“Well, not withthatattitude it’s not.”
“All I want is some funding, maybe expand it into a feature, maybe get an agent with it. Oscars aren’t exactly on my radar.”
“I thought you told me once that you promised your dad an Oscar—that was part of the deal.”
He shrugs his puffy shoulders. “Did you not hear what Leo just said about my dad? Kind of impossible standards.”
“Wellmymom always says, ‘If you can dream it, you can be it,’” I say. “So why not dream it?”
I don’t add:She’s sick again.She called a few days ago and broke the news because she didn’t want to tell me when I was home for Christmas, but she told me not to worry, that it doesn’t look so bad, that they caught it again before it spread too far. She hadn’t betrayed a hint of it for the three days I’d been back; that was all the vacation time I could afford when I could pick up overtime work at the bar and jump-start my bank account for the new year. She looked tired, sure, but she almost always looked tired from her shifts at the hospital, and on Christmas Eve, she and Piper and I curled up on the couch, like we did when Piper and I were little, and watchedIt’s a Wonderful Life.
And it never once occurred to me that the insidious seeds of cancer had returned.
Tonight, on the last night of the year in the span of the millennium, I try to forget that my mom is sick again, that after her call I thought the walls of my tiny student apartment might crater on top of me. But I am an actress: I can pretend to do anything, be anyone. So I compartmentalize my fear and reach for Ben’s hand. I will tell him tomorrow because I know on instinct that I can tell him, and he will find a way to make it a little better. For now, my glove finds his, and it feels right, it feels sturdy, like I’m holding on to something grounding.
He says: “You’ve always wanted to do this?”
“Times Square? Oh, my gosh, I grew up watching it with my sister every year!”
“No.” He laughs. “Acting. Movies, theater, all of that.”
“Oh, it’s the only thing I really ever felt like I was good at.”
“Besides bartending.”
“Besides that, yes, of course.”
“Because you’re terrible at making bets.”
“Ugh.” I groan loudly enough to be heard over Caroline and Leo, who are cheering at Boyz II Men, who have just wrapped their set, beamed in on the large screens from Hollywood. “I’m sorry, but that was fixed! Stupid Daisy.”
He squeezes my hand through our gloves, and I squeeze back, like we have a secret code, like there is an electric pulse running through him into me and back again.
And now there are only a few minutes until midnight, and the snow is both furious and beautiful, eye-opening and blinding, and we have given in to the excitement of the other thousands of people here, of Dick Clark’s voice over the enormous speakers that surround the block, of the twinkling ball that’s projected across the screens a hundred feet above us.
“I’m glad you made me come here,” he says, his breath billowing in a plume of white steam. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’d never have done this without you.”
“I’m glad that Daisy got the chicken pox,” I reply, and his blue eyes widen then crease into happiness.
“I’m glad that I didn’t give you my number last year,” he says. “My heart couldn’t have taken it at the time.”
“I’m glad that I didn’t ransack your heart, and so you’re not dead and that dumb ex-girlfriend didn’t have to revive you with her fancy medical knowledge, and then, either way—dead or alive—you wouldn’t be here with me now.”
He nods. “I’m glad that I’m here with you now.” He peers toward the sky. “God, it’s like I’m seeing this city for the very first time.” He finds my eyes again: “It’s like I’m seeing a lot of things for the very first time.”
The crowd has started cheering, counting down, jumping and throbbing and clamoring for midnight, the start of something new, the promise of beginnings.
“Me too,” I say.
“I see you,” he says.
“I see you too,” I say, and I do, and he does, and it’s as if he has a microscope inside of me.
And then we are at three, and then we are at two, and then we are at one, and he is kissing me or maybe I am kissing him, but it doesn’t matter because the old year is behind us and a new one lies in wait, and I don’t worry about my mom and I don’t worry about my next part or my next paycheck or my mom’s next scan. Thousands of pieces of sparkling confetti rain down, mixing with the snow, and I feel like I’m caught in time, caught in a perfect moment inside a snow globe that maybe I’d beg my mom for at a gas station, and I can’t find my breath, and my knees feel a little wobbly, and I try to remind myself to remember this moment, to hold on to it forever, to seal it up like we really are in that snow globe and to never let anything shatter the bubble that envelops us, that protects us from everything else around us in the outside world.
5
BEN
