“I know,” I said, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. “I know. I promise I’ll do whatever I can. I promise you we will figure this out.”
“OK,” Harry said, and then he squeezed my hand back and walked out the door. “We will figure this out.”
* * *
MY DRIVER, WHO introduced himself as Nick as I got into the back of the car, picked me up at around nine in the evening.
“To the airport?” Nick said.
“Actually, we’re going to make a stop on the Westside first,” I said, giving him the address of the home where Harry was staying.
As we made our way across town, through the seedy parts of Hollywood, over the Sunset Strip, I found myself depressed about how unseemly Los Angeles had gotten since I’d left. It was similar to Manhattan in that regard. The decades had not been good to it. Harry was talking about raising Connor here, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we needed to leave both big cities for good.
As we were stopped at a red light close to Harry’s rented home, Nick turned around briefly and smiled at me. He had a square jaw and a crew cut. I could tell he had probably bedded a number of women based on his smile alone.
“I’m an actor,” he said. “Just like you.”
I smiled politely. “Nice work if you can get it.”
He nodded. “Got an agent this week,” he said as we started moving again. “I feel like I’m really on my way. But, you know, if we get to the airport with time to spare, I’d be interested in any tips you have for somebody starting out.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, looking out the window. I decided, as we drove up the dark, winding streets of Harry’s neighborhood, that if Nick asked me again, after we got to the airport, I was going to tell him that it’s mostly luck.
And that you have to be willing to deny your heritage, to commodify your body, to lie to good people, to sacrifice who you love in the name of what people will think, and to choose the false version of yourself time and time again, until you forget who you started out as or why you started doing it to begin with.
But just as we pulled around the corner onto Harry’s narrow private road, every thought I’d ever had before that moment was erased from my mind.
Instead, I was leaning forward, shocked still.
In front of us was a car. Bent around a fallen tree.
The sedan looked as if it had run head-on into the trunk, knocking the tree down on top of it.
“Uh, Ms. Hugo . . .” Nick said.
“I see it,” I told him, not wanting him to confirm that it was really in front of us, that it wasn’t merely an optical illusion.
He pulled over to the side of the road. I heard the scrape of branches on the driver’s side of the car as we parked. I froze with my hand on the door handle. Nick jumped out and ran over.
I opened my door and put my feet on the ground. Nick stood to the side, trying to see if he could get one of the doors of the crashed car open. But I walked right to the front, by the tree. I looked in through the windshield.
And I saw what I had both feared and yet not truly believed possible.
Harry was slumped over the steering wheel.
I looked over and saw a younger man in the passenger’s seat.
Everyone sort of assumes that when faced with life-and-death situations, you will panic. But almost everyone who’s actually experienced something like that will tell you that panic is a luxury you cannot afford.
In the moment, you act without thinking, doing all you can with the information you have.
It’s when it’s over that you scream. And cry. And wonder how you got through it. Because most likely, in the case of real trauma, your brain isn’t great at making memories. It’s almost as if the camera is on but no one’s recording. So afterward, you go to review the tape, and it’s all but blank.
Here is what I remember.
I remember Nick breaking open Harry’s car door.
I remember helping to pull Harry out.
I remember thinking that we shouldn’t move Harry because we could paralyze him.
But I also remember thinking that I couldn’t possibly stand by and allow Harry to stay there, slumped on the wheel like that.
I remember holding Harry in my arms as he bled.
I remember the deep gash in his eyebrow, the way the blood coated half his face in thick rust red.
I remember seeing the cut from where the seat belt had sliced the lower side of his neck.
I remember two of his teeth being in his lap.
I remember rocking him back and forth.
I remember saying, “Stay with me, Harry. Stay with me. Stay true blue.”
I remember the other man on the road next to me. I remember Nick telling me he was dead. I remember thinking that no one who looked like that could be alive.
I remember Harry’s right eye opening. I remember the way it inflated me with hope, the way the white of his eye looked so bright against the deep red of the blood. I remember how his breath and even his skin smelled like bourbon.
I remember how startling the realization was—once I knew Harry might live, I knew what had to be done.
It wasn’t his car.
No one knew he was here.
I had to get him to the hospital, and I had to make sure no one found out he’d been driving. I couldn’t let him go to jail. What if they tried him for vehicular manslaughter?
I couldn’t let my daughter find out her father had been driving drunk and killed someone. Had killed his lover. Had killed the man who he said was showing him he could love again.
I enlisted Nick to help me get Harry into our car. I made him help me put the other man back into the totaled sedan, this time in the driver’s seat.
And then I quickly grabbed a scarf from my bag and wiped the steering wheel clean, wiped the blood, wiped the seat belt. I erased all traces of Harry.
And then we took Harry to the hospital.
There, bloodstained and crying, I called the police from a pay phone and reported the accident.
When I hung up the phone, I turned and saw Nick, sitting in the waiting room, blood on his chest, his arms, even some on his neck.
I walked over to him. He stood up.
“You should go home,” I said.
He nodded, still in shock.
“Can you get yourself home? Do you want me to call you a ride?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’ll call you a cab, then.” I grabbed my purse. I pulled out two twenties from my wallet. “This should be enough to get you there.”
“OK,” he said.
“You’re going to go home, and you’re going to forget everything that happened. Everything you saw.”
“What did we do?” he said. “How did we . . . How could we . . .”
“You’re going to call me,” I said. “I’ll get a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Call me there tomorrow. First thing in the morning. You’re not going to talk to anyone else between now and then. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Not your mother or your friends or even the cabdriver. Do you have a girlfriend?”
He shook his head.
“A roommate?”
He nodded.
“You tell them that you found a man on the street and you brought him to the hospital, OK? That’s all you tell them, and you only tell them if they ask.”
“OK.”
He nodded. I called him a cab and waited with him until it arrived. I put him in the backseat.
“What are you going to do first thing tomorrow?” I asked him through the rolled-down window.
“I’m going to call you.”
“Good,” I said. “If you can’t sleep, think. Think about what you need. What you need from me as a thank-you for what you did.”
He nodded, and the cab zoomed off.
People were staring at me. Evelyn Hugo in a pantsuit covered in blood. I was afraid paparazzi would be there any minute.
I went inside. I talked my way into borrowing some scrubs and being given a private room to wait in. I threw my clothes away.
When a man from the hospital staff asked me for a statement about what happened to Harry, I said, “How much will it take for you to leave me alone?” I was relieved when the dollar figure he came up with was less than what I had in my purse.
Just after midnight, a doctor came into the room and told me that Harry’s femoral artery had been severed. He had lost too much blood.
For a brief moment, I wondered if I should go get my old clothes, if I could give some of his blood back to him, if it worked like that.
But I was distracted by the next words out of the doctor’s mouth.
“He will not make it.”
I started gasping for air as I realized that Harry, my Harry, was going to die.
“Would you like to say good-bye?”
He was unconscious in the bed when I walked into the room. He looked paler than normal, but they had cleaned him up a bit. There was no longer blood everywhere. I could see his handsome face.
“He doesn’t have long,” the doctor said. “But we can give you a moment.”
I did not have the luxury of panic.
So I got into the bed with him. I held his hand even though it felt limp. Maybe I should have been mad at him for getting behind the wheel of a car when he’d been drinking. But I couldn’t ever get very mad at Harry. I knew he was always doing the very best he could with the pain he felt at any given moment. And this, however tragic, had been the best he could do.
I put my forehead to his and said, “I want you to stay, Harry. We need you. Me and Connor.” I grabbed his hand tighter. “But if you have to go, then go. Go if it hurts. Go if it’s time. Just go knowing you were loved, that I will never forget you, that you will live in everything Connor and I do. Go knowing I love you purely, Harry, that you were an amazing father. Go knowing I told you all my secrets. Because you were my best friend.”
Harry died an hour later.
After he was gone, I had the devastating luxury of panic.
* * *
IN THE MORNING, a few hours after I’d checked into the hotel, I woke up to a phone call.
My eyes were swollen from crying, and my throat hurt. The pillow was still stained with tears. I was pretty sure I’d only slept for an hour, maybe less.
“Hello?” I said.
“It’s Nick.”
“Nick?”