“Our guest room?” I repeat. We hadn’t discussed plans after this, but this certainly was not part of it. No, my dad would return home with Piper, get back to work, get back to his own life. But I can’t say this now, as we’re checking him in to dry out. I can’t set him up for failure before he’s even started. “We’ll see. OK? Let’s just see.”
“It would help him recalibrate, get away from his triggers,” she says.
“I said we’ll see.”
She nods. Ben narrows his eyes, starts to say something, then does not. It occurs to me that it’s his guest room too, that he’ll want a say. But Ben is always benevolent; of course he’ll offer for him to stay.
The nice nurse with enormous breasts says, “OK, well, family is welcome next weekend, in seven days. If you head to the desk around the corner, they’ll give you all the information.”
And then she nods to my father, who is so defeated and looks so much like a broken little child, and ushers him through the swinging door, which eases back into the frame and latches.
Piper starts crying, and I stand there, my hands flanking my hips, my brain drifting to all the ways I want this moment to be different, like I’m in a movie and writing my own script. Like I’m a daughter with a mom who is alive and a daughter with a father who hasn’t been a terrible disappointment. In my mind, in my new role, I’m anyone I want to be, anyone I dare to dream.
“Let’s go,” I say, unable to stand there a second longer in the muddle of the real moment. “Please, can we just get out of here?”
I spin quickly and head for the exit. They linger for a moment before following, because they are better equipped for this reality; they don’t need to write themselves into a world of make-believe to get by.
15
BEN
JUNE 2009
The doorbell rings early, too early. The sun has barely risen, and I can’t imagine who could possibly be at the front door before seven a.m. I roll to my left but Tatum’s side of the bed is empty. She must have gotten up for a crack-of-dawn run on the beach. She’s been doing that lately to lean down to ensure that she fits back into the corsets forAs You Like Itafter gaining fifteen pounds (all muscle) forArmy Women(a break from the awards-bait films in an attempt to go commercial and expand her fan base).
The doorbell rings again.
Shit. This had better be an emergency. And whoever it is had better not wake the baby.I push myself to my elbows, then flop my feet to the carpet. Then I remember the last real emergency from eight years ago, when my dad—when three thousand people—died, and chide myself for ever wishing for something so stupid.The best you can hope for is that there’s never an emergency again, you dumb fuck!
I haven’t slept well, and the left side of my neck aches. I woke at three thirty, as I do most nights now worrying aboutAlcatraz’s dismal ratings—how Eric and I had spent the better part of two years committed to this TV project, how after a hot start it’s become creatively wretched—you can only have so many shankings before the audience yellsjumped the shark!—and how I didn’t even want to do network TV in the first place, and now even that is going south.
My dad used to say that if you aim for the middle, you shouldn’t expect to come out on top: when I came home with a B in English sophomore year, when I told him I was content on the JV squash squad, when I announced that I didn’t care if I were named editor of the school paper, as long as I got to write.
He’d push his glasses up on his nose, sip his scotch in his library amid biographies of great men throughout history—Washington and Churchill and Babe Ruth (and eventually plenty of Reagan biographies too; Reagan was only a few years out of office when I was in high school)—and remind me that I’d get lost in the middle, that my potential would seep out of me like water through a drain.
Shortly after our trip to Paris for his fortieth, my dad was hospitalized for what they thought was an early heart attack. He’d been in court that day and seized, then fainted. Leo and I were pulled early from school by our nanny, and a waiting town car raced us to Mount Sinai Hospital, a straight shot up Madison Avenue. My mother was there, hysterical, though the nurses were trying to calm her. I remember trying to make myself as still as possible in the waiting room; our nanny had taken Leo to the cafeteria for a snack, and my mom was still weeping, and there was nothing to be done other than wait. And to still myself. Like a superstition: if I could hold myself as if I weren’t breathing, prove to God that I could do it, maybe He would save my dad. I never lasted very long—I’d count to forty in my head, maybe forty-five, and then I’d fidget or get distracted by the nurses’ station. Finally, I heard my dad in my brain telling me that if I was going to do something, I’d better do it right. So I did: I stared at the floor and held myself still until I reached six hundred and thirty-seven, and just as I was at six hundred and thirty-eight, a doctor emerged and said:
“It was a cardiac incident, not a full-blown attack. He’s going to be OK.”
And I exhaled and felt something come unpinned inside of me, something crazy, something that thought:Maybe I just had to prove to him that I could do itright, and he felt that and came back to us.
Now, so many years later, I can see this as literal wishful thinking, but at fifteen, it felt almost prophetic. That I could be named editor of the paper and be granted a seat at the chessboard with my dad. That I could win an Oscar and, like a piece on a chessboard, move closer to my father, the king. And even if I resented it back then, even if it rankled me, I understood it as I got older. I admire it now, in fact. That if you aspire for mediocrity, that’s what you will get. But if you hold your breath for the world record, you’ll get your name written up in a book.
Alcatrazis mediocrity, and not even good mediocrity at that.
So I lie awake every night, staring at the ceiling, wrapped in my embarrassment and disappointment. That Tatum is coasting toward the stars doesn’t help alleviate my shame of knowing that I have settled. That’s not her fault. Of course it’s not. But it does shine a mirror on my own inadequacy when what I’d like to do is look away.
The doorbell clangs.
I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and pad down the hall in my underwear. I stick my head into Joey’s room, watch his chest rise and fall for a beat. Tatum’s been doing breakfast so I can sleep late, before she heads to the set. Joe murmurs something in his sleep, then falls quiet, a small victory.
“I’m coming,” I whisper to the door. “I’m coming.”
The doorbell chimes again.
“Jesus! I’m coming,” I call louder.
“It’s me,” I hear from the outside.
