Free You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis Page B

Where did you get this?”
    I grab it out of his hand and say, “Do you know him?”
    His whole body seems to be shaking now, and it scares me a little. He doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring at me like I’ve become someone he doesn’t recognize.
    “Was he the person that Mom was with the night she died?”
    He turns his back to me, and I realize that he’s trying not to cry.

CHAPTER 17
INDISCRETION
    I spend the evening in my room staring at the picture of my mother on the wall, next to one of Regina Spektor from
Rolling Stone
. My father is locked in his office, and we still haven’t talked further. There are possible truths swirling around my head that I really don’t want to think about. It’s hard enough that my mother’s not here.
    To distract myself I flip through a recent issue of
New York
magazine with Drew Barrymore on the cover. I met her once at a casting for one of my father’s films. She came in late, and everyone there seemed really annoyed—the producers, their assistants, even my dad, who’s normally very even-keeled. I think it was because everyone was losing faith in the project. Two studios had rejected the script despite the attachment of many stars. But as it turned out, the person Drew was supposed to read with wasn’t there either, so she waited in the studio next door,where I was fiddling on an upright piano. It was raining sheets, and Drew went over to the window, putting her hands up to the glass as if trying to bring back a memory. I walked up behind her and she commented on how beautiful it was. “All this rain,” she said. At the time, I didn’t really know who she was. She sat down on the floor and thumbed through the script. She told me that she had always wanted to work with my dad. I asked her why and she said, “I’m not sure, really. I mean, I loved
The Lazy Road
, but I also just feel like there’s something about him, something exceptional.”
    Even though I was eight at the time, I was used to people kissing up to him. But I could tell she was for real. She wasn’t saying it to try to win me over. Like I had anything to do with his casting anyway. We sat there until the rain subsided, and she told me I had mysterious eyes. I remember that distinctly, because no one had ever complimented me in that way, like you would an adult.
    Most of the actors I’d met during my dad’s auditions were pretty nervous. In fact, I never liked to be around them because it made
me
nervous. Drew was acting like she was in a dentist’s office, waiting to get her teeth cleaned. She seemed unfazed by it all, even after she divulged her admiration of my dad and his work. I asked her why she was so calm and she smiled. She told me she’d been doing the showbiz thing for a while, and that it got her into a lot of trouble at an early age, and that she was forced to grow up fast.
    “You want to know so much, you want to experience somuch, but I think it’s better to let it happen gradually. At least for me, I learned way too much way too early.”
    Now, listening to Imogen Heap sing “Hide and Seek” on my iPod, I am wondering if I really want to know all this. I can sense that it’s more than just Cole, that it may be like opening one of those Russian dolls made of painted wood that have a smaller one inside, and another, and another. The tiny little doll at the end may be the one thing that will change me forever. But it’s too late. The seed has been planted, breaking out its roots, spreading the branches through me. I have to know. The lyrics in the song seem to be coming straight from my own heart:
    Where are we?
    What the hell is going on?
    I knock on my father’s door twice and then enter. He’s staring at his screen saver, a pencil that draws characters that come to life then run away. I wonder how long he’s been sitting there.
    I sit down in the nook by the window.
    “You have that look,” he says.
    I feel myself slipping, words straining to get out of my mouth. I