Chapter 10
Instead of going home, I drove to Gabe’s. I didn’t trust myself to make it all the way back to Silver Lake. I existed outside my body. Had I eaten? I couldn’t remember.
Gabe wasn’t home, so I waited in my car, outside his building.
Five minutes might have passed, or fifty—I’d lost all track of time.
He eventually showed up with a trunk full of plastic-bagged groceries and noticed me while trying to balance a gallon of milk in the crook of his elbow.
I couldn’t help but wonder what a twenty-five-year-old man living alone was doing with a full gallon of milk.
I got out of my car, grinning idiotically despite my panicked fugue. Maybe because of it.
“I’ve had the most terrible day,” I said, smile crumbling. Something about my face or the tone of my voice clued Gabe in to just how terrible, and he gathered me in a massive hug. He didn’t ask me why I wasn’t at work, why I was parked on his street, why I was crying.
“It’ll be okay,” Gabe said. “Whatever it is, it’ll be okay.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to pour myself an entire bottle of wine and pass out in his bed and wake up to a repeat of this morning, when Sally Ann was still alive. This was, in fact, what I intended to do—minus the time travel—but first I had to tell him what had happened.
I don’t remember much of that initial conversation.
Gabe said something like Oh fuck and assured me the whole thing was a crazy freak accident.
He made me a dinner that I barely ate and let me borrow a T-shirt to wear as pajamas.
He was so tender. So sweet. I wish that I’d had less to drink, that I could clearly remember the exact planes of his face or how he held himself.
I wish that those were the moments that had been stealthily captured on camera—that I had video footage of me and Gabe, holed up in his condo in Sun Valley, the evening I drove over and he held me while I cried.
This was the hinge, for me and Gabe. This was the moment when we’d either crossed the border into actual intimacy or he’d officially pulled the wool over my eyes.
Between my memory and the hard drives of raw footage, I have most of the story of that day, but this stretch of time with Gabe is lost to me.
Gabe on the phone with his mother. A glare of light against the kitchen counter, an episode of Frasier playing muted on TV.
In the morning, I woke up to a voicemail from Lauren telling me that I should not have walked off set but she was willing to forgive me.
Production was on pause for the rest of the week, but I should come in on Monday, as usual.
Her tone was no different than it had been in the previous voicemail she’d left me about buying paper doilies.
Death did not faze Lauren; she was immune to the weaknesses of human emotion in a way that I decidedly was not.
Maybe because she hadn’t been the one to fuck up.
Maybe because she had hardened her heart to anyone who appeared in front of the camera line.
Would this be part of Season Two’s story?
If legal would let Lauren use it, I sensed that it would.
So much for romantic comedy—we were in dead-girl genre now.
Sally Ann was dead.
Was that little girl in her locket her sister or her child?
I should have given her the lunch order myself.
I should have known to get the EpiPen—it was sitting right next to me.
Instead, I’d watched, done nothing. Maggie had had to walk clear across the kitchen, an extra thirty seconds that might have cost Sally Ann her life.
I put down my phone and pulled the curtains open, inviting the midmorning light.
Gabe’s place had slightly more flair than your typical bachelor pad.
He’d clearly paid someone to decorate—there was no way the Gabe I knew would go for chintz.
But that overstuffed chair added a certain warmth to the otherwise austere bedroom, with its dark jersey sheets and off-white curtains.
An acoustic guitar leaned against a hamper.
A framed photo of his niece and nephew, aged one and five, sat on a mostly bare dresser.
There was another photo of him with his parents at what I thought was maybe Niagara Falls.
It all smelled like that piney soap he used—what had been like a drug to me last week was helping to ground me in the present.
“Hey.” Here he was with coffee. “Do you want breakfast before you go?” I shook my head. Gabe was a good cook, but I couldn’t stomach anything.
“They’re stopping production for a while,” I said. “I don’t have anywhere to be.”
“Except right here,” said Gabe.
“Except right here.” I closed my eyes tight, pulled my hair into a ponytail. Gabe sat on the side of the bed.
“We can hang around here today,” he said. “If that’s what you want.” It was exactly what I wanted, though I knew he must have plans he’d be abandoning on my behalf.
“What a weird day,” I said. “What a weird everything.” Gabe shifted so he was next to me, our backs against his headboard. “Do you ever think about how every person you encounter could just drop dead at any second?”
Gabe pointed at himself. “Kool-Aid club, remember? Existential angst has always been my jam.” I chuckled, then felt I shouldn’t. How could I laugh when Sally Ann was lying in a morgue somewhere? “Hey,” Gabe said. “It makes sense that you’re shook up. It happened yesterday. It’s traumatic.”
“Did I just kill someone? I can’t figure out if I just killed someone.” I was going to start crying again; I could feel the pressure build behind my eyes.
“You didn’t kill anyone.” Gabe’s voice was firm.
“But if I had just—”
“You could have dug through the order, and there still might have been oil in the sauce. She could have made a bigger deal about the allergy. She got the medicine. You can ‘what if’ yourself into anything.”
“It feels like my fault.” I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
“It’s not your fault.” Gabe gathered me to him.
How strange that life went on, that even in my well of guilt I could take pleasure in the nearness of his body, the feel of his fingers stroking my hair.
“If you want to smoke weed and play video games, or do a marathon of bad TV, or get ice cream, or just sit here and feel it, whatever you want to do, I’m here. ”
“I love you,” I said. It just came out of me. Were I in my right mind with any time to mull it over, I would certainly have talked myself out of telling Gabe that I loved him. But I felt it then, and I had bulldozed my defenses, so I said it. Gabe’s face blossomed.
“I love you.” He pulled me closer, resting his chin on my shoulder, his cheek next to mine.
“Fuck,” I said. Gabe pulled away, concern wrinkling his forehead. “I’m not taking it back. It’s just a shitty time to realize.”
“Every time’s a shitty time in some way or another,” said Gabe. “But also a good one.”
“What you are you, a songwriter?”
He kissed me. “It’s going to be okay.”
I stayed at Gabe’s for six days, wearing his T-shirts and using a fresh toothbrush in shrink-wrap that he’d gotten from the dentist. I didn’t want to go anywhere, so we hid from the world, curtains closed, bed unmade.
I flipped channels and browsed Gabe’s bookshelves.
He cooked elaborate dishes he’d been wanting to show off to me: coquille Saint Jacques and chicken confit and some meat with a long braise.
I didn’t go to work on Monday. I couldn’t stomach it.
I texted Lauren that I was sick, and I let my phone lose charge.
Tuesday passed, then Wednesday. I was certain they would fire me.
I only plugged my phone back in because my mother would probably be worried if she couldn’t reach me after I’d called her mid-workday the week before.
I did indeed have a voicemail checking in on me, as well as one from Lauren and another from Dan.
I called my mother back to assure her I was fine, had just been dealing with some weird stuff at work.
I immediately felt bad about not letting her in.
But I didn’t usually give her the details of a day on the job, never asked her advice about handling Lauren’s dry-cleaning or transporting equipment.
This was just something that had happened; it hadn’t even happened to me.
Sally Ann had died, and I was getting used to it.
I no longer shuddered into recognition—the fact of it wasn’t an avalanche that buried me anew each time I let my memory breach the past few days.
Sally Ann hadn’t gone to visit her family; she wasn’t fired.
She was nowhere; there was no more Sally Ann.
I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to be able to walk back on set.
I felt pathetic and soft and—despite Gabe’s continued insistence that I wasn’t to blame, despite the lack of police banging down my door—extremely guilty.
I was inclined to let the work voicemails go.
“They’re probably just firing me.”
“But they might not be,” Gabe said. “It’s worth at least a listen.” He was tuning a guitar. I was going to have to get back to work, if only to let him get back to work.
The first voicemail, from Lauren, was a quick heads-up that Dan was going to call. The second, from Dan, asked me to come into the main production office.
Production headquarters in Glendale was closer to Gabe’s place than my own, but I opted to head home to get an outfit that wasn’t the jeans and tee I had been wearing at the scene of the crime.
Even if they were just going to fire me, I wanted to show up professional, smelling like my own shampoo, wearing mascara.