The Rom-Commers

Chapter Eighteen

AFTER FOUR WEEKSof living with Charlie, day in and day out, I had to make it official: We were good together.

Good at writing together, and good at living together.

Given how everything started, I might’ve expected the whole rewrite process to be endless clashing, and arguing, and insulting each other. Charlie could so easily have chosen to be offended by some nobody from nowhere trying to tell him what to do. He could have dug in his heels and fought me on every single thing.

And yet—he didn’t.

I had armored up for a field of battle—and somehow we wound up in a field of daisies instead. Having a picnic.

I worked out many theories to explain it. Maybe Charlie really did understand that his version of the script was bad. Maybe he truly had liked my honesty when I ripped it to shreds. Maybe he was telling the truth when he said he liked my writing. Maybe his ego wasn’t as immutable as everyone claimed.

Maybe I’d fallen madly in love with his writing for a reason. Maybe we shared some kind of essential linguistic rhythm, or some comic outlook, or some moral framework that made it easier to be friends than enemies.

Or maybe we both just really loved writing—in the exact same way.

Maybe writing was our shared love language.

There’s a joke that writers “don’t like to write—they like having written,” and that must be true of some writers. But it wasn’t true of me or Charlie. We liked the process. We liked the words. We liked playing around and trying things. We liked syllables and consonants and syncopation. We liked deciding between em dashes and commas. We liked figuring out where the story needed to go and then helping it get there.

It wasn’t easy, exactly—but it was fun.

It was work that felt like play.

Which is all to say that one day, when we should have been writing, Charlie wanted to take me to a farmers market off Mulholland Drive instead—and swore that we would definitely get work done by talking about the story nonstop there and back, and I believed it. That was absolutely what we would do.

Except we never made it to the farmers market.

The road was windy and breathtaking—built in the 1920s as a scenic drive and strung with the hidden driveways of world-famous people—and Charlie seemed more than happy to tool along it with the windows down and his shades on and the radio blasting 1970s music.

I, in contrast, was terrified.

I didn’t know who designed this road—but it must have been before the invention of safety. Or road shoulders. This thing slalomed back and forth between a steep valley on one side and a low canyon on the other, and only at the most lethal points were there any guardrails. Over and over, we rounded curves where the edge of the road kissed hundred-foot drop-offs. I started gasping and wincing.

As we weaved along the two skinny lanes, I found myself getting motion sick. The ups, the downs, the side-to-sides. It was a lot for my inner ear to handle. Charlie drove it fearlessly—one hand slouching on the wheel—like he drove it all the time.

Which I guess he did.

When Charlie happened to glance over and see me bracing against the door in fear, he said, “You don’t like the Hollywood Hills?”

“I come from a town that’s elevation zero,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I drive here all the time.”

“Why aren’t there more… guardrails?”

At the question, Charlie scanned the road and noticed its very weak guardrail game for what seemed like the first time.

“People are just careful, I guess,” he said in a tone like Huh.

We’d curve one way and get a glimpse of a deep ravine to the right, then curve the other way and see the LA valley on the left. Through it all, I braced against the dashboard and jammed my foot over and over on a nonexistent brake pedal.

“You’re a terrible passenger,” Charlie said.

“I’m a fine passenger,” I said. “On a normal road.”

“Try to enjoy the view. We just passed Jack Nicholson’s house.”

“I’ll enjoy it later. After we’ve survived.”

“You want to know why you shouldn’t be worried right now?”

“Why?”

“Because the bad thing you’re worried about is never the bad thing that happens.”

I took that in.

“It’s always some other bad thing you’re not expecting. Right? So the fact that you’re worried we’re going to plunge to our deaths off the side of this road means that there’ll definitely be an earthquake instead. Or a drone strike. Or Godzilla.”

“So you’re saying something terrible is a given.”

Charlie shrugged. “Pessimism’s always a safe bet.”

I was just about to argue with that when—right then—an orange cat scrambled full tilt out of some low bushes by the edge of the highway and shot across the road in front of us.

We were edging along a section of the drive that had a steep hill to our left, and, um—how to put it—nothing at all to the right. Just a curving road with no shoulder that dropped off so dramatically into a canyon that you couldn’t see any edge at all.

With only a laughably low aluminum guardrail to protect us.

The cat dropped out of nowhere from the hillside, skittered across the road, and shot under the guardrail to disappear. Charlie touched the brakes, but the cat was gone in a flash—but before we could even exhale, that’s when, from the exact same place in the exact same low bushes, another, much bigger animal leapt out.

I thought it was a dog at first. It was the size of a yellow lab.

But it wasn’t a yellow lab.

Charlie hit the brakes for real this time—hard enough for me to slam forward against my seat belt like I’d been smacked with a wooden board.

And then the chaos started.

The second animal was gone as fast as the first one was—but it had been much bigger, and faster, and closer, and if Charlie hadn’t jammed on the brakes, we would’ve hit it for sure.

Who knows—hitting it might’ve been worse.

But it was bad enough, either way.

We were on a curve so sharp that stopping short made the back wheels spin out. And then the whole lumbering seventies Blazer started fishtailing into a 360 across the pavement like we were on a carnival ride.

The worst carnival ride ever.

I remember Charlie and me—both screaming—as the world outside the car blurred past the windows and Charlie desperately worked the wheel to try to regain traction. I remember the exact pitch of the tires wailing across the asphalt. And I don’t know if it was Charlie’s maneuvering or just an accident of physics, but as the car straightened itself out, I realized we were now lurching toward the guardrail.

The measly, maybe two-foot-high, definitely not-to-code guardrail.

Which was the only thing standing between us and a deep ravine that dropped off to nothingness past the edge of the road.

Everything disappeared except for the rail itself, and it felt more like it was coming toward us than the other way around.

And then we hit it. Front wheels crossing the white line painted at the edge of the road head-on like a finish line—just as the snout of the Blazer hit the metal railing with unholy creaks and deep groans like thunder as the metal bent with the force of our impact.

The front axle of the Blazer went fully over the edge of a berm of dirt before we stopped.

And I immediately felt terrible for underestimating that poor guardrail.

It caught us. God bless it, it caught us.

We fully snapped two of the posts as we went over them, but the horizontal belt caught us like a muzzle and didn’t let go.

In the silence that followed, with the wind whistling through the axle underneath us, I pieced together an understanding of our position: the back tires were still on the road, the chassis of the Blazer was resting on the berm, and the two front wheels were fully over the edge.

In front of us, and all around, was only a vast empty sky, with a valley that I couldn’t really see—and didn’t dare to look for—down below.

As an aside, I’ll mention that the view of the sky was breathtaking—electric blue with stippled white clouds.

“Did that just happen?” I whispered out loud.

“I guess the good news is,” Charlie said, “we didn’t hit the dog.”

“That wasn’t a dog, Charlie,” I said.

“It wasn’t?” Charlie said. “I thought it was a Great Dane. Or maybe a deer.”

“It was a bit too mountain lion shaped to be a deer.”

“A mountain lion? That’s crazy!”

“You’re the one who told me about the mountain lions!”

“Yes—but I was just trying to scare you.”

“Mission accomplished.”

At that, the car shifted a little.

We both froze, holding each other’s stares, like Did we just imagine that?

Then quietly, in a whisper, Charlie said, “I think we must be teetering on the axle.”

“Let’s get out,” I whispered back. “Can we get out?”

Almost imperceptibly, Charlie shook his head. “There’s no getting out. We have to call for help.”

“Where’s your phone?” I whispered.

In slow-mo, Charlie reached up to slide it out of the breast pocket of his Oxford and dial 911—and I listened, frozen still, while he calmly explained all of our details to the dispatcher.

After Charlie hung up, he said, “Ten minutes or so,” in a non-whisper that I suspected was meant to signal somehow that we were okay enough for full volume. Then, when I didn’t say anything, he added, “Lucky for that guardrail.”

“Charlie,” I said, also making the choice to not whisper, but not 100 percent sure that the vibration of my vocal cords wouldn’t be enough to shift our position. “That thing could give way at any second.”

“All we have to do,” Charlie said, keeping his voice as smooth as chocolate milk, “is wait for help.”

But that’s when, as if to undermine all his efforts, Charlie coughed.

And then he coughed again.

I wasn’t sure if the coughing was rocking the car or if it was just my imagination, but I said, “Don’t cough, Charlie.”

In response, Charlie coughed again.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

“It’s allergies,” Charlie said.

“What are you allergic to? Plunging to our deaths?”

“We’re not going to plunge,” Charlie said, like I was being far more ridiculous than I actually was. “And we’re not going to die.”

But in the silence as we waited for him to cough again, I wondered.

Finally, I said, “I have this worried feeling like I might freak out.”

“Freak out in a still way?” Charlie asked. “Or in a way that will rock the car?”

“Unclear,” I said. “But the waiting is definitely getting to me.”

Charlie studied me for a second. And then he said, out of nowhere, “My first kiss was in the seventh grade. Did you know that?”

I frowned, like How would I know that? And then, additionally, How is this relevant?

“She was a friend of my sister’s, at her birthday sleepover,” he said, and then in a tone like just speaking the name conjured up a whole world: “Mary Marino. She had, and I say this with so much reverence, legendary boobs.”

“Why are we talking about this?”

“She left the party,” Charlie went on, “and asked me to take a walk, which I did. And we made our way to an empty park and sat side by side on a bench and talked, but I have no idea what we talked about. All I remember is that she kept leaning close to me, and looking at me, and kind of puckering up her lips. I was not getting the message. I kept wondering if her braces were bothering her. Finally she turned to face me like I was the biggest pain in the ass in the world and said, ‘Are you going to kiss me or not?’”

“I love this kid,” I said. “She’s a role model for us all.”

“So I kissed her,” Charlie said. “And then she said, ‘That’s it?’ And I could tell she was disappointed, but I had no idea how to do anything differently. And while I was thinking, she told me she was going back—and to wait ten minutes so nobody would catch on.”

“Did you ever figure out what you did wrong?”

“I think I just kissed her like you’d kiss your grandma.”

“Oof.”

“What was your first kiss?” Charlie asked.

“Second grade,” I said. “The boy across the street. I made him climb up onto the top shelf of my bedroom closet with me, pecked him on the cheek, and then swore him to secrecy forever.”

“And? Did he keep the secret?”

“Does it count if he forgot about it entirely?”

“Okay. Next question,” Charlie said. “Ask me something interesting enough to keep us distracted.”

And so I just said, “Tell me about your cancer.”

It was a wildly inappropriate question. One I never would have asked if we hadn’t been teetering above our deaths.

“Sure,” Charlie said, extracasual. “What do you want to know?”

“What happened?”

“I had a lump on my forearm, which seemed like an odd place for a lump. I asked the doc about it at a checkup—but more just making conversation than anything else. I still had that thing back at that age where you think you’re invincible. But just from his frown as he started looking at it, I knew.”

“You knew you had cancer?”

“Yeah. I’m a pessimist, though, so I didn’t trust myself, either. I always start with death in every situation and work my way backward.”

“Are you starting with death now?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re here. And you’re gonna be fine. And if you’re gonna be fine, then I’m gonna be fine. So it’s not even a question.”

“That’s the worst logic I’ve ever heard.”

“The point is, I thought for sure I was only worried because that’s just what I do. Not because there was actually something to worry about.”

“But then you turned out to be right?”

Charlie nodded. “The biopsy came back malignant. So starting with death turned out to be the right approach.”

“But you didn’t die.”

“Not yet. Give me time.”

“And that’s when your wife left you?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “On the day I got the biopsy results. But she’d been planning it for weeks, if that makes it less bad.”

“She was planning to leave you while you waited for biopsy results?”

“In her defense, I didn’t tell her about the biopsy.”

“You didn’t tell her anything? Not even about the lump? Or that you’d gone to the doctor?”

“Nothing,” Charlie said.

“Why not?”

“It just felt… personal.”

“But wouldn’t a wife be someone you’re supposed to share personal things with?”

“This tells you a lot about our relationship.”

“Were you not close?”

“Our lives just didn’t intersect as much as they should’ve.”

“Isn’t that the point of being married, though? So you can intersect?”

“I guess that’s why we’re not married anymore.”

“So—” I was still trying to wrap my head around it. “You told her you had cancer, and she told you she wanted a divorce?”

“Kind of. But not in that order. When she got home that night, I said, ‘I have something to tell you,’ and she said, ‘I have something to tell you,’ and then we did a ‘you go first; no, you go first’ thing for a while, and then finally we decided to just say our things at the same time. So I said, ‘I have cancer,’ just as she said, ‘I want a divorce.’”

I swallowed. “Brutal.”

“Yeah.”

“She tried to take it back after that, but I said, ‘You can’t take it back. It’s already out there.’”

“So you just—went through everything alone?”

“My sister came to stay a couple of times, but my dad’s not in great health and couldn’t make the trip. Logan helped out. And Jack and I played a lot of video games.”

“What about your mom?”

“She left when I was a kid.” And then, like he was putting something together for the first time, he frowned and said, “When I was sick, actually.”

“When you were sick?”

“I never talk about this.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes my mom sound so awful, what she did. But my dad wasn’t exactly a dream, either.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Charlie looked at me like he was deciding. “I’ll tell you. Just don’t, like, retell it in an interview.”

“Nobody’s interviewing me, Charlie.”

Charlie tilted his head. “Yet,” he said. Then he said, “I was eight, and I was obsessed with Harry Houdini. I’d seen that movie about him—you know the one where he unties all the ropes underwater?”

I nodded.

“My sister and I were making a kid version of that movie on our dad’s camcorder, and I was going to do that trick, and she was going to film it. We’d studied the scene and taken notes, and I’d practiced untying the knots like five hundred times with a stopwatch. And so one night we tied my hands and feet and I jumped into the pool, but we’d used the wrong rope, and it plumped up once it got wet, and I couldn’t get the knots undone. My sister had a timer, and when I hadn’t surfaced in twenty seconds, she ran to get our dad—but our parents were having this epic fight, which they did sometimes, and she couldn’t get their attention right away. By the time our dad pulled me out, I’d inhaled a bunch of water and I was pretty hysterical.”

“Wow,” I said. “No wonder you don’t swim.”

“After a few minutes, I was okay, and they put me to bed, but later that night I woke up and couldn’t stop throwing up, and it turned out I had this thing called ‘secondary drowning’ where your lungs have kind of a delayed reaction, and I had to spend the night in the pediatric ICU getting fluids and supplemental oxygen. But the thing was, my parents weren’t just fighting that night. They were breaking up. My mom was leaving. And so when I woke up that night, and only my dad was there, I kind of knew.”

I felt a wave of indignation. “Wait! Your mom left your dad on the night her child almost drowned?”

“In her defense, my timing wasn’t great.”

“But… how could she?” I protested, as if that moment had been written wrong and we needed to revise it.

But Charlie was coming to a bigger realization. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t want to tell Margaux I was sick.” Charlie looked at me, frowning. “Could that be it?”

“Uh, yeah. Hello. That is textbook subconscious nonsense. Didn’t you take psych in college?”

“So…” Charlie said, still snapping the pieces into place. “My mom left when I was sick, and my wife left when I was sick.”

“But now you’re dying,” I said, gesturing at the valley below with my eyes. “And another woman in your life”—I pointed at myself—“is not going anywhere.”

I lifted my eyebrows, like How ’bout that? Like by breaking the pattern, I’d fixed him.

But then Charlie said, “Only because you can’t get out.”

“You don’t know that.”

I gave Charlie a minute to process. This had been a very productive near-death experience so far.

Then, to keep the distractions going, I said, “I don’t have a mom, either.”

Charlie met my eyes. “She left you?”

“She died,” I said. “In the same camping accident that injured my dad.”

“Oh,” Charlie said then, his voice low and soft like a hum. “I’m sorry.”

“You know what?” I said. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I remember my dad saying, over and over in the years after she died, ‘We’re going to be okay. We know how to do this.’ And he wasn’t wrong.”

“How to… grieve?”

“How to let go.”

“That’s not easy.”

“No. And it takes a long time. My dad kept promising that grieving was a natural process—part of being human—and that we’d be okay in the end. I didn’t believe him at first. But he was right. It’s okay now. It doesn’t make me sad to remember her now. I miss her, but in a way that doesn’t hurt. You do get there, eventually.”

“Your dad sounds very wise.”

I nodded—just barely. “I won the dad lottery, for sure.” Then I added something that I’d never said out loud before—something that was so scary to verbalize that it made my feelings about the situation we were currently in—teetering above a vast valley below us, held only by a ribbon of guardrail metal—seem almost cute. “The camping trip was my choice,” I confessed to Charlie then. “Everybody else, my mom included, voted to go to the beach.”