Class Novel: Chapter 11 by Carson Williford

Author's note: I tried to tie together a lot of the problems we've brought up and build the tension in the story. I tried to get more into Nat's mind so readers know her attitude about the problems, her pregnancy, and the film. I realized only after writing this that Susan and Cody aren't distanced in it as they were in Jenny's chapter. I suppose in a full novel we would develop this into a subplot, but here I decided to show at the end that they are either not necessarily back together but aren't necessarily apart. The chapter is more three scenes connected by Nat's problems. Hopefully this works. Hope you enjoy.

It was on the first morning after Nat had taken her final pills, when she woke up feeling no better, the same vertigo, the same sickness—it was on this morning that Nat began to accept what was wrong with her. She put it this way, wrong with her. She had known, of course. The button on her pants reached over only her flexed abdomen, her held breath. She had tried to convince herself that her missed periods were due to the fact she was so thin. (She had missed her period when she ran cross country in high school, and so had experience.) But here, no such thing. The pills from her drug trials—they had not worked. Nat was still sick.

She began seeing it around Unalaska, in the family that spent a weekend in the Grand Aleutian, in mothers at diners. Once in Amelia’s, on a morning that she and Susan and Cody drank their morning coffee at the same booth she had first sat in, the table’s underside sharp with dried gum and the bench’s padding aged flat, Maria, their waitress, told them about her son.

“I get off at three to pick Miles up from daycare,” she said. According to Cody, Maria is twenty-six. She had moved to Unalaska to find Miles’ father, who had moved to Unalaska to work a fishing boat and never come home. Once here, though, she didn’t have enough money to return home, never finding Miles’ father and unable to leave. Maria’s hair was frizzed and her eyes suspended more than open.

“How old is Miles?” Nat asked.

“Almost three,” Maria said. “Want to see a picture?”

Though she wanted to answer in the negative, Nat recognized this question as one she was not allowed to answer no to. Susan said that, yes, they would like to see Miles.

“Here he is,” said Maria. She handed Susan a wallet-sized photo of a thin-haired boy wearing a green jersey. In the picture, he was learning to smile. From across the table Nat looked at this boy, his eyes squinted over lips that strained to show both rows of teeth. She, too, had a picture like this, her own strained expression. Her mother kept it under the family’s coffee table.

“He’s adorable,” Susan said.

Susan passed the photo to Nat. Nat held this boy, Maria’s boy.

“He’s adorable,” she said. She was lying. Or rather, she wasn’t telling the truth. It wasn’t that that Miles was ugly, so much as that he existed, that he smiled as Nat had, that he grow and one day sit in diners and coffee shops like Nat, that he would likely become a parent one day with his own children, who would each of them have mothers. These mothers, Nat thought, these mothers would have no support and would work for themselves for their children—regardless of whether their man was around, they would work for their children. Like Maria, the waitress, who retrieves the photo of her son from Nat after she refills their mugs from the steaming pot of coffee.

When she left and took the coffee back to the counter, Cody leaned in to the table, “And even though she hasn’t found Miles’ father, no one has ever heard her complain.”

Silence, Nat thought. Silence.

               

                Several times Eugene asked her whether she was sick.

                “I’ve been stressed from filming,” Nat said. She carried with her, on most evenings when she returned to the hotel, her backpack of notes and footage from the day’s shots, a duffle bag that Susan claimed she couldn’t fit in her room, and a water bottle. She did not lie to Eugene—she had been feeling stressed from the film. She tried to hurry past him to avoid revealing more.

                “You should try getting more sleep,” he said. “You leave so early and now it’s almost ten.”

                “The film won’t shoot itself,” Nat said. She slid her feet around the desk, not wanting to be rude.

                “When do you think you’ll be done?” Eugene’s eyes widened and his lips parted. He raised a hand to his nose. “Sorry, I’m going to sneeze.” Eugene sneezed and rocked in his chair like a shot cannon. “Hold on one minute,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to grab a tissue.”

                Nat did not want to be rude to Eugene. He was unaware of her sickness and of the stress the film put her under. The money from the drug trials secured her only a ten thousand dollar budget for her brother’s film. Her parents’ phone calls felt more like warnings than catching up. She needed to impress them. She needed to capture the memory of their son. She needed to portray who her brother really was. She needed to create high-quality with low-budget. She needed to clean her vomit from the toilet on morning’s she got sick. She needed to make her film. She needed.

                “Sorry about that,” Eugene said. He sat down and smiled at her. “So when do you think the film will be finished?”

                “As soon as possible,” Nat said.

                Though Nat told herself this film was about her brother, it was only in rare moments that she felt his presence in it. On one of these days, she was filming a scene in the Holy Ascension of Our Lord Cathedral, which Nina and the crew had taken to calling “Tha Ol C.” This was one of the movie’s few pre-hike scenes. Cody sat in a pew in the empty church, the other pews spreading bare and ordered around him, his hiking pack bulking and leaned beside him. They had already caught a wide shot from the church’s inner balcony, the isle and its concrete floor lit by the open double-doors at the end of the nave beneath them. The church’s stained glass was lit by the sun, the midday light also streaming into the church from windows beneath the ceiling. Outside the windows, the mountaintop runway could be seen with Ballyhood Mountain rising in the distance behind it.

                It was in the final shot of the flashback that Nat saw her brother. She watched through the camera as Cody lifted his head from his hands—his position while deciding that he would prove himself against his parents by complete his hike. The scene is intended to show her brother’s spiritual commitment. So Cody lifts his head and looks—as the shot captures it—toward the stained glass of Mother Mary holding Jesus, an image that gave Nat particular trouble filming this scene. After a moment of Cody looking at the mother and child, though, the camera tilts to a low angle and moves behind him, Cody looking not at the stained glass but the peak of Ballyhood Mountain in the distance. From this shot, where Nat could see only the back of Cody’s shoulders and his unkempt brown hair, the top of his pack above the pews, her brother’s eyes on the mountain above all else, she saw her brother. She lifted her head from the camera and saw the scene before her, her brother preparing to begin a hike that he knows might kill him, might leave him stranded in a snowy, unseen crevice or sliding from ice down a mountainside. She saw her brother praying to some idea of himself that stood on top of that mountain, away from his parents and LA and even his sister, that version of himself that would return or stay forever on that mountain. This was the brother she loved.

                Nat looked at the camera again when Susan touched her shoulder. Susan shrugged, raising her hands to her shoulders and pointing toward the camera.

                “Cut,” Nat yelled. She felt disoriented, as if she herself halfway up the mountain.

                Cody turned around, put his elbow of the pew. “I was wondering when that would end.”

                “Sorry,” Nat said. “That’s our best shot so far.”

                “But I didn’t even say anything,” Cody said. He stood up and put the hiking pack around his right shoulder.

                “But you acted well,” said Nat. She looked back up to the windows above the stained glass.

                “So we’ve got all we need at Tha Ol C?” Susan asked.

                “I think so,” Nat said.

                “Does that mean I can go home?” Cody asked.

                “It’s only noon,” Susan said. “We can fit another scene in today.” She turned to Nat. “What do you think?”

                Let’s take a break, Nat said. We’ve got what we needed.