“I’m going to call some people,” says Wale. “See if they’ve heard anything.” A look of unease hasn’t left him.
“Wale, when you met my father, was he in some kind of trouble?”
“All of Laos is trouble. The place is full of bad cats.”
“But my father wasn’t mixed up with any of them,” she insists.
“He didn’t strike me as the type.” He avoids her gaze as he says it. “Honestly, if I was worried, I’d go over myself and bring him back with me.”
She stares at him a moment, trying to discern if he’s serious. “You wouldn’t. Your heart’s made out of shit, remember? You only do things that are in your interest.”
“It would be in my interest,” he says with a glint in his eye.
Maggie blushes and looks away. “Don’t talk like that. Just call those people and tell me what you hear.”
She offers him a ride back to the farm, but he says he has things to do and heads off down the aisle. On her own she continues through the store, cursing when she realizes she’s lost her shopping list. She gathers ketchup, buns, and napkins. At the checkout counter, the girl working the till asks her if she’s stocking up for tonight’s party at the farm.
“You know about it?” Maggie asks.
“Sure,” says the girl. “That Fletcher guy you’re always with has been inviting everyone in town.”
Once the groceries are rung through, the girl reaches for the cigarette case, but Maggie declines the offered pack. She’s three weeks late. She still thinks it must be stress.
“Cold turkey?” the girl asks, and Maggie nods. “Yeah, I figured as much. To be honest, right now you don’t look so good.”
When she returns to the farmhouse, the sun hangs low in the sky and there are a dozen unfamiliar vehicles parked in the driveway. She should be glad of them; drawing new people was Fletcher’s whole reason for suggesting a party at the start of the Labour Day weekend. But there’s too much to do: groceries to deliver into Rhea’s hands, food to prepare, and the projector to set up so people can watch the film Maggie has put together. It’s a single movie, not quite the one she has imagined but a version of it distilled from all the summer’s footage, a mammoth thing four reels long, each twenty minutes except the shorter final one. And thanks to the checkout girl, who remembered them at the last moment, now Maggie has three more spools of processed film to add, though she’d forgotten all about them. She worries they’ll spoil whatever shape and order she’s managed to give the thing, but the new footage will have shots of newcomers who aren’t in the rest, and people will want to see themselves.
As she carries the grocery bags past a group drinking beer on the front lawn, she sees Fletcher talking to a pair of men who sport aviator sunglasses and Robert Redford haircuts. She has met them before: Karl and Lambchop, friends from Fletcher’s boarding school days. Changing course to meet them, she realizes they’re in the middle of an argument. When Karl spots her, though, he breaks off to greet her as if she’s the surprise visitor and he’s the one long settled on the farm. It turns out he and Lambchop are only up for the weekend.
“Did you get the burgers?” Fletcher asks her. “Rhea’s waiting—”
“Here,” she says, handing him all the grocery bags except the one with the film spools. “Tell her I’ll be there soon. I have to start up the projector.”
Approaching the porch door, she spies a piece of paper on it that at first she takes to be a new version of Fletcher’s principles for the pursuit of happiness. Steeling herself to be embarrassed, she draws closer and sees the words are different.
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled asses. We accept dodgers, deserters, and dissidents. We also accept peaceniks, beatniks, cowlicks, and New York Knicks. We do not accept American Express.
It could be worse. Looking back, she finds Fletcher still on the lawn, waiting for her reaction, so she gives him a thumbs-up and he smiles with a relief that makes her ashamed of herself. Behind him, the sun has been swallowed by a cloud, the pink edges damming a great reservoir of light that looks on the edge of bursting. It would make a good shot, but for tonight she’s decided to leave the camera in its bag.
Upstairs, the playroom is empty of people though crammed with chairs, the rest of the house denuded of them earlier in the day by Fletcher, who said he wants her to have the biggest audience possible. Moving down the crooked space between the rows, she reaches the corner where the editing machine has been tucked away on its table. With a sloppy taping job she appends the new footage to the end of the final reel, doing it quickly because she’d rather not think about how inferior the unedited footage will seem after the rest. Then she winds it by hand from its old spool onto the new one. As she does, she remembers her interview with Wale. At first she thought she’d include it. She hasn’t finished synchronizing the sound, so tonight the film will run silently, and it struck her as innocuous enough to show a few minutes of Wale’s face at least. When she watched the interview with the volume down, though, it seemed even more exposing: the way he doesn’t look at the camera, the way his expression grows rigid like it’s all he can do to keep himself in check. No one who sees him in that footage could ever look at him again in quite the same way.
Then there’s the other clip, the one that has been bothering her awhile.
On an impulse, she goes to the closet in her and Fletcher’s bedroom, where she retrieves the curl of film with Pauline and the dead sparrows. Probably Fletcher’s right and Brid won’t find anything wrong with it. Maybe she won’t even see it. Hurriedly, Maggie adds the clip to the reel as well. It’s out of sequence, but as finales go, it should do fine.
Loading the first reel onto the projector, she starts up the machine, watches the camper van travelling along the road, and is tempted to linger. She remembers the day at the start of June when she filmed the shot, standing on the shoulder while Fletcher, indulging her, drove back a quarter mile to be recorded going by. There’s a comfort in viewing a scene watched many times before, one thing following another in an expected way. Next come the shots of the bedroom with its trash-filled drawers and the crack in the ceiling that still hasn’t been fixed. There are so many things to do before the cold weather sets in: insulation for the attic, new mats and coat hooks for the mud room. She ticks through the list in her head before assuring herself that every item is already on paper. Then she forces herself out of the room and downstairs.
In the kitchen, Rhea greets her without disguising her annoyance at Maggie’s lateness. There’s a handful of people drinking and chatting around the table, but apparently as far as Rhea is concerned their idleness is sacrosanct and only Maggie’s work is necessary. All week Maggie hasn’t spoken with the Centaurs. Dimitri has stopped making an issue of George Ray, so she has decided to leave things be, not wanting to play Dimitri’s chaperone. Lately he and Rhea always seem to be ill-tempered, though, and yesterday at dinner they just smiled coldly when Fletcher called tonight’s party a farewell bash for them. Now, as Maggie works alongside her, Rhea stays silent except to order her around. After fifteen minutes of it Maggie excuses herself to change the reels.
During her absence from the playroom, a number of people have discovered the film, some sitting on chairs, some leaning against the wall. Onscreen, there’s a row of neon signs she shot in Niagara Falls, which means only a few more seconds remain before the reel ends. When it does, she replaces it quickly to keep the audience from losing interest. Nobody speaks or moves, as if they’ve gone blank with the screen and will be reanimated when the projector starts again.