14. Then Valentina’s House Part 1

In mid-April of 2008, fifteen years after her out-of-the-blue call and answering machine message that had led to Valentina and Cleo pitching me my role in Horror Movie, Valentina called and left me another message. This one a voicemail on my cell phone. We hadn't spoken since the brief trial. I don't know how she got my number this time, and she never told me.

I didn't recognize the phone number associated with her voicemail, of course, but I recognized her voice, despite it being reedy, weak, and distant, as though she were speaking to a phone that was on the opposite end of a large room, maybe the dining room in Karson's house. It's difficult for me, especially now, not to relate everything that happened and happens in terms of our movie.

On the voicemail, Valentina said she had a proposition, and she laughed. Her laugh turned into a cough. She didn't apologize for laughing or coughing. She said the proposition was serious. This was a knowing, canny replay of the message she'd left on my answering machine in 1993. The uncanny part was that I hadn't remembered what it was she'd said originally until I heard her repeat it. We were trapped in another script, one that was self-aware and echoed what had taken place earlier.

In retrospect, maybe Valentina, nearing her end, couldn't resist thinking in the language of film.

***

I didn't know anything about what Valentina had done with her life post–Horror Movie. I was surprised she still lived in her hometown. Given everything that had happened on-set and afterward, and her complicated relationship with her parents, I thought she would flee this town as fast as a final girl fleeing the killer. Maybe on some level she enjoyed being the local pariah, the cautionary tale. She wasn't exactly conflict-averse. I always admired and loved that about her.

On the way to her place, I swung by the old elementary school we'd used in the movie. I expected to find a skeletonized husk, or a pile of rubble, or an empty lot for sale. But the brick school building survived and had been converted into condos with an adjoining apartment building and parking lot on the footprint of the old schoolyard. Ah, you can't stop progress, you can't stop change. I wondered who lived in the classroom we'd used, what the supply room had been converted into, and what might lurk in its corners.

Cut to my arriving at Valentina's house, which was a modest Cape, maybe a half mile away from where her parents lived. It was three blocks from the road we had used for the various shots of the teens walking.

I parked on the street. There was no curb to delineate the road from a cracked, narrow sidewalk. Her house's exterior was freshly painted yellow, the trim a bright white. Larger neighboring houses leaned in, keeping it in line. New, early-spring grass patched the muddy front yard. The front stoop was red brick. I wiped my feet on a straw welcome mat and rang the bell.

Valentina opened the door, and the sight was so shocking, I took a step back. She was always short, and I had not expected her to grow taller in the intervening years, but now she was small. Her shrunken body was adrift in plaid flannel pajama pants and a billowy hooded gray sweatshirt. Her long, dark curls were gone. She wore an orange winter beanie over her obviously bald head. Her cheeks had deflated and sunk below her cheekbones. Her skin was sallow and jaundiced. Her moon-sized eyes settled on mine and her expression was blank, a deathly vacancy that was more than unrecognition; it was a despairing incomprehension at the unfairness of her physical degradation. I thought about asking if she was home alone, how someone could leave her alone like this. Then, with great effort, as though drudging up a lost memory, she smirked, and her face became one I recognized, if only as a sickly echo.

"I know. I look that good, right?" she said. There was anger and sorrow and grit and a gallows charisma if not humor in those few words. Valentina held out her arms, pivoted on her heels, posing like a supermodel.

I wanted to cry but I was also a little bit mad at her for making me confront her illness after years of not seeing her, of bursting my delusionary fantasies that, of all of us, she was and would be okay. She was supposed to be the one who survived.

I said, "Hey, um, it's great to see you, but fucking hell."

"Exactly. Sorry, I should've warned you." She paused and had that look, that almost-smile she used so often on-set. Maybe she was still directing me. "I thought about putting jeans on at least, but then, well, I spent most of the morning puking. Come on in." She stepped aside and held the door open. She didn't make any sort of move that communicated she wanted a hug or a handshake.

I followed her slow shuffle through the sparsely decorated house, which was clean and well-kept but for a small, cluttered office space into which I had the opportunity to briefly glance. I thought I saw a reel-to-reel projector among boxes and paper piles, and I wanted to linger there, but she led me to a living room that had a television, a half bathroom, a wooden dining-room chair, plus a puffy love seat and pull-out sofa bed both covered in sheets and blankets. A bottle of Pedialyte, assorted prescription bottles, and a half-eaten plastic sleeve of saltine crackers cluttered an end table. The room's smell was something I'd like to forget.

Valentina cratered onto the love seat, and I settled into the wooden chair.

She told me she had stage-four pancreatic cancer that had spread pretty much everywhere. She had maybe two months left, but they'd said that to her one month ago. She had opted for home hospice care, something her parents were able to help pay for. Normally her mother and the day nurse were there, but Valentina had managed to convince both to leave so she could have some time alone with me.

I told her I was sorry. And I didn't know what else to say. I knew nothing of her too-brief adult life, and it felt wrong to barrage her with questions about who she was and what she had done now that both her past and future were dead. But I still asked her, because I wanted to put off whatever her new proposal was.

Valentina said that "after everything"—here she paused to honor our experiences—she had moved to Denver and worked admin for Learningsmith, a short-lived educational toy and game store, then moved to San Diego to work for Petco, and in between she married and divorced a guy named Jeremy who didn't do her the favor of disclosing he was a high-then-low-functioning alcoholic. He wasn't a monster, but it became impossible to live within his constantly draining whirlpool. They remained in touch, and he was doing better as far as she could tell. After the divorce, she moved back to the East Coast, settling in Providence. She worked for her father, helping to manage the car washes, and the experience wasn't as terrible as she had thought it would be. Of all the things she told me, her voice sounded the saddest at that. Her cancer was diagnosed last summer, already in stage three, and none of the treatment prevented the aggressive disease from worsening, spreading. Her eyes were too big now, could see too much, and they blinked and rolled out of focus. Her parents wanted Valentina to move back home so they could help care for her. She would've rather stepped in front of a bus, but she didn't tell her parents that. Renting this house was the compromise. She started most days with a hard cry in the bathroom. The duration of those bouts diminished with each passing day, just like her.

Her candor was a shock and not a shock. I couldn't help but feel there was a purpose to it. She thanked me for letting her say what she couldn't to her mother. Her thank-you was cold though, an employer thanking an applicant for the effort.

With her flash autobiography completed, she asked, "So quid pro quo, yeah? What have you done with your life?"

I said, "Keeping a low profile. Walking the earth."

She smiled again. It was both wonderful and horrible. "Right. Walking the earth. Are you Cain or Caine with an e?"

"Maybe both. I have a few marks," I said.

"Don't we all." She wrapped her thin arms around her chest and shook her head. "I never blamed you. Ultimately, I was responsible. I failed to make a safer set."

"I still blame me." I wished I had my mask, so I could hide. But that's a lie because the mask was never about hiding.

She said, "I know you tried reaching out a few times, but the years of no contact wasn't about you either. I just wanted to, needed to—"

"Forget. You needed to forget. Which was and is impossible. But I totally understand—"

Valentina interrupted. "May you be blessed and cursed with a long life, my friend, one over which to continually pick at the corpse of regret. Anyway, no, I didn't want to forget. Certainly not in the way you mean it."

"I'm not sure I understand."

Valentina waved a never-mind-what-I-said hand at me. "Being so close to oblivion makes me think and say portentous things." She pointed a finger at me. "Not pretentious though."

"Of course. Never."

"Now that we have that out of the way. I do have something to ask. A new proposition. But I also wanted to see you, see how much you've changed."

"Well? What's the verdict?"

"It's too early for a verdict. Clearly you've filled out, and good for you that you still have your hair."

I said, "Thank Christ," a little too enthusiastically, and then immediately felt guilty given Valentina's bald head. "I mean, I'm not that old yet."

"Overall, I'd say you're more the same than not."

"Is that a good thing? It sounds kind of pathetic." I was never very good at self-deprecation because I was too honest.

"To be determined."

"Nice."

Valentina struggled to stand up. "Okay, sorry, but I need to use the bathroom—"

I stood too. "Don't be sorry. Do you need any—"

"No. I don't need any anything." Once she was upright, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, then shuffled away from her seat. "If you want anything, please, head into the kitchen and get it yourself. Take your time. I'll just be on the toilet, trying to decide if I should bother reupping this place's rental agreement."

I stood with my arms out like I was ready for her fall, like I could catch her.

She waved me away and said, "Go, please."

Her more than strongly worded hint taken, I wandered into the kitchen and got myself a glass of tap water. Instead of expending mental energy on what her proposal was going to be, I tiptoed through the house to her office. At the doorway, I listened for sounds of Valentina emerging from the bathroom, but all was quiet. I walked inside. There were two tabletop Macs on an elongated and overloaded wooden desk; one of the computer screens was double the size of the other. On and around the desk and shelving were a chaotic array of wires and other equipment, including a reel-to-reel projector and stacks of boxes piling toward the ceiling in a losing game of Tetris. I focused on the reel-to-reel projector, the gargoyle on the top shelf. Its exterior shell was metal, painted a light brown color, and in decent condition other than a few rusted patches at the base stand. The empty reels perched vertically above and below the projection lens. I didn't know anything about it, but judging by the appearance, I assumed it wasn't functional, was a collector's item, though haphazardly stored. I decided the carefree placement of it looked too carefree. The projector was cherished, but she didn't want anyone else to know how much she cherished it. Maybe it was a carefully placed prop to seed movie thoughts in my head prior to her new proposal. Later, when I finally returned to my apartment, I searched for projectors on eBay and found an 8mm film model from the 1940s that looked similar, but not quite the same. I moved on to the sieged desktop and a rubber-banded stack of papers print-side down. Not daring to set my glass of water on the desk, I flipped the stack over with one hand, accidentally nudging an unseen computer mouse. Both Mac screens woke from their slumber with a loud, crescendoing note from a bombastic classical piece. Frightened by the audio jump scare, I stumbled away from the desk, splashing water onto the throw rug. I wiped the wet spot with my foot and listened for Valentina. The toilet flushed on cue. Fuck. I still had the paper stack in my hand. I took a quick peek at the print and saw the telltale screenplay typeface and the capitalized character names from Horror Movie. There were red-ink underlines, circles, and notes in the margins. I returned the screenplay to the desk. The glowing computer screens displayed the same home page, cluttered with folders that had roman-numeral names, the letters lowercased.

I walked back quickly to the living room, and Valentina was already settled in her love seat.

She said, "Welcome back. I'd offer to give you a full tour of the place, but, you know."

I sat down on the wooden chair again, feeling caught. By "caught" I mean "ensnared." "Sorry. I'm a snoop," I said, and added, "That's a cool projector, in the office," as though she didn't know what she had and where she had it. "Does it still work?"

"It does. I don't have a lot of 8mm film stuff to show on it, but yeah, it works."

I wondered about the projector's origin. Had she bought it for herself recently, a lonely online, secretive purchase? Had one of her parents given it to her as a housewarming present, which seemed both thoughtful and terrible at the same time? We're always compelled to invent stories that make sense of the unknown and meaningless. If we were in a movie, Valentina would tell me that Cleo had given the projector to her as a congratulatory present in the days before filming started. If we were in a horror movie, the formulaic, comforting, cheap-thrill kind, one that followed the dumbass rules of having a scare every ten or so screenplay pages, Valentina would flash back to how she used the projector to obsessively watch and rewatch the flickering final death scene of Horror Movie on the dingy wall of her office.

She asked, "Do you still have the mask?"

"Yes, I do."

"I hoped you would say yes. I also hoped you would've said no."

If there was, unsaid, a moral judgment, that was probably fair, but it was one I had no interest in exploring. "I just couldn't bring myself to throw it away," I said.

"You don't have to explain why you kept it."

"Good. Because I can't."

"You mean you don't want to explain or—"

I interrupted and finished the sentence for her. "Or I won't explain. Maybe that's right. Honestly my opinion on the matter changes daily."

"Fair enough," she said. "Is it in good condition?"

"Pristine." I luxuriated on the two syllables.

"You didn't bring it with you by any chance?"

"If you had asked, I would've brought it with me."

"Is that an answer to my question?"

I held up my glass of water and an empty hand. "I don't have it with me."

If I were to describe her face as having an I-don't-trust-you expression, you should rightly ask, How would he know that? The answer: I was projecting. Her expression registered as distrust because I didn't trust myself.

She said, "I almost did ask you to bring it. I wish I had." Her wish was a casually dropped penny into a well, and she followed it down into the water, zoning out. She wasn't there in the room with me anymore and her body slumped into the love-seat cushions and I worried the slump might take her down to the floor. I called her name and started up out of my chair.

She came to and readjusted in her seat. "I'm fine. Just got a little light-headed." She sipped from the bottle of Pedialyte.

"Are you sure? Should we call your nurse? Can I get you anything?"

She shook her head and drank the fluorescent-colored electrolytes. She said, "If you haven't figured it out by now—but it sounds like you understand, too, since you kept the mask—I didn't and don't want to forget the movie. I want to finish the movie. I've always wanted to finish it."

I put my glass down on her end table, and I asked, "How much of what we filmed do you still have?"

"I have every single frame we shot."

"I thought you had to, you know, turn everything over to the police. Did they give it back? Did you, what, make copies?"

Valentina dismissively waved a hand at me and said, "It took me years to work up to it, to be honest with myself about what I wanted. I finally started working on the movie again, digitizing all the film I had, at the start of last summer, months before my cancer diagnosis. The cancer, of course, was already there inside me without my knowing." She leaned forward and smiled; it was a skull's smile. "Who knows, maybe the cancer appeared the moment I rewatched those first frames, yeah? Maybe it's a cursed film." She sounded way too hopeful in anticipation of my response.

"You don't believe that, do you?" I asked.

"A cursed film? No. But there will be lots of people who will believe and want to believe it's a cursed film, especially when I put it out there."

"Out where?"

She didn't answer me. "I could've rushed together a sloppy, almost-full cut of the movie, but I wouldn't include your and Cleo's final scene. That's the one bit of film I haven't and won't watch again. I can't. I tried, though, because I'm a terrible person. When I first unpacked everything and watched the shots and clips from the start, I planned to watch that last scene and include it for the sake of the movie, for the sake of the thing that we all worked so hard on, you know? It has our literal blood, sweat, and tears. I went through and digitized the last scene, but when I pressed Play to watch and I heard me yell, ‘Action!' I stopped it immediately. I couldn't watch." Valentina paused and was breathing heavily, and I knew there was more there that she wasn't telling me, so I filled in for her, imagining her pacing circles in the office, returning to the chair, pressing Play again, then stopping, then diving under the desk and unplugging the power strip and sitting in the suddenly stilled room.

She continued. "Without that scene there wouldn't be a full film, not even close. Why bother putting the rest of it together, right? I mean, what would be the point? But I still want and need people to see this movie someday, somehow. So, I came up with a new plan. The long play, even though I don't have any time left. Does anyone ever have time? Don't answer that.

"I've cut, edited, and completed three scenes: the cigarette burns, the party, and Karson's dining-room scene. I even made a rudimentary synth soundtrack. That took a lot of time and energy I didn't have. I'm no Trent Reznor, but it came out pretty good, I think. The first two scenes look how I'd hoped they would look. A little shaggy in terms of production value, obviously, but they work. And that arriving-at-the-party scene is magic. Dan was a camera wizard, but I don't know how we pulled it off, how we got it to look so good, how you made that jump. Do you remember?"

I took a moment to gather what I thought she expected or wanted to hear and mixed it with the truth. I said, "Honestly, after the finger scene, I don't remember much about the making of the movie. I only remember the movie, as though I was in it. Living it."

"You became the Thin Kid. I love it. So method."

"I had a great director."

She bowed her head, then said, "The third scene, Karson's scene, is almost perfect. That's the filmmaker's lot in life, I think, which is kind of wonderful. Which is why I wanted to make movies. To be almost perfect. We couldn't shoot exactly what was in the screenplay, remember? The technology is here now though. Someone else will be able to shoot that scene the right way if they commit to it."

"Someone else?"

"I'm going to upload those three scenes to YouTube, and post stills along with the full screenplay on various horror message boards and my blog. I know horror fans, and this will cause an online stir. A slow-burn kind of stir. And that's probably better for the second life of the film, more organic. I'm guessing it'll take years—years I don't have, but years you have—years for the legend of our cursed movie to grow, take a life of its own. I mean, take on a life of its own. No Freudian slip there, right?

"People will discuss and dissect the scenes and Cleo's fucking brilliant screenplay, and everyone will know how talented she was and they'll know a little bit about who she was and maybe remember that instead of how she died, and if we're lucky—and if you help—the legend will grow and grow until someone, someday will have no choice but to make this movie. My proposal: I need your help to get Horror Movie made."

I didn't say yes. I didn't say no. I asked, "How?"

She described a convention she'd attended in the fall called Rock and Shock, held at the DCU Center in Worcester. The place was packed with horror fans in black T-shirts. Aside from the merchandise vendors there was a large section of booths with B-grade horror-movie actors signing autographs, selling shirts and pictures. Every actor's booth had a line, no matter how obscure, no matter how scraggly they looked, no matter how dimmed the shine of their onetime starring role. She said it suddenly all came to her. She could see me there and at other, bigger conventions. With an oracle-like forecasting of the future, she talked about a cult-like fan interest in the cursed movie and the controversial Thin Kid reaching a point where Hollywood could not ignore the built-in, waiting fan base. They couldn't say no to the easy, cynical buck. Producers would contact me and would want my involvement and Cleo's family would sell the rights to the screenplay because they would be convinced making the movie would honor her memory, that it would be what she wanted, and the money would be too much to say no. She said it all hinged on my participation. I would need to stop walking the earth, to come out of hiding, and to be approachable but not too approachable. I'd never be the carnival barker. I'd be the mysterious tease. Make people think I was coy and damaged and dangerous. She said of course people would be drawn to the released scenes, to the what-could've-been, and they'd discuss and dissect her possible motivations for releasing materials, but the Thin Kid would eventually and necessarily become the focal point, the face. The mask. She said she knew what she was asking of me. She knew it would be difficult and horrible. She knew what I would have to live with. She said that people would think I was a ghoul, making money off Cleo's death, and some would argue that her death was my fault no matter what I did or said. But, she said, everything, all of it, would boil over into irresistible momentum toward remaking the movie.

Perhaps my memory of Valentina's last proposal has been embellished by the intervening years. If I step back and am honest with myself there's no perhaps about it. If she didn't say everything exactly as described above, well, it was all still there. That was what I heard. That is what I remember.

Valentina lifted her bottle with a shaking hand after she finished.

I was no near-oracle, but prior to the visit, I'd hoped Valentina's newest (and last) proposal had something to do with our movie. I didn't ask follow-up questions. I didn't offer a lengthy retort. My answer was not no. I didn't say the word "yes." I didn't have to.

I stood and said, "I, um, I'll be right back."

She said, "I'm not going anywhere."

I walked through the house, darting through the front door, breaking into a run, fleeing what was behind, desperately running toward something else. I stopped at my car, or my car stopped me. My hands smacked, palms open, against the rear-window glass. I unlocked and threw open the hatch trunk.

I took a moment to breathe, to slow everything down, to make sure that this was what I was going to do, that this was what I was running toward.

I carefully freed my mask from its case.