Five for Forever (8 page)

She lay down on the comfy couch that Emile had personalized for her with some cushions and decorations from home. She reached for an old, ragged Steiff bear that she had gotten at one of her first red-carpet events from a little girl in the crowd. It had light yellow fur, spotty in the typical cuddle places, like on the belly and the back. But her hands grabbed air; the bear was gone. Great, someone had stolen her bear. She hugged one of the cushions instead, closed her eyes, and tried to relax.

Relaxation wouldn’t come—too many people moving outside the door, fought off by Emile.

I am not alone.
The realization swept over her. She couldn’t say what gave it away, but she felt sure.
Or I am turning certified psycho.
Then she remembered what the studio was in the middle of and got up carefully. She looked under the couch—only a number of shoeboxes. There was no wardrobe, the dressing table had no drawer, the costumes of the day hung on a rolling coat hanger. Of course she was alone.

Then, again, maybe not.

When in doubt, fake it.

“Dana, dear. I can see you,” she whispered. “You think I can’t see you, but I can.” She started moving around in her dressing room and played a game with herself. “I think I’m getting hot. Little Dana is somewhere close.” She went to the dressing table, watching the rest of the room through the mirror. “Is little Dana behind the wastebasket?” She grabbed the basket and playfully looked inside. “No, she is not. Is she . . . in the drawer?” Louise opened the middle drawer of the table. “Of course not, she is not that small. But I am getting hot, I know it.”

There was a rustling in the room, almost inaudible; Louise couldn’t identify from where.

She went on. “Here is my bag—maybe she’s in there?”

A small voice came from behind her, “Cold!”

Louise turned and played along, still unable to locate the source. “Silly me, much too small. But she must be here somewhere . . .” The rustling became more distinct; it came impossibly from the couch. She stepped forward. Could it be the backrest cushion? She pulled the cushion forward, two child legs showed, and she removed the rest of the backrest to stare into the wide black eyes of Dana.

“Found you!” Louise said and touched Dana’s nose with a stretched finger.

She sat beside Dana, who made no attempt to get up from the uncomfortable hiding place. “What’s going on? Why did you run away?”

“I got a melon. There was a scary monster. The monster stood between Dad and me. And Dad was sleeping,” Dana explained.

“And then you came here and hid?”

“Monster didn’t find me here.”

“Well, I found you.”

“But you are no monster.”

“That is true.” Isn’t that so sweet.

Dana thought for a second. “And I made it easy.”

“Yes, thank you for that. I think this was a brilliant hiding place. I needed all the help I could get.” Louise tussled Dana’s hair. “What kind of monster chased you off?”

“A big hairy one.”

“A gorilla?”

“A Wookiee.”

“Your knowledge about alien species is admirable. Are you sure?”

“I know Wookiees.” Dana sat up and made a splendid impersonation of a Chewbacca growl.

Louise had to laugh. “That’s a Wookiee, all right.”

The door to the dressing room opened, and Emile popped his head in. “Everything okay here? I heard a strange noise.”

“It was this junior Wookiee here,” Louise said and tussled Dana’s hair.

Emile’s face lit up. “Oh, fantastic! I’ll call off the search!”

“And find her father, will ya?”

A minute later the whole gang poured into the dressing room, which suddenly became very crowded. The Flints gave Dana a group squeeze, and Dana had to explain the Wookiee incident again. Louise made some signs to Emile, who got the meaning. Everyone laughed at Dana’s explanation and impersonation. Suddenly a Wookiee growl echoed from the door. There stood a seven-foot-tall full-grown Wookiee. Dana’s eyes grew wide and then suspicious. She looked at the grown-ups—no one appeared to fear the furry monster. Then the Wookiee took off his head, revealing a black man with short, sweaty hair and a beard. He came forward and kneeled in front of Dana.

“Sorry to have scared you. I wanted to grab a drink in the lounge, saw your stare and then you were gone in a flash,” the actor explained. “I am Dan.” He offered Dana a furry hand.

Dana looked at him quizzically and then took the hand. “You are Dan, I am Dana. But Charlie calls me Dieter.” Laughs again from everyone.

“Good to meet you. Both are very nice names.”

“You are not scary.”

“Well, you can ask my kids about that. No, I am an actor like Louise and Josh here. I play a Wookiee in a
Star Wars
computer game production. Tonight I’ll be home again, eating pizza and watching TV.”

“Now I know what a Wookiee eats!” Dana stated wisely and brought down the house again.

seven

Ship Positions

Rick’s Sunday night date with Debbie Flack, the mother of Dana’s day-care friend Cheyenne could not be filed under success. Debbie was all right to look at but talked excessively about her two kids and issues and problems, and had an inherent negativity that somehow shadowed every minute. Hal, who pointedly kept score on an old whiteboard behind his desk, made one mark in the thumbs-down column on Monday. “Zero thumbs up, five thumbs down. Rick, my longtime friend, I worry about you.”

“Hal, you kill me. Thank you for your consideration, but feel free to organize the next date if you think your interpretation of my taste in women is surpassing my own.”

“Done deal, buddy!” Hal immediately started browsing his little blue book.

“Hey!”

“Hey what?” Hal said over the book.

“It feels wrong that I date girls that had been with you.”

“What’s your problem? You only get . . .”

“No! Get creative.”

Hal waved his book. “But not all of these were . . .”

“Hal!”

“Got it. Fresh ideas, I’ll get creative. All for my lonely, desperate widowed friend.”

Monday the Flint kids were the stars of the neighborhood, fueled by their stories of visiting the film set and cemented by some Twitter and blog reports of a mysterious half-hour shutdown of the
Sell! Sell! Sell!
production. Josh Hancock’s Facebook page showed a photo of a Wookiee bumping fists with a Dana.

Flint and Heller Fine Wooden Boats became busy on Tuesday when Josh’s boat arrived.

“Here they come,” Styler came running onto the yard, waving his arms like a madman, followed by a police car with flashing lights, then the trailer, and at the end another police car. Hal instructed the trucker on how to position the trailer. The plan was to move the boat onto fixtures that kept the giant stabilized in the middle of the yard and allowed construction access from all sides.

The event of a sixty-foot boat arriving spread throughout the yacht harbor community of Oxnard like a wildfire, and when the rented mobile crane got into action to lift the boat from the trailer onto the holding fixtures, a large crowd cheered the crane operator on. A majestic and spectacular sight. Flint and Heller was a recognized company in Oxnard; everyone involved in boating was proud that the best wooden shipbuilders on the West Coast had set up shop here. And even the laymen among the boating folk could see the beauty of the yacht that was otherwise in a pitiful state. M&M adjusted fixtures every five yards, and Styler gave small signs to the crane operator to lower the boat by another inch.

Rick and Hal stood on the sides. They had climbed on top of a stack of wooden beams for a better overview and gave commands now and then.

“Mr. Boatstruck will need to have deep pockets to get this one going,” Rick muttered after the circus was over and the elegant but derelict boat dominated the yard. The hull consisted of lot of holes and obvious rotten beams, the keel had deep breaks and cuts every few feet, and the deck looked as if a giant had tried to punch holes into it with a finger. There was no cabin structure, and the mast was broken off like a toothpick after use. Most mechanical parts and deck fittings were missing, probably stolen by metal thieves. The keel weight was gone; for a boat of this size that would have been around fifteen metric tons of lead—another good deal for a metal sale. But then there were the lines. Oh, those lines! Where many boats of this size were wide-hipped to maximize the space below deck for living quarters, a necessity to spend many days at sea or to have nice vacations, this boat made no compromises and stayed lean and mean from stern to bow. Rick ran his hand across the lines, and he understood what the unknown original designer had in mind. Most boats made compromises between convenience, comfort, speed, and stability. But this one had only one clear intention: speed. Had anyone told Rick to design a boat, green field, white paper, no holds barred, Rick would never have even attempted such a design so radical, so brutal in its consequences, and so straightforwardly aimed at a single goal. This was no boat for a sailor. This was no boat for civilization. This was a boat made for raw elements.

“How old you think she is?” Rick asked Hal.

Hal tapped the hull with the pointed end of a screwdriver a few times to test its consistency. More than once the driver ended up embedded in spongy soft matter that used to be wood. “Based on the state of rot, many decades. Maybe early sixties. It takes forty years in a salty environment to create the amount of rot that we see here on the side walls.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Rick said.

“Do you think she has some sort of history?” Hal asked. “Such a gutsy design must have been the result of a very specific vision. Not too many builders in the fifties or sixties who would have dared.”

Rick took out his smart phone and snapped some photos. “Let’s test the waters with our friends out East. Maybe someone knows or remembers something.”

“You sound hesitant, my friend,” Hal said.

Rick pointed with both of his hands. “Look at this beast. If we repair it according to its original intent, chances are high that our client will kill himself on the first trip out.”

Hal laughed. “Now that would be true advertising for us! ‘Flint and Heller—Finely Crafted Deadly Boats’”

Then the real work began. Every existing piece of the boat’s wood had to be catalogued and evaluated. The state of rot, the state of fit. Every measure had to be taken, which was not a trivial task for a three-dimensional structure with curved lines everywhere. In fact, this was classical reengineering, using the real-life object to draw up the construction and the plans. Tedious work for the gang for the days to come.

Thursday afternoon Hal cornered Rick with a blind date with a former client of theirs, or better, the ex-wife of a former client.

“A very attractive ex-wife of a former client, I might add,” Hal said. “She turned forty recently and has a great laugh. It will be a fun night, I promise.”

“I might not be over Bella completely,” Rick said, defending his reluctance. “And the string of the failed dates like with Debbie did not bolster up my confidence.”

“To spice up the deal: Cheryl has a great body.”

“I don’t know, Hal.” Rick was not really motivated.

“Rick-baby, you will never be over Bella! You guys and the kids were meant to be forever. But life goes on, and you know that she wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone for the rest of your life. And to drive the knife home and twist it, last week you actually made a dead-Bella joke with none other than Louise Waters. If you can do that, you can also date another woman. Anyway, I knew you would try to chicken out, so I pinched your iPhone over lunch and already responded to the text message she sent you. Santa Monica Pier bridge, Saturday, six o’clock sharp.”

“But the kids . . . ?”

“Agnes will cover. I already cleared the date with her.” Hal had blocked all exits.

“But . . .”

“Go, tiger!” Hal tapped on the chalkboard’s empty thumbs-up screen.

And that was that.

Louise’s private feud with Madge Hardy came to a new peak on Friday afternoon. One of the biggest literary agencies in the United States had asked bidding parties to an auction of the hottest ticket of the season. A year earlier, a coming-of-age story called
Five Ways of Solitude with Sarah Lewis
had hit the bookshelves and had left most records of the industry behind. The advance for the first-time author had been extraordinary, $6 million. The marketing budget alone was $20 million, and it was released in twenty-five languages on the same day globally. And the book had been worth every penny. It had entered the charts all over the world at number-one fiction spot in March and had stayed there for a long time there, way past New Year. It was the must-read for everyone older than fourteen, and everyone had read it. Usually a book’s film rights were snapped up much earlier, but the shrewed agent had anticipated the success and had waited out until a considerable craze had built up over the year. A profitable craze.

“You are bidding for the film rights for a book that was under every Christmas tree last year,” the literary agent said, concluding the completely unnecessary spin of stats and records, as every participant knew the facts inside out.

“Get on with it,” Izzy muttered, the conference phone on mute. Louise and Emile, plus Aaron, the scriptwriter hired by Louise’s production company, were sitting in Izzy’s office, waiting eagerly for the auction to begin.

The auctioneer got on with it. “Here with me I have a notary public to witness the correctness of the proceedings. The minimum bid increments is a hundred thousand dollars; we are starting at five hundred thousand. Before I open it, we will run a quick roll call based on the RSVPs you returned to us.”

Izzy gave some running commentary for Louise and Aaron as the auctioneer’s voice droned through the list. “That’s Tom Cruise’s company. That’s the Chinese. Universal is behind that one . . .”

“Mono Movie?” the auctioneer asked.

“Here!” came the reply in the phone conference.

Izzy nodded. “That’s Madge’s outfit.”