Siren Queen(76)

My sister cocked an eyebrow at the Bentley, but she climbed into the front seat next to me. She directed us to a sheltered spot behind her apartment building, and then she led us up the dirty stairs to the very top, where we traded our shoes for slippers like I hadn’t done in years. There was a girl sleeping on the tattered couch, a thick book over her chest, but my sister ignored her as she took us to a bedroom at the back. The door shut behind us with a click, and my sister indicated the wing chair in the corner, just big enough for two, while she took the unmade bed.

She lit a cigarette without offering one to either of us, and she pierced me with a sharp glance.

“Well?”

“‘Well?’” I echoed, and she laughed.

“You drove up the coast for a reason. What is it?”

I had put off thinking about this moment the entire ride up and throughout Hai’s act. I had watched out for the chain gangs of ghosts by the side of the road, kept a wary eye for the highway patrol that would ask too many questions that Tara and I didn’t want to answer, and the whole time, I had never put myself here in San Francisco itself, in my sister’s small apartment as she watched me with unimpressed eyes.

“I wanted to say that I’m sorry,” I began experimentally, but she cut me off with a sharp gesture, making the smoke from her cigarette rise in surprise.

“Would you do it again? If you knew then what you know now, would you have done it anyway?”

I didn’t know the answer to that. Tara sat very still, and I was strangely and masochistically glad she had slipped into the car. This wasn’t something I could tell her about, so instead, she would have to see it.

My silence stretched out, and my sister laughed softly, shaking her head.

“Then you’re not sorry, are you? Did you just want to come say the words? What did you expect, sissy?”

The old nickname made us both flinch, and I could see her resolving not to use it again. It reminded us of a very brief period when she had looked to me for everything, translator and protector and custodian, and that time sat terribly on us now.

“I don’t know what I expected,” I said, folding my hands in front of me. The toe of my sister’s embroidered slipper bounced as she waited. “This morning, I was on set, and someone made me angry because she said some very true things about me.”

“And what were they?” my sister asked. Her tone was exaggerated patience, but she deserved it.

I hesitated. Tara tensed next to me, but I could tell she wouldn’t stop me. That made me think for perhaps the first time that I loved her. The thought of love dazed me, so I pushed it aside, and took a deep breath.

“Among other things, she kept calling me Luli Wei,” I said at last. “And that’s not me. That’s you.”

My sister’s denial was as swift as a rapier cut.

“No, sis, that’s you. It’s not me that’s playing at the Plaza, that’s Luli Wei. She was born in Shanghai, the daughter of a Chinese spy and a Hungarian nobleman, or she was a foundling on the doorsteps of a Beijing acting troop, or—”

“Stop it,” I said sharply, the same tone I used when she was being a tiresome little girl. Now she only laughed, shaking her head.

“Sis, you became Luli Wei, and now you don’t want it anymore? What, you want to take it all back, go live at the laundry again? Those dolls Ma made are mean. They used to pull my hair when I was trying to sleep, and they’re probably worse now.”

“You lived alone with them after I left,” I realized, a sickening feeling in my stomach. I knew of course she had, but the weight of the laundry, those dolls, the loneliness, pulled me down for the first time. I had never been troubled by loneliness, but my sister, always.

Her face trembled like disturbed water. She hunched in on herself sullenly.

“You can leave if you want,” she said ungraciously. “I forgive you for the name thing, whatever.”

“It must have been so quiet,” I said, and Tara stirred with a certain recognition as well. Children troubled by loneliness share a common space, some plain-walled room that is dark too long and too often.

“It was,” my sister said, picking at a loose thread on her quilt. “Ma was never one for talking, but Dad talked with those fucking dolls. All the time.”

She coughed, and I realized that no one else in all the world knew what the second floor of the laundry was like, knew the pattering of doll feet or the way the steam of the laundry made the walls breathe on particularly restless days. We had the same dull scars on our forearms from being careless with the heavy irons, the same memory of huddling under a patchwork quilt made from our maternal grandmother’s old clothes.

“I’m sorry I left you alone,” I said carefully. The words came out flat, nothing graceful or pained about them. I think that was the only reason she believed me.

“What are you going to do, stay in San Francisco? You want to move in with me and Yun, see if you can show some leg and tit over at the Forbidden Palace?”

For one brief and dizzying moment, I actually considered it. In San Francisco, my bonds to the studio felt less, like things that could be broken instead of immutable truths that must be obeyed. There was no Jacko Dewalt in San Francisco, and no Harvey Rose either, and they would both be waiting for me when I came back.

But there was no fire either, no silent burning stars, and even if it left me nodding around the back lots, I knew I had to go back, to finish the siren queen’s story wherever it ended.