Chapter 8 1964
Waking my aunt is like waking a corpse or a lion. It’s impossible, or could result in me being short of a limb. Thankfully her stupor this morning is too heavy for violence. I move the pills out of reach and kneel on the ground where her half-open eyes can see mine.
“I’m moving to the first floor,” I tell her. “I’ll come and check on you every day.”
She laughs. “The orphan is leaving me? Ungrateful orphan.”
Yes, family always knows exactly what will hurt the most.
I know I should stay with her. But while I could describe the difference between a heroin overdose and a barbiturate overdose, I couldn’t tell you what it’s like to sit on Santa Monica Beach.
Last night I made grilled cheese; today my baby step toward the future is to move into my own room.
There’s always the fear that the world out there is where people catch fire, but that’s something I’ll just have to conquer.
“I’ll see you just as much as I do now,” I say.
But she’s already lost in the tranquilized world where she can escape from whatever happened fourteen years ago that’s erased her piece by piece, taking away her career, her confidence, her Friday parties, her self-worth, her spirit, and her future.
I don’t know why she hasn’t been able to, like Calliope, carry on in spite of whatever she did.
Don’t know if it’s because she’s a weaker person, or because she did something worse than Calliope had to.
Don’t know if I want to know.
But unlike my aunt, I have a future. I can’t stay in this mausoleum of the past in case I end up buried alive too.
Over the following fortnight, I finish with Adele around nine o’clock at night, which is when her dad returns to the penthouse from wherever he goes all day.
He doesn’t use the office at the Marmont.
He doesn’t spend his days at the penthouse.
I arrive at eight in the morning and he walks out the door with his sunglasses on and isn’t heard from again for thirteen hours.
I guess being mysterious goes hand in hand with being a rock star.
Each night when I return to my room, I make it feel more like mine. Tonight, I’m sewing a set of curtains when I hear a moan, deep and low, like an animal in pain.
I hurry through the lobby and out into the gardens, never quite sure how these sounds echo in my room when the laws of vibrational energy tell me it should be impossible for me to hear them. It’s like the Chateau Marmont is a spirit, sighing into my ears, its ghostly arms guiding me on.
I find her by the tree where my one-legged bird lives. He’s on a branch keeping watch, eyes two droplets glistening in the night.
I turn her face toward me. It’s Nathalie, a starlet who’s been here for a few months and had very little work. She raises her hand to cover her face, elbow bent like the wing of a wounded bird.
There’s too much blood.
“It’s Aria,” I whisper.
“I…I…”
“Shhh,” I tell her. “We need to get to the turret.”
A second later, footsteps sound. Nathalie curls into a ball. I peer around the tree and see Win, his expression dark as night, ducking under the barrier that reads Keep Out!, then striding down the path to Bob’s former bungalow. More mysterious errands.
“It was just someone going the other way,” I tell Nathalie.
She’s so pale I don’t know if she’ll make it to the turret.
I wrap her arms around my neck and we limp to the garage where Jupiter scoops her up and Isaiah gets us straight to the seventh floor.
Jupiter lays her on the mattress and I thank him, knowing his dad will have called the doctor and I just have to keep Nathalie alive until then.
I sit with her head in my lap, biting the nails on my left hand, smoothing her hair off her forehead while blood soaks the sheets.
I wish I had hot cocoa and a warm bath because, looking at her face, I’m almost sure that a bit of comfort and kindness is all it would take to lure her back home to Pennsylvania.
Doctor Foster arrives soon after and I help him stem the flow of blood from the womb she’s paid to have scraped clean, but which has been ruined instead.
Nathalie whispers, “He gave me a phone number and a hundred bucks to fix it.”
“Who?” I ask.
She turns her head away.
Suddenly it’s like there’s a madwoman battering the walls of my mind, wanting to scream at Nathalie, Say something! Wanting to scream at the night, Is everyone blind or stupid?
A whisper scratches at the window: No, Aria. They’re smart.
So all I can do is make sure the starlets know where to find a mattress to lie down on until they’re ready to walk to the pool and start all over again.
But that isn’t enough to quiet the madwoman, and she screams at me again for being so afraid of consequence that my focus is on aftermath, rather than stopping these things from happening at all.
Doctor Foster sends me down to bed a couple of hours later. Each time I make the journey from turret mattress to my own bed, my feet feel heavier and I wonder if one day I won’t be able to move at all, will find myself stuck inside this staircase, part of the Marmont’s walls.
I shiver, decide to go outside. I need fresh air.
Out on the driveway, I inhale, head tilted toward the sky. When I straighten up, I lock eyes with someone who shouldn’t be walking down the driveway from the street at two in the morning.
Adele.
I wrap my hands around her wrists, pull her in close by my side where she’ll be invisible too, but she’s too tall. “What are you doing?” I demand, trying not to squeeze her wrists too tightly even though I want to slap her.
“I suppose you’ll tell Win,” she snaps. “Then he’ll have to find someplace else to lock me up.”
We stand there, both of us breathing hard, me from anger and fright, her from I don’t know what. He should lock you up, are words I only just bite back.
I let go. Step away. What am I trying to do? Make Adele into me, the ghost of the Marmont? Nobody should be locked up anywhere, especially not a fourteen-year-old.
I examine her face. Her eyes are red. Booze? Junk?
“Were you doing anything illegal?”
“No.” She crosses her arms, throwing down the gauntlet. It’s up to me what happens now.
There’s noise at the end of the driveway. Paparazzi, stationing themselves on the curb, the closest they’re allowed to the Chateau Marmont.
“Come inside,” I tell her, knowing the last thing we need is her face in the newspaper.
In the small foyer in front of the ground-floor elevators, I make a decision. I hope it’s the right one. But I don’t want to ruin any chance of Adele and her father ever having a relationship. At least one person around here deserves a parent.
“Go to bed,” I say. “Don’t ever sneak out again. Promise me that, and I won’t tell your dad.”
Surprise flashes over her face. “Fine.”
Unspeaking, I accompany her to the seventh floor and watch her slip into the room she sleeps in, which is next door to the penthouse—whether because Win figured out that she’d need some space or because he wanted privacy while he conducted the nocturnal life of a rock star, I don’t know.
I’m exhausted. But I never did get my fresh air.
Back outside, I sit on the edge of the pool, dip my toes in the water, close my eyes, and pretend it’s the sea that I’ll live beside when I leave here in December. I can almost smell the salty air, hear the waves rolling in and out. But then I hear footsteps.
My eyes fly open.
A shadow slips out from behind the Do Not Enter tape barricading access to the path to Bob’s former bungalow. One of the lights from the garden illuminates, just briefly, a face.
Theo Winchester again.
What is it with all the Winchesters sneaking around tonight?
A moment later he’s on the main path back to the hotel.
Maybe rock stars need some kind of kink in the form of construction sites to excite them.
Hopefully his daughter’s escapades had nothing to do with either kink or excitement.
Hopefully Win never finds out. Hopefully she keeps her promise, or else I’m screwed.
None of this is relaxing.
When I return to my room, I’m still too edgy to sleep. I finish the curtains I started hours ago, then survey my room.
I’ve sanded back and painted white the dresser Flitter and Calliope once shared, as well as the walls.
On the dresser is a photo of me, Flitter, and Calliope, taken last year after Calliope was nominated for an Academy Award.
There’s a shelf with my favorite books from the turret: The Secret Garden, Rebecca, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
In the corner is a hanging rail holding my borrowed clothes.
A knock sounds, preceded by the jingle of a large ring of keys clipped to somebody’s waist, meaning it’s Maisie, who’s in her mid-seventies but whose energy is boundless. “For your new digs.” Maisie passes me a bundle of blue that opens into a quilt the color of the sea.
I throw my arms around her and she pushes me away.
“ ’Bout time you did this.” She sweeps her arm around the room. “Just like it was about time Mr. Mason left. Time for all of you to move on.”
I sit down on my bed, quilt cradled in my arms. “Move on from what?” I ask.
“All I can come up with is that my aunt cheated on Bob and he found out and told the press, and that’s why she fell from grace and locked herself in her room.
” I remember the abrupt shift in those magazines I’d found in the library, how my aunt had been a goddess one month and immoral the next.
As a theory it makes partial sense. “Except why did Bob’s sister jump off the roof?
Unless…” My mind scrambles around in the mud of a new possibility.
“Did my aunt cheat on Bob with Mr. Mason?”
Maisie frowns at me. “No, your aunt did not sleep with her best friend’s fiancé. You’ve been in Hollywood too long, Miss Aria, if you’re making up stories like that.”
I grimace, chastened.