The Animators(113)

The boys look on guiltily, Ryan wagging his dreadlocks in his face, when Mom bustles back in. “I just saw that homeless lady take a crouch in some gravel. In broad daylight.” She stops when she sees me. “Sharon. You’re all gray. What’s the matter.”

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “I just need to take my pills.” I put my head down and beat a fast track to the bathroom.

We clean until midnight. I collect Mel’s Post-its, her cigarette butts, pencils bearing her specific chew marks, and put them all in a box in her bedroom. “Just leave them for the time being,” I tell the boys. And they nod, they don’t ask questions, and they don’t look at me.

I’m seething. I keep seeing Teddy’s face everywhere I look. All of this happened—Mel dead, my arrest, the spiraling out of everything I’ve ever known—and he knew about it. It’s not that hard to track me online. Ryan and Tatum knew, obviously. It was news. And not even a phone call? In my hour of need, nothing from this man, who occupied an entire world in my mind, even when we weren’t speaking? I could still feel him so strong, for Christ’s sake. He was with me all the time. And his life is proceeding without me, as if we had never happened?

Mom is sent back to Park Slope in a taxi. I take Ryan and Tatum to get tacos from a truck on Troutman and Knickerbocker. We’re in the middle of Ryan trying a cabeza taco, then being told what cabeza means and losing his shit, when Tatum’s phone rings. It’s Teddy. We all know it. Tatum plays it cool, cocks his eyebrow, holds up a finger—just a sec—then ambles down the street, glancing at us over his shoulder.

We go back to the studio, picking up a bottle of Four Roses on the way. When I inevitably outdrink the boys and they collapse, I pick up Tatum’s iPhone from where it rests next to his head and, with only a slim moment of hesitation, access the history and dial up.

Teddy’s voice is fuzzy, craning upward from sleep. “Dude, it’s late. You better be wounded somewhere.”

I can’t speak.

I hear him sigh. He’s processing it. Knows who it is. Says low, “What are you doing?”

“You weren’t going to call. What was I supposed to do.”

He sighs. There’s a murmur in the background. Someone beside him stirring, asking who it is. I feel a pang in my chest.

“Why didn’t you call me,” I whisper.

There’s a pause, the creak of bedsprings. When he speaks again, he is in another part of the house with deeper acoustics. “I guess I really didn’t know what to say,” he says.

I feel a little of my anger slough off. He’s being sincere, and there’s no one as sincere as Teddy when he’s being straight with you. That’s the thing about sincerity. It never fails to feel like someone trusting you with a valuable.

“I’m sorry about Mel,” he says. “I really am. It’s absolutely miserable.”

“Thank you.”

“Does Tatum know you’re using his phone?” I hear him rise and move elsewhere. The old kitchen. A door closes.

“He’s asleep.”

“Are you okay?”

“Ugh.”

“I don’t know what ugh means.”

“Do you really care to know?”

“Did I not ask you, Sharon?” There’s an edge now.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“It’s interesting that you seem to feel I owe you something, Sharon,” he says, voice lowering to a hiss. “That’s why I didn’t call you. Your overwhelming sense of entitlement. Despite the fact that I was worried sick about you after you were arrested running through traffic in your goddamn bathrobe. You know, I actually went by the carriage house to apologize.”

My stomach shrivels.

“You were gone. And thank God you were. Because you didn’t deserve an apology. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble. It would have set a really dangerous precedent, letting you get away with something like that.”

“What did I do,” I cry.

He grows louder. “You—” There’s a pause, an intake of breath. A confirmation, if I ever needed one, that someone else is there, that he is engaged, that she is there with him and he doesn’t want her hearing any of this. “You made a movie and you put me in it against my wishes. And it is obviously me, Sharon.”

“Did you see it?” I ask him.

“I saw the parts I needed to.”

In Irrefutable Love, Teddy is my young, nameless co-conspirator in opening the trunk, and he is also the unnamed man I meet in my journey through the forest, the man the boy became, the one with whom I climb into an oak’s knothole and descend into a warm red cubbyhole, where we wrap our legs around each other and drift through the air, spinning lazily, a moment’s respite from being pursued. I couldn’t help it. He was, in a way, everywhere I looked; his face bloomed when I placed pencil to paper.

In the movie, he disappears, as if he were dreamed; I awaken outside the oak, the thunder of footsteps approaching, and am forced to run again. It was a section we’d considered cutting, of course, but at day’s end, even Mel, with a peculiar, grudging twist to her mouth, had to admit that the scene added a certain softness to the whole—that it gave the journey out of the woods some hope, some solace.