41. Anna
ANNA
My hairstylist helps me get into the dress.
Black. Floor length. A deep V in the front that Delia's stylist spent forty minutes pinning just right.
My heels are four inches, and I practiced walking in them yesterday because I am not going to fall on a red carpet in front of the entire internet.
I look at myself in the mirror.
I turn sideways. The dress barely fits. My hips are different. My stomach is different. Ten months of being someone's mother has redistributed things in ways that no amount of walking Zeke through the hills has fully corrected.
I turn back.
The makeup artist hands me my clutch.
Luke comes out of the bathroom in his tuxedo and stops when he sees me.
He doesn't say anything for a moment.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay?"
"You look—" He shakes his head. "Okay."
"That's the best you've got?"
"I'm trying to find the right word and I can't."
"You look good too," I say.
The makeup artist straightens his tie.
We go downstairs.
Nina is on the couch with Adam in her lap.
At almost one-year-old he already looks like Luke but with my eyes.
He's been pulling himself up on things for two weeks and hasn't figured out the letting go part yet.
He's wearing the little striped pajamas with the feet in them that make him look like a very small person who has just come from an important meeting.
He sees us on the stairs.
He stares.
He has never seen us like this before. We are not the people he knows. We are tall and shiny and smell different and he is working out what to make of us.
Then both arms shoot out toward me anyway because I am still me regardless of what I'm wearing.
I cross the living room in four-inch heels and pick him up. He grabs a fistful of my hair immediately.
"Adam."
He pulls harder. He always pulls harder.
Luke comes up beside us. Adam transfers his attention to Luke's tie. Both hands. Straight into his mouth.
The hairstylist fixes my hair.
"Hey." Luke retrieves the tie. "Not food."
Adam looks at him with complete seriousness and puts it back in his mouth.
"He's been doing that all day," Nina says. "Everything."
Luke crouches down to Adam's level. Adam looks at him. Luke looks back. Adam reaches out and puts one hand flat on Luke's face, the way he always does, like he's checking that Luke is real.
Luke goes very still.
He smiles.
"We'll be back," he says quietly.
I kiss Adam on the top of his head. He smells like Johnson's baby shampoo and something I've never been able to name that is just him. He grabs my earring.
"Adam."
Nina takes him back.
He goes to her without complaint, already distracted by something on the counter. He doesn't watch us leave. He's already somewhere else.
Nina looks at us.
"Go," she says. "You look beautiful."
"Thank you," I say.
"Not you," she says to me. Then she looks at Luke. "Him."
Luke grins.
We go.
The car is outside.
The driver doesn't speak, which is what I want. Luke takes my hand in the back seat and I let the city move past the windows — the canyon road, the freeway, the grid of Hollywood coming into view and then Grauman's Chinese and the marquee lit up three feet tall.
THE SENTINEL.
Luke looks at it through the glass.
I look at him looking at it.
The car stops.
Delia is at the arrival point with Steven. Delia in something architectural and severe and perfect. Steven in a suit with the expression of a man who has been waiting a very long time for this particular night.
Delia and Steven come over. Delia pulls me two steps away from Luke.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“The casting director from Private Paradise called.”
“What did she say?”
“They want you back. Four more episodes.”
“What?”
Delia smiles. “Try not to look stunned. You’re an actress.”
Steven winks at me.
Then someone shouts my name.
Not Luke’s.
Mine.
"You look incredible," Delia says to me.
"Thank you."
"Both of you." She's already moving, phone in hand, eyes scanning. "Don't make eye contact with the Variety reporter. She's been asking about Morocco and I don't want that conversation tonight."
"Delia—"
She disappears into the crowd.
Steven shakes Luke's hand. He holds it an extra beat.
"Very exciting," he says.
"Yeah," Luke says.
Steven looks at me.
"Ready?" he says.
"No," I say.
He laughs. "Everything is about to change for you, my friend."
Someone with a headset grabs us and leads us to the red carpet.
The noise is the first thing. A wall of it, names being called from every direction, the crowd behind the barriers pressing forward, cameras already firing. Then the lights — not individual flashes but a sustained brightness that turns everything flat and vivid at the same time.
Someone calls Luke's name.
Then both our names together.
Then just mine.
Anna. Anna. Anna Simons, over here.
I don't know what I expected it to feel like. This is the world saying your name back to you.
I squeeze Luke's hand.
We move through it. Luke knows every mark, every angle, every moment to hold still and let the cameras do their work. I follow his lead and somewhere in the middle of it my hands stop shaking and I'm just here, in this dress, on this carpet, in this life.
Luke breaks off for photos with Rebecca.
She arrives in red and the crowd noise shifts up a register. She and Luke stand together for the cameras — easy, unhurried, the way two people stand when they've spent six months in a desert making something real together. I watch from the side.
She catches my eye across the distance.
She raises an eyebrow. Just slightly.
I nod.
Max appears. Shakes hands with four people in thirty seconds. Gone.
Danny finds me while Luke is still with the photographers. White tuxedo. He looks like a movie star.
Jen appears in something green that is exactly right for her. She hugs me and we find a spot just off the main carpet where the noise drops slightly.
"How's Adam?" she says.
"He tried to eat Luke's tie."
"You have about a year before it gets really interesting," Danny says.
"He means terrible," Jen says.
"I mean interesting."
The lights go down.
We find our seats. Luke on one side. Jen on the other. Danny beside her. The theater fills. The murmur of a thousand conversations dropping all at once into silence.
The Sentinel begins.
I've heard this story in pieces for over a year. I know the scenes. I know what went into them and what it cost and what was found in the middle of a desert hotel room at four in the morning by a man who didn't know yet what he was looking for.
Watching it whole is something else.
Luke on screen is not the Luke I know and is entirely the Luke I know. He's larger. More still. Everything he carries in real life — the weight of it, the history — visible in every scene without ever being stated. He doesn't act it. He just is it.
The hotel scene builds slowly.
The theater knows it's coming. I can feel it in the room — the collective held breath, people sitting forward slightly, everyone leaning in before they realize they're doing it.
I can't live without you.
I remember the kitchen table. The script between us.
On screen he reaches for her.
The theater goes completely silent. The popcorn stops.
He looks at Rebecca and tells her he loves her. I know it's me he sees.
The audience holds their breath. That's the shot that cost us two million dollars.
When it ends, I realize I've been holding Luke's hand so tightly my fingers have gone white.
I let go.
The credits roll.
People stand before they're finished.
The after party is at Soho House. The whole cast. The whole crew. The people who made something together over six months and a year of post-production and are now standing in a room watching it exist in the world without them.
Luke and Rebecca and Max and Danny form a loose circle near the bar. I stand close enough and watch. Rebecca laughing at something Max says. Danny with his arm along the back of a chair, the way he always stands. Luke in the middle of it — relaxed, present, belonging there completely.
Three years ago he shoved a director in a parking lot.
Tonight he's the reason everyone in this room has a job.
Rebecca catches my eye. I go over. “There’s talk of a sequel.”
"I heard that."
“No more drama?”
“No more drama,” I say
Jen appears at my elbow.
"Drink?" she says.
"Oh yeah." We head to the bar.
"Living dangerously."
"I know." She looks out at the room. At Danny. At Luke. At all of it.
"You know what's funny?" I say.
"You can't wait to get home to Adam?" she says.
"You too?"
"Every time," she says.
The car is waiting at midnight.
Luke finds me in the crowd. He doesn't say anything. He just puts his hand out.
I take it.
We say goodbye to everyone. Delia, who squeezes my hand and says something about the next project she's already thinking about.
Steven, who is still slightly emotional and pretending not to be.
Danny and Jen — Jen hugs me for a long time.
Rebecca, who pulls me in and says something quiet in my ear that I will keep to myself for the rest of my life.
The car pulls away from Soho House.
The canyon road winds up through the dark the way it always has. The city drops away on both sides. Luke's arm around me. My head on his shoulder. Neither of us talking.
The gate opens.
The house is dark except for one light in the kitchen.
Nina is asleep on the couch.
Zeke lifts his head, decides we're not worth the effort, puts it back down.
We go upstairs quietly.
Adam is asleep in his crib. One arm thrown up beside his head, completely surrendered to it the way only babies sleep — no holding back, no bracing for anything, just entirely and completely out.
We stand there.
Luke picks him up. Adam doesn't wake up.
We go upstairs.
Luke sets him on the bed.
We undress.
Luke gets in bed with Adam.
His chest rises and falls.
Outside Los Angeles keeps going.
In here it's quiet.
I look at Luke asleep with our son by him.
I remove my make-up.
Look in the mirror.
I’m more than enough.
The End
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