Shane shrugs and reaches for one of his socks on the floor. “I have three older sisters. All of my early memories are of them. I loved them; I was their toy, like a doll they dressed up. When I was six or so, my oldest sister, Olivia, developed an eating disorder. Just about destroyed our family.
“It was awful. Olivia was thirteen, and she’d go in the bathroom and throw up. She’d spend her lunch money on diet pills, squirrel food away in her clothes. At first my parents yelled at her, but that did no good. She didn’t care. It was like she wanted to waste away. You could see the bones in her arms. Her hair falling out.
“My parents tried everything. Therapists and psychologists, inpatient treatment. My ex thinks that’s when they really started becoming so overprotective—I don’t know. What I remember is lying in bed one night and hearing my mom weep and my father trying to comfort her, Mom just saying over and over, ‘My baby is starving to death.’ ” Shane still has the sock in his hand, but he doesn’t put it on. He just stares at it.
“What happened?” Claire asks quietly.
“Hmm?” He looks up. “Oh, she’s fine now. The treatment clicked or something, I guess. Olivia just . . . got over it. She’s still got some food hang-ups—she’s the sister who never brings food for Thanksgiving, always makes a centerpiece instead. Little pumpkins. Cornucopias. And don’t even mention the word brownie around her. But she came out okay. Married this jackass, but they’re happy enough. Have two kids. The funny thing is . . . the rest of my family never talks about that time. Even Olivia shakes off that whole period like it was nothing. ‘My skinny years,’ she calls them.
“But I never got over it. When I was seven or eight, I’d lie awake at night, praying that if God would make Olivia better, I’d go to church, become a minister . . . something. And so when it didn’t happen right away—you know how kids are—I blamed myself, connected my sister’s starving to my own lack of faith.”
He stares off, rubs the inside of his arm. “By high school, Olivia was fine, and I was over my religious phase. But after that, I was always fascinated by stories of starvation and deprivation. I read everything I could find, did my school reports on the siege of Leningrad and the Potato Famine . . . I especially liked stories of cannibalism: the Uruguayan rugby team, Alfred Packer, the Maori . . . and of course the Donner Party.”
Shane looks down and sees the sock in his hands. “I guess I identified with poor William Eddy, who escaped himself, but who could do nothing while his family starved in that awful camp.” He absentmindedly puts the sock on. “So when I read in Michael Deane’s book how pitching a movie is all about believing in yourself, pitching yourself—it was like a vision: I knew exactly the story I needed to pitch.”
A vision? Believing in yourself? Claire looks down, wondering if this Just-Do-It-Dude confidence is what Michael was actually responding to yesterday. And what had attracted her last night. Hell, maybe they can make Donner! based on nothing more than this kid’s passion for it. Passion: another word that sticks in her throat.
Claire glances back down at her BlackBerry and sees an e-mail from Michael’s producing partner, Danny Roth. The subject line is Donner! Michael must have called Danny about Shane’s pitch. She wonders if Danny talked some sense into Michael. She opens the e-mail, written in the tortured, hurried, moronic, electronic shorthand that Danny somehow believes is saving him great amounts of time:
C—Rbrt says your setting up pitch for Unvsl Mnday on Donner. Has to look gd, re: contract. See if writr has storybords or bakstory, anthing that looks lk wre furthr down the road. Straigt faces. Danny
She looks up at Shane, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her. She looks back down at Danny’s e-mail. Has to look gd . . . Why would it look good and not be good? And storyboards to make it look like they’re further down the road? Straight faces? Then she recalls Michael’s boast yesterday: I’m going to pitch an eighty-million-dollar movie about frontier cannibalism.
“Ah, shit,” she says.
“Another text from your boyfriend?”
Would they really do this? She recalls Danny and Michael talking about the lawyers looking for a way out of Michael’s contract with Universal. What a stupid question: of course they would do this. They would never not do this. This is what they do. Claire’s hand comes to her temple.
“What?” Shane stands and she looks over at him, his big doe eyes and those bushy sideburns framing his face. “Are you okay?”