The Next Best Thing Read online

  I would pick at my food, then excuse myself, telling Grandma and Maurice that I needed to work, closing my bedroom door behind me. Of course, I wasn’t working. I was staring at my phone, trying to will it to ring, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was dialing the first nine of the ten numbers that would have connected me with Dave, the only person I really wanted to talk to.

  “Ruth?” The voice on the other end of the line startled me so badly that I gave a little squeak. The assistant, who had probably grown accustomed to the quirks of neurotic writers, pretended not to notice. “I have Lisa on the line. Please hold for Tariq, and Lloyd and Joan from the network.” I got to my feet, my heart lifting as quickly as it had sunk. The network. Oh God oh God oh God. The network doesn’t call unless it’s a pickup, Dave had said. They give the bad news to the agent, not the writer, and probably you’ll read it online before someone has the decency to tell you to your face that your show is dead. But maybe Dave was wrong. It had been years since his own show was green-lit, years since he’d had to sit in breathless, chest-pounding agony, waiting for the call, this call.

  Voices came back on the line, one after another, ringing like bells.

  “I have Tariq,” said Tariq’s assistant.

  “Holding for Joan,” said Joan’s.

  “Ruth?” asked Lisa. “Still there?”

  “I’m here.” My voice was faint and quivery. I stood up, clenching my fists, my jaw, my abdominal muscles, trying to keep from shaking.

  “Please hold,” said a new voice, male and brusque and impatient, “for Chauncey McLaughlin.”

  I reeled back toward the bed. It felt like Christmas morning, New Year’s Eve, a birthday cake blazing with candles, a man down on one knee with a diamond ring in his hand. Joan was ABS’s head of comedy, and Chauncey McLaughlin (rumor was, he’d been born Chaim Melmann, then changed it to Charles, then gone full WASP with Chauncey) was the president of the network, a man I’d glimpsed once at a holiday party and had spoken with precisely never. Chauncey McLaughlin was the man who ultimately decided which of the pilots would get shot and, of those, which would make it onto the air in the fall and which would die quietly in the springtime.

  “Who’ve I got?” he asked in a booming voice. Names were reeled off—Tariq, Lisa, Lloyd, Joan. “And Ruth, of course.”

  “Hi,” I managed.

  “Chauncey McLaughlin. I don’t want to keep you waiting. We’re going to go ahead and shoot The Next Best Thing.”

  I closed my eyes. My legs went watery with relief. “Thank you,” I said. With the phone still pressed to my ear, I got up and unlocked the bedroom door to find my grandmother standing there. Evidently she’d given up even pretending that she wasn’t waiting for the call. I flashed her a thumbs-up. She sprang into the air and actually clicked her heels together, a feat she couldn’t have managed before her hip replacement two years before. Then she held my face in both of her hands. I could feel her hand on my left cheek and felt, as usual, nothing on my scarred right side as she kissed me, first on one cheek, then the other, before stowing her cell phone in her brassiere (“God’s pocket,” she called it) and hurrying off to the kitchen, undoubtedly to start giving her hundred closest friends and relations the news. A moment later, Maurice appeared in the living-room doorway, dressed for golf, with his tanned hands clasped over his head. He stood on his tiptoes to kiss me—Maurice, while not technically a little person, is a long way from tall, and a good six inches shorter than I am—then turned back down the hallway. Maurice had two sons, no daughters, and even though he’d never said so, my sense was that he liked having a young lady in his life. He’d pull out my chair, hold doors open for me, ask me if my boyfriend was treating me well, and say that if he wasn’t, he, Maurice, would be happy to talk to him about it.

  As congratulations spilled over the line, from Lisa and Tariq and Chauncey, I found myself wishing not for my boyfriend, Gary, but for Dave. Dave, one of the Two Daves, was my boss and my mentor, the one who’d helped me craft the concept for The Next Best Thing, who’d overseen each revision of the script and assured me that I had just as good a shot at writing my own show as any other writer in Hollywood, even if I’d never been a staff writer, even if I was only twenty-eight. Dave’s promise to serve as my co-executive producer had gotten me the meeting with Joan, and Dave’s involvement, I was sure, had gotten the network to take a chance on an unknown quantity. A Hollywood veteran who’d co-created and run a successful sitcom for the past five years, Dave would know what to do next. And Gary. I’d have to call Gary and let him know.

  “Ruth?” Chauncey’s voice was deep and warm, the sound of your favorite uncle who’d come for the holidays with fancy barrettes and foil-wrapped chocolate kisses and the latest Babysitters Club book. “Did we lose you?”

  “No, I’m still here. I’m just a little overwhelmed. I . . . oh, God, I don’t even know what to say except thank you.”

  “And that the show will be brilliant,” Lisa quickly added.

  “We’re counting on it,” said Tariq. I could hear, or thought I could, the edge of desperation in his voice. Last year, Tariq had shepherded five pilots through the development process. The network had green-lit only one of them, a trippy hourlong dramedy set in an alternate universe where the dinosaurs were not extinct. The network had lavished millions of dollars on the sets and had cast a big-name former movie star as the lead. Even with all that, the show had lasted for exactly three episodes. Dave had told me, and the commentators on Deadline had confirmed, that if Tariq failed to improve his game, he’d be looking for a new job by the fall.

  “Thank you,” I said again. “Thank you all so much for believing in me.”

  “Of course,” said Chauncey casually, “we might need you to make some changes. Nothing drastic, just a little rewriting.”

  “Oh my God. Of course. Absolutely. Whatever you need.” I’d thought the script was perfect when I turned it in, but obviously I’d be willing to tweak or cut or change it in whatever way the network deemed necessary to get it on the air.

  There was another round of congratulations, and Chauncey said, “Got more calls, kiddo,” and, just like that, the call was over, and I sank onto my bed, clutching my telephone in one sweaty hand. I’d survived the first round of cuts. I would get to hire a cast, find my star, build the sets, shoot my pilot show. Instead of competing against dozens of scripts, I was up against maybe twenty-four . . . and even if The Next Best Thing never made it on the air, I’d have a lovely souvenir, a DVD of my dream made real.

  I got to my feet, the same person I’d been ten minutes ago: average height and average weight (which made me practically obese in Hollywood), with thick, shoulder-length hair that could be coaxed to hang, sleek and glossy, when I spent the time or money to have it straightened. I had brown eyes, my grandma’s full pink lips, features that might have been almost pretty before the accident, broad shoulders and curvy hips, a solid torso thanks to years of swimming, and olive skin that tanned easily and stayed that way, even in what passed for winter out here. Except for the scars, which my clothes covered, and my face, which my clothes did not, I was normal—even, from certain angles, pretty. It was a problem. Sometimes, people would react to me after they’d seen me from behind or from my good side. Hey, baby, lookin’ good! construction workers would shout when I was walking with my gym bag over my shoulder and a baseball cap’s brim shadowing my face . . . or, if I was meeting my grandmother at a restaurant, a man would approach from my left side at the bar and start chatting me up. I’d take care of things as quickly as I could, pulling off my hat, pulling back my hair. I would show them the truth, who I really was. The catcalls would stop abruptly, and the man at the bar would suck in his breath, then scowl as if it were my fault, as if I was somehow playing a joke on him. Once, a homeless man had asked me for change, ignoring my muttered “sorry” and chasing me down Sunset until I’d turned. His eyes had gotten big as he’d taken in my face. Then he’d pulled a dollar out of his pocket. And han
ded it to me.

  I started to punch the button that would connect me to Gary. Then I stopped. Should I tell Dave first? I certainly could, now that I’d gotten the Call. He’d want to know. Maybe he’d even want to celebrate. Or maybe I should sneak out of the house, head to the airport, and buy myself a ticket to Hawaii, where he was vacationing, to tell him in person. I knew where he liked to stay, which flights he would have taken, his favorite restaurants on every island. Whether I’d be a good showrunner remained to be seen, but I had been an excellent assistant. The hard part would be getting past Grandma. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” she’d say, and point out that I had already had my heart broken once by a Hollywood writer and that I should endeavor to make new and interesting mistakes rather than repeating the ones I’d made before.

  She was right, I thought, and picked up the phone and called Gary. “Good news?” he asked, and I bounced on the bed, smiling as I said, “The best.”

  TWO

  My love affair with television began when I was eight years old. It started—as so many things do—with The Golden Girls.

  When I was three, my parents were driving on the Massachusetts Pike, on their way from their house in Framingham to dinner with friends in Worcester, when their station wagon hit a patch of black ice. The car skidded over the guardrail, flipped over twice, and then burst into flames. My mom and dad died, and my car seat broke free of its straps and went flying through the windshield. I broke an arm and a leg and most of my ribs on the right side of my body—the side I’d landed on—but most of the damage had been caused by going face-first through all that glass.

  My mother’s mother, Rae, had spent her life in Boston but was living in Coral Gables when the accident happened. She came north for the funeral and never left, arranging the sale of her condominium over the phone, having her furniture and clothes and dishes shipped up, moving into my parents’ house, and taking over the business of raising me.

  I’d spent chunks of my childhood in hospitals, undergoing and then recovering from various surgeries intended to repair the damage the accident had done. The longest stint was the summer between second and third grades, when I stayed at Shriners Hospital of Boston. The doctors there had big plans, a series of operations that would stretch from June to August. First, I was to have a titanium rod implanted in my jaw, to replace the shattered bone that had been reinforced with pins when I was five but was failing to grow properly. “You’ll be like the bionic girl!” my orthopedic surgeon, a jolly man named Dr. Caine, had announced. Of all my doctors, I liked him best. He had a shiny bald head that glowed under the hospital lights. He carried peppermints and plastic-wrapped caramel squares in the pocket of his white coat, and when he looked at me, he looked at all of me, not just the parts he’d be cutting and sewing.

  Three weeks after Dr. Caine finished up, I would have surgery on my face, a free-flap skin graft during which doctors would remove a rectangular piece of skin from my hip and sew it onto my cheek and chin. The danger there was reabsorption, the body taking the relocated skin and basically sucking it back into itself. I’d gone to the library after school, had snuck into the adult section and found medical textbooks there. In some cases, patients who’d had this kind of surgery looked almost normal—the new skin raised or stretched or discolored or lumpy, but the shape of their faces essentially correct. Others looked bizarre, grotesque, like they’d had bites taken out of their faces, the surgery grinding and swallowing bones and flesh. This, though, my grandmother told me in a phrase that never varied by a word, was “a state-of-the-art procedure.” I would have it, and we’d hope for the best.

  Finally, the ophthalmologist and the plastic surgeon together would work on my right eye, which drooped and watered and had a tendency to wander when I wasn’t paying strict attention. By the first week of September, I’d be, if not healed, then “on the road to recovery” (another one of my grandmother’s phrases). The doctors had talked about sending me back to school in some kind of protective plastic mask, which I had privately decided to pocket as soon as I was out of my grandmother’s eyesight. Hope for the best, I told myself.

  In those days, the television sets that patients could rent were boxy, outdated models that were bolted to the ceiling and got three channels. This might have been fine for regular folks, but Grandma decided it wasn’t good enough for me. When I checked in on a sunny afternoon in June, I arrived with a twenty-four-inch top-of-the-line Zenith housed in shiny walnut paneling, with a remote control and stereo speakers. Grandma prevailed upon one of the orderlies she’d plied with baked goods to carry it into my room and set it up on a table that she’d convinced a friendly nurse to lend us.

  The week before, Grandma and I had gone shopping together at Lord & Taylor downtown, buying pretty new pajamas and nightgowns, three new robes, slippers, and socks. We’d packed a reading lamp to plug into the wall, and board games: checkers and chess, Boggle and backgammon, decks of cards so we could play Crazy Eights. Instead of the ugly green plastic water pitchers most patients used, Grandma brought me one made of acrylic, with a candy-pink swirl that ran through it, and a matching drinking cup and a pink bendy straw to match. The night before the surgeries were to start, we went to the library and chose a dozen books: Caddie Woodlawn and Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables and The Chronicles of Narnia. “I’ll read them to you,” Grandma promised, because the doctors had told us there would be times when reading would be uncomfortable for me. My face would be swollen, stitched up, and bandaged after the jaw operation. I’d wear compression bandages once the plastic surgeon did what he could for my cheek, and I’d have a patch to let my eye heal, when I wasn’t doing exercises to learn how to track and focus with it again. “Eye gym classes,” Grandma called them.

  I spent my summer on the fourth floor, in the bed by the window in a room for two, where a bulky air conditioner wheezed and rattled day and night. Most of the children on the floor with me were there for simpler surgeries. They were having their tonsils or appendixes taken out, getting tubes put in their ears, having broken bones set or birthmarks removed. These kids would come and stay for a night or two. Parents and siblings and grandparents and friends would crowd into the room with balloons and presents and get-well-soon cards, cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with the orange-and-pink logo, and sheet cakes from Stop & Shop. They’d draw the curtains and imagine I couldn’t hear what they were saying through the flimsy cotton. What’s wrong with her? Jesus. Poor thing. Theah but for the grace ah God, I heard somebody’s mother say in a thick Boston accent. Well, can they fix it? a boy once asked, and his mother had shushed him and hadn’t answered. Once, someone’s little sister wandered through the curtains. She stood at the side of my bed, looking down at me thoughtfully.

  “Do you have cancer?” she’d asked. She was, I guessed, maybe five or six years old.

  “Uh-uh,” I said, and shook my head back and forth the few inches I could move against the pillow. This was between Surgery Two and Surgery Three. Most of my head and face was swathed in tape and gauze. The left half of my mouth worked fine, but the right half was immobilized by the bandages, so everything I said came out of the corner of my mouth, sounding like a secret. “I was in a car accident. I’m having operations to fix my face.”

  She looked at me steadily, staring in a way grown-ups and older children wouldn’t let themselves. “What’s it look like underneath?”

  “There’s a scar.” With my fingers, I traced the raw red line that extended from the corner of my right eye to the edge of my mouth.

  “Does it hurt?” asked the girl.

  Because Grandma wasn’t there yet, I could tell the truth. “Yeah, it does,” I said, “but it’s going to get better.”

  She considered this for a moment. “My brother had food poisoning,” she confided. “He’s ten. He throwed up everywhere.”

  I smiled, wincing as the right side of my mouth tried to mimic the upward motion of the left. “Is he feeling
better?”

  She frowned. “He got a new bike! And he says I can’t even use his old one!”

  The side of my face was throbbing. It felt like the flesh was being squeezed by a giant invisible fist, a hand that would never let me go. A tear leaked out of the corner of my right eye and trailed underneath to soak the bandage.

  “I wish I had food poisoning,” the girl said. “I’d throw up if someone would give me my very own new bike. I’d throw up everywhere.”

  Rage rose inside me, swelling like I’d swallowed a balloon. I found myself suddenly furious at this girl, at her desire to be sick, to be here, and furious at her brother, who, I knew from experience and eavesdropping, would puke and poop for a few days and then go home a few pounds lighter, essentially fine. I was beginning to suspect that I would not ever be essentially fine. My face might never stop hurting, and even if it did, it would probably never look right, no matter what the doctors kept saying.

  Just then, a woman pushed through the curtain, coming to collect the little girl. Her gaze touched my face; then she quickly looked away. “Katie, are you being a pest?”

  Katie, who had clearly already decided that the universe was a cruel and unjust place, screwed up her face in preparation for a tantrum. “I’m not bothering her, I’m just telling her about how stupid Jared got stupid food poisoned!”

  The woman gave her daughter a tight smile, then gripped her shoulders and looked at me . . . or, rather, looked in my direction without looking at me directly, with her gaze focused a few inches above my forehead. It was something I’d noticed grownups doing a lot that summer—some of the nurses, most of my roommates’ parents. “I’m sorry if she disturbed you, honey.”