Harper, first into the room, hopped up onto the edge of Bo’s desk—an industrial mass of a desk, wooden slab top with metal legs, solid enough to have been built for the rollicking of a pirate ship or the pound of a butcher’s mallet—and settled herself there, touching the cigarette behind her ear. She would have happily smoked it right then, but this was her job, even if sometimes, like now, it didn’t really seem like one. Bo didn’t like people to smoke in his house. (Bo’s husband Ozzi especially did not like it.) And right then, Bo needed the three of them to be in his office, just as they were. He was counting on her to make this work. And she was counting on herself to make this work. She was, after all, now an officially credited producer: she was supposed to have insights and know-how.
Bo’s office was large, though made smaller by the camera and lighting equipment set up along its perimeter. Audrey sat at one end of a green velvet chesterfield as Merritt headed to a wall of bookshelves. She inspected the spines. “Decorator,” she said to no one in particular, “do be a lamb and stage it to look like I read.”
Harper laughed. “Checking to see if you’re there?” she asked as Merritt slid out a Peter Straub novel, Ghost Story, thumbed its pages in a paper purr, and put it back.
“I’m not,” Merritt answered.
“How do you know already?” Harper asked. “That’s gotta be three hundred books.”
“I know mine,” Merritt said. “It’s not here.”
“That’s because he’s got it on his nightstand,” Audrey said. “Right? Stuffed with Post-its and weird notes in the margins.”
“That’s it,” Harper said, smiling at Audrey for trying with Merritt. “You’re Bo’s own Mary MacLane. He’s obsessed.” She said this last part as reinforcement to Audrey’s kindness.
But Merritt would only have it her way, which was to now look over her shoulder at them while gesturing to the framed, vintage movie poster she was nearest. “This is the one your mom is in, isn’t it?” she asked Audrey. “That’s her?”
Audrey didn’t even have to look. She seemed to have clocked the poster when they’d walked in the room. “Yeah, that’s Caroline giving fright face.”
“Campy,” Merritt said, her nose nearly against the poster’s glass.
“That pool party scene,” Harper said. “It might be what made me gay, if I, like, trace it back.” She studied Audrey’s face. “Sorry, is that fucked up for me to say? About your mom?”
“I mean, it is a thing I’ve heard before,” Audrey said. “Not the make-you-gay part, necessarily, but the formative nature of that scene.”
“Can I ask you something else?” Merritt asked her. “Since we’re on the subject.”
“Sure,” Audrey said.
Harper couldn’t read that sure at all.
“I mean, feel free to tell me it’s none of my business,” Merritt said as she settled into a club chair, “but is there any particular reason you’re not online? I couldn’t find you, anyway. Not at any of the usual haunts.”
“Oh,” Audrey said. “No, I’m not on.” She paused, seemed to be considering something. Then, “Wait, are you asking if that’s because of my mom?”
“Is that why?” Merritt asked.
Harper thought Audrey looked like she was now silently sorting through possible answers, not very excited about any of them: like rummaging through a laundry basket for the least-dirty socks.
She settled on: “It’s why I got off in the first place, but that was a long time ago now—during all the tabloid stuff over the accident. And my parents’ divorce.”
“That shit was fucked up,” Harper said. “I mean, obviously I don’t remember it like you do but, Jesus—that was way too much to try to wade into.”
Audrey nodded. On her face you could see a light turn on in some room from her past. It was there without being a show for them, which is probably why Harper noticed it.
“How old were you?” Merritt asked.
“Fourteen,” Audrey said. “But it basically kept going until I was, like, seventeen, I guess. Anytime she went to rehab or did a red carpet or did anything at all, for a while. Then it stopped.” She tilted her head. “Mostly.”
“Fuck that shit,” Harper said.
“Yeah, and now I—anytime I’ve seriously thought about going back on, or someone tells me I should, it seems not worth it. It all just feels like ads or gossip.” She stopped, seemed worried she’d offended them, and quickly added, “I mean, I know it’s not that way for everybody. Just, I refuse to pay someone to do it for me, but, like, when I’ve tried to dip my toe in, it feels like I’m eavesdropping on people. I hate that. And I hate how constant it is.”
“No, I get that,” Harper said again. “I get all of that. I feel like, even with the trolls, I’ve been able to find my people online and, like, come into my own because I’ve found them. Whereas you were having to hide from people really early.”
“So these sides?” Merritt said. Even though she was the one who’d started this discussion, apparently she was now ending it, too. “What are we doing with them?”
Together they skimmed the pages.
“I’m already so obsessed with this place,” Audrey eventually said. “L’Orangerie. I remember going with my parents to a premiere party or something at the restaurant L’Orangerie. I mean, like, I was really, really little but—”
“You speak French?” Merritt interrupted.
“Oh,” Audrey said, surprised. “Yeah, sort of. I had lessons for years. My dad thought it was important for some reason. I still make a mess of it, though. I learned that the one time I was in France and trying to show off.”
“Huh,” Merritt said.
“I keep trying to learn languages with apps but not committing,” Harper said.
“I don’t think I could do it with an app, either,” Audrey said.
“Let’s hope L’Orangerie’s still standing when it’s time to film there,” Merritt said. Her French was unnecessarily sharp.
Harper remembered. “Oh shit, that’s right. Some asshole set it on fire last night,” she explained to Audrey.
“That’s terrible. What happened?”
Merritt did not respond to these prompts so Harper raised her voice a little and asked, “How does it look this morning, Merritt? Did you hear anything else?”
“Just that it’s a mess,” Merritt said, flipping through her phone and then handing it to Harper. On its screen was a picture of the burned-out middle of The Orangerie: glass walls enclosing a heap of wet ash.
“Oh fuck,” Harper said, the thinnest of shivers along her spine. It was worse than whatever she’d imagined. Though, truth be told, she hadn’t worked that hard to imagine anything about it at all.
“They just took those,” Merritt said. “There’s more. Scroll forward.”
Harper did. There were several shots from various angles, but at the center of each, the soppy mess of charred wood and ash was like the black nest of some horrible thing, empty and awful and waiting for its tenant to return. No one had been hurt in the fire, she knew, and the damage seemed relatively contained. And yet these images were somehow gruesome. Maybe it was the contrast of the ripe green Brookhants lawn in the background, there beyond the glint of The Orangerie’s glass, while in the foreground this black hole of burn and wet almost looked to be alive. The pictures, one after the next, made her feel a little nauseated.
“Can they fix it in time to use it?” Audrey asked, now beside Harper on the desk, leaning over to see the phone screen. “Or will it delay things?”
“No, they say they can fix it,” Merritt said. “Elaine keeps saying it’s not as bad as it looks. But I don’t know who’s telling her that.”
“Who did it?” Audrey asked. “Do they know?”
“I believe the consensus at dinner last night was ghosts,” Merritt said plainly.
Audrey’s face opened up in, was it hope? “Do people really think that?” she asked.
“No,” Merritt said, reaching to take her phone back. “Not really. It was a dumb joke.”
Audrey tried to smile like she was also in on the joke. “Oh, for sure. Right.”
“Do you think it was ghosts?” Merritt asked like Merritt would.
“I guess I wasn’t totally sure,” Audrey said. She was clearly embarrassed, even blushing a little across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks. “I think I have ghosts on the brain.”
“How’s that work?” Harper asked.
“I’d like to know,” Merritt said.
“No,” Audrey said, blushing harder. “Last night—” She shook her head. “It’s a lot of nothing. It’s dumb.”
“What is?” Harper asked.
“Nothing,” Audrey said, smiling. “Really. It’s nothing.”
“We can’t possibly move on until you tell us what ghosts on the brain means,” Merritt said.
“It’s really not anything,” Audrey said again. “And now I’m embarrassed that I brought it up. There was just a bunch of weirdness at my house when I was reading the script.” She spoke like she was attempting to shrug off what she was saying even as she said it. “Like I creeped myself out, which is a total compliment to your book, but I think it primed me to be willing to believe in the supernatural today or something.”
“So you do believe in it?” Merritt said. “In ghosts?” Her nostrils ever so slightly flared, as if the word itself was malodorous.
Audrey was flustered. “I mean, not like hovering with sheets, but I guess I think I could be convinced, sometimes—at least that places can be haunted. Weird energy. I don’t know.”
“I believe,” Harper said. “And anyway, ghosts don’t care if we believe in them or not—I mean, in order for them to be real.”
“I think the opposite is true, actually,” Merritt said. “Like most things with no scientific evidence to support them, their existence depends entirely on our belief in it. Magical Thinking 101.”
Harper turned again to Audrey. “Ignore her. What happened last night?” She wanted to hear this, which meant that she needed Merritt to stop with her needling.
“It’s kind of about her is the thing,” Audrey said, smiling at Merritt.
“Well now we have to know,” Harper said.
“Please tell us,” Merritt said. “I won’t interrupt.”
Audrey did. She told them about the videos she’d watched, and the scenes she’d read. She told them about the open patio doors and the night shadows and the scuttle she’d heard behind her in the house. Harper nodded along, made a point to do so—it did all sound sort of creepy—but then Audrey got to the song surprise-playing on their speakers.
“Oh shit,” Harper said. “Wait, the chant thing? No way. That thing freaks me the fuck out. I’d have lost it.”
“I did lose it!” Audrey said. “I screamed and then I, like, flailed around like an idiot trying to get it turned off. And then when I did, it seemed like the rooms were foggy or something. It just felt wrong, like something was there with me inside the house that shouldn’t be there.” Now she seemed to be losing confidence again, rushing through the rest. “And then later there were all these dead wasps floating in dishwater in our kitchen sink, but I mean like dozens, and I didn’t see them come in anywhere. Some of them weren’t even dead yet.” She looked between them, embarrassed. “But when I say it now, it also just feels like a bunch of coincidences that I’ve strung together.”
“You don’t have to play it down,” Harper said. “That sounds scary as fuck to me. Jesus.”
“Move over, clowns in the storm drain,” Merritt said.
“Don’t even joke,” Audrey said. “Last night I would’ve taken a clown in the storm drain.”
Harper hopped from the edge of the desk. She felt wired. “Listen, that fucked-up chant thing comes on at night in my house when I didn’t tell it to? I’m losing my shit. It would be weird not to lose your shit over that.”
“No, I know,” Audrey said. “I did lose my shit.” She smiled, took a breath. “So hey,” she said, looking at Harper. “Because I am mortified that I told you all of that and don’t want to talk about it anymore, and also because I’m a little nervous that we’re wasting time: I had this possibly dumb thought that we could use the desk to stand in for the Orangerie table—in the scene. I mean get under it together? What do you think?”
Harper liked the idea a lot. Audrey Wells was gonna work for this, she could feel it. “Totally,” she said. “When the hail comes. I love that.”
Harper thought she maybe then heard Merritt make some small noise to indicate her displeasure over the idea, some signal of disapproval or judgment, but if so, it was a very small noise, with no follow-up, and besides, this was not Merritt’s specific area of expertise. In this instance, Harper would not defer. This part, this letting a character swallow her up, this fitting of herself into the self of another, it was the best part of all of this—the part people sometimes said she was such a natural at.
Merritt’s potential judgment over their acting choices notwithstanding, Audrey’s story seemed to have worked as kind of a conversational bridge to get them past their earlier tension: maybe because it both made Audrey seem vulnerable and let Merritt feel superior. Whatever the case, now Audrey was asking Merritt a question about the shorter of the two scenes—the one with cousin Charles—and Merritt was actually being helpful in her answers.
She told Audrey that, in her opinion, Charles was always more taken with Clara than was appropriate for cousins. But it’s possible he might not have even realized how deep her infatuation with Mary MacLane’s book ran (Charles was no reader) except for the crucial fact that Mary MacLane herself had visited Newport, Rhode Island, during the summer of Clara’s obsession. And Clara’s family, of course, summered in Newport. For a week or so in August it was a common topic of societal discussion there: Mary MacLane would be coming to attend a wedding and write an article for the New York World about what she called “the pomps and vanities” of those with “the Money.”
Unsurprisingly, Clara Broward had become every bit the 1902 fangirl at the prospect of actually meeting her idol, and cousin Charles, egged on by the gossip around town, took notice of this. Mary MacLane suddenly seemed worthy of his daft attention. So he stole the book from Clara, read it (let’s be real: skimmed it), and declared it, and Mary herself, an affront to decency. And Charles got Clara’s mother riled about it too, convincing her that Mary MacLane was the most vile of influences and that Clara must be protected from her dangerous way of thinking.
As a direct result of his meddling, Clara was not allowed to go to Bailey’s Beach and meet Mary MacLane when she came to Newport. And for this, Clara would never forgive awful Charles. Or, if eventually she might have in the distant future, there just wasn’t any time to—she died not two months later.
Merritt knew her stuff, and even though Harper had heard her say some of these things before, she was glad she was now saying them to Audrey. As she listened, and without really thinking about what she was doing, she headed to the wall of windows behind it, touching the cigarette at her ear as she went. The view was of Bo’s side yard and then on into the neighbor’s backyard, where a mom and toddler were in the garden. As she looked through the glass at them, Harper could suddenly smell lilacs that shouldn’t even be there this time of year—ripe and heavy with blossom, full of perfume.
“Clara locked herself in her bedroom the whole time Mary MacLane was in Newport,” Merritt said. “She did try to sneak out once, but a maid saw her and called for her mother, and Charles caught her in the garden. I mean, he basically tackled her is how she wrote about it after. So here she was, Mary MacLane right there in her town—I mean, right, right there, down the street and visiting with the sole purpose of observing people like Clara’s family, like Clara herself, even—but she couldn’t go meet her. It’s fucking heartbreaking. In her diary entries from that week Clara talks about having these really vivid dreams—or daydreams, it’s unclear—that Mary would come through her open window at night.”
“Come through her window and what?” Audrey asked Merritt. Her voice sounded like it was a greater distance away than Harper knew it to be. “Wait, do you mean like sex dreams?”
“I do mean like sex dreams,” Merritt said. “I mean, we’re talking more subtle than 50 Shades of Mary MacLane, but yes.”
Audrey was now asking about maybe seeing the diaries, more than just the entries reproduced in Merritt’s book. Harper had wondered about this too, was going to turn and get in on the ask, but she felt magnetized to the scene out the window. She couldn’t pull away, though she couldn’t say why.
The woman out the window was now picking tomatoes and the toddler happily stomped around, her purple jumper cladding a body built for cumbersome, destructive movement; her mother clearly exasperated. Harper smiled, leaned closer to see which of the crops would be harassed next. And then, in a flinch, the scene changed. The child was crying—Harper could just hear the shrieking through the window, and now the little girl was clutching her cheek, screaming. The mother shot up from her crouch and tore off one of her gloves to cup the same place on the child’s face that the child was holding. The mother’s other arm reached around, picked up the screaming toddler, and carried her off and into their house.
The child had just been stung. That was the explanation Harper’s brain filled in for her. A bee, maybe. Could be.
But Harper knew it wasn’t.
As she stared, in the space between window and garden, she saw several small things drifting in the air—could be ash, caught on the breeze, or insects. Whatever they were, they caught the glint of the sun as they drifted. And now there were even more, their soft forms collecting on the air as if hovering there. And now still more and more until, as if some wrong lens had been placed in front of the window, the scene changed, and it was snowing. It was impossible, but it was. The world outside the window was white with snow—the trees caked in it, the garden killed by it—its plants stiff and gray, frozen, the tilled ground mounded white, and footprints, from garden to house, showing the path the mother had walked with her screaming child. Though somehow the tomatoes remained bright red, now almost like shiny Christmas tree ornaments—much too red against the snow. And in the moments, for they were only moments, Readers, when Harper tried to make sense of this change, it was as if a white hand crept up the window, and now there was snow and ice clinging to it too, reaching across its panes and forcing Harper to peer through gaps in order to continue to see the garden.
In the span of these queer happenings, the room had grown prickly behind her. Prickly between Merritt and Audrey, that is, some line apparently crossed, judging by Merritt’s current tone. Harper could sense that—she could feel it tickle at the back of her neck, palpable tension—even as she continued to blink at the strangeness outside the window.
Somehow, she knew that if she turned away, the winter scene would be gone. If she spoke of it aloud, called to Audrey and Merritt to come see, or even tapped at the window to try to knock free some of the snow, or to feel the ice and cold collected on the other side of the glass, then it would all return to the way it was before, the way it should be: sunny and hot and SoCal in summer. And she didn’t want that to happen yet, though she couldn’t say why. She felt a bit light-headed. She could smell the lilac again. And then—
“That is not what I’m asking about at all.” Audrey’s voice, its strained tenor, pierced Harper’s snow world, its whites and grays swirling away, leaving glinting sun and green and brown—shiny cars in the driveway, one corner of a blue swimming pool. All as it should be.
Audrey’s voice, however, said otherwise: “It’s not the fact of the kiss,” she said, “it’s what you just said about us doing it today.”
“What I said is that you seem really uncomfortable with it,” Merritt said. “Based on what you just said.”
Harper’s bare arms prickled with gooseflesh. She couldn’t tell for sure if it was from the scene out the window or the one developing behind her. “I just watched this kid outside get stung, I think,” she said, turning to find both Merritt and Audrey staring at her, neither of them happily.
“Are we supposed to kiss today?” Audrey asked. “I mean, is that what they’re looking for with this whole setup?”
Audrey’s question was enough of a surprise to Harper that whatever had just happened out the window was shoved below it. At least for now. “What do you mean, with this whole setup?” Harper asked. She came around the desk to join them again. “I’m sorry, catch me up—I must’ve missed something.”
“In the scene,” Audrey said. She held her sides up like a placard. “The kiss at the end.”
“There’s a lot of kissing at the end,” Merritt said. “They spend the entire scene building to that action.” She made a line with her mouth, almost the pure emoji form of that expression. Then she broke that line to say, “Clara wants to kiss Flo. She’s into it. I’m thinking the actor playing her should probably not be weirded out by the idea of women kissing.”
“I don’t even know where you’re getting this,” Audrey said to Merritt. “That’s not what I said.”
“Huh. Clearly I got it from something you said.”
Audrey was back on one end of the chesterfield, her body in a knot. She shook her head to herself, like a bobble doll, and then turned to face Merritt full-on. “Yeah, so I’m bi,” she said. “Not that it’s really your business, but no, the idea of kissing a woman does not make me uncomfortable. Not as a person, not as an actress. I don’t—”
“Actor,” Merritt said flatly.
“What?” Audrey said. If a word can sound like an eye roll, that one did.
“Why does it have to be actress? Is it still poetess? Do you go to a doctress? Actor. One word for all humans who do the thing.”
“Last time I checked, they still give awards for best actress,” Audrey said.
Merritt sniffed. “Well if they give awards for it, I mean: holy shit.”
“OK,” Harper said, trying on what she hoped was like a reasonable but chill counselor voice. “Come on—Audrey’s not in charge of naming things. I mean, plus heroines, right? Like the whole namesake of our purpose.” By now she’d caught the thread of their disagreement and was considering how to say the next part without Merritt storming from the room.
“Yes, in 1902,” Merritt said.
“Just so you know, Merritt,” Harper said, “this is like standard practice. We always talk about anything physical, you talk it through with your scene partner and decide how to do it or if you even should. I mean, especially for an audition. It’s never a given. Or it shouldn’t be.”
Merritt blinked at her. “Yes, and all of that makes sense,” she said. But she said it as if nothing Harper had just said had anything to do with whatever was pissing her off in the first place and now she was additionally annoyed to have been educated about their process. “It just seemed to me like there was some real subtext in what Audrey said earlier. But forget it. I must be mistaken.”
“I really don’t know how this got so confused,” Audrey said. She looked at Harper to make her case. “I wasn’t even saying that I don’t think we should do the kiss—I just wanted to talk about it, see where we’re at.”
“Totally,” Harper said. “We still can do that, right?”
“Right, yeah,” Audrey said. She paused, then added, “And I would ask that no matter the gender of the person I was doing this scene with.” She looked at Merritt. “I really am sorry if you thought I was saying something else. I wasn’t.”
Merritt shrugged, noncommittal. “I misunderstood. Mea culpa. I just wanted this movie about queer women to actually have some involved.”
“Well if they cast me, I’ll count for one of them,” Audrey said.
Merritt offered no reaction to this.
But Harper said: “Fuck yes you will.”
Audrey Wells was gonna work for this. She could feel it.