He nods to the screen. “Have you seen this one?”
“Oh. Um.” I peer at the screen, then stop. Literally. Every cell in my body suspends as I notice something at the bottom of the streaming service, a little screenshot with a long gray line below the movie that Arthur’s currently on:Grey Gardens.
I force my face to remain casual as I say, “I love this one.”
Arthur presses play. The first moments ofGrey Gardensspill across the screen. I lean my head back and let the tragedy play out in front of me, my pulse still racing.
It’s a beautiful documentary. Big Edie and Little Edie, mother and daughter, the cats and the clothing and the Kennedy connection. It’s up there in my top-ten list, right betweenSans SoleilandDon’t Look Back, one of those rare films I could watch a thousand times and catch a new piece of dialogue with each viewing. I’ve always wondered what kept them stuck in their estate after the wealth had withered up—the delicate psychology between two people trapped in a broken fantasy world. That, to me, is how you film politics, the upper class, any of it. Keep your mouth shut and your camera on as the interesting people dance.
It’s hard to pay attention to them today, though. Back when Arthur had been on the loading screen, I saw that he’d recently watched the documentary I’d made about the congressman.
All the way, from beginning to end.
Chapter SixEngland
Quick thing to know about me is that I hate liars, lying, a large amount of fiction, etcetera. I’m a documentarian with justice sensitivity; telling the truth is what I do.
My adoptive parents are old-school hippies. “Life is suffering, but I can find calmness within myself; true joy is embracing chaos” and all that. I started my own personal journey toward Enlightenment (with a capital E) and Mindfulness (capital M) when I was almost pulled out of school for my attitude and equally awful grades. ADHD wasn’t a thing in my hometown, and back then, anything and everything made me angry—lying most of all. It was an interpersonal wavelength my brain couldn’t understand, and the confusion boiled. I took my anger out on myself: shut down, stopped doing homework, didn’t talk to people.
Then there was my birth mom. Nothing makes you hate fake happiness like being forced to pretend like you feel it, particularly as a hormonal teenage girl. Or when you’re a teenager whose parent doesn’t believe in your medical diagnosis, occasionally “forgets” to pick up the medication that directly impacts your brain’s neurotransmitters, and tells you to stay positive when you’re shuffled back to a foster family’s house, since one day, everything is going to work out!
Spoiler alert: It did not work out.
But I did have time to watch a lot of movies.
This is the part where things turned around. The good bit. Some people don’t ever find their passion, the reason to stay awake working until your eyes are begging you to go to bed. I did. I was exactly the type of almost-goner who needed to fall deeply in love with something, and when I shot my first documentary in high school, it was like finding out that magic is real and I can make it.
Because you can make a documentary anywhere, with almost anything. You don’t need a fancy camera or a script, only your own ethical backbone, some sort of camera, and an eye for telling the truth.
I was hooked.
I think about that—falling in love with the truth, Arthur lying about not having watched my documentary—for the entire twenty-minute car ride to our London hotel.
It’s nice to have a dichotomy to chew on, at least. Arthur was dragged away for “post-flight physical therapy” once the plane touched down, so I have ample time to study the distinct lack of in-another-country excitement from Ignition staff. They don’t stop walking because they’re distracted by the accents churning around them. In the sleek black van that carts us to the hotel, nobody is stupefied by the fact that we’re driving on the wrong side of the road and the world looks like aDoctor Whofiller episode.
So, I also try to be casual. World travel! Who cares? Suddenly finding myself in the United Kingdom? Just another day in my thrilling life.
Then we make a turn, and we’re being waved through a black iron gate, and we’re parked outside a palatial hotel, and there goes being casual. “Did they filmBridgertonhere?” I ask Delaney as I follow her into the tastefully beige lobby, complete with empty velvet settees and twin crystal chandeliers.
“Probably.”
“Unreal.” I almost drop my suitcase trying to get a photo of the actualgolden cherub statuesabove a fountain. “Did Ignition get some coupon to put us all here?”
“This is how we travel, Lilah.”
Slowly, I lower my phone. “Everyone?”
Delaney shrugs. “It takes a team to win a race.”
“You’re joking.”
“Deadly serious. Now follow me—we need to throw our bags upstairs if we want to make our reservation.”
I’m five steps behind her, cursing my short legs. “We’re going out?”
“It’s tradition,” she says, like it’s obvious. “We always have the first Team Arthur dinner in London.”
We’re in and out of our painfully pretty hotel rooms in ten minutes; five of those minutes are Delaney rifling through her clothes for something I can borrow. Then we’re in a cab, and I keep tugging down the hem of the simple lavender dress she managed to find, since none of her pants would fit me without cuffing them and apparently, “That’s a crime.” Delaney sweet-talks the driver into taking the long way from Knightsbridge to Chelsea so she can point out a string of trees that lines Hyde Park. “And Kensington Palace is back there, maybe that way?”
