8. Chapter 5 | Elle #2
"Three weeks after the funeral, the studio put me on a list for a fundraiser.
Mrs. Kennedy was going to be there — good publicity, they said.
Mingle, look pretty, don't cause trouble.
" Her breath was short and humorless. "I meant to.
I had the smile ready and everything." She looked at her own hands on the bar.
"Then she asked me for my perspective. Wanted to know how we inspire the Negro youth of this nation.
How we give them hope. And I just told her.
Right there, champagne in hand. Told the First Lady exactly what 'hope' had cost my brother. "
"What did she say?"
"Not much. But somebody wrote it down." Her mouth twisted. "By the next morning I'd embarrassed the First Lady. By the next week I'd made her cry. Contracts went quiet. Calls stopped coming back. Nobody dropped me, exactly — they just stopped finding parts for someone that difficult."
"I could have waited it out," Elle said.
"People said so. Keep a low profile, let it blow over.
" She shook her head. "But I'd watched it happen to others.
You come back smaller. You come back grateful to be allowed back at all, and grateful means careful, and careful means you don't say the thing again, until one day you realize you've been not-saying-it so long you've forgotten you ever thought it.
" She looked at Dom. "I didn't want to come back like that. "
"So you didn't come back at all."
The clock above the bar read half past one. Neither of them had moved. Elle had stopped counting.
They heard it at the same moment — a small noise from the hallway, quickly swallowed.
Dom tensed. Elle looked up.
CJ stood in the doorway in his pajamas, one hand pressed over his mouth, his face above it wide with alarm. He looked at Elle. Looked at Dom. Looked at his own hand like it had betrayed him.
He took it away. "I was thirsty. I came down for a Coke. I heard voices, I didn't want to interrupt." A pause. "I've been standing here a while."
"CJ."
"It's fine, I don't know anything." He looked at the ceiling, the floor, a point about four inches left of Elle's face. "I'm very good at not knowing things. Ask anyone."
"CJ."
"I'm not going to say it." He pressed his lips together, nodded once, firmly, like shaking hands with himself. "I'm going to go back upstairs and I'm not going to say — that thing. The name. I'm not." His gaze flicked to Elle, then away. His jaw tightened.
"Nightshade." He winced. "I said it. That's the last time."
Dom pressed a hand over her face. Elle felt the same math turn over in her chest: two people knew now, and Louie's door was thirty feet down the hall. One argument, one drink too many, one overheard phone call. CJ had just proven, in real time, that he couldn't keep a secret for thirty seconds.
Footsteps on the stairs. Slow. One step, a pause, then the next.
Elle closed her eyes. Of course.
Louie appeared in his old robe, unhurried, crossing to the bar with the stiff, deliberate care his knuckles had been demanding lately, though he'd never mentioned it.
He poured two fingers without measuring, glanced between the two of them without comment, and turned around to find CJ rigid in the doorway, Dom resolute, Elle with both hands flat on the wood.
"Ya'll was loud enough to wake me up. Why is everyone staring at each other like that?"
CJ's jaw tightened. Elle saw him working hard at looking like a boy with nothing to hide.
He almost made it.
"Papa. Elle is Nightshade. From the TV."
Louie put down his glass and turned very slowly. "What," he said, "is a nightshade?"
So Elle told it — not the whole thing, just enough. That she used to be someone else, someone the world had watched every week. That she'd said something true to the wrong person and it had cost her everything. That in the middle of losing it all, she'd had to become Elle Brown just to survive.
CJ didn't move the whole time she talked. Neither did Louie.
Louie looked around his own bar. Elle's gaze followed his — the dark wood, the ceiling fan, forty years of a place that had seen things and kept quiet about most of them.
"Bar's been here forty years. Seen a lot.
Forgotten more." He picked his glass back up, his attention on her now instead of the room.
"Knew you were trouble the day you walked in.
" A hint of a smile. "That's alright. I like a little trouble.
And I'm good at forgetting." He held her gaze, making sure she understood what he was choosing, not just what he was saying. Then he drank.
Silence.
"I'm going back to bed, Elle Brown." He looked at all three of them, then pointed at CJ. "You too. Now."
"I want to show you my sketches tomorrow," CJ said, already backing toward the stairs. "I've drawn Nightshade a bunch. Like, a lot."
"Bed."
CJ left. Elle listened to his footsteps on the stairs, then Louie's — slower, one hand on the rail the whole way — then the house settling back around itself.
Dom watched her as the quiet settled back in. Elle didn't look up right away. The room smelled of old whiskey, copper polish, and the faint trace of Louie's cigarette. Dom, four feet away, still. The phone behind the bar where it always was.
"I don't want to leave," she said. "I just want to be Elle Brown here. Please don't tell anyone who I was."
She kept her gaze on Dom's. "Please."
Dom studied her, then came around the bar — toward Elle. She stopped close enough that Elle could see the faint scar along her jaw. The lightness in her voice all night was gone when she finally spoke.
"Nobody touches you while you're in this house," she said. "Not the network. Not the papers. Not anybody with a badge or a camera."
Elle gave a sad chuckle. "They can't touch what doesn't exist." A certainty settled in her as she said it. "Thelma Blake is already dead, far as anyone's concerned." She looked at Dom. "But Elle Brown is no one. No one they can catch. No one they can hurt."
Dom watched her, as if Elle were believing something for the first time. "Get some sleep," she said.
She went up the stairs without looking back, her footsteps steady and unhurried, like a woman with nowhere else in the world she needed to be.
Elle stood alone in the quiet long after she'd gone, turning the name over.
Elle Brown. No one.
For the first time since the car went off that cliff, it didn't sound like a sentence. It sounded like a choice.