Alix Ohlin - Inside

She left the party fifteen minutes after the director turned off his enormous TV and broke out the champagne. Back at the cottage, she listened to the message Diane had left, stiffly congratulating her. She felt an agonizing twist of pity and longing at the sound of her voice, but set it aside. She set it aside every day, and each time it was easier, more automatic, less twisting.

Reviews were bad; ratings were good. She filmed the new episodes, working sixteen-hour days, and perfected the art of the sudden nap; at any moment she’d lie down on the couch in her dressing room and drop off. She was sleeping one day when a PA knocked on the door and came in. She was a twenty-year-old UCLA dropout, timid and lithe. Anne couldn’t remember her name.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.

Anne yawned. “What is it?”

“There’s a call for you,” she said, “that got forwarded from the production office.” She held out a phone. “I wasn’t sure what to do, but this woman’s been calling, first the network and then the producers. She’s very resourceful, and really pushy. On the one hand it’s probably a crazy person but I just thought, what if it’s not? What if she’s telling the truth and I didn’t tell you? I hope you aren’t mad.”

Anne stared at her blankly and took the phone without giving it much thought.

“I’m really sorry,” the PA said. “It’s just, you know, I wasn’t sure what to do. She says she’s your sister.”

“I don’t have a sister,” Anne said. She weighed the phone in her hand, then hung up.

A week later the girl came by Anne’s trailer again and stood in front of her so long that she had to say something, if only out of impatience.

“I haven’t seen you for a while,” she said. “Everything okay?”

The PA’s face wrinkled. “I’ve been here. I think you just didn’t see me.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I’m self-involved, but I’m not blind .”

The PA nodded, apparently taking this as a statement of fact instead of the joke Anne had intended. Then someone swooped in to reapply her makeup, blocking the girl from view, but Anne heard her say, “Anyway, I’m really, really sorry.”

“For what?”

“I brought you this,” the PA said, producing a manila envelope from her messenger bag and handing it to her.

Anne stared at it, having no idea what it was.

“It’s your fan mail,” the girl said. Her walkie-talkie crackled and she turned to leave.

As the stylist kept working, Anne glanced at the letters. It was her first fan mail ever: young girls, middle-aged women, boys asking her to their proms, convicts, men promising they’d leave their wives in a heartbeat if she’d meet them for a drink, they really felt like there was some kind of special connection there, two hearts that could beat as one. If you wanted to feel optimistic about the human race, fan letters to a TV star were not the place to start. She flipped through the stack, not thinking she was looking for anything in particular, until she saw it. A letter postmarked Utica, New York, with Anne’s name written in the bubbly, curly penmanship of a teenage girl.

She thought that waiting to read it would make the letter seem too important. Better to read it as quickly as possible, then throw it away.

She saw the words Annie, we need money before she panicked and crumpled it up. Even though she had stopped reading, words kept throwing themselves at her: television and please and need and baby , each one giving her a strong, unpleasant, sickening sensation. How could she have taken in so much of the letter when all she wanted to do was get rid of it?

“Sweetie, do you want a Xanax?” the stylist said. “Please try not to cry, it’ll be hell on your makeup.”

Two more weeks of twenty-hour days, all workouts and hunger, tanning and fittings. She was stretched into a new shape, her skin and muscles reconfigured, cut from new cloth. At night she dreamt of cheeseburgers and banana splits. She had never had trouble keeping her weight down, but this was a whole new discipline, and she embraced it. She didn’t even have to try to forget the phone call and letter; her body was too busy forgetting everything for her.

She made friends with the PA, who sometimes came over after work with some Zone meals for dinner. They’d watch movies, and several times the PA slept over on the couch in the living room. Her name was Lauren, but Anne still thought of her as the PA. It comforted her to wake up and see her there; Anne would make coffee and bring her a cup, happy to do at least one thing in her day for somebody else.

So she was surprised and a little annoyed one afternoon when the girl brought her a phone and said her sister was on hold.

“Please,” Anne said. She was wearing a leather bustier and five-inch stiletto heels and could barely move. “I thought I told you.”

“She keeps calling,” the PA said. “I know you said you don’t have a sister, but this woman … To be honest, Anne, the producers kind of want to know what’s up. They’re wondering if something’s, like, weird. That the media might get a hold of? No judgment or pressure or anything. They totally understand that everybody has, you know, some family strangeness. But here they’d just like to know the particulars.”

At this, Anne’s eyes narrowed. “Give me the phone,” she said, then held it to her ear. There was breathing on the other end, and she felt like she was going to be sick when she heard a long, gentle sigh, like a sheet settling on a bed. “Hello?” she said.

There was no answer, just another sigh. It was like getting a crank call from a ghost.

“Well, talk to me if you’re going to call,” she said.

What came through the line was the sound of weeping, and this was so unexpected, so shocking, that she dropped the phone on the ground. “Whoops,” she said to the PA.

The girl instantly picked up the phone and held it to her ear.

From her expression Anne could tell that the call was still connected. “Damn,” she said under her breath, and held out her hand.

“Annie,” Hilary said all in a rush. “Please don’t hang up. I saw you on television, and we need help.”

Anne’s stomach twisted uneasily. “What’s going on?”

“Alan lost his job and then the baby got sick and we don’t have insurance, and now the hospital says we owe thousands of dollars, and our parents don’t have any money either.”

“Where are you?”

“We’re at home, we’re still right here.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Anne said, remembering the day in her apartment when Hilary’s uncle revealed all the lies Hilary had told, how Anne had heard nothing from her when the baby was born. Words came back to her from the long-ago past, not her mother’s hysterical voice but Grace’s calm, soothing, maddenly therapeutic one. You can be anything you want to be. You don’t have to be like them . “Don’t call here again,” she said, handing the phone to the PA, who took it back with an expressionless nod and went off to get her some coffee.

In New York, it was late fall. In the year she’d been gone she’d been back only once, for upfronts when the show was picked up, the visit a blur of luncheons and parties with press and execs, questions about how much was she like the character she played and did she enjoy the romantic scenes with the handsome guest star and did she have a boyfriend in real life and was he jealous. Each night she’d return to her room and tumble into bed, too tired even to watch TV, then she’d get up the next morning to face more of the same. She had barely been outside in the three days it lasted, and before she knew it she was leaving the hotel for the airport, hardly having set foot on a sidewalk or sat in a cab or seen anything of New York at all.