Help, I cannot say.
PART 2
Chapter 7
The summer I turned twenty-seven, I was nominated for an Emmy for the episode I’d written about Henry. The category was Outstanding Dramatic Writing for a Comedy Series, and I was the only woman in it. Right away, the studio sicced their director of publicity on me, and we began shaping my responses to questions like why I thought women were overlooked for writing and directing nominations and what did I think needed to happen for this to change. My responses had to satisfy the discontent of feminist bloggers with hundreds of thousands of foamy-mouthed Twitter followers (it was still Twitter back then) without alienating the mostly male voting body of an awards organization that rarely elevated women but had chosen to honor me. This was not the only land mine I had to sidestep in strappy heels at all the luncheons and dinners and benefits and Q&As and special screenings in the months leading up to the ceremony.
The series was a comedy series, but the nominated episode fell into the Dramatic Writing category, tackling an issue the director of PR referred to as coercive control in intimate-partner relationships, all words I’d heard before but never together like that. We partnered with an anti-sexual-violence organization, and I filmed a conversation with an expert in this field and someone from the leadership team whohad survived an emotionally abusive relationship. Everyone was big on using that word. Survive. We spoke in soft, careful tones, and when the woman from the leadership team told her story, I cried for real, and I said things myself that were true but platitudinal. Still, when I watch that interview now, I inwardly coil. I only know how to write about what happened with Henry and me. When I try to talk about it, it sounds one-note, earnest, and, frankly, revolting.
In the episode, my character lands an interview for a big job in a city across the country. Her boyfriend is brooding, handsome, controlling, disapproving. He finds all kinds of ways to poke holes in the opportunity. Her friends have been gently trying to get her to see the truth about this guy all season, but it comes to a head when he offers to drive her to the airport. The boyfriend starts complaining about chest pain. They were partiers, the two of them, and he’d gone out the night before and put all kinds of things up his nostrils.No, really, he’s panting, clutching the steering wheel with bone-white knuckles,I think I’m having a heart attack.
My character is staring at the time on the car’s dashboard, panic-stricken, torn in two perfect pieces. She is worried sick about her boyfriend. He could be having a heart attack. They put substances in their bodies that cause those. But her flight. Her interview.I have to pull over, he says, and he abruptly takes an exit, and she looks at the clock and realizes she’s going to miss her flight, and all at once, she’s angry. She sees what’s going on. She screams at him that he’s deliberately trying to sabotage her and she wants to break up.
The boyfriend doesn’t seem to hear. He’s driving until there are no other cars or homes, and then he finds a dirt path to pull onto. I got some pushback on this. The characters lived in Silver Lake. Which airport was he taking her to where he could pull off the highway and find a rural murder passageway? They were right, butI fought to keep it anyway. Because when Henry did this to me, he was driving me to the airport from the Adirondacks, and he pulled into one of many rural murder passageways where he could have taken his time ending my life and gotten away with it.
The boyfriend character shuts off the engine and at this point becomes somewhat catatonic. He’s staring straight ahead, and he’s reciting a sort of mental to-do list out loud. Things that have to do with the logistics of a breakup. That he will have to end their lease. That he would like to keep the Le Creuset pan they bought together at HomeGoods. That she can’t do this to him. That he’s dying. My character takes out her phone, and he snatches it away from her, and she thinks on her feet and says,We have to call 911. You’re having a heart attack. She holds out her hand, and she screws her face up into one of concern and compassion, and he returns her phone to her. And she calls her best friend, and she pretends like she’s on the phone with 911, and she’s giving the operator their location. And she tells her boyfriend she is going to get out of the car and walk back to the road so she can wave down the ambulance, and he permits it. She staggers to the street and begs her best friend to come and get her as fast as she can. In real life, it was PT I was begging. He came and got me. He made sure someone came and got Henry too. I made my flight. I got the job. I met the woman who put me on her show and let me write the episode I was sitting there talking about with an expert in coercive control in intimate-partner relationships.
By the time I climbed the six steps to the stage on the second Sunday of September and accepted my award for Outstanding Dramatic Writing for a Comedy Series, I was positively seething. The red carpet had been a hoot for my male fellow nominees but for me a gang rape of breathless questions about the plight of women in entertainment and heterosexual romantic relationships, and then I won, and I had to get up in front of hundreds of my colleagues and the world andtalk about how women’s stories mattered even though I still had not told mine. I did not lie; I was very careful about how I phrased everything. The episode was inspired by something that happened to me. Henry was controlling and he frightened me at times, but there was more to it than that. There were things I wanted from him too, things I wrote into the episode that no one wanted to touch down on. Seven years later I think people might be ready, might understand that even though some pieces of the story don’t seem to fit with the others, they indeed come from the same puzzle box. And if they’re not, oh well. I think I’m in danger of imploding if I don’t finally tell the story of what really happened with Henry.
Chapter 8
I have remembered this room often, and now I see all the places I have remembered wrong. Where are my cathedral arches? The oppressive dark wood? The bed faces three adjoining windows, and between my feet Lake Wanika is as blue as the ocean, shimmering with resentment that memory had cast its waters gray-brown.This is why you cannot convict someone on eyewitness testimony alone, I think with outrageous clarity before my brain goes back to feeling like it’s in one of those jars in a laboratory, submerged in blue liquid. Or is that the stuff hairdressers use to disinfect their combs? Certainly not my hairdresser.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand out of habit, finding instead a Nature Valley granola bar and a Dasani water. He hates both items with a fiery passion. I did not know granola bars could make you fat or that water had a taste before I met him. I feel infirm, trying to twist the cap off the water bottle. When my Pilates instructor guides me through a sequence to improve my grip strength, I stop trying. I want to reserve my energy for my core and glutes. But if I get out of here alive, I will hire a fucking personal trainer for my thumbs.
I finally get the cap off and gulp until the plastic craters, wipe my mouth, then wolf down the granola bar in four bites. I collapse back on the bed, lie there covered in crumbs. Wait for the shaking to stop.
Eventually, I drag myself into an upright position and set my feet on the ground. Wait again for the spots to clear from my eyes. The rug I got right, at least. Red, rough plaid that used to burn my knees.
I walk hunched and hurting to the door and find it locked from the outside. On Henry’s lot there are two structures—the main house with the kitchen and rustic, gnarled log furniture arranged around the fireplace where we used to gather with wine and dark chocolate after dinner, and then this studio apartment–like cabin. It’s where Henry’s mother used to put him before he learned to swim and, worried he might wander into the lake in the middle of the night, she had the door outfitted with a lock from the outside, like Henry was a valuable in a safe. There’s nothing in here but a bed and a minuscule airplane bathroom and a closet containing a pair of slippers the size of boats, I find when I peer inside. Someone must have finally recycled the endemic collection of wire hangers from the dry cleaners. I go to the windows, and though I see they are double paned and possibly soundproof—there is an insulated silence to the room that feels manufactured—I give them a shove so I can say I covered all my bases. I look around the room. The dresser is without drawers and there are two circular stains on a console table at the foot of the bed, telling on the pair of table lamps that used to frame the space. Anything I could use to break the windows, to cast the walls with the demented splatter of Henry’s brain, has been removed from the room. It is just me and the granola crumbs and my roofie juice. I stumble haphazardly toward the bed, land like a chalk outline of a dead body.
It is night when I wake again, and Henry is sitting on the edge of the bed with his face turned away from me. I lie still awhile, wits thawing, eyes adjusting to the dark. I count to three, sit up with a gasp. Henry’shead whips in my direction, and I catch it, the flash of relief on his face, in the way of someone sitting bedside to a loved one in a coma.Nurse. Nurse. She’s not a vegetable after all.
“Henry,” I whisper cautiously. “What… what is this?”
He says nothing for a long time. Then, “It’s just for a few days.”
I stare at his potent silhouette in the dark, my heart inching up my throat. “A few days for what?”
He ignores me, reaching for something on the nightstand. Water, in a Yeti. He offers it to me and I do not take it.
“I’m not drinking that.”
“There’s nothing in it this time.”
This time. His medal is in the mail. “Can I… Could I just go home?”
“I’m trying to make that happen for you.”
Something about the way he says this, like it’s out of his control, infuriates me. “You’re trying? What the fuck? Unlock the door, then. Give me my phone. My phone. Where is my—”
My head slams into the pillow. Henry is on top of me, his hand around my throat. “If you try to tell me what to do again, you will regret it.”
Henry has had his hand around my throat before, he’s even squeezed as hard as he’s squeezing now, but it is how he is looking at me that is new and incomprehensible. He is afraid.Afraid. Why wouldHenrybe the one who is afraid?
Like he is telling me a secret, Henry leans in closer. “Say you understand, Faye.” Gracefully and with deep benevolence, he lifts the index finger at the base of my windpipe, permitting me to suck in a wheezy breath. He smells the same. Like he’s been fixing something outside. Fresh air and good, clean sweat.
“I understand.” My voice is sandpaper. My hands, I realize, are pressed against Henry’s chest. I’m holding on to him like he’s saving me from a burning building.