Lead Me Back

by Reiss, CD

  “Who is it?” Having finished the left sideseam, I moved to the right.

  “Josef Signorile.”

  The seam ripper slipped, and I avoided shredding the entire bodice only because my muscles wanted to crawl back inside themselves.

  “You’ve heard of him?” Evelyn asked.

  “I used to work for him.” I kept my eyes on the loose threads, plucking them like feathers out of a chicken.

  “Oh!” She clapped. “Great, so—”

  “I’m good!” I said with such a thick dose of saccharine cheer no one would confuse my feelings with actual optimism.

  “Kayla?”

  “No, really. I’m sorry. Hey. Look. It’s complicated. Just . . . Cool. Never mind. Okay?”

  “None of that made sense.”

  “He’s not a nice person.” I turned the dress right side out. “That’s all.”

  “Well, then I guess don’t talk to him?”

  Signorile was going to be at the ball. Of course. He took a trip to LA every year before the yarn and fabric shows in Milan. I should have remembered how nice July was in the office.

  “Actually, it’s not complicated,” I said. “He gets his kicks grabbing women who work for him.”

  “Did he . . . ?”

  “Yeah. He has a staff of people to cover it up. It’s like a machine, the way it works. Either you play along and take money to keep your mouth shut, or he ruins you. I took door number two.”

  “I’m sorry that happened.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “If you don’t want to go, I totally understand.”

  “Los Angeles is my turf now.” I held her dress out. “Put this on. Bathroom’s over there.”

  “I’m not shy,” she said, pulling her shirt off. “Is that why you came out here?”

  “Yes.” I rearranged my pins and scissors as if that would focus my energy where it was needed. Evelyn stepped out of her pants. This was supposed to be fun, but I felt as if I’d cut a birthday cake and found worms inside. “Can we change the subject?”

  “Sure. Sorry. Hey. Francine’s next movie starts in two weeks,” Evelyn said from under the skirts as she looked for the armholes. “It’s Treasure Hunt, and the budget is huge. You coming with us?”

  “Not sure.” The job offer had gotten buried under all the other stuff I had on my mind, like my meeting with Butter Birds, the smell of Justin Beckett on my sheets, and now my old boss attending an event I promised to go to.

  “It’ll be low drama,” she said brightly after her head popped through the neck. With the sideseams slashed, most everything else hung better on her. Or maybe it was just the way she stood a little squarer and held her head a little higher in period dress.

  “Was Pride and Prejudice high drama?” I measured the gap where I’d slashed for the size of the side panels.

  “Justin was just . . . it was always something.”

  “How so?” I wrote the numbers down and measured the other side to make sure.

  “There were girls when we were shooting in Ireland.”

  “And? He beat them or something?”

  “No just . . . girls. Around. And Gloria freaked whenever he went out. You know there’s a thing in his contract where he has to keep his nose clean?”

  I liked Evelyn, and I wanted to keep liking her, but her gossipy tone offended me. I had no business getting defensive over Justin. He was a grown man. But I couldn’t help wanting to protect him.

  “Okay, you can take it off,” I said. “So, that’s it? Just some vague stuff?”

  “And makeup was always complaining that his eyes were puffy,” she said as she wrestled out of the dress.

  “You know . . .” I paused before continuing, ostensibly because unrolling pattern paper was noisy, but really because I needed to take a moment to decide if my feelings were proportional. They weren’t. “Justin’s a person.”

  “Yup,” Evelyn answered absently as she got dressed.

  “And you’re accusing him of . . . well, I don’t even know what. But you’re doing it by inference. I’m not going to pretend I know what happened that night at the Roosevelt Hotel or in Ireland, but is it possible none of it was as bad as people say?”

  “Sure?” She got into her clothes. “Why?”

  “He’s all right. He’s really . . . for an egomaniac, he’s not such an asshole.”

  “Okay, look.” Fully dressed now, she leaned over the cutting table. “I’m just going to tell you something that happened that doesn’t matter anymore, okay? I’m not trying to make you mad.”

  “I’m going to drop the armhole three-eighths. And not be mad. So, go ahead.”

  “There were rumors.” She laid her hands flat. “Around set. About you and him.”

  “You didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t believe them.”

  “Well, thank you for that.”

  “You’re welcome.” She straightened. “So you aren’t?”

  “What if I am?”

  “You are?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Oh my God.” Her eyes went big, and she gasped as if she was utterly delighted. “You’re having a thing with—”

  “It’s not a thing!”

  “So . . . What is it?”

  I smoothed the dress, trying to define what I had with Justin. It was pure, undefined potential for romantic fulfillment or devastating heartbreak. Everything and nothing.

  “Never mind,” Evelyn said, standing straight. “It’s not my business.”

  “It’s just . . .” I drifted off, carefully snipping the seam on a skirt panel.

  “I understand.” She fussed with the tracing wheel, which was like a half-size pizza cutter with spikes around the disk. “You don’t have to say.”

  Why shouldn’t I tell her? The shoot was over. It wasn’t as if Justin and I had agreed to secrecy.

  “It’s a thing. Me and Justin.”

  “Wow,” she whispered.

  “Yeah.” I chalked out the shape I’d measured. “He’s . . .” I laid my hands flat on the table, trying to come up with the right adjectives. “He’s the most arrogant man I’ve ever met. He’s got the swagger thing down. But it’s self-contained. He’s cocky, but it’s got nothing to do with me or how he treats me. He’s reverential. Respectful. Kind of unsure with me but so confident in himself that he’s okay with it.” I picked up my shears. “Forget me. I’m not making sense.”

  “Are you excited for you?” she asked. “Because I’m excited for you.”

  I was, and it bothered me. Excitement was the lead-up to disappointment.

  “Do you want pockets at the sideseam?”

  “Duh.”

  I laid the shears against the flat surface and snipped the panel along the chalk lines.

  “I’m sorry about gossiping about him,” she said.

  “It’s his job to be gossiped about.” I said it as if to shrug it off, because I didn’t believe in magic or spells. I didn’t think that speaking something out loud could bring it into being. I told myself the story of his job as a test of my own belief system, asking if I could live with it or not, and deciding I could.

  Evelyn wasn’t a bad hand sewer, so I had her tack up seams while I used the machine. By lunch, we were almost done, so we ordered in. Over chicken salad and iced coffee, she explained how she’d gotten a history degree at UCLA and—while she was waiting to hear if she was accepted to a master’s program—had gotten a job on the set of the historical TV show Roman Numerals.

  “It was like . . . love,” she said, scrolling through her phone. “I was the truck girl, but they let me do a toga. And then I did Faraway Angels. This was mine.”

  She handed me the phone. I wiped my fingers and took it so I could see an actress I didn’t recognize wearing full evening dress with lace and a deep-red shawl.

  “It’s gorgeous,” I said, handing the phone back.

  “Just an extra, but still.” She tapped at her phone with a smile.

&nbs
p; I knew the satisfaction she felt very well. Three years into my career wasn’t very far, but I was deep enough in to see that I was going to be locked into “design assistant” for a long time. Never entrusted with more than administrative and technical duties, while being thrown a bone here and there. This garment. This group. This update of what sold last year.

  Would Evelyn be locked in? Was it okay for me to steal her joy by telling her she should demand more? I’d risked everything to demand . . .

  You risked nothing because you had nothing.

  “Um,” she said, looking at her phone, thumb hovering over the glass. “Kayla? Are you subscribed to DMZ?”

  “No.” Slowly, I picked up my phone, skin tingling with the anticipation of a physical blow as I navigated to DMZ’s alliterative headline.

  BECKETT FEEDS FRIES TO FRIEND’S EX.

  Justin feeding Heidi—Gordon Daws’s wife—a french fry. The woman he’d been caught naked with in a hotel room. Hand-feeding wasn’t a habit between adults who weren’t romantically involved.

  Did the divorce mean he’d stopped caring who saw him?

  Was I just a distraction in the meantime?

  Or was he just doing what Justin Beckett did?

  Frozen in place, I stared at Evelyn’s phone, unable to tear my eyes away from the intimacy of his posture, her parted lips, the way the hand that had touched me the night before braced against the table so he could lean forward.

  “You all right?” Evelyn asked from a million miles away.

  “I’m fine.”

  The article under the picture was short and full of words that stabbed my heart. It was a “tête-à-tête” on a “private patio” at a restaurant known for its “discreet staff.” Justin and Heidi were “bosom buddies” who were the subject of “whispers by those in the know” to be “trysting” while her husband filed for divorce over “rumored infidelity.”

  I wasn’t stupid. The article was written to titillate and shame. But I wasn’t immune to getting hurt either. All I could imagine was them going back to his place—wherever that was—and . . .

  Wait. Was the picture time-stamped?

  The picture wasn’t date-stamped, but I scanned the squib of an article again and found the time.

  Last night, about seven p.m.

  He’d texted me right after, and by seven thirty he was in my alley, smacking glass bottles against the side of my building. Sure, he could have had a quick thing with Heidi in between, but it didn’t seem likely. I didn’t want to say a word or expose my immediate horror. If I ignored it, maybe it would be all right. Maybe I could steer clear of his reputation and think he wasn’t half the douche he was rumored to be.

  But based on past history and the tone of the captions, I was sure Evelyn assumed Justin had slept with Heidi, and though her opinion of him didn’t matter, her opinion of me did.

  I weighed my choices. Was she a friend, or a potential antagonist?

  I put the phone down.

  “Kayla?” As if she’d intuited that I was deciding how much to trust her, my name was a question.

  “He came here last night. Right after dinner.”

  “Oh.”

  She was going to think ill of him. I wasn’t ready to draw conclusions from the clues I had, and I didn’t want her to either.

  “And it was nice,” I said. “We had a good time. We found a tape of A Star Is Born.”

  “Like, on a VCR?”

  “Yeah. He helped me figure out how to rewind it when it was done.”

  “Cool,” she said. “He sounds pretty cool.”

  “We’ll see.” I closed my food container. “Let’s get back to work.”

  Evelyn left in the afternoon with a smile and a dress she loved. I’d convinced her and myself the pictures of Justin and Heidi were nothing, because I believed it. He’d fed her a french fry across the dinner table. I really didn’t care. As a matter of fact, I hoped they could be friends again.

  But I hadn’t shared my worry that my relationship with him was going to be defined by garbage headlines. It nagged me as I cleaned up loose threads and scraps of fabric, and went in for the kill when I looked at my phone again.

  As if the universe was suddenly aware that I was vulnerable, a red BREAKING NEWZ! banner appeared, and since it seemed like the quickest way to get away from the picture of Justin hand-feeding Heidi, I tapped it.

  As it loaded, a black Buick parked and idled in the alley below.

  The big “newz” was that Justin Beckett had been spotted behind a defunct movie theater with a mysterious young woman. The pictures were blurry and shot from the second floor of the building across the alley, but it was him throwing a bottle. Me leaning out the window with my face blurred. Me opening the back gate with the same blur. Us talking. Him pulling his car in. The gate closing with his Tesla inside.

  The pictures of us the following morning had better lighting.

  “Christmas on a cracker,” I said softly, scrolling to the end. I was a “lovely lady” and a “mysterious maiden” who was having a “secret meeting” with the “notorious” musician and—quotes theirs—“actor.” Going through the pictures again, the license plate on the back of my van was blurred, but a white van with a blue stripe was a white van with a blue stripe.

  The black Buick was still idling. The rear window was rolled down.

  I closed the windows and called Talia.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Okay?”

  “You’re a lawyer.”

  “Yes?”

  “Can anyone publish my picture just because?”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Like if they saw me with Justin Beckett?”

  “Come to my office right now.”

  Not wanting whoever was in the Buick to see me, I called an Uber and met the car in the front.

  The receptionist at the law firm had gotten me a cup of water that shook so hard in my hand I had to gulp it before it splashed out. When Talia met me in the reception area, I was still shaking, but at least I was hydrated.

  “Come,” she said, and led me behind the double doors. No one was looking at me, but I kept my gaze on my sister’s back so I wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone.

  Talia took me to a conference room and closed the glass door behind her. I sat, and she sat catty-corner at the head of the long table.

  “I saw,” she said before I had to explain. “Are you okay?”

  “I feel weird. Like outside myself.”

  “Normal. Do you want water?”

  “No. I’m good. Is it legal? What they did?”

  “Well, you’re not a known commodity. You didn’t seek attention. So they’re limited in what they can do. But your face is blurred. They don’t give the location, so your privacy is nominally protected. They never say you’re having sex with him or anything negative about you, so it’s not libel.”

  “But they found me. There were paparazzi hanging around the alley.”

  “That’s their job.”

  “Is everyone going to know who I am? Who I was in New York?”

  “Probably.”

  I covered my face with my hands and bent forward as if I could hide from the truth.

  So much for the new life with new friends and a clean-slate career. Starting over was going to be impossible with the past nipping at my heels.

  Talia rubbed my back.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

  “How?” I asked into my palms.

  “First, I need to know what’s going on with you and him.”

  I sat straight, with a sweaty face and hair coming out of my ponytail.

  “It’s a disaster,” I said. “I don’t even know. We hung out a few times. Last night he came over, and he left at five in the morning, but nothing happened. No. Things happened but not the thing, not that it’s anyone’s business.”

  “So, if you’re going to be together, t
hat complicates things.”

  “But then I saw the pictures of him and Heidi. His bandmate’s wife, right? And I don’t know if I’m more hurt about that or the guys with the cameras. Because I like him, Talia. I like him so much. He’s sweet and funny and don’t look at me when I say . . . he’s smart. He’s attentive and cares about people in his life. And I thought I could be one of those people. But there’s this Heidi picture all over the place, and it was all lies. He wasn’t being sweet. He was manipulating me for a thrill, and I got all turned around. I fell for him when I wasn’t looking.” I couldn’t see Talia’s expression through a fog of self-abasement. “I have crappy taste in men and zero professional instinct. How could I be so stupid?”

  “You’re not stupid.” She handed me a tissue that I crumpled in my sweaty fist.

  “I am.” I pounded the table. “I packed myself up, drove a few thousand miles, and left my brains behind. I’m two days away from my first meeting. Now I’m going to have to move to the moon if I want to start fresh. Everyone’s going to know why I was blackballed out of New York, and they’re going to blackball me out of LA too.”

  I opened the tissue and rubbed my eyes even though they were dry.

  “If you don’t see him again, they’ll lose interest.” Talia put the tissue box in front of me.

  “Do you think?”

  “Yeah.” She stretched for a black plastic garbage pail and put it at my feet. “You’re not clickbait without him.”

  I tossed the dry tissue and snapped up another one.

  “That should make me feel better.”

  “But you like him.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Why?”

  I laughed to myself and balled up the tissue, lodging it at the base of my palm.

  “Remember the Christmas Mom didn’t have money for paper, so she wrapped everything in those annoying PennySaver flyers that got left at the door? No ribbons. No tags. Just pictures of pink meat at bargain prices? Our names were written in the white parts with ballpoint pen. I knew there was no Santa Claus that year, and that was the year I knew we were poor. And I thought, ‘Wow, I should be sad about that,’ but . . .” I wiped my nose with the tissue ball. “But I wasn’t. That was the year she got me a sewing machine and a whole kit. She wrapped up each spool of thread separately so I’d have more things to open. And for you, the tackle box, right?”