The Animators(78)

I pick up the phone, consider letting it go to voicemail. Decide to answer. “Mom?” I say as Teddy bundles a wad of toilet paper and thrusts my thumb inside.

“Sharon, where are you all,” she bleats.

I wince, hold the phone away from my ear. Teddy laughs silently. It’s as loud as if she were in the room with us. I had described my mother’s voice to Teddy as resembling the shriek of a thousand bagpipes melting in Satan’s taint. She’s not proving me wrong. “You all have been gone for I don’t know how long, and here I was thinking the worst. Y’all could be raped and murdered by the side of the road.”

Teddy covers his mouth and doubles over.

“We’ve been gone two weeks,” I say. “This is just now occurring to you?”

“You shoulda called me and you know it.”

I squeeze my thumb, trying to stop the blood. “I’m sorry. We’re still in Louisville. Some things came up.”

“Oh,” she says. Tones of blame. “You’re in Louisville.”

“Yes.” I lean my head against the wall.

“Are you okay?” Teddy whispers. I nod.

“Who was that,” Mom demands.

I hold my finger up and duck out into the hallway. “Funny story,” I say. “That was Teddy Caudill. Remember? From next door?”

There’s a wary silence. Then she says, in a tight, small voice, “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, that was him.”

Her voice goes up. “That was him just now?”

“Yup.”

“Well, what’s he doing in Louisville?”

“Living. He owns a business. Mel and I are actually kind of thinking about sticking around here for a month or two. The people subletting our place in New York want to extend the lease, and we’re really liking Louisville. We think it might be a good place to get a jump start on this thing we’re working on.”

There’s a silence, then she counters, “Are you all staying with him?”

“Off and on. He helped us to rent out a space to work in.”

“And that’s all right with him?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know,” she says dubiously. “This seems like it happened awful quick. You sure you’re not wearing out your welcome?”

“He invited us to stay, Mom. It’s fine.”

There’s another minute of silence. Then she says, “I thought you come out here to visit with us. Did you really come out to hunt some boy down?”

“Holy hell, Mom. Really?”

When speaking to or about me, my mother has a very short range of tones: suspicion, resignation, exhaustion, singsong condescension, and, occasionally but memorably, disgust. She is not a believer in the power of tone—the argument It wasn’t what you said, it was the way you said it earns the adjudication of “Bullshit”—but were one to judge from tone alone, my mother thinks I am the world’s biggest twat. It’s a weird sensation, knowing your family believes the worst of you. It makes you want to disappear a little.

Of course, the fact that she’s partially right in this case doesn’t make it any better.

“I know we’re not real exciting or anything,” she says, “but I would have expected you all to stick around a little longer. I didn’t even know y’all were going to Louisville until you left. Kent had to tell me.”

“We told you, Mom. The night before we left.”

“Well, I didn’t hear you.”

“I don’t have any control over what you see and hear.”

“What are you doing out there,” she repeats, and though I’ve already told her, I know she’s asking a different question entirely.

—

Mel suggests a chronological format for the List movie, checking off items from first to last. “You are at the center,” Mel tells me. “Just start from square one—the Faulkner stuff, growing up, Teddy—and then sprint out to one thirty-eight. Don’t think about the guy, but think about what was going on in your life when you encountered the guy. We sort of chart your life through them. They’re the buildup to the stroke.”

“And then what’s the resolution supposed to be here?”

“You’ll tell me,” she says. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

But when we start work on the guys, we quickly discover how boring it is. Instead, I find myself drawing the Phillips-Stamper Cemetery as I’d imagined it during our night ride—twilight, the sky in streaks of deep purple and vermilion, casting a shadow over Faulkner as it twinkles, light and wavering. “Whoa,” Mel says. “What’s that?”

We do Faulkner, we do Shauna’s face. My father’s face. The layout of my high school. The old Magnavox set I watched television on. Teddy as a boy. Teddy’s dad’s room. The red plastic ashtray on his bedside table. What a Hustler centerfold would have looked like in 1994. “The only difference between then and now,” Mel says thoughtfully, “is bush. And implants. By 1994, all those adorable little tea-spout boobies would have been long gone.”

“Do we have to start there? At the stuff in the trunk? I mean, I don’t want that to be the launchpad,” I say.

“We don’t have to do anything,” she says. “We can put the story about your mom throwing that ottoman through the window and spirits coming at you through the TV first, so long as it does what we want it to in terms of starting the story. First the fight, then the pictures. One discovery, then the other.” Her eyes go wide and she starts rubbing her temples. “God, I sound like you, talking all this story technique shit. That’s scary.”