Thank You for Listening(47)

They looked at each other.

Sewanee prepared to say something, but she wasn’t sure what. Adaku didn’t give her the chance. “You know I think you threw in the towel too soon.”

Grateful to be spared a moment of her own reckoning, Sewanee nodded. “Yeah, I know. You’re wrong, but I know.”

“You were the only one who told you it was over. Even your agent said–”

“He’s an agent. He thought he could capitalize on it. If I’d been more established before the accident, maybe. But I wasn’t.”

She’d wondered: Had she done that show back in high school, had her parents let her, would she have been famous enough to overcome what happened to her? If she’d had fans, and they’d lived through it with her? If the industry felt it owed her something? It would have been a story, at least. She could have–and God, she hated this word–leveraged it. But how could she have a comeback without a place to come back to? As it was, she was simply another actress who disappeared as quickly as she had been discovered. Not a star; a shooting star.

And then Doug Carrey of all people had said, “Don’t give up.” That maybe there was a place for her. And then Brock had talked about his fear of trying to reclaim what he’d had before and she hadn’t been able to sleep that night for thinking.

Adaku still peered at her. “It’s a simple question. Do you want to act?”

“It’s not a simple question. I can’t–”

“Yes or no.”

“I miss it, but I don’t know if I’m just being–”

“Yes! Or! No!”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t know? Try saying it. Try saying it and see how the truth feels.”

There was an interminable lacuna. “Yes.”

Adaku banged the table so forcefully Sewanee lunged for her water glass and the whole restaurant turned. Adaku was unperturbed. “Then what are we waiting for?! Here’s what we do!”

“A, please. Everyone’s looking,” Sewanee murmured.

“Yes, they are! At two co-stars of The Originator!”

“What, no, A, no–”

“You don’t get to talk right now, you get to listen.” Adaku leaned over the table. “There’s a role in this film and when I read it? All I could think was, I swear to God, I thought: this is Swan. This is Sewanee Chester as I live and breathe. But you’re so stubborn about never acting again–”

“I’m not stubborn, I’m realistic.”

Adaku ignored her. “It’s the best role in the film! Not big. Maybe six scenes. But pivotal and memorable and just”–Adaku groaned loudly, fiercely, garnering more looks–“delicious.”

Sewanee quirked her head. “In this film? Isn’t it chicks in hot pants with machine guns in the jungle–”

Adaku waved her finger at Sewanee’s mouth. “You got to close this up and hear me out, okay?”

Sewanee could have been blinded by the light in her friend’s eyes. She sighed with internal excitement and external caution and said, “Okay.”

Adaku brought her hands together, as if in prayer. “She’s the leader of this resistance group that’s been living in the trees–”

Sewanee snorted. It was involuntary.

Adaku glared at her. “And when I stumble upon them with my tribe, she almost kills me. Bowie knife to the throat. But then we ally–”

“Let me guess: She dies in the final battle?”

Adaku’s hands turned into fists, taking the reins on her patience. “Swan. There’s so much meat on this bone. It’s such a good death. They hang her!”

“They hang her? Jesus–”

“She goes out like the true warrior she is.” Adaku leaned in. “And as they’re raising her up real slow, real torturously, because they’re dickwads, she and my character? They make eye contact. And there’s this beautiful camaraderie, this, like, witnessing. This, ‘I will make this right if it’s the last thing I do, you will not die in vain’ thing. And I’d have tears streaming down my face and you’d have one tear rolling down your cheek–’cause you have that freakish ability to time your tears–combined with this steely go-ahead-you-shitheads-kill-me defiance on your face. And then your life force . . . just . . . fades out. I mean, come on!” Adaku spread her hands over the table, at this imagined spread of opportunity. “It’s your role. I can do this.”

“What do you mean you can do this?”

“Star power, babe! It’s what we’ve been fighting for since our Tony’s pizza days and now I’ve got it.”

Sewanee tried to squash the jolt of excitement that shot through her. “Okay. Okay. What’s her backstory?”

“She was kidnapped and forced to work in a brothel. And she refused to do what they told her to. A queen from the jump.”

Sewanee paused. “So, they punished her.”

Adaku paused, too. “Right. But because she was so–”

“She’s disfigured.”

Adaku took another pause. “Yes, but that’s not the point.”

“No, my ability to time my tears is the point.” She balled up her napkin, tossed it gently onto the table. “Come on, A, at least be honest.”