Chapter Twenty-Five Brielle
He was hard.
That’s what I keep coming back to. Not the words, though the words are living in my ear. Not the fact that Jase and Evan watched from the table. Just that he pressed himself against me and I felt all of him, and then he walked back to his chair like it was nothing.
Maxwell Redwood. Who has looked at me for weeks and given nothing, nothing, and then stood behind me in his own kitchen with his mouth at my ear and his hands braced on the counter on either side of me and let me feel exactly what he was thinking.
Invite me next time, he said. To the whole table. Like nothing happened.
That was two hours ago.
Now I’m on the couch with my legs tucked under me and a blanket pulled up to my chest.
The television is on low, showing something nobody is watching, and the four of us have been winding down.
Nobody has mentioned the kitchen. Nobody has mentioned any of it. We cleared the table and moved to the living room.
Jase says goodnight first, leaning down to press a kiss to my hair, like it’s always been part of his routine. Evan follows, his hand brushing my shoulder as he passes the couch, warm and brief, and then his door clicks shut, and the apartment goes quieter.
Just me and Max.
He’s in the armchair across from me with his phone, the lamp beside him low, and I lie on the couch with the blanket pulled up and watch him without meaning to. The line of his jaw. The set of his shoulders. The way his thumb moves across the screen.
I keep thinking about the kitchen. About how still I went when he stepped behind me. About the warmth of his chest at my back and the sound of his voice dropped that low, and the undeniable feeling of him pressed against me, and the fact that he just. Walked away.
He looks up.
I close my eyes.
A minute later, I hear him stand, the soft click of his bedroom door, and then the apartment is fully quiet, and I am alone on the couch in the dark, with the city doing its ambient thing outside, the blanket pulled up to my chin, and absolutely no hope of sleeping.
I open my eyes and look at the ceiling and understand that Maxwell Redwood sat across from me for twenty minutes in a dark living room and then went to bed, and I genuinely cannot decide if he is the most disciplined person I have ever met or if he is doing this to me on purpose.
Both possibilities are equally maddening.
I lie there in the quiet for a long time.
***
I take the B train to Brighton Beach alone.
The set is smaller than I imagined and more real than I expected.
Callie operates with a crew of seven, which she has told me before is exactly the right number for the kind of films she makes, enough people to do the work properly and few enough that everyone knows what everyone else is doing at all times.
They’re set up on a stretch of beach that is mostly empty at this hour, the November cold keeping the casual visitors away, the boardwalk behind them quiet and salt-bleached and beautiful in the particular way of things that have been weathered into honesty.
Callie sees me coming across the sand and breaks into a grin that she doesn’t bother managing.
“You made it,” she says.
“I said I would,” I say.
She looks me over with a quick professional assessment. “You look good. You look like yourself. Come on, I want you to meet everyone before we lose the light.”
The crew receives me with warmth.
Callie’s DP, a woman named Sera with paint on her jacket and a precise way of speaking, shakes my hand and asks me two questions about my face and the light, and nods at the answers like they confirm something she already suspected.
The sound guy, whose name I immediately forget and who doesn’t seem to mind, hands me a cup of coffee from a thermos without being asked.
Callie walks me through the role while we’re still standing on the beach.
Mara, she says, exists in the film at the intersection of two other characters’ stories.
She doesn’t drive the plot. She illuminates it.
She’s the kind of person who walks into a room and changes the temperature without trying to, who carries something with her that other people feel without being able to name.
Four scenes. Mostly silent. One monologue, sixty seconds, which Callie wrote specifically after she decided I was going to do this, whether I agreed to or not.
“It’s not about what she says,” Callie says. “It’s about what she doesn’t say. What she’s holding.” She pauses. “You know how to hold things. You’ve been doing it your whole life.”
I look at her.
“That’s not a criticism,” she says. “It’s a direction.”
The first scene takes forty minutes and three takes.
I am not good at it immediately, which I expected and which Callie also expected, and which is why she scheduled the simpler scenes first. The camera is closer than I thought it would be and the November wind is doing things to my hair that are apparently fine actually, Sera says, keep it, and I am standing on a beach in November being looked at by a lens and trying to remember that the character is not me and also trying to remember that the best thing about the character is that she is, in the ways that matter, entirely me.
The second take is better.
The third take is the one where something shifts.
It happens between one breath and the next, in the pause before a line that Mara doesn’t say, and I stop thinking about the camera and the wind and the forty minutes of standing in the cold and I just. Am there.
In the space of the scene, in the particular weight of what Mara is carrying, which is not so different from what I have been carrying, which is the specific heaviness of a person who has spent a long time being someone else’s idea of who they should be.
Callie calls cut.
She looks at Sera.
Sera nods once.
Callie looks at me with an expression I have never seen on her face before in twenty-five years of knowing her, something that is past satisfied and into something quieter and more serious.
“That’s the one,” she says.
I breathe out.
The crew disperses toward the boardwalk at noon, and the food truck that has appeared at the top of the beach access stairs.
Callie and I find a bench facing the water and sit down with our coffees, in the ease of two people who have been in each other’s company long enough not to need a transition.
The ocean is grey, restless, and beautiful. I look at it for a while without saying anything.
“You were extraordinary,” Callie says.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I’m not flattering you,” she says. “I’m telling you what I saw through a lens. There’s a difference.” She turns her coffee cup in her hands. “You have something, Cousin. You’ve always had it. The question is what you want to do with it.”
I look at the water.
“I don’t know yet,” I say. “I’m still figuring out the list of things I’m allowed to want.”
“The list is infinite,” she says. “That’s the point.”
I smile at that.
We sit with it quietly. The wind comes off the water, and I pull my jacket tighter and think about Max’s face last night at the dinner table.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Shoot,” Callie says.
I look at the ocean. “How insane is it. What’s happening with the three of them and me?”
Callie turns toward me on the bench. “How much of what’s happening are we talking about?”
I look at my coffee cup. “More than feelings,” I say.
She’s quiet for a second. “All three of them.”
“Not all at once,” I say, and then I think about two nights ago and say, “mostly.”
Callie processes this. I watch her face move through several things before it settles.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?” I say.
“I’m not judging you,” she says. “I’m processing. Give me a second.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Are they okay with it? With each other, I mean.”
“Apparently,” I say. “More okay than I expected.”
“And you?”
I look at the water. “I don’t know what it’s called,” I say. “I don’t know what it looks like long term. I don’t know what anyone outside of us would make of it.”
“Anyone meaning your mother.”
“Anyone meaning the world,” I say. “My mother is a specific subset of that problem.”
She considers it.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“Yes.”
“When you’re with them,” she says, “not any one of them specifically, but in the apartment, all four of you, does it feel right?”
I think about last night’s dinner. The ease of it. The way the apartment holds all of us without anyone having to make themselves smaller to fit.
“Yes,” I say.
“Then it’s right,” she says. “The rest is noise.” She turns toward me on the bench.
“Listen to me. You spent twenty-six years living for other people’s ideas of what your life should look like.
You know better than anyone what that costs.
So if you’ve found something that feels true, something that feels like you, then you hold onto it, and you stop waiting for the world to give you permission.
” She pauses. “The world was never going to give you permission anyway. That’s not how permission works. ”
I look at her for a long moment.
Then I look back at the ocean.
“I’m scared,” I say quietly.
“I know,” she says. “But you have to do it anyway.”
She reaches over and squeezes my hands, and then she stands up and says we’re losing the light.
We have three more scenes and my monologue to get through, and she needs me focused. I stand up and follow her back across the sand.
The monologue takes two takes.
The second one, Sera says, is the best sixty seconds she’s shot all year, which, coming from Sera, who is not given to hyperbole, means something significant.
Callie hugs me when we wrap, which she doesn’t usually do on set, and says in my ear that she’s going to submit this one to Tribeca, that I should think about whether I want an agent, and that she has two names she can send me when I’m ready.
I take the B train home in the early dark of a November evening. I sit with my reflection in the window, and I feel like someone who has remembered something important that they’ve known for a long time.
The apartment is quieter than I expected when I let myself in.
Jase’s shoes are not by the door, which means he’s not back yet.
Evan’s jacket is not on the hook. But the kitchen light is on, and I can hear the low sound of something from down the hall.
I drop my bag by the door, shrug off my jacket, and walk toward the light, feeling as if I could float.
I am thinking about the monologue and the beach and what Callie said and the way the camera felt once I stopped being afraid of it, and I am smiling to myself for no specific reason except that I am full of something that has no precise name but which is warm and bright and entirely mine.
I push open the door to my room to drop my jacket on the bed.
Max is in the doorway when I turn back around.
I stop.
We look at each other.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says.
And something in the way he says it tells me this is not a simple conversation.