chapter 22
CHRIS
“Your fan club is waiting for you,” Claire says, pointing to the opposite side of the lobby. I can see the start of a smirk on her face.
She’s right. I follow her finger and see a small crowd gathering. There’s a sea of cell phones raised at the two of us. At least one of the amateur photographers probably captured the visual evidence of the shock I just had. Great. Like I needed another thing to worry about.
“Wave to your public, dear. It’s rude not to.” She smiles beatifically at the prepubescent teenage girls who are scampering closer to us, before taking my arm in hers to skillfully sidestep the small crowd. “We should get a coffee, I think. And perhaps we can see if your knowledge of anthropology has deteriorated over the years.”
“Dr. Caldwell…”
“I think perhaps we’ve grown past that, Christopher. Claire will do. However, I do think we want to avoid those unscrupulous characters.”
I follow her gaze and see the cluster of paparazzi outside, their numbers growing by the second.
“Yes. We should definitely avoid that.”
Five minutes, a detour through the kitchens, and a mad dash down the street later, we’re sitting in a hole in the wall coffee shop just off Michigan Avenue. I stir my latte until all of the foam has disappeared. The fake mustache makes it hard to drink, anyway. I’m trying not to demand answers, since Claire Caldwell is probably the last person in the world who will give them to me, but the picture of the curly-headed little girl lingers in my mind. I have to wait for her to make the first move.
She rests her chin on her hand and stares up at me.
“I don’t remember you as a man of such few words. If I recall correctly, you’re prone to make some serious leaps in the use of logical fallacies, and you even throw in a straw man argument or two, but I didn’t think silence was a part of your repertoire.”
“I think I remember a straw man or two coming from you, too.”
She leans her head back and laughs, and the entire room fills with a full, rich, throaty sound that makes me spill the coffee onto the table in shock.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard her laugh before, and while I’ve never been able to see much of Claire in Hallie—they’re too different, in both looks and manner—they share the same laugh. Claire immediately puts her napkin over the spilled drops and smiles at me, a real, genuine smile.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen your face, Christopher. Five years?”
“Do you mean to tell me that you’re not a regular moviegoer? Or, is it just that you’re just not a fan of my work?”
She flicks a packet of sugar into her coffee. “I didn’t say that.”
“To answer your question, the last time I saw you was in New York.”
“I wasn’t sure if you remembered.”
I cringe, because I do remember, at least most of it. She came to visit us in that summer before London, and I had been somewhat less than my best self. I think I called her a vicious bitch. Another one of my finest moments.
“I’m sorry for that visit, Claire.”
“I know you’re sorry.” Her lips are drawn in a thin line, and all traces of her smile are gone. “I hope those days have passed.”
“They have.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” She wipes the table with a napkin and I can tell that she’s decided to drop the subject. I breathe a sigh of relief.
“I’ve followed your career, you know. You’ve done well for yourself. I can hardly say I’m surprised at that.”
“Thank you, Claire. I assume you’re still teaching?”
“No, I gave that up when…” She stops mid-sentence. “I gave it up about a year ago.”
“You must miss it.”
“I do. Every day.” She sighs. “However, I didn’t drag you here to talk about the myriad of reasons why I miss the classroom. Besides that, I’m sure that you probably have other engagements. You must be a busy man. So, let’s get down to the real reason why we’re both here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I haven’t called anyone ma’am in a very long time, but there’s something about Claire that always makes me feel like a small child. Hallie used to say that in another era, her mother would have been an inquisitor. It certainly feels like I’m on the chopping block.
“I know you saw my daughter when she was in New York. I know that you saw her while she was here.”
I lift my eyes upward to meet hers. “Did Hallie say something?”
Her face relaxes into a smile. “No. She didn’t. But the photographs of the two of you plastered all over the tabloids gave me a pretty solid hunch that my assumptions were correct.”
“Oh.”
“I knew before I saw those pictures, though. I know my child, Christopher. She’s never been able to keep a secret. When she was seven, she tried to tell me that space aliens had broken the vase in our living room. She didn’t get halfway through her very carefully rehearsed story before she broke down into tears. While she may have changed her tactics over the years, she’s never learned how to hide her feelings. And when I picked her up from the airport last week, she had that same dreamy look in her eye as she did when the two of you arrived in my home to tell me about some nonsensical plan to run off to Prague.”
A dreamy look in her eye? This is definitely not that conversation I thought we would be having. But Claire’s not finished.
“Tell me this, Christopher. Why did you come looking for my daughter? Why did you have to pick that particular screenplay? Is there a reason that you couldn’t leave well enough alone?”
I check her face to see if it’s a trick question, if she wants me to say that it was all part of a grand plan. Her watchful eyes stay steady on mine.
“I don’t want you to tell me what you think I want to hear. I want you to tell me the truth.”
Even if Claire Caldwell scares the living shit out of me, I have nothing left. I have to lay my cards out on the table.
“I didn’t know that it was Hallie’s movie. Ben’s movie. I read the script, and something about it made me desperate to have it. I guess I should have known that it was hers. Theirs. Whatever. I read it again, a dozen times, over the last week, and I think I figured out why I needed it so badly. The words, they sound like her. The whole thing, it feels like Hallie’s. I know that must sound silly, but it’s true. And I needed it.”
Claire looks puzzled. “You knew nothing about what happened? Ben’s accident? The book? I find that extremely hard to believe.”
“I didn’t know the movie was hers. I didn’t know that she and Ben had gotten married. And I didn’t know that Ben had…”
She nods. “That explains it, then. I didn’t believe that trash they printed, but I had to see for myself.”
“Claire, if I had known…”
“That’s neither here nor there. You can’t do anything about the past but dwell in it. Believe me. I know.”
There’s regret there, and understanding. She lays her hand on top of mine and I stare up at her.
“What are we doing here, Claire?”
“I needed some new material for my James Ross fanfiction.”
It’s an impressively deadpan delivery, so much so that I don’t even dare to laugh.
“You would at least thought my daughter would have had the sense to pick a man with a sense of humor. You can’t have it all, I suppose.”
“You know, there really is some decent fanfiction out there. You wouldn’t happen to be larvae1961, would you?”
“You got me. I’ll admit it. I do love that movie.”
“Your daughter had a lot to do with that. The director of that movie, Hallie’s biggest fan, by the way, stopped speaking to me the second she left.”
It’s true. Alan would have had me blacklisted, if that were still possible. He handed off James Ross to some music video director who had ruined the franchise. All because he was angry with me.
“Do you love my daughter, Christopher?”
I don’t hesitate.
“I told you this seven years ago, and there hasn’t been a time since that it wasn’t true—I love your daughter to the ends of the earth and back, Claire. I love her so much that I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to apologize to her when I was anything less than my best self. I love her so much that when she told me that she didn’t love me, I crawled into a hole and stayed there for almost a year. I love her so much that she’s the first and the last thing that I think about every day. I would do anything for her. I would even stay away from her. I’m hoping you’re not going to tell me to do that, but I would do it. You know her best. You tell me what to do. You tell me, because I just don’t know anymore.”
Claire tilts her head to the other side, smiles at me, and then bends her head down to write something on a napkin.
“She left about an hour ago. She’s on her way to her house in Lake Geneva. The address is there; it’s just off Alla Vista Drive, but you’ll probably find her in the neighborhood park if you plan on leaving now. My granddaughter is even more persuasive than her mother was at that age, and I suspect she’ll have convinced Hallie to stop at the park, even if it is an ill-advised notion.”
I’m in the process of grabbing the napkin from the table, but I stop when I hear the word granddaughter.
“Claire, I have to know whether…”
“It’s not my place to meddle in my daughter’s affairs, Christopher.”
“You just gave me her address.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Her steely eyes meet mine for an impossibly long moment. “Grace is Ben’s child. I know you won’t believe that until you’ve seen her for yourself, but I can promise you that. I can also promise you that if you do anything to hurt that little girl, I will murder you with my bare hands. I’m sure there will be a long line for that particular job, but I will get to the front of that line.”
I take a deep breath. Claire wouldn’t lie to me about something like that. She couldn’t. Still, the tiny seeds of doubt sown into the back of my head remain. It still doesn’t explain why Hallie hadn’t mentioned her existence to me. What if she hadn’t told her mother? What if…
“I thought you were in a great hurry, Christopher. If I had been aware that you planned on gawking at me all day, I would have taken my time to create a more dramatic effect.”
I pick up the piece of paper and stare down at the address.
“Thank you, Claire.”
“I fully expect that you’ll find some way to repay me for this favor.”
“I will. But right now, I really have to find your daughter. The park?”
She nods sheepishly. “Don’t tell her I told you. She would massacre me.”
“I won’t. I promise.”