*
“I’m calling the cops right now,” Stephanie said in the car. Out on these country highways late at night the stars ripple like great sparkling banners overhead. Jeremy headed steadily for the brighter lights: Ames in the distance.
He reached over from the driver’s seat, putting his hand over Stephanie’s cell phone. “Don’t,” he said.
“I am calling the police!” she said. “You can’t be OK with this!”
“We’re not hurt,” he said. “Don’t.”
“You are so weird!” She was yelling, frustrated by how he kept his eye on the road while he argued. “You’ve always been weird! You’re sick like her!”
“I’m not sick. We’re not hurt,” he said again. “There’s something wrong with her. She can’t help it. Don’t.”
Stephanie stared at Jeremy, trying to understand his apparent calm. It would be morning soon. They’d been kept there all night. How could he stand it?
“How can you stand it!” she said.
“Put yourself in her shoes,” Jeremy said evenly, and it felt like a knife pushing through his chest from the inside, because he knew Stephanie would not be able to understand—Stephanie, whose mother and father lived together in a house less than a mile from the apartment she rented, whose parents would grow old together and someday be buried next to each other in a plot in the Nevada City Cemetery, their children and grandchildren gathering to honor two lives well lived.
“Try to put yourself in her shoes,” he repeated when she gave no response, leaving it out there in the opening silence, the spring night air.
*
Lisa in mid-frame; a voice offscreen: Sarah Jane Shepherd, sounding steady and confident, sure of her purpose. She has never considered herself a religious person, but this morning—as they prepare, on short notice, to leave the house in Collins, each to their own errands: Sarah Jane back to Nevada, Lisa to parts unknown—she feels a vague sense of kinship with former coworkers from back when she worked retail; people who used to tell her, on their lunch breaks together around a tiny table in a supply room, that God had a plan for everybody.
“Are you ready?” she says.
“I think so,” says Lisa.
“Whenever you’re ready,” says Sarah Jane.
“It helps if you ask questions.”
“OK.” There’s a beat; birds chirping nearby somewhere, greeting the day. “Where did you grow up?”
“A couple of places.”
“Where were you born?”
“Down in Tama.” Lisa smiles. “You already know all this stuff.”
“OK.” A silence. Lisa looks at the lens, waiting. “OK, then. Why do you make these movies?”
Over the years, she has taken great pains to hide the face of the child she once was. She does it by trying to feel older than she is. She began this practice when she was young; it made her feel better the first time she tried, so she kept at it. Over time it has been a great comfort, this discipline of imagining herself alive and intact, safe on the other side of years she might otherwise have had to live through, uncertain of where they would lead. The camera catches her out now; there’s a part of her that never left Crescent, that still waits there for someone.
“For my mom,” she says.
“How do you mean, for your mother,” asks Sarah Jane.
“I wanted her to be able to tell her story,” says Lisa slowly.
“But we don’t even know what her story is.”
“Well, to do her a kindness, I guess.”
“But she can’t really receive that kindness.”
“It’s so she won’t be forgotten,” says Lisa, looking pleadingly into the lens.
“But there’s nothing you can do about that,” Sarah Jane presses. “And besides, Lisa—I don’t really see how any of this helps with any of that. They don’t seem connected. You have to see that.”
“Look, I do it for myself, too, I know that,” says Lisa, casting her gaze out now past the tripod, around it and out to the tall rows of corn on the neighboring property, the pigs in the distance. “I don’t see why you have to make me say it out loud.”
She gets up then, walking past the mounted camera, and there’s an extended quiet during which we can’t see that she’s gone to stand beside the friend she made of the lonely woman from Nevada; the two of them looking out from the porch to the corn, and the brace of sycamores farther down, the wind at play in the leaves.
*
Emily called Ed down to the basement when her gut told her it was time; after they’d all spent a couple of hours watching movies together, they congregated in the living room. This was an unfamiliar scenario for all of them. The Pratts hadn’t ever been the sort of family to hold meetings, to regiment their lives like a business. Still, they all took their places on the couches and cushions, like they’d been doing it all their lives.
Ed spoke first, from his heart: “I don’t really know what to say.” He looked at his children. “Are you both all right?”
By now James had managed to summon up his defenses. “No, Dad, I’m hurt. I watched a lot of movies,” he said.