Chapter 10 The Mother You Needed
The Mother You Needed
The next morning at the office, Blair reread the latest subpar incarnation of a Green Light script.
Tiffany had pretty much given up on Green Light, but she humored Blair. This latest version—the script Tiffany had delivered on Halloween—was the result of her finding a young writer to do some tinkering, a woman who was getting a lot of buzz for a sleeper-hit TV show.
Blair had had high hopes for this one.
She always did.
Her hopes were dashed.
They always were.
She thought back on the chain of adaptation.
There was the novel on one end and this script on the other.
In between was a series of iterations, each meant to solve some problem or other that had arisen in the previous version.
Each version made sense, on its own, when she thought about its specific aim.
But the cumulative result was the screenplay version of a copy of a copy of a copy. Pixelated and blurry.
Dead as a doornail.
For the first time, Blair wondered if perhaps Green Light wasn’t meant to exist as anything other than a book in a world where Angela didn’t exist. Maybe the reason all these scripts sucked was that Angela was meant to be the one writing the adaptation.
She hadn’t known Angela for very long, but sometimes she missed her so much, it hurt.
Cranky and hungry, she announced her intention to work from home for the rest of the day. “I have no meetings today,” she said when Tiff raised an eyebrow at her uncharacteristically early departure.
It was depressingly true. They had feelers out on a couple books she was potentially interested in.
She had a writer working on a script for a YA series she was honestly kind of lukewarm on but that Tiff loved—Tiff was humoring Blair on Green Light, so Blair was trying to return the favor.
But it was too early to expect anything on that project.
On the way home, thinking of her silly goals of going to a restaurant and to a party before the end of the year, she drove by a café near the office where she and Tiffany sometimes had meetings.
It was only eleven. It wouldn’t be crowded.
She slowed her car. There was a spot right out front. It seemed meant to be.
At the last minute, she accelerated past the spot. She couldn’t do it.
At home, sick of herself, she ate some cheese and crackers, changed into a bathing suit, and went out back, where she encountered Jack.
He was stretched out on one of the lounge chairs with his computer on his lap.
She almost crept away, not wanting to disturb him, but changed her mind. It was her house.
“Fancy meeting you here under the sun of high noon.” She waited for him to call her on the fact that he’d just told her yesterday that he was in the habit of writing by the pool, but he did not.
“As I said, I guess this LA shit is wearing off on me.”
“Your secret is safe with me. Is it going to bother you if I swim?” The question was a formality. Jack could be an asshole, but he wasn’t going to tell her she couldn’t swim in her own pool. She dropped her towel.
He stared at her, and if she didn’t know him to be incapable of being at a loss for words, she would have said he was dumbstruck. She was about to look down at herself to make sure she didn’t have an accidental wedgie when he made a go-ahead gesture.
“I need to cool off.” Her sad cheese-and-crackers lunch and empty calendar had worked her into a state.
It was possible the presence of a hot literary genius next to her pool was a contributing factor.
She walked around to the far side of the pool so she wouldn’t splash him and his computer and dived in.
As she settled into her laps, she wondered if he would mention her in the acknowledgments of his second book.
She wondered what it was going to be called.
She wondered if he’d nuked the leaked pages and started over or if he’d managed to salvage them.
She was so curious about the book, but she knew that to ask him about it would be counterproductive. He was like a spooked horse she had to tiptoe around.
When she was done with her laps, she flipped onto her back and floated, looking up at the sky. Floating like this, she could imagine getting back to normal. Finding some sort of equilibrium. Maybe even moving on from Green Light.
This was the opposite of the cyclone. This was ease. Tranquility in aquamarine water under a cornflower sky.
Her peace was punctured by the sound of an incoming FaceTime. It was always something; peace never lasted.
She’d left her phone on the chair next to Jack. “Do you mind telling me who that is?” she called.
He leaned over. “It says ‘Cal.’”
A shock of joy, the particular sort of joy conferred by one’s children seeking one’s company, even if only digitally. The only thing worth ending the aquamarine/cornflower respite. She hustled out of the pool.
“Hey, honey. What’s up?”
She didn’t introduce Cal to Jack the way she had Esme. Calvin was her serious child. When he called, it was because there was something he wanted to talk about, something that was important to him, so she always gave him her undivided attention.
True to form, he wanted to discuss whether he should stay on campus for the spring semester or join a sublet where a friend of his was moving.
“I know it’s strange that I haven’t brought this up, but I didn’t even know it was an option.
I didn’t know Liam was moving off campus.
He just suddenly invited me. The price is about the same.
I already told the dorm I was staying, but even with the forfeited deposit, it comes out about even. ”
Blair appreciated that her son, who didn’t have to worry about money, worried about money.
She walked to the other side of the pool to put some distance between Jack and her conversation and took a seat at the dining table next to the main house.
“Then it sounds like you should take the spot in the apartment.”
“Yeah, but it will be a much longer commute to school, and to the internship in the summer if I get it.”
“Ah.”
“But on the other hand, I’m a junior, and I’ve only ever lived in a dorm. But on the other other hand, if I go to the apartment, I only know Liam. I don’t know the others. It could end up being a party atmosphere.”
She smiled. When Cal was a baby, Blair, herself still a girl, had battled so many fears.
What if she screwed him up? What if he dropped out of school, or did drugs?
Could she ever have imagined she would birth a child who was worried that his college apartment would be too much of a party scene? But she had, and he was.
“What’s the worst-case scenario?” she asked him. “Say it is party central. You don’t have to partake. You can close your door.”
“I know. But will I get enough sleep?”
She had to stifle a laugh. She still missed Reggie sometimes—like when she wanted to laugh at one of her kids.
She had never done that, of course, but she had at times met Reggie’s gaze and shared a silent moment of understanding and amusement.
“Yeah, it’s a tough call. The known versus the unknown. ”
“That’s a good way of thinking about it. And there’s nothing wrong with the known.” That was Cal, talking himself into following the safe path.
She wanted to tell him to move out with his friends. If he ended up sleeping with earplugs and the commute was a slog, so what? Some phases of life sucked. But she strove always to respect her kids for who they were. She tried not to project her own tastes and opinions onto them.
“You know what? I don’t think you can make a wrong choice here.
Sure, one might be suboptimal compared to the other, but short of a tesseract that would let you travel back in time for a do-over”—Cal had loved the Wrinkle in Time books as a kid, and even though he would say he’d grown out of them, she was pretty sure the reference would still work—“you can’t live both versions, so you’ll never know.
You’re going to have a fun, productive semester no matter what you do.
” Well, that might be a lie. He would be productive no matter what; fun she was less sure about.
“Yeah, you’re right.” He paused. “What would you do?”
“I would go live with my friends. But I’m not you. You should do what feels right to you.”
“I might have fun.”
“You might.”
“And if I don’t, I can suck it up for a few months and move back to the dorm for the summer.”
“And speaking of summer, you know there’s always a room for you here.
” Which he wouldn’t use. She had no idea how it had happened, but Cal was committed to a career in government.
“And at your dad’s, of course.” Which was the house he’d grown up in, where he would probably want to spend the majority of his time should he, for some inexplicable reason, ever decide to come back to California.
She regrouped. This was not about her. “My point is, you have options if you end up not liking being in the apartment.”
“I think I’m going to do it.”
“Great!”
They talked a little longer. Cal was a good kid. Though he had called solely to get her advice on the housing situation, he didn’t want to make it seem that way. Again, she had to stifle a laugh. She was amused by how easily she could read him.
“Any progress on Green Light?” he asked, and even though she was laughing at him internally, she appreciated that he was polite enough to ask about her life.
“Not really. I had a meeting with a new potential director. She’s not a big name like Tolhart was, but she has a solid track record and she was nominated for an Emmy a couple years ago. I was hoping if I could get her attached, we might be able to scare up some new money.”
“But? Is there a but coming?”
“I don’t have a great script. I can almost guarantee she’ll pass.” As she, a woman on an upward trajectory, should.
“Crap.”
“It’s OK. Sometimes projects don’t work out.” Even projects that feel like they have your whole heart wrapped up in them.