Harry shook his head. “He can’t move to New York.”
I sighed, losing my patience. “All the more reason for us to discuss this later.”
Harry stood up, as if he was about to give me a piece of his mind. But then he calmed down. “You’re right,” he said. “We can discuss it later.”
He came over to me as I was packing my soap and makeup. He took my arm and kissed my temple.
“You’ll pick me up tonight?” he said. “At my place? We’ll have the whole trip to the airport and the flight to discuss it more. We can throw back a couple of Bloody Marys on the plane.”
“We will figure this out,” I told him. “You know that, right? I’m never going to do anything without you. You’re my best friend. My family.”
“I know,” he said. “And you’re mine. I never thought I could love someone after John. But this guy . . . Evelyn, I’m falling in love with him. And to know that I could love, that I can . . .”
“I know,” I said, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. “I know. I promise I’ll do whatever I can. I promise you we will figure this out.”
“OK,” Harry said, and then he squeezed my hand back and walked out the door. “We will figure this out.”
* * *
MY DRIVER, WHO introduced himself as Nick as I got into the back of the car, picked me up at around nine in the evening.
“To the airport?” Nick said.
“Actually, we’re going to make a stop on the Westside first,” I said, giving him the address of the home where Harry was staying.
As we made our way across town, through the seedy parts of Hollywood, over the Sunset Strip, I found myself depressed about how unseemly Los Angeles had gotten since I’d left. It was similar to Manhattan in that regard. The decades had not been good to it. Harry was talking about raising Connor here, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we needed to leave both big cities for good.
As we were stopped at a red light close to Harry’s rented home, Nick turned around briefly and smiled at me. He had a square jaw and a crew cut. I could tell he had probably bedded a number of women based on his smile alone.
“I’m an actor,” he said. “Just like you.”
I smiled politely. “Nice work if you can get it.”
He nodded. “Got an agent this week,” he said as we started moving again. “I feel like I’m really on my way. But, you know, if we get to the airport with time to spare, I’d be interested in any tips you have for somebody starting out.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, looking out the window. I decided, as we drove up the dark, winding streets of Harry’s neighborhood, that if Nick asked me again, after we got to the airport, I was going to tell him that it’s mostly luck.
And that you have to be willing to deny your heritage, to commodify your body, to lie to good people, to sacrifice who you love in the name of what people will think, and to choose the false version of yourself time and time again, until you forget who you started out as or why you started doing it to begin with.
But just as we pulled around the corner onto Harry’s narrow private road, every thought I’d ever had before that moment was erased from my mind.
Instead, I was leaning forward, shocked still.
In front of us was a car. Bent around a fallen tree.
The sedan looked as if it had run head-on into the trunk, knocking the tree down on top of it.
“Uh, Ms. Hugo . . .” Nick said.
“I see it,” I told him, not wanting him to confirm that it was really in front of us, that it wasn’t merely an optical illusion.
He pulled over to the side of the road. I heard the scrape of branches on the driver’s side of the car as we parked. I froze with my hand on the door handle. Nick jumped out and ran over.
I opened my door and put my feet on the ground. Nick stood to the side, trying to see if he could get one of the doors of the crashed car open. But I walked right to the front, by the tree. I looked in through the windshield.
And I saw what I had both feared and yet not truly believed possible.
Harry was slumped over the steering wheel.
I looked over and saw a younger man in the passenger’s seat.
Everyone sort of assumes that when faced with life-and-death situations, you will panic. But almost everyone who’s actually experienced something like that will tell you that panic is a luxury you cannot afford.
In the moment, you act without thinking, doing all you can with the information you have.
It’s when it’s over that you scream. And cry. And wonder how you got through it. Because most likely, in the case of real trauma, your brain isn’t great at making memories. It’s almost as if the camera is on but no one’s recording. So afterward, you go to review the tape, and it’s all but blank.