Chapter Five #2
“That you’ve spent four films letting other people decide how small I get to be in the story of your own life, and never once spent anything real to stop them,” I said.
“Not your name. Not the deal. Not a single dollar of your own leverage. The credits fix costs you an email and an afternoon. What’s it going to cost you the next time a studio note asks you to shrink me again?
Because there’s going to be a next time, Rhys.
There’s a three-film deal coming, isn’t there.
Deana’s not flying you to three cities for a one-film relationship. ”
He didn’t have an answer ready for that one — a half-second’s hesitation before he recovered it, enough to tell me I’d guessed closer to a real number than I’d known I was guessing. “There’s a conversation happening,” he said, carefully. “Nothing’s signed.”
“That’s not a no,” I said.
“I’m not going to promise you something I don’t know yet how to keep,” he said, and I heard, underneath the sentence, something that might have been the first fully honest thing he’d said since he got out of the rental car — an admission, however incomplete, that he understood the difference now between a promise that cost him nothing and one that might.
“Then tell me what it would actually cost you,” I said.
“Not the version where you sound thoughtful about it on a porch. The real number. If the studio comes back with the same note on film five that they gave you on film three, what do you do differently? Because ‘I’ll think about it differently next time’ isn’t a plan, Rhys, it’s a mood, and I have been living inside your moods for twelve years while doing the actual math myself. ”
“I don’t know yet,” he said, and for once didn’t reach immediately for the next fluent sentence to cover the gap.
“I want to say I’d walk. I don’t know if that’s true or if it’s just the answer that sounds right standing here, in front of you, on your father’s porch, with the lodge looking like this behind us.
I don’t want to hand you another answer I haven’t tested yet. ”
“That’s the most useful thing you’ve said all night,” I said, “and it’s still not an answer.”
“I think what I’m learning,” he started, and I felt myself brace for the cadence, the documentary voiceover reflex I’d watched him reach for in a hundred interviews, and he must have heard it too, because he stopped, visibly, and started again, plainer.
“I don’t have the ending of this figured out.
I came up here thinking I did. I don’t.”
“That’s more honest than the credits thing,” I said. “It’s not enough. But it’s more honest.”
? ? ?
We didn’t resolve anything that night, which I’d stopped expecting we would somewhere around the word card.
Rhys stayed in the room that used to be my father’s study, on a foldout Wade himself had once kept there for storm-stranded clients, and I lay awake in my childhood bedroom listening to the house settle around all of us, Wyatt and Birdie asleep down the hall, my husband asleep — or not asleep, I couldn’t tell — two doors further, and thought about the actual arithmetic of what he’d have to give up to change the pattern rather than just apologize for its latest instance: money, certainly, and something harder to price, the comfort of being a man whose myth has never once had to make room for anyone else’s version of events.
I thought, too, about Desmond Calder, whose name I still hadn’t said out loud to Rhys in five days of being back in the one place that had made him, and understood that I was, in my own way, doing the same thing he’d just been caught doing — managing a hard truth down to a size I judged safe to hand over, rather than trusting either of us with the whole of it.
I know, better than almost anyone alive, what it costs Rhys to hear his father’s name in a room — how his whole posture changes, careful, braced, a man checking a hold before he trusts his weight to it.
I have never once used that knowledge against him, and I understood, lying there, that I had also never once used it for anything either — I had simply filed it, the way I file most things I’m not ready to act on, protective and withholding in exactly the same gesture, and let the house go quiet around me.
By morning, Day Seven, Rhys was up before the kids, standing at the kitchen window with a cup of my father’s terrible instant coffee, watching the mist come off the river the way I remembered him watching weather on a dozen mountains, reading it for what it might cost him.
“I have to fly back tonight,” he said, when he saw me.
“Deana wants to talk before the next city. I’ll come back up as soon as I can get free. ”
“How soon is soon,” I said, filling the kettle, not looking at him, the same evasive-question strategy Wyatt had used on me three mornings earlier, and I heard the small, private irony of it even as I did it.
“I don’t know yet. A week, maybe two. It depends what Deana wants to talk about.” He said it plainly, without the varnish he’d have put on it a week earlier, and I gave him credit for that, the way I’d give a climber credit for reporting an honest position even when the position was bad.
The kids came down before he left, and Birdie asked, with the same flat directness she’d used at breakfast the day before, whether he was leaving because of the divorce that wasn’t decided yet, and I watched Rhys crouch to her level and answer her honestly, without performing anything for my benefit, the first time all visit I’d seen him do that.
“Your mom and I are trying to figure out something hard,” he said.
“I have to go do a work thing today, but I’m coming back, and none of that changes how much I love you and your brother.
That’s not up for negotiation, no matter what else your mom and I have to work out.
” It was, I thought, watching him say it, almost exactly the sentence I’d given her myself, arrived at independently, which told me something true about the parts of this marriage that had never been the problem.
He hugged both kids hard at the door, held my gaze a moment longer than the goodbye required, and said, “I heard you last night. About the pattern. I’m not going to pretend I have it fixed just because I heard it.
” Then he was gone down the gravel road in the rental car, and I stood on the porch with Birdie’s hand in mine and Wyatt already drifting back toward his book, and thought that hearing it was, at minimum, further than the credits fix had gotten him.