“My work wife,” he said. “Don’t deny it.”
“Your work wife is Marx,” Sadie said.
“And I was saying it so they’d let you come back,” Sam said. “The key to getting what you want in a hospital is telling the right lies in an authoritative voice.”
She yawned again. “I’m still so jet-lagged. I should drive home. I feel like I haven’t driven in so long that I’ve become a bad driver.” She shook his hand, which was their parting custom. “I’ll be here when you wake up from surgery, okay? I love you, Sam.”
“Terribly,” he said.
After Sadie left, Sam wasn’t tired, so he decided to take a last walk on his rotten foot. By this time, the foot could bear almost no pressure, and Sam was on crutches. But still, he wanted to remember what it felt like to be two-footed. He found himself walking over to the children’s hospital, where he’d spent so much time, where they’d devoted so much effort to saving the thing that would, in several hours, be excised for good.
He went into the waiting room and a girl, not much older than Sadie had been when he met her, was playing a game on a laptop. In the perfect world, Sam thought, the game the girl is playing is Ichigo. He looked over at the screen: it was Dead Sea.
“Do you like that game?” Sam asked.
“It’s kind of old, but I like killing zombies,” the girl said. “My brother says I look like the Wraith.”
As Sam walked back to his hospital room, he felt the surprisingly sharp point of Sadie’s crystal paperweight in his pocket, poking his thigh. He reached into his pocket, and he took it out. He looked at the little paperweight and he laughed at himself. How angry he had been at Sadie! How much righteous passion he had devoted to holding this grudge! He had thought himself so mature when he’d decided to cut her out of his life, but his reaction had been embarrassingly childish and over-the-top. He’d once tried to explain the falling-out to Marx, and Marx had not even understood it. No, Sam had said, you don’t understand. It’s the principle. She was pretending to be my friend, but she was just doing it for community service. Marx had looked at Sam blankly, and then he said, No one spends hundreds of hours doing anything out of charity, Sam. Thinking of this and looking at the little paperweight, Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said “love” all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.
He wanted to call her right now and tell her, but he knew she was jet-lagged and would be sleeping in that mint green four-poster bed, under the rose-print sheets, her parents down the hall. The thought made him happy. His best friend had come back to their hometown for him. He wasn’t a fool; he knew what Marx had been doing when he’d insisted they move their business here. Marx had let him think that they were moving for Both Sides, for Sadie, for himself, and for Zoe even. But the truth was, they had done it for Sam, because Sam had been afraid of facing the winter, because Sam had constantly been in pain, because Sam had been afraid of the surgery and it was obvious to everyone that the surgery could not be put off. They had been worried about him, and they had wanted to make his life easier. And so they invented reasons—some of them even compelling and real. And they had not done this for the game or the company, but because they loved him, and they were his friends. And he felt grateful.
He took off his clothes, carefully setting the crystal heart on the nightstand, and he changed into his pajamas. He took a last look at his foot—adieu, old friend—and then he got into bed, and he went to sleep. As was often the case when he was in the hospital, he dreamed of his mother.
* * *
—
For the first several months of being in Los Angeles, Anna did not work at all. She steadily auditioned for movies, soap operas, commercials, voice-overs, but hadn’t received so much as a callback. When she asked her agent why she was striking out so much, he said not to worry. “You have to let them get to know you, Anna.” Her agent insisted she had a young look, and he advised her to revise her résumé to say that she could play parts from thirteen to forty.
A few days after Sam’s tenth birthday, she did get a callback for a Saturday-morning cartoon show about tiny singing blue trolls, but in the end, they decided that they wanted someone whose voice was less ethnic. Briefly, Anna wondered what was “ethnic” about her voice: she was a native Angeleno. It was never any use to dig down on rejection feedback, though. Maybe they didn’t like her because she was no good, not talented, too short. Maybe they didn’t like her because they were racist or sexist or harboring some other secret prejudice. In the end, they didn’t like her because they didn’t like her. She wasn’t going to reason them out of their dislike. She wasn’t going to teach anyone anything.
While she waited for her big West Coast break, she took classes: acting （voice, auditions, movement）， dance, yoga, computer programming, memoir writing. She meditated. She went to therapy. She worked at her parents’ restaurant when they needed the help. She watched her bank account diminish—she and Sam had far fewer expenses now that they were living with her parents, so it didn’t go down as quickly as it might have. But there were expenses. Life was expensive anywhere you were. The classes cost money, though she considered them necessary. She’d bought a used car. She needed new headshots and clothes. She paid her parents room and board, even though they said she didn’t need to. Eventually, she’d need money to find them their own place, in a good school district, better than the Echo Park one her parents were zoned for. And she needed to work, because if she didn’t work soon, she’d lose her union health insurance, and Sam would lose coverage, too. She told her agent: Send me in for anything. I will literally do anything.
In September, she had three auditions. The first was for the national touring company of South Pacific: the minor role of Liat, with the possibility of understudying a larger role. Anna thought South Pacific was racist, and a national touring company would mean being away from Sam for the whole year. The second was for the role of an “ethnic” maid on General Hospital who would end up having an affair with the male lead of the show. The character’s name on the sides was Ximena, but Anna’s agent assured her that the producers were open to all colors: Ximena could be LaToya could be Meimei could be Anna （but probably not literally Anna, because that sounded too white）。 And behind door number three was a model/hostess gig on a newish game show called Press That Button! The program was meant to be a competitor to The Price Is Right and was hosted by Chip Willingham, who was famous, though Anna wasn’t quite sure for what, maybe just being a host of things. The show was replacing one of their two spokesmodels. （Though they weren’t really spokesmodels, in that they were rarely called upon to speak.） Anna was short to be a model—she was five-foot-five—but if she wore her highest heels, she was shapely enough and slim enough and high-cheekboned enough to present as a model. In addition to an Asian, they were looking for someone in her twenties with “a great sense of humor,” which usually meant that some degree of humiliation would be involved. Anna didn’t want the gig anyway. Game-show model was not real acting. Anna had gone to Northwestern and had even done a stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Anna had been on Broadway. Anna was trained. Anna had craft.