“Josh?” she asked, in her best wheedling tone. “I need to get to Palm Beach right away. This morning. Can you book me on a flight, please, and call me back? And if you can’t get me on a flight, can you find out if the Citation is free? I’ll use my NetJet card.” She paused. Using the Citation for a personal situation was highly frowned upon (and could, technically, cost her her job), but it could be argued that it was an emergency (Shane had kidnapped the kids!)—and the only reason she had the emergency was because of work—she’d had to basically spend a month in Romania getting Ragged Pilgrims back on track. And if worse came to worst, she would just pay for it herself. Whatever the cost . . .
“On second thought,” she said, “skip the commercial flights and try the Citation first. If it’s booked, then go to commercial.”
Josh called back fifteen minutes later. “You’re lucky,” he said. “The Citation is at Teterboro Airport and it’s free, but it has to be back at three p.m. Victor Matrick needs it at four.”
“No problem,” she said. She looked at the clock. It was six fifty-three a.m. That should give her plenty of time to fly to Palm Beach, pick up the kids, and be back in New Jersey in no time.
She picked up her beat-up valise—the same one she’d been dragging around for the last month and hadn’t bothered to unpack the night before—and a small rollerboard suitcase she’d bought in the Paris airport that was filled with presents for the kids. She walked unsteadily down the hall to the elevator, exhaustion tearing at every muscle. Only a few more hours, she reminded herself, and then hopefully this whole terrible misadventure would be over.
“Hi—Ms. Healy?” called the desk clerk as she passed by. “Are you leaving us this morning?”
Wendy stopped. “I don’t know,” she said, suddenly conscious of how she must look. She hadn’t bothered to wash her face or brush her teeth, and she was wearing the same T-shirt she’d been traveling in (and had slept in last night, if you could call that “sleeping”), and had on a pair of pants that were once tight but now baggy with overwear, and her hair wasn’t brushed either and was stuck up in a scrunchy—but did it really fucking matter?—and she said, “I have to see what happens. I’ll let you know, okay?”
Luckily, the young woman didn’t seem to find this strange or her appearance unusual (and why should she, Wendy thought; she was used to dealing with eccentric showbiz types), and she nodded and smiled and, holding open the door, said, “By the way, congratulations on your Oscar nominations.”
“Thank you,” Wendy said.
That was really all the world cared about—Oscar nominations, she thought bitterly. If you had those, you could rule the planet.
But you couldn’t keep your husband.
A cab pulled up and she got in. “Teterboro Airport, please,” she said. The cab took off with a jerk, and she fell back against the seat. Running off to Palm Beach like this was probably insane, an ill-advised adventure that might possibly make things worse. But she had no choice. When her kids grew up, what was she going to say? How could she ever explain how Shane had taken them and she hadn’t done everything in her power to bring them back? That was probably a little dramatic (hey, they were only staying at the Breakers Hotel for the weekend, so how bad could it be?), but when you took away the glamorous bits, that was basically the scenario.
There wasn’t anything to question, really. She had to go and rescue her kids from Shane. After all, they were her children.
* * *
SITTING IN THE BACK of the taxi, Wendy picked at a dry piece of skin on her lower lip, wondering about the bizarre series of events that had led to this moment when she was speeding to the airport at seven in the morning to board a Citation to fly down to Palm Beach to get her children away from her husband who was trying to divorce her because she’d had to spend a month in Romania fixing a $125 million movie for which she was solely responsible.
There was something about it that felt disturbingly inevitable.
So how was it that just twenty-four hours ago, everything was fine? She was standing on a muddy hillside that overlooked a remote village watching Jenny Cadine attempt to lead a cow up a rocky path. The cow wasn’t budging. This went on for an hour. “Can we please get another cow?” she asked.
“There isn’t another cow. There aren’t any cows here. We had to truck this one in from Moldova,” someone said.
“There has to be another cow. Where do they get their milk around here?”
“Another cow is on its way,” someone said into her earpiece, which was connected to a small walkie-talkie she wore clipped onto the back of her pants. Her involvement in the movie at this level—acting as a sort of über-director-slash-producer—wasn’t the norm for the head of a studio. But she had decided that if the movie had any chance of working, she was going to have to get down and dirty. She was going to have to be right in there, in the trenches, leading her troops . . .
Now the cow incident made her think about how there were two kinds of people on movie sets. There were the people who anticipated problems and planned for them, who were always one step ahead (and these were the people who ended up becoming successful), and there were people who just went along until a problem arose, and then shrugged their shoulders and made a halfhearted attempt to deal with it.
The difficulty was, she thought, cringing in the backseat of the taxi, if the same harsh judgment could be made about people in marriages, most people would have to accuse her of falling into the latter category. For the past few months, she’d been just going along, assuming, praying that everything would be fine (and it had been, for a while, hadn’t it?), and it was only when it had blown up in her face that she was bothering to deal with it. Maybe she should have worked harder at those transatlantic therapy sessions with Shane and Dr. Vincent. But there was a six-hour time difference, and while Dr. Vincent charged $500 an hour, that was nothing compared to the cost of an hour wasted on a movie set. Try $25,000. And when they were ready to shoot, you had to go. You couldn’t say, “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes, just as soon as I finish soothing my husband’s ego.”
But she had tried. And when she’d come home, two weeks ago, for five days, she had made time for an emergency three-hour session with Dr. Vincent. Dr. Vincent had requested an easel and a pad of large white paper of the type television writers used to plot out story lines for episodes. It turned out, of course, that Dr. Vincent had once been a television writer herself, but had realized she could do more good by helping people in the Industry have a better Understanding of Relationships and of Themselves.
“E” she wrote, in blue Magic Marker. She circled the letter. “What does the letter ‘E’ bring to mind?”
“Ego?” Wendy said, thinking that she was getting pretty good at this game.
“Very good. Shane?” Dr. Vincent asked.
“Excalibur,” Shane blurted out. He looked at Wendy as if daring her to make fun of him.
“Excalibur,” Dr. Vincent wrote on the piece of paper, followed by a large question mark. “Let’s talk about that. Excalibur was a sword. Are you thinking about your penis, Shane?”
“He’s always thinking about his penis,” Wendy said. She couldn’t help it, it just came out. Shane glared at her. She shrugged. “I mean, aren’t all men? Most of the time?”
“No, Wendy. We’re not,” he said.