Audrey had only recently moved back in with her mother after three years of paying an unsustainable amount of rent for her own place in Santa Monica. Both of them had been working hard not to act like it was a concession, this living-together-again thing. (Hence this joint shopping trip.) It was a choice. An opportunity. It was surely not some sign of failure for either of them.
Audrey noticed her mom touching the thin white scars on her face, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand tracing her jaw. Caroline used to do this all the time, a tic, but maybe she did it less so these days.
Something occurred to Audrey. “Are we sure their dog is OK? I literally just read something about all the missing pets—I mean because of the fires—they escape. Do you know for sure they even still have it?”
“Shit,” Caroline said, dropping her hand from her jaw as she messily merged them two lanes over, a chorus of honks in their wake. “I have no idea. I don’t want to text them to ask if their dog is dead on top of everything else.”
Audrey had a decent imagination for personal tragedy that blooms from a chaos of random events, both because she was an actor and it was her job to, and also because, as you might already know: she had been party to a version of it. Not a “your new house just went up in smoke and your dog died, too” version, it’s true. But hers involved those scars on her mother’s face and it had been, if not tragic, at least ugly in a very public way.
They were pulling into a busy strip mall with all the stores to buy all the things on this list they’d been making. Not that buying these things—bananas and bottled water, socks and hand wipes, crying chocolate (as Caroline called it), and yes, dog food for the dog that may or may not still be alive—would make any of this easier for the families with char where their houses had once been. But maybe some of it would give them at least a moment or two of comfort, a few simple needs provided for. Years later, Audrey still remembered the people who’d sent food baskets and flowers after Caroline’s incident. And she also remembered the people who hadn’t.
Plus, you have to do something, right? When things like this happen? You have to do something or you’re left doing nothing, and that, in Audrey’s experience, made you feel helpless, and helplessness was a feeling she despised. In others, sure, but mostly in herself.
“Should we split up?” Caroline asked as she parked them near a shopping cart stall. “Divide and conquer?”
“No,” Audrey said. She was back to scrolling Instagram. “That never works. I can never find you where you say you’ll be and then I’m locked out of the car and you’re not answering my texts.”
“That’s a lot,” Caroline said, her own phone in her face.
“It is a lot.”
“If you learned to drive, you’d be the one in control of the keys.”
Audrey’s refusal to get her driver’s license—even at the age of twenty-three—was a sticky spot between them, one that ultimately also linked back to Caroline’s past public debacle. Shouldn’t I be the one too scared to drive? was a thing Caroline had said to Audrey more than once.
“Let’s do it, then,” Caroline now said to the back of her daughter’s phone. She waited. Nothing. “Aud,” she said, “I’m leaving you.” She opened her car door to emphasize her point.
At once a yellow jacket flew in through the open door, though its path sent it over the seats and to the rear window. Caroline didn’t notice it because she was looking intently at Audrey, and Audrey didn’t notice because she was looking intently at her phone.
More specifically, she was looking at the Instagram stories of one Harper Harper, who couldn’t have been more on fire herself right then than if she’d been standing in the flame-filled Hollywood Hills. The Harper Harper—indie-film-darling turned celesbian-megastar-influencer. She was supposedly on a rocket ship to awards season—seemingly any awards season, all of them. The out-of-nowhere actor with enough edge to be authentic and enough talent to make a career for herself. The one who hadn’t been around long enough to have that promise curdle in any of the ways it might. Yet.
Audrey had been around. Audrey’s mom, Caroline Wells, the newly minted real estate agent waiting beside her, had been around even longer. Eventually that rocket ship would lose its fuel. It did for everyone, except, like, Meryl Streep. Eventually even Harper Harper wouldn’t be so new, her talent seen as so raw and perceptive, or whatever other adjectives the critics were using at the moment. Soon enough, people would tire of her—the projects she chose, who she was or wasn’t dating, what she posted or didn’t post. That especially.
But not just yet. For the moment, Harper Harper was still on fire.
And she would be bringing that fire to her new movie, which just so happened to be Audrey’s new movie: The Happenings at Brookhants. Because Harper was attached, it already had buzz. It might even be a chance for her, Audrey Wells, to come out from the creep of her mother’s long shadow and her own childhood name.
Probably that wouldn’t happen. The role of Eleanor Faderman was small, a part for a minor character actress. Whatever that meant. (Not a lead is what it meant.) But there was some meat to Eleanor, some depth—and she was to have a scene with Harper Harper herself. That might be enough to get Audrey noticed.
And more than that, there was this: for the last sixteen months, Audrey Wells hadn’t been offered any roles at all. Not one. Not until The Happenings at Brookhants came along. Her transition from preteen to twentysomething actor hadn’t quite been a transition. She was stuck in between, in the nowhere. Audrey and Caroline might have been decidedly B-list, but they did have a Hollywood past. And because of Caroline’s various public incidents, that past was now often thought of as more significant than any of the roles either of them had ever played. (And that was only when anyone was thinking of them at all.)
Almost certainly this movie, like most movies Audrey had been in, would end up being disappointing. But this was still the short window she loved best: anticipating it. The promise of what the project might be if everything lined up just so and all of the usual things, like script changes or test-audience feedback or, worst of all, her own mediocrity, didn’t fuck it up.
Of course, Caroline couldn’t know each dip and contour in this particular coil of her daughter’s thoughts, but she could guess at some of them, especially when Audrey tilted her phone enough so they could both watch the feed she was so taken with: a handheld video of a sunburned Harper Harper cannonballing into a teal mountain lake.
The whole setup was a notch too Instagram perfect to be believed, a few water droplets even landing on the lens. Then came a slow-motion clip of Harper and her little brother having a splash war in the same lake. Then another video, this one longer than the first: Harper dancing on the large deck of a lake house with a woman whose lopsided hairstyle manages to look good even while she bops her head aggressively to pop music. This person (someone Audrey had googled earlier) is Harper’s current girlfriend, Annie Meng: a twenty-five-year-old visual artist who had, the year prior, sold the entirety of her first public exhibition of collages. (Two of them, said the internet, to Oprah.) They keep dancing while strings of twinkle lights blow around overhead and the real twinkle of stars stretches out behind them. And then into the frame comes a woman wearing an apron that says World’s Okayest Cook. She waves a spatula at the camera and mouths the Roxette lyrics. Her hair is thin and her cheeks hollow, but it’s clear that Harper has her mouth and chin. This resemblance is confirmed when the screen shows a series of popping pink hearts and the handwritten caption my mama can dance! Audrey can’t remember ever before seeing Harper’s mother in one of her posts.