Perhaps Holly and I were the same after all. Both of us had been living a lie.
And now we both were where we belonged.
JACK
Acting is all about finding truth in made-up situations. I know that seems like a paradox, that’s why it’s hard. An actor’s job is to be completely honest while pretending to be someone else, in a place that’s dressed up to look like somewhere else, while telling a story that isn’t true.
A good actor is a master of deception. Sometimes we get lost in the role, and the line between what’s real and what’s imagined gets blurred. I’ve never fallen in love with a co-star, but I understand why it happens. If you’re really good at pretending to be in love with someone, sometimes you fool even yourself.
My son was not an actor, but when the press decided that he burned that girl’s house down because he was mad with jealousy, he played the part. They made it easy for him, because even his denials were seen as proof that of course it was true—the boy doth protest too much!
But there was one person who didn’t believe the narrative—his mother. She knew our son too well. She had felt his indifference about the girl. She didn’t buy what the press was selling.
“I don’t think he was in love with that girl,” she told me as they hauled him off to jail. “He didn’t act like a boy in love.”
She asked me if I believed it, or if there was more to the story. I was tempted to lie. But I knew that, even with all my acting training, I couldn’t, not to her. I didn’t know how to play myself in a made-up story. She knew my process. She would see my tells. There was no way to hide the truth, not from her.
I told her on a Sunday, and she was packed and gone by Monday. My son was in jail, Evan had resigned, and for the first time in my life, I was completely alone.
I didn’t have a big bottle of Vicodin lying around, but there were other ways to do what Holly had done, and if I’d had the courage, I might have tried them. I thought about Holly a lot those first few weeks as I slept anywhere but in my bedroom and ate standing at the kitchen counter to avoid seeing Kate’s empty place. I was mortified that I’d tried to bury this woman’s grief by gifting her a dream house. I knew now it was preposterous to think a princess would want to live in the castle without her prince, and that I was cruel to have suggested it.
A week into my sequestration, a man in a suit came to my door. I assumed it was the law and readied myself to get carted off to jail. But it wasn’t a policeman. It was the attorney Evan had hired to represent my son. I nearly wept at the kindness of the gesture. After everything I’d put him through, he still had my back. In that moment, I knew definitively I hadn’t deserved him, and felt genuinely relieved that he’d finally left me.
I had thought the press would drag me through the mud, but in the end, they probably saved my life. Because they wrote their own version of the story—that my son was ill, my wife was heartless, I was the victim. My fan base was energized. People all over the world sent messages of love and support. Rather than plummet, my star rose to new heights. The studio begged me to make a movie. I had a script that I liked under option, written by an investigative reporter I’d be wise to keep busy, so I agreed.
My days are a whirlwind of prepping and scouting and putting the movie together now. I am as busy as a shovel in a blizzard, but thoughts of Holly still leak through. The nights are the hardest, but whiskey helps, and I have something stronger when the whiskey’s not enough. And when the time comes to shoot the movie, I’ll get to pretend to be someone else for a while, just as Holly did, with borrowed costumes, a new haircut, and a fake backstory to complete the masquerade.
The movie will end, as all fake lives do, and, like Holly, I’ll return to myself. And, like Holly, I will continue to grieve. Yes, Holly’s grief reeks with the permanence of death, but mine carries the stench of shame and regret, which is just as relentless and tastes just as sour.
If loss could be measured, I think Holly and I both got our fair share. Death is worse than divorce, but Holly’s daughter—a willful accomplice—roams free, while my son sits behind prison bars. And my most trusted friend has defected from my home to hers.
Has justice been served? Have we been returned to equilibrium and balance restored? If the dead man could speak, would he say we all got what we deserved?
I look to my tattered heart for the answer.
But like my life, my heart has been ravaged. I peer inside only to find it is barren, broken, as good as dead.