The question kind of surprised her. Given that he was allegedly allergic to that word.
“Eventually. Yeah. Well before I divorced him, anyway.”
They were quiet for a long time. They heard thescritch, scritch, scritchof Phillip in his litter box. A homey sound.
She got the sense that J. T. was deciding what to say.
“There was a period of time when I thought my career was tanking. And I didn’t... er, handle... it all that well. To put it mildly.”
“Swatting photographers, stuff like that?” she asked. “Asking cops who pull you over if they know who you are?”
He winced. “Yeah. The odds are really not in anyone’s favor when it comes to a long, glorious acting career. Kind of like you, I thought at one time my own success had been kind of cause and effect. Like I’d had something to do with it, when really, it was down mostly to luck and timing. Finally I thought... What if I never act again? Who will I be? Because that’s the guy I’ll have to live with the rest of my life. Whoever you arewithoutall the window dressing, all the ego, all the stuff you think you need and that you think defines you... Well, that’s who wereallyare. I didn’t much like myself for a while. I had to figure out who I was in order to tolerate being alone. I would say that’s the one benefit of at least a little failure,” he said dryly.
“That’s exactly it,” she said, amazed. “That’s the word. I felt like a failure. My whole life, I was so invested in being that good girl and I guess I kind of felt I earned all my successes that way. I felt like I let my entire family down, in a way, because I’d fucked up and made a bad choice that I thought was a good choice, and brought that darkness into our happiness. So I ended up questioning everything I’d ever done or thought or felt in light of that one decision to marry Jeff, and in the process it was like I completely lost my moorings. I stopped going to work and I lost my job. And everything fell apart from there.”
“And that’s how you ended up here, in Hellcat Canyon,” he guessed.
She looked up at him then, eyes wide, because it was so on the nose. “One day I put things in my car and packed up Phillip and just drove and drove. I ended up here. I thought for a while it would be just until I figured things out. But the figuring-things-out part of life never seems to end. And I love it here, anyway.”
He was quiet a moment.
“Bastard’s name was Jeff?” he murmured.
It was, peculiarly, a relief to hear him say it that way: sleepy-voiced, idly. It utterly de-fanged the memory of him.
“Yeah.”
She could hear Jet the dog in the throes of his first bark of the morning off in the distance.
“I was doing a stunt one day on a movie set,” he said finally. “And it went wrong—there was some miscalculation, and the car hit a ramp at the wrong angle, and it went flying through the air, and it could have been the end of me. And you’d think you’d be scared under those circumstances, right?”
She nodded. She was scared just thinking about it.
“Thing was, while it was happening, I was more surprised than anything else. I felt like a doll being tossed across a room, just that consequential. That two seconds or so up there between the time where there was absolutely nothing I could do and the time my fate would be decided for me, I just had to kind of surrender. But you know, that moment was kind of freeing.”
She took this in, and she felt a sort of epiphany trying to break through. “So what you’re saying is...”
“What I’m saying is, maybe our triumphs and tragedies are not as profound as we think they are, and maybewe’renot as important as we think we are, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe we don’t have as much control as we think, and that’s okay. Or maybe life is just like... say you were traveling a road, and you took a scary wrong turn. Or hit a pothole that trashed your alignment and gave you whiplash. And it’s taken you a while to find your way back. So maybe the guy you married doesn’t sayanythingfundamental about you. Or even if it does... maybe it’s something you needed to learn to keep going down the road that was right for you. Maybe it doesn’t have to tarnish everything about your past. And maybe it doesn’t have to affect your future.”
Every bit of this rang so true to her, it was like a light being switched on in a dark place.
And it wasn’t like J. T. was the Buddha or some sage. He was just another human who was trying to figure it all out, the same as she was. But he’d just said all the right words in a row. He’d said what she’d thirsted to hear for so long and just didn’t know it.
They lay in silence. She listened to his breathing, as soothing as the wind in the leaves outside.
“The worst part was...” she whispered. Then she cleared her throat. “I always felt like there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, something soul-deep wrong, if I chose a man like Jeff. I thought only a damaged person would choose another damaged person. I’ve done my fair share of self-help reading. But I never could shake that feeling.”
It was the bone-deep shame that had dogged her for years.
“Well...” he said easily. “What kind of man am I?”
She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him for some time, studying him like a map.
“Racking up the superlatives?” he guessed dryly.
“You’re a good one,” she said softly. Definitively.
“And what part of you tells you that?”