Every head turned away from the carnage on stage to watch as Scarlett made her wobbling, half-running way out of the darkened room into the blinding sunlight. She allowed her legs to follow their instincts. She rounded the building and headed for the playground. There was a low brick wall on the far side. She ducked behind it and sat on the ground, collapsing her face into her knees.
She was alone for several minutes, except for a few brave pigeons that would not be scared off by a human running at them, arms flapping in the wind. She tried to block everything out—shutting her eyes. But it was all still there. The girl. The look on his face. Eric crumpled on the stage.
She soon became aware that someone was standing nearby, but it didn’t seem worth it to look up and see who it was. The person slid down the wall and sat next to her.
“Do you remember when I accidentally set fire to myself?” Spencer asked.
Scarlett pulled her head up just enough to look over at his shoes.
“I saw it on TV, these stunt guys explaining how they do those scenes where they run out of exploding buildings. I thought I could
do it by spraying hairspray over my pants and burning off the fumes. It actually worked for thirty seconds. Looked great. Except that I hadn’t worked out the plan for putting myself out. Stop, drop, and roll takes a lot longer than you’d think.”
Scarlett remembered this quite well, but couldn’t answer because a lump of something had risen in her throat so fast that it gagged her. She tried to force it back down, hold whatever was left of herself and her dignity together.
“I’m not asking for any particular reason,” he went on. “Except maybe to see if you noticed how stupid I am. You
pretend
not to see it, but I think you do.”
She wanted to say that he wasn’t stupid—she took all honors for that. Stupid to think she could date Eric, stupid to follow Mrs. Amberson’s advice, stupid not to listen to Spencer in the first place. She wanted to say she was sorry, but all that came out was a noise that almost sounded like a quack.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, dropping an arm over her shoulders.
Whatever was gripping her throat released it, and a torrent of tears erupted from some unknown reservoir inside. She buried her face in the folds of his jacket and sobbed huge, wheezing sobs that finally scared off the remaining birds. It was like she was draining herself dry.
It felt like they stayed like that a long time, but it was probably only a few minutes, then her tears slowed just as suddenly as they had come. She tried to make her breathing normal, but couldn’t. It staggered and fell all over the place, and she started to hiccup. She hadn’t felt like this since she was little, when she would run to Spencer when she got hurt or upset. Total regression.
He tipped her chin up to get a look at her face. She felt horrible and genuinely swollen, and the light hurt her eyes. Spencer’s jacket was soaked, and something was connecting her nose to the front of his collar. He wiped it away with his sleeve.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said thickly.
“Yeah…no you’re not.” He wiped at her face with his hand to try to dry it a bit and unstuck a curl from her cheek. “And I just punched my scene partner in the face.”
“I’m sorry…”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “This one is all mine. But I’m going to have to go and answer for it.”
He stood, and then reached down to help her up.
“It looks like we have company,” he said.
Mrs. Amberson was waiting at the other end of the playground, flipping the cigarette case thoughtfully in her palm.
“You should probably go in,” she said to Spencer, when they reached her.
Spencer looked to Scarlett, checking on her general condition. It still wasn’t great.
“I’m not going back in there,” she said. “I’ll see you at home.”
“Okay…” he said. He didn’t seem to want to leave her there or go back inside, but he dragged himself forward.
“The plan,” Mrs. Amberson said, when he had walked off, “did not work quite as I anticipated.”
Scarlett decided that there was no need to add to this statement. It pretty much covered the situation.
“Think anyone noticed?” she croaked. Her throat was still a mess.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Actors love drama, by definition. You made their day.”
“Spencer slipped,” Scarlett said dutifully.
“Of course he did. Accidents happen. And this is just a temporary setback, O’Hara…if it’s a setback at all. Lover’s quarrels are a natural part of relationships. Making up is always the best part. Now, tell me what happened, and we’ll make a plan.”
“Please stop helping me,” Scarlett said.
“Too soon?” Mrs. Amberson said, undaunted. “Best to take the afternoon off. Here.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out some money for a cab.
“We’ll sort it out later, O’Hara,” she said, as Scarlett walked to the street. “You’ll see!”
Lola the Unstoppable was still at the desk when Scarlett returned, stamping and addressing all the brochures that she had never gotten to the other night.
“Someone left a message for you,” she said, holding up a slip of paper. “Probably something for Mrs. Amberson. Are you all right? Your eyes look kind of funny.”
“Um…allergies.” Scarlett’s voice was a bit thick still.
“Are you sure?”
Scarlett nodded and took the note.
“The woman asked you to call right away,” Lola said. “Do you even
have
allergies?”
“I’m fine,” Scarlett said, walking quickly toward the elevator. “I’ll call her. Thanks.”
Back in the Orchid Suite, Scarlett dropped the note on her bureau and drew the purple sheers. She could hear her parents yelling about
the pigeons (“the flying rats”) from the opened window below. She dropped back on her bed and did nothing. She let the heat fall over her and crush her.
A few hours later, the door creaked open and Spencer looked inside. He was carrying a bag.
“I thought you might be here,” he said. “I bring presents. Soup dumplings from Joe’s Shanghai. Yes, I am actually that good.”
Soup dumplings were, arguably, Scarlett’s favorite food. They were dumplings full of the most delicious soup in the world, plus a little meatball.
“I’m not really hungry,” she said. “You can eat them.”
“Come on,” he said, holding out the bag. “I went all the way down there. And you’re telling me you won’t even eat one?”
Scarlett accepted the bag and pulled out the container of steaming-hot dumplings. She stared at the little globlike forms inside—forms that would usually have made her indescribably hungry. They did nothing now except repulse her slightly. Spencer flopped down next to her.
“How is he?” she asked, unable to even say Eric’s name.
“Bruised,” he said. “But fine. I was kind of hoping that if I screwed up that big I’d at least have given him a black eye, but I guess it’s good that I didn’t. I didn’t hit him
that
hard. He just wasn’t expecting it. If he’d had a chance to react, things would have ended differently.”
“Are you in trouble?”
Spencer shook his head.
“He obviously wanted to drop it. Someone got him some ice, he made a joke, I made a joke. We waited half an hour and did the fight again. Eat.”
Scarlett tried nibbling at the thin dough for Spencer’s sake, but gave up on the effort and set the soup back down.
“Why did you do it?” she asked.
“I know you like soup,” he replied.
“You know what I mean.”
Spencer took the container for himself and very deliberately avoided her stare.
“All I know,” he said, “is that Amy came by in the afternoon to work with me and was going on and on about how sad you looked. For about an hour.”
Right. The brilliant plan at work again.
“Then you came in with Eric. I’ve never seen that look on your face before. We were on stage, things were going fast, someone was telling me to hit him. My brain just decided to go all literal. I sort of watched myself do it. I saw the spot where my fist was supposed to turn, and it just didn’t turn.”
He shoved a dumpling in his mouth, not taking the time to create the vent on top that was so critical in the eating process. He jerked back when he felt the burn and opened his mouth to let out the steam. Scarlett had the feeling that that was self-punishment.
“You knew about the other girl,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
He looked at her as he waved his hand in front of his mouth frantically. He showed no surprise hearing that there was another girl.
“I didn’t
know
,” he said, when he had gotten it under control. “I guessed.”
“How?”
He sighed.
“Whenever anyone asked him if he was seeing anyone, he would always give cagey answers, at least around me. Once you said that it
was his idea not to say anything…it all fell into place. There’s only one reason he would do that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
“There was nothing to tell. I never saw her. I told you I had a bad feeling. That was all it was.”
“Well,” she said, sniffing. “You were right.”
Scarlett was hit by a wave of exhaustion—a welcome chance to block it all out.
“I just want to sleep,” Scarlett said. “And never go back.”
She rolled over on her stomach. Spencer scrunched her curls until she settled herself—another throwback to when she was little. She heard him take the bag of soup away, heard him shut the door. What she couldn’t possibly have heard was his arm brushing the bureau as he left, causing a small slip of paper to flutter to the ground. It landed just under the bureau, where it could hardly be seen.
“Let’s talk about towels,” Lola said, coming into the Orchid Suite late the next morning.
Scarlett looked up over the top of her blanket blearily.
“What time is it?”
“Eleven. Spencer told me to let you keep sleeping. You must have been really sick. Do you feel any better?”
Scarlett had to make an effort to collect her thoughts. She’d been sleeping for something like fourteen hours. Her mouth was dry, her head hurt, and she was starving. Oh, and Eric had still dumped her.
“Not really,” she said.
“I’ll bring you up something to eat,” Lola said. “Unless you feel like you can get up.”
“No,” Scarlett said, sick of being in her bed. “I’ll get up. I need a shower.”
“Towels,” Lola repeated, indicating that it was the word of the day and needed to be used as frequently as possible. “That’s what sets certain hotels apart. Really nice towels, and lots of them. As many as you like. I think towels are one of the big reasons people like hotels at all. You can use them and drop them on the floor…”
That was about how Scarlett felt. Used. Dropped on the floor. And she was really starting to miss Chip. She never had to deal with these kinds of wake-up calls before.
“…and someone comes along and picks them up and gives you new ones. Towels are nurturing. Towels go against bare skin. Now, lots of hotels provide piles of thin, scratchy towels. But when you use a good towel, a really thick, soft, amazing towel, you feel cared for. You remember the towels. And their cousin…the bathrobe.”
Scarlett picked up her shower basket and stared.
“Why are you talking about towels?” she finally asked.
Lola held up a photo from some high-end catalog. It showed some woman getting out of a tub the size of an SUV and wrapping herself in a massive blanketlike towel.
“Egyptian cotton,” Lola said. “These are pretty expensive, but once you feel them…”
“We have towels.”
“We have terrible towels from some bargain supply place.”
“They’re monogrammed.”
“They scratch! I’ve been trying to explain this to Mom and Dad. People are not going to come back if the towels scratch.”
“There are a lot of reasons people won’t come back,” Scarlett said. “Like, birds in the rooms and nonfunctional toilets. Do you really believe that expensive towels are going to solve our problems?”
“I’m just trying to come up with a few practical solutions,” Lola said.
“A bunch of towels we can’t afford for guests who aren’t here…that’s not really a solution.”
Lola looked genuinely saddened by Scarlett’s lack of support for her towel idea. It wouldn’t work…but Lola was the only one
trying to help the hotel. Scarlett would have faked some more enthusiasm, but it wasn’t in her.
“Spencer told me to tell you that he’ll be back around six,” Lola said, carefully refolding her picture. “And it’s family dinner night tonight. Mom and Dad are out getting some pipes or something. There’s a leak in the kitchen. I have to get back down to the desk.”
“Hey,” Scarlett said, as the guilt sank in. “I’ll take the desk for a while. I mean, I’m here.”
The front desk of the Hopewell was not a good place to distract yourself. It was, however, a great place to really let the loneliness and pain sink in. Lola had gone off to try to find the towels of her dreams at a lower price, her parents were still buying pipes, and Marlene was off at her friend’s apartment. Even their three guests were out.
Scarlett was the most alone person in the city of New York—a city that never let you be alone. She tried to distract herself by reading e-mails from her friends, but it only made them seem farther away and their lives so much better than hers. She tried not to replay every single moment of what happened the day before…that didn’t work. Then she really tried to avoid watching Eric’s commercial online.
Seven viewings later, she was openly weeping at the desk. This was probably the only good thing about no one being around.
Unable to take it anymore, she hung the sign and headed out down the street to buy herself an iced coffee. She was just locking the door, when she heard someone speak.
“It’s not Tara,” the voice said. “It’s Lola, right?”
“Scarlett,” Scarlett corrected whoever it was. She gave her eyes a quick rub, just in case they were still dripping, then turned to find herself facing a woman with very short silver hair.
“Oh. I must have read it wrong. Nice name, though.”
Donna Spendler looked very different with a crew cut.
“Going out?” she asked.
“Just to get a coffee,” Scarlett said. There was the throat thing again. The clamp was on her—but this time, it was all panic.
“I’d like a coffee myself. Do you mind if I come down with you?”
It wasn’t like she could refuse, so the two walked together. Donna seemed strangely at ease as they went together. She even paid for Scarlett’s coffee before Scarlett could stop her.
“I left a message for you yesterday,” she began, when they sat with their drinks. “You may not have gotten it.”
“Sorry,” Scarlett said.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering how I got here.”
This was precisely what Scarlett was wondering. Her brain was working feverishly on this problem and getting nowhere.
“It took a while before I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I was so pleased to get a television show that I let some oddities slip by. But when I didn’t hear anything about the script, when my agent couldn’t confirm what was going on with any of the trades…sometimes those things are normal. But then she really started looking, and no one had heard anything about
The Heart of the Empire. The Heart of the Empire
really did not seem to exist. And I started to think. Paul. I kept thinking he looked very familiar. I started to think very hard about where I had seen him before. Then I remembered. It was a commercial.”
The famous commercial. Scarlett felt her eyes roll back into her head in realization. Mrs. Amberson probably didn’t know that his face was already familiar—she had been in Thailand when it was shown.
“It wasn’t hard to trace his name online. He posts his resume. From there, I was able to find his agent, find out what he was working on. Do you know that someone in that cast keeps a blog about what’s going on with the show, complete with pictures? Imagine my surprise when I saw his assistant in there as well. I looked up your brother, and lo and behold, both of you are pictured on the Web site for this hotel. The Internet is an amazing thing.”
The picture with the braces glistening in the sunlight. Apparently, she still looked like that.
“Now,” Donna went on, ripping open a packet of sweetener, “I had to ask myself, why did the cast of
Hamlet
at a little theater downtown want to set me up like that? You see, that stunt ended up costing me a big part in a show. And I can’t help but feel that maybe that was the goal.”
Scarlett looked past the tips of Donna’s clipped locks, out of the window to the street.
“I figured the explanation behind this had to be pretty interesting,” Donna said. “So, Scarlett, would you care to enlighten me?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know what? Why it was set up? Who did it? Because it wasn’t you or your brother or his friends who planned this.”
Scarlett sucked hard on her straw. What was she supposed to say?
Donna took out a leather case, which she snapped open. She wrote down her number on a piece of paper inside, and ripped it off.
“You should know,” she said, “that I work both with theater people and the tourist industry. It’s easy to get a bad reputation in the theater world, and it’s also easy for a hotel to get the wrong kind of publicity. I am taking this very seriously, Scarlett. Don’t think for one second that the fact that I’m not screaming and yelling means that I’m not angry. Whoever it was can contact me here. They should make it soon.”
Donna got up and left, leaving her coffee untouched. Scarlett put her head in her hands and allowed herself to panic. Spencer was under threat. The show was under threat. The hotel…
And Spencer didn’t even know what he had done.
“Oh,” she said to herself. “This is so not good.”