The Comeback(42)

“I’m sleeping,” I said, but she pushed it open anyway.

“Emilia’s just left,” she said, standing above me. I looked up at her quickly and knew she wasn’t lying. Able hadn’t even bothered to come himself, had sent Emilia to assess the damage for him, perhaps even in an ironic nod to the role of protector that Emilia had promised to play when she first met my parents. Only Able and I knew just how short she’d fallen.

Once the twins were no longer babies, Emilia had tried to reach out to me a few times—inviting me to the peach house for lunch or sending me bags filled with new clothes or makeup she thought I’d like. By that point, though, I already realized that whether she knew it or not, Emilia had only been at that first dinner to soften the blow for my parents, as if her presence could make the fact that they were handing me off to strangers more palatable for everyone. It turned out that Emilia rarely visited Able’s film sets and that she didn’t even enjoy the premieres or awards shows. She must have found it all either intimidating or boring, but I never got the chance to find out which it was, because I never spent any time with her without Able.

“I’m not going back,” I said quietly.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but she told me to tell you that Able’s sorry.”

I shook my head, willing her to leave me alone. My mother looked different, affected by Emilia’s visit in some way I couldn’t identify. I could still remember how she’d acted when we shared the hotel room during the shooting of the first assassin movie—giddy with excitement at first, then stung by my cool response and exhaustion. After that, the fault lines opened up and she grew mistrustful of me.

“Sometimes when people work together creatively for a long time, they can say or do things to hurt the other person,” she said mechanically. “It’s part of the process.”

“Okay,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. Of all the ways I had imagined Able trying to make amends with me, sending his wife to influence my mother wasn’t one of them. He was sending me a message, I figured, that Emilia had no idea what had happened. Everything was always a power move with Able.

“Emilia said he pushed you too hard on set this time. Is that true?” she said then, watching me.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Especially with you.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Even I could hear the contempt dripping from my voice. I recognized it instantly as the same disdain I’d heard from Able whenever he spoke about my parents, and I was now using it against her. My mom stood up taller and pushed her hair over her shoulder, and I watched as her lips twisted like they had all those years ago in the restaurant when we first met Able.

“I’m sorry I’m not special enough to understand what it’s like to be you,” she said, and the ease with which she landed on her argument reminded me how close it always was to the surface.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said warily. I didn’t want to engage in the same fight we had every time I came home, because it always seemed to end with me leaving.

“We both know exactly what you meant. I would never understand what it’s like to be gifted, or talented, or special, because I’m just a mother, and not even a good one.”

“Why are you making this about you?” I asked, and she just stared at me with her mouth open, helpless as a goldfish.

“Don’t think that you coming back here is any sort of service to us,” she said then, and it made me wonder what it was Emilia could have said to her.

“I wanted to come back.”

“Sometimes the past is best left in the past,” she said, and it was only when I looked up and saw the bitterness in her eyes, the strange shape of her mouth, how it pulled against itself, that I understood the full implication of what Able had done to me. How far he’d alienated me from my family so that I could never go back to them, even when I needed them the most. In his most ambitious move yet, Able had turned me into a stranger in my own home.

Neither Able nor Emilia actually needed to say one word to me. I returned to LA the following morning, and almost immediately signed on to the movie. I started drinking more and more, to forget what had happened and everything I’d left behind. I kept my distance from Emilia after that, and, like everyone else in my life apart from Able, she slipped off-screen, fading into the background.

For the first time I let myself believe I was in control of my future, even though in reality everything was spinning away from me, just out of reach. Somehow, when I met Dylan at a party three weeks after my return, I even let myself believe that I could be normal for just long enough that he believed it too. I spent my first year off pretending to be anyone other than myself.



* * *



? ? ?

When Lights of Berlin finally went into preproduction, I had to train for the role of the homicidal sex worker for a further ten months. It was grueling: the incomprehensible German lessons, the Krav Maga training with the former Mossad agent, the hours of body conditioning with the Russian ballet director, the driving stunts Able insisted would only work if I did them myself. I faced him every day, and every night I went home and drank enough vodka or snorted enough coke until I forgot his face. The only thing that stopped me from falling over the edge was Dylan. Each morning I woke up with him still next to me was another small indicator that maybe I wasn’t such a bad person. After a while, I even figured that if he believed in me so much, maybe it didn’t matter that I couldn’t believe in myself. By the time principal photography on Lights of Berlin began, we were already married.