I woke up the next morning to the sound of my phone ringing, the special tone I set for Liza a few years ago, the chorus of the theme song from Saving Addy.
I’d been dreaming something strange, or something wonderful, something hazy about Will... And my first thought as I reached blindly for my phone was about the way I had felt last night, kissing him in the dark in the tree house. My second thought was, why was Liza calling me so damn early?
“Amelia, I didn’t wake you, did I?” Liza’s voice rang through, cheerful as always. No matter what news she had to deliver, or reason for calling, or what time of day it was, Liza always sounded extremely caffeinated and overly hopeful.
“No... I uh...not really,” I stammered. Clearly giving myself away. Great acting. “I mean, I was just getting up anyway.” I pulled the phone back to check the time. It was after nine. It wasn’t all that early. I really should be getting up.
“Good, okay. Well, small change of plans.” She said the word small so emphatically it instantly made me nervous, and I swallowed hard. “Gloria wants to go up to set today instead of Saturday, so I wanted to let you know, I moved your hotel reservation back and I’m sending a car for you at noon.”
Noon? Like three hours from now? But I was still supposed to have two more afternoon sessions with Gloria. And Will and I had parted last night talking about sneaking out for another drink after dinner. I was supposed to have two more days with him too.
“That’s fine, right?” Liza hummed cheerfully. “You’ve gotten whatever you needed from Gloria by now and you’re all set?”
“Um...” I was still too half-asleep to land on an appropriate lie, and instead of saying anything I finally just sighed.
“All good, right?” Liza repeated.
“Can you have the driver come at two instead?” I finally said something that made sense. “Gloria and I are supposed to meet at one and I still have some questions for her.”
Liza was silent for a moment. “That’s odd. Her assistant was the one who said noon.”
Clearly, this was deliberate. I had a weird creeping sense that somehow Gloria knew about what had happened in the tree house last night. But how could she? When Will and I had come back into the house it had been quiet and dark, and I’d been certain both she and Tate were already long asleep.
“Well, call Tate back,” I told Liza now. I wandered to the mirror across the room as I talked. My hair was a mess, and I brushed it away from my eyes with my fingers. “And tell her I need to meet with Gloria again today before we leave. And tomorrow too. She and I can meet at the hotel. I need a few more sessions still to prepare.”
“Will do,” Liza said, and though I fully expected Tate and Gloria to argue with her, I knew that she had been around in this business long enough to handle them and figure it out. “I’ll be up there next week to check on you in person, but text or call if you need anything before then, okay, Amelia?”
I nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see me, and I leaned closer to the mirror. I hadn’t done my makeup in a few days and my cheeks looked a little pale. What exactly had Will seen last night when he’d called me beautiful? It couldn’t have been a glamorous, made-up kind of beauty like Jase had always found attractive. It was like Will saw something else in me, something unvarnished and real, that I hadn’t even remembered existed.
“Oh, and one more thing.” Liza was still talking. “Cam’s agent reached out and wanted your number. Okay if I share it? He said Cam wanted to meet up with you before the shoot to go over everything. I think he’s getting in today, so you’ll have some extra time for that too.”
Cam, who was about to play George, the alleged love of Gloria’s life. The man I was going to have to pretend to be so madly in love with that I built an entire career on it. Of course, I wanted to meet him before the shoot. “Yeah, please give him my number,” I told Liza. “And tell them I want to meet up with him too.”
I took a shower and got dressed and then packed up my things to be ready to leave this afternoon, purposefully waiting a good forty-five minutes before I went downstairs and had to face Tate, hopeful that Liza had worked out all the details in the meantime.
But the kitchen was empty, and the entire house felt quiet. I grabbed another yogurt from the fridge, and as I sat at the breakfast bar and ate, I pulled up Emily’s photos and looked at them again on my phone. I wanted to know more about Emily St. James’s books and I googled her. It appeared her novels were literary mysteries. And the cover quote from her first novel, Darkness, told me Gloria Diamond found it “stunning, searing and suspenseful.”
“Good morning.” Will’s voice surprised me—I hadn’t heard him walk in—and I dropped my phone on the bar counter. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.” He smiled, and I stared at his lips for a moment, remembering what it had felt like to kiss him in his childhood tree house last night. I felt simultaneously embarrassed and thrilled to be seeing him now in the light of day.
“Morning,” I finally said softly and returned the smile. Then I picked up my phone and handed it to him so he could see what I’d been looking at, his mother’s quote on Emily’s book.
“Darkness,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Interesting. Emily struck me as more of a lightness and rainbows kind of person.”
I laughed, but I agreed that was a pretty spot-on way to describe her. It seemed funny the way a writer could be nothing at all like her work. Writing itself struck me as somewhat close to acting. Pretending to be someone you never would truly be in real life.
“Anyway, I’m getting ready to take my mother up to the set this afternoon,” Will said. “And I have to run to the office first. But should I add my number to your contacts? We could...” His voice trailed off, as if suddenly he lost the courage to say exactly what we could do later.
“Please, go ahead, add it,” I said.
He smiled and entered it into my phone. Then handed my phone back to me. William Forrester, and for “company,” he wrote Gloria Diamond’s son. I bit my lip and tried not to laugh.
“I’m staying at the same hotel as all of you for the next few days,” Will said. “I need to go back to work next Wednesday but I’ll be there through this weekend and for the first day on set on Monday for sure.”
He presented it all factually and yet, the idea of him being there comforted me more than it probably should. If Will was there, he would keep helping me try to figure Gloria out. And more than that, I felt excited at the prospect of spending more time with him.
“Sounds good. I’ll text you later,” I said. “Maybe we can get a drink after dinner?” I suspected the hotel bar would be a large step up from Ba(r) down the road, and that had been our original plan for tonight.
He smiled again, and then looked around. But Tate seemed to be out, and I assumed Gloria was locked away in her office, writing. He leaned toward me, and I thought he was going to kiss me. But then he lowered his voice and spoke instead. “What I’m picking up at my office is that box my aunt overnighted.”
I’d almost forgotten about that, but he had mentioned it yesterday. Before we met Emily, before we sat up in the tree house and kissed like teenagers. “You’ll let me know if there’s anything interesting in there?” I said.
“Of course.” He looked down at his phone, unlocked it and then handed it to me. “Maybe you should give me your number too?”
I was packed and ready to go and sat on the couch in Gloria’s library, nervously chewing on the skin around my thumb by 12:55. This felt like the end of a whole lot of nothing. But really, it was only the beginning.
My last project was the indie film I’d wrapped up the week before my mother died. I’d played a supporting role, a young woman named Wanda, the best friend character, who was dealing with anxiety. It wasn’t much of a stretch. One, because it was a pretty similar role to Addy (Liza was starting to get worried about me being typecast). And two, I was a young woman myself, dealing with my own anxiety on and off for years.
But this role, Gloria Diamond, would mark the first time I would ever play a real person. A living, breathing (extremely critical) person whose life felt so far from my own. What I was hoping to get from her now, before we left her house, was just the smallest crumb of understanding. An emotional ledge to start from. She loved George. Or she loved this other mystery man? And if that was truly the case, then why did she lie in her memoir? And why did she stay with George? Was all of that for Will?
I held her memoir in my lap and flipped through the pages one more time. The book ended just after George’s death. Gloria and Will fled to Seattle and Gloria wrote her first romance novel staring off into these woods.
I heard the thump of her cane, and I looked up in time to see her hovering over me, frowning. She was dressed casually in leggings and a plain black sweater, no wig, no makeup. “Your agent demanded this meeting. Now I’ll be stuck in traffic,” she said tersely before sitting down across from me and folding her arms in front of her chest.
I remembered that Tate told me she didn’t drive, and I suspected Will was driving her and wouldn’t complain about the traffic, but I bit my lip. “I’m sure Liza explained that I don’t feel quite ready for the role yet. I’d love it if you would share more about the real you.” I said it kindly, but spoke firmly, channeling my best inner badass bitch. (Which Wanda also very much was, in spite of her anxiety. Or maybe because of it. Thank you, Wanda.)
“You have my memoir,” Gloria said, her voice rising in frustration. “The entire story of my young life. What more could you possibly need?”
I pulled out my phone and pulled up the photo of Emily, Gloria and their crew of writing friends at the bar. I showed it to Gloria now.
She looked at it, narrowed her eyes and then pulled her readers from the top of her head to examine it more closely. “Where did you get this?” she asked.
“I interviewed one of your friends yesterday, and she brought it to show me.”
“One of my friends?” She laughed a little and raised her eyebrows, and I wondered if she didn’t really consider Emily as much of a friend as Emily considered her.
“Anyway, this photo is helpful because it gives me a visual of what you looked like during the time period I’ll be playing you.”
“Wonderful.” I thought her voice was imbued with sarcasm, but then, I wasn’t entirely sure.
“It is,” I said. “So, can you tell me a little more about the people you’re with here? Who’s this?” I put my finger on the half of the man’s face next to her so she could see what I was asking.
She frowned and looked away. “I don’t remember,” she mumbled softly.
It’s not that I wanted to out her if she had been in love with someone else. I wasn’t going to reveal it in interviews. I only wanted to understand her. I wanted to understand how I was supposed to feel about George when I was playing her. Was I playing the role of a wife who truly loved him, or that of a wife who was only pretending to truly love him? And if she was pretending...why?
“Are you sure you don’t remember?” I prodded. “I’ll keep this just between us, whatever you tell me. I promise,” I added.
She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I held my breath, hoping she was about to tell me the truth. But then she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “One of the other writers at the retreat. It was over thirty years ago. Do you expect me to remember everyone’s name?”
Emily had remembered very specifically that everyone in this picture had been attending the writers’ retreat except for one. That he was Gloria’s friend from college. She was lying again, and I sighed deeply and rested my head in my hands. Maybe I really shouldn’t have taken this role, come out here. I could call Liza back and see what else had been coming in for me. Probably several other offers for young anxious woman roles. I could practically do that in my sleep.
“Why does this matter so much to you?” Gloria asked me. “It’s not a part of the movie. And now we’ve met and talked, like you wanted to, so what else is there to say?”
Like Will said over Korean food the other night, even if he was arguing his client’s innocence, he had to know if the person was guilty. I thought about offering Gloria Will’s comparison now, or trying to explain the Method to her, but I didn’t think any of that was going to get me anywhere. And besides, it wasn’t guilt or innocence I was worried about. I just wanted to be able to feel the real Gloria in my bones when I played the part.
“Who are you really?” I finally asked her. “Who were you?”
“I could say the same to you, couldn’t I, Annie?”
The sound of my real name felt so shocking, so unexpected that I let out a small cry. I covered my mouth with my hand. It had been months since I’d heard my real name out loud. Only my mother used it. Even my dad had switched to calling me Amelia after I’d asked him to years ago. My mother, though, had refused. You can be anyone you want for your job, for the world, she had told me once. To me you’ll always be my Annie. I bit back tears thinking about that now. “Why did you call me that?” I asked Gloria.
She frowned for a long moment. Then she said, “I know how to use the internet, you know. Annie Gaitlin is your given name, isn’t it? Amelia Grant is your stage name.”
I nodded.
“‘Annie, Annie, your heart shines like a star,’” Gloria sang softly.
I closed my eyes and heard that same line in my mother’s voice. She would sing it to me when I was little, a chant, a chorus. And it was one of the last things she ever said to me when she’d hugged me goodbye the weekend before she died. A swan song.
It was a line from a popular song back in the ’80s, and what she told me had inspired my name because she’d heard it playing on the radio in the operating room in the minutes before they’d knocked her out and taken me from her womb. She’d woken up with a baby girl, humming that song in her head, and then she said she immediately knew my name, Annie.
“My mother used to sing that to me,” I finally said to Gloria. “And she was the only one who still called me Annie.”
She bit her lip and stared at her hands. Her nails were a freshly manicured pale purple, and now there was a tiny diamond on each nail tip so her fingers truly sparkled. I guessed she’d had them done this morning, for the shoot. “I’m sorry,” Gloria said softly, after a moment. And for once, she sounded and looked like she was genuinely sorry. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s okay,” I said, though I didn’t feel okay. I felt my mother’s loss again, sharply, acutely, in a way that made my stomach start to ache. “It’s just for a minute when you sang that line, I felt like I heard a ghost.”
She looked back up and she nodded. “If you really want to know how it felt to be me moving here, writing my first novel, it was exactly like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like hearing so many ghosts,” she said softly. “I just couldn’t let them go.”