Siren Queen(50)
Emmaline reached out to cup my face in her hands. When she had done it before, it was tender, but now I felt her urge to flex her fingers and to dig her perfect manicure into my face.
“I don’t know how you failed to notice, Luli, but we are all alone! All of us. You, me, Harry, Helen Martel … We are all alone together.”
“Because…”
“Because yes! You nearly brought the whole damn thing down on top of us. Wolfe doesn’t forget, and maybe he knows how to forgive, but it isn’t likely. We exist because Wolfe allows us to. We thrive because he turns a blind eye, and after Halloween, that eye is suddenly a little less blind, all because of you and fucking Caroline Carlsson.”
It would have been better if she was just jealous. Jealous was a fight and a make-up, and a morning hiding the claw marks on each other’s ribs and shoulders. There was a fury in her eyes fueled by a very real fear, and for the first time, I was sorry for what I had done, instead of simply being afraid of the consequences. I had been alone so long that I had never considered the risk to others like me, simply because for so long, there was no one even a little like me to consider.
“Emmaline…”
“No. You don’t think, Luli, and that’s going to cost you some fine day. And I refuse to let Wolfe or anyone see me as … just one more unfortunate part of your story. Don’t come back here anymore.”
She turned and walked away. I saw that she had been barefoot and the soles of her feet flashed whitely where they weren’t dark with dirt.
Eventually, the cab came, and she must have told the company where to take me because he started to drive back to the studio lot. As we wound our way out of the Palisades, the rain started again, running down the glass just a few inches from my face, washing away everything that had come before.
XII
I spent November haunted by October. The room I’d shared with Greta was too empty, but no one ever came looking to share it with me, even when they were stacked three and four to a suite elsewhere. Caroline Carlsson was bad luck, or maybe I was. It didn’t matter.
When I wasn’t working, I stretched out on my unmade bed, smoking cigarettes I could never get a taste for, wondering how real people ever filled their days. The work never ended at the laundry, and the time before Halloween I remembered as being full of Greta and panic and fear. I should have been more afraid, especially after Wolfe’s warning, but instead I was restless, bored, inclined to weeping and tired to the bone.
Two things happened in December. The first thing that happened was that Return of the Siren was released to raves. It was more popular than Nemo’s Revenge had been, more daring, more dramatic, more dripping in pathos, gore, and plastic seaweed. Some of that was Scottie Mannheim’s work, some of it was Harry’s, but a lot of it was mine.
Suddenly the hall phone was ringing off the hook for me, and a thin and terribly upright man from the studio appeared to escort me to interviews and photo shoots, and also, I imagine, to pass reports of my behavior back to the studio. I never quite got his name, but he referred to himself as my assistant, helping me remember things about where I was from, what I liked, and how old I was.
That was when the story about me being the daughter of a Chinese spy and a Hungarian nobleman got around, where I learned English from a Bible left in the attic where I was kept until the age of ten. With my assistant’s helpful guidance, I remembered the golden fields of Guangzhou, the cold castle in Budapest, the cruel stepmother that had driven me finally to the arms of Hollywood and Wolfe Studios.
(“I heard they found you in Kansas.”
“Kansas? I never heard that one.”
“Yeah, a nice old farm couple who wanted to have a kid found you late one night after they heard a terrible crash.”
“Jane—”
“Pulled you out of the wreckage of what could only have been an extraterrestrial craft, and soon they realized you were no ordinary infant, and in fact had great powers—”
“Remind me why I put up with you again?”
“You love me.”)
Of course I couldn’t come from Hungarian Hill. Even I didn’t always quite believe that I had when I woke up at ten to be taken to a photo shoot where I would be dressed in silk and gold, turned and posed for the flash.
The second thing that happened was that meetings started for production on the third siren movie, tentatively named Siren’s Sea. It was more Whalen’s project than Scottie’s, a risk given Whalen’s artistic pretensions, but one they thought they could afford after two hits.
I showed up for what I thought would be a makeup test, only to have the door opened for me by Harvey Rose.
“Miss Wei,” he said in his gravelly way, and I almost bolted. I had been waiting for the second shoe to drop for so long that I was exhausted. If I ran, I wouldn’t have made it far, and so instead I made sure my step was steady and entered the room.
Whalen and Scottie Mannheim were both there, but neither of them would meet my gaze. Instead they sat behind their table as if it would protect them from Wolfe’s right-hand man, busying themselves with the papers in front of them. There was no makeup team there, no one besides me, the Mannheims, and Harvey Rose, and when none of them would speak, finally I had to.
“Well?” I asked, glad it sounded more like arrogance than fear.