Page 61 of Love Scenes

By the fifth take, I’m winded and unexpectedly overwhelmed. In the scene before this, Stuart has betrayed Elise. Pushed too far and tried too much too soon. Elise takes off physically unscathed. The emotional impact still hits. She wants a safe place to lay her head for the night.

In the next scene, she finds her mother isn’t home. That’s what pushes her to knock on Calvin’s door and ask if she can sleep beside him. Just sleep. She’s afraid to be alone.

This is, of course, when it turns into more.

Elise has no idea she’s sprinting headfirst into the very thing she’s spent years convincing herself she doesn’t want. All she knows right now is she’s terrified and alone and running throughthe dark without a hand to hold, but that’s better than being touched by someone she doesn’t care about.

While they reset the take, Mom comes and wraps a blanket around me. She holds me as I lean into her, both of us unsure why it is I’m crying. She doesn’t need to ask questions, though. Sometimes the work is like this. Sometimes a scene guides you somewhere far deeper and darker than you intend to go, and it’s all you can do not to be swept up inside your own imagination.

After my whimpers die down and I seem to be mostly all right, Mom finally speaks. “You used to do this when you were little.”

“Do what?”

“Sob. Wail. Scream and cry. There was nothing we could do to comfort you. We tried everything. After a while we realized you would stop when you wanted to stop, and the best thing we could do was sit with you while you rode the wave.” She’s rubbing the side of my arm like she’s hoping to at least keep me warm. “Tyler was easy. If I put her in a room with you, she was happy. And Powell was a little lover. All I had to do was hold him and he was kissing my cheeks with tears still running into his mouth.”

I can see it so clearly. Tiny Powell with his head shaped like a block, smothering Mom with more affection than I’ve ever had the energy to give in my entire lifetime. And baby Tyler with her fingers in her mouth, dark eyes staring at me with alarming focus.

“I thought when you learned to talk that would solve it,” Mom continues. “I gave you all the words I knew to teach. You still never told me how I could help you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s who you are.” She kisses the side of my head. “I think if you asked your father he’d say it’s because you’re just like me. Naturally, I think it’s because you’re just like him.”

“Sounds about right.”

She smiles. “I saw the way you and Joseph were looking at each other when we started this shoot, and I swear I thought I was having a flashback to me and your dad. We hated each other at first. Did you know that?”

Of course I know it. It’s a famous part of their canon, how they were at each other’s throats when they filmedTouch.

They were engaged three months after production wrapped.

But I let Mom tell the story anyways. When she gets past the details I could recite along with her, she says, “I know now that I was wrong for assuming you would make the same mistakes I did. Not that loving your dad was a mistake. He brought me the three greatest joys of my life. But I also spent way too many years still playing that game with him. Comparing my successes to his. Ranking my worth against his. Believing that everything I did had to be in some kind of response to him. It always starts as fun. Then suddenly you’re looking in the mirror counting your wrinkles and going to bed counting your husband’s and secretly making appointments to get yours injected so that you’ll age slower and look better and be more beloved than the person you’ve chosen as your life partner.” She wells up. “I’m sorry. I put all of that onto you when you’ve done nothing but show me that you’renotme. In all the good ways.”

After a thoughtful beat, she adds, “And you’re not your father either. You’re you.”

I keep my mouth clamped shut and accept the apology. It’s everything I’ve ever hoped to hear from her. She doesn’t need to know that Joseph’s coming over to my house tonight to rehearse for the gala, and while I’m terrified over whether or not we can pull off this performance, I’m excited to see him.

The truth is, I know I’m not her. In my bones I know it.

Besides, this thing with Joseph and me? It’s only casual.

Joseph shows upat my doorstep with his guitar slung across his back and flowers and chocolate in his hands. “Thank you for letting me come over.” He’s about to lean in for a kiss when I inform him that Sarai is already here, and Emmy and her husband are on the way.

He hands me what he’s holding. These are not grocery store impulse buys. It’s one of those $150 boxes of pink roses that can live for up to three years. And an eight-bar box of Compartés chocolates. Nearly a hundred dollars as well.

“You can’t show up at someone’s house empty-handed, and I didn’t wanna buy booze,” he explains, reading my startled expression.

“Of course. Thank you.” I kiss his cheek in the most formal, courteous manner I can muster, using the opportunity to externalize my panic for a single second, frantically looking out into the dark beyond my entryway. “Come on in.”

Sarai’s in the living room with her tambourine, playing “Listen to the Music” on her phone and practicing the rhythm against her leg. “Hey,” she says to Joseph, an ease in her voice that reads like she’s known him for years. “Did you have enough time to learn everything?”

“Sure hope so.”

His hands wrap tight around his guitar strap as he walks through my living room, going right past the banana leaf chair that everyone comments on when they first arrive. Instead heheads to the bookshelf beside my TV, pausing to tilt his head and read each title, saying nothing. Then he wanders from there to looking at Tyler’s painting above my couch. Then the picture frames on my side table and the small, weird figurines and random art pieces I’ve amassed from years of going to the Melrose Trading Post.

His quiet appraisal of my home surprises me. He’s always the type to immediately claim the energy of any space with the sheer brute force of his charm. But he’s gently padding across the hardwood like a tourist in a museum, drinking it all in with an almost meditative focus. It’s a funny contrast to Sarai hammering on with her rehearsal, tapping the tempo of the song with her heel while she hits the twos and fours on her tambourine.

When Joseph is done looking around, he makes a decisive turn to give me one small head bob of approval. I’ve spent so much time remembering how this home used to belong to Tyler and Kearns that I forget how everything that remains is only mine now.