The Animators(88)

I feel Teddy inhale. His hand, wandering through my hair, freezes.

Onscreen, the door to the Caudill house opens. We step inside. The door shuts.

I feel Teddy take his arm back from behind my head and drape it neutrally over the sofa. I look to him. He’s staring at the screen. I see a muscle in his jaw work.

“Are you okay?”

He does not look at me. “Mmm hmm.”

“You sure?”

“Mmm.”

Onscreen, the trunk seems to pan out for miles and miles. It is a coffin, then a chocolate bar, then an enormous brick. It swells, looms over us. When Teddy’s hand reaches up to unlock it, he has to strain, rising on his toes.

Later on, this will become a driving image for our movie, an encouragement of confrontation, of taking control of what haunts you, stealing its power: Open your trunk. It is an affirmation of why we made it, why we were so compelled to keep pressing forward. Repeated dozens of times in the comments sections of the clips on YouTube: Open Your Trunk.

But I will never be able to watch that scene without feeling Teddy’s chest against my face, rising and falling and then, when he watches his younger self unlatch the trunk, seize, as if he’s been hit with something hard.

It finally ends.

Mel will tell me later that this first screening was when she knew the project was going to work. “You could feel it in there after the file had stopped playing,” she said. “It was in the air. You could smell it. I practically went to sleep next to it that night.”

But I don’t notice any of this. I am too distracted by Teddy thrumming next to me, jaw clenched. By the time we reach the scene in which I take the Polaroids from his outstretched hand, images of the girls facing down, he is gripping his knees, breathing rapidly.

“That was awesome,” Ryan says.

“Yeah,” Tatum agrees. “It’s gonna be even better than Nashville Combat.”

“I need to talk to you,” Teddy says to me.

“Is everything okay?” I ask him.

“Outside. Now. Please.”

“What do you need to talk to her about?” Mel says.

“I need to talk to Sharon privately, Mel, thank you.”

“Is it about the movie? Because if it’s about the movie, you can talk to the both of us.”

Teddy narrows his eyes at Mel and takes a deep breath. I hold up my hand. “It’s okay,” I say. “We’ll be right back.”

I follow Teddy out the door and into the carriage house’s yard. We are surrounded by sprawling brick mansions penned in by high wrought-iron fences. It is ten degrees, icicles hanging from the oaks. There are no lights. I try to put my hand on his back. He shakes it off. “What the hell was that, Sharon?”

“That— What do you mean? That was the project. Or the start of it.”

“And when were you planning on disclosing that I would be in this project?”

My mind goes white, empty. I stall. “I told you it was about me. I thought you might kind of infer—”

“You said it was about your stroke.”

“Well,” I say, “we started talking about it and decided that we’d start from, you know, Faulkner, and when I was a…”

I trail off. Teddy is staring at me.

“That boy character was me,” he says.

“It never said that it was you. It never used your name.”

“Bullshit,” he yells.

I have never heard Teddy raise his voice before. It robs me of breath. I feel dread lace long, cold fingers up my spine. “It’s not bullshit,” I say weakly.

“Sharon. Do you think I’m an idiot? That is obviously me. You effectively co-opted my life in there.” He stops, puts his hands on his hips, closes his eyes. “You’ve been working on this the entire time you’ve been here?”

“There’s a lot more to it than what you just saw. Or there will be.”

“Unbelievable. There’s more.”

“You’re angry.”

He makes a sound close to a laugh as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yes. Sharon. I am angry. As I think any reasonable person would be.”

“Okay. This is a problem.” I try to put my hands on him again. His entire body tightens. It’s worse than feeling him push me away. “How you feel is important to me. What can I do?”

He shakes his head and presses his palms to his face. “What can you do. Okay. The first step would be to burn what you just showed me.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Burn it. Fucking trash it. Make sure nobody else ever sees this.”

My voice comes out tiny. “All of it?”

He takes his hands away and stares at me. “Jesus Christ, Sharon, yes. All of it.”

My bad leg starts to tingle. I would do just about anything to get out of this situation—Teddy glaring at me in the dark, his voice venom on ice.

I glance back at the carriage house and see Mel’s shadow, tall and skinny, through the curtains. She’s watching and listening, Ryan and Tatum alongside. It’s been over six weeks of work. Good work. Getting-lost-in-it, getting-lifted work. It’s been, God help me, revelatory work. And it’s ours. “That’s unreasonable,” I tell him.

He looks hard. “Did you just tell me I’m unreasonable? You— You’re standing there staring at me like you’re totally dumbfounded. Which seems pretty impossible. Is this why you’ve been staying with me?”