In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (29 page)

You nod and sit in the chair that matches the sofa (also bought from the previous tenant). She sits on the couch and looks at the can of soda.

The digital clock on the DVD player marks the passage of another minute.

“I hope I didn’t spoil any plans you had for the evening,” she says, back to the formal adult, and you remember you should call the doe-eyed lawyer from the garage.

“I didn’t really have anything going on.”

Another minute marked on the DVD clock.

“If this was a movie, we’d bond now,” Natasha says flatly, and you chuckle.

“Did you eat dinner?” you ask.

She shakes her head, so you pull a stack of menus from the kitchen drawer, tell her you’re hungry, too, even though the dishes from the sandwich you made an hour ago are still in the sink. You tell her to choose whatever she wants, but Natasha is a polite girl, so she looks to you.

“How about pizza?” you say. “Tedino’s is on the corner, and they deliver until midnight.”

“Is it Chicago style?” she asks, and when you nod, she smiles. “Dad and I usually get it at least once when I’m here, but we didn’t this time.”

Giving her the TV remote, you instruct Natasha to find something good while you’re ordering. Then you duck into the bedroom to call Jill and explain tonight won’t work for a drink after all. She sounds skeptical when you say you’re with your sister.

“I thought you said she was married and lived in Utah?”

“This is my half sister from Cincinnati. Sometimes I forget about her, too.”

You suspect you and Jill will not have another date and are perfectly fine with that.

Back in the living room, Natasha is watching a show where a bald guy with a mark on the back of his head is talking to the redhead from the jeans ads. There’s something familiar about the look of it, and you realize it must be that
Eons & Empires
series that started a few years ago on the cable expansion network. Natasha looks up, says you can change the channel.

“No,” you say. “I used to read the comic books. Is the show any good?”

“The Ed Munn books are better, but it’s reasonably well done. It looks like they’re running a marathon tonight.”

The episode is about the Neutrocon, which you remember from the comics, even though you probably haven’t thought about them since you tried to see the movie with Phoebe Fisher fourteen years ago. Parts of the dialogue are clunky, and it’s a little hard to believe that the Jericho Jeans girl is a world-renowned scientist, but the show itself is entertaining.

The pizza arrives gooey and hot, and you and Natasha sit on the couch watching back-to-back
E&E
episodes while trying not to burn your mouths on molten cheese.

Natasha points to the screen during the closing credits. “I sat next to the actor who plays Captain Rowen on a plane once.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The show wasn’t even on yet, but I recognized him right away when it started. It was sad; he was trying to get to a funeral from Salt Lake City, but there was a snowstorm.”

You ask if Natasha was in Utah visiting your older sister, feel an unexpected prick of sadness that she was. That she apparently sees Karen and her family at least once a year and is only a few years younger than your nieces (nieces you haven’t seen in nearly as long as you haven’t seen Natasha). And you think you should give Karen a call in the next week or so, just to say hi.

Natasha asks about the comic books you used to like and explains that she’s pretty big into anime. And you discuss Dad a little, now that you’ve established he is, in fact, father to you both.

“He talks about you quite a bit,” she says. “He thought it was really impressive the way you got to see the world.”

You wonder if that’s true, and you ask a question that’s been in the back of your mind for as long as you can remember.

“Did he ever take you up in a little plane?”

“No. I asked once, but he said he took you when you were too young, and he didn’t want to make that mistake again.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah.”

QT runs three more
E&E: Rising
episodes, and the two of you watch them all.

There’s probably a time when you’re supposed to tell Natasha that she should go to bed, but you’re her brother, not her father. And while you don’t know her well, you know enough to sense that she’ll be more than prepared when you have to take her to the airport the next morning.

10   in some other world, he probably did

In the days and months that followed, Adam wondered if everything would have been different if craft services had had NyQuil instead of Sudafed and Robitussin. Despite his four-year tenure on a show all about parallel worlds, where things were a hair-fracture different one or fifty universes away, he wasn’t accustomed to obsessing over small details that had the potential to change everything. But during the ten days the show had to shut filming down—and all the emptiness afterward—Adam had a lot of time to think about things in those terms.

E&E: Rising
seemed to have specified in the production bible that any day Adam wasn’t feeling well, filming would take no less than fifteen hours, be physically demanding, and require copious quantities of water be dumped on his head. He couldn’t stop coughing and kept sweating through his makeup, which worked out fine because the whole last hour of shooting involved him and Cecily standing under a rain curtain. It didn’t help matters that the scene actively sucked (a lot of scenes had been actively sucking since the series creator had stepped down as show runner after season three), and Cecily kept tripping over a giant block of exposition about the off-screen destruction of Worlds 78 and 5. Her speech ended with an overwrought turd of a paragraph: “You destroyed those worlds, if not through intent, then through neglect. You were too busy waging your war on Bryce, and you weren’t watching the Neutrocon. The damage that you’ve done cannot be undone.”

Though he considered Cecily one of his closest friends, her inability to spit it out was shredding his patience. The one time she came anywhere near getting it right, Adam couldn’t contain a coughing jag. He fully expected several outtakes from the day to end up on the blooper reel in the DVD extras.

While Cecily complained to the assistant director between takes, the cute new PA brought Adam daytime flu medication. The recommended dosage of Sudafed was two pills; Adam tripled it. So in addition to feeling like he’d gone several rounds with Mike Tyson, he was oddly wired. He chugged half a bottle of cough syrup, hoping to level out.

Perhaps in some other universe (maybe World 2 or 27—just not Worlds 78 and 5, as Rowen had apparently destroyed those with horrendous dialogue), the assistant slipped him the nighttime cold stuff, and when they finally wrapped for the day he simply hobbled back to his trailer and passed out on the couch before he even had a chance to dry off. Maybe in those worlds, he returned Phoebe’s call when he felt less like strangling every living creature in a ten-mile radius.

In his world, Adam went back to his trailer and toweled away ubiquitous water. He contemplated crashing because he felt achy and awful, but was too hopped up on pseudoephedrine to sleep. The idea of walking through the actual rain (in four years of filming in BC, Adam swore, there’d been all of three sunny days) to his car and driving to the generic luxury apartment he rented seemed even more unpleasant. He’d already talked to Phoebe during the break for lunch, but she’d left a message saying she wanted to discuss something. It was after midnight, but he called her back figuring the downpour would stop by the time they were done.

“Feeling better, sweetie?” she asked from twelve hundred miles away in sunny California.

Adam told her he’d survive but didn’t try particularly hard to stifle another bout of hacking. “So what’s your big news?”

“Poor baby, you sound terrible,” she cooed. “It can wait. You should go to bed.”

“Pheebs, I’m fine,” he said, adding irrationally angry to achy and awful.

“So I got into Michigan’s grad program.”

“I thought you were going to USC?”

She sighed and said that she’d already told him she was wait-listed there. “And Michigan is actually the better MSW program.”

“Fucking Ann Arbor, really, Phoebe?”

“It’s only a year and a half, and I think part of it can be done remotely.” She sounded unsure; that annoyed him more.

“Like this isn’t hard enough already? Why did you even apply there?”

On some level he realized he was being a jerk, and he did have vague memories of Phoebe mentioning Michigan (and, like, fifteen other grad programs) a few months ago. But his throat was raw, his head was killing him, and just for once he wanted a girlfriend who would be there to rub his temples and make him soup (or order—he would have been completely satisfied with a soup-ordering girlfriend). An actual flesh-and-blood girlfriend, not a disembodied voice on the phone who preread scripts and made sure that the electricity stayed on in his LA condo. Usually he tried never to play the fame card, but he was on a TV show. No, he had been TV’s sexiest bad guy. Scarcely a week went by without some lady (or dude—there really was a lot of homoerotic subtext in the series) propositioning him, slipping him a number, a note, a hotel room key. At sci-fi conventions women regularly asked him to sign their breasts. And not a single time since he journeyed to Chicago after Phoebe’s brother died had Adam taken any of them up on their offers. He’d pat their shoulders and say he was flattered but spoken for. Was it too much to ask that if Phoebe couldn’t move to BC, she at least go to a grad school in the same time zone?

“I’m serious,” he continued. “You say you love me and are committed to this, but you really do a crap job of showing it.”

“Adam, you’re never here anyway. You were in New Zealand all summer for that stupid slasher film.”

This was true but seemed irrelevant in his mediciney head. And while for months he’d been regretting (rather loudly) his decision to star in the inauspiciously titled (and yet to be given a release date)
Murder Island,
he took offense at her calling it “stupid.”

“It’s my fucking job, Phoebe.”

“Mine, too,” she said quietly.

Also true. Plus Phoebe’s work was about helping people, not making schlocky horror flicks and past-their-prime basic cable shows. Adam didn’t feel like conceding that point, either.

“I’m not trekking across the country on a goddamned red-eye every weekend,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know, would you want to take a little break or something?”

The sentiment was a gut punch.

In some alternate
E&E
world, maybe he told Phoebe he didn’t want to lose her, that he was simply scared of how her new life could change things. In his world he felt like shit and was sick of the ever-present rain. Also, vulnerability had never been a great role for him in real life.

“That’s probably a good idea,” he said calmly. “I slept with Cecily, anyway.”

Phoebe wasn’t generally the jealous type, but Adam knew she didn’t
love
the fact that his best buddy was a flirty model whom he made out with several times a week as a job requirement. It was one of the cruelest things he could possibly say.

Across the line there was a pause. Plenty of time for Adam to explain that he was lashing out and probably high on cold medication (didn’t Canada have different drug standards?), to say that while he and Cecily did spend a fair amount of time together, their interactions were entirely devoid of romance and/or seduction. That Cecily spent hours discussing her poop and would sometimes deliberately eat a pungent lunch on days when they had love scenes just to see if she could make him break character.

Adam said nothing.

“I don’t believe you,” Phoebe finally offered. “You’re only saying that to hurt me.”

“Am I?”

Mean was how he felt. A haunted echo of the time before they were in love, when he hated the exposed nerve of his feelings for her.

“Maybe we should talk about this when you’re feeling better.” She sighed.

“Oh, so we’ll be allowed to talk during our break?”

“Adam—”

“No, you’re right, we’ll talk when we talk.”

He hung up.

Whether it was the cold medicine or his anger, Adam was twitchy, muscles unsteady.

He could have called Phoebe back and told her he was sorry. In some other world, he probably flew home for the weekend or insisted that she come to BC, told her how vital she was to him. Maybe whisked her off to Vegas and finally made good on the five-carat sapphire ring she’d been wearing for two years.

Instead he dialed Cecily’s cell phone.

“You out and about?” he asked.

“I’m home in my jammies,” she said, but in a way that suggested it might not be a terminal condition.

“Get dressed and let’s go somewhere.”

“Weren’t you, like, hacking up a lung and moaning about your imminent death an hour ago?”

“I’m feeling better.” He chugged more cough syrup, trying to make it so. “We’ll just go to Polly’s, today sucked.”

“It sure did.”

“Come on, I know you need a drink as much as I do.”

“Fine”—she sounded smiley—“but you’re picking me up, and you’re buying!”

Because they’d been doing love scenes in body stockings together for four years, and Cecily sometimes called to tell him about a particularly glorious dump she’d taken, Adam had long ago forgotten how genuinely stunning she was.

Quickly he remembered when he pulled up in front of her house and she bounded from the front door into his sports car, dodging the rain. She was wearing a short, tight dress made of lace, her hair tied up in a casual knot that showed off her freakishly perfect features.

Over their first few drinks, they threw darts and complained about the rain curtain scene, as well as the decline of the show in general. His cough had largely subsided, but Adam finished the bottle of Robitussin in hopes of keeping it at bay.

Though most Vancouverites were immune to all the actors filming American television shows in the area, a group of Midwestern tourists recognized them and sent over tequila shots. More shots ensued. At some point Adam switched from Jack and Coke to straight whiskey. Not long after, his darts began landing farther and farther from the bull’s-eye. A few actually hit the wall next to the board and fell to the floor. Picking them up, Cecily suggested they sit at one of the high tables.