All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher

your father because it
was
about your father.”
    “More or less. Movies can be redactive.”
    “Or expansive.”
    “I wrote Liv letters in juvie. She never wrote back.”
    “Maybe she did, but she just never sent them. Liv was sent off to boarding school after…”
    “Amanda was there before Liv and Amanda was there to get me through the aftermath. She stuck it out with me for a long time.” He took a deep breath and held it. “I’m going to win her back.”
    “What?” Ru hadn’t heard the term
win back
for nine full months. Of course, he wasn’t referencing the name of a Hollywood insiders’ screenwriting award that she’d won, but still her previous life flooded back to her—L.A.’s dry air, the interior of her BMW, and Cliff—handsome, with his windswept hair, a little sunburn on his nose, naked in a pool in Beverly Hills at night. She felt stricken with panic. She’d called it off? Jesus. It had made sense while living in a longhouse in Vietnam, but here, now, hurtling through the skies over the United States of America? She swallowed drily. “To win her back? Why does she need winning back?”
    “It’s a long story.” He shrugged off his passion, but not very convincingly.
    “We’ve got another hour and a half,” Ru said.
    “Are you going to rip it off for another book?”
    “I’m writing about elephant calls now—guttural breathing, growling deep in the ribs, sharp blasts, circular whirring, deep purring, and this noise like European mopeds.”
    “Okay then.”
    And so then Teddy Whistler told Ru about Amanda.
    They grew up in Ocean City together, same street, and went to each other’s birthday parties. “After I got out of juvie and a little time somewhere private, we finally dated through high school, college.” When he was in law school, his uncle died and left him a booming international real estate company, headquartered in Seattle, but with satellite offices all over the world. “It’s the kind of thing that you don’t say no to,” Teddy said. “I had to give it a shot.” He expected Amanda to follow.
    She didn’t. They broke up, but only to give each other a little space to grow up, be independent, and then—or so he thought—they’d get back together once he’d built up the business and opened an office wherever she wanted to live.
    When he heard she was engaged, he was in Chicago. “I bought a ticket and I’m flying home to Ocean City to tell her I love her, to win her back.”
    There were those words again. “Okay,” Ru said, as if he’d asked her a favor.
    “Okay…what?”
    “I owe you, don’t I? And I specialize in win-backs.”
    “Win-backs?” he asks.
    “Yeah, classic scenes. I’ve written a bunch of them. It’s, you know, a set piece.”
    “A set piece? Well, I’m actually talking about my life right now. Not a classic scene. Not a set piece.”
    “I pull from the truth to try to reveal a deeper universal truth.” This was something she’d learned to say early on.
    He seemed to be considering it and then he smiled a little. “I liked it when my character said, ‘The dog dragged me in.’ And when he put his fist through the window. And ‘Even Teddy Wilmer isn’t really Teddy Wilmer.’ Those were good lines.”
    “What about ‘I’m not a hero. I’m just here. I’m the one who stays.’ That’s the line most people point out.”
    He shook his head. “Ah, well, that’s where you might have gone wrong. I’m still trying to be a hero.” He fiddled with the latch on the tray table. “But I liked what she said after that.”
    “ ‘Then stay, and keep staying,’ ” Ru said softly. She hadn’t had a conversation about these lines in a long time.
    “Yeah,” he said. “That.”
    Ru had failed in Vietnam. Though she understood the different calls of elephants and the situations that aroused each of them, she’d made no progress in communicating with them. And she’d long since given up on trying to understand the inner