The Siren

by Katherine St. John

  Embarrassed, she wiped at the tears with the towel. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She took a ragged breath. “Sorry. Just personal shit.”

  Felicity sat on the other side of her. “Anything you want to talk about? We’re good listeners.”

  I nodded agreement.

  “Really, I’m fine.” Taylor forced a smile.

  “We have rum,” I offered.

  Felicity shot me a look, and I remembered that especially after last night I really shouldn’t be drinking in front of Taylor, but she was too distraught to notice my slipup, or care. “I would, but…” She started crying again.

  “Do you want us to leave you alone?” Felicity asked.

  Taylor nodded. “Please don’t tell anyone you saw me like this,” she begged.

  I patted her back. “Of course,” I said.

  “Invitation’s open if you change your mind,” Felicity added.

  Fat raindrops started to fall as we walked away, back in the direction of our bungalow. We hadn’t gotten halfway up the walkway above the surging sea when Taylor came running to catch up with us. “I changed my mind,” she said.

  The dark clouds ripped open, and sheets of rain cascaded down as the three of us hastened toward the bungalow. Inside, Felicity picked up the phone next to the purple orchid as we dried ourselves off. “I’m ordering dinner. What do you guys want?” she asked.

  “A salmon burger,” Taylor said. “And fries, and a ginger ale.”

  Felicity repeated the order into the phone, adding a cheeseburger for herself and a salad for me, then came to sit with us in the living room. Mary Elizabeth ran in circles, barking as lightning flashed and thunder shook the windows. “We never get thunderstorms in LA,” I commented. Mary Elizabeth jumped into my lap, shaking. I stroked her little head as I gazed out at the rain. It was kind of frightening, being out here over the water, though surely we were safe. Cole certainly had bragged enough about the security of this place. “Exhilarating.”

  “Good thing Jackson canceled tonight’s shoot,” Taylor said.

  “Has Madison been fired yet?” I asked hopefully.

  Taylor shook her head. “Jackson’s talking to Cole about it. I promise I’ll let you know when I hear anything.” She took out her phone and checked her weather app. “Shit.” She groaned. “This morning it said it was going to be clear tomorrow, and now it looks like thunderstorms the rest of the week. I guess we’re just gonna have to go with it.”

  “Why don’t we shoot the end then?” I suggested. “The part where I use the storm as cover to kill Peyton and the nanny. I’m especially looking forward to that part.”

  Taylor groaned. “Can we turn on the news? I want to see what the meteorologists have to say.”

  Felicity flicked on the flat-screen and selected the Weather Channel, but they were busy talking about the heat wave sweeping Western Europe. She muted the volume. “The food will be here in thirty. Does anybody need anything while we wait?”

  I wanted rum, but I still wasn’t totally sure whether I could quit pretending in front of Taylor. Instead I grabbed my pack of smokes and headed for the sliding glass door.

  “I’m pregnant,” Taylor blurted.

  Felicity and I turned to her in sync, not even trying to hide our shock. No one said anything for a minute. I dropped my cigarettes on the end table and perched on the couch next to her.

  “I’m guessing this was a surprise?” Felicity asked tenderly.

  Taylor nodded. “I just found out today. Please don’t tell anyone.”

  “We won’t,” Felicity and I promised in unison.

  “Jinx,” I said, and she threw a fuchsia pillow at me, which elicited a small smile from Taylor. “Who’s the dad?” I ventured.

  She furrowed her brow and looked down at her hands, blinking quickly. Damn, that had been the wrong question. It was the logical one, though, wasn’t it? I’d been asked such invasive questions about private issues at every step of my life, I wasn’t terribly good at knowing what was and wasn’t socially acceptable anymore. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She shook her head and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “We’re not together. It was a mistake—I don’t even remember…” She choked back a sob.

  Poor girl.

  Felicity rubbed her back. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not though.” Taylor took a ragged breath. “I blacked out, and I’d only had two drinks that I know of. I think…I may have been drugged.”

  Felicity and I exchanged a glance, and I could see she was thinking the same four-letter name I was.

  “Like Stella was last night?” Felicity asked.

  Taylor peered at us from beneath a furrowed brow, her eyes guarded.

  “It was the first night we arrived, before you all got here. I woke up the next morning all sandy and wet in my bed with his shirt on the bedside table, and I didn’t remember anything. He said I’d gotten super wasted and tried to fuck him, but promised me we hadn’t actually done it.”

  “That asshole,” Felicity fumed.

  “Are you sure it’s his?” I asked.

  Again she nodded. “There hasn’t been anyone else. Well—there hadn’t been. There is now, but it’s new, and we haven’t slept together.”

  “Rick,” I sang gleefully, and Felicity gave me a sharp glance.

  Taylor nodded, staring up at the bas-relief wood Buddha on the wall. “I guess that’s over now. I already had to cancel going out with him tonight.”

  “Last night wasn’t the first time Cole drugged me,” I admitted. “He did it once years ago, when we were married.”

  Both girls gaped at me.

  Veins of lightning shot across the sky out over the water as I dragged my mind for yet another sordid detail of our relationship I’d buried under an avalanche of drugs and therapy. “I’d been on a juice cleanse. I hadn’t even had a drink. I was so confused when I woke up naked with no memory of the night before…I knew we’d had rough sex because I was sore, but also because I was on my period and our bed looked like a small animal had been sacrificed—sorry, TMI. I couldn’t understand it; I would’ve had sex with him, done whatever nasty thing he wanted. I confronted him, and he laughed it off, saying he’d thought it was hot to fuck me while I was asleep. When I balked, he gave me a lecture about what a judgmental prude I’d become.”

  Felicity’s eyes narrowed as though trying to understand something much more complicated than what I was saying, while Taylor furrowed her brow, disturbed. “Wow,” she said. “That’s…awful. I’m so sorry.”

  “I later found out it was kind of his thing,” I went on. “He had a fetish, or whatever, for having sex with women while they were asleep. He’d hire hookers and consensually drug them, then have sex with them when they were passed out.”

  “He did this while you were married?” Taylor asked, aghast.

  “And you knew about it?” Felicity piled on.

  Reluctantly, I nodded. I couldn’t believe I was confessing this to them, but the cat was out of the bag. “You have to understand, it was nearly fifteen years ago, long before #metoo or #timesup or any of that, and the circle we ran with at the time—people were into some weird shit. We had so much money and fame—everything at such a young age, people wanted more; they’d go to extremes to feel something. My arrangement with Cole was less than ideal, but it was part of who he was and I’d married him. Still, I didn’t want him doing that stuff to me. The girls were clean and he paid them well; they knew what they were in for. Consenting adults. I figured that was better than the alternative—what happened to you.”

  Taylor picked at her cuticles, nodding slowly. “It makes sense now. I’d found his explanation hard to believe, but…” She wiped the tears that spilled from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I feel so violated. And I’m so mad at myself. It’s like I’m two completely different people—professionally I’ve got my shit together, but personally I’m a fucking mess, and my personal shit gets in the way of my professional life and now I’m completely
screwed and freaking pregnant and without this job working for a guy who raped me, I have nothing, and I just…” Her chest heaved. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

  “This is not your fault,” Felicity said.

  We put our arms around her as she broke down sobbing. “It’s gonna be okay,” I soothed. “At least you weren’t arrested high on ketamine, half-naked and throwing pickle jars at bystanders in a Hollywood grocery store.”

  Taylor almost laughed through her tears as the picture on the television switched to a radar image of our corner of the Caribbean. The colorful patch of storm activity currently hovering over our island paled in comparison to the ominous splotch of angry red surrounded by yellow and green that seethed out in the Atlantic to the east of us. Felicity grabbed the remote and unmuted the volume.

  “…tropical disturbance east of Barbados in the southern Caribbean has formed a tropical depression,” said the weathercaster in the yellow dress. “We are currently issuing a storm watch for the area in red.” Another map popped up, showing a swath of red over the long chain of islands that included ours. “This is a fast-moving depression, and there is a real possibility it could quickly turn into a tropical storm, though it’s too early to accurately predict a path for the storm. Stay tuned as conditions develop.”

  The screen returned to the radar image of the storm as she went on about the early start to hurricane season this year. “Rick did say the unusual warmth of the water meant a hurricane was likely,” Taylor said. She took a ragged breath and dried her tears on her sleeve. “I’ve gotta go talk to Price and Jackson.”

  “But your food,” I protested.

  “We’ll send it to your bungalow when it comes,” Felicity said.

  “Thank you,” she said, rising. “For everything. And please, please don’t tell anyone what I told you.”

  “Of course,” we answered in unison.

  As we shut the door behind her, a flame of renewed fear flickered to life inside of me. I’d narrowly avoided Jackson shutting down the production this morning after I was drugged; if a hurricane were to hit, the film would be over, taking with it my career.

  Felicity saw my sudden shift in mood and squeezed my shoulders. “It’s gonna be okay,” she said, echoing my words to Taylor.

  But her voice was drowned out by the howling of the wind around the eaves.

  Felicity

  Two Months Ago

  At four p.m. on a Tuesday in mid-April, I take up residence on a park bench in the shade of a big sycamore tree along the path that leads to the enclosed dog run with a view of Lake Hollywood. My face is scrubbed clean of makeup, my pockets full of doggie treats, and I’m wearing an oversize T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a prestigious liberal arts college I didn’t attend.

  I open my copy of Believe It and It Will Be and let my mind wander, glancing up every time another hipster comes around the bend in the path, canine companion in tow. Twenty minutes pass. Thirty. I’m ready to give up and try again on Thursday when at long last I spot a small-boned woman in a big sun hat and dark glasses trailing an aging Chihuahua up the trail. Stella’s dressed much too warmly for the weather, swathed head to toe in black Lululemons, only her pale hands protruding.

  I stand and cross to the garbage can on the other side of the path, tossing in a crumpled piece of paper. As I cut back to my bench, the gold charm bracelet I picked up in a secondhand store last week slips from my wrist and lands in the packed dirt, glinting in the dappled sunlight as she approaches. I pretend not to notice.

  Stella scoops up the bracelet and addresses me, just as she’s meant to. “I’m sorry, miss?” She proffers the bracelet. “I think you lost this.”

  I look up, surprised—not that I dropped the bracelet, but that my ambush is for once going according to plan. “Oh my gosh, thank you so much!” I take the bracelet from her, smiling. “I didn’t even feel it slip off! It’s very special to me. My mother gave it to me before she passed away last year…Anyway, thank you.” Feigning embarrassment, I bend to pet her Chihuahua, slipping her a kibble as I scratch under her chin. “Hi, sweetie.” I look up at Stella. “She’s adorable. What a good doggy.”

  The dog rubs against me, wanting more kibble. “That’s Mary Elizabeth,” she says.

  Yeah, I know. I continue to scratch her ears. “A big name for such a little lady.”

  “It’s silly—I got her when I was in Louisiana shooting this movie and named her after my character.”

  Wow, she is desperate to talk. This may be easier than I’d thought. I look up to see she’s taken off her sunglasses, revealing a face at once familiar and strange. She’s still beautiful, though her cheeks aren’t quite as round as they used to be, and her brow is pinched with anxiety. Her big green eyes beg me to recognize her.

  “Under the Blue Moon,” I say with delight, as though only now placing her. “I love that movie. You’re Stella Rivers. I didn’t recognize you behind the hat and glasses.”

  “Yes,” she says, relieved to be fondly recognized. “I have to wear them out; you know—tourists in the area. It can be difficult trying to live a normal life.”

  “I can imagine! Or really I can’t. I’m just a nobody off the bus from New Hampshire.” I laugh self-consciously, fiddling with the hem of my counterfeit T-shirt in hopes she’ll bite.

  Finally she notices the name of the school shouting from my chest. “Oh.” She indicates the block letters. “How funny. That’s where I went to conservatory! Well, I wasn’t able to graduate. I was cast in the Harriet films after my first year and didn’t have time to finish, but they gave me an honorary degree. Did you go there?”

  I shake my head. “Grew up in the town, though.”

  “How lovely,” she says wistfully. “New Hampshire is so beautiful. I always wanted to be from a small town; it’s so romantic. I think maybe in a past life I was a professor. I’m wearing tweed and the leaves are changing colors…” Her gaze softens as though lost in memory.

  “All I ever wanted was to get out.”

  Her eyes refocus on me. “Out?”

  So the rumors would appear to be true: she’s lost a few marbles. “I wanted to get out of New Hampshire and come here to Hollywood, where it’s sunny and anything is possible.” Now I’m making myself cringe.

  “Oh,” she says. “Yes. Hollywood. Here we are! I’ve been in the business since I was a child, of course. I can’t imagine what it must be like starting from scratch, trying to get an agent and do the whole thing. It’s a tough business; take it from me.”

  Okay, she’s not totally out to lunch. At least she has some self-awareness. “Oh, I’m not an actress,” I demur. “I just wanted to get away from the snow and my father.”

  She laughs. “My father was no walk in the park either. And I hate snow.” She notices my book on the bench. “Are you reading Believe It and It Will Be?”

  I nod, fleetingly worried the book is a step too far. But I have no choice but to commit now. “Again.”

  “I love that book. It changed my life.”

  “Positivity and gratitude are everything.” Relieved, I bend and scratch the dog again. “Nice to meet you, Mary Elizabeth. You be good for your mama.”

  Stella cocks her head. “She likes you. She doesn’t usually like people.”

  Here we go. “I love dogs,” I admit, barely hiding my glee. “If you ever need a doggy sitter, you let me know.”

  “Actually”—she considers me—“I might do that. I shoot such long hours…I used to bring her to the set with me, but she’s losing her sight and isn’t so comfortable being in new places anymore. Do you have a card?”

  “No,” I say, internally berating myself for not having had cards made up. “But take my number.”

  She extracts her cell phone from a zippered pocket and inputs my number. “I’m Felicity,” I say.

  It’s true. I officially became Felicity Fox last week.

  She smiles to herself and shakes her head. “What?” I ask.

  “N
othing. I was just thinking about my horoscope this morning.”

  “What sign are you?” I ask.

  “Aquarius.” She smiles. “What about you?”

  “Gemini. With an Aquarius rising,” I embellish.

  “Oh, no way! Gemini is one of the signs Aquarians get along with the best.”

  “I know! Two of my best friends growing up were Aquarians,” I fib.

  We laugh together, and she fishes an amethyst pendant from beneath her sweatshirt. “Amethyst is supposed to be really good for Aquarians.”

  “What’s good for Gemini?”

  She lights up. “Agate or celestite are great. Tigereye too, for protection.”

  “Good to know.” I bend to pet Mary Elizabeth again. “It was super nice to meet you two. Hopefully I can help you with Miss Mary Elizabeth.”

  “That would be great. I have your number.”

  I gather my things from the park bench as she and the dog scurry up the path toward the park.

  At long last, the hunter snares her rabbit.

  I can barely contain my joy. The weeks since I learned of her upcoming role opposite Cole have been a travesty of failed casual encounters at the coffee shop she frequents, the yoga class she attends, even the waxing salon she patronizes. Today marked the third time I’ve sat on this bench at this time in this stupid T-shirt I found on eBay. I’d been running out of time. If another week had gone by without success, I’d planned to head down to the islands to try to get a job at the resort where they’re going to be staying while they shoot the movie.

  Still, if she doesn’t reach out to me within the week, I’ll have to stage another chance meeting quickly; the clock is ticking. I need to have enough time to ingratiate myself with her and make my services indispensable before she leaves for the Caribbean in seven weeks, and I’m already cutting it close.

  Jackson never responded to my email, and with today’s interaction, I’ve burned my ability to get a job at the resort, so this has to work.

  But I have faith. My entire life I’ve never had faith in anything, until now.

  Taylor