fiction by katherine vondy
Before She Wakes Up
This is the conversation they have before she wakes up:
Mollie — Maybe you should get a haircut. You’ve got a lot of split ends.
Laurie — I can just trim it myself.
Mollie — Terrible idea! Remember that time you cut my hair? And the left side was as long as my shoulder and the right side barely reached my chin?
Laurie — It was very fashion-forward.
Mollie — It was appalling.
Laurie — You just didn’t know how to style it correctly.
Mollie — I was seven!
Laurie — You’re the one who wanted to look like a Hollywood star.
Mollie — I looked like a homeless girl.
Laurie — Little Orphan Annie is huge in Hollywood.
Mollie, irritated — I’m not saying you need some drastic new ’do. Just a trim.
Laurie — But you know what happens. You go into a salon and you say ‘hey, I only want to cut it an inch or two, just a trim,’ and the stylist says ‘sure, that’s not a problem,’ and then she engages you in tiresome small talk for thirty minutes and the next thing you know all your hair is in a pile on the floor.
There is a pause.
Mollie — Oh, I see. You don’t want to have the small talk.
Laurie — And everyone’s like ‘oh, this new haircut really shows off your ears!’ But you don’t want to show off your ears.
Mollie—- It’s just half an hour. You can talk to a hairdresser for a measly half an hour.
Laurie — And just pretend like it’s all okay? Like everything is fine?
Mollie sighs deeply.
Mollie — Just get a haircut.
*
In the morning, Laurie calls a salon. They had a cancellation and are able to squeeze her in before her audition at 3:00 PM.
At 2:55 PM she is sitting in a folding metal chair in a hallway full of other 20- to 30-something women sitting in other metal folding chairs. The women prefer not to speak with one another; instead, they re-apply cosmetics and examine the effects in their compact mirrors. Occasionally, one woman will come out of the audition room and another woman will be called in. The producers are running behind, but this is par for the course. While she waits, Laurie re-reads the sides, which is an exercise in futility. She’s had this dialogue memorized for three days and there’s no need to keep studying it. The part is a big one, a leading role in an indie feature. The kind of part that launches careers and turns pretty no-names into überstars. Or it could, at least, if the film plays the right festivals and gets the right publicity and nails the right distribution deals.
It’s past 3:30 PM by the time her name is announced. She walks into the room and generates a smile for the people sitting behind the table. There are four of them, smiling blandly back at her.
“Hi, Laurie,” says one, a guy who is almost good-looking. He would never be a leading man on the big screen, but he might make some hearts throb back in the Midwest. He looks the way she has come to expect directors to look, what with his hipster glasses and ‘90s flannel shirt and scrutinizing expression. In a weird, comforting way, he resembles Joe Giacchino, her first and also most recent love. He examines her headshot, then flips it over and inspects her acting resume. It is not especially meaty and his brow furrows a little bit as he contemplates its sparseness. One small role on a TV show that was cancelled after its third episode, a handful of student films and an infomercial for a software company: these are not the kind of credentials that typically impress the bigwigs of the entertainment industry. He looks up.
“Let’s jump in,” he says. “You’ll be reading with Carrie.”
Laurie nods at the woman sitting next to the director, who must be Carrie, to acknowledge that she’s ready. She looks at the floor for a moment and thinks about Margaret, this person she is about to pretend to be. She looks back at Carrie and says her first bit of dialogue.
It is a good audition; she might not have the years of experience that the other actresses have had, but she knows that she owned it somehow even before she has finished the last line.
“That was excellent,” confirms the director. The four faces behind the table are looking at her with slightly more interest than when she walked in. “We’ll let you know about callbacks in the next few days.”
“Thanks so much for seeing me,” she says. “I really love the script.” This is what every actress says at the end of every audition, but she is being genuine. Margaret is not the kind of role she expected to be brought in for: Margaret is witty and sassy and brash, while Laurie has historically been the more conservative, buttoned-up type of girl. But then again, people change.
“She really felt like Margaret,” she hears the director whisper as she exits the audition room.
“And I loved her hair,” adds Carrie.
*
The rest of the day is just biding time until it is appropriate to go to sleep. Her bedtime has been creeping earlier and earlier with each day that passes. She used to be a night owl, but these days she is in her pajamas at 8:00 PM, in bed an hour later. It’s not long after Laurie turns out the lights that she drifts off into a sleep that verges on catatonia.
Mollie — What’d I tell you about the haircut.
Laurie — What about it?
Mollie — They loved you!
Laurie — I really doubt that my haircut had anything to do with it. Besides, who knows what’s going to happen? It was just the first audition. . . I don’t even know if I’ll get a callback.
Mollie — You’ll get a callback. She sounds certain, as if she knows that her guidance has been effective.
Laurie wakes up in the late morning to a voicemail from the director. He says they enjoyed her audition. They’d like to see her again. When she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she is surprised to find that her eyes are brighter and more mischievous than she has been used to seeing them. It’s a good look for her.
She attends the callback and, at the end of the afternoon, the director tells her she’s got the role. Her first jubilant instinct is to call Mollie so they can share in the excitement, but this is not something that can be easily achieved in the daylight hours. Though Laurie’s memory of the funeral has not faded—not a tiny bit in the many months since it occurred—she has not reconciled that event with what it means.
*
In 1997 they play together after school until their parents come home from work. At twelve, Laurie is considered old enough to keep herself and Mollie out of trouble. Mostly this is true. Occasionally, though, they will find themselves part of small anarchies that their father frowns upon, but generally overlooks. These include their short-lived but violent disagreement over which is the best song from the latest Sarah McLachlan album and their attempt to make chocolate truffles, aborted at the midpoint and the materials abandoned in great, dripping piles in the kitchen.
Even though Mollie is younger by three years, she is the leader. It’s like she’s already a rebellious teen, just transplanted into the body an adorable nine-year-old whose favorite food is still plain spaghetti with butter and grated parmesan from a can. Her flair for the dramatic is well-developed and her imagination is boundless. It’s Mollie who has all the good ideas, like borrowing their father’s birdwatching binoculars to more accurately inform them of the comings and goings of their neighbors, the Conlans, or removing the living room curtains from their rods and wearing them toga-style in a vague approximation of that plot point from The Sound of Music.
It is the binoculars that reveal, one late afternoon, Mr. Conlan running out of his front door in an agitated manner. He paces back and forth across his lawn a few times before he gets into his old Caddy and zooms away.
“Something’s wrong,” Mollie says.
“Definitely,” agrees Laurie.
“We should investigate,” proposes Mollie. Laurie thinks to herself that Mollie isn’t yet old enough to understand when to be afraid, but the truth is that Laurie is a scared person and Mollie is not. Their ages are not the issue.
But Laurie cannot let a girl still in single digits outshine her in the bravery department, so together they creep under the fence that divides their property and army-crawl up to the Conlans’ porch. There are shuddering sobs coming from inside the house, a peculiar kind of crying that neither Laurie nor Mollie is accustomed to.
“It’s Mrs. Conlan,” whispers Mollie, but Laurie is not so sure. Adults do not whimper like whoever is inside the house is whimpering.
Mollie gets up on her knees to get a better look through a window, but her motion knocks over a clay pot planted with herbs. It cracks open loudly when it hits the ground.
The crying stops and a moment later, the screen door opens and Mrs. Conlan walks out onto the porch. The skin around her eyes is pink but it does not prevent her from seeing Laurie and Mollie crouched guiltily by the window, the planter in several ceramic pieces by Mollie’s foot and binoculars slung on a strap around Laurie’s neck.
“Oh—hi, girls,” Mrs. Conlan says, trying to pull herself together.
“Why were you crying?” asks Mollie, and the question gets the tears streaming again. Mrs. Conlan sits down on the floor of the porch. She looks at the girls and they look back at her, curious to hear what sort of event can trigger this sort of odd behavior from adults.
*
The director has a crush on Laurie. He is hoping—plotting—to sleep with her, but Mollie has advised her that there are some situations in this industry in which fucking someone will be to your advantage and some situations in which it will not. Mollie claims that if Laurie can continue to remain impervious to his advances, he very well might cast her in his next film, too.
And in the meantime, the set is a magical place, with the director instructing the entire crew to attend to all of Laurie’s perceived needs. He demands that the hair stylist touch her up after every take, nitpicks the DP’s lighting for not showcasing her beauty, is forever barking at PAs to bring her a bottle of water or a piece of fruit or whatever delicious snack craft services can offer.
Laurie — It’s like I’m a real star.
Mollie, joking — Yeah? Are you part of the Big Dipper? Or are you more of a Cygnus kinda star? What’s it like, up there in the heavens?
Laurie — I don’t know, you tell me!
Laurie’s thoughtless retort brings a long and painful silence, because it is a reminder that Mollie is no longer alive and, as such, should no longer be having these sisterly interactions, not even in Laurie’s dreams.
Laurie gives Mollie a long, piercing stare, but Mollie’s face is fuzzy around the edges, as if she is melting into the air around her.
*
In 2000, Mr. Conlan tells everyone that his wife has left him. This is not interesting news to Laurie, who is more concerned with whether Joe Giacchino is going to ask her to Homecoming. (He doesn’t; it was a far-fetched hope to begin with.) The Conlans’ split is a more compelling event for Mollie, who has just turned thirteen and is therefore battling childhood and adolescence simultaneously. She is certain that the world should get more thrilling as soon as one becomes a teenager. Sometimes, she still sits outside with the binoculars, looking for excitement.
Mr. Conlan explains the situation with a catch in his throat and everyone feels sorry for this cuckolded gent. He says that his wife jetted to someplace faraway—Colorado or Cuba or China—with a strange gentleman, a widower with whom she had become completely infatuated.
“What if it was real?” Mollie proposes to Laurie, recalling the strange exchange she and Laurie had with Mrs. Conlan several years prior. Laurie has tried to forget that conversation.
“What if what was real?”
“You know.”
Laurie feels a chill, because the things that Mrs. Conlan described in 1997 were impossibilities and outside the borders of science.
“Mrs. Conlan is crazy,” Laurie decides at last. “Mr. Conlan is better off without her, anyway.”
*
The movie gets into Sundance, a great coup in the world of indie film. Laurie strides around Park City, occasionally spotting the celebrities who are there to promote their own cinematic masterpieces and feeling a bit like a celebrity herself: sitting on the Q&A panels after the film screens, posing in front of the step and repeat with the director, who wraps his arm gallantly around her waist, a gesture that implies the physical intimacy that Laurie has been careful to evade, though there are times she greatly desires it.
In a coffee shop one morning, an agent approaches her.
“I’m so glad I ran into you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you ever since I saw your film. You were amazing as Margaret.”
“Thank you,” Laurie answers, flattered.
“If you don’t have representation, I want to work with you. Hell, even if you do have representation—drop them. I’m the one for you. A girl with your qualities? Believe me, I can make you a star.”
“What qualities are those?” Laurie asks this question mostly to see how well this agent can bullshit, not expecting him to have a talent for specificity.
“You’re sharp, gutsy, ingenious. You’ve got this feeling about you that is off the beaten path, but still mainstream. It’s a great collection of attributes.”
Laurie is shocked by the agent’s facility with details. Especially since it is the first time many of those words have been said in connection with her. What was it her fourth-grade teacher wrote on her year-end report card? Something about how she needed to stop being so timid if she wanted to find success later in life.
“Let’s set up a meeting when I get back to LA,” she tells the agent.
“Absolutely!” The agent is pleased with her suggestion. Laurie is pleased, too. She really is going to be a star. Mollie will be so happy.
*
In 2017, Laurie gets the worst phone call of her life. It is her father, panicked and desperate in a way that makes him seem a stranger. When he says that Mollie was in a car accident, it’s like hearing it from someone she has never met before. She doesn’t bother asking anything like, “is she going to be okay?” because she already knows the answer.
The specifics of the accident are more exacting than Laurie can bear. The worst part is the bit about the collapsed lung, because the thought of not being able to breathe is the most horrifying thing she can imagine. Laurie cries for her dead sister and does not stop for days. There are so many tears that she becomes dehydrated, a side effect of sadness that she had not realized was possible. She drinks glass after glass of water, trying to alleviate the stinging in the back of her throat. She drinks so much water that her urine turns clear, and still she keeps drinking and crying.
It is weeks later when that old childhood memory comes back to her. It is a strange salve, but anything that soothes this labyrinthine despair is a relief.
*
Sitting on the Conlans’ porch steps, the girls feel great compassion for Mrs. Conlan, whose husband, she says, cannot understand what she is going through.
“I had a sister, too,” she says. “We were best friends, just like you two.”
“We aren’t best friends,” Mollie asserts, and Laurie agrees by rolling her eyes. The mere thought of having a best friend who is just a kid is ridiculous.
“Well, you might not know it yet,” says Mrs. Conlan. The tears are still pooling. “But Janice was my best friend and my sister, and she died six months ago.”
“That’s sad,” says Mollie, which is the extent of the language she has to express negative emotions at this point in her life. “Is that why you’ve been crying?”
“Kind of. I guess it’s sort of hard to explain.”
“We’ll understand,” Laurie assures Mrs. Conlan. It is obvious that Mrs. Conlan is yearning for anybody who is willing to listen, because she keeps talking, unraveling the whole story.
“The thing that is truly heartbreaking is that she had just gotten married. She was on her honeymoon, a cruise through the Caribbean, when she had an aneurism. Do you girls know what an aneurism is?”
“No,” says Mollie, at the same time as Laurie lies and says, “Yes.”
Mrs. Conlan gleans the correct answer. “Janice had a rupture in an artery and bled to death,” she explains, “But because it was internal bleeding, nobody knew what was happening. And since she was on a cruise ship, they couldn’t get her to a hospital in time. So she died.”
This is the first time that either girl has heard of an aneurism, and the thought of bleeding to death without spilling a drop is sobering and frightening.
“You must miss her a lot,” Laurie says, the full impact of what Mrs. Conlan has said finally hitting her. Mrs. Conlan will never see her sister again, ever.
“I do.” Then there is a long pause. “Except she isn’t really gone.”
This is the kind of metaphysical statement that the girls would typically dismiss without a second thought, but they keep listening.
“Because I am becoming her. I’m becoming Janice.”
“How?” Mollie seems willing to believe, though she wants to understand the process, step by step. But this sort of thing, as Mrs. Conlan explains it, does not seem to be a recipe with detailed instructions.
“I just feel myself changing. I’m doing things she would have done. Things I never would have done. Sometimes it’s like I hear her giving me advice.”
Laurie is skeptical. These words are coming from an unbalanced mind.
“And Frank—her poor husband. Oh, that poor man. He can see it. He can see her in me. We talk on the phone all the time. Sometimes I meet him on his lunch break and we go to the deli around the corner from his office. I always get the pastrami sandwich, which is strange because I never used to like pastrami. But suddenly I started wanting this pastrami sandwich by Frank’s office. And Frank says that was what Janice always ordered. I know how silly that sounds. I eat a pastrami sandwich and suddenly I think I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone. But the way Frank looks at me—it’s the way he used to look at Janice.”
“And that makes Mr. Conlan upset?” Mollie presumes, putting the pieces together and understanding Mr. Conlan’s agitation earlier that afternoon.
An even longer pause.
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
Of course, Laurie is a reasonable twelve-year-old and she believes that what Mr. Conlan dislikes is the double whammy of watching his wife drift into insanity and sensing the attention that she’s begun to pay to another man—not whatever supernatural transition Mrs. Conlan claims to be undergoing. This woman is disintegrating, racked with anguish, and her story has no more credence than a fairy tale.
*
Her boyfriend still tries to be there for her, but nobody can offer any solace now that her best friend is gone forever. This is especially surprising, given that her boyfriend is the notorious Joe Giacchino, with whom she has been romantically entangled for some time. At their ten-year high school reunion, Laurie had confessed her childish love for him and he had responded by asking her to dinner at a fancy restaurant the following weekend and then kissing her on the sidewalk afterwards as they waited for the valet to bring their car around. She had felt like the kind of girl that only exists in movies, the kind of girl who waits years and years to be with her true love.
But now, when she looks at him, she does not feel the same way. He’s kind, but one day she overhears him on the phone with his mother and he quietly says, “She just needs to move on,” as if Mollie’s death is a stoplight she is paused at and as soon as it turns green she will be able to put her foot on the gas and leave it behind her.
She is flipping through a photo album, revisiting the past. She stares for a long time at the photo of teenaged Mollie dressed up as Kim Macafee in a community theater production of Bye Bye Birdie. She thinks about how Mollie will never have the chance to be an actress, a concept dripping with infinite sadness.
That night she dreams of her sister for the first time. She sees Mollie’s face and hears Mollie’s voice.
Mollie — I miss you so much.
Laurie — I miss you, too.
Mollie — If only things could have gone differently.
Laurie — It isn’t fair, everything that happened. You were going to move to Hollywood. You were going to be in all the most important films, leave a legacy on the silver screen.
Mollie, wryly — Plans change.
Perhaps it is something in Laurie’s unconscious, dreaming mind that gives her the idea, some strange remnant of that old childhood memory. Or perhaps it is the touch of something truly mystical manifesting itself in the unfamiliar, tactile world. At any rate, the decision is made before she wakes up.
*
The next morning she starts packing her all belongings. Joe Giacchino watches in disbelief.
“But—but . . . where are you going? I thought we were going to go to Branson next weekend?”
“Plans change,” she echoes. She has never been much of a performer, but suddenly the idea of acting is irresistible. How freeing it must be to spend your days pretending to be someone else. She is heading to Los Angeles, fully prepared to transition into a new kind of lifestyle, one which is focused around assuming personas that are not her own. She feels a cautious, anxious excitement about what developments the future may hold.
*
Laurie meets with the agent when they are both back in LA. He’s already got a huge pile of scripts from producers who are looking to cast rising stars just like her. He asks her if she’d always wanted to act.
“Yes, ever since I was a little girl,” she tells him. It’s not true, precisely—but in another sense it’s entirely true.
Laurie — So, I don’t think Mrs. Conlan was crazy after all.
Mollie — I don’t think so either.
Mollie’s voice is very far away. Or else it is deep inside? But then again, it has been deep inside for months, coming as it does only as waves in the ocean of sleep.
Mollie — We’re making it. We’re going to be in movies, TV shows, we’re going to be on Broadway.
Laurie, chuckling — Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Mollie, softly, fading — This is what it feels like when dreams come true.
Laurie doesn’t know what she is feeling, except that it feels like a heaviness lifting off her heart. She had grown so accustomed to it that she’d forgotten it was there. The transformation is the best gift she’s ever received. It is a warmness spreading throughout her body, as if all the loneliness is dissipating and leaving behind only tranquility and perfection. She has one more thought before she wakes up: it happened.
*
Mollie does not come during dreams anymore, but then again, she does not need to.
She thinks of Mrs. Conlan—so many years ago—running away with her dead sister’s husband, living out what was meant to be Janice’s life, and it does not seem such an alien concept. After all, souls are a mysterious business and as far as she can tell there is no evidence that there is not enough room for two of them in one body. Her nights now are dreamless and unhaunted. Her days fill up with costume fittings and table reads. Sometimes the director from that first feature calls her, still pining. She’s successful enough now that she could fuck him without any unfortunate repercussions, but she has more interesting prospects than this guy, even if he did give her that legendary first big break, even if he bears a passing resemblance to the only man Laurie ever loved. When she goes to the salon for touchups on her hairdo, she chats easily with the stylist. She feels brave on a regular basis.
She thinks sometimes she should be sad, like her father. If only he could understand.
Now elderly, he sits on the veranda of the SoCal retirement home he moved to in order to be close to his daughter, binoculars in hand. The on-site nurses bring him his field guides, Peterson’s and Kaufman and Stokes, but he does not consult them. He just looks through the eyepiece, at the trees across the lawn and the horizon in the distance. When she visits him, Laurie gets the disconcerting feeling that he no longer cares about birds, and perhaps he is looking for something else through his binoculars. She would not be surprised; after all, she never used those binoculars for birdwatching herself.
There is an eerie peace to life and, though she may not recognize her face or her mannerisms or even the lion’s share of the thoughts that spring up in her mind, she has something more important than a solid grasp of her own identity. There is a headstone in a cemetery hundreds of miles away with Mollie’s name chiseled into it, but what is there to mourn? Mourning is only for things that are gone, and Mollie is not gone.
Katherine Vondy is a Los Angeles-based writer and director working in film, theater, and literature. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals including the Iowa Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Briar Cliff Review, Quiddity, the MacGuffin, and Hobart. She is also the recipient of writing residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge, Dorland, Wildacres, Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, Starry Night, Palazzo Stabile, Fresh Ground Pepper, and the HBMG Foundation. Visit katherinevondy.com for more information about all her creative adventures.