Joe, who never lied, could lie fluently when it was necessary.
“Did you leave her a note?” Maisie asks.
He shook his head. “If I’d left her a note she would have known I was sitting by her bed like some kind of weirdo, thinking how pretty she looked when she was sleeping.”
Oh, Joe, working all day on the farm and then driving down to play the Stage Manager and then coming to the hospital to sit in a vinyl chair and watch me sleep. And I had missed him. “Sebastian didn’t stay?” Emily is disappointed. She needs Sebastian to be better than that.
But Sebastian was better than everyone. He parked the car and carried me into the emergency room, and all the while I was thinking how romantic it would have been had Duke been the one to do the carrying. More romantic, though less practical, as Duke would have played it as a screwball comedy or hospital drama whereas Sebastian told the doctor what had happened with so much specificity they must have thought he was a doctor himself. “He stayed until they got me in a room but then I told him to go back. I knew he wanted to see Pallace and I knew she would want him there.”
“How was Pallace?” Nell asks her father. She cannot help herself.
“Pallace was just fine,” he says diplomatically.
“She was excellent,” I say.
“Were you scared?” Maisie asks me.
“Of Pallace?”
Maisie rolls her eyes. “Of being in the hospital, of surgery.”
There is no scenario in which one of our girls would be in a hospital without us. We would find a way to get there and they know this. But I was the girl who’d left college for Hollywood, who’d lived alone in a furnished apartment in L.A., who’d offered to sleep with the wrong person in her efforts to get a part in a play, who came to Michigan with two suitcases. It never occurred to me to call my parents and tell them what had happened. I was an adult, after all, with good insurance through the Screen Actors Guild. “I was scared later,” I say. “I wasn’t scared then.”
“Were you scared of Pallace?” Nell asks.
“Later,” I say.
I woke up in the morning to a fat beige rotary phone ringing on my bedside table. I didn’t know where I was or what the phone was doing there. I didn’t have a phone in my room at Tom Lake. When it finally occurred to me that the only way to make it stop was to answer it, I picked up the receiver. A man said, “Lara?”
“Ripley?”
“Believe it or not.”
The room was sunny. The shades were up. The second bed was mercifully empty. “Ripley, I’m in the hospital.”
“Why do you think I’m calling you in the hospital?”
“Why are you calling?”
“One of the camp counselors at the lake said you had an accident.”
“Do they know you?”
“No.”
“Then why did they call?”
“Lara, are you on drugs?”
“Probably. I’m just waking up.”
“Waking up? It’s nine o’clock out there.”
I turned my head to look at the nightstand. There wasn’t a clock. “I think I had surgery yesterday. Be sympathetic.”
“I am sympathetic. That’s why I’m calling.”
My ankle was encased in a mound of plaster and laid out on a stack of stiff pillows. Everything about it looked like a prop, a movie cast. “I still don’t understand why they called you.”
“You put me down as your person to contact.”
Had I done that? The form must not have been very clear because really, why would Uncle Wallace have listed his second wife? “I must have thought they meant professional contact, like if I was offered a great part and they needed to get ahold of someone.” Is that what I was thinking?
“Well, I’m touched,” Ripley said. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.” Why was the cast so big? I fell on a tennis court, that was all. “I ruptured my Achilles.”
“You don’t want to do that,” he said, like I’d been offered a part in a teenage slasher film that would ultimately diminish my career.
“Well, I wish you’d called yesterday morning and told me.”
“You aren’t the easiest person to get on the phone.”
“Have you been trying?”
“No, but I was going to. There’s serendipity in this.”
I pushed the button on the guard rail that made the top of the bed go up. I held it until I had achieved the angle I thought of as Elyse Adler. “I want to hear how my ruptured Achilles is going to work in your favor.”
“I need you to come back to L.A.”
I planned to go back to L.A. in the fall when summer stock was over. Duke and I were going together, but somehow hearing Ripley say it, I didn’t want to anymore. I looked out the window of my hospital room, across the parking lot to a row of trees. Even the parking lots had trees! For the first time I realized that I didn’t want to leave Michigan. “I have a contract.”
“Okay, one, it’s a contract with a summer stock theater. That’s easy enough to take care of. Two, you can’t walk, which means you’re no good to them. They’ll be thrilled to get you off the payroll.”
“If that’s one and two I can’t wait to hear three.”
“Three,” Ripley said, pausing to indicate drama. “Three is that your movie is coming out.”
“Singularity?”
“Unless you’ve made another one.”
I had thought it was a wash, a tax write--off for someone. “Oh, Ripley, that’s great. I’m happy for you.” It had taken such a long time.
“Be happy for yourself. The film editor fell in love with you. When he cut it all together he made you the star.”
“I’m not the star.”
“Wait till you see it. It’s a sharp bit of work, kiddo. You’re fantastic. I need you out here for publicity. Publicity is all about sitting down, you know. Plus the injury makes you relatable. How did it happen?”
“Tennis.”
“Tennis in the summer in Michigan. Beautiful.”
My toes were sticking out of the plaster, a pale row of little mushrooms. I could move them, which I took to be a good sign. “Always glad to be picturesque.”
“Did you ever wonder when things were going to change?” Ripley asked. “Well, now they are. This is it.”
I hadn’t wondered when things were going to change. I had wondered when things were going to stop changing. “Ripley, I’m in the hospital. I’m on Demerol. I’m not going to walk away from my commitment.” I didn’t know if I was on Demerol but it seemed possible. I was definitely on something.
“Are you listening to me? You can’t walk and you don’t have any commitments in Michigan. You’ve got a commitment to this film.”
“The nurse is here,” I said, because surely if it was after nine o’clock a nurse would be here any minute.
“Don’t go cagey on me.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Do I need to come get you?”
“Ripley, listen to me, I’m hanging up now. Say goodbye.” I said it but then I didn’t give him the chance. I hung up before he did.