2017
Dean was asleep on the carpet in Daniel’s bedroom, a yellow toy truck in his hand, when Daniel woke. He threw on sweatpants and knelt near the boy, who was curled on his side in blue pajamas and felt slippers still damp at the toes from the dewy grass. He placed his hand on Dean’s arm.
“Hey Deano.”
The boy took a deeper breath and straightened his legs. A cloudy memory of his own son waking at this age rose up through the decades, and Daniel tried to burnish it: gray early light from the north-facing window above the bed in Forest’s old room, dark thumb of ocean visible up the beach between half-open drapes. He nudged at it, but the old memory retreated.
Dean’s eyes opened, and he regarded Daniel as if waiting for a response to something he’d said before going to sleep.
Daniel said, “What are you doing here, buddy?”
“I came to see you.”
“Where’s your grampa?”
“Asleep.”
“Are you okay? Everything okay?”
Dean nodded. “I couldn’t find anything for breakfast.”
“Okay, let’s get you something to eat. Then we’ll go up and see if Grampa Jack is awake.”
Dean followed him down the hall and into the kitchen, carrying his truck. The boy and his mother and grandfather had moved into the main house up the hill eight months earlier, and Dean had taken to visiting Daniel, who lived in what had formerly been a guesthouse on the Beverly Hills estate of his late friend, Cameron Cooper. Daniel’s fondness for Dean’s visits made him more willing to ignore the questionable level of supervision the boy received from his grandfather when his mother and the part-time nanny weren’t around. Jack was a little older than Daniel, and they had begun a guarded minor friendship, with Jack occasionally stopping down for a drink in the evening when his daughter or the nanny were there to look after Dean. Daniel still had not met Dean’s mother, Celia Dressler. She was a young movie star fresh out of rehab number two and a round of tabloid thrashings, and was lately off shooting some epic film that Jack said was supposed to reinvent her career. When she was home Dean stayed up the hill.
The first time Dean had appeared at Daniel’s was a month after they’d moved in. Daniel was on his patio reading when the gate in his fence rattled, and he looked up from his book, stabbed by the thought of Cam. No one had used that gate since Cam’s death two years earlier, and now someone was fumbling with the pull-chain on the other side. The latch finally disengaged, freeing the gate onto its rusty hinges, and it pushed slowly open. Daniel waited to see who would step through. For a few seconds nothing happened, then a small white disc of a face emerged around the edge. The boy’s eyes searched the yard, and when he saw Daniel he pounced through the gate and ran smiling toward him, blond hair bouncing in stride. He looked as though he would leap into Daniel’s lap when he got there, but he pulled up short, stopping at the edge of the brick patio and staring, his smile faltering.
“Hi there,” Daniel said.
“I forgot your name,” the boy said.
“My name’s Daniel, and I don’t think you forgot it, because I don’t think we’ve met. What’s your name?”
“Dean.” He looked perplexed. “I thought I remembered you.”
“Are you Jack’s grandson? Do you live up the hill?”
“Yes. In our new house.”
“What brings you down here, Dean?”
“Nothing. I just came.”
“Does someone know you’re here?”
The boy stared long at him, and his mischievous smile reappeared.
“I’m guessing that’s a no. Why don’t we head on back up there, okay? I’ll take you.”
“Do you know my mom?”
“No. I know who she is, but we haven’t met. I have met your grandfather.”
“Have you lived here a long time?”
“Yes, quite a while.”
“But you used to live somewhere else?”
“Well, I guess I did. I lived in a lot of other places when I was younger.”
“Closer to the ocean.”
“Sure, I lived in Malibu for a while. I grew up across the country, though, in a town called Ithaca with no ocean at all. Let’s go, my friend.” Daniel stood and Dean took his hand unprompted. They walked back out the gate and sixty yards up the grass hill to the main house.
That first time, Jack had played it off as if losing track of Dean was an anomalous occurrence, but as time went on Dean’s visits continued, ramping up to once or twice a week after his mother moved out to the location in Arizona. When Daniel brought him back, Jack often seemed unaware he’d been gone. Sometimes he’d clearly been passed out. So Daniel started letting Dean stay a while. He would send Jack a text to let him know Dean was there, and they would listen to music together or Dean would play with a toy he’d brought while Daniel read. They had marathon Nerf basketball battles—one-on-one and HORSE—the only toy Daniel had in the house. The kid was clearly lonely.
“You like eggs?” Daniel asked when they got to the kitchen. This was the first time Dean had shown up in the morning.
Dean shook his head. “Cereal.”
“Well, I don’t keep cereal around. What about some toast with peanut butter?”
“Okay.” Dean went into the living room and pulled the mini Nerf basketball from between the couch and the side table. “Rematch!” he called, shooting for the basket clamped to the kitchen counter. The shot missed and Dean scooped the ball up, did a spin move, and dunked it. “Want to play HORSE?”
“I’m going to fix breakfast, we’ll play later.”
Daniel made the toast and poured a glass of milk to go with it, then made coffee while Dean ate.
“Doesn’t your grampa usually get you breakfast?”
“Yeah. But when I can’t wake him up I just get my own cereal. We have no food right now.”
“You tried to wake him and couldn’t?”
“Yeah. He’s really hard to wake up. Not always, but sometimes, especially when he sleeps on the couch.”
“Okay, well, once you’re finished I’ll walk you back up there and we can check on him. Make sure everything is all right.”
But Jack showed up a minute later, knocking on the sliding glass door in the living room, which was visible from the kitchen counter. He slid the door open and spoke to Dean without acknowledging Daniel, “There you are, kiddo! I’ve been looking for you. I didn’t get a text from Daniel so I got worried.”
“He was here when I woke up,” Daniel said. “He said you were asleep. He was hungry, so…”
Jack ruffled Dean’s hair. “You should have woke me, I would have got you your breakfast.” He still hadn’t looked at Daniel.
“Coffee?” Daniel said, already pouring a cup.
Jack shrugged and accepted the coffee. When he turned his face to Daniel his expression sagged off the tentpoles of cheer he’d propped under his hungover features. He was still waking up. “Thanks.”
Jack was a skinny old man whose face showed his age. He wore tan work boots, old jeans, and a threadbare gray T-shirt. When they’d first met, Daniel had felt a flash of kinship: another aging product of sixties counterculture. Daniel could always tell. They were from different cloth, but they’d been cut by the same scissors.
Jack sat at the counter next to his grandson. “You ready for your big day on Monday?”
Dean nodded solemnly, chewing.
“What’s the big day?” Daniel asked.
“First day of first grade,” Jack said. “Right, bud?”
Dean nodded again. He gulped the last of his milk.
“That’s exciting,” Daniel said. “You’re going to have a great time.”
Dean took a moment to swallow and then looked at Daniel. “Do you remember your first day of real school?”
Daniel laughed. “I’d like to say yes, Deano, but it was so long ago. I guess I don’t.”
“How long ago?”
“Well, more than sixty years. That’s ten times as long as you’ve been alive.”
Dean’s eyes widened and he smiled, pleased with the thought of such an incomprehensible span of time. “My mom’s coming home Sunday.”
“That’s great. Are you excited to see her?”
The solemn nod again, his smile poking through it.
Jack said, “She’s coming home for one night so she can drop him at school Monday. Then she’s got to get back to Arizona.”
“They almost done shooting?”
“I don’t know. The schedule keeps mushrooming. The director, who’s also the writer, is some crazy genius. He keeps rewriting, adding stuff. Five months they’ve been out there. I guess there’s starting to be grumbling among the cast. But Celia, she’s drunk the Kool-Aid.”
When Dean finished eating, Jack took him back out the patio door and through the gate in the yard. Daniel lost sight of them for a moment behind the fence, and then they reappeared moving up the grassy hill, holding hands. When they topped the rise they disappeared onto the flagstone pool deck of the main house.
BLADES OF SUNLIGHT lacerated the floors under the windows, but otherwise the shades in the small bungalow defended valiantly against the desert morning. Celia sat at the vanity and stared at herself in the mirror. She pulled her pale streaked hair back from her face and examined first one cheekbone, then the other, trying to approximate the camera’s pitiless gaze and find the best angles on which to present her face.
The core fear gripped her in the usual way—commonplace enough that at first she sighed and tried to shrug it off, but commonplace or no it did not relent, nor did the litany of ancillary fears it generated. For one, that she was in over her head. In truth, even when she’d been making shlock for adolescents she’d felt in over her head, but now, as the lead in Miles Rossinger’s “surrealist, sci-fi Anna Karenina reboot,” as he referred to it, she was surely not good enough. How could she be? She’d never been all that good to begin with, though recently she’d taken to studying with some good teachers instead of winging it based on grade-school drama class. Miles’s constant praise of her performance felt nice when she heard it on set, but rang hollow in memory when she replayed it. And often she thought she saw pity, or contempt (what was the difference, really?), in the eyes of the crew when she moved among them. These were artists. They were Miles’s people, whether they liked it or not. She was going to make an incredible fool of herself when this film came out. If that had been her only fear, she would have been fine. The fear of making a fool of oneself was the first thing an actor learned to ignore. But the list went on: Everyone hated her, possibly. The crew, the rest of the cast, her driver, the kid who brought her lunch and bottles of water, the girl who made sure her costume wasn’t sticking to her in weird ways between shots in the heat, whose name she kept forgetting. Her son, for being away from him. Not Miles, though. She knew he didn’t hate her. But she also knew that everyone outside his inner circle was beginning to hate him, if they hadn’t from the start, so his friendship wasn’t all that reassuring except that he was in charge. Of course nobody actually acted like they hated her, but you couldn’t trust people to act the way they felt.
Then there was the core fear, the thing that sat at her center, source unknown, nurturing and deploying these lesser emissaries against her. Its unfathomed mass rode inside her always, weighing her down, like a gigantic, immovably dense meteor lying deep in its own prehistoric crater behind the display glass she’d constructed around it. It was so heavy that she was sometimes surprised when her body actually moved in immediate response to signals from her brain. But her body did move, her brain worked, her mouth said the things she told it to, and she was miraculously able to function well enough that she occasionally forgot about the presence inside her for extended periods of time. Right now was not one of those times.
Copyright © 2024 by Max Ludington