Chapter Two
The reception was held in a room the festival called the Founders’ Gallery, which turned out to be exactly what that name promises — exposed brick, a wall of black-and-white photographs of men in wool sweaters standing on peaks nobody had bothered to identify by placard, and a bar doing brisk business in a rye cocktail somebody’s publicist had named after the film.
I worked the room the way I’d worked every room like it for a decade: a hand on an elbow here, a name recalled correctly there, a producer’s assistant steered gently toward the canapés before she could ask Rhys a question he’d already answered twice that week.
Nobody in that room had asked me to do any of that.
Nobody ever has. It’s simply the kind of work that stops existing the moment you stop doing it, which I understood, standing there with a glass of something I wasn’t drinking, was a fairly good description of my whole marriage.
Rhys found me near the photograph wall a little after eleven, tie loosened, jacket open, carrying the loose-limbed relief of a man who has just watched something he built survive contact with an audience.
“That went well,” he said, which was, I would come to notice, the exact sentence he used after every premiere, every festival panel, every studio table read, regardless of what had happened in the room — a phrase worn smooth from years of use, the way a stair tread wears smooth in the place everyone’s foot lands.
“Deana texted during the Q she’d flown out before the reception, back to the edit bay for some post-release cut she was deep in, according to the two people I overheard discussing it.
I remember thinking, standing there, that whatever the studio’s note had done to my four seconds, it had presumably done something to her credit too, somewhere in the same document, and that I had no idea yet what that something was, or whether it would ever occur to either of us to compare notes on it.
? ? ?
We got home a little before one, paid the sitter, checked on Wyatt, who’d fallen asleep with the glacier book open on his chest and had to be extracted from it the way you extract a climber’s hand from a hold he doesn’t know he’s still gripping, and Birdie, who woke halfway, asked “Was Daddy’s movie good,” and went back under before I finished answering.
Rhys showered. I sat on the edge of our bed in the dark for longer than I meant to, still in the dress, doing the thing I do instead of crying, which is inventory.
Here is what I had, set down plainly, the way I’d set down a gear list before an expedition: nine hundred hours of raw footage across four expeditions, shot on cameras that belonged to the production but logged, timestamped, and backed up by me, onto drives I had bought myself, with my own card, because the production’s own archiving system had gone down twice in year one and I hadn’t been willing to bet an expedition’s worth of irreplaceable footage on it happening a third time.
Three storage units’ worth of drives, technically two now since I’d consolidated the year before, in a facility eleven minutes from the house, in my own name, on an account I paid from my own card every month on autopay, a fact so unremarkable I’d never once mentioned it to Rhys because there had never been a reason to.
He knew the footage existed. I’m not certain he knew where it lived, or whose name was on the storage contract, or that four years earlier, at my father’s insistence, delivered over the phone in the flat, unpretty voice Wade Marsh uses for things he considers non-negotiable, I had gotten a media lawyer to draft a work-for-hire rights letter that put my ownership of every frame I personally shot or logged into writing, filed, notarized, boring, ordinary paperwork that I had signed the way you sign paperwork for a storage unit — not because I expected to need it, but because my father had spent his whole life watching young men on that mountain lose things they never got in writing, and had raised me to never once make that mistake myself.
I hadn’t thought about that letter in three years. I thought about it that night with the cold, sudden clarity of a woman realizing she has been carrying a spare rope the whole time without knowing she’d need it.
Rhys came out of the shower, toweling his hair, and found me still sitting there in the dress. “You okay?” he said, and I watched him ask it the way he asks most things lately, kindly, genuinely, and a half-beat too fast to wait for the answer, already halfway toward the closet for a t-shirt.
“Tired,” I said, which was true, and also not what he’d asked.
He climbed into bed, and within four minutes was breathing the deep, even breath of a man whose body has spent twenty years learning to sleep on command in whatever tent, plane seat, or hotel room the schedule handed him, a skill I’d once found almost unbearably endearing, watching him drop off mid-sentence on a red-eye home from somewhere brutal, trusting the world enough to just stop being awake in it.
I lay beside him a long time not sleeping, listening to Birdie’s white-noise machine through the wall, running the numbers the way I’d run a weather window: probability, cost, contingency.
What it would cost to say something now, tonight, half-formed, and have him apologize in the fluent way he always does for things that are, underneath it, about his own discomfort at having upset me rather than about the thing itself.
What it would cost to say nothing and let the four seconds harden into the record, the permanent version, the thing people would reference the next time somebody wrote about him, forever, the wife who holds the fort.
What it would cost — and this was the number I kept returning to, at two in the morning, in the dark, with my husband asleep beside me and my children asleep down the hall — to simply take the children somewhere he wasn’t, for a while, and see what the silence showed me that the noise of our actual life together never had time to.
? ? ?