20. Erika
— ? —
Erika
Dean invites me to his premiere, and I say yes because I’m trying to prove a point, and I’m still not entirely sure what the point is.
The movie isn’t my taste, an action sequel with explosions and car chases, designed to make a billion dollars and win no awards, but the option deal made me his natural guest, and showing up on his arm feels like a statement.
The red carpet is chaos. Flashbulbs go off in constant bursts, so bright and relentless that I stop being able to tell when one ends and another begins, people scream Dean’s name from behind barriers, and I walk beside him trying to remember how to breathe in heels that pinch my toes.
“E.C. HART! OVER HERE! ERIKA!”
They know my name now. The realization lands somewhere between the third camera flash and the fourth shouted question.
I’ve been in the trades, on the podcasts, in the entertainment sections of websites I used to scroll mindlessly during lunch breaks, and then a voice from behind the rope cuts through the others, sharper, aimed.
“Erika! Is your husband here tonight?”
I don’t answer. Dean’s hand tightens a fraction at my back and he steers me two steps forward, smiling at a different camera, and the question gets swallowed by the next one, and I keep my face exactly where it was, and I think, he knows.
Somebody in this crowd knows Kai’s name is on the invitation list, and now so do I.
“You okay?” Dean murmurs without breaking his smile for the cameras.
“I feel like I’m dreaming and drowning at the same time.”
“That’s the red carpet experience. You’ll get used to it.”
Inside the theater the chaos fades to controlled glamour, studio people working the room with practiced ease, actors I recognize from a dozen films waving at Dean like old friends, and then I see Kai, and everything else falls away.
He’s near the bar, and he looks terrible, and whatever was left of him at the gala is gone.
He’s lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose, his cheekbones carved too sharp beneath skin that looks almost gray, and the tuxedo that should make him look devastating just hangs on his frame, emphasizing the gauntness instead of disguising it.
His company co-financed this film, and the invitation predates our separation by months, and he’s not here because of me. But when his eyes find mine across the crowded lobby the world narrows to just the two of us.
Dean puts his hand at the small of my back. “Friend of yours?”
“Something like that.”
“Ah.” He steers me gently toward a cluster of producers. “Come on. There are people you should meet before the lights go down.”
The next fifteen minutes are an exercise in torture.
I shake hands with studio people whose names I immediately forget, smile for photographs with Dean’s co-stars, accept compliments on my book from people who probably haven’t read it but know it’s the thing to say, and the entire time I can feel Kai thirty feet away, watching.
He doesn’t approach or try to catch my eye again, he just stands near the bar with a drink he’s not drinking, looking like a man attending his own funeral.
A man in a good suit says “Mrs. Channing” as he passes, warm, automatic, someone from Kai’s world who hasn’t heard or doesn’t care, and I don’t correct him, and I hate that I don’t.
Someone asks me about the film adaptation, and I answer on autopilot, a line about being excited to see the story on screen, while my peripheral vision tracks Kai’s every movement.
He sets down the untouched drink. He shoves a hand through his hair, and even from here I can see the tremor in his fingers.
He looks up, and our eyes meet again, and the lobby suddenly feels too small, too crowded, too everything.
The lights flicker, the universal signal that the movie is about to start.
“Shall we?” Dean offers his arm, and I take it, grateful for the excuse to stop pretending I’m not aware of exactly where Kai is standing.
We take our seats, and I realize I’ve walked us to the aisle without thinking, because Kai always wanted the aisle so he could step out to take a call, and I’ve been choosing aisle seats for four years for a man who isn’t sitting next to me.
The theater is dark and plush, the seats wide enough that Dean and I aren’t touching, and the movie starts with an explosion, because of course it does, and I stare at the screen without seeing any of it.
He’s here. Somewhere in this darkness, in one of these seats, he’s watching the same screen I am, or maybe he’s watching me, and the thought makes my skin prickle.
I shift in my seat, crossing and uncrossing my legs, unable to get comfortable, and every few minutes I have to physically stop myself from turning around to look for him.
The last time I sat in a dark theater with Kai was our second year of marriage, a terrible movie he’d picked, and he spent the whole thing whispering the plot to me a beat before it happened because he’d read the reviews, and I kept elbowing him and he kept doing it, and somewhere in the third act he stopped narrating and just held my hand in the dark, and I remember thinking that was the whole point of movies.
I don’t remember what the movie was. I remember his thumb moving over my knuckles for an hour, and I remember that he didn’t look at his phone once, and I remember thinking that was normal, that it would always be like that, that I’d never have to notice it because it would never stop.
On screen, Dean’s character is fighting someone on top of a train, and the audience gasps and cheers, and I couldn’t tell you what’s happening if my life depended on it.
All I can think about is whether Kai is watching me from the darkness, whether he’s as aware of my presence as I am of his, this thread between us pulling taut across the theater.
The movie runs two hours and seventeen minutes. I know because I check my phone twice, hiding the glow against my thigh, counting down the minutes until I can escape this suffocating awareness, and when the credits finally roll and the lights come up I’m already moving toward the exit.
Dean catches up with me in the lobby. “You okay?”
“Fine. Just need some air.”
“The after-party is at…”
“I think I’m going to head home, actually. Early morning tomorrow.”
He studies me for a moment, then nods. “I’ll have the car brought around.”
The valet stand is blessedly quiet compared to the chaos inside, and I stand in the cool night air, letting it wash over me, trying to slow my racing heart.
“Erika.”
His voice stops me dead.
I turn around. “Kai.”
Up close he looks even worse, the circles under his eyes almost purple, his skin a grayish tinge that makeup can’t hide, and the tuxedo hangs on his frame in a way that makes my chest hurt.
“I can’t do this,” he says, and his voice is rough, scraped raw. “Watch you with him. Pretend it doesn’t kill me every time I see you smile at someone else.”
“That’s not my problem anymore.”
“You’re still my wife.”
“On paper. For now.”
“I haven’t signed.” He steps closer, and I should step back, should maintain the distance, and my feet won’t cooperate. “I won’t sign. I don’t care if it takes the rest of my life, Erika. I’m not giving up on us.”
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
“That’s not mine to fix anymore.”
“I know.” His jaw works. “But I’m here now, telling you that I can’t breathe without you. That nothing I’ve ever built means anything if you’re not there to share it.”
His voice cracks on the last word, and my chest cracks with it.
We stand there, inches apart, the night air cool on my bare shoulders, and his eyes are wet.
I’ve seen him cry twice now, on the stairs the night of the ceremony and in the foyer with my suitcase at my feet, and both times I was the one who’d made him, and this is different, this is a man crying at a valet stand in a tuxedo that doesn’t fit him anymore, in front of a parking attendant who’s very carefully looking at his clipboard and will tell this story at a bar tonight, and it makes me want to reach for him.
My hand twitches at my side.
“Erika.” He says my name like a man who’s forgotten every other word.
I could close the distance between us. I could let him pull me into his arms. I could pretend, for one night, that none of this happened and we’re still the people we used to be.
Instead, I step back, and I watch him watch me do it, and I watch him understand exactly what it cost me, and he can still read me that easily, and I’ve stopped pretending he can’t.
“Goodnight, Kai.”
Albie idles at the curb, Kai’s car gleaming under the streetlights, and Albie is looking at me too, through the windshield, with the face of a man who drove me to my award and drove Kai to a restaurant the same night and has never once said a word about either. Kai gestures toward the car.
“Let me give you a ride home. It’s late. You shouldn’t be standing out here waiting for a car alone.”
I spot Dean’s car pulling up to the valet stand and walk toward it without letting myself look back, and the door opens, and I slide inside, and only when it closes behind me do I let myself breathe. In the side mirror Kai is still standing where I left him, watching me go.
Dean doesn’t say anything until we’re on the highway.
“You’re still in love with him.”
It isn’t a question, and his voice is gentle.
“I don’t know what I am.”
“Erika.” He glances at me. “I just watched it. Whatever that was back there, it wasn’t nothing.”
I don’t deny it. I can’t.
“The question,” Dean says carefully, “is whether that matters to you.”
I stare out the window at the city lights blurring past.
“I don’t know,” I say finally. “I really don’t know.”
He nods like that’s an answer, and reaches over and turns the radio up a notch, low, some song I don’t know, and doesn’t say anything else the rest of the way, and it’s the kindest thing anyone’s done for me all night.
He pulls up outside my building and puts it in park and doesn’t reach for me, just squeezes my hand once and says he’ll see me at the next production meeting, and I watch his taillights disappear around the corner.
Upstairs I take off the heels in the hallway before I’ve even got the door open, and then the earrings, and then the dress, and I leave all of it in a line on the floor from the door to the bed like a trail somebody could follow, and there’s nobody to follow it, and I don’t look at my phone, because I know what’s on it, pictures of me on a red carpet on a movie star’s arm looking like a woman who’s moved on, and I don’t want to see her face right now.
I lie awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the way Kai’s voice cracked when he said he couldn’t breathe without me, and thinking about how I’m not sure I’m breathing either.