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“Well, good,” he added, “because you donotwant the pressure of deadlines that I have to deal with. But… now that I think about it… you might get more pressure down there in la-la land.”
“How could it be bad making films?” I asked. “You could write the scripts, and I could turn them into cinematic masterpieces!”
“I’ll tell you what. One day, when you’re ready, I’ll be happy to work with you on that movie of yours.”
We stopped our game of catch then. Walked back across the park and through the hilly neighborhood streets which lead us to our home in Arlington Heights.
I often thought about this conversation. Often analyzed it, wondering if I could find any kind of clue that would have tipped me off for what came next. Though, try as I may, I could never figure it out. Nothing seemed off about my dad. Nothing seemed atypical from how he usually acted.
Four days later, a bullet cut into the night, ripping me from a deep sleep. The shot blasted Dad far away. From a gun he held in his own hand.
I heard the noise from my bedroom. Ran downstairs in my pajamas.
I was the one who found him in the bathroom on the first floor. Bleeding out as he lay in a pool of his own blood.
That was the first day I seriously considered death. The instant I understood how fleeting life really was. We were always just one shot away from meeting the other side of nonexistence.
That fall, I went back to Stony Point Academy as a brand-new person.Thatyear, the school took a field trip to the Portland Art Museum, and I spotted the sculpture of a man tormented by his demons. Only to befriend a boy full of his own terrors.
And a year and a half later?
That’s when I decided to go for a permanent swim in the river.
Chapter Eleven
Reflection
Life has a funny way of throwing you curve balls, doesn’t it?
I was now a thirty-two-year-old writer—books, not movies. Living far from the Hollywood most people think of when they thinkHollywood. And theCasablancaandGone with the Windposters in my old bedroom had long been ripped away—by my own hands—in a similarly destructive manner in which my father had decided tooffhimself.
And today, sitting in that Hollywood café, I had the greatest blow of all.
That agent of mine told me I couldn’t kill off the father in my book.
But, how could she not understand? The charactercouldn’tlive at the end. That couldn’t be how it finished. That wasn’t how life worked.
Not for me. Not ever. Death surrounded my every conscious thought, always sparing me but taking the people who I loved. Metaphorically and literally. My father, my marriage, the boy who I once loved.
No one was safe.
Except me, it seemed.
Except me.
Somehow, despite myself, I always lived.
Chapter Twelve
The Sound of Silence
You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you’ve playedThe Sound of Silenceon repeat for a full hour after drinking an entire bottle of wine during rewrites.
The rain beat against the window.
From the bare floor of my office in the spare bedroom, I typed away on my laptop in a space literally devoid of all furniture.
I’d repurposed a laundry basket, which I’d flipped upside down, to serve as my new office chair. I hunched over an external keyboard that connected to my system via a docking station. Furiously beginning—beginning again, I should say—the ending of my book in hopes of meeting my deadline.
