A loud beeping sound filled the air and Teddy moved her hands to her ears. “Oh, shit,” Everett shouted over the sound. He ducked inside, pulling Teddy with him, and pressed a few buttons. The beeping stopped.
“Sorry,” he said. “The alarm. I didn’t notice I was holding the door open.”
“It’s okay,” Teddy said. In the absence of the alarm, the silence was so loud, and she couldn’t help but realize she was standing so close to Everett, his hand still clasped around her elbow from where he’d pulled her through the door.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said softly, looking down at her. She kept forgetting how tall he was—that was something you didn’t notice when you saw a man next to puppets.
“It’s okay,” she said again, then grimaced. She had to show him she knew other words. “Thanks for taking me here. Is it . . . I mean, is it weird that I asked?”
Everett smiled and started walking down a dimly lit hallway, unfortunately removing his hand from her arm as he did so. “It might be weirder on my part. I don’t, like, bring every woman I meet here. Not that I’m meeting tons of women,” he added in a rush.
Now it was Teddy’s turn to smile. “I get it. I wasn’t under the impression that you were a monk because you host a children’s program. I mean, I’ve seen the message boards.”
Everett groaned. “You looked at the mom boards?”
Teddy nodded, eyes wide. “Those moms love you. And they would like to do some very PG-13 things on that couch.”
Everett’s face flushed, and Teddy found this almost impossibly charming. “No offense to the moms, but let’s just say I deeply wish I didn’t know those discussions existed.” He fumbled with the keys to open the studio. They stepped through the door and he flipped a switch, bathing the room in light.
And then there it was. Everett’s place, and also Everett’s Place. “Here it is . . . where the magic happens,” he said wryly.
“Whoa,” she said quietly, looking around. Of course it looked different from this angle. There were cameras, for starters, which obviously weren’t visible on the show. Cords snaked across the ground and equipment was everywhere.
But right in the middle of it was a room that felt more real to her than anywhere she’d ever lived. The plaid-papered walls with framed children’s artwork, the bookshelf full of picture books, the lamp Everett turned off at the end of every episode . . . and, of course, the couch. The one where Everett sat when he talked to the camera and, by extension, to Teddy. The one where he held conversations with puppets and read letters from children and dispensed advice that never felt like teaching so much as it felt like understanding.
“Is it okay if I . . .” Teddy gestured toward the set.
Everett nodded. “Sure! Go ahead, look around.”
Teddy stepped into the living room, and a surreal feeling washed over her. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she whispered, pulling a book off the bookshelf before putting it back in exactly the same place. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be touching anything.”
“You can touch things,” Everett said. He was standing by a camera, giving Teddy the strange feeling that she was performing on a stage, like she was being watched and recorded. “I don’t mind if things aren’t in the exact same place from episode to episode. I like it to look lived in, you know? Like this is really my living room.”
“Is this what your real place looks like?” Teddy asked, studying a crayon scribble that looked sort of like a dog. Or a cat. Or a possum.
“Uh . . . no.” She heard Everett’s heavy footfalls, and then he was standing directly beside her. “My place is more basic. It’s really just a space where I work, eat, and sleep.”
Teddy nodded. “Who drew this? You?”
Everett smiled the lopsided grin he did when he really thought something was funny—Teddy had seen it so many times on the show, when one of the puppets puppeteered by someone else said something that seemed to surprise him. “Believe it or not, my work is slightly more sophisticated. No, this is something Gretel did when she was a kid.”
“That’s sweet,” Teddy murmured. “You two seem like you have a really close relationship.”
“We do,” Everett said. “I was basically an adult when she was born, so it always kind of felt like she was partially my own kid. This picture, though . . . not so sweet, actually. It’s supposed to be a raccoon that was terrorizing our neighborhood one summer. She was obsessed with it.”
“I can see why,” Teddy said, leaning in. “It’s disturbing.”
“Oh, no, she wasn’t scared,” Everett said. “She thought we should adopt it. You know, keep it in our home. But it had rabies, and she was forced to give up her plan to convince our parents.”
Teddy laughed. “She’s great.”
“She is,” Everett agreed. “She’s also occasionally terrifying.”
They were standing close together, so close that their arms were almost touching. Being near Everett while on the set of the show that had kept her afloat was almost too much sensation, so Teddy took a step away. She pointed toward the couch. “May I?”
“Only if you promise not to give any details about the couch’s texture to the mom message boards,” Everett said.
“You know I can’t promise that,” Teddy said, sitting down. “And anyway, I think we both know they don’t need any help creating extremely vivid fantasies.”
Teddy looked out at the cameras. This was what Everett saw whenever he filmed. This was what he saw whenever she saw him, when they were staring at each other without even knowing it.
“Kind of makes it all seem a little less interesting when you see the behind-the-scenes stuff, huh?” Everett asked, sitting down beside her.
Teddy shook her head vigorously. “Not at all. If anything, this makes it better. Seeing what you see . . .” She could feel herself blush. “There were some days . . . some hard days . . . where seeing the show, seeing you, was all that I looked forward to.”
Everett watched her, so she kept going.
“When I was with my ex . . . Richard was his name. When I was with Richard, I didn’t ever feel like he was really listening to me when I talked. Or like he valued what I said. It seemed like I was some sort of instrumentation for him, like a hood ornament on the BMW of his life. And when I saw your show for the first time, I couldn’t get over the way you talked to kids. Like they mattered. Like you saw them all for the people they were, not for the people you thought they should be.”
Everett reached out and grabbed her hand. “That’s the goal,” he said softly.