her sister, her pettiest thoughts and most shameful secrets, and he had listened and stroked her hair and held her hand, and she had thought, I’ve never felt so understood before.
“You love me?” he had chuckled, in a half-teasing, half-embarrassed way. “We’ve only known each other for a week.”
That wasn’t love, Helen admonishes herself even now. You’re not that stupid anymore. You don’t fall for just anyone who smiles at you.
She sometimes wonders if she’s incapable of loving the way other people do, and if the ones closest to her can sense it.
When the TV deal was officially announced, Helen’s agent took her out for a celebratory lunch. Chelsea had tittered gossipily when she saw Helen’s ex from across the room—Oliver, a foreign affairs correspondent. They’d had a nice life together for two years—he had practically moved into Helen’s place, the doorman knew him by name, and he knew all her favorite breakfast and dinner spots within a four-block radius. He told her he loved her just often enough to be reassuring instead of suffocating and he accepted that after two years, she still hadn’t said it back to him. “Say it when you’re sure,” he always added.
But seven months ago on Valentine’s Day, Helen had misinterpreted him reaching for his wallet for him reaching for a ring and blurted out, “I don’t wanna get married.” He’d blinked at her and slowly produced his credit card for the check and she had flushed almost as pink as the specialty prix fixe menus on the tables.
“Maybe we should take a break,” Oliver said when they got home, in a gentle voice. “Figure out if this is really something we both want.”
She had nodded and hoped they could move past this, and a week later he had determined, “I deserve someone who can love me back. I just don’t think you’re capable of it.”
“He must be regretting you right now,” Chelsea had said, and ordered another round of drinks for the table. Helen found herself tearing up unexpectedly over her second martini.
“It’s stupid,” she said, and viciously swiped beneath her eyes while Chelsea graciously became fascinated with the tablecloth. “I’m just thinking about the life I almost had with him, and how it probably would have been nice if I’d just been able to say I loved him like a normal fucking person, but I’m being an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Chelsea had said soothingly. “You’re a number one New York Times bestselling author.”
She hates how quickly that actually did make her feel better.
Helen takes special care to do her best by the few people she does love. She thinks ruefully of old friends who probably don’t miss Helen’s defective kind of love—maybe throw in a sister too—and she thinks of her parents, the ones who loved her first. She’s never been able to completely erase the shadow of despair from her parents’ eyes, but Helen has done the very best she possibly can.
This is not doing the best she possibly can.
She wonders if she can still call the whole thing off. She detected some familiar look of complicated guilt in Grant’s eyes at lunch, and she thinks if she were to pick up the phone now, he’d answer. I’ve changed my mind, she’d tell him. I need you off the show. Surely you owe me a favor or two.
Then some contrary part of her decides, no, it’s too late now—he stays.
Helen turns on the sink and washes last night’s dishes as she determines, it’s not really about him at all. It’s about some private rebellion she finds herself relishing in the idea of keeping Grant on the writing staff, despite having spent their last two in-person interactions in open hostility.
What happens next? she keeps finding herself wondering in his company.
It’s been a long time since she remembers feeling this interested in anything, even if it’s an interest wrapped in some heady combination of wrong and go away.
It makes her feel like a different person—like she isn’t a boring Goody Two-shoes who still writes young adult fiction mostly because she doesn’t think her parents could handle reading “harder stuff,” as her agent has called it. There’s nothing in Helen’s books that would suggest she’s had sex or engaged in risky behaviors of any kind.
Her characters pine after each other with the tension of a nineteenth-century romance novel, while poring over long-forgotten eighteenth-century academic texts. The fictional dead sister died a saint, not a hint of heroin in her veins. “They could all probably use a good fuck and a few addictions,” Suraya said in their first meeting, pitching her vision for the soapier series adaptation.
Maybe her parents will find out about Grant Shepard working on The Ivy Papers someday (he could still set fire to himself professionally or die in a car accident, or his episode could get pulled by the network, for reasons beyond anyone’s control, she thinks optimistically), but someday won’t be today, and she feels a new and thrilling kind of power in holding the reins on this piece of information.
She stares at her reflection in her glass cupboard and wonders what Monday—the first day of school, he called it—will bring.