The Call Sheet

I woke up on the leather couch in the living room of the location house with a quilt tucked under my chin and no memory of how I got there. For a second I thought I was in a hotel, which is a weird thing to think when there's a plaster ceiling above you and a wicker chair with a film magazine on it six feet away. Then it all came back in pieces.

Not all of it. Pieces.

I remembered Hal locking the front door behind the last of the production assistants around eleven. I remembered him saying something about the last bottle of wine and me saying sure, why not, I'm on leave, my kid is in Ohio, and the airport shuttle doesn't come until nine thirty. I remember laughing at something dumb on his phone. I remember his hand on the back of my neck and me asking him plainly, are we doing this, and him saying only if you want to. I said I did. That part is clear, at least. Everything after that comes back in flashes, like looking at frames of film instead of the whole reel.

I'm fifty-two, by the way. Hal is thirty-five. He's Mexican American, raised in Boyle Heights by a mother who still calls him every Sunday, and I'm a pale Arizona girl who burns in the shade and has the freckles to prove it. I want all of that on the table early because I know how you people read.

I sat up and the quilt slid off and I realized I was wearing his t-shirt. Mine was somewhere. My bag was by the front door where I'd left it last night, packed, because my plan had been to shower at the airport lounge like a normal person. So much for the plan.

There was a uniform blouse hanging over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. My uniform blouse. White, with the epaulets still pinned, the four stripes. I'd hung it there the first day of the shoot as a reference for the costume department, and then I'd worn it for the scene where the consultant explains the cockpit procedures to the actors, and Hal had said something like, God, that's a look, in front of everyone.

And last night, apparently, I'd let him take it off me slow, and I'd let him look.

I stood there holding a coffee mug that didn't match anything and felt something between embarrassment and grief. Six months out from ending a twelve-year thing with a man who flew the same routes I did, and the first person I'd let see me without armor was a kid who calls storyboard meetings "story time." Not a kid. Thirty-five. But you know what I mean.

"Nice stripes," Hal said from the hallway, and I nearly dropped the mug. He was leaning in the doorway in gray sweatpants and a hoodie, hair flattened on one side, holding his own coffee. "Four of them. On a kitchen chair. It's a strong look for a chair."

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough to see you salute the refrigerator." He came into the kitchen and set his mug down and opened the fridge. "There's eggs. There's also half a cake the caterers forgot. I vote cake."

"It's nine in the morning."

"It's eight forty," he said, checking his phone, "so basically cake is a vegetable right now."

I laughed before I could stop myself, and that annoyed me. The whole setup annoyed me. The man had no business being charming at eight forty in the morning in a rented Craftsman in Altadena with catering cake.

He cut two slices anyway and slid one across the counter to me, and then he stood next to me instead of across from me, close enough that I could smell the hotel soap on him, the little bars they leave you at the production hotel in Burbank. Same soap. Same hotel. That felt like a fact I should think about later and not now.

"Your shuttle's at nine," he said.

"Nine thirty."

"Nine thirty." He nodded like he was logging it on a call sheet. "So you have time."

"Time for what?"

"Cake. Conversation. Closure, whatever they call it in your manuals."

"We don't have manuals."

"You have checklists. You told me. Everything's a checklist." He was smiling into his mug. "Preflight, takeoff, cruise."

"You were listening. Good. Most directors don't listen to the consultant until the consultant threatens to walk."

"You never threatened to walk."

"I threatened to reblock the cockpit scene so your lead couldn't find the fuel cutoff. He cried a little."

"He did not cry."

"He got quiet in a crying way."

Hal laughed, and I watched his shoulders come down when he laughed, and I hated noticing that. Then the kitchen got quiet in the way kitchens do, and we were both eating cake and not saying anything, and I could feel the night sitting on the counter between us like a third plate.

"So," he said.

"So."

"Are we going to talk about it or are we going to eat cake and let you get on a shuttle?"

"You're the one who said closure."

"I said the word. I didn't mean it. Nobody means it." He turned his mug a quarter turn on the counter. "I've been up since six making coffee and rehearsing what to say to you."

"Supposed to say. Interesting. Like there's a script."

"There's always a script. I'm a director, Susan," he said my name carefully, like it was a prop he didn't want to drop. "I've been running scenes in my head all morning. Version one, I play it cool, we shake hands, you fly away. Version two, I say something honest and it goes badly and you fly away anyway."

"What's version three?"

"That's the one where you talk first."

I looked at him. He looked at the cake. Outside, a crew truck was pulling out of the driveway, the last one, and I could hear it graveling down the street and then it was gone and it was just us and a house full of borrowed furniture.

"The blouse," I said. "You kept bringing it up last night. The uniform. You said you liked it, and I let you, and I've been standing here this morning feeling like I handed you something I didn't mean to hand you."

Hal set his fork down. "Okay. Honest version two, then. I didn't ask for the uniform because it's a costume. I asked because you wore it like you owned the whole sky, and I wanted to see what was under that. Not the shirt. The armor. The shirt was just where the armor attached."

"That's a very director thing to say."

"It's a very true thing to say." He picked the fork back up. "And for the record, you asked me first. You said, are we doing this. I just said yes."

"I remember."

"Good." He pointed his fork at me. "Because I've been replaying the yes all night, and I need to know it still counts in daylight."

I took a breath and looked at the clock on the stove. Nine twelve. Eighteen minutes until the shuttle. I had a bag by the door, a blouse on a chair, and a man waiting on my answer with cake on his fork.

"It counts," I said.

He nodded slowly, like a man accepting a take. Then he said, "Okay. Now I'm going to say version three."

"Version three," I said, "is a big buildup for a guy in sweatpants."

"These are my honest sweatpants. I keep the dishonest ones in the trailer." He ate his last bite of cake and set the fork down. "Okay. Here it is. Stay another day."

"The shuttle's at nine thirty."

"So cancel it. There's a later shuttle, there's a later flight. There's a whole world out there, Susan, full of later flights." He was doing the thing with his hands again, the thing he did with actors, like he could gesture a yes out of me. "One day. The house is paid through Friday. We could eat the rest of that cake and you could tell me about the cockpit for real this time, not the movie version."

"The movie version was accurate. I made sure of it."

"It had a fuel cutoff in it, so I know you were there." He leaned a hip against the counter. "Look, I'm not asking for a plan. I'm asking for eighteen more hours."

I looked at the clock. Nine thirteen. "That's not eighteen hours."

"It's close if we don't waste it talking."

I almost laughed again, and this time I let it happen, because I was already losing the argument and it seemed polite to lose it smiling. "I have a leave of absence, not a prison sentence. I can stay."

"Great. Version three, locked." He held up his mug like a toast.

"But I want my coffee first and I want you to tell me why you disappeared from the wrap party at ten."

That caught him off guard. "You noticed that?"

"Everybody noticed. Your first AD made a joke about it. Something about Cinderella and a sound stage."

"Adam jokes about everything. It's his whole job." He rinsed his mug, which was a very obvious way to not look at me. "I left because parties after wrap are funerals with shrimp. Everybody's already gone somewhere else in their head. The next job, the next town. I've been to forty of them and they're all the same party."

"You could've stayed an hour."

"I could've." He put the mug in the rack and turned around. "Honestly, I left because you were there and I couldn't watch it anymore."

"Watch what?"

"You. Standing by the window with that cup of punch, doing the thing where you scan a room like you're checking the gate before departure. I'd had half a glass of wine and I was sitting there thinking, if I stay, I'm going to walk over there, and if I walk over there, something's going to happen, and I needed it to not happen in front of forty crew members and a cake shaped like a biplane." He shrugged. "So I went upstairs and hid. And then it happened anyway, a couple of hours later, in the living room with the leather couch."

"The leather couch," I said. "That we did not use."

"The floor was closer. You said so."

"I did say so." I drank my coffee. The mug didn't match anything in the kitchen, which the props department had decided was a character detail, and now I was standing in that character's kitchen wearing the director's t-shirt. "You disappeared at ten. I stayed till the last PA left."

"I know. Adam texted me a photo of you doing an air traffic control impression with two breadsticks."

"That tracks. Your lead actor was asking about radio calls."

"You taught him to say 'wilco.' He said it at least thirty times." Hal grinned, and then it faded into something more careful. "Can I ask you something in the honest version?"

"You've been asking them all morning."

"Why couldn't you sleep?"

I set the mug down. There was a version where I gave him the light answer, the one about wine and jet lag, and I considered it for about a second. "Because my kid's in Ohio and my phone was on the nightstand and I kept looking at it. Because the house got quiet after eleven and I don't do quiet well anymore. Because you were down the hall and I could hear you not sleeping too."

"You could not."

"There's a floorboard in that hallway that talks. You paced at about one fifteen."

"That's, okay, that's fair. I did pace." He pulled the wicker chair out from the wall and sat in it backwards, arms folded over the backrest. "I've slept in this house a handful of nights this shoot and never once slept well here. The plaster ceiling has a crack shaped like Ohio. I looked at it every night. So when you say quiet, I know exactly the quiet you mean."

"Tell me why you couldn't sleep. Fair's fair."

"I was running the edit in my head. That's the boring answer. Then I was running you in my head, and that's the one I actually lost sleep over," he said it plain, no performance in it. "Susan, I've been living at the production hotel in Burbank for six months. Same room. Same soap. There's a receipt taped to my desk for a dry cleaner three miles from here, and if you asked me my home address I'd have to think about it."

"Where is it?"

"See, that's the test, and you failed it." He smiled a little. "Sherman Oaks.