I’m about to lie, to blow it all off, but instead I tell the truth. “Not really. Not for a while. I’m rattled by . . . everything. The attacks. The sneakiness of someone on my property.” I lift my shoulders. “You.”
“Yeah. Me too, honestly.” I see him swallow. He takes another sip of coffee. “I read about the attack. Are you recovered?”
“Physically.” Saying it aloud settles my body a little. “I don’t really want to talk about that, though, if that’s okay.”
“I get it. No worries.”
The music has settled into a soft bit, swirling around us like this is a movie. I smile as I say, “So, you have the advantage. You know a lot more about my life than I know about yours.”
He leans back. “Uh. Okay. Where to start?”
“Tell me everything.”
For a long minute, he’s quiet, just looking at me. Then he takes a breath. “Let’s see . . . everything since I last saw you . . .” He ticks off items on his fingers. “Juvie, Seattle with my dad, community college, lost years, married, settled down, got divorced, moved back to Seattle to take care of my mom, watched my old girlfriend become a big star, got married again, divorced again, came back to Blue Cove about seven years ago.”
So much pain in those simple sentences. For me, for him. “I never thanked you for burning down the church.”
It surprises him into a laugh. His eyes crinkle and I can see the crooked eyetooth on the right, and the sound is exactly the same, slightly hoarse and comically high pitched. “My pleasure, ma’am,” he says with a salute. “Where’d you go when you—”
“Got out of the home? Yeah.” That’s tender territory. “Beryl helped me emancipate myself. I lived with her through the rest of high school. How long were you in juvie?”
“Eighteen months. I got lucky. No criminal history, and extenuating circumstances.”
I think of him then, a smart, fierce young man of color. “Juvie had to have been hell for you.”
He looks away, shrugs, but I can see the sorrow around his mouth. He clears his throat. “They showed pictures of you after your dad—”
“Tried to kill me?” I fill in with a humorless laugh.
“Yeah.” His jaw goes hard, and there’s a suspicious sheen over his eyes. “God, I felt so helpless.”
Now there’s a river of dark emotion rising, and I can’t avoid the tears in my own eyes. “You set me free, Joel. You totally did.”
He bows his head, and I can feel the weight of our losses, but the silence gives me space to calm myself down. We sit in the quiet for a time. The music lilts around us. Outside, clouds chug across the sky. The ocean washes to shore.
I’ve forgotten how still he can be, his limbs quiet when other people would be wiggling or tapping or restless. I forgot how much I liked it, how much space it gives me to breathe.
After a time he says, “Now you. Tell me everything.”
“Me? Um . . . let’s see.” I lift my hand and count on my fingers to mirror him. “Got sent away to Portland, came back and lived with Beryl, went to New York after high school, got discovered”—I spread my hands, like ta-da—“made a bunch of movies, bought a big house in Hollywood, and made some more movies.”
“Fell in love with a big director.”
Dmitri. My soul gives a little wail. “Yeah. We were together nearly twenty years. Until he died.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “COVID, right?”
I nod. “The worst was that he was alone in the hospital. I hated that so much.”
“Same with my mom.”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.”
“Thanks.”
“No kids?” I ask, and then wish I hadn’t.
“Only the one,” he says. “You?”
“Same.” An old pain rustles. I see her dark hair, her newborn blue eyes.
“Did you”—he leans on the table, hands steepled tightly—“see him? Her?”
“Her.” I swallow hard. “Yeah. For a very short while. She had a lot of hair, and a beautiful little mouth.” A lot of memories are blurry, but not that one. After so long, the memory no longer brings tears, but thinking of how Joel never even had that glimpse of her brings a fresh swell of sorrow. I bow my head, touch Yul Brynner’s long tail.
Joel closes his eyes. Breathes. Then: “I am sorry you had to go through all of that alone, Suze. I really am.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Still.” He straightens, picks up his cup, and it’s empty. “Mind if I help myself?”
“Not at all.”
We can’t stay in that place of darkness. I can’t. When he comes back, I ask, “What were the lost years?”
“Ah.” He wipes his clean-shaven cheeks. “Just . . . the usual bullshit. Fights, bad jobs, bad relationships. Looking for something I didn’t know how to find.”
“What pulled you out of it?”
“My first wife, Ella. I met her in Seattle. Solid as granite and didn’t put up with nonsense and self-destruction.”
“Good for her.”
He nods, looks toward the sea. “I broke her heart, though—I couldn’t be the guy she wanted.”
“We all do that when we’re young, don’t you think?”
“I wasn’t that young by then. Almost forty.”
“Oh.” I allow myself a smile. “That’s a few lost years.”
“Mmm. Did you?”
“Have lost years?”
“Break hearts.”
“Of course.” I’d had my share of tempestuous relationships. “The difference is, my peccadilloes were fully documented by the paparazzi and the tabloids.”
“Well, that would suck.”
“It’s a weird world.”
A beat between us. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says.
“Me too.”
For a minute, maybe two, we’re simply silent, looking at each other. It feels like a million years have passed and no time at all. It feels like he’s always lived in some secret part of my body and now I’ve opened the door. It feels like oxygen. It feels like a prayer.
He picks up his cup and drains it. “I’m going to see about getting you an alarm system that works. Is that okay with you?”
“Very.”
He stands. “I’ll get to it, then.” On the way by, he touches my shoulder for longer than a casual moment. I close my eyes.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and then he’s gone.
Right after he leaves, my agent calls.
“Hey, Edwina. What’s up?” She never calls, only emails, so something is up.
“Not the best news of all time,” she says.
I’ve been expecting something like this. The new season is set to start filming in a month and some decisions need to be made about what to do with my character, who has been languishing in a coma for quite some time to give me space to heal. But I’ve pushed the time a little too long, I guess. “They’re going to kill Alice on Going Home Again.”
“Not exactly.”
“They’re not going to leave her in a coma, are they?”
“No. They’re replacing you with Morgan Millstone.”
“What? Viewers hate that!”
“Viewers are clamoring to have her back, and they don’t want to go through another season waiting for you. The network is gambling that they’d hate the end of the show more.”
“But she looks nothing like me!” Morgan is an actor about my age but she has a completely different look—like a cat standing in for a dog. “How will they explain it?”
“I don’t know, Suze. I’m so sorry. It’ll be some idiot thing about plastic surgery or something. You know the things they do.”
A hollow feeling pours through my gut. I thought I was ready to get out of Hollywood, but this is all I’ve known my entire adult life. “Wow,” I manage.
Edwina says, “Are you ready to come back? I could probably get them to hold off for a couple of months if that’s what you want.”
I’m shaking my head even though she can’t see me. “No, I’m not ready. I . . . I can’t right now. I don’t know when I will be, not for television. I need to work through some things.”
“Totally. I get it, and I’ll let them know. How about I send you some scripts I’ve collected for you? Maybe a movie in a few months would be a welcome change?”
“Okay.” I am not sure that will be the answer, either, but I have nothing to put in the yawning space where my career has been all this time. “Thanks, Edwina. I know you’re just the messenger.”
“I hope you get to feeling better, Suze. The world misses you.”