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Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.
—O. HENRY
Part 1
Once Upon a Time . . .
1
It feels important to start with the truth about how I got here. When everything gets messy and brutal and complicated, the truth is the first thing to go, isn’t it? People try to shade it or spin it or fix it. As though fixing the facts will make the situation less messy and brutal and complicated. Not more. But there’s no fixing this. The truth is that I brought it on myself. All of it. Everything that was coming next—everything I couldn’t have begun to imagine would constitute the next year of my life. After all, I was the one who did it that morning, knowing full well what could happen, what history had taught me would happen, if I were reckless enough to go through with it. I went down to the living room, still wearing Nick’s oversized pajama top, and snuggled myself under the blanket, turning on the DVD player. Like it was that easy. Like Roman Holiday was just any movie. Like it wasn’t a bomb I was about to detonate right into the middle of my life.
I’m not normally—not, as a rule, at least—a superstitious person. But there are hard and true facts that can’t be ignored. The first time I saw Roman Holiday, I was seven years old and watched it during family movie night with both my parents. The following day they announced they were getting a divorce. The next time I was sixteen. My mother proclaimed later that day, post-viewing, that she was moving us—our ninth move in nine years—this time away from San Francisco (where we’d lived just long enough for me to find a real friend, a “boyfriend,” and a potential other friend) to a tiny town in the northeast corner of North Dakota (population 351, where I’d attend my last year of high school with three people in my entire graduating class).
Five years later I’d just graduated from college and landed a job at the New York Sun. I’d be the lowliest reporter imaginable, but I’d be a reporter. In New York City! While I was packing, I came across Roman Holiday and thought, I’m a grown-up now, not subject to childhood superstitions. Why not? Here’s why not: the next morning, I received an e-mail from my once-future employer. Due to cutbacks, we have frozen all future hires . . . . et cetera. I had less than forty-eight hours left in my college apartment, $105,000 in school loans, and the sum total of my accumulated savings sunk into a security deposit for the only apartment I could afford—a 300-square-foot studio right by the West Side Highway. And no job, not anymore.
The fourth time I was twenty-seven. Nick and I had just celebrated our one-year anniversary and were getting ready to move across the country together, to Los Angeles. Nick was trying to break into movies, a feat that demanded the move. Which was fine with me—exciting, even. I was writing a weekly travel column for a newspaper in Philadelphia and since I’d been traveling for the paper an average of two hundred days a year anyway, they were more than willing to let my new home base be Los Angeles.
And so I turned on Roman Holiday, feeling solid in my job, solid in my relationship, solid in my decision to go west, feeling there was little that the movie could mess with—a part of me, maybe, even wanting to prove to myself there was little it could mess with.
But halfway through (the bad didn’t even wait until the end that time) the telephone rang. The house we were supposed to move into in Venice—the house where we’d already shipped 80 percent of our belongings—had burned down. No one seemed to know the cau
se. I knew the cause.
And yet there I was, four years later, thirty-two days shy of my thirty-second birthday, and what was I doing? At some point don’t you get Pavlovian about it? The movie had hurt me enough times, or, at the very least, I had several of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life in bizarrely close proximity to watching it—how could I not associate it with that pain? Why would I watch it again? Here’s why: I loved the movie. What When Harry Met Sally was to some of my girlfriends—or Field of Dreams was to Nick—Roman Holiday was to me.
It was my comfort movie. It was, quite simply, my comfort. Yes, my mother had admitted that she’d named me in part after Audrey Hepburn’s Princess Ann. How could any young girl watch that movie without wanting to be Audrey Hepburn? But it was much more than that. Part of it might be that I was a reporter myself, a travel writer—my column, “Checking Out,” was meant to provide a guide for how best to explore the most exotic and interesting places in the world. A complete guide to enjoying exciting cities/special towns/tiny islands-in-the-middle-of-the-Indian-Ocean that might be hard to navigate otherwise. Not surprisingly, I’d devoted my first column to Rome. Truthfully, it was as much an ode to Roman Holiday—to the experience of watching Princess Ann and reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) explore the Eternal City and escape their real lives. That’s what I loved about my job—being able to explore the world, to constantly escape. But somewhere deep inside, I’d always wondered if, like Audrey’s Princess Ann, I wasn’t just hoping that if I fell asleep on a park bench in one of the hundreds of cities I visited, I’d wake up and get to spend a day living the exact life I always dreamed of.
The other reason I loved the movie had to do with the quality of the romance between Bradley and Ann—its incandescent charm, the happiness beneath its every beat. It led me to convince myself, as a logical person, that my tragedies couldn’t possibly have anything to do with a movie that was so romantic, so full of hope. Or they wouldn’t. Not this time.
So there I was, at a not-this-time moment again: thirty-one, complacent, sleepy. My brilliant and beautiful dog, Amelia (named after the original fantastic traveler and explorer, Amelia Earhart; we called her Mila, for short) and I had the morning to ourselves. Nick was working. He was a movie director, currently shooting his second movie—a thriller about vampires taking over Washington, D.C. Since his first film, a road trip movie (not a vampire anywhere to be seen), had been well received at a film festival where it was apparently important to be well received, he was experiencing his first taste of fame. I was so excited for him—for us, really. I had been there during the salad days, when we were shooting his short films on the street. Me as both key grip and leading lady. His sister as producer. Our dog, Mila, as . . . Dog Mila.
And yet, since his newfound success, Nick had become slightly exhausting in the way he talked about his work. For starters, he was calling it “my work.” It was a phase, I knew. It was just one that I was hoping would end soon. Plus, I’d just gotten back from my own tough month on the road—spending August traveling through three separate countries (Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Argentina), working on pieces for “Checking Out.” And so I decided to go for it. To treat myself. Sweet Mila laying on my lap, I pushed a button, the DVD player powered on, and I hit PLAY.
Then it came across the screen: the crisp white credits, the orchestra keying up, Rome’s most famous sites in the background. The Vatican. The Wedding Cake. The ancient ruins. Until the words News Flash come across the screen, and there she was before us: the stunning Audrey Hepburn sitting in her carriage, waving at her minions, the saddest princess in the world.
When The End came and the final credit crossed the screen, I looked around our house, the one I’d been sharing with Nick since we moved to L.A.—the house we found after the other house had burned down. No vase or photograph had come tumbling to the floor. No spontaneous toaster malfunction. And the fresh tulips, the ones I’d bought at the farmers market over on Arizona for $3.99, didn’t immediately die. They stayed in their almost-dead-but-still-standing position.
I rubbed the back of Mila’s head. She looked up at me and lovingly met my eyes.
“I guess we’re good,” I said.
Then the key turned in the lock.
Nick kicked open the door, balancing his thermos, the Los Angeles Times, his phone. He looked closer to sixteen than thirty-six standing there in his backward baseball hat and one of the button-down shirts he lived in. All of which is to say that Nick looked like Nick, the exhausted version: a four-day scruff of beard, dark circling his eyes.
He pointed to the phone so I’d know he was on a call. Then he made a circle motion with his index finger—that motion you make when you want the person on the other end of the line to finish up already. And, whoever the other person was, he must have taken the hint, because, less then a minute later, Nick clicked shut his phone and headed toward me, dropping all of his stuff on the recliner in a messy heap.
“Hey there, stranger . . .” Nick said, leaning down to give me a kiss hello—his palm cupping the back of my head, holding me there.
“Hey back at you,” I said, staying close to him for an extra beat. We were used to having long periods apart, but between my column and his movie shoot, it had been a particularly brutal time. His smell, his sweetness, felt more like the exception in my life than the reality.
As Nick got down on his knees and rubbed Mila’s furry ribs—his usual Hey honey, I’m home greeting to her—he whispered into her ear.
