As soon as the movie premieres Charlie has about ten thousand places he needs to be in rapid succession: New York and London and Tokyo and Beijing. Will gets back from set close to midnight and finds him packing a suitcase the size of a conversion van, listening to a guided meditation on his phone. “Shouldn’t you get an assistant to do this kind of thing for you?” Will asks, standing in his bedroom doorway eating a bowl of ice cream while Matthew McConaughey gently encourages them to imagine themselves as trees.
Charlie dumps an armful of socks into the bag. “I had one,” he says mournfully, “but then all my underwear started disappearing one pair at a time.”
“Fair enough.” Will stands there for another moment, shifting his weight uncomfortably. Caroline cornered him in the bathroom this morning, waving her phone in his face: “Literally every piece of press about this movie mentions June Benedetto in the first paragraph,” she seethed, sleek blond hair beginning to frizz a bit around her temples. “Every single article, William! You need to talk to him.”
“I need to talk to him?” Will spat a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink. “Why me?”
“You know why,” Caroline shot back immediately. “You’re his best friend. He trusts you. It sounds different when you say it.” She shrugged. “Also, he’s mad at me for sending those flowers to Anne Mulgrew and signing his name to the card.”
Will wiped her mouth with the back of his hand. “Can’t imagine why.”
“I’m serious!” Caroline wailed. “If there’s one thing those women know how to do, it’s bottom-feed. Her mother is already on the Sinclair doing that winking, purposely coy no-comment bullshit. It’s tacky. It makes Charlie look tacky.” She caught his gaze in the mirror then, lifted her sharp, elegant chin. “He’s better than that, don’t you think?”
Now Will grits his teeth, watching as Charlie packs his jeans and his running shoes, the expensive vintage watch he bought when he booked Major Fantastic and then ruined in the pool by mistake. He still wears it, the thing winking uselessly on his wrist in the pages of People and Us Weekly and In Touch. If he needs to know the time he checks his phone. “Look,” he begins, “about June.”
Right away, Charlie shakes his head. “Don’t,” he says, turning his attention to the half dozen bottles of cologne on the dresser. “Seriously, dude—”
“I’m not!” Will protests immediately. “I’m not. But if I was . . .” He thinks of Cinta Benedetto plotting her reality show comeback across the development. He thinks of Lilly’s face as she turned away from him at the premiere. He thinks of New York and of Hamlet, of letting himself want something—letting himself believe he could have it, even—only to realize the joke was on him the entire time. “It isn’t worth it, man.”
Charlie smirks at that. “What,” he asks, “love?”
Will shrugs. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly, and it comes out a lot quieter than he means for it to. “Any of it, maybe.”
Oh, Charlie doesn’t like that. He straightens up quick as if someone has pinched him, dropping a couple of undershirts on top of the suitcase. “Hey,” he says, taking half a step in Will’s direction. “You all right?”
Right away, Will realizes his mistake. “Yeah, of course,” he says, “totally. I didn’t mean—”
“Because I can cancel this trip. I don’t even really understand what a press tour is, to be completely honest with you. Probably they can just do it without me. Or maybe I can Skype.”
That makes Will smile. “Pretty sure they need you on-site, brother,” he says, trying to sound as sane as humanly possible. He is sane; at least, he’s pretty sure he is. He’s just . . . lonely, or something. Sometimes it feels like everyone he meets knows how to be a person except for him.
“A hologram, maybe,” Charlie muses, reaching for a pile of T-shirts. Will laughs all the way down the stairs.
* * *
Charlie tells Will to stay at the house in Pemberly Grove for as long as he wants to, and there’s technically no reason for him to find a place of his own, but once Charlie and Caro decamp to the East Coast it starts to feel a little bleak—Will shuffling around like Miss Havisham down the quiet, empty hallways, testing out line readings for the benefit of the artificial plants. He eats a lot of waffles. He hangs around on set. Georgia sends him a book of knock-knock jokes from Amazon, and he reads it cover to cover in a single go.
The longer he sticks around the more apparent it starts to become that the builder of this place should probably be on the receiving end of legal action or at the very least a dead fish in his glove compartment: On Monday the microwave door comes off in Will’s hand while he’s heating up a frozen bean burrito. On Tuesday, the A/C conks out. On Thursday he discovers a bright green fungus blooming under the sink in the downstairs bathroom, and by the time the weekend rolls around the urge to leave is starting to feel immediate, like he ought to make his escape before the whole place collapses around him and he finds himself standing in a pile of rubble in his boxers like something out of a comic strip.
On Sunday he runs out of shampoo, so he gets in the car and drives to Target, where he spends the better part of an hour wandering the pitilessly bright aisles wondering if he needs an Instant Pot or a Forgettle. He thinks he might stay there forever, subsisting entirely on Frappuccinos and cake pops from the Starbucks kiosk up by the registers, but his phone vibrates in his pocket as he’s staring hypnotized at an endcap display of multipurpose cleaner arranged in rainbow order. “There are a lot of different kinds of Swiffers,” he says, instead of hello.
“What are you doing?” Georgia asks.
“Having a dissociative episode in a big-box store.”
“Big night,” Georgia replies. He can hear the rustle and hum of the city in the background, horns honking even though it’s close to midnight on the East Coast. Will resists the urge to ask if she’s being safe. “I’ll look for you on the Sinclair.”
“‘Will Darcy’s Hollywood career ended before it began this weekend, following a psychotic break in the parking lot of a Los Angeles–area Target.’”
Georgia snorts. “Just get whatever you went in there for,” she advises. “I’ll order anything else you need.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he protests, even as he feels the relief flowing through him. “You’ve gotten me like a hundred things already.”
“And yet,” Georgia teases. “Families look after each other, right?”
Will blinks, surprised. It’s a thing one of their dad’s friends told them at their parents’ memorial service, Will and Georgia sitting side by side on the boat of a leather couch at their old house in Toluca Lake: “Families look after each other,” he intoned, leaning over them like an omen. “And from now on, your family is the two of you.” They used to use it as a joke when they were teenagers, covering for each other after curfew or passing the peas across the table at their aunt Marcy’s apartment on East 63rd Street. Neither one of them have said it in years.
“Yeah,” Will agrees softly. “I guess so.”
He almost tells her then, standing alone in housewares: That the movie is a farce and he should never have come out here to begin with. That he misses New York so much he can barely breathe. That he’s sorry and grateful she’s the one who found him that morning, slumped over the toilet in his bathroom. That he doesn’t think he actually wanted to die at all.
Instead he says good night and loads his eleven bags into the trunk of the Land Rover, then gets lost twice on the way back to Charlie’s. It’s not until he’s about to climb into the shower that he realizes he forgot the shampoo.