Landline(41)

“You’re the best mommy in the world, and I love you more than milk and fishbones and . . . what else do kitties like?”

“Yarn,” Georgie said.

“Yarn,” Noomi giggled. “That’s crazy.”

Georgie took a calming breath. “Noomi, is Daddy there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“No.”

Georgie knocked her head back against the wall. “Why not?”

“He’s sleeping. He said we can’t even go upstairs to pee.”

Georgie should tell Noomi to do it anyway. Neal was her husband. And she hadn’t talked to him for three days. (Or thirteen hours.) (Or fifteen years.) Georgie sighed. “Okay. Can I talk to Alice?”

“Alice is playing Monopoly with Grandma.”

“Right.”

“I have to go. My hot chocolate is cold now.”

“Meow,” Georgie said. “Meow-meow, love you, green kitty.”

“Meow-meow, Mommy, I love you even more than yarn.”

Noomi hung up.



There’s a magic phone in my childhood bedroom. I can use it to call my husband in the past. (My husband who isn’t my husband yet. My husband who maybe shouldn’t be my husband at all.) There’s a magic phone in my childhood bedroom. I unplugged it this morning and hid it in the closet.

Maybe all the phones in the house are magic.

Or maybe I’m magic. Temporarily magic. (Ha! Time travel pun!) Does it count as time travel? If it’s just my voice traveling?

There’s a magic phone hidden in my closet. And I think it’s connected to the past. And I think I’m supposed to fix something. I think I’m supposed to make something right.



When Georgie got back to the writers’ room, Seth looked like he was at the end of his rope. He’d unbuttoned his shirt an extra button, and his hair was sticking up around his ears and at the back of his neck.

She stood at the whiteboard and took charge of the outline.

It wasn’t that hard—they’d been talking about these characters for years. They just needed to get their ideas into writing. Wrestle them into a few workable scripts. Georgie could do this in her sleep. Sometimes she did do it in her sleep. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and hang off the side of her bed, scrounging around for a piece of paper. (She never remembered to put a notebook by the bed when she was lucid.) Neal would stir in his sleep and reach for her hips, pulling her back onto the bed. “What’re you looking for?”

“Paper,” she’d say, leaning off the bed again. “I have an idea I don’t want to forget.”

She’d feel his mouth at the base of her spine. “Tell me. I’ll remember.”

“You’re asleep, too.”

He’d bite her. “Tell me.”

“It’s a dance,” she’d say. “There’s a dance. And Chloe, the main character, will end up with one of her mom’s old prom dresses. And she’ll try to fix it to make it cool, like in Pretty in Pink, but it won’t be cool; it’ll be awful. And something embarrassing will happen at the dance to ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’”

“Got it.” Then Neal would pull her back into bed, into him, holding her in place. “Dance. Dress. ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’ Now go back to sleep.”

And then he’d push up Georgie’s pajama shirt, biting her back until neither of them could go back to sleep.

And then, eventually, she’d drift off with his hand on her hip and his forehead pressed into her shoulder.

She’d get out of the shower the next morning, and it would be written in the steam on the mirror: Dance. Dress. Try a little tenderness.

Georgie shook her head and looked up at the whiteboard and tried to remember where she’d left off.



The night that Neal told her about his girlfriend (f*cking of course he had a girlfriend), Seth took Georgie home, then went back to the Halloween party. Georgie stayed up listening to her mom’s Carole King albums and wrote a really angsty monologue for one of her theater classes.

That was back when she still thought about performing someday. Before she’d decided that she had a better face and brain for the writers’ room. “Why would you want to act, anyway?” was Seth’s take on the subject. “Stand there and say other people’s words, let everybody else tell you what to do . . . Actors are just beautiful puppets.”

“If that’s true,” Georgie’d said, “you sure date a lot of puppets.”

Georgie didn’t really want to act—she wanted to do stand-up. But she hated bars, that was a problem. Also, she wanted to get married and have a family.

Seth said nothing beat writing for TV. “It’s comedy with health insurance,” he said. And big houses and cars. And sunshine.

The morning after the Halloween party, Georgie picked up bagels on the way to Seth’s frat house. She passed last night’s girl—the lovely Breanna again—in the hallway. Breanna looked surprised to see Georgie; Georgie just nodded, as if they were coworkers.

When she got to Seth’s room, his hair was wet, and he was changing his sheets.

“Gross,” she said.

“What’s gross?”