Chapter One: Desirée
Nothing matters. Almost certainly this is true. Desirée is driving, in despair, toward the end of the world. No, the end of the world has come and gone. This is her in the afterlife, a terrible place, just like the other in every respect, except: without the illusion of meaning that made struggle seem purposeful. That assured her whatever shit she was going through, time would prove it a blessing in disguise. Everything happens for a reason, she used to love to say.
Well, ha. Ha!
She has seen through that treacle fiction to the stupid, dumb, stupid, dumb truth. Everything we do, everything we dream, everything we love, all comes to nothing at the last. Everything. Means. Nothing. (She screams.) And now that she knows it there’s no going back.
It’s a joke, but it isn’t funny. The wasteland that was once her life flies by: Bruce Park, the Yacht Club, the Avenue. See ya. Where she learned to ride a bike and where she learned to sail and where she learned to shop, to gossip, to be one of the girls; to like espresso, to love Amanda Page—and then to hate her. Places, lessons, useless to her now.
Now she is arcing onto the interstate, doing her best to speed, but between Greenwich and the city there’s too much traffic. Frustration stalls her grief for a beat. Can’t the world move out of her way and let her feel what she’s trying to feel?
Of course it can’t.
When she thinks about it, which she sure has time to, poking along like this in the fast lane, when she thinks about it—this cosmic indifference to her pain—she understands. It is only further proof.
“Life is senseless!” she screams at the Prius she’s passing.
And she passes the exit to Valley Prep. Exit to Tessier Stables. Exit to Larchmont, where she used to exit with A-Page so they could walk Umbrella Point unrecognized. And why didn’t she get it then? When the girl who claimed to love her kept her secret. When, after all of A’s sweet words and sultry words, she dumped D and declared it had been an experiment.
Desirée passes by all the turns she used to take—for study and sport, to go chasing after love—and then, where she should’ve born left, to meet the East River, to follow it south, if she were really, as she’d told Tom and Tricia she was, returning to the East Village to stay with Himali until the dorms opened up and back-to-school shop, instead she heads west on I-95, bisects the Bronx, the Heights, the Hudson River. Over the George Washington, into New Jersey.
New Jersey! And there’s another clue she missed. New Jersey. Of course life is random and cruel!
She can hear, at that thought—or, imagines she does; no, wishes she did—Will’s burst of laughter. His lyrical cackle. Elegant and abrasive in equal measure, just like him.
Which gives her an idea, which she dictates to her phone. “Every character’s character matches their laughter.” She adds this to The List. The List she can’t help keeping, still, of all the films they meant to make.
Some days, they vowed to make art house pictures only—obscure and conceptual, hypnotic or shocking. Others, they declared the selves they’d been snobs and set about scheming the next superhero sequel. But of course they really believed they would do both. Believed they’d do it all. That was the plan.
Well, fuck the plan, apparently. Fuck it all.
Will was from New Jersey, but he’d be the first to put it down. “America’s armpit, I should know.” Another of the many things they had in common: complicated feelings about the places they came from.
Desirée is finally able to speed now, going against the tail end of the morning’s rush. She won’t be in New Jersey for long. It’s a small state, but she has no idea where within it he grew up. Liberty. And where is that? She’s never noticed an exit for it. So it must be north. Or, along the coast. But if that were the case, wouldn’t he have mentioned the ocean? This is something she should know. She wants to picture him as a boy. But, although they were fast friends, although, almost instantly, he became her best friend, they didn’t get to be friends for long.
The funeral—his funeral—was in Boston, where his mother moved after her third divorce. There was a priest and pomp, there were polite stories told. Nothing he would have chosen. She does know that.
Exiting 95 to angle east, Desirée is passing, now, off the map she knew, though this landscape looks more or less like what preceded it. Blobs of green and blobs of grey, fields and forests and houses and factories, people and cars and cows and that seagull. So what. She speeds past, faster, past the fools who don’t know better, the ones still trying to “live” their “lives.” Ha! Ha.
It’s what she once, just weeks ago, would have called a fucking lovely day. Everything a girl could want from her weather: heat, a breeze, the sun, a sprinkling of those clouds that look like pastry puffs. So what. “Good” doesn’t do her any good. It should be raining. There should be hail and lightning, and the lightning strikes and, blinded, she swerves and she’s off the road and it’s over.
No such luck. She’s still at the wheel, foot pressed to the pedal, following the blue arrow on the screen in her dash. Following blindly. She couldn’t name the road she’s on, even the state she is in now. Maryland? Delaware? What’s the difference.
Desirée has known two moods in this afterlife: anguish and emptiness. After a certain amount of time on the road, after she has spent her high emotions, she passes into the second, and drives no longer in a fury but in a trance.
When the sound of a siren breaks through her fog, she sees the scene like a shot from a film they might have made: from above: the cruiser—this is period, late 50s, and the car is a classic PD black and white, cherry strobe revolving almost calmly (not like the car that’s actually pulled her over, turquoise, topped with a double bar of LEDs that sign their alarm wildly)—it peels out from the pull-off as our protagonist emerges from the tunnel, to race along the causeway.
Because here the road runs above the ocean, its route bisecting the wide mouth of a bay. Did this infrastructure exist in the 50s? They’d have to check. There are gulls riding the air above the rails and standing sentinel atop each lamppost, balanced on one leg, beaks to the wind. And to the east, the open ocean, sprinkled with tankers that, at this distance, look like toys.
As Desirée did, the woman in their film would hear the sirens, slow, and pull to the side of the bridge. In this first, establishing shot, her convertible’s top would be down (though Desirée’s isn’t), and so you’d see her hair settle, watch her check her reflection in the mirror, reach for her pocketbook, retouch her lipstick—quickly, but not hurriedly. You’d wonder, who is she, and where is she going? What is she running from or towards? You’d understand, she is preparing to put on a show.
But Desirée—who is not the woman in the film; whose anguish isn’t the attractive cinema kind that sort of makes you wish you were miserable, too, but the ugly, unremarkable real deal—makes no preparations or adjustments. She doesn’t try to pull herself together. Does nothing at all, in fact, except the one thing she does most of all now: imagines he’s still here.
Will’s describing the shot to her, moving his hands like a camera, like he used to: up, aerial, and then doing what you didn’t expect: moving farther out as the moment approaches, when these two strangers will meet. Their cars will be specks, the causeway a thin vein bisecting the body of the ocean, you’ll be seeing mostly light on the water, blueness and brilliance, by the time the officer bends to ask the woman at the wheel if she can guess why he’s pulled her over.
Her real life cop raps a knuckle on the glass and Desirée’s daydream evaporates. She jabs the button that makes her door inhale its window.
“I was speeding,” she says before the window’s done retracting.
“Why don’t you go ahead and switch that ignition off for me.”
“Sure,” she says, and does. But with less antagonism than she’d intended, because the cop at her window is a woman. That’s interesting. She can’t help but find it interesting. Of course it must not be uncommon anymore, but it’s still not what you’d expect. Not the default. And it changes her idea for the film.
These two aren’t adversaries, they’re accomplices. This isn’t a 50s noir drama about a woman on the run. It’s a 90s buddy comedy.
She turns to see if the woman at her left saying, “License and registration,” is the sort of broad she could team up with. Chestnut hair pulled back tight. Unsubtle highlights. Prominent forehead. Waxy complexion. No makeup. Not solid enough to be butch, not delicate enough to be femme. And no hint of flirtation in her square stance, no sense of humor in her pursed lips. Oh well. In the film she’d have charisma.
B Evans, her name tag reads.
Desirée decides that B stands for Brenda. Decides Brenda is third generation law enforcement. Her brother was the one expected to join the force, but he ran off to Miami to open a bakery and Brenda took up the mantle instead, less passionate about policing than eager to win her father’s approval.
“License and registration,” B Evans says again, more loudly but still in monotone.
Desirée stirs herself to find the documents. She isn’t trying to be difficult. “I’m not trying to be difficult.” But she’s finding it totally impossible to give a fuck whether Officer Evans fines her or books her or pulls her from the Porsche and tosses her into the ocean. “The thing is, though, Ma’am or whatever? Officer. In case you hadn’t noticed? Nothing matters. News flash. Breaking news. So, this whole deal here, like, so what? Give me the fucking ticket or whatever. Do you worst. That’s your program. But, who cares? Nothing you do is going to change anything.”
She used to be good at this game. She used to think it was a game, winning sympathy, wheedling leniency, inspiring special treatment. She always considered it one of her arts, knowing just what to say, and what not to say—how to tear up and look away, or throw her head back, laughing, or lean in conspiratorially—to get anyone on her side.
But she’s done with games and sides and sympathy. The only thing she wants anymore isn’t in anyone’s power to grant her. She thrusts her documents out the window at B Evans.
The officer peers over her shades, giving nothing away. But Desirée can guess what she is thinking. A pretty young thing from out of state with an attitude problem and a car worth, probably, her whole year’s salary—is there any way Brenda doesn’t hate her?
But all B Evans says, before she walks back to her cruiser, is, “If nothing matters, Miss Memhard, what’s the rush?”
What’s the rush? She can’t help considering the question in the time that Brenda’s gone. What is the rush? If nothing matters, nothing matters. Fast or slow, what’s the goddamn difference? She shouldn’t care if she sits on the side of this highway forever.
But she does. Cars are whooshing past, a rhythmic sound, like the sound of the waves colliding with the pylons below. Clouds are skating past, soundlessly metamorphosing, moving so easily on. And doesn’t she wish she could go with them? But, why? Is caring an old habit that dies hard? But that isn’t it. What it is—she admits to herself before she can stop herself—is that something might matter. She doesn’t know what, and she certainly doesn’t know why. But there is still a chance. One place in the world where she might discover a meaning she couldn’t find anywhere else. One person who could maybe persuade her—as neither Tricia nor Tom nor any of her still-living friends have managed to do—that the absolute, irrefutable stupidity of Will’s death doesn’t cancel everything out. And the rush is, she wants to know which it is. Sense or nonsense? She needs to know.
Watching Brenda, at last, walking back to her, a plodding stride with little character, Desirée can’t resent her—not for this delay or for the ticket she’s about to deliver. She pities her. A dull woman living a dull life. They could’ve made a film about that, too. One average cop on the same beat, day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out. A meditative black-and-white with a sweeping score. Brenda, they could’ve called it.
She looks past Brenda, to the gulls, trying not to cry.
At her door, Officer Evans bends, pulls the shades from her face and leans lower, closer, to be certain she’s got the girl’s attention.
“Your actions behind the wheel do matter, Miss Memhard.” It’s an afterschool special kind of line, unoriginal and unconvincing.
“Why?” Desirée says. “We’re all gonna fucking die. So what if it’s sooner than later?”
Brenda pauses. Straightens up. Seems to be looking for the answer somewhere over the top of the Porsche. And maybe she finds it, because she leans down again. “You see enough folks die in my line of work. Let me tell you, Miss Memhard, you always wish it had been later. Always.”
Desirée could protest, could say what she’s thinking, which is: you believe that, Brenda, because you haven’t yet seen through the illusion. You’re still stuck on the thought that there’s some fucking value to a day on Earth. You fool. But one day you’ll see. One day the scales will fall from your eyes and you’ll know. That girl who gave you lip on the causeway was right.
She could say that. But she doesn’t. Because why should Brenda have to know what she knows? Better for her if she doesn’t. “Okay, Evans. Message received. I’ll slow down.”
She takes back her license and registration, along with the ticket that details her transgression, and makes a point of not listening as B Evans tells her how to mail it in or what to do if she objects. Sure she objects. But, again, so what?
When she is back on the road, when the causeway and the cruiser are safely behind her, for some reason, she keeps her word. She doesn’t speed. But she does drop the ticket out the window.
She throws her phone out the window next. It’s been buzzing with the trivia she once confused for news. Emmy and Angie have landed at Burning Man and ohmigod the hottest CowboyAngel just gave them the prettiest little blue pills! SHUT UP Olivia is sitting next to ETHAN FUCKING HAWKE at Building on Bond. Should she start humming “Fortnight”? Jamal’s on a plane to Ibiza with the twink, he’ll keep them informed. Meanwhile, can Des believe Harper’s dealing with Nico again?!
What she cannot believe is how quickly they all moved on with their lives.
How can they say they were his friends? Or, now, that they are hers.
All her life, until she met Will, Desirée never felt quite like she belonged to any of the worlds through which she passed. Only when she was alone on the water, at the helm of Sweet Caroline, Tom and Tricia’s gift to her on her sweet sixteen, or at her sewing station, the motor of her Pfaff vibrating up through her fingertips as fabric flowed beneath the presser foot, very much like water beneath a hull…only then did she sense the person who lived beneath the personas she put on to win the approval of her parents, peers, instructors.
“It’s maybe because of the adoption thing? I’ve felt like an imposter, like, always,” she’d tried to explain it to A-Page. “Like, I just low key feel like I’m always pretending.” She’d thought that maybe her girlfriend would want to know who she was.
But, “Everyone’s always pretending, you dunce,” was how Amanda had replied. A-Page aspired to be a model, so of course appearances were her primary concern.
Will, on the other hand, didn’t give a fuck how things looked, had no patience for pretense. He was the most honest person she’d ever met—Was he the only honest person she’d ever met?—and in his company she felt freed to be equally frank. Which was how she finally found out what she really thought about the world, unearthing opinions she’d been keeping even from herself.
Will was always on the hunt for The Truth, which was why he’d tracked down her birth mother’s name and address. Handed Desirée the white 3x5 filled with his fluid script one perfectly ordinary April afternoon as they walked to the Nuyorican.
“What is this?” she’d asked.
“It’s her.” He’d never let on that he was looking for her. She’d mentioned, just once, drunk on some rooftop, that she wondered about the woman who carried her those nine months just to pass her off to a pair of strangers.
Kimberly Lane. Kimberly Lane. Kimberly Lane. Staring at the paper, Desirée had tried to make the name conjure a person, but it didn’t. “How?”
“I’m good on the phone. Don’t thank me or anything.”
“Thank you? I might not want this.”
“You want it. You are going to want it.”
This trip had been his idea. He was supposed to be here with her. It was supposed to be their first collaboration. A documentary. He would shoot the drive on his handheld Panasonic, do the interviewing as they went. It would feel rough, raw, personal. Plus, there was the appealing metaphor of the journey. They would drive down the coast and, whatever happened, they’d get it all on film, and—“Even if it’s awful, Des, it also won’t be. Because we’ll be turning it into art.”
Instead of art, this drive south has been a fever dream, sometimes vivid, sometimes hazy, never seeming quite real. When Desirée discovers herself over the water next it’s on a boring old beam bridge. Wright Memorial, a placard informs her. Which means she is crossing over, onto the Outer Banks, where the first flight North Carolina boasts about took place.
Will had wanted to see the site, now a National Memorial. “Des, it’s one of history’s fulcrums! The conquest of the air! These guys take a thing that’s been impossible forever and they make it fucking normal!” Of course Will loved the Wrights’ story of dogged devotion to a wild idea.
She tries to see the place through his eyes. To find the story in it. This is a working-class vacationland, the road crowded with pickups and flanked by strip malls, surf shops, big boxes, tracts of ranch houses on stilts. The ocean is somewhere to her left, not far, but she has no view of the water from the highway. Maybe there are fancier enclaves, away from the main road. There must be. But what’s visible to her is coarse and tacky. Might be seedy. Not a bad setting for a show about, say, a misfit band of teens or an aging fisherman. But hardly the place she’d choose to find her birth mother.
Luckily, another bridge carries her west again to Roanoke Island, nestled just inland from the crescent of the Banks, the site of that infamous, failed English settlement and, now, home to the town of Manteo, where Kimberly Lane reportedly lives. Here, the frontier vibes give way to something quainter. Here there are window boxes, picket fences, rockers on porches and roses climbing trellises. Tacky in their own right, lacking imagination, but bespeaking an aspiration to style, at least.
Which is something. Isn’t that something? It once would have been.
Desirée’s GPS directs her—right at Jack’s Cafe, left at the Maritime Museum, past the ornate gates to the Lost Colony Theater and left again at the Elizabethan Gardens—through this affable harbor-side downtown, then away again, into a third type of neighborhood, neither cute nor commercial, where the southern charm has turned anemic; where picket gives way to chain link, gardens to scrub grass, houses to trailers, welcome mats to ‘Beware of Dog’ signs.
It’s depressing. Depressed. A type of neighborhood Desirée knows only from the screen. The Porsche informs her she is nearing her destination. 382 Fair Oaks will be on her right.
And, shit, there it is. She slows, leaning forward against the wheel.
The address is your standard issue mobile home, well past its prime, beige vinyl siding warped and stained, set back from the road in what would better be described as a thicket than a yard. The organizing principle here seems to be neglect: two sad begonias on the front stoop are wilting in their plastic pots, a plaid couch sits abandoned in the high grass, and the gold Carola parked in the sandy gravel drive sports a sizable dent in its fender, where the paint has been replaced by rust.
At the sight, Desirée’s heart sinks a little, not really something she thought possible.
There are depths upon depths of disappointment, apparently.
But, “Des, don’t be so judgey,” she can hear Will saying. “Get past the surface.” He was so much more open to everything than she was. So much more comfortable with discomfort. Too comfortable, maybe. Is that what killed him?
She hates that the thought even crosses her mind. As if there could be a reason. There is no reason!
So, it’s her guilt that gives her the final push, out of the car, along the path of cracked pavers that wend toward 382.
It’s an appealing notion, that we can sense when something significant is about to take place. That when we meet someone who will matter to us, we know. That if a change is in the air, we will feel it in our bones. Once upon a time, Desirée believed it. Believed in intuition, premonition, threads of feeling strung between us. Once upon a time, until—
She’d been at Baldwin Park, kicking it with her hometown girls, down by the fountain, sipping spiked lemonade. She’d been hoping someone would say, without her having to ask, how Amanda had fared her first year at Northwestern. She’d been laughing. And then she would never laugh again.
The text came from Emmy, Will’s kid sister, as he called her, though she was only two years younger. Des had met her when she came to stay in his dorm that spring while she toured the city schools. And she’d agreed to take the girl for brunch when Will was too hungover to withstand the sunlight. In vampire mode, as he called it. She’d enjoyed the chore more than she’d expected to; she’d seen how they were siblings. Though Emmy was the softer. Why should Emmy have to send a text like that?
Desirée had read it twice and then…it was like ceasing to exist. She blinked out, then she blinked back. And when she returned to the Earth, to herself, her phone was on the concrete, screen shattered, those worst words webbed, illegible, and her girls were staring at her; Venezuela asking, was she okay? Which had to be the first time D had ever heard V say something serious.
There’d been no sign preceding that moment. No sinking feeling. No sudden bee sting or shattering of glass. Just the relevant words rising up from their context: dead, hotel, OD, sorry, fuck. Fuck. Desirée had gotten no warning before the world ended.
So she doesn’t assume these butterflies that she’s feeling as she climbs the cinderblock steps portend anything. She identifies them as the last vestiges of a hope that, somehow, hasn’t quite died within her. Thinks, this is sure to be its death knell.
“The Drive” is what they’d planned on naming it, their first film, hers and Will’s. Because that would be 80 percent of the film—the long lead-up to the meeting. They would talk, the two of them, before and behind the camera. About what you might expect: her adoptive upbringing, her hopes and fears for this reunion. But also, about everything. Anything. Especially, about what art meant to them, their aspirations for this film, and the careers they hoped would follow.
Would they talk about their friendship? The whole drive would evince its strength and character. It would all be very heady, very meta—and then just when you assumed that was the whole mode of the film, they would arrive at Desirée’s mother’s house (which of course she had pictured differently), and, snap of the fingers, slam of the car door, analysis would give way to action. Here would be The Scene. Which would stand as the conclusion to the work, no matter how it all went down. There would be no ex post facto theorizing, checking in, chatting. Not even a shot of the car pulling back out of the drive to offer closure.
That was their plan, their scheme, their dream. The vision they forged together. Which has been her only roadmap without him. And can lead her no farther than this.
At the door now, she imagines herself turning to the camera. She’s arrived at one of those fulcrum points Will loved so much. Yes, she imagines herself turning, and, Here we go, she says, dramatically for the sake of the shot. But then she breaks into a smile, and she bursts into laughter. Because, behind the camera, there he is.