Chapter 4
Ingrid paces in Dr. Hayes’s office, trying to figure out her next move.
She could get a new writer and go through this all over again, but she’s running out of time. Her deal at FYC is expiring. The option she has on Rebecca Thomas’s book—that’s expiring soon, too. Even if she could find another writer, Charlie could just as well not like that take.
She could go back to Mel and ask her to write another take, but what if that irritates Mel? She can’t have two accusations that she’s demanding, can she?
It’s infuriating. She’s not part of the boys’ club.
She’s not the fresh face everyone’s clamoring to work with anymore.
She’s an older woman who can’t ride her writers as hard as she used to, because then she won’t be likable.
How is she supposed to operate? It’s enough to make her want to drop dead while she’s still ahead.
She knows it’s morbid, but on days like this, she lets herself imagine her funeral… just for a second.
It’ll be catered. It’ll be nice. Everyone will rave about the extraordinary changes she made for women in Hollywood.
There will be a long succession of A-list actresses, directors, cinematographers, set designers, all singing her praises.
Her daughter, Cassie, will show up and hopefully wear a shirt that actually meets her pants.
Her son, Connor, will fly in from Thailand.
Everyone will remember her for the brilliant woman she is.
Not for this…this exhausting slow burn to obsoleteness.
Her phone rings.
“Charlie?” she answers.
But it’s Cassie.
“Mom, it’s me,” she says.
“Oh hi, sweetheart,” Ingrid says. “Sorry, I was expecting a call from the studio.”
“You’re always expecting a call from the studio.”
Ingrid frowns, letting that comment go. “What’s up?”
“So, Mom…you’re not going to like this.” Cassie sighs. Ingrid squeezes her eyes shut.
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” Ingrid blurts out.
Cassie gasps. “No!”
“Oh thank God!” Ingrid opens her eyes. At least they’re not in pregnancy danger. “It’s just, you didn’t text first. You just called. And I just…I assumed. Sorry! What is it?”
“Now I don’t even want to tell you.”
“No, please tell me. I’m here for you, sweetheart.”
“Well, I was texting, and I sort of accidentally…sent a message to my TA?”
“What kind of message?”
In Ingrid’s mind, she goes through every possible mortifying permutation of a text Cassie could send—something racist? Homophobic? Anti-Israel? Anti-Palestine?—and what the repercussions could be on her own career if it got out.
“Well, actually it was a picture,” Cassie says.
Oh geez. “To your TA? Was it a nude?” she guesses, putting a finger to her temple.
Cassie’s at Morrison College, a small liberal arts college in Connecticut that’s relaxed, to say the least, when it comes to academics.
But at least it has that East Coast cachet.
Now Ingrid deeply regrets not sticking her in Pepperdine, where she could have at least kept an eye on her.
“It was an accident, I swear! I did not mean to send it to him.”
“Uh-huh. You just happened to have it on your phone, and you figured, why not ask about the reading assignment in an artistic way?”
“I knew you were going to judge me,” Cassie says testily. “I don’t even know why I called you for advice!”
Ingrid tells herself to calm down. She may not understand her daughter.
May not relate to her. She thinks of herself at nineteen.
So different, so determined to make a mark on the world.
Where is that determination in her daughter?
No one prepares you for this part of motherhood, when you wake up and you don’t recognize your adult children.
But Cassie is still her daughter. Ingrid tells herself to be gentle. It’s just a stupid nude. Kids do it all the time.
“I’m sorry. Don’t panic,” Ingrid tells her. “OK, this is what you do. If you can’t unsend, you text Please disregard my previous message. It was sent in error. Happens all the time in our office with actresses’ headshots.”
That’s a lie. No one, to her knowledge, has ever sent another actress’s or writer’s info in error. And if they did, they’d be fired.
“I can’t take it back and pretend it never happened! It’s embarrassing, Mom! I want to quit school!” Cassie cries. “I can’t go to my classes and look at him, knowing what he saw!”
“Then you shouldn’t have sent it!”
“Mom!”
“Sorry,” Ingrid says quickly. “Cassie, you are not quitting school over this. You worked hard to get into Morrison College. You have to stay there and own this!”
“You don’t know how uncomfortable it is!”
“Well, sometimes growing up is…uncomfortable,” Ingrid mutters.
The door swings open. Ingrid’s doctor walks in wearing a white coat over dark blue scrubs, a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He flashes Ingrid a smile, like he’s right on time. Ingrid could kill him if it weren’t for his ridiculous good looks.
“I gotta go. Don’t quit school!” Ingrid whispers.
She puts her phone down and is about to give him a note on his cold steel chairs when he announces, “So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just double-checking something. We found…signals.”
“What?”
Dr. Hayes sits down and reaches for her file.
“Remember that test I gave you a few weeks back?” he asks.
She nods slowly. She remembers it vaguely. The PREM test, she thinks it was called. He had said it was preventative. Not FDA approved, but he liked the science behind it. She remembered it costing nine hundred dollars. Something about early cancer detection?
“Oh God…Did you find something?” she says, putting a hand to her mouth. Her fingertips are ice-cold.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he says. His blue eyes dance as he talks with his hands. “Remember, this test is not even FDA approved. There’s not enough evidence to show that these early predictions are definitely going to materialize. It’s only meant to be a guide. But we found precancer signals.”
“Precancer signals,” she repeats.
Ingrid’s heart drops like a rock. Her mother died of ovarian cancer.
“Again, I want to assure you, it’s not cancer. You don’t have cancer,” he quickly says. He jumps up from his desk, walks over to his glass whiteboard, and starts drawing cells and DNA segments. “All you have right now are mutations.”
Dr. Hayes points to a squiggly line. “As we get older, sometimes a change happens in the genes when a cell divides. Maybe we breathe in some toxic fumes or we smoke. Maybe it’s nothing we do at all, just age.
When we’re young, our cells are good at repairing genetic damage, but over time, the damage can build up. ”
Ingrid can’t hear a word he’s saying. All she can think about is her mom, lying cold in that hospital bed.
All that morphine she was on in the end.
Her vacant eyes. Ingrid thinks about her kids, her husband…
She’s worked too hard, given up too much of herself to her job to have no time left in the end. She can’t get cancer!
“And this test found damage?” she asks.
“This test found mutations. They may not necessarily be coming from cancer cells. They could also be from regular cells, which also form mutations as they age and die.”
Even though he’s saying it may not be cancer, every time she hears the word, Ingrid’s skin crawls.
“What do we do? How do we get rid of it? I want all these mutations gone.”
Dr. Hayes hesitates.
Ingrid points to a poster he has on his wall. Medicine Reimagined, it reads. “There must be a way.”
“I was talking to a colleague of mine up in Silicon Valley. He’s developed this new treatment. Very experimental. He’s been doing it on a trial basis for his patients, mostly tech billionaires. It’s a little out there, but it’s…promising.”
“What kind of treatment?”
He opens another folder with some papers and shows Ingrid. “Essentially, they seem to have found a way to repair older cells through transfusions with a younger person’s blood with this new high-tech machine they’ve developed.”
Ingrid sits up. Is he saying what she thinks he’s saying?
“I know it sounds like science fiction, but I’ve been looking at the results all morning. One transfusion with this new machine works better than a year of donated young plasma infusions.”
Ingrid shakes her head, not understanding. What are donated young plasma infusions?
“If done effectively, the treatment can take ten years off your age,” he explains in plain English. Ingrid’s eyes bulge. Did he just say ten years? “But again, it’s only ever been done on a handful of tech billionaires, all of them male—”
“You’re telling me there’s an antiaging therapy that can shave off a decade from your age, and they’ve never tried it on a woman before?”
“Not yet.”
Ingrid can barely breathe.
“Can we get the machine?”
Dr. Hayes puts up his hands. “Before we get that far, you need to understand, this is highly experimental. You’d have to be hooked up to the same person with this machine for several hours every week for a minimum of ten weeks.”
“Ten weeks for ten years?” Ingrid asks. She imagines herself at forty-three again.
Her body, her skin, her mind—what she’d give to not be saddled with hot flashes and cold fear!
To be razor-sharp again! Bold and curious.
To have energy! If what he’s saying is true, it would change womankind forever.
“And then what? Would you be able to do it again?”
“If you’re asking if you can continue reversing your age beyond that, I’m not sure.
The original research comes from mice. Two mice were joined together, sharing one physiological system.
That’s not possible for humans, of course.
But so far the transfusions with this machine appear to offer similar benefits. Though…”
“Though?”
“Well, curiously, some of the research in mice suggests it can add to the young person’s age.”
This last part gives Ingrid chills. “What kind of young person would want to do this?”
“Well, that’s the biggest problem: finding a donor,” he says. “According to my friend, most of his patients so far have used their children.”
Her mind instantly goes to Cassie, but she shakes her head immediately. She can’t use her children. No way.
Dr. Hayes nods. “I thought as much. If I were in your position, I’d feel the same. Well, it was worth a shot.” He starts closing the folder.
Wait, he’s just going to give up?
“What if I find someone else—”
“Ingrid.” He laughs nervously. “We’re talking about a risk of aging here. Not to mention infection, allergic reactions. You can’t just get a stranger.”
“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy to find this person. But it is possible, for the right amount of money, to get someone with the right blood type. It can be done.”
He doesn’t react for a long time. Then he nods slowly. “It is possible, I suppose.”
“Then I want to try it,” Ingrid says.
“Ingrid…” Dr. Hayes starts to say. She can hear the edge in his voice.
“I want to be the first woman to do this.” Ingrid’s already decided. She’s not going to let him talk her out of this. It’s her body, and it’s her decision. And frankly, there’s another reason she has to do it.
“Alex, you don’t know what it’s like…the slow torture that is menopause. Sex feels like knives.” She pauses. “You know Kyle cheated on me?”
Dr. Hayes looks genuinely sorry.
“He went to an escort service. Got himself two twenty-two-year-olds! It only happened one time. He didn’t want me to know, so he put it on his company credit card. And got fired.”
She feels so naked saying the words, admitting the ugliest part of the last few months, which no one else knows.
She’s been shoving it deep into the recesses of her psyche because it’s tough enough being an older female executive, competing with the men, pretending to not care about the things people say about you.
You have to project strength! You have to appear calm and collected, no matter what.
No one can ever upset you. Nothing can ever be about your issues.
You have to have empathy, but not so much empathy that you’re “soft.” You have to endlessly understand, without getting emotional.
Show that you care, but never let your guard down.
You certainly cannot be “going through something.”
“You know we’re going to intimacy coaching?” Ingrid says, the corners of her eyes wet. “Where I have to come up with a weekly list of five things that arouse me.” Once again, she thinks about her funeral. “Right now, death is pretty fucking high up on that list.”
“Oh, Ingrid,” Dr. Hayes says, handing her a tissue.
“I’m serious. What is the point of this slow torture?
Watching all my projects get stalled because I’m not a guy who can laugh it up on the golf course.
Nor am I the twenty-eight-year-old hot young thing.
But that’s not even the thing that guts me.
The thing that guts me is…” She lifts her eyes to meet Dr. Hayes’s.
“I just wish I had more time for my kids.”
Dr. Hayes drops his eyes to his framed photo of his own two small children.
“They still need me. Please, Alex.”
Ingrid holds her breath as she waits for her speech to sink in, hoping the power of story is still pounding strong in her.
“If you can find a donor who is willing to take on the risks and is comfortable, then I’ll see if I can get them to send me a machine,” Dr. Hayes finally says.
Ingrid’s face blooms. She stands and hugs him. “Thank you,” she whispers into his ear. “This is going to be huge. For both of us!”
As she picks up her purse to leave, Dr. Hayes calls out.
“Where are you going to find this eager and willing young person?”
“You let me worry about that.” Ingrid smiles. “I’ve been casting my whole life.”
Stepping outside his office, she gazes up at the tall towers of Century City poking into the pink clouds. She feels younger already.