What the hell was he talking about?
“Oscar nominations?” he asked. “I guess that’s why you’re calling me so early on a Sunday morning.”
“Oh, yes. We got six. And I want to thank you, Josh. You’ve been a big help.” And yadda, yadda, yadda, said a voice in her head.
“I try,” Josh said, with dramatic overstatement.
“Josh?” she asked, in her best wheedling tone. “I need to get to Palm Beach right away. This morning. Can you book me on a flight, please, and call me back? And if you can’t get me on a flight, can you find out if the Citation is free? I’ll use my NetJet card.” She paused. Using the Citation for a personal situation was highly frowned upon (and could, technically, cost her her job), but it could be argued that it was an emergency (Shane had kidnapped the kids!)—and the only reason she had the emergency was because of work—she’d had to basically spend a month in Romania getting Ragged Pilgrims back on track. And if worse came to worst, she would just pay for it herself. Whatever the cost . . .
“On second thought,” she said, “skip the commercial flights and try the Citation first. If it’s booked, then go to commercial.”
Josh called back fifteen minutes later. “You’re lucky,” he said. “The Citation is at Teterboro Airport and it’s free, but it has to be back at three p.m. Victor Matrick needs it at four.”
“No problem,” she said. She looked at the clock. It was six fifty-three a.m. That should give her plenty of time to fly to Palm Beach, pick up the kids, and be back in New Jersey in no time.
She picked up her beat-up valise—the same one she’d been dragging around for the last month and hadn’t bothered to unpack the night before—and a small rollerboard suitcase she’d bought in the Paris airport that was filled with presents for the kids. She walked unsteadily down the hall to the elevator, exhaustion tearing at every muscle. Only a few more hours, she reminded herself, and then hopefully this whole terrible misadventure would be over.
“Hi—Ms. Healy?” called the desk clerk as she passed by. “Are you leaving us this morning?”
Wendy stopped. “I don’t know,” she said, suddenly conscious of how she must look. She hadn’t bothered to wash her face or brush her teeth, and she was wearing the same T-shirt she’d been traveling in (and had slept in last night, if you could call that “sleeping”), and had on a pair of pants that were once tight but now baggy with overwear, and her hair wasn’t brushed either and was stuck up in a scrunchy—but did it really fucking matter?—and she said, “I have to see what happens. I’ll let you know, okay?”
Luckily, the young woman didn’t seem to find this strange or her appearance unusual (and why should she, Wendy thought; she was used to dealing with eccentric showbiz types), and she nodded and smiled and, holding open the door, said, “By the way, congratulations on your Oscar nominations.”
“Thank you,” Wendy said.
That was really all the world cared about—Oscar nominations, she thought bitterly. If you had those, you could rule the planet.
But you couldn’t keep your husband.
A cab pulled up and she got in. “Teterboro Airport, please,” she said. The cab took off with a jerk, and she fell back against the seat. Running off to Palm Beach like this was probably insane, an ill-advised adventure that might possibly make things worse. But she had no choice. When her kids grew up, what was she going to say? How could she ever explain how Shane had taken them and she hadn’t done everything in her power to bring them back? That was probably a little dramatic (hey, they were only staying at the Breakers Hotel for the weekend, so how bad could it be?), but when you took away the glamorous bits, that was basically the scenario.
There wasn’t anything to question, really. She had to go and rescue her kids from Shane. After all, they were her children.
* * *
SITTING IN THE BACK of the taxi, Wendy picked at a dry piece of skin on her lower lip, wondering about the bizarre series of events that had led to this moment when she was speeding to the airport at seven in the morning to board a Citation to fly down to Palm Beach to get her children away from her husband who was trying to divorce her because she’d had to spend a month in Romania fixing a $125 million movie for which she was solely responsible.
There was something about it that felt disturbingly inevitable.
So how was it that just twenty-four hours ago, everything was fine? She was standing on a muddy hillside that overlooked a remote village watching Jenny Cadine attempt to lead a cow up a rocky path. The cow wasn’t budging. This went on for an hour. “Can we please get another cow?” she asked.
“There isn’t another cow. There aren’t any cows here. We had to truck this one in from Moldova,” someone said.
“There has to be another cow. Where do they get their milk around here?”
“Another cow is on its way,” someone said into her earpiece, which was connected to a small walkie-talkie she wore clipped onto the back of her pants. Her involvement in the movie at this level—acting as a sort of über-director-slash-producer—wasn’t the norm for the head of a studio. But she had decided that if the movie had any chance of working, she was going to have to get down and dirty. She was going to have to be right in there, in the trenches, leading her troops . . .
Now the cow incident made her think about how there were two kinds of people on movie sets. There were the people who anticipated problems and planned for them, who were always one step ahead (and these were the people who ended up becoming successful), and there were people who just went along until a problem arose, and then shrugged their shoulders and made a halfhearted attempt to deal with it.
The difficulty was, she thought, cringing in the backseat of the taxi, if the same harsh judgment could be made about people in marriages, most people would have to accuse her of falling into the latter category. For the past few months, she’d been just going along, assuming, praying that everything would be fine (and it had been, for a while, hadn’t it?), and it was only when it had blown up in her face that she was bothering to deal with it. Maybe she should have worked harder at those transatlantic therapy sessions with Shane and Dr. Vincent. But there was a six-hour time difference, and while Dr. Vincent charged $500 an hour, that was nothing compared to the cost of an hour wasted on a movie set. Try $25,000. And when they were ready to shoot, you had to go. You couldn’t say, “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes, just as soon as I finish soothing my husband’s ego.”
But she had tried. And when she’d come home, two weeks ago, for five days, she had made time for an emergency three-hour session with Dr. Vincent. Dr. Vincent had requested an easel and a pad of large white paper of the type television writers used to plot out story lines for episodes. It turned out, of course, that Dr. Vincent had once been a television writer herself, but had realized she could do more good by helping people in the Industry have a better Understanding of Relationships and of Themselves.
“E” she wrote, in blue Magic Marker. She circled the letter. “What does the letter ‘E’ bring to mind?”
“Ego?” Wendy said, thinking that she was getting pretty good at this game.
“Very good. Shane?” Dr. Vincent asked.
“Excalibur,” Shane blurted out. He looked at Wendy as if daring her to make fun of him.
“Excalibur,” Dr. Vincent wrote on the piece of paper, followed by a large question mark. “Let’s talk about that. Excalibur was a sword. Are you thinking about your penis, Shane?”
“He’s always thinking about his penis,” Wendy said. She couldn’t help it, it just came out. Shane glared at her. She shrugged. “I mean, aren’t all men? Most of the time?”
“No, Wendy. We’re not,” he said.
“How about this one?” Dr. Vincent asked. She wrote the word “escape” in capital letters.
“Escape?” Wendy asked.
“Work equals escape,” Dr. Vincent said, writing this on the pad.
“Well, that’s true,” Shane said, crossing his
arms.
“It is not!” Wendy said, looking from Shane to Dr. Vincent in dismay. “People have to work,” she insisted, realizing her blunder the second the words were out of her mouth. What was she saying? Shane didn’t work. What did it all mean? It was so confusing.
“Work is an Escape,” Dr. Vincent reiterated. “But when you put the letters together, what do you have?”
“E-W. Ew?” Wendy asked.
“We,” Shane said, looking at her like she was stupid.
“That’s right. WE,” Dr. Vincent said. “You don’t want Work to become an Escape from the WE.”
“But it isn’t,” Wendy protested. “Shane and I have rules, and I stick to them. I’m not allowed to be away for more than two weeks. And I never am. I should have stayed in Romania—I shouldn’t even be here right now—but I came back. I did. Didn’t I, Shane? I was only gone for ten days . . .”
“You said you’d be away for three. Max,” Shane said.
Wendy looked to Dr. Vincent for help. “I had to fire the director and hire a new one, and then I had to . . .” She sank into her chair, defeated. How could she possibly explain the whole harrowing process of having to get a new director and work with him? And then the producer had quit in protest, and now she had to go back to take over that position until the new producer (who was finishing another film) could wrap that and show up on their location in, exactly, if everything went according to schedule, four days.
“Just don’t go. I dare you, Wendy,” Shane said the next day, when she was preparing to leave again.
“I have to.”
“Didn’t you hear what Dr. Vincent said? You’re escaping. You’re using your movies—fantasies—to escape from life.”
She could have killed Dr. Vincent then. There was nothing more dangerous, she decided, than a man with a little bit of psychological knowledge, because he would only use it against you. Maybe women were better off before, when men were like Neanderthals, with no understanding of why they did what they did, and no comprehension of why women did things either.
In her defense, she said, “People need fantasies, Shane. If we all looked at the world exactly the way it really is, no one would get out of bed in the morning.”
“That’s just you, Wendy. I can see the world the way it really is. And deal with it.”
This was such an offensive falsehood that Wendy lost it. “That’s only because you don’t have to, Shane. Because my hard work makes it possible for you to live in a little bubble where you never have to do anything you don’t want to do!”
That was it then—it was finally out in the open. This was, Wendy thought, probably the most wounding argument they’d had in their twelve years of marriage. But only because, for once, she hadn’t walked away or lied to him to soothe his ego. Dr. Vincent was right. She had been using work to escape—from Shane!
Jeez. Did she even love him anymore?
How could she? Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t, not after what he was trying to do to her and their family. It was so unbelievable, so low, she could barely allow herself to think about it. And now, sitting in the taxi and looking out the window at the bleak cement landscape (the taxi was just coming out of the Lincoln tunnel into New Jersey), she felt herself flush at the shame and anger of it.
She had known that something was wrong when she was in the airport in Paris on her way home from Romania. It was a tradition that she always came back from a trip with presents, and it was the one part of the journey that she actually looked forward to—buying stuff for the kids because it meant she’d be seeing them soon. She had bought a small canvas rollerboard suitcase to fill with gifts, and wandering around the duty-free shops, she’d tried to call Shane repeatedly. He didn’t answer anywhere—not on his cell phone or at home or even at his parents’ apartment. She tried the kids’ cell phones, but they didn’t answer either. It was four p.m. in Paris, ten a.m. in New York. There was probably some logical explanation—they had gone somewhere. Shopping maybe. Was it possible that Shane didn’t know she was going to be back on Saturday evening? She was quite sure she had told him, but maybe he hadn’t believed her. She had made it a point to phone Shane and the kids at least once a day. Her conversations with Shane were stiff and strained, but that was to be expected; even if they hadn’t had a fight, transatlantic phone calls were impossible, and she’d long ago learned not to read into them—if you did, you made yourself crazy. But when she couldn’t get Shane from the Paris airport, she panicked, dialing him and the kids every ten minutes for the next two hours, right up until she got on the plane and the flight attendant asked her to turn her cell phone off. A sense of dread set in—a fear that stayed with her for the entire seven-hour flight. There had been an accident. Maybe a fire. Perhaps Shane was dead. But something told her it was worse.
(The only thing that could be worse was if something happened to the kids. Please, God. Not that.)
She started dialing their numbers again as soon as the wheels hit the runway at JFK at 8:03 p.m.
Still no answer. Not anywhere.
This was really wrong. She began hyperventilating, lugging her valise and the suitcase down the Jetway and along the frustratingly long, winding passageway that led to the customs area. All she could think about was how she had to get home.
“Anything to declare?” the customs agent asked, looking through her passport.
She smiled hopefully. “No.” Please let me get out of here quickly, she prayed.
The agent looked at her and wrote “1” on her customs declaration card and circled it. Damn, damn, damn! She almost wanted to cry. That meant they were going to search her. Why did this always happen to women traveling alone? It was like the whole world wanted to punish you.
There was a female customs agent waiting at the exit for her. This was another bad sign. It meant that for some reason they had picked her out—her!—as a potential criminal (which she was, in a way, wasn’t she, for leaving her husband and children behind to pursue her glamorous and now probably totally meaningless career), and they needed a special female agent in case the situation required a full-body cavity search. No one believed her when she told people about this little routine that customs always pulled, but she’d traveled way too much not to know what this was about.
They really did suspect that she was a criminal. A drug carrier. Because the world still couldn’t imagine that a woman who traveled a lot on her own could possibly be anything else than a mule.
Instinctively, her eyes shifted from side to side, looking for an escape route (even though she hadn’t done anything wrong, or at least not illegal), and then before she could flee, the female customs agent (“Agent Cody” Wendy mentally named her), approached her and held out her hand.
“Can I see your customs declaration card, please.” It was a command, not a question.
“Sure,” Wendy said, nervously shifting the valise from one hand to the other.
Agent Cody examined the card. “Come with me, please.”
Wendy followed her to a long table, already feeling exposed, like she was being marched naked in front of a crowd of strangers. “What was the nature of your trip?” Agent Cody asked.
“Business,” Wendy said firmly, her mouth getting dry.
“And what is the nature of your business?” Agent Cody lifted her valise onto the table and began pawing through it.
“I’m a movie producer . . . I’m actually the president of a movie company. I’ve just been on location—”
“What was the movie?”
“It’s called Ragged Pilgrims—”
“Ragged Pilgrims? Have I seen it?”
“No. We’re in the middle of making it now . . . it comes out next Christmas,” she said apologetically.
Another agent approached. A man, mid-forties, five foot ten. Lips like two strings. Now they had her surrounded, Wendy thought. She was beginning to sweat.
“You ever hear of a movie called Ragged Pilgrims?” Agent Cody asked String Lips.
br /> “Nope,” String Lips said.
“She says she’s a movie producer,” Agent Cody said, removing her cosmetics bag from the valise and sliding it over to String Lips. String Lips unzipped the top and looked inside, pulling out a toothbrush that was so worn, the bristles were splayed to the sides like limp fingers.
“Do you . . . uh . . . mind if I make a phone call?” Wendy asked. “I’ve got to call my children.”
“No,” Agent Cody said.
“What?”
“No. No phone calls in the customs area.”
“Can I see that?” String Lips asked.
Wendy surrendered her phone. String Lips held up the phone and shook it.
“It’s just a phone . . . really,” Wendy said, daring to show her impatience. How much longer were they going to torture her like this? In a couple of seconds, they’d probably be leading her away for a strip search . . .
“Can I see your passport, please?” String Lips paged through it. “You travel a lot,” he said sternly, as if this in itself were a suspicious activity that should be avoided. “You should know that customs has the right to search any passenger at any time for any reason.”
She bowed her head, contrite. “Yes sir. You’re right.”
And only then, having finally humiliated her, did they release her.
Oh, thank God. She was free! She hurried through the swinging doors to the waiting area. There was a throng of people, but right up in the front, just as he’d been instructed, was a uniformed driver with a cart and a sign that read “Ms. Healy.” She rushed toward him, waving her hand . . . And then another man stepped forward. He was wearing a dirty trench coat and he was bald, with a few strands of greasy black hair combed over his pitted scalp. “Wendy Healy?” he asked.
Oh God, she thought grimly, this was it. The bearer of bad news. She was right all along, something dreadful had happened to Shane and the kids. And her knees began shaking with fear.
She couldn’t speak.
“Are you Wendy Healy?” the man asked again. He had a fuzzy voice, the kind of voice a stuffed animal might have if it could speak. She nodded mutely.