ADAM (V.O.)
It was creepy how Monika had looked at Matthew. But Clara Swift had been a mother. I knew she must miss her son. There was nothing creepy about the way Clara looked at Matthew. It made me want to confess everything—not to Grace, but to my father.
The elevator door opens; Adam and his family step out.
INT. HALL, HOTEL JEROME. CONTINUOUS.
In the third-floor hall, one more of Monika’s “tourist attractions” is passing—the ghost of a SOBBING SILVER MINER. The miner’s dishevelment is more apparent to Grace than what links him to an earlier century; Matthew sees the miner, too. Like his mom, Matthew doesn’t know the miner is a ghost. The elegy CONTINUES OVER.
GRACE
(to Adam)
From what you’ve said about the Jerome—not to mention the way your mother went on about it—I expected a more upscale clientele.
Coming toward them in the hall is the ghost of a SOAKING-WET MAID. Grace and Matthew let the wet ghost pass, withholding comment. The elegy is coming to its mournful conclusion.
ADAM (V.O.)
It was the hotel maid who died of pneumonia after falling through the ice on a pond—she still showed up to turn down the beds.
GRACE
They send a soaking-wet maid for turndown service?
MATTHEW
Why is she wet?
ADAM
Maybe she turned on a shower by mistake.
GRACE
We should call the front desk.
INT. BEDROOM, HOTEL JEROME. LATER THAT NIGHT.
Matthew is asleep in a rollaway—a single bed, but a big bed for a small boy. He’s holding a teddy bear.
PULL BACK: in a king-size bed, Grace and Adam are sleeping; their bed is alongside Matthew’s rollaway, which is on casters.
ADAM (V.O.)
Matthew wanted his rollaway in the bedroom, next to us—not in the living room of our suite, where I also left a light on for him.
The door to the living room is open, as is the door to the bathroom, where another light has been left on—providing the bedroom with enough light to make Matthew feel safe. Adam is sleeping on the side of the bed nearest Matthew’s rollaway. Separating the two beds is a narrow aisle of carpet, serving as a path to the bathroom or the living room.
ADAM (V.O.)
The jet lag affected us all.
CLOSE-UP: on Adam’s face, asleep. We hear a bouncing ball, a basketball being dribbled.
ADAM (V.O.)
The trailer for Rim Shot replayed itself in my sleep.
INT. BASKETBALL COURT, SMALL GYM. DAY.
There’s no music, no dialogue—no sound, except the basketball. A TEENAGE GIRL in a wheelchair is practicing her dribbling. Before she can take a shot at the basket, she dribbles the ball off the footrest of her wheelchair. The ball rolls off the court. The girl looks too discouraged to go get the ball. Then we hear—she also hears—a ball being dribbled.
ADAM (V.O.)
Grace had read reviews of Rim Shot. The basketball player isn’t permanently disabled. She has a spinal injury from a car crash. She’ll miss the basketball season of her senior year in high school, but she’ll completely recover. You wouldn’t know this from the trailer.
The bleacher seats are empty, but the girl in the wheelchair isn’t alone in the gym; she sees Paul Goode coming toward her, dribbling a basketball. Paul is in his coaching outfit: basketball shoes, shorts, T-shirt, a whistle around his neck.
ADAM (V.O.)
The girl’s drunken father was driving the car—he was killed in the car crash.
The WORN-OUT BRUNETTE, the girl’s mom, enters the gym and takes a seat in the bleachers. Paul bounces the ball to the girl, a pass the girl handles better than we might have expected. The girl dribbles once or twice, taking a shot at the basket. The ball bounces off the glass; it doesn’t touch the rim. Paul retrieves the ball, noticing the widow as he dribbles back to the girl.
ADAM (V.O.)
The tall widow will fall in love with her daughter’s basketball coach—anyone will know this from the trailer, if not why the widow wants to be with a guy who barely comes up to her boobs.
Paul passes the ball to the girl—a hard pass, which the girl handles just fine. The girl takes her time—more dribbling, with more determination. The girl’s widowed mother can’t bear to watch; she hides her face in her hands.
ADAM (V.O.)
Grace read more than the reviews; she also read the Hollywood gossip. Paul Goode and the young woman who played the teenage girl were now “an item,” Grace read. The young woman wasn’t a teenager, but she was only in her twenties—an age difference of more than forty years.
The teenage girl in the wheelchair puts up a shot; it swirls once or twice around the rim, then falls in. The little coach and the big girl in the wheelchair high-five each other. Even sitting down, the girl is almost as tall as Paul Goode.
ADAM (V.O.)
You wouldn’t know they were an item from the trailer, either.
INT. BEDROOM, HOTEL JEROME. THAT SAME NIGHT.
CLOSE-UP: on Adam’s face, asleep.
ADAM (V.O.)
When I wasn’t seeing this trailer in my sleep, I was seeing that woman with the baby carriage in The Wrong Car in black and white.
EXT. GETAWAY CAR, MOVING. DAY.
At a city intersection, the driver stops for a WOMAN WITH A BABY CARRIAGE in the pedestrian crosswalk.
ADAM (V.O.)
My father was thirty when he played the getaway driver. The woman with the baby carriage was not much younger. In the years I thought she was a ghost—when she was haunting or stalking me—was it only in my imagination that she hadn’t aged?
INT. GETAWAY CAR, STOPPED. DAY.
In a hail of gunfire, the gangster in the passenger seat and the three thugs in the backseat are shot.
EXT. GETAWAY CAR, STOPPED. DAY.
The woman with the baby carriage has paused in the crosswalk while the ongoing gunfire riddles the getaway car; all four tires are shot, the car appears to slump, and gas and oil (and maybe blood) leak into the street.
ADAM (V.O.)
At my book signings, she wasn’t with the baby carriage; she didn’t wait long enough to get to the front of the line. CLOSER ON: the little driver sits unharmed and relaxed at the steering wheel, as if waiting for the light to change.
ADAM (V.O.)
The woman had stalked Paul Goode—in real life, she’d spied on every woman who ever knew him.
PULL BACK: the woman pulls a sawed-off shotgun out of the baby carriage; she approaches the getaway car as Paul Goode gets out of the driver’s-side door. He tips his duckbill cap to the woman, leaving the car door open for her. She shoots the slumped-over bodies of the dead passengers, just to make sure. Paul Goode nods to camera as he exits frame, as if the camera were one of the marksmen who ambushed the getaway car. Loose bills float through the blown-out windows of the car. Camera stays on the woman, transferring the satchels of money to the baby carriage, where she also stows the shotgun.
ADAM (V.O.)
When she showed up in the attic bedroom of my grandmother’s house, the crazy woman was spying on me. I should have known this woman wasn’t a ghost—she couldn’t be bothered to disappear. When I woke up with her sitting at the foot of my bed, she just walked away.
INT. BEDROOM, HOTEL JEROME. THAT SAME NIGHT.
CLOSE-UP: on Adam’s face, asleep.
ADAM (V.O.)
The woman with the baby carriage wasn’t credible as a ghost.
PULL BACK: from the open door to the living room, the ghost of Monika Behr enters the bedroom with catlike stealth and purpose. She walks fine; for a big woman, she moves with athletic poise and quickness. She’s feeling the sheets—on the bed where Adam and Grace are asleep, and on the rollaway, where Matthew is sleeping. There’s more room for Monika with Matthew. She slips off her parka, her turtleneck, her sweatpants; Monika’s ghost is in her bra and panties when she gets in bed with Matthew.