Page 17 of The Lion in the Library

She pulled back, her eyes meeting mine. Something in them had settled.

“Goodnight, Leo,” she said.

I could still feel the warmth of it. “Goodnight, Estrella.”

I made it to the hallway before I stopped, leaned my back against the wall, and took one long breath.

Then I smiled like an idiot all the way to the car.

CASTLES AND KINGDOMS

ESTRELLA

Iwas still thinking about the kiss when I walked into the wrong audition room.

Not badly wrong — the right floor, the right corridor, just one door too early — but wrong enough that I had to be redirected by a production assistant who was very kind about it and very young, the way everyone in this city seemed to be young, as if Los Angeles ran on a different calendar than the rest of the world.

“Flores?” she said, checking her clipboard.

“Yes. Estrella Flores.”

“Room Four. Down the hall, last door on the left.” She smiled. “Good luck.”

I thanked her and walked the rest of the corridor telling myself to focus. This was not a significant audition by any measure I had previously used to measure auditions. A supporting role in a television series — not a major network, not a film, not anything that would have crossed my desk two years ago in Mexico City. But that was two years ago, and I was here now, and the only direction available was forward.

The self-talk was something I had developed recently. Before Leo, I had managed on pride alone. Pride was efficient but brittle. The self-talk was slower but it held better under pressure.

I was thinking about this — about Leo, again, inevitably, as I had been thinking about Leo at irregular intervals since Sunday when he had kissed my hand in front of the library and then, much more importantly, since I had kissed him properly on my own doorstep and watched his face do something extraordinary — when I pushed open the door to Room Four.

Three people sat behind a folding table: a director whose name I had researched and then temporarily lost to the general fog of the morning, a casting woman named Deborah with whom I had spoken briefly on the telephone, and a man whose lanyard identified him as a producer, and who was currently eating a granola bar with focused efficiency.

“Ms. Flores,” Deborah said warmly. “Thank you for coming in. We’re excited to meet you.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” I said, and the words came out in my own voice, unguarded, the accent sitting exactly where it always sat when I was not concentrating on moving it.

I had been concentrating very hard on moving it for weeks. Mrs. Feldman’s exercises, Miguel’s suggestions, my own increasingly exhausting self-corrections. Th not d. Flatten the r. Soften the music of it. Make yourself easier.

Today I was thinking about a kiss on a doorstep, and I forgot to concentrate.

“We’ve pulled up your reel,” the director said. He had the particular energy of someone who had been in rooms like this one for many years and retained, despite everything, a genuine curiosity. “The scene from Corazón de Ceniza — the confrontation with the husband. That’s extraordinary work.”

“Thank you,” I said. Still my own voice. I was so distracted by the kiss that I had not yet noticed I was not performing any of the corrections.

“We’d like to read the scene on page twelve,” Deborah said, sliding a page across the table. “It’s a confrontation scene as well — our protagonist, Rosario, has just discovered that her sister has been lying to her. She’s furious, but she’s also frightened, because the sister is the only family she has left.”

I looked at the page. Read it once. Felt the shape of it.

This I knew how to do. This I had always known how to do. The fury that sits on top of the fear, the love underneath both of them. Two marriages had given me, among other things, an advanced degree in this particular emotional architecture.

I set the page down and began.

I was three lines in when I felt the room change. The quality of silence shifted — from the professional assessment of people doing their jobs to something more alert, more present. The producer set down his granola bar.

I didn’t stop. Rosario was not thinking about accent corrections, and so for the length of the scene, neither was I. Rosario was thinking about her sister, about the lie, about how the people we love most are also the ones best positioned to destroy us — and about how we choose them anyway, because the alternative is worse.

When I finished, there was a pause.

Then the director said, “Can you do it again? Exactly the same.”