“I’d like to meet. Face to face. Talk things out.” Wrob’s voice was smug, so relaxed he sounded almost benevolent. “Now that I know where you stand, and you know where I stand—or you will in a minute—there really isn’t any reason we can’t be more cooperative on this, right? I mean, given the amount of work you’ve already done, I’d be an idiot to cut you out completely.”
“Out of what?”
With a theatrically heavy sigh: “The project, of course. All I ever wanted was proper credit, and now that that’s all fixed, there’s no point in being vindictive. If this is the only way forward for both of us, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones if you are.”
I couldn’t stop myself from reflexively rolling my eyes at his arrogance, no matter how oblique it might be. “Seriously, Wrob, what the actual fuck are you talking about? Yeah, this thing with the NFA—with Jan—it’s a setback, but the material we’ve put together is still way ahead of anything you could’ve possibly . . .”
But here I trailed off as some sort of oh-shit realization signal suddenly popped up behind Safie’s eyes; she began shaking her head frantically, pulled her laptop from her bag, flipped it open. “Hold on a minute,” I told Wrob, curtly, while she dug out the DVD I’d seen her and Malin working with yesterday, popped it into the laptop’s disc drive, and waited till the media-player program activated. With a glance back at me, she clicked PLAY, and I leaned in to watch, with Simon—intrigued despite himself—angling to look over my shoulder.
For a moment, the screen showed nothing but blue. Then it flashed to a stuttering, staticky ghost image of washed-out negative colour that broke apart in great swathes of smeared pixel clouds, then flashed back to blue, over and over again. Intermittently, I’d catch sight of a distorted image that looked familiar—Safie’s face, the Vinegar House’s outlines, a page of Mrs. Whitcomb’s handwriting stretched out into spaghetti, a blur that might have been a painting of Lady Midday. Abruptly, however, everything cut to black, after which three words appeared onscreen in a large, white sans serif font, like a PowerPoint caption on an empty slide:
TEXT ME
WROB
“Shit,” Safie blurted, slumping; Simon covered his eyes with one hand and turned away, muttering under his breath. I just stared, numb, face rigid. I picked up the phone again.
“How . . .?” I began.
“Same way as always, Lois—money.”
He was gloating now, unattractively so, though I suppose that in a weird way, he had every right to. After all, he’d won.
It would be more than a year—summer after next, in fact—before Safie, who’d been fruitlessly trying to phone, text, and email her ever since she’d first reviewed the DVD, ran into Malin by sheer fluke on Yonge Street one afternoon, outside the Eaton Centre. Confronted, Malin would admit that when she’d left the studio that night she’d found Wrob outside, literally waving his wallet around. Ruining our DVD and turning over our files had netted her enough to finally pull off a long-planned move to Los Angeles, and she saw no point in lying about it, let alone apologizing. Frankly, she’d never expected to see any of us again.
“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Jan, by the way,” Wrob added after a moment. “Hell, I’m insulted you’d even think that, Lois; Jan and me . . . we had something. I’m gonna miss him every day. But I understand. You’re not very a trusting person, I’ve found.”
“Don’t trust you, that’s for sure. Which seems to have been a pretty good call, considering.”
“Yes, well; that’s all behind us now, or can be. And one advantage of working with me, by the way, amongst many—I’ve got a far bigger budget than the NFA, but not even a quarter as many rules about how best to spend it.”
“Working with you,” I repeated.
“Yup.” He paused, probably for effect, before adding: “Well, okay . . . for me.”
At that, Simon threw up his hands. “This is Simon Burlingame, Mr. Barney,” he spat. “Lois’s husband. I—” Here he stopped, and I could hear Wrob’s voice cut in, tinny, snarky; I couldn’t quite make out the words, but the mocking tone was clear. Simon’s face reddened. “Yes, well, seeing you just boasted about ruining someone else’s work, I’m not surprised that’s your opinion—but it’s also not much of an incentive to enter into any sort of business arrangement, either. So here’s my offer: stay the hell away from my wife, or I’m getting a restraining order. And don’t call this number again.”
He slapped the phone back on the table and sat there fuming. Safie’s eyes were wide; she shot me a look that could’ve been labelled “the fuck?” But I simply leaned forward, and asked, “What’d he say? The thing that got you so pissed off, I mean.”
Simon huffed. “I don’t see the point—”
“Humour me.”
“All right. He said, ‘Oh hey, Simon, nice to finally meet you. Too bad you married a full-on bitch.’” I laughed, which made his eyebrows lift. “This is funny to you?”
I felt like saying Funnier than everything else, for sure, but ended up simply shaking my head instead.
“Simon,” I said, “I could give a flying fuck about Wrob and his drama—or the project, at this point, believe it or not. Right now, it’s about one thing: doing what I can to get Clark out of harm’s way. Whatever I can. You’re with me on that, right?”
“Of course,” he snapped back. “Look, whether I accept all this haunted film crap or what, we could still stand to spend a week or two away from here, in Florida, maybe; I could use my extra vacation days, the ones I was saving for Christmas.” I shook my head again, making him trail off, groaning. “Oh, come on, man . . .”
“No, Simon. Look at the evidence—Mrs. Whitcomb changed continents, twice, and that didn’t turn out to be a goddamn bit of help in the end. Besides which, the absolute last thing we need is Clark getting sick south of the border, down where health care’s a pay-as-you-go game your insurance won’t even cover!”
My voice rang in my own ears with this last part, and I suddenly realized just how loud I must have gotten, yet again—enough so that other Tim’s customers were either turning around to look at me or trying to ignore me by “studying Mars,” as my dad would’ve said. I rubbed my face and found it wet, felt a surge of guilty, painful rage that lit up my cheeks.
Christ, I thought, I would cut this useless, stupid excuse for love right out of me this very minute, slash this choke-hold knot around my neck with a rusty fucking knife if I had to, if I believed doing it’d help, even a little bit.
“Lo,” Simon began, softer, but I raised a hand to stop him. “No,” I replied. “Don’t you get it? This is my fault, right from the start: me. Clark, fucking Jan—the Vinegar House, the NFA. My mistake, my . . . error. I kicked it off, I kept it going, I didn’t listen, and here we are. So I have to do whatever I can to solve it, because it has to stop, all of it—it just has to. Because it is my fault.”