She pauses, aware she’s been swept up in movie talk. But there’s still one more thing she wants to say. She needs to say it, because it’s true.
“Movies are like life,” she finally says. “Only better.”
She leaves out another truth, which is that you can get lost in movies. Charlie learned that the day her parents died, when Nana Norma came to stay for good.
The wreck happened on a Saturday morning in mid-July. Her parents had left early to go to the lawn and garden place two towns over, waking her long enough to say they’d be back by ten.
Charlie didn’t think much of it when ten came and went and they still weren’t home. Same thing when the grandfather clock in the living room struck eleven. Fifteen minutes later, a cop came to the door. Deputy Anderson. Her friend Katie’s dad. She’d slept over at Katie’s house once when she was ten, and Mr. Anderson made them pancakes the next morning. It was the first thing Charlie thought of when she saw him on the doorstep. Mr. Anderson standing over the stove, spatula in hand, flipping pancakes as wide as dinner plates.
But then she saw the hat in his hands. And the gray tint to his face. And the uncertain half shuffle he did on the welcome mat, as if forcing his legs not to run away.
Seeing all of that, Charlie knew something horrible had happened.
Deputy Anderson cleared his throat and said, “I’m afraid I have bad news, Charlie.”
She barely heard the rest, registering only the most important snippets. Accident. Highway. Killed instantly.
By that time, Mrs. Anderson was there, no doubt brought as backup, pulling Charlie into her arms and saying, “Is there someone we can call, honey? Family?”
Charlie whimpered yes. There was Nana Norma. And then she broke down crying and didn’t stop until hours had passed and Nana Norma was there.
Nana Norma used to be an actress. Or had tried to be. As soon as she turned eighteen, she did the whole hop-on-a-bus-to-Hollywood cliché, like a million other small-town girls who’d been told they were pretty or had talent. Nana Norma had both. Charlie’s seen the pictures of the beautiful brunette with the Rita Hayworth figure, and she’s heard her grandmother singing in the kitchen when she thought no one else was around to hear it.
What young Norma Harrison didn’t have was luck. After a year of checking coats, going on auditions, and not getting even a millimeter past the dream stage, she hopped back on that bus and returned to Ohio a little harder and a lot humbled.
But it didn’t diminish her love of movies. Or pictures, as she still calls them, like she’s a walking, talking Variety headline.
“Let’s watch a picture,” she said to Charlie that first, awkward night, both of them too bowled over with grief to do anything but sit there, silent and shell-shocked.
Charlie hadn’t wanted to. At the time, she wasn’t much of a movie fan, despite always knowing how she got her name. That was Nana Norma’s doing. She had a thing for Hitchcock and instilled that love in Charlie’s mother.
“It’ll make you feel better,” Nana Norma told her. “Trust me.”
Charlie relented and joined her on the couch, where they watched old movies all night and into the dawn. The characters talked tough and smoked and drank glass after glass of whiskey. Even the women. There were murders and double-crosses and stolen glances so scorched with lust it made Charlie’s cheeks turn red.
Even better was Nana Norma’s running commentary, in which Charlie got glimpses of her Hollywood days.
“Nice guy,” she said of one actor. “Drank too much.”
“Went on a date with him once,” she said of another. “Got too handsy for my taste.”
When early-morning sun started trickling through the living room blinds, Charlie realized Nana Norma was right. She did feel better. All those churning emotions—the pain, the rage, the sadness so thick she’d thought she’d sink right into it like quicksand—had momentarily left her.
They watched movies until dawn the next night.
And the night after that.
And the one after that.
By the time Charlie realized they were using cinematic fantasy to escape their horrible reality, it was too late. She was hooked.
On the day her parents were buried, everything felt larger than life. The closed coffins side by side at the front of the church sat in a patch of sunlight colored by stained-glass windows. The flowers behind them burst out of their vases in rainbow brightness, contrasting perfectly with the black-clad mourners who fanned themselves in the July heat. When they gathered graveside, the sky was piercingly blue. There was a light breeze, too, on which traveled the sound of a gospel choir. It was all so beautiful, in a way that made Charlie sad but also comforted. She knew that as hard as this was, she was going to get through it.
After the funeral, she asked Nana Norma if she knew the name of the hymn the choir had been singing as her parents’ coffins were lowered into the ground.
“What hymn?” Nana Norma had asked. “And what choir?”
That was the moment Charlie knew the reality of her parents’ funeral was far different from the one she had experienced. She understood then that her brain had embellished it, turning it into a mental movie. Images on film churning through reels, telling someone else’s sad tale, which was how she was able to endure it.
“Have you ever thought about making movies?” Josh says, bringing her back to the moment. “Since you love them so much.”
“Not really.”
Charlie had considered it only briefly, back when she was trying to decide which schools she should apply to. She suspected there was more gratification in creating something as opposed to taking it apart. But she also feared that knowing the nitty-gritty of making films would ruin the magic of watching them, and since there was already so little magic in her life, she didn’t want to risk it. That’s especially true now that Maddy’s gone.
Gone.
Such an awful word. So absolutely blunt in its finality that Charlie gets sad just thinking it.
Maddy is gone.
Never to return.
And Charlie herself is to blame.
Grief suddenly washes over her, as it’s done so many times in the past two months. With it is a sense of guilt so heavy Charlie feels pinned to the passenger seat. Both emotions overwhelm her to the point where she only barely hears Josh say, “Why not? Seems like a sweet gig.”
“Lots of gigs are sweet,” Charlie says. “Doesn’t mean I want any of them.”
She looks to her right, checking her reflection in the side mirror outside the window. The dashboard lights illuminate her from below, casting a cool glow on her coat collar, revealing how it matches her shade of lipstick. Not that she can see those matching reds. The night and the moonlight make everything appear monochrome. Not black and white. Nothing that stark. A thousand shades of gray.