Page 1 of The Quiet Rebuild

1

It was the end of summer in Tokyo, which meant the kind of humidity that you could slice with a knife. In the early morning hours before she was expected on set, Taylor Charron stepped out of her hotel and into the darkness, stretching her arms over her head and dropping into a squat to stretch her legs. She liked to briskly walk around the gardens surrounding the old imperial palace to get her heart rate up. The few people she passed in the park at that time of day hardly looked at her. Maybe this was their sense of Japanese propriety. But she also guessed it was because—miraculously, so far from home—they had no idea who she was. She liked this sense of normalcy before everyone stared at her all day long, either through the camera lens or as they whisked from one end of the set to the other.

Not that she didn’t sometimes like getting recognized at home. When she looked good. When she’d done her hair. When she was ready to be seen by a world that was often so cruel.

Taylor got to set at seven that morning. She was in her makeup chair, trying to relax her straining jaw, watching as people in the mirror prepared for the day ahead. She could see everything—the frantic eyes of the sound guys and the laughing banter between the people at the breakfast table.

At age forty-four, this was not Taylor’s first rodeo in the film world. She knew the ins and outs of all film sets. She knew who was important at what time. She could sense the change in tide when people got power over one another. As the lead actress of this film, she knew she was the heartbeat of the story. She knew, too, that because she was forty-four, there was far more to do to her face than there’d been a few years ago. Makeup lay heavily on her cheeks and forehead. She couldn’t wait till later tonight, when she could take it all off and put on a face mask and lie in her anonymous hotel bed.

The makeup and hair artists were all Japanese and between the ages of twenty-five and fifty, although it was sometimes hard to gauge who was older and who was younger because Japanese people seemed never to age. This felt like a magic trick only they understood. Taylor had been through the gamut of skincare operations, especially Asian ones, but her Caucasian skin had suffered too much sun damage when she’d been a teenager, those long-lost days back in Los Angeles when she’d had all the money in the world and had thought she would stay young and beautiful forever. There was a lot she couldn’t undo.

The makeup artists muttered to one another, as though they were speaking about this very sun damage. As though they knew the horrors she’d done to herself.

Taylor’s costar Chase approached a few minutes later. He was blond and tall and in his late thirties. In the film, Chase played her younger brother, a messed-up guy with a drug addiction and a bad habit of dating the wrong women, whom her character comes to Tokyo to “save from himself.”

“How’s it going?” Chase asked her, sliding into the chair beside her. “Got a big scene today.”

Taylor fixed her face into a smile. “You ready?”

“About as ready as I’ll ever be. It’s a clunker, isn’t it?” Chase let out a big, broad laugh that made Taylor shudder.

“I don’t know,” Taylor said, her eyes flashing over to the other end of the set, where the scriptwriter and the director were discussing something. “Maybe it isn’t so bad?”

“You kidding? I worked on soap operas with better writing than that,” Chase said. “But come on. It’s a paycheck, right? And at my age, I can’t afford to complain.”

The conversation lodged behind Taylor’s heart, making it difficult to breathe. The makeup artist told her to raise her chin and close her eyes, and she did, feeling the wand against her cheeks and eyelids. As she worked on Taylor’s face, Taylor thought about the pages she’d memorized for today’s scene. She remembered that her first thought had been, Oh, this is bad. This is really bad. But she’d reminded herself that this film was meant to be her comeback. In this film, she was the star of the show, America’s favorite household name. Taylor Charron. It was up to her and this film to rise and bring sense back to her life.

When her makeup and hair were finished, it was time to wait while set workers finished their preparations. Taylor checked the clock and saw it was 8:15. She did a quick calculation and realized it was only 1:15 in the morning in Paris, where her husband, Jason, was working on a film. She remembered that Jason had worked late last night, filming an action scene that he’d said via text message had “nearly destroyed him,” and she knew that he’d probably sleep late today to make up for it. Her heart ached with love for him—and something else, something needy. She and Jason hadn’t seen one another in more than two months, which was longer than they’d ever gone. She reminded herself not to show him how needy she felt. It was never attractive, no matter how long you’d been together.

When Chase and Taylor stood on their marks and rehearsed their lines, Taylor’s tongue was sour with the scriptwriter’s words. She had the sense that everyone on set was laughing at them. She imagined them heading back to their girlfriends, boyfriends, and partners later tonight and telling them over dinner how bad the film was. She imagined them saying, “Taylor Charron is washed-up, and she doesn’t even know it yet. There’s a rude awakening waiting for her.”

Embarrassment made Taylor’s neck burn.

Right before the director Stanley called “action,” Taylor raised a shaking hand and said, “Can I talk to you for a second?”

Stanley, who was a mid-tier director who’d done a moderate-sized action film as well as a string of indie films that people more or less respected, looked miffed. “Oh, um. What’s up, Taylor?”

Taylor’s heart began to pound. “I want to talk about my lines.”

Stanley glanced at the scriptwriter, who crossed and uncrossed his arms.

“What’s up?” Stanley asked.

“I mean, not just my lines. I want to talk about Chase’s lines, too,” she said, offering a smile to Chase.

Chase refused to look at her. He shifted his weight.

“What do you mean?” Stanley demanded.

“Could we…” Taylor gestured toward a dark corner, hoping to talk to him about it away from the prying eyes of the scriptwriter. She didn’t want to embarrass him.

Taylor turned and led the director to that corner. When she turned, she looked into his dark and confused eyes. She remembered the first meeting they’d had about the film, during which the director had told her point-blank that this would be her ticket to the next phase of her career. “We’ll both get into Tokyo and do what we do best,” he’d said. “We’ll make a film. We’ll cash a check. We’ll move on with our careers. We’ve earned this.”

But now, Taylor wasn’t so sure. She felt she had to do something. She cleared her throat.

“What’s going on?” Stanley demanded. Taylor knew she was wasting his time and everyone else’s. If she was going to do something, she had to do it now.

“It’s the script. It’s my lines. I don’t think she’d say it that way. I don’t think anyone would say it that way,” Taylor said, stuttering slightly. She felt foolish.