4

The next morning, my head is still buzzing. It feels like a hangover, even though we didn’t drink. All we did was watch the movie. Evening had begun to fall by the closing credits, and Anthony had shuttled me out like one of the stepsisters whose feet were too large for the glass slipper. Maybe my headache is just from the stress. I only half slept. All night long, scenes from the movie continued to pummel my thoughts. Gregory Peck reminded me of my father, how morally correct he was, how protective he was of his daughter. Watching him compromise those morals and become a savage to rescue his daughter had grabbed me. More than that, it had triggered something deep within my psyche. He would rather have died than allow his daughter to suffer. It hasn’t been that long since I lost Dad. And I couldn’t help but see the two of us, in nearly every frame. Even the quaint, conventional ways Gregory Peck and his on-screen daughter spoke to each other—Daddy, the girl called him, in her high-pitched saccharine voice—had been almost unbearable to watch.

Still, though, there had been something disappointing about the movie, at least by today’s standards. Not just tame, but predictable. The daughter is as innocent as a fawn. The evil the film wants to depict never actually seems to touch her. In the end, what it’s really about is the men, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, who are at war with each other. The daughter is just a pawn. What she feels—her terror, even—doesn’t matter, except as an element of that conflict.

As I race into the city to start my dog-walking shift, with Ben’s oatmeal churning in my stomach, I find myself wondering again what Anthony has planned. We aren’t filming a remake of Cape Fear, he’d insisted. But the movie that’s inspiring our shoot is about a brutal fight—almost to the death—using an innocent girl as a weapon. Its tension derives from the threat to this girl. If what Anthony intends to do is take this threat out of the safe confines of an old-fashioned staged drama and make it real, what does that mean for this poor girl? I mean, for me. Think of it like reality TV, he’d said. But how can he make this real? What is he expecting of me? And how will he contain this violence, if it’s real—if it’s as raw as he seems determined for it to be? Will I even be safe?

I try to put these thoughts out of my mind. Of course I’ll be safe. Sofìa wouldn’t have arranged for me to audition for Anthony’s movie if the danger were real. And she wouldn’t put herself in danger, either. What am I worrying about? This is Anthony Marino making this film. He knows what he’s doing. He’s done this before. And who knows? Maybe he’ll even play the criminal himself. He had been reluctant to tell me what part he’d play in this whole drama. I’m overreacting for nothing.

Besides, I’ve already said yes. There’s no turning back now. I’d be forever disappointed with myself if I chickened out. Someone else would play the girl, and I’d have to watch her on the screen with Mads Byrne and Anthony Marino. No way, Betty. This prize belongs to me.

For the next hour, anyway, I’m in charge of two dogs. That’s my life this morning, and I have nothing else to worry about. The Pomeranian is my favorite. Her name is Peaches, and she walks with obvious pride. The other dog is a mutt, one of those old-man dogs with a beard and weird smile. His name is Forsythe, which suits him. The three of us are hustling through SoHo to Washington Square Park, where the dogs can mingle. I’m avoiding eye contact with passersby, a technique I’ve developed to keep the people on crowded sidewalks from careening into me. The dogs swarm one of the stands that sells bracelets on Prince Street while I pretend to read a text, when in fact I’m double-checking Google Maps. The park is only five blocks from the apartment where I picked up Forsythe, but somehow I’m lost. This city is a grid. I should know it after a month. I want to feel as if I’m home here. But I’m still not sure which street will lead me to the park. On the way back, it’ll be easier. I can retrace my steps.

My phone rings when we finally hit Houston and West Broadway and I can see the canopy of the trees surrounding the park. I pull Peaches out of the gutter and check the screen: Mom. I can’t keep avoiding her. I take a deep breath and answer the phone.

My mother’s voice blares like a car’s horn. “Elizabeth! Where are you?”

“I’m fine,” I say at the same time, answering the wrong question. The light changes and I walk, tugging the dogs along behind me. “I’ve had a busy couple of days. Sorry.”

She repeats herself, her words coming out in a rush of impatience. “Where are you?”

I answer, “New York City,” with a confused twist of my lips. Then just, “Here and there,” figuring what she means is, where have I been? I catch a stranger’s eye as I speak and for a moment the woman looks startled, as though she had thought she was invisible. When we reach the other side of Houston, Forsythe stands on his back legs, yoked by the chain, to challenge a passing Chihuahua. I can hear my mother’s heavy sigh between barks. I yank him backward. Just a few more minutes and he can roam untethered in the tiny dog park.

My mother’s sigh transforms into a question. “But where in the city?”

That’s not what she’s really asking, is it? She means, why haven’t I been accepting her calls? I’d rather not tell her, so I answer literally, “Washington Square Park.” I can hear rustling on her end, then a thump. I continue, breathless as we race across the final street to the park. “And I’m almost there, so I should probably get going.”

“Stay put,” she commands. “I’ll be right there.”

I pause at the gate. “What?” Peaches and Forsythe gaze up at me in polite silence, as though they’re as stunned as I am. I can feel myself grinning. “What do you mean?”

“I’m here. Surprise!”

I look wildly around, convinced she’s actually here, but am met with only the indifferent yet intrusive stares of strangers. Mom tells me she’s staying at a hotel in Greenwich Village, and she can be here in a few minutes. I don’t know how to assimilate the information. I tell her I’m with the dogs and hang up as quickly as I can, the world gone fuzzy with shock and fury. We had spoken only a few days ago and she hadn’t mentioned anything about coming out here. She had been the same dreamy, pushy mother who wanted to know that I wasn’t walking alone at night and was still checking my horoscope to plan my days. It’s impossible, apparently, for her to talk to me about anything real.

I hunch on a bench at the far end of the dog corral and watch Peaches and Forsythe play. I consider leaving. I can disappear into the chaos of the city. I can turn off my phone, drop the dogs off, and park myself in a library for the rest of the day or week, however long she is here. But underneath my indignation, something else is welling up. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized how homesick I was. So I wait obediently right where I am and try to calm myself down. Mom’s sudden arrival here doesn’t change anything. I’m still going up north with Anthony. She didn’t tell me she was coming, so she can’t be upset that I have other plans. Especially when they involve Sofìa. She’s always liked her.

I could have told Mom, I guess, about my audition with Anthony. I could have warned her I would be leaving the city to make a movie. All of this is happening so fast, though, I hadn’t thought of telling her. But that’s a lie, isn’t it? She’s called me a dozen times in the past couple days. I could have told her at any point. Maybe I didn’t want to jinx it, by telling her. Maybe the magic would have been ruined if I’d said it all aloud.

Or maybe I just hadn’t wanted to tell her. She isn’t the parent I would have called about my good news. I would have called Dad. And then he would have been the one to tell her.

Something brushes my ankle. I expect Peaches or Forsythe, but look down to find an even tinier dog, barely larger than a rat. Its buggy eyes meet mine, then stare off stoically into the middle distance. It has a vest tied around its body labeled service dog. Evidently, the creature has intuited that I’m in distress. This thought makes me laugh, but I stop myself with a cough. Mom’s in the city. She’s here. It comes over me slowly. I’m actually glad. I lean forward and drop a hand on the creature’s soft fur.

Not so long ago, I walked in a place where you could hear the stars. I stopped to listen, and I stood still until my toes ached. The Northern Lights glowed and fizzled, then spread like pale green fireworks. Dad sidled up next to me. I caught his eye. He laughed wildly in the darkness—as if there was no other way to express everything he was feeling—and reached for my gloved hand.

I have never been colder. I have never been happier.

I try not to return to this particular moment often. I don’t want the memory to lose its sharp edges. But it comes back to me anyway with my mother’s first hug—a dizzyingly tight embrace that infuses her French perfume into my clothes. She hadn’t gone with us because she said she was too afraid of the weather. She didn’t even like the name of the place. Iceland. She told us we were crazy to go, and right up until the very end, at the airport, she was convinced we would change our minds and stay. It was all one big joke we were playing on her.

My mother takes a seat on the bench with a mulish expression on her face. “This?” she says. She gestures to the dogs and sweeps a hand across the rest of the park. “This?” My father’s grip had been so strong. Even through the many layers of our gloves, I had felt the contours of his palms.

As incoherent as Mom’s question is, I know what she is asking me. This is what I’ve chosen to do? Have I really abandoned my life in Humboldt to care for dogs richer than me? But I ignore her as Peaches approaches our bench, circles it a couple of times, then hesitantly releases a stream of pee that barely misses my feet. Reflexively, I squeal, “Good job, Peaches! That’s a good girl!” I can hear how shrill I sound through my mother’s ears. My cheeks burn as I try to explain. “They told me to cheer her on so she doesn’t pee at home.”

My mother dismisses me by rearranging her hair into an effortlessly elegant bun. I haven’t inherited her Dutch coloring, no blue eyes or silver-blond hair, though people do say I look like her. I think they’re just being kind.

She crosses her legs and gestures again to the dogs. “You must be joking.”

“This is my life,” I snap. “Not a joke.”

Her expression softens, and she reaches for my hand. “You’re an Aquarius, a wanderer. An old soul. But this”—she uses our joined hands to gesture at the air—“the dogs? You came to New York for this?”

I resist the urge to pull my hand away. I tell myself it’s because I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but the truth is, I like the touch of her fingers. “No,” I tell her. “I’m going to be an actress. This is to keep me fed.” My phone vibrates in my pocket, giving me an excuse to look away. The Walking Miss Daisy app issues me a warning that I’m reaching the time limit for having Peaches and Forsythe out. Apparently, some walkers kidnap the dogs. “And I need to go,” I say, showing her the screen to demonstrate I’m not lying.

“‘We’re set to leave tomorrow. Smiley face,’” my mother reads with a frown. “What’s this about, Elizabeth? Who’s Anthony?”

I whip the phone around to see for myself what she’s talking about. My breath catches when I read the text, and I can’t stop the smile from cracking my cheeks. “It’s a role,” I say. “A big one.” To her bemused expression, I repeat: “Mom, I’m going to be in a movie.”

“Where are you going?” she asks, without acknowledging the significance of my accomplishment.

I tell her it’s a location shoot—words Anthony had used—somewhere in Maine. She doesn’t react except to pull her hand from mine. I recover from the sting by standing. My knees are shaking. I turn my back on her and text Anthony a quick reply. My misgivings are all gone. Suddenly. Maybe because Mom is here. Because I feel safe with her next to me, and eager once again to make my escape. Great! Can’t wait! I deliberate over the emoticons, but finally decide against inserting one. Let Anthony be the demonstrative texter.

“Where in Maine?” Mom asks me.

I realize, with a pang of shame, that I don’t know, but since I don’t want to admit this, I pretend not to have heard and instead tell my mother that it really is time to go, and I walk into the fray of dogs.

Once Peaches and Forsythe are back on their leashes, we hustle back to the bench. Mom hasn’t moved except to rearrange her purse on her lap. Her silk pants billow in the breeze. Every person passing through the park stares at her, as though they know she’s famous but can’t quite place her.

They can’t because, as beautiful as she is, she is no one. She should be more, but she isn’t. She is my mother, that’s it. A woman who spends her days writing poetry in dazed spells, like Muhammad receiving divine dictations, only to forget them in piles in the wastebaskets. I’m used to these second and third glances from strangers. She has always possessed this same presence.

“So you’re an actress now,” she says. “You never mentioned wanting to be an actress before.”

“Well,” I stutter, “I’m fine. See?” The dogs tangle themselves around my legs. “That’s what you came here to find out, right?” But that wasn’t it, was it? And we both know it. It was to verify that I’d fallen on my face, and then to scoop me up and take me home. My father’s laughter had exploded in my ears like shots fired from a gun, somehow echoing in the cold. We were in the middle of nowhere in Iceland, but I had felt so safe. So sure of who I was. He would be gone just a week later, vanished from our lives with barely a trace to prove that he’d ever actually been there. But this laughter was genuine. I know it was. He was happy. In that moment with me, he had been. I close my eyes and picture instead the glossy lens of Anthony’s camera. My reflection on his TV screen, Anthony’s soft voice telling me, I want you to see how you look on camera. This is it, I remind myself. This is my chance. Opening my eyes, I tell my mother, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice, “It was nice of you to come here. But I don’t need your help.”

“You can’t be serious,” she says, pushing herself up from the bench. She’s wearing wedge espadrilles, so when she straightens, we’re eye to eye. “I flew overnight.”

I tighten my grip on the leashes. The dogs strain to escape, but I won’t let them. “Without asking or telling me.” Maybe I’m only trying to convince myself.

Her eyes fasten on mine. Where my father would shout when we’d argue, my mother simply watches, waiting for me to buckle. I lock my knees and focus on my diaphragm, forcing myself to breathe. The dogs tug at the leash. Before I moved here, I would have fallen to pieces beneath that gaze. But not anymore. I stare right back at her and think about the promise Anthony is making me with this film. I can be more—I will be more—with him.

Mom hitches her purse higher on her shoulder, her mouth turned upside down in thought. I pull the dogs in closer to me, then make up my mind to speak these next words, which have never come easily: “I love you, Mom.”

“I’m here,” she answers quickly, as if she is returning the same expression.

“I know,” I say.

She frowns. Maybe she wants to elaborate. Maybe she wants to tell me I’ve already stayed here too long and I’m not ready yet to make my own decisions. But her lips only twitch, and I feel myself crumble inside. My mother gave me secret presents, once or twice, out of the blue. A flower she had pressed that her grandmother had given her, a poem she had cut out of a magazine, an orange pouch she had found at the flea market that she might have wanted as a young girl. I said thank you, but that was never the right thing. There was an absence I could never fill, and I could always see the exact moment I had disappointed her. I watch it happen again, in real time, in this wretched, loud dog park in the middle of nowhere important.

“It’s time to come home,” she says, finally admitting why she is here. Her face is wooden, her eyes blank. There’s a note of finality in her voice, but she speaks in a monotone, as if she’s reading off cue cards. “You’re all I’ve got.” What she means, though, is that I have nothing else but her. I’m the one in need of rescue, and she’s ready to make the sacrifice.

I close my eyes, and for just a second, I’m in Humboldt again with Dad. I had left home to move in with Tucker. This was only a few months ago now, but it feels like years. I was homesick. I called Dad every single day, and sometimes he would even drive me to work. One morning, I received a call from him. His voice sounded unusually frenzied, and he practically begged me to stop by the house as soon as I could. I found him sitting on the floor in the living room, surrounded by travel magazines. Neither of us had ever traveled outside the country, but he’d buy those magazines at the supermarket sometimes to indulge his fantasies. “This is it,” he’d told me, pointing to a photo of green ribbons of light in the sky. “This is the place for us. Here—read. They eat sharks there. From the ground, Betty. They take sharks from the sea and bury them in hot soil, then dig them back up and eat them. Everything is opposite. They have glaciers and volcanoes in the same valleys. Sunbeams that light up the night sky. It’s so upside down it can’t be real. And look at this: We can just get on a plane and fly there. In twelve hours.”

But even though the memory is so real it feels as if I’ve been transported there and I can even smell our living room, the dust and my father and a faint whiff of rosemary, I try not to think of home. Instead, I think of Anthony. I think of that walk from the restaurant. How he placed his hand on my hip. He told me about the first night he’d spent at summer camp as a kid. The camp was only a thirty-minute drive from his family’s cabin, but he said it had felt like an alternate universe. At night, he had listened to the frogs whistling in the woods, and that was the only time, he said, he had ever truly believed in vampires. He had called his mother on the phone in the office and told her he wanted to come home. In the background, he heard his father barking words like “toughen up” and “c’mon,” but his mother drove out to the camp in the middle of that very night, as if she wouldn’t have survived until the morning without him, not the other way around. The next day, his father drove him right back again, and he didn’t so much as hug him when he kicked him out of the Mercedes. He didn’t stop long enough to turn off the engine. “I understand, you know,” Anthony told me quietly as we walked through the glow of the city’s lights. “What?” I asked him, lost in thought but assuming he’d continue the story. “What it’s like,” he said, “to be—” He cut himself off, shaking his head. Finally, he said, “I mean, I think you have to be almost destroyed by the people who are supposed to love you the most in order to become your own person.”

I look at my mother, dressed in her billowy silk clothes, her thinning silver hair unraveling from its bun, staring back at me as if I’ve just thanked her, yet one more time, for a gift that I was simply supposed to accept. I tell her again that I love her. But I know she cannot hear me.