Chapter Ten
Nick booked our table for what his text called a mandatory creative summit. Agenda: the third act, Luma’s song, and whether Pip’s coat is red or rust. He said to “wear something that helps you argue”.
I wore the green dress I’d bought in the hotel boutique. I wanted something Dara hadn’t chosen for me.
We spread the color boards across the table between the bread and the half glass of wine I was finally cleared to have, and for an hour, we worked the way we’d always worked – fast and stubborn, and enjoying it. He fought me on the song placement and won. I fought him on the coat and won bigger.
“Rust,” I said, tapping the board. “Red is a flag. Rust is a kid’s coat that’s been through things. Pip has been through things, that’s the whole reason children hand her their hearts. She looks like she got there the hard way.”
“The marketing team will say red reads better on a lunchbox.”
“The marketing team can hand-paint every lunchbox personally. Rust.”
“Rust,” Nick agreed, and made a note.
I watched him write it in his terrible left-slanted hand, and the strangest feeling came over me at that ordinary sight.
I was happy. Sitting in a garden restaurant, considering the contaminated tea in an evidence locker, and my marriage dissolving into a criminal case.
I was happy, and it had snuck up on me through a conversation about fur.
“You went somewhere,” Nick said.
“I stayed here, actually. That’s what’s strange.” I set down my fork. “Can I tell you where the coat comes from? The real place, not the version I give journalists.”
“I’d love to know.”
“I was eight when I started drawing Pip. We moved constantly. My mother chased money and boyfriends who had it, and I was always the new kid in some new school, in some new town, eating lunch alone with a spiral notebook. So, I drew a friend. Small, stubborn, tenderhearted. And I drew her finding doors, hidden ones, in fences, closets, and the backs of cupboards, because that was the whole fantasy. That somewhere in whatever ugly apartment we’d landed in, there was a door, and on the other side of it things were strange and beautiful, and nobody could follow me through.
” I smiled, looking into my wine glass. “The journalists get told I created her in college. It sounds better. Whimsical art student, not lonely kid in a parking lot waiting for her mother to stop screaming at a boyfriend.”
“And the coat?” he asked gently.
“Goodwill. Mine was brown, rust-brown, two sizes big so I’d grow into it, and I wore it for three winters.
I hated it and I loved it. It was the one thing that moved with me every time.
” I looked at the color board, at Pip’s small figure in her small coat.
“So no, it can’t be red. Red is for kids whose mothers bought their coats new. ”
Nick didn’t reach across the table, and he didn’t make a speech. He looked at the board for a while, and then he crossed out his earlier note and wrote rust, final, creator’s call, and underlined it twice.
“Since we’re trading real answers for journalist answers,” he said. “The Glass King. Where’s he from? Because I’ve sat through three script meetings where smart people theorized about him, and I’ve watched you let every theory stand.”
“What’s the leading theory?”
“That he’s your mother.”
I laughed, and it surprised me how easily it came.
“My mother wishes she were that interesting. No. Here’s the strange part, and I’ve never said this out loud either.
I drew the Glass King years before I understood him.
A beautiful figure in a beautiful hall, and everything in his kingdom reflects him, and nothing in it is alive.
He doesn’t cage anyone, that’s what children miss about him and adults feel.
He convinces you the hall is the whole world.
He shows you yourself in his glass, a little smaller each time, a little more his, until you’d swear the reflection was your own idea.
I drew him at twenty-four, Nick. I met Karl at twenty.
Some part of me had already met him. The rest of me just wasn’t allowed to hear about it. ”
“And Pip walks out of the hall.”
“Pip finds the door. That’s the whole book. Everyone remembers the moon and forgets that the door was in the hall the entire time.” I looked up from the glass. “The mirror scene stays.”
“The mirror scene stays,” Nick said. “You know what got me, watching all this from the outside? Before I knew anything. The first meetings, when Karl still came to everything. He’d introduce the concepts and he would say: our franchise, our characters, our vision.
And I’d sit there and let him, and I remember thinking, she made every inch of this out of nothing, and she nods along to ‘our vision’.
It bothered me more than I ever showed.”
“He believed it, that’s the thing I keep bumping into,” I said.
“He wasn’t lying when he said ‘our’. Somewhere along the way, he decided that managing a thing is the same as making it, and I helped him do it, because correcting him felt cruel, and being cruel felt dangerous, though I couldn’t have told you why.
” I shrugged. “Now I could write you a report on why. Ask me anything. I’ve become the field’s leading expert. ”
“The offer stands, you know,” Nick said. “It’ll always stand. If you need the movie to wait, the movie waits. I’ll hold the studio off for a year if you need a year. Nobody who matters would blame you.”
“No.” It came out fast and certain. “That’s the one thing I need you to never offer me again, and I’ll tell you why.
Karl wanted the movie without me. He planned a whole future where my name is on a plaque and he takes the meetings.
If I step back now, even to heal, even for good reasons, I hand him a small version of exactly what he wanted, and I’d rather draw with my teeth.
Pip is mine. Luma is mine. The Glass King is mine.
I’m going to finish this movie, and I’m going to sit in the front row at the premiere, healthy, under my own name, and that’s not stubbornness, Nick.
That’s the plan. That’s the whole revenge. ”
Nick sat back and looked at me. He gave up an argument he’d apparently been having with himself for a while.
“There she is,” he said.
“There who is?”
“The woman who put two executives in their place before I’d ever said a word to her. I wondered where they’d put her.” He raised his glass an inch. “To rust. And to the premiere.”
We drank to it. The plates went, coffee came, the boards got packed away, and neither of us manufactured a reason to stay. Neither of us moved to leave.
It got late, and he eventually walked me back. Gravel, jasmine, the turn in the garden path. At the turn he stopped, the way he always stopped, hands going toward his pockets, getting ready to say goodnight.
“Nick.”
He looked at me.
“I told you that when I came to you, I’d come on my own two feet.” I stepped closer to him.
I kissed him. He held still for the first second, making absolutely sure that I wanted it, then his hand came up to my jaw the way it had the other night.
He kissed me back with his whole attention and no hurry.
It stayed soft. It stayed slow. One of his hands settled at my waist and stayed exactly where it landed.
I could feel the restraint in him, not reluctance, restraint, a strong man keeping a promise with his hands.
I understood that I could stand on this path all night, and that hand would never wander an inch without an invitation.
I broke the kiss when I needed to and stayed close, my forehead against his chin, both of us breathing.
“That’s as far as tonight goes,” I said.
“I’m not inviting you in. I want to. I’m telling you I want to, so you know it’s not a test and it’s not a doubt.
But the next part of this happens when I’m a free woman, all the way free, papers and all.
You deserve a beginning that isn’t tangled in an ending. ”
“So do you,” Nick said. His thumb moved once along my jaw and dropped away. “I’ve waited without knowing what I was waiting for. Waiting on purpose is going to be a vacation.”
He said goodnight and left. I walked the rest of the path on a feeling I’d honestly believed they’d poisoned out of me for good.
The suite phone was ringing when I got the door open. The landline, which meant hotel staff or the short list of people who knew to use it. I picked it up expecting Beatrice.
“Millie? Thank God. It’s Sandra.”
Sandra Finnigan had worked with me for many years, both on the movie and our past projects with the studio. She’d never once called me past midnight.
“Sandra. What’s happened?”
“That’s my question, honey, and I need you to hear how I mean it.
I’m not calling about business. I got a phone call today that I’ve been sitting with all evening, and I finally decided you’d want to hear it.
” She took a breath, and I heard ice move in a glass, which meant Sandra had poured herself something, which meant it was bad.
“Karl called me. And Millie, it was the strangest call of my professional life. He was warm, he was worried, he was reasonable, and by the end of it, I realized I’d spent forty minutes listening to your husband explain to me, gently, with medical words in it, that you’re not well.
Not tired-not-well. Not-well not-well. He talked about episodes.
He said the word paranoid, then apologized for saying it.
He said there’s a doctor’s assessment, and that the family may need to make some difficult decisions about your commitments, and he asked me, as someone who cares about you, to keep him informed if you said or did anything concerning. ”
My hand tensed on the phone, but I kept my voice calm.
“And what did you say?”
“I said of course, Karl, anything for Millie, because twenty years in this business taught me to smile at a call while I check the exits. Then I hung up, and I sat with my drink, and I did what he apparently assumed I wouldn’t do, which is think about the actual Millie Barber instead of the one in his story.
Then I called the artist herself. Because here’s the thing, honey.
I’ve had you on the phone six times this month about deliverables, and you’ve been sharper than you’ve sounded in two years.
You caught a royalty error my office missed.
So, one of two things is true tonight, and I know which one I’d bet on.
Either you’re having a breakdown that skips work calls.
” She let it sit. “Or your husband is building one for you. Which is it, Millie? Because I need to know which side of this call I’m standing on. ”