Emily Mandel - Station Eleven

When he was done with work in the evening, he had a driver drop them at a restaurant downtown, where he sat across the table from her looking very ordinary in a Toronto Blue Jays cap and she looked at him and thought, I prefer you with a crown, but of course she would never say this aloud. Three and a half years later in the Hollywood Hills she stands outside in the yard and wonders if anyone at the table saw the tabloid photo that appeared the following morning, shot as they were leaving the restaurant—Arthur with his arm around her shoulders, Miranda in dark glasses and Arthur blinded by the flash, which washed her out so mercifully that in the photo version of that moment the bruise was erased.

“What a lovely story,” someone says, and Arthur agrees, Arthur is pouring wine, he’s raising his glass and he’s toasting her, “Here’s to my beautiful brilliant wife.” But Miranda, watching from outside, sees everything: the way Elizabeth goes still and looks down, the way Arthur thanks everyone for coming to his home, meeting everyone’s eyes except Elizabeth’s, who has lightly touched his thigh under the table, and this is when she understands. It’s too late, and it’s been too late for a while. She draws an uneven breath.

“Great story,” Heller says. “Where is that wife of yours?”

Could she possibly go around to the front of the house, sneak in the front door and up to her studio unnoticed, then text Arthur to say that she has a headache? She steps away from the glass, toward the center of the lawn where the shadows are deepest. From here the dinner party looks like a diorama, white walls and golden light and glamorous people. She turns her back on it to look for Luli—the dog is nosing around in the grass, delighted by a scent at the base of an azalea bush—and this is when she hears the glass doors close behind her. Clark has come out for a cigarette. Her plan was to pretend if anyone came out here that she’s looking for the dog, but he doesn’t ask. He taps the cigarette box on the palm of his hand and holds out a cigarette without speaking.

She crosses the grass and takes it from him, leans in when he flicks the lighter, and observes the dinner party while she inhales. Arthur is laughing. His hand strays to Elizabeth’s wrist and rests there for an instant before he refills her wine. Why is Elizabeth sitting next to him? How could they be so indiscreet?

“Not a pretty sight, is it?”

She thinks of disagreeing, but something in Clark’s voice stops her. Does everyone already know? “What do you mean?” she asks, but her voice is shaky.

He glances at her and turns his back on the tableau, and after a moment she does the same. There’s nothing to be gained by watching the shipwreck.

“I’m sorry for being rude to your guest in there.”

“Tesch? Please, don’t be polite to her on my account. She’s the most pretentious woman I’ve ever met in my life.”

“I’ve met worse.”

She hasn’t smoked in a while, managed to convince herself that smoking is disgusting, but it’s a pleasure, actually, more of a pleasure than she remembered. The lit end flares in the darkness when she inhales. She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it’s all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills. Luli wanders near them, snuffling in the grass. There are stars tonight, a few, although most are blanked out by the haze of the city.

“Good luck, darling,” Clark says quietly. He’s finished his cigarette. When she turns he’s already reentering the party, reclaiming his place at the table. “Oh, she’s just searching for the dog,” she hears him say in response to a question, “I expect she’ll be in any moment now.”

Dr. Eleven has a Pomeranian. She hadn’t realized this before, but it makes perfect sense. He has few friends, and without a dog he’d be too lonely. That night in her study she sketches a scene: Dr. Eleven stands on an outcropping of rock, a thin silhouette with a fedora pulled low, scanning the choppy sea, and a small white dog stands windswept beside him. She doesn’t realize, until halfway through drawing the dog, that she’s given Dr. Eleven a clone of Luli. Wind turbines spin on the horizon. Dr. Eleven’s Luli gazes at the sea. Miranda’s Luli sleeps on a pillow at her feet, twitching in a dog dream.

Miranda’s study window looks out over the side yard, where the lawn terraces down to a pool. Beside the pool stands a lamp from the 1950s, a crescent moon atop a tall dark pole, placed in such a way that there’s always a moon reflected in the water. The lamp is her favorite thing about this house, although she wonders sometimes about the reason for its existence. A diva who insisted on permanent moonlight? A bachelor who hoped to impress young starlets? There’s a brief period most nights when the two moons float side by side on the surface. The fake moon, which has the advantage of being closer and not obscured by smog, is almost always brighter than the real one.

At three in the morning Miranda leaves her drafting table and goes down to the kitchen for a second cup of tea. All of the guests except one have departed. At the end of the night everyone was drunk but climbed into expensive cars anyway, all except Elizabeth Colton, who drank quietly, determinedly, without taking any apparent pleasure in it, until she passed out on a sofa in the living room. Clark plucked the wineglass from her hand, Arthur removed Elizabeth’s car keys from her handbag and dropped them into an opaque vase on the mantelpiece, Miranda covered her with a blanket and left a glass of water nearby.

“I think we should talk,” Miranda said to Arthur, when the last guest except Elizabeth was gone, but he waved her off and stumbled in the direction of the bedroom, said something about talking in the morning on his way up the stairs.

The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. “This life was never ours,” she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. “We were only ever borrowing it.”

In the living room, Elizabeth Colton is still unconscious. Even passed out drunk she’s a vision in the lamplight. In the kitchen, four head shots are lying on the countertop. Miranda studies these while the water’s boiling and recognizes somewhat younger and more brooding versions of four of the night’s caterers. She puts on a pair of flip-flops in the sunroom and lets herself out into the cool night air. She sits for a while at the poolside with her tea, Luli beside her, and splashes her feet in the water to watch the moon reflection ripple and break.

There’s a sound from the street, a car door closing. “Stay,” she tells Luli, who sits by the pool and watches as Miranda opens the gate to the front driveway, where Elizabeth’s convertible is parked dark and gleaming. Miranda runs her fingertips along the side of the car as she passes, and they come away coated with a fine layer of dust. The streetlight at the end of the driveway is a frenzy of moths. Two cars are parked on the street. A man leans on one of them, smoking a cigarette. In the other car, a man is asleep in the driver’s seat. She recognizes both men, because they follow her and Arthur much more frequently than anyone else does.

“Hey,” the man with the cigarette says, and reaches for his camera. He’s about her age, with sideburns and dark hair that falls in his eyes.

“Don’t,” she says sharply, and he hesitates.

“What are you doing out so late?”

“Are you going to take my picture?”

He lowers the camera.