Page 18 of No One Aboard
Eileen Mavenson was left-handed. She suffered from thalassophobia, could speak Cajun French, and took her coffee with a shot of Creek Water Whiskey on mornings when she breakfasted with her husband.
But what was the plot? Why was Eileen on a boat?
It was a boat party gone wrong. Eileen and her husband had to flee out to sea after the party resulted in the death of the popular host. Was Eileen responsible? Was her husband? Eileen didn’tfeelguilty. But perhaps she was, and the feeling there instead was relief. Or pride. She would need to stew on the details, but what mattered now was that Lila’s emotions were not her own. Who could blame Eileen for feeling trapped at sea? Why shouldn’t Eileen be disenchanted with her circumstance? Why shouldn’t she look at the ocean and see it as a monster?
Lila’s heartbeat calmed. Her stomach retreated from her throat. She found herself focusing instead on the tissue-soft skin of her aging hands. She wasn’t old, nowhere near it in fact, but as far as Hollywood was concerned, she was already a decade past relevant.
Even if Eileen were a real character, Lila would never be cast to play her.
Lila was far from naive. She knew that parts dried up for women as they aged—a particularly maddening fact when she also knew she’d become a better actress the older she got. Lila’s career had exploded thirty years ago when she’d played a pithy detective’s wife inHerald of Mystery(not her first movie, but the first one anyone counted). In the story, Lila’s character becomes entangled in a homicide case that eventually implicates her own husband. Roger Ebert diagnosed the script asturgid, while Lila’s performance wasinspired. In the end,Herald of Mysteryfailed to earn out, but Lila Logan was subsequently offered a trifecta of superior roles.
Had those been the glory days? She hadn’t thought so at the time, and to think so now made Lila all the more ill. She stepped back from the edge and peeked at her phone. Her agent still hadn’t called about her audition last week, or even texted about the one she had coming up in mid-June. This was her last opportunity for cell service until they reached Florida.
Lila couldn’t help herself.
Any word?she texted and stared at the bottom-left corner, waiting for bubbles. Instead, she witnessed the slow demise of her cell service as the bars dropped one by one to zero.
Lila tucked the phone back into her waistband, trying not to despair. But how could she not? In show business, no news was worse than bad news.
Lila would forever prefer to be a scandal than an irrelevance.
Already, her hair had unraveled from its pins, blowing in webs across her face, and she caught a wisp in her hand. Her hair was thinning, and sometimes when she twisted it into a bun as she’d done so many times through the years, it looked less like a rope of blond and more like worn and colorless string.
Lila smoothed her hands down her front to keep her linen blouse from ballooning. Sometimes the worst person in the world she could be was herself. The hunger she’d felt as a young woman to be known had only intensified over the years. But the world no longer cared to feed her.
No. Better to be Eileen right now.
And so she was Eileen, she was on the run, and yet she had absolutely nothing to lose. And whatever would poor, desperate Eileen Mavenson do when she had nothing to lose? Lila glanced around the ship. The possibilities were endless because she didn’t really know Eileen, not yet. It was Lila’s job to discover her.
“Lila, love!” Francis called from the back of the boat at his place on the helm.
Lila whipped her head around. Had he been there that entire time?
“Come here, you’ve got to try this.”
Lila left Eileen at the railing, looking out to sea. She stepped into the cockpit where her husband clasped her hands and fastened them onto the helm to let her steer. He looked more alive than he had in years. Francis Cameron’s love affair with the ocean was both in better standing and longer-lasting than any encounter with a woman, his wife of twenty-seven years included.
“It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” Francis could hardly contain himself. He was waiting for her to agree, as if the metal wheel were the most exciting thing Lila Logan had laid her hands upon.
Lila regarded the helm. She would like to understand it in order to better understand him. She would like to know what in the cold, dead ocean made his heart beat faster, his eyes shine. She turned the wheel to the right.
The Old Eileenmoved. It obeyed her, and the waves were sliced to pieces in their effort to stop it. Something quivered inside her, and this time it wasn’t nausea.
She almost liked it.
“It is,” she said, but the wind devoured her words before they had reached her husband, and Francis was already taking the wheel back.
Still Lila returned to the railing reinvigorated. Her pale hair rippled out behind her, and she pictured herself on the filmy poster of an old movie. She’d have Veronica Lake waves, a bloodred lip, and a mink around bare shoulders. The sea would be behind her as she draped herself on a railing and looked meaningfully just past the camera. Oh, and maybe there’d be a gun placed somewhere in there so all who viewed it would know Lila had graduated from ingenue to femme fatale.
A star with incentive.
She looked around at the world, this terrible flat blue plane that thought it could erase her, and she knew without a doubt what she must do.
Make them remember me.
And in that moment, in that delicious in-between of Eileen and herself, Lila couldn’t honestly say whose thought it had been.
Chapter 9
