She nodded.
He looked down at his hands. “The worst thing I did—the thing I’ll feel terrible about forever—is what I did, and said, to my mom, when she came to his funeral. She told me she came for me, and it infuriated me. I was just so…mad at the world then. And I was really mad at her. I blamed her, for him dying. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I didn’t make a lot of sense then. And so when she told me that, I said…” He stopped, and looked down for a few seconds. “I said such awful things to her. Like…like I did to you, in the library, except so much worse. I told her this was all her fault, that she was brainless, talentless, a leech on him. I repeated some of those things my dad said about her over the years.” He was silent for a moment. “She…I’ll never forget the look on her face when I said all of that. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I see it.”
Izzy tried not to react to anything he said, to just listen.
“Not too long after that, an agent approached me about writing a book. I jumped at the idea. I haven’t really had an acting career in years, and I wanted to write. I’d always sort of thought I’d turn to screenwriting eventually, like him, you know.”
He laughed quietly, but there was a note in his laughter she didn’t like. It was that same mean laugh from the first week.
“Don’t,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Don’t laugh like that. That’s not…I don’t like it when you do that.”
That sounded so silly, so pointless to say, but he nodded like he understood what she meant.
“I don’t like it either. I don’t like me, when I do that.”
He folded his hands together. She could see his nails biting into his skin.
“A little over a year ago, I was going through some of his papers. Partly because it had been almost a year since he’d died, and it was time to clean out the house, and partly to do some research for the book. I found the boxes full of drafts of all the screenplays he’d written. I started to flip through them, just, you know, to see how his work had changed from draft to draft. And that’s when I realized that my mom had done the bulk of the writing of them. All of them.”
She looked up at him, but he was still staring at his hands.
“How did you—”
“Her handwriting,” he said. “It was all over them. He would draft something, and on the sides, or the back—often both—she’d make extensive, lengthy, huge changes. Not just little edits, but entire scenes, story lines, character motivations. And then I’d flip to the next draft, and there it would all be, neatly typed up, with his name on the title page. It was like that for everything. I have no idea why he kept them all, other than he had such a big ego he never thought anyone would know that the handwriting wasn’t his. But I knew. I went through them all, in one long, terrible night, read them all, just to see, to make sure, to confirm that it was all true. That one that won the Oscar, God, that one was basically completely hers. And he didn’t even fucking thank her. And then I said…”
No wonder he felt so terrible.
No wonder this book was so hard for him to write. She thought back to how when she’d first gotten here, she’d demanded he tell her what his struggles had been with the book, and winced. Of course he couldn’t have told her any of this then.
He got up again, opened the tin on the counter, took out two lemon bars, and put them on plates. He came back to the table and pushed one across the table to her.
“Iz—Isabelle, I can’t describe to you how I felt that night. That night, and most days since then. I guess…if I’m really going to write this book, I guess I’m going to have to describe it, at some point, but as you saw, I’ve done my best to avoid doing that.” He laughed, but she didn’t think he really found any of this funny. “I hated myself. So much. I still do, I guess. At first, I thought there was no way I could write a book, knowing what I know now. Knowing who he is, and who I am. The same kind of monster he was.”
“Beau, you’re not—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “And then I decided I did want to write this book. That I wanted to tell the world what kind of person my dad really was. And what kind of person my mom really is. Admit how wrong I was, about everything. I thought I could do it. But it’s really…” He swallowed. “It’s really hard. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
He stared down at the lemon bar on the table. Izzy didn’t know what to say to him, but she wanted to say something, to do something so he knew she saw what he was going through, that she appreciated him telling her. That she cared.