The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements
Chapter Sixteen
The thought that Win might leave at any minute gave the days a solidity they’d lacked before; they fell past Leo with an urgent sort of weight. The house was shifting, the jagged shadows of autumn giving way to the clear, gray light of winter. Win seemed half-in and half-out of the world, sitting beside her mum with a strained, frightened look about her, like she was fighting hard against the current. He had to resist the urge to grab at her, hold her to him. Sometimes she caught lightly at his shoulder as she drifted past, like she was anchoring herself.
Pritha was getting stronger, and she and Win circled each other like boxers, but the tension didn’t flare into anger. Instead they eyed each other up, tried out conversations as though for the first time. He’d always been the peacemaker with his siblings, but this was something new, a not-quite conflict he didn’t know how to defuse. Pritha kept him busy with a litany of tasks, helping reorganize the bookshelves in her room and bringing flowerpots from the garden inside for the winter, rehanging some pictures in the hallway that she insisted were off center. He enjoyed it for the most part, but it struck him one evening that maybe she, too, had realized that soon he wouldn’t be there anymore, a thought that left him cold and tired.
They’d started eating dinner together, all three of them grouped around the kitchen island or in the lounge with food that Win’s people had sent over, or takeout, or—rarely—their own cooking. (“What is this?” Win asked. Leo poked at the dish and said, “Casserole, maybe?” and Win propped her elbows against the counter and laughed helplessly, her head falling forward, hair tumbling down. They ate it with spoons straight from the dish, poking through for what was edible and fighting over the unscorched vegetables.) They never used the dining room; Pritha said it was too big and Leo thought it was too formal and Win didn’t care.
The night Pritha’s doctor called to say that the first scans had come back clear, Win gave in and they ate pizza, sprawled on the living room floor with Yeh Rishta playing in the background. Even Pritha sat on the floor, her back against the couch and Win lounging by her side. Win could barely take her eyes off her mum.
“I don’t get why you two are so obsessed with this,” Win said, gesturing at the screen. “It takes, like, two hours for anything to happen—”
“That’s why it’s great,” Leo said. “You can have a conversation halfway through and not miss anything.”
“Leo likes Kartik,” Pritha said. “He thinks he is also a bad boy.”
“That’s not true!” Leo said, though it was.
Win rolled her eyes at both of them. “God, this is good,” she said, taking another bite of her pepperoni slice. “I haven’t had pizza since that night we went swimming in Saint-Tropez.”
Leo’s head jerked up despite himself and he met her gaze. She was wide-eyed, as though she’d surprised herself, and the memory flashed across Leo’s mind like lightning: Win’s dark skin and smooth strokes in the pool, the long line of her legs, the dip of her collarbone. At the time he had tried to be gentlemanly and not look too closely. He’d thought cockily that he already knew the easy curves of Win’s body, the press of her nipples against her bra, the shadows on the inward dip of her thighs. Now he thought there was a difference between knowing and getting to look again.
“You’ll be back soon enough,” Pritha said.
“Ma.” Win’s voice was quiet.
“Back where?” Leo shook his head. “Back in France?”
“It’s not like I eat pizza all the time in France,” Win said, mostly to herself. “It’s just, you know…”
“When are you going back?”
Win hesitated. “I’m going over to La Roche-Guyon next week.”
“Wow,” Leo said. He could feel himself smiling, a weird horrible rictus of a grin, but couldn’t get rid of it. “That’s so soon.”
Win swallowed. “It’s only for a few days. Then I’m flying to Montreal for Shift’s wedding, and—well, hopefully I’ll come back here…”
Pritha was already shaking her head. “You said Patrick said that they’d want you back in France after the wedding, and then you have to be in New York until Christmas.”
“That’s what they want, Ma,” Win said, “it doesn’t mean I’m going to do it. I need to be here with you. They’ll want to do at least one more follow-up scan—”
“I am fine,” Pritha said. “I could come out and visit you. There’s no need for you to babysit me.”
Win flinched like she’d been hit. Leo leapt in, still feeling a little dizzy at the speed with which everything was happening. “Win, it’s just that you’ve already taken so much time off, so if this is important—”
“Yes, thank you, I don’t need you to interpret my mother for me,” Win snapped, and all three of them went silent. After a moment Win passed her hand over her eyes and handed Leo the soda, like a peace offering. “Sorry. It’s not certain, that’s all. Everything’s up in the air.”
“It could land anywhere,” Leo said, solemn, trying to make them laugh, but Win and her mother just looked at him as though he was right, and they were worried about it.
Leo slept late more than ever as time took on a momentum he couldn’t fight. He went on the occasional date with Win—they were petering out now that Win and Marie were quietly preparing the world for when Win and Leo went their own separate ways again—and he spoke to Lila every so often. Win’s phone calls with Marie were switched out more and more often for sessions with Emil: “Always a sign my life is back on track,” Win said drily, surrounded by piles of paperwork, printed out calendars and schedule suggestions. One morning Miriam, Gum’s lawyer, called to tell Leo that everything was done and she was sending the paperwork, and he panicked and had her redirect it to Hastings Post Office, where he could pick it up himself without worrying about Win or Pritha watching him sign for it.
Win was gone when he got back, and Pritha was having coffee with a woman from her book club, who scrutinized Leo with far too much interest for Leo’s liking. He made a hasty retreat upstairs and wondered what he would do, now that it was nearly over. There was the wedding coming up, but that would only be a weekend.
Maybe it was time to actually start on the studio, though the idea of committing to it made Leo anxious, something twisting in the pit of his stomach. Everything felt uncertain. But he didn’t have to tell Win he was doing it; he didn’t have to tell anyone he was doing it. If he was desperate, he could tell Pritha, who would frown and declare that he should have done something like this years ago, making it seem inevitable, rather than frightening.
And it might be nice to have a real project, the way the last few months had been a project. He’d been here helping, not just jetting around for a series of photo shoots and living a charmed life for both the public and his own selfish enjoyment. It had been different this time. Even when it was awful, it had been satisfying to be useful, a tool rather than an ornament. He could go after the studio in the same way.
Maybe Leo had spent the last few years searching for the wrong thing. All those times he’d told himself he was “location scouting,” searching for a space, as if lofts and studios were hard to find in capital cities. The location wasn’t the problem—the problem was Leo. Leo as director, Leo running his petty vanity project. But it didn’t have to be like that. Leo had friends, he had contacts, he had Lila and Riva and the thousand other people who had offered to put him in touch with artists they knew, real artists with the vision Leo lacked and the requirements Leo could fulfill. Leo felt he understood art, but he didn’t understand what fledgling artists needed, or how to bring them together, or what to offer them. What he did have was money to burn and a name that would open a few doors. It was a start.
He was driving into London for dinner with his mums tonight, and he resolved to ask Thea’s opinion. She would encourage him no matter what he planned, but she was thoughtful and cleverer than him and would spy out any major flaws in his plan, and explain them to him gently. Dusk was encroaching, and Leo felt restless. He was standing out on the porch smoking in the semi-dark when Win reappeared.
The gravel crunched under Win’s feet as she walked over from her car. Frost was already setting in on the grass and the last withered leaves of the trees, and everything looked like it would crumble away if you tried to touch it. Their cohort of photographers had started to dwindle in the falling temperatures, and the ones that remained stayed shut up in their cars until there were signs of movement. Leo had seen one with a paraffin stove set up for hot tea and coffee.
“You shouldn’t smoke here,” Win said to him as she held her hand out for the cigarette and took a slow, satisfied drag.
“Your mum’s asleep already,” Leo said.
Win nodded, still mostly preoccupied by the cigarette. Leo rolled himself another, and they stood together in silence.
Win broke it. “I’m leaving on Thursday.”
Leo nodded. “For France.”
“Yeah,” Win said, “but I’m not coming back. Maybe for a day or two over Christmas, that’s all.”
He’d been expecting it, but something still dropped in Leo’s stomach, a stone fallen into a well. “Oh?”
“Ma’s fine. The doctors think she’s recovering well. They said she can do a few hours at the office next week if she wants to.”
“How can they tell?”
Win shrugged her shoulders mutely. She looked younger than usual in the porch light. Leo wasn’t sure if the photographers’ lenses could see them at this distance, but it was probably best to assume the attention. He put his arm around her shoulders, thumbed at her collarbone.
“How can they tell?” Win echoed, and laughed. “Leo. They’re doctors.”
“Okay, I just meant—”
“They have quite a lot of very impressive scientific technology,” Win said, clearly enjoying herself, “and they can run tests, and take blood, and do these special things called X-rays, which is where they look inside you—”
“Okay, okay,” Leo said. Win laughed again and dropped her cigarette half-smoked on the wood, ground it out with the toe of her boot. Leo took another drag. His chest was tight. His mum was always going on at him to stop smoking. “Well. That’s good, then. That your mum’s all right, I mean.”
“Yeah,” Win said.
“It’s a relief,” Leo said.
“Yes,” Win said, quiet in the gloom, warm all along his side. She reached out and took Leo’s cigarette again, contemplative like she didn’t really know what she was doing. “I don’t know. It’s not like it’s easier when she’s sick, of course. It’s awful. It’s so frightening. But at least there are things I can do to help. It’s harder when it’s just me and her, to work out what she needs. How to—how to be a good daughter.”
“Mums are tricky,” Leo said.
Win huffed a laugh. “Like you can talk. You have two mums and they both adore you.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I can tell,” Win said. “You’re the most obvious Mummy’s Boy I’ve ever met.”
“Fuck you,” Leo said, laughing, and nudged at her. “I’ve got plenty of daddy issues, if that helps.”
“That’s so original of you,” Win said, but he could see the edge of her smile in the shadows. She rubbed her hand over her face. “God. It’s—it’ll be fine. It’s just…I keep thinking about when my dad got sick. They didn’t tell me he was dying, even though they knew it was terminal. Him and Ma, I mean. Ma told me that Dad said it was too hard, and unfair, that I was going to have to deal with it anyway, so why not give me a year when it wasn’t hanging over me. It was—it was an okay year, even though he was so sick. They acted like he was going to be fine. I think it was better than it would have been if I’d known he wasn’t going to get better. We hung out all the time and…” She shook her head. “But when he died it was like the world ended and it turned out everyone knew it was going to happen but me.”
“That’s shit,” Leo murmured, trying to deflect attention, not startle Win into stopping.
“It was so surreal. I still can’t decide if it was a good idea or not. Ma told me later that they fought about it tons, that she wanted to tell me really badly.”
She paused. They contemplated the dusk, the last of the light. Leo’s head was reeling; he couldn’t even wrap his head around the idea of one of his parents dying. He tried, “To…give you the chance to say goodbye?”
“I think I did get to say goodbye,” Win said. “Not consciously, but we spent so much time together, it was like the Year of Dad. Ma told me that Dad said that him dying was going to make me grow up, that it would be the end of my childhood. And he wanted me to hold on to it for as long as possible.”
Leo nodded. Win ran her hand through her hair.
“He was right,” she said. “But sometimes I think…he never got the chance to see me grow up. Didn’t he—didn’t he miss out on something that he could have had, in a way?”
“Win,” Leo said. He wanted to touch her very badly.
“Anyway,” Win said, mouth quirking self-consciously. “I just keep thinking about it.”
“You have plenty of time left,” Leo said. “It won’t be like that. She won’t miss out. Neither will you.” He wanted to add, I promise, but it wasn’t anything he could give her, wasn’t a promise he could make, and Win looked at him like she knew it and was pretending she didn’t.
“I know,” Win said. Her shoulders straightened, a door closed. “And it will be good to get back to work. Even besides filming, I’ve got a lot of scripts to look through and there’s this thriller, we want to sign the contract later this week. And Shift’s wedding, obviously. And then it’s awards season.”
Leo swallowed, trying to get his head back to where she needed it. “I like the Oscars. Excellent champagne.”
Win gave him an amused look. “You like the week before the Oscars.”
“That’s true,” Leo said. Hollywood buzzing, everyone excited and a bit fucked up, lots of petty drama, lots of pre-parties. He and Win had gone together, years ago while Win’s fame was still only growing. They gave bad advice to fledgling talents and did shots. Leo had dared Win to climb one of the Californian laurel trees in a producer’s backyard and was thrilled when she actually did, grinning down at him in her designer gown, framed by green and twigs in her hair.
“It’ll be good,” Win said, “to be going out for real again, not—” She waved her hand between them noncommittally.
Leo looked down at her, and realized with a start that she was looking up at him. Her breath was warm against his cheek. Leo’s stomach knotted.
“I don’t know,” Win said. “I was so angry, when you came.” She swallowed, dry; Leo could hear the tiny click of her throat. “It’s probably good you didn’t tell me it was your idea. But I’m glad,” she said, very low. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She laughed, a little embarrassed. “Even with all the fighting.”
“I thought you liked fighting with me,” Leo said.
“I guess I’m growing up,” she said. He turned closer to her, arm falling from around her shoulders. Win’s expression was hidden in the dark. Night had arrived while they were talking, and he hadn’t noticed.
“It’ll be weird leaving,” Leo said. “I’m used to this now. Hanging out here with your mum and your horrible cat.”
“She’s a nice cat.” But Win was nodding. “I’ll be glad to get out again. But it’s going to be so different. I’m out of practice talking to people,” she concluded. “I don’t know how to switch back into that world.”
Leo hesitated. Then he said, “Well, I have an idea.”