I heard a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Julia entered wearing her Eastman school uniform of pleated beige skirt and white polo shirt. I knew she was at odds with her rapidly changing body, which was sprouting pimples instead of breasts, growing taller but not softer. It pained me to see her dissatisfaction with her appearance; to me, she always looked wonderful. Now she seemed like an image from a time of innocence, before last night, that was already receding into an irretrievable past.
“Did you finish the script?”
I nodded, and she smiled, happy for me.
Julia’s real mother had died of cancer when Julia was three. Julia was about eight when we’d met, and when Jonathan first introduced us, she had looked at me the way a shipwrecked passenger would gaze at a boat on the horizon. The longing in her eyes terrified me, given the work I’d done to keep anything like it out of my own. My relationship with my own mother didn’t make me eager to recreate the mother-daughter bond. And yet, she’d won me over with her lack of guile. As I fell in love with Jonathan, I also fell in love with her. We’d done our best to be a family ever since.
“I made French toast.”
“Oh, honey...” I reached for her, and she came over to me. I put my arms around her and buried my head against her. “You shouldn’t have to do that. I should be the one making breakfast for you.”
“You were on deadline.” Julia had grown accustomed to taking up the slack for preoccupied grownups.
I gave her a kiss and told her I’d be there in a minute and to get herself ready for school. Fortified by the vodka, Fiorinal, and cocaine, I went upstairs to shower and dress. Julia was waiting for me in the kitchen when I came down, and I saw the reason she’d prepared a special breakfast. She had written a story she wanted me to look over before she turned it in today.
My head throbbed; my throat was ash. I poured myself a cup of coffee, though the cocaine had already begun the heavy lifting of getting me up to speed. My stomach turned over at the thought of food, but I pretended enthusiasm for the breakfast Julia had prepared. I took a sip of coffee and tried to focus.
The story was written in longhand on four pages of lined paper. It was about a princess who rescued a pirate from the evil king who was holding him in a dungeon for daring to woo her. It was filled with adventure, larger-than-life characters performing bold deeds of heroism and villainy. My own show, Murder Will Out also featured a bold female heroine, Jinx Magruder, whom I had conceived as the anti-damsel. But I suffered so over writing. I agonized over every word. Success had raised the stakes to the point where I needed drugs to catapult me over the fear. Julia wrote for the joy of making things up and writing them down, without worrying about how derivative it was. I envied her freedom; it reminded me of how much I had lost.
“Honey, this is wonderful! I mean it. It’s just great!” I added, “I may just have to steal it for next week’s show.”
Julia laughed with pleasure, not deflecting the compliment. Julia never pretended to feelings she wasn’t having. When she was happy, she laughed; sad, she cried; shy, she hid. Everyone else I knew took a drink.
But she would soon be thirteen. That dangerous age, when fearless girls begin to worry about what boys think of them. It was already beginning, I realized, as she asked self-consciously, “Maybe it’s too...babyish. I mean, who really cares about pirates and stuff?”
“Tell that to Johnny Depp,” I said and gave her an extra hug.
When the phone rang, I jumped.
For a few seconds reading her story, I’d almost forgotten. Now I knew it must be the police, having traced my car. Who else would call at seven a.m.?
The ringing phone pierced the quiet in the kitchen. Julia looked at me, her face reflecting the fear I felt. I knew I must look pale because all the blood had drained from my face. My heart beat so hard I thought she might hear it.
I answered tentatively, a lump in my throat.
“Brett Tanager, please.”
“Speaking.” My throat so dry, my voice cracked.
“Hold for Danny De Lucci.”
Danny was the production manager. He got on the phone and told me they’d gotten the script and were boarding it now. We were too heavy on the outdoor day; were there any scenes that could be rewritten to take place indoors? I went to get my copy of the script, and we talked about it back and forth until we’d come up with two scenes that could be adjusted to fit the shooting schedule. I said to go ahead and board them, and I’d rewrite them as soon as I got in. I bent down to check the damage on my car in the driveway. The rubber protector on the bumper had been pulled off slightly, and the fender was bent. I looked for blood, chipped paint. But, at least to my naked eye, I couldn’t see either. It didn’t look too bad. Maybe I hadn’t really hurt that woman after all. Maybe I’d just knocked her over, and she’d be fine. If she’d been really hurt, my car would look worse.
Julia came out to see what I was looking at.
“I think I hit a dog,” I said as explanation.
She whimpered in sympathy.
“Or maybe it was a coyote.”
“When?” she asked, concern for the animal all over her face.
“Come on, you’ll be late for school.”
I had to get into the office to rewrite those two scenes before starting the next script, and I had meetings all day. I didn’t take my car in to be fixed. Somehow I thought it was better not to try to hide the evidence. As if not getting the car fixed were the moral equivalent of turning myself in. I searched the newspaper for word of what happened but found nothing. It might be too soon. But when I checked the next day, and there was still no word, I thought with enormous relief that, one more time, I had eluded the consequences of my own bad behavior. I resolved again that, when the season was over, I’d take a good hard look at my drug and alcohol problem. In the meanwhile, there was a script to write.
On the third day, a small item appeared in the back of the metro section. Rosa Aguilar, a housekeeper who worked for a family in Beverly Hills had been on her way home shortly after one in the morning when, changing her tire by the side of the road, she was hit by a car whose driver did not stop. She had been taken to Cedars-Sinai hospital where she remained in serious condition. Police had few leads; there had been no witnesses.
I closed the newspaper, a numbing sensation spreading through my body as all the muscles in my neck arms and chest contracted and blocked off the flow of blood. I don’t know how long I sat there, struggling for breath, when my secretary buzzed to tell me Brad Castleman was on the line.
Brad worked for the network. A call from him was never good news. He would have read the script and would be calling with “notes.” Getting notes from Brad was like being pecked to death by parakeets. I knew I shouldn’t take the call in the state I was in, but I picked up the phone anyway.
“Brad!” I said, trying to sound like someone eager to hear what he had to say, like someone who hadn’t caused a woman to be taken to the hospital, someone who wasn’t a criminal.
Brad had some “concerns.” I looked
