The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [88]
Write me if you can,
Lucy Wayne
Before writing and directing Date Due, Lucy had been a conceptual artist of some renown in the Chicago art scene, her own parents having been minimally famous photographers. Lucy would cross-stitch blankets with black thread to make strange phrases such as: This Is the Best I Could Do for You and Run to the Ocean and Back Again, Barefoot and Clap Your Hands and Make Rain. She would then hand out these blankets to the city’s homeless, and soon Chicago was filled with these blanket-sized billboards. Lucy would then wander the city with a video camera in search of her own handiwork, the results of which would be shown at galleries. She started adding narrative, converting some of the material into several short films that she showed at various film festivals, which finally brought her fully into moviemaking. Annie remembered how awed Lucy had been when she found out that Annie was Child A. “I was so in love with your parents,” Lucy told her. “I wanted to be their kid.” Annie, still trying at that point to escape any connection to the Fang legacy, had only said, “They would have torn you to pieces.”
Lucy’s new script, Favor Fire, was about a woman who becomes a caretaker for a couple in Western Canada whose children periodically catch fire. The children are not harmed by their own combustion, but it is the woman’s job to keep the house from burning down, to contain the flames. The matriarch and patriarch of the family, wealthy and intellectual and endlessly cruel, rule over the mansion and seek to find fault with everything the caretaker does. The four children, ranging in age from six to fifteen, are sweet but made lonely by their circumstances, their parents’ obvious distaste for their affliction, and so they rely on the woman for entertainment and news from the outside world. Over time, as the woman grows more and more capable with her responsibilities, she develops an obsession with fire, matches, and sparks, and has to resist the temptation to goad the children into catching fire. The house—how could it not—burns to the ground at the end of the movie, the children swept up by the woman, leaving the parents behind, driving out of British Columbia and into the pristine cold of the Yukon.
Annie could not help but be moved by the strange emotions in the script, the unpleasant ways in which the woman finds herself giving in to the danger of this family. The movie, which would be filmed almost entirely in a single location, the mansion, had a claustrophobic feel, the constant threat of the fires, and she could see how the making of the movie would be difficult and somewhat thrilling if it all managed to come together. Like Date Due, it was about someone who gives in to her worst impulses and yet somehow manages to survive the ordeal. She wondered if this was how Lucy saw her, a woman incapable of being harmed by the terrible choices she would always make. She minimized the document and wrote an e-mail to Lucy that read, simply: “I love it. I’m in.”
Once she sent the e-mail, she allowed herself a vision of the future that did not include searching for her parents. And then, because she realized that she could, she imagined a future where her parents were already found. And then, no one to prevent this unfounded optimism, she imagined a future where her parents had never existed in the first place. Once she allowed herself this miracle, as soon as it had taken shape, it immediately burned up in the atmosphere, turned to vapor, as Annie realized that, without her parents, there would be no way into the world for her. She could not, despite every attempt to do so, figure out a way that she could arrive ahead of her parents, to outpace them. It would have to be her parents, young and still tender,