Suite Scarlett (3 page)

Generally speaking, New York City is a good place to spend your birthday. You can go to a show, you can shop, you can eat and see the sights. There is very little you
can’t
do in New York, if you set your mind to it.

The problem, however, is if you are alone and broke. If you have about sixteen dollars left to your name, with no prospect of getting many more…if your friends have scattered around the globe, your older sister is working a ten-hour shift, your younger sister probably wouldn’t put you out if you were on fire, and your brother, who would normally have spent the day with you, is out trying to save his career…it’s not all it could be. Especially if you live there, and have therefore seen all the sights, because the “sights” are really just the “things on your street.”

If you add to that the fear that your family is on the verge of total financial collapse, you have the makings of a birthday that is memorable for all the wrong reasons. You should probably go back to bed.

Scarlett tried to make the most of her day. She wandered around some stores and went to Central Park. She’d even gotten away with
using the expired ice cream coupon, which felt like a minor victory. When it got too hot and walking around got tiring, she went home and sat on her bed with her computer.

Her computer was one of the things in life that made her very happy, despite the fact that it was old and very slow. It was a hand-me-down from Chloe, who got new computers and phones on a regular basis. Aside from Marlene, Scarlett was the only Martin with a personal computer; everyone else shared the one at the front desk.

This was especially useful since Scarlett liked to write—and you didn’t need money to do that. She could be one of those people who published a book at age fifteen and went on to worldwide fame and fortune and didn’t have to scam ice-cream places with expired coupons.

That sounded very appealing, so she spent several hours trying to string together some meaningful sentences. She tried to write about what she knew—but what she knew didn’t seem very interesting. No one was going to want to read about getting stuck in the elevator or missing subway trains or having furniture break underneath you.

Lola came home at a little after eight, and went immediately to take a post free-makeover-day bubble bath. The tiles, massive clawfoot tub, sloped high ceiling, and skylight in the bathroom next to the Orchid Suite created a perfect echo chamber, enough noise to easily penetrate the thin walls—so Scarlett never got to miss a thing in terms of the bathroom activities. It was just one of those little bonuses that life had thrown her way.

Scarlett’s writing process was therefore interrupted by Lola and Chip’s phone conversation. Tonight’s was all about shirts. Granted,
she was only hearing Lola’s end of it, but this was still pretty clear. Spencer was right—their conversations weren’t exactly romantic. This one certainly wasn’t. Who made the highest count cotton dress shirts? Was tawny rose just pink, was pink what he really wanted, and if so, was it
this
pink? Was it better just to get shirts made? If so, by whom?

So very, very boring. Everything was boring.

Scarlett listened to the distant droning on about shirts and stared at the screen. Nothing was coming to her now—nothing but thoughts about shirts. She put on her headphones to block it out.

A few minutes later, Lola returned to their room, wrapped in her silky, pink knee-length robe. She sat down on her bed primly, knees tucked together, and stared at her dresser. She cocked her head slightly, following its angle. One of the legs had come off years ago and been replaced by one that was a centimeter or two too short.

She let out a light, airy sigh. Lola was often like this when she finished talking to Chip. Not exactly sad, but not brimming with excitement, either. Tonight, she seemed a bit more pensive than usual. She picked up her brush and stroked her hair slowly.

“Problem?” Scarlett asked.

“Something’s come up tomorrow,” Lola said. “I have to go somewhere with Chip. But I’m supposed to be taking Marlene to an event in the morning.”

“Oh,” Scarlett said sympathetically. Marlene was strictly Lola’s job, because Marlene pretty much refused to go anywhere with anyone else.

“I was wondering if you could do it, since you’re not…well, working. And it won’t take long.”

“Me?” Scarlett gasped.

“Well…”

“Don’t you, um, have work?”

“I took off,” Lola said. “Or, I will in the morning. I’ll call in sick. She really likes going places with you. She just doesn’t know how to show it.”

Scarlett leveled a look at her sister that could have penetrated a cement barricade.

“It’s really not that bad,” Lola said. “Honest. I won’t forget this. I will owe you, and you know I’m good for it.”

Lola was actually good for these kinds of things. She very much operated on the system of doing and returning favors. Her credit was impeccable. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was Marlene would burst a blood vessel. She would scream and howl and make all their lives a misery.

Before Scarlett could point out this incredibly obvious fact, there was a rapid knock on the door. After a short decency pause, Spencer let himself in without preamble. He went airborne and landed hard on Scarlett’s bed, causing her frail computer to bounce. She grabbed and stabilized it before it exploded into its component parts.

“I have news,” he said. “Remember how I told you that I was going to call everyone I knew? It turns out that one of my friends from school knows these people who are doing
Hamlet.
One of their cast members just got cast in a touring company of
Mamma Mia
, like, yesterday. So he’s leaving, and they called me to come in and read for the part.”

“Spence,” Scarlett said. “That’s amazing! You’re going to be Hamlet!”

“Well, not Hamlet. I’m up for Guildenstern, one of Hamlet’s
guys—and also one of what the script calls
two clowns
, who are actually unfunny gravediggers. Here’s the thing, though. This isn’t just a straight-up
Hamlet
, it’s kind of like a carnival. It’s the happy
Hamlet.
Until everyone dies, including the guy I would play. But until we bite it, we basically run around like idiots through the whole show.”

“So it’s perfect for you,” Lola said earnestly.

“Pre
cisely
,” Spencer replied. “The list of stuff they wanted is pretty much the entire bottom of my resume…lots of fistfights and falling.”

“Which you do,” Scarlett said happily. “Better than anyone. It’s the perfect part!”

Spencer scratched under his chin thoughtfully for a moment.

“Which is good, right?” Scarlett said.

He scratched some more.

“There’s kind of a catch,” he said.

“Catch?”

“It’s with this group called First National Bang Theater Company, and this show is their Shakespeare in the Parking Garage production. Technically…”

He held up one finger at this.

“…technically, it’s on Broadway. Just, really
far down
Broadway.”

Lola sighed.

“You mean it’s on the
street
called Broadway, right?” Scarlett said.

“Right. But no one ever said what that meant, specifically. So I can say the theater is
on Broadway
, which it is, and no one can call me a liar.”

“Spence,” Lola said. “That’s not Broadway. That’s not what they meant in your deal.”

“Does it pay at least?” Lola asked.

“Subway fare counts, right?”

Lola played with the belt on her robe and said nothing.

“I
need
this play,” he said. “Agents will come to this. Casting directors will come.”

“You want to do
Hamlet
in a parking garage instead of going to school?” Lola said. “Spence, you know that scholarship offer is about to expire. Can’t you figure out a way to do both? It’s full tuition. And we need a cook.”

“I know what it is,” Spencer replied, squaring off to Lola. “But in exchange for the money, they farm me out to restaurants for forty hours a week. That’s on top of full-time classes. How am I supposed to act when I’m working eighty hours a week? For
two years.
Also, even if I did it, I really don’t want to work in
this
place my whole life.”

He held up his hands as if to say, “You see my problem.”

“I guess,” Lola said, without much conviction. “But it still couldn’t hurt, Spence. I mean, you’d be a trained chef with lots of experience, and you could always fall back on that.”

“Well,” he said, “I realize not all of us date millionaires. They’re pretty good to fall back on, too. All that nice, soft cash.”

He propelled himself off Scarlett’s bed before Lola could reply.

“Anyway. Gots to go. Have to prepare.”

He patted Lola’s head as he bolted out the door. Lola carefully pulled the loose strands of her long blonde hair from her brush and thoughtfully wound them around her finger.

“I know you think I’m being hard on him,” she said quietly. “But I think at some point, you have to get practical.”

“Define practical,” Scarlett said. “Because it sounds like you’re saying he should give up. Spencer is a good actor.”

“I know that,” she said. “I know it’s hard for him. I get it. And I know that’s why he makes fun of Chip because he’s well-off.”

“He’s rich,” Scarlett corrected her.

Lola cocked her head to the side noncommittally. She never said that Chip was rich. The word seemed vulgar to her. It was always
well-off or comfortable
, but the real word was
rich.
The pink diamond stud earrings that sparkled demurely when she tucked her hair behind her ears, the stack of stubs of opera and ballet tickets…these were all reminders that while Lola was still a Martin, she spent some of her time in a very different world.

“There’s nothing wrong with what Chip is,” Lola said. “Having money doesn’t make him a bad person. Spencer is hung up on this idea of being a poor actor.”

“I don’t think he wants to be poor. He wants to work.”

“Nobody wants to be poor. But you need to use some sense if you want to avoid ending up that way. Look at us. Look at where we live.”

“You make it sound like we live in a burned-up car under a bridge,” Scarlett said. “We live in a hotel, in the middle of Manhattan.”

“Exactly. This place is worth millions. We should be rich, too. But we’re not. I’m pretty sure we barely own this place anymore. We can live in it, but if we left it, we’d have nothing but debt. This place owns
us.
”

There was a slight edge creeping into Lola’s usually calm voice that unsettled Scarlett.

“It’s not that bad,” Scarlett said.

“Not that bad? Scarlett, where are your friends this summer, while you’re here?”

This was a bit of a low blow.

“All I’m saying,” Lola went on, returning to her reasonable tone, “is that we all have to face the fact that we live here, and that things are like they are. Mom and Dad break their backs to keep things going. They do every job now. He’s had a year to try. And if there is a scholarship offer, he should take it.”

Scarlett’s eyes automatically turned to the graduation cap that sat on the top of Lola’s dresser.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about me,” Lola said, getting up and opening her armoire. “I have my year now to figure out what I want to do next. I have my job, which I love. And in the meantime, I have somewhere I have to be tomorrow. So, is it a deal? Because if it is, I have something special for you to wear.”

She lifted out a plastic garment bag attached to a thickly padded hanger. She hung this on the edge of the door and unzipped it, revealing a sleekly-cut black summer dress—light enough for day, dressy enough for night. The perfect dress. It was Dior. Chip had purchased it for Lola two months before for some event that required a designer label. This was Lola’s biggest gun—the most valuable thing she owned, aside from the pink diamonds.

“This must be important,” Scarlett said.

“It would mean a lot to me.”

“Where exactly would I be taking her?”

“Somewhere fun!”

“Seriously, Lola. Where am I taking her?”

“To the set of
Good Morning, New York
!” Lola said. “You don’t have to do a thing. Just sit in the audience while they stand around doing something for a segment on healthy cooking. I promise you. It’ll take two hours. That’s all.”

She waggled the dress and smiled her sweetest smile.

“That won’t fit me.” Scarlett said skeptically. Lola was taller, but Scarlett was far curvier.

“Of course it will!” Lola said, refusing to be daunted. “We’re almost the same size. In fact, this will look
better
on you than me. You can fill it out in the right places.”

It was clear that Lola was determined to make this work.

“Why not?” Scarlett said, turning back to the futile effort struggling along on her screen. “Might as well start the summer on a high note.”

When Scarlett woke the next morning, Lola was already awake and out of the room. Scarlett found that her hair had grown during the night, like a mushroom, and her curls clung to her eyelashes. She grabbed her shower basket and stumbled out into the hall, half-blinded.

The bathroom door opened just a sliver, and the smell of burning hair slithered through the crack. Spencer was long gone, and Lola’s blonde locks were so fragile that she never used any heating devices on them. That left one person.

“Marlene?” she asked the crack. “Are you on fire?”

The door was
foomped
shut as hard as it could be, which wasn’t very hard. The door was a little crooked and didn’t shut completely.

“Just tell me if there are actual flames coming off your head,” Scarlett said, patiently leaning against the wall.

“Shut up.”

Scarlett nodded. Marlene couldn’t be on fire and telling her off at the same time. Well, maybe she could…but she couldn’t be a complete fireball, and that was what mattered.

“I’m going to need the shower, too,” she said.

“I’m busy.”

It didn’t sound like Marlene knew about the switch yet. She wouldn’t have been talking to Scarlett at all if that were the case.

“Can I just…”

Foomp.
The door stuck shut this time. Marlene must have hit it hard.

It was a complicated thing having a cancer survivor for a little sister.

There was a time—thought it seemed like a
long
time ago—when Scarlett remembered liking being an older sister. She took Marlene on the carousel in Central Park. She took her for ice cream down the block (as long as Spencer or Lola walked with them long enough to help them cross Second Avenue). And then, one day when Scarlett was eleven and Marlene was seven, Marlene got cranky. A few days later, they first saw the little bluish lump on Marlene’s neck. A week later, it hadn’t gone away, and it was joined by another bluish lump under her arm. She went to the doctor’s office one afternoon and didn’t come home that night.

That was the beginning of it all. The disease entered all of their lives.

Marlene was in and out of the hospital for seven months. What leukemia really was…what it really meant…Scarlett didn’t really get the details. She understood more from watching how the rest of the family reacted. Her parents stopped paying as much attention to the hotel. They did what they needed to, but they reserved most of their energy for the hospital. They closed doors more often, physically huddled together more.

Lola, at thirteen, was already very responsible, very popular, very perfect. She could easily have become a queen of her class, but she
softened her ambitions to spend as much time with Marlene as she could. She started doing things around the hotel without being asked.

Spencer, at fifteen, still messed around—but Scarlett noticed that he started to make much more deliberate efforts not to get hurt. He went to the hospital regularly to entertain Marlene, covered up his excesses carefully (and there were plenty), and picked up all the slack when it came to Scarlett. While everyone else was busy, they cemented their already strong bond.

And so, the pairs were set, and they had never altered. It was Lola and Marlene, Spencer and Scarlett from then on.

The Powerkids were Marlene’s “class”—part of a charity surrounding the group of kids in her unit. Even though she had been in remission for two years, the Powerkids were still the center of her life. The Powerkids gave Marlene a social calendar that easily rivaled Lola’s. She went to basketball games at Madison Square Garden and baseball games at Yankee Stadium. She saw the Rockettes every Christmas. She went on special tours of the Bronx Zoo where they let you feed the monkeys. She had met the mayor, at least a dozen major league sports players, and a handful of TV stars. She had also gotten to switch on the lights on top of the Empire State Building one night.

It had definitely crossed Scarlett’s mind once or twice that having cancer was a serious boost to your social life.

She went back to the Orchid Suite and sat on her bed. A fat pigeon landed with a heavy thump on the outside of the window air conditioner and stared in at Scarlett. It shook out some feathers and squatted there, apparently finding her an engrossing sight.

Lola entered, smiling brightly and carrying a steaming mug of
coffee, which she handed to Scarlett. Lola was already dressed in a pretty white sundress, imprinted faintly with white dots. Her fair hair was wound into a loose knot on the back of her head, and her pink diamond earrings flashed warmly.

“She won’t let me shower,” Scarlett said.

Lola looked at the dress hanging from the wardrobe door worriedly, then fished around in the Drawer of Mysteries—the massive, slightly unstable top drawer of her dresser in which she kept special samples of expensive products and magical clothes-fixing devices. She removed a small baby-blue package of what appeared to be wipes of some kind.

“These are amazing,” Lola said, delicately drawing a wipe from the pack. “They have verbena, Turkish sea salt, vitamin A, sage, and ginger.”

“Do I eat it?” Scarlett asked, taking the wipe by the corner as it was offered. “Sounds healthy.”

“It’s about twenty times better for you than soap,” Lola said with a smile. “They’re a hundred and fifty dollars a pack and very, very effective. I only have them because the company rep likes me.”

Lola resealed the pack with the same kind of care that doctors use when packing up organs for emergency transport. Then she left for a few moments to let Scarlett rub herself down in spicy-herby-salty goodness. At first, it was freezing cold. Then her skin tingled wherever the rub had touched. Actually, it almost burned—but it was a strange cold-burn. The wipes clearly did
something.
She wrapped her pajama top around herself and stood there shivering in the heat.

“Feel clean?” Lola asked, as she came back in.

“Clean, and kind of rashy.”

“That’s the ginger,” Lola said. “It’s stimulating your pores.”

“Is that a good thing?”

Lola’s smile said that it was impossible for pore stimulation not to be a good thing.

“Now,” she said. “I just need to get you some things. Drink your coffee.”

Scarlett sat and sipped while Lola dug around in the next drawer, the one filled with perfectly folded panties, spooned together bras, floral sachets, and tiny packets of special detergents for the most delicate materials.

“Here we go,” she said, lifting a complicated adjustable bra from her drawer. It looked like something that had been removed from a parachute, all clamps and straps and impossible-to-disengage safety features. She helped fasten Scarlett into it, then removed the dress from its padded hanger and handed it over.

“What is this thing you’re going to?” Scarlett asked.

“A clambake.”

Scarlett stopped with the dress halfway down her face.

“You’re leaving me with Marlene for a clambake?”

Lola pulled the dress down and shifted it into place. It strained a bit over her hips, but it eventually gave.

“This looks great on you,” she said soothingly. “It’s a little long, but I can fix that by tying this a little tighter.”

The dress tied at the back of the neck. Lola adjusted it carefully. It was only when everything was moored in place that Scarlett was allowed to put on deodorant.

“Clambake,” Scarlett muttered. “Chip and the clambake. It sounds like a mismatched partner cop comedy.”

“See? You haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere yet.”

“Come on.” Lola steered Scarlett in front of the mirror. “Let me fix your hair.”

For a non-curly-haired person, Lola could handle Scarlett’s anarchist hair with surprising skill. More products were pulled from the magic drawer. A curl was pulled out here, scrunched up there. Two types of fine mist were sprayed, and a small amount of a light-as-air waxy substance was snapped over the tips.

“Perfect,” Lola said. “Why don’t you try out the makeup I got you yesterday? That red lipstick would be fabulous with this. I’m going to go tell Marlene what’s going on.”

Scarlett twisted up the lipstick as Lola went next door. She heard the whole conversation through the wall.

“Guess what!” Lola said. “Scarlett’s going to take you today!”

This had exactly the effect that Scarlett had predicted.

“
Why
?”

“Because I have to go somewhere with Chip.”

“Where?”

Marlene had a journalist’s instinct for questioning.

“Just somewhere.”

“I want you to take me,” Marlene said. “It’s
TV.
”

Scarlett resented the implication that she was somehow less worthy to sit in a studio audience than (the admittedly photogenic) Lola, but she was used to this kind of thing from Marlene. She twisted the lipstick open and carefully tapped it against her lower lip. The color was strong.

“Come on,” Lola said coaxingly. “It’ll be just as good.”

“No, it won’t.”

“My little sister loves me so much,” Scarlett said quietly to the mirror. “I am her
favorite.
”

There were general moans of protest now. A low whine. These were coupled with soothing words from Lola as she tried to tame Marlene into submission. Scarlett rolled her eyes. Only Marlene could throw a temper tantrum about who was going to take her on one of her countless interesting trips.

“It’s a favor,” Scarlett heard Lola say. “Just for me. I’ll tell you what. You go with Scarlett today and, later this week, I’ll bring you into the store and get you a makeover. Deal?”

There was a pause and a banging around of what Scarlett assumed was the curling iron. Hopefully Marlene wasn’t trying to scorch a hole in the wall with it to stare at her through. It wouldn’t have surprised her, though.

“Fine,” Marlene finally said. “I have to finish my
hair.
”

Lola returned, a mask of placid innocence on her face.

“She’s trying to look like you,” Lola said, smoothing down her dress. “You should be flattered.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s what she’s doing.”

“That lipstick is perfect,” Lola said, deftly switching subjects. “Told you. You really need to go for bolder colors. You have the skin and the hair for it. Some people spend thousands of dollars a year and fry their hair to a crisp trying to get your shade of blonde or those kind of curls.”

Lola was always sincere. That’s why it was hard to deny her anything.

“Speaking of frying hair, you should probably keep an eye on her,”
Scarlett said, running the lipstick over her bottom lip one more time. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

Scarlett was poking around in her closet for some shoes when her phone rattled on the dresser. It was the front desk.

“Get down here now,” her mother whispered urgently. “Now—
now.
Whatever you’re doing, drop it.”

There was something in her voice that told Scarlett this was no drill. She shoved on a pair of flip-flops and ran.