Rosebushes.
When Gracie Stevens was hospitalized, everything changed. The phone call with the director sent Margaret Thompson into a tailspin. She sighed her best sighs and apologized for Gracie’s terrible state. As the director elaborated on the actress’ critical state, the machines in her sterile hospital room that kept her alive, Margaret fought to keep a straight face. She chewed the corner of her mouth until she tasted blood. If she smiled, he’d hear it in her voice.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” she said.
The world knew Gracie Stevens well. Her face was the smiling makeup-smeared idol that loomed high on billboards. Her bleached hair flowed in cascades of gold. She wept the holy tears of saints into tissues on movie theater screens all over the world. Her decades in the film industry were memorialized in looping GIFs on message boards, film reviews from critics looking for any excuse to wax poetically about her beauty, and footage of her flirting with talk show hosts. Few spoke about her best friend. Her platonic soulmate, Margaret.
While Gracie spent her time rehearsing anecdotes for daytime television interviews, Margaret spent long hours in the blistering heat of soap opera soundstages. She applied and reapplied makeup. Her foundation dripped from her face like she was a melting wax figurine. Manicured nails snagged on splintered doorframes and scratched caught against the cheaply made secondhand clothes she wore. Gracie played the roles of women in peril. Beautiful single mothers who ached for a better life and spoke like real people. Margaret played venomous stepmothers who talked like a junior high student’s poor imitation of a Shakespearean sonnet. She delivered her lines with as much charm as the dialogue allowed, but it never gave way to better opportunities.
Now, with the phone in her hand and a cigarette pinched between her ring finger and thumb, she kept trying not to smile.
“We’d like you to take her place,” said the director.
His fingers tapped against his desk. Through the distance and distortion of the phone, it sounded like a fleet of horses galloping.
Margaret hesitated. She was a schoolgirl again, pretending she wasn’t desperate for the boy on the other end of the line. Pretending she hadn’t spent all day by the phone, waiting for this call. She sighed and ruffled through some papers on her desk – overdue bills, scripts for auditions that led to nothing. With her cigarette in her mouth, she threw papers around the room. A bank notice sliced the thin stretch of skin between thumb and index finger. Blood beaded from the papercut. She plucked the cigarette from between her lips.
“Sorry,” she said, exhaling smoke. “I had to check my calendar. You know how busy I’ve been.”
She laughed. He didn’t.
“We’d like you to take her place,” he repeated.
“I’d love to.”
Later that evening, accompanied by the hum and whir of machines, Margaret sat by Gracie’s side in the hospital. She held her hand and looked at her face. Bruises swelled the lilywhite skin, gray, yellow, deep violet hues. When she touched Gracie’s hair, it was what touching God’s hair must be like. Her heart swelled at the sight of her friend. Tears filled her eyes.
She remembered the night before and how bewildered she’d been by Gracie’s manic ramblings. The two of them were getting old, Gracie said, and it was time for Margaret to have her time in the limelight.
Gracie had had a dramatic flair ever since the pair were children.
“If I just retire,” she said between sips of red wine the night before, “that’ll be all. But if I’m injured and you care for me—”
“Sweetheart.”
Margaret put a hand on her friend’s shoulder and shook her head. The optics of the situation would be wonderful for them both – a beloved starlet whose career came to a tragic end due to a horrific accident, the friend who juggled acting with caregiving. They both went to bed shortly after the conversation and half a bottle of wine. Gracie went to her room upstairs and Margaret went to her own downstairs.
She was asleep when Gracie fumbled drunkenly with the latch on her bedroom window. The actress shivered in her nightgown and slippers. She dove like a swimmer and landed in the rosebushes. The maid called the police the next morning, while Margaret continued sleeping.
In the hospital room, holding the starlet’s hand, she watched the heart monitor’s screen. Its neon green graph reassured her that the other actress was alive and as unwell as she needed to be. No more, no less.
“I’m sorry I doubted you,” Margaret said.
Gracie was too weak to speak. She just moaned quietly and smiled.
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