The Last Guest

by Tess Little

  Mostly, at home, we wasted time, browsing the internet side by side. We spoke to each other about the mundane. What would we make for dinner? Did we need to buy more bread, milk? The closer we approached ordinary life, the more it was exposed as a pretense.

  There was nothing real or necessary or true to say. Neither of us wanted to be the first to bring up Richard, Sedgwick, Tommo’s arrest. We didn’t even talk about Honey—my misgivings about him before the memorial; the arguments. Every time Lillie slipped out to meet him, all she said was, “I’ll be back before dinner.” I knew where she was going, and she knew that I knew. But how could we broach that subject when it was so tangled with the rest?

  We could only wait, refresh our newsfeeds. Side by side on the couch.

  In the end it had been me who spoke first, inadvertently. During a commercial break, sometime toward the end of the trial, I absentmindedly asked out loud, “What happened to Persephone?”

  Lillie blinked blankly.

  “The octopus.”

  “Honey found instructions in Dad’s notes,” she’d said, lifting a lock of hair to search for split ends. “He wanted it to go to the public aquarium.”

  Schools of yellow fish were following as we strolled. Sharks above our heads; coral at our sides.

  “Oh my god, Mom, look,” said Lillie. Even amid everything, she couldn’t help but be awed. “They’re unreal.”

  We slowed to a standstill in front of a jellyfish tank. They were unreal, she was right. Their tendrils were oddly fluffy, drifting through the water as they swam over one another. A mass, a plume of smoke.

  * * *

  —

  “Get yourself to makeup and wardrobe,” someone scolded. “You were supposed to be here over an hour ago.”

  He was the first person to address me since I had walked into chaos.

  “I thought I was early,” I said. “I was told—”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this. Grab Petra or—”

  The sentence was lost with the buzz of his walkie-talkie. I had no idea who Petra was.

  Richard had told me there was nothing to worry about. Someone with a walkie-talkie would point me in the right direction. I still didn’t understand why we’d had to arrive separately. So he needed to get to the studio three hours before me—couldn’t I arrive early and just hang around? Couldn’t he introduce me to everyone, show me the set?

  “You’re sweet.” Richard had laughed. “The new girl in school. Trust me, everyone’ll respect you more if you walk in like a professional. You wouldn’t want them to think I cast you because we’re sleeping together, would you?”

  I strode toward a group of young men. I would not be nervous, I told myself. In only a few hours, I would be performing in front of these people. And wasn’t that what I’d always wanted? There was a flutter of excitement in my belly at this thought.

  “Hi,” I said, flashing my best impression of Tanya. “It’s my first day—do you know where I need to be?”

  “Don’t ask Craig questions like that,” one of them said. “He barely knows his ten-four from his ten-two.”

  They roared with laughter. I kept my grin plastered.

  “Cast?” asked another, when they had finished. He looked me up and down. “Find an AD.”

  “Someone with a walkie-talkie,” his friend added, patronizing.

  “Sure,” I said, still smiling. “I know what I’m doing, I just don’t know where I’m going. You guys must know where makeup is?”

  Makeup was no less frenzied, every seat occupied. A woman with a clipboard approached. “Do they need you for the club scene as well?”

  I told her I was not an extra.

  She shouted over her shoulder, “No, she’s not.”

  “Thank the lord above,” cried a woman brandishing a palette. The man in her chair flinched. “Who is she, then?”

  “Name?” asked Clipboard.

  “Elspeth Bell.”

  “Oh,” said Clipboard. “Oh.” Then shouted again, “She’s Cassandra.”

  “Mine,” said the other woman. I was shepherded into her chair.

  “Cassandra DiSotta”—she swaddled me in a black bib—“I’ve been waiting to get my hands on you. First day on set, right?”

  Something about the environment—the women, the perfume, the familiarity of a salon—encouraged me to drop my pretenses.

  “First day on set ever,” I said, letting myself grin.

  “Wow, okay. Big day. Make sure you enjoy every moment. You only get one first day. Before you know it, you’ll be a battle-scarred veteran like me.”

  I laughed. Yes, I would enjoy every moment—here I was, with a professional makeup artist, and I was being paid for the privilege. If Tanya, if my parents, could see me now.

  “Okay”—she pulled my hair into a bun—“there’s still a backup in hair and wardrobe, so let’s get your face done while we’ve got a second.” She blew her bangs off her forehead. “You picked the wrong day to start, girl.”

  “Sam,” someone called, “Casey wants to know where the Mastix should go.”

  “Ask Lucy,” Sam said, and then to me: “It’s the extras. Their agency fucked up, so they all arrived an hour late. Right, let me get your folder.”

  She rummaged through a box. Found my character’s name.

  “You’re much younger than I expected,” she said, looking at my casting Polaroids. “Don’t know what it is—some people are younger in person, aren’t they? And this is your first set. Well, that’s exciting for you. But you should know now, it’s mostly hanging around. It’ll flash by so quickly, your time in front of the cameras. Okay, here we go.”

  I held as still as I could while she dabbed at my face. When she stood back, I could study my reflection. Heavily outlined lips, thin brows—just like the girls back home.

  Strangers across the country, maybe even around the world, would watch this face, would lose themselves in my character’s story. In my and Richard’s creation. How many couples could point to an artwork and tell the world, Look, here, this is our love?

  “Let me find the camera,” Sam said. “Continuity.”

  A few minutes after she had left, a woman sat in the chair next to mine. “I don’t think we’ve met, have we?”

  “Elspeth.” I put out a hand to shake and beamed. “It’s my first day.”

  “Of course it is.” She smiled.

  “Sorry, I don’t think I caught your name?”

  “Joan. Joan Tucker. I play Kim.”

  “So we have some scenes together,” I said. “When do we rehearse?”

  She took a sip of her coffee. “I thought we weren’t filming those till next week.”

  “But don’t we rehearse before?”

  Sam returned with her camera, and Joan stood to hug her. They gossiped while Sam captured my face, fanned the Polaroids in the air to dry.

  “And you’ve met Elspeth?” Sam eventually asked. “First day on set. Ever.”

  Joan smirked. “I gathered. She was asking when we would rehearse.”

  “Oh, no,” said Sam, trying not to laugh, “there’s no rehearsal like that. You’ll walk through the scene a couple times before shooting….”

  “But that’s for everyone else,” said Joan, inspecting her nails. “Camera setups, blocking.”

  “When do we get direction?” I asked.

  “Richard might give notes right before shooting, but that’s not usual. He’ll only tell you what to do when you’re doing it wrong.”

  “So how do I know—”

  “Just do what you did during casting,” she stated. “I mean, you did go through the audition process, didn’t you? They chose you for a reason.”

  Joan was unblinking.

  I felt myself blush. I had been through auditions, screen tests, b
ut I could see the judgment in her eyes. She knew about my relationship with Richard.

  “You’ll be fine.” Sam smiled. “Don’t overthink it. Lucy will take you to wardrobe and hair. Lucy?”

  As clipboard woman led me away, I heard Joan snigger.

  “I don’t want to be mean,” she whispered, “but her? That’s the arm candy?”

  “I know.” Sam sighed. “They get younger and younger, don’t they?”

  * * *

  —

  In the next exhibit, the jellyfish moved with tiny rhythmic pumps, as though we were watching a tape in fast forward. I was mesmerized by the slow, stringy pink ones in the case after that, but Lillie preferred the creatures beside them, the violet ghosts. Our favorites, however, were the same: the umbrella jellyfish. They were perfectly transparent, catching light on the lines of their strange anatomy. They would swim and swim, then suddenly pause—as though waiting for something—before moving forward again.

  I could have watched their mushrooming forms for hours, but Lillie pulled me on.

  We had avoided most of the trial drama—I followed reports online instead. Tommo’s arrest at the memorial had come with an unexpected breakthrough. After weeks of rifling through and testing the mess of that night, police had finally located what they believed to be the murder weapon. As Yola had boasted at the memorial, the aquarium handlers had discovered, wedged behind the octopus flap, one champagne bottle. As slender and green as the others, but the only one containing traces of Richard’s vomit. The shape matched the wounds; the fingerprints matched Tommo’s. It seemed he had pushed it down Richard’s throat while he lay unconscious, inducing the bile that had choked him to death.

  The motive was equally straightforward. Tommo had not, as he’d told me, lent Richard money for his first film equipment. Of course he hadn’t—I didn’t know why I’d never questioned this. Richard had always been wealthy, the beneficiary of a generous trust from his grandfather. In fact, as it emerged in court, Richard had invested heavily in Tommo’s nascent hedge fund and had, with the catastrophe of Dominus, been looking for an out. But his boyhood friend was reluctant to grant him one—given his failure to retain other clients, given his overly ambitious plan to span the Atlantic—and so Tommo had attended the birthday party with the aim of persuading Richard to stay. Tommo had not succeeded. Tommo had been humiliated. And then—went the prosecutor’s argument—Tommo had seen his opportunity as Richard fell from consciousness. If Richard was no longer a loyal friend and did not want to invest in him, perhaps his heir would.

  “Nearly there,” said Lillie. Her voice echoed from the glass tanks. “I think she’s in the next room.”

  I had shuddered reading the prosecutor’s closing remarks, thinking back to the way Tommo’s eyes had followed my daughter’s path at the memorial. Far worse was the growing dread as I scrolled through reports of character witnesses. Stories of Tommo and Richard tormenting younger boys in school, tales of their disagreements and physical fights; the strawberries and the river incident, it transpired, were only tastes of the truth.

  Tommo’s lawyers requested me as a character witness for the defense, but I instructed Scott to make clear my hostility. It was not the champagne bottle that had shaken my affection for the tufty-haired boy I’d met all those years ago. It was the dishonesty. How could I provide any kind of testimony when I barely knew the man? How many of his lies had obscured my vision? And so I was not subpoenaed. I imagine the lawyers knew it would not play out well before the jury—hounding the pathetic mother of Richard’s innocent daughter.

  The defense argued that Richard had acquired the throat wounds earlier in the night—and that the traces of vomit could well be cross-contamination from the investigation or the lab. As I read this, I recalled my conversation with Tommo, in the bathroom at the memorial.

  What about the bruises? I had asked.

  It could have been anything.

  Who’s to say they weren’t from earlier in the night?

  Don’t you remember when we passed round the bottle in the paddling pool and people were seeing how deep they could push the neck into their mouths?

  Tommo’s lawyers laid the blame for Richard’s death on the other guests. He had overdosed, they said. He had choked on his vomit, they said. Somebody must have heard this, they said, and decided to let him die.

  Tommo maintained that when he began to fall asleep, Kei, Honey, and Charlie were still awake with Richard. As they took the stand, one by one, each faced the aggressive questions of Tommo’s defense team, who painted a picture of Richard and how each of us had reason to kill him.

  “Any of them could have done it,” one of the lawyers told a gaggle of journalists outside the courthouse. “And it’s the responsibility of the prosecution to ensure, beyond reasonable doubt, that they have the correct suspect. It is implausible that anyone could have murdered Richard Bryant while his guests slept soundly only inches away. But equally implausible is the notion that nobody woke as he accidentally choked to death. My client is adamant that one of the other guests must have heard something and decided not to act.”

  In aqueous light, my daughter’s face traced the shape of Richard. He was in her brow, in the hollow of her eyes, even the curve of her lips. But the chin was mine.

  “There,” she said, pointing.

  And there it was—a silhouette clarifying as it moved toward us, creeping over the rocks. An alien from a deep and unknowable realm.

  * * *

  —

  “Cut,” shouted Richard. “For fuck’s sake, who the fuck is the fucking fuckwit lingering by the fucking door? You’re in the back of the shot, you…”

  It was only at that moment that we both realized he was talking to me.

  “…imbecile.”

  I froze with the attention of the room. Everyone had stopped mid-task to stare.

  “Well?” Richard said, like he had no clue who I was. “Are you going to move out of the fucking shot or what?”

  I tried to mumble an apology. Felt the gush of shame. Frantically searched for an exit.

  It was strange, emerging to evening light. Like I had accidentally slept all day, woken after dinner. I sat on the curb. Held my head. Found a cigarette in my pocket.

  My mistakes had been monumental, and I had not yet filmed a scene. I had accidentally touched a piece of equipment and received a tirade from the key grip. I had spilled soda on my white dress, provoking a flurry of wardrobe damage control. And then I had ruined a take by hanging around in the wrong place. I was useless. An embarrassment to Richard.

  I leafed through my script again. Mouthed my lines in cigarette smoke.

  “Elspeth Bell?” called a man, from the warehouse door. “Elspeth Bell? They’re ready for you.”

  I threw down my stub and followed him to the set.

  * * *

  —

  Her bright red was dulled by the turquoise of the water, but Persephone was undeniably herself: the tumbling tentacles, suckers two by two. We watched in awe. And then she was drifting away, squeezing through a crack in the rock. Only one tentacle remained, lifting and falling, as if writing out words in the water.

  “So she came out to say hello.” A woman approached. “Well, you must be Mrs. Bryant.”

  “Please,” I said, shaking her hand, “call me Elspeth.”

  “And you must be Lillie,” she continued, in the singsong voice of someone who spends their time with children. “Jim’s sorry he couldn’t make it today, but he wanted me to thank you for everything on behalf of the aquarium. Persephone, the donation—it’s all so generous. And he said you were interested in hearing how we’ll use your donation, is that right?”

  “Yes, but my mother and I were mostly interested in coming to see Persephone,” Lillie said.

  “Excellent. Well, let me introduce myself real quick. My name is Mon
ice, and I’m the education coordinator here at the aquarium. So I’m not directly involved in looking after our animals, but it’s my job to know what’s going on and explain it to the public.”

  We looked to Persephone’s writhing arm. Her skin swayed with the water.

  “Let me tell you”—Monice raised her voice as a gaggle of boisterous kids ran past—“we’ve got big plans for this one. Gosh, we were so excited when we got your call, Lillie. Because we’ve got a male giant Pacific, his name is Alfonso—I know, I know, we let the kids vote on names—and both he and Persephone are about the right age for mating. So we’ll be introducing them to each other pretty soon, and fingers crossed they mate. Our researchers could not be more thrilled.”

  The children’s footsteps echoed down a tunnel as they ran away.

  “Although,” said Monice, “if it’s successful, unfortunately Persephone won’t live for long.”

  “She won’t?” asked Lillie.

  “No. Both the male and the female GPO die after breeding. The male normally dies a few months afterward. Out in the wild, a predator would probably kill Alfonso—males drift around in the open a lot. Here, he’ll die of starvation or maybe an infection. We call this period senescence, but that’s basically a technical term for old age. The octopuses enter this kind of dementia-like state where they don’t hunt, don’t forage, don’t eat; their bodies start consuming themselves for energy; wounds on their skin no longer heal.”

  “And Persephone?” Lillie looked uneasily to the tank. The creature was crawling out from her crevice once more, carefully placing all eight limbs.

  “Persephone stores the sperm in her body until she wants to lay her eggs—and there’ll be a lot of them, a lot, like tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands,” Monice explained. “They’re about the size of a grain of rice, though, absolutely tiny. And Persephone will attach them to the wall of her den, her rocky nook, and they hang down, kind of like grapes. Then she spends the rest of her days tending to them. Stroking them, blowing water over them to get rid of algae and fungi and other junk.