Opening Acts

by SFnovelists

  Midnight at Spanish Gardens

  by Alma Alexander

  Overture

  Thursday, 20 December 2012

  Olivia could not believe how little had changed on the street where she stood. Twenty years had slipped by since she had last seen this place; twenty years, crumbling away with each step, days falling like leaves from autumnal branches and swirling around her feet. In an era where everything hurtled forward at a breakneck pace, where entire neighborhoods were swept away at a whim to create new malls or parking lots or great gleaming edifices of steel and glass with forlorn 'For Lease: Office Space' signs growing old and faded in empty windows, this particular street seemed to have remained alarmingly faithful to Olivia's memory of it - back in the days when she was young, at the top of the world, invincible, immortal.

  In fact, it was a little disconcerting to allow herself to realize that the single thing that had changed the most from the way things used to be twenty years ago was…herself.

  Well, but that's as it should be, she thought, allowing herself a little philosophical shrug.

  But it was also…wrong. Wrong that everything else should be so changeless and immutable while she alone was the flotsam on the river of life, being carried hither and yon as the currents willed it, being allowed to tarry nowhere, only to find herself apparently cast back on the same shores she thought she'd left a long time ago.

  The short winter twilight had passed while she lingered in the oddly empty street, wasting time, peering at shop windows and trying to recall if they were in fact identical to those she remembered being there before, or if she was just painting a mental landscape with the things that she knew ought to be there. There ought to have been a notebook in her bag - there always was, she carried one by what was part instinct and part ritual, but when she rooted around for it this time, in the moment when she really needed it, the thing seemed to have disappeared.

  No matter. Her mind's eye would do She would transcribe later; it might not be the same, it might not be as good as it came in the instant when she was standing here resting her eyes on the scenery, but enough would remain. In the meantime, she rolled up her mental sleeves and sat down in front of a blank screen in the back of her mind, her hands poised over a keyboard that wasn't there.

  A cursor blinked momentarily as she did a slow, apprising circle, raking the street up and down with a writer's recording stare.

  Evening You walk down a shuttered street; there are "Closed" signs in shop windows and on doors as you stroll past Illuminated displays of things. This is not Rodeo Drive; you're likely to see cheap, ordinary shoes. Maybe tools. Printed T-shirts. A bicycle shop.

  Olivia's footsteps seemed loud on the empty pavement. Things looked wet - as though it had recently rained, but not rained hard; not nearly enough water for puddles, just barely wet enough to reflect back the glow of street lights in a strange and oddly magical manner - as though it was not so much reflection that she was seeing but that the asphalt had turned transparent, revealing glimpses of an upside-down world beneath her feet.

  She reached a gap between buildings - a narrow alley which someone who did not know that it was there would have probably missed completely, or dismissed as an insignificant cul-de-sac - and paused, glancing up and down the street again, and then down the short alleyway. The mind-screen woke again; words appeared in the wake of the blinking cursor.

  A narrow alley opens between two buildings. There are no signs, nothing to indicate that it leads anywhere at all. But you turn.

  The alley was lit dimly at the street end by a fluorescent sign hanging from the shop front facing the street on the corner, and at the far end by an old-fashioned collared street light with a large yellow bulb, barely pooling enough light at its foot to show that the alley was paved with irregular cobbles. Ordinarily this was the kind of place that might have been regarded with wariness, even suspicion - a mugger's lair where a single female should never venture alone - but that sense of vague danger was window-dressing, camouflage, and the far end of the alley was barely a dozen steps away. At the other end it opened up…

  Olivia closed her eyes briefly, conjuring up the lay of the land in the courtyard at the far end. The words on her mind's eye-screen helpfully spilled into the space she had left for them.

  The passageway between a couple of blank brick walls widens abruptly into a courtyard. There is a doorway, dark now, with some sort of gilt writing on the glass. An accountant, maybe, or a dentist - I forget what it was, and maybe it even changed once or twice during my time here. And across the courtyard, dimly lit, a coy sign above the door, there it is, Spanish Gardens.

  It does not look very Spanish. It certainly doesn't look anything like a garden.

  And then she was there, under the far light, and she opened her eyes…and smiled to herself, a little grimly. She might have stepped back in time, so much alike was it to what she remembered.

  She paused for the longest time, staring at that door, at that sign.

  The outside of that side of the courtyard was utilitarian. So ordinary, in fact, so far from being special, that Olivia wondered just by what kind of alchemy it had lingered in her memory with the kind of etched precision that it did. The door itself was a perfectly mundane metal frame, spare to the point of being almost industrial, with somewhat dusty glass, inscribed with the hours of opening (late afternoon, night; to this kind of place daylight was never kind). Next to it, a large shop window, with one of those half-curtains like one would expect to see in cafes or neat suburban kitchens, leaving the top part of the window open. Through the glass, it was just possible to glimpse the top of the till - not precisely antique, but not computerized, either - still obstinately analog, old-fashioned.

  The glass door opened to a view of a narrow room, one side almost entirely taken up with a glass-fronted display cabinet such as one would expect to find in an old-fashioned neighborhood deli or a pastry shop, and the other side, against the wall, crammed with a couple of small tables covered with red and white checked tablecloths and flanked by pairs of old-fashioned wooden chairs, no two of them alike.

  Olivia stepped closer and was somehow not surprised to see that over at the far end of the glass display case, beside a crimson-curtained doorway above which hung signs pointing the way to the restrooms, sat a tall bar stool surrounded by a mike and an amplifier and a couple of speakers. It was currently unoccupied, but she remembered all too clearly the young, long-haired troubadours of twenty years ago perched on that very stool, or one just like it, strumming guitars and crooning songs like "Starry Starry Night" and songs by John Lennon.

  At first glance through that door, the interior of the place was cramped to the point of claustrophobia, once you factored in a coat rack and a line of hooks on the wall waiting to receive coats and jackets. But next to the table furthest from the entrance, there was an arched opening to another room. It had a further cluster of red-check-tableclothed tables and mismatched wooden chairs. A large blackboard adorned most of the far wall, festooned with graffiti from previous patrons, an ever-changing display. One couldn't see it from the vantage point of the entrance, but Olivia knew that just above the archway, facing into the second room, hung the only other piece of art in the place - a framed print of a bullfight, with a charging black bull and a matador resplendent in gold with a red cape flourished jauntily. The only nod to Spain in the place, if one didn't count the presence of the occasional guitar.

  She pushed the door open. It gave after a slight resistance The oil lanterns on the tables had been lit, and the flames behind glass globes, grayed by years of smoke, flickered sturdily, leaving soft edgeless shadows pooling on the tables and the walls. If that had been the only available light, the place would have been cave-dark, but there were other lights strategically fastened to available walls - muted, to be sure, covered in dusty shades that made the light a mellow reddish orange-gold. Perhaps it was that permanent half-light that changed the place, metamorphosing it from shabby to enchan
ted. One entire wall of it, facing into the courtyard, was no more than a couple of huge plate glass windows - but it was impossible to tell that from the inside, where the harshness of that enormous expanse of cold glass was softened by an almost theatrical floor-to-ceiling red-plush curtain. In a more garish light it might have looked cheap and contrived; in what light there was, it looked mysterious, warm, inviting, intriguing - as though one was on the stage, on the wrong side of the curtain, waiting with a sense of rising excitement for the curtain to go up and show you the audience beyond.

  Olivia stepped inside and allowed her eyes to fall sideways at the glass deli cabinet. There were things on display here, pies and pastries. The laminated menus in metal holders on the individual tables also offered burgers and fries, pasta, toasted sandwiches, and soup. The food was always plain but substantial here - because this was a student place, had always been, knowledge of it passed like arcane secrets from senior to freshman through time-honored underground channels, advertised nowhere except by word of mouth. A scattering of the usual clientele occupied the main room, girls with pony tails and fresh faces, young men with long hair and intense eyes, leaning across the tables toward one another, fingers intertwined between them on the tabletop.

  Oh, dear God.

  Olivia closed her eyes briefly. The cursor on the screen in her mind's eyes blinked briefly, words falling after it in another burst of memory.

  This was a place of celebrations - you would come here for your graduations, your anniversaries. Young women with long lanky hair and bold eyes were given wine-red roses at these utilitarian, almost dingy, tables, and their memory of it is glamoured in a romantic spell. You bring your girlfriend here to propose…

  Four times. Four times she had been asked that question in this place. She could remember each occasion quite vividly - twice it had happened almost by accident, meant more as a joke than anything else; the third time, over at the table in the far corner right underneath the blackboard, the potential groom-to-be had been broken quite recently by a rejection of a similar proposal made to another girl, the love of his life, a friend of Olivia's. Initially he had brought Olivia there to pour out his misery to her. The proposal came out of nowhere, had been slipped into his tale of woe born out of sheer desperation. The evening had ended badly - because Olivia had come out with the young man as a friend, because she could listen and commiserate, and had been entirely blindsided by the sudden switch in his focus. Rejecting him was the only thing to do, but she remembered feeling like dirt, stammering, groping blindly for words that would not slice like flensing knives and yet would not come out resembling anything remotely like an intention to even seriously consider the question. They both knew the proposal for what it was - and yet there was a thread of seriousness there, and if she had uttered anything close to a yes he would have taken it as a promise. He had finally gone very white, very quiet, and they had left early, knowing that they would never see each other again - after that night, it would have been entirely too excruciating to endure one another's company.

  The fourth time it had been Sam, and she had accepted, flushed and flustered; there had been a ring and the resident troubadour on the bar stool had smiled and had sung…something appropriate…

  "Oh I can't have possibly forgotten," Olivia muttered to herself, aggrieved, astonished that she could remember every nuance of the scene except the soundtrack. But it was no use, the song was gone, vanished - and the only memory that remained was that she had broken the engagement less than a month later, and fled the city, and had not come back for years.

  "Forgotten?" asked a cheerful, pleasant male voice to her left.

  She turned her head slightly, eyebrow slightly raised, and met a pair of friendly smoke-gray eyes of a young man vigorously drying some glassware with a clean cloth behind the deli counter. Olivia's first thought was that she could have sworn there had been nobody there a moment ago. Her second was that he looked uncannily familiar. It's as though he and the counter, he and the whole place, were part of a seamless whole - as though he must have been standing there just like this when Olivia had walked out of the place in stiff silence with the young man whose rebound proposal she had just fumbled in turning down - or even when she had floated out on a cloud of short-lived euphoria when she had left with the one whose proposal she had accepted It was odd, how she almost…recognized him. And yet he was nondescript, almost calculated to be erased from memory - average height, average build, hair that was neither blond nor brown, his only outstanding features those astonishing eyes and possibly the long-fingered hands working the cloth in the glass.

  Olivia shook her head, her lips twitching up into a slight smile.

  "Ah," she said, with a self-deprecating little shrug "I forget a lot of things these days."

  "That's what some people come here for," he said. "To forget stuff."

  Olivia's eyebrows came together in a puzzled frown. "What do you mean?"

  "Unless they come here to remember stuff," the young man said enigmatically.

  "It looks just the same," Olivia said, almost reflexively, glancing around as she began to unbutton her coat.

  "That's the point," he said, putting the glass down.

  "The point of what…?"

  "It looks the same. It looked the same twenty years ago, or ten, or two, or last month, or last week. The world ends tomorrow, according to some, and it still looks the same on the eve of that. There is nothing that will change this place. Ever."

  Olivia stared at him. "I'm sorry, do I know you? You look awfully familiar…"

  "I don't think so," he said cheerfully.

  "So you changed?" Olivia asked. "This place never changes…but you're new?"

  "Perhaps," he said cryptically. "I'm Ariel."

  "Get out of here."

  "Pardon?"

  "Sorry," she said, looking embarrassed. "It isn't…a common name. Last time I saw it, I think I was reading Shakespeare."

  Ariel had the grace to laugh. "It could be worse," he said cheerfully. "Can I be of assistance?"

  "I'm meeting a bunch of people here tonight - I don't suppose any of them are here yet…?" Olivia said.

  "Nobody who said they were meeting a bunch of people," Ariel said. "But the big table over in the corner - the one with the bench - you can go grab that, if you like. I'm sure your friends will be here soon."

  "Thanks."

  As she turned away, Spanish Gardens reached for her and swallowed her whole. Whether she was one of those who came to remember or to forget, she didn't know - but the place was redolent with memory anyway. The cursor in her mind's eye blinked at her, and more words spilled out on the waiting screen.

  You come here in a rowdy crowd after the pomp and circumstance of the graduation ceremony, and you order Irish Coffees ("Keep 'em coming!") and you get beautifully, headily, cathartically tipsy while some crooner weaves his way through "House of the Rising Sun" on his high chair and you bellow the lyrics with him when you can actually remember them. You came here to laugh, and to cry, and to share, and to grow, and to guzzle cream pies and to linger over coffee after some sad movie show, and to be able to tell some newcomer, somewhere, sometime, "Ah, yes I know the Spanish Gardens".

  Irish Coffees. That, she remembered. The cheap and plentiful food was not the real reason that this place was a legend with generations of students It was the Irish Coffees - this place made the best Irish Coffees on the planet, bar none.

  Olivia's mouth curved into a wider smile.

  "You guys still do Irish Coffees?" she flung at Ariel over her shoulder, reaching to hang up her coat on a free hook on the wall.

  "Sure do," he said.

  "Send one over to the big table with the bench," Olivia said.

  "Make that two."

  The new voice made Olivia turn so fast that she nearly dropped the coat in a heap on the floor Just inside the narrow entrance, a man stood looking at her, one eyebrow lifted in inquiry.

  "John…?" Olivia said carefully
.

  "I've changed that much?" John asked, sounding a little plaintive.

  "Hardly at all, actually, if you disregard the gray on the temples and a little, um, broader than you used to be," Olivia said. "There was a time you could practically disappear if you turned sideways…" She bit off the rest of the sentence, flushing. This was the kind of banter that she used to be able to have with John; it suddenly seemed presumptuous to assume that she could just pick it up where she left off, with both of them twenty years older.

  "Yeah, well," John said with a grin, apparently unconcerned by Olivia's misgivings. "Aside from the fact that your hair was never that color and that you have the tiniest touch of laugh lines where there weren't any before…I'd have known you anywhere."

  "Old friends?" Ariel asked, with a knowing smile. "Two Irish Coffees, coming right up."

  Olivia dropped her gaze, suddenly awkward; her hands tightened around her coat. She suddenly wanted to hide it, to bundle it out of sight - the bright red coat with its fetching cowl that could be raised as a hood, the coat she had loved, the coat that she had walked out of her home in when she had walked out on her marriage carrying only an overnight duffel bag, a laptop case, and a battered teddy bear under one arm. The coat that had matched the Olivia whom John remembered - the girl with hair the color of French-roasted coffee or of bitter chocolate, not the dark auburn that she wore now and that suddenly and hopelessly clashed with the bright red of the coat, something Olivia had not noticed until now, had not cared.

  The coat that had her initials - her initials then - monogrammed onto its lapel in elegant cursive: OHB, Olivia Halloran Boyes. Irrationally, helplessly, she would have given the world right now for that B to be erased, for John never to have to see it, for her never to have to answer questions about it, or to defend it, or to explain.

  But John showed no indication that he had noticed. He had shrugged out of his own jacket, generic yellow-and-black Goretex, and draped it untidily over the nearest coat hook. When he did reach for Olivia's coat, it was just a gentlemanly gesture.

  "Let me help you with that," he said. "Let's go sit. The rest of them should be along shortly."

  "Why did I ever think that coming back here would be a good idea?" Olivia muttered under her breath as she turned away from the coat racks and led the way to the big table in the corner where she had been told to go.

  She slipped onto the bench, on the edge of it, leaving John the choice of coming around the far side to slide down the length of the table, if he wanted to sit beside her, or to take one of the chairs on the opposite side. He did the latter, smiling a small crooked smile; Olivia kept her eyes down on the shadows dancing on the tablecloth. One of her hands, flat against the side of the bench, rubbed experimentally against the material upholstering the seat.

  "Can you call this Naugahide?" she said, apparently apropos of nothing. "I've often wondered what a Nauga looked like, or if they were killed humanely in order for their hides to be sat upon…"

  John rolled his eyes a little. "And this, before you've had your first Irish Coffee…Simon phoned me earlier, he said he and Ellen are going to be running just a little late - he said to go ahead and order something to nibble before they get here if we're starving."

  "Ellen's late, eh," Olivia said, looking up with a smile. "Oh, God, this brings back memories. Ellen was always late. She never wore a watch, and she behaved as though time itself was the Devil's construct made just to annoy her. I remember her falling into lectures ten minutes after they started, tripping over people's bags, causing complete havoc and bringing everything to a standstill until she was settled, the center of attention, waving to everyone like a queen…"

  "I always thought that was the point, rather," John said.

  "What?"

  "The being late. The being the center of attention. Hey, don't knock it, it worked. I did think that having kids might have beaten it out of her, though. Children have regimented lives - the first time she tried being 'late' to a 2 AM feed she would have been disabused of the notion of using the lateness quirk to hog the spotlight. The screaming kid gets the spotlight. Every time."

  "Speaking from experience?" Olivia asked, lifting an eyebrow.

  John shook his head "No No kids. Never married. I heard you did, though -"

  Olivia made a small sharp gesture with her hand. "Lasted only long enough to cure me."

  "Cure you? Of what?"

  "Being a romantic. Remember what Simon said to me, twenty years ago, in this very room…?"

  "Should I?" John asked, sounding startled.

  "He was passing down his oracular pronouncements on everyone's future, that time we came here after graduation, remember? He told you that you were the person who would damn well prove that hard work and dedication really could be enough because you'd get whatever you went after…"

  "That didn't turn out too well," John said. "Sometimes life is just a crap shoot. But what was it that he told you?"

  "He said…" Olivia began.

  "He said, 'You? You are just misguided'," a new voice said, from the archway separating the two rooms.

  Olivia turned, and John pushed back his chair, getting to his feet, his face cracking into a broad grin.

  "Quincey! Q! You look great! It's so good to see you!"

  "All right, all right, down," said Quincey, making warding-off gestures - but her face was wreathed in a matching grin as she ran one hand through close-cropped blonde hair. "Let me get rid of this coat…"

  "Two Irish Coffees," a girl wearing a small black apron over tight pants and a short-sleeved white peasant top said, setting two tall glasses on the table between Olivia and John.

  "Hey," Quincey said, "you can bring another of those, next time you swing by."

  "Sure," the girl said, spinning on her heel in an almost balletic motion and skipping back behind a curtain that separated the cafe from the kitchen area.

  "I was never that young," Olivia groaned, watching her go.

  "Yeah, you were. But you left it all in a heap right here in this room and they feed on it. It's the picture of Dorian Grey, all over again. We age, and they never do, the people who work in this place. They never get a day older than eighteen," said Quincey. "Budge up. You're taking up the whole bench."

  "Well, that's depressing," Olivia said, shifting up a space so that Quincey could slip sideways onto the edge-of-the-bench seat she had claimed earlier.

  "Is Simon here yet, or are we just talking about him behind his back?" Quincey asked, settling back against the wall.

  "Late," John said.

  "Figures, if Ellen's in the picture. Even the end of the world doesn't make the gears grind faster," Quincey said, glancing at her watch. "I meant to have something to eat before I got here but time got away from me. Can we order a basket of garlic bread, at least? I've waited on Ellen often enough to know that I'll be ready to eat her by the time she gets here."

  Olivia glanced sideways at Quincey's long, lanky body, lean and tight, not an ounce of extra weight anywhere on her. When she had first spoken, she had been leaning against the archway - a woman in her forties who might have been poured into her jeans, her long-fingered, slender hands bare of ornamentation except for one silver and turquoise ring, a close-fitting long-sleeved t-shirt outlining her small breasts, a loose man's shirt that she wore over the top of it, flat-bellied, long-legged, slim.

  "How do you do it?" Olivia asked, smiling, but serious. "How do you stay looking like that? Someone with an appetite big enough to devour Ellen shouldn't have your hips, damn it all. All I have to do is think about a box of chocolates and the pounds appear on my backside just like magic."

  "Stress," Quincey said.

  "If you could sell that as a diet you would make a mint," Olivia said.

  "Your coffee," said the girl with the pony tail, setting another glass before Quincey.

  John leaned his elbow on the table beside his own coffee, pillowing his face in his hand, staring at Olivia with frank curiosity.


  "What?" she said, a touch defensively.

  "You really did drop out of the world," John said. "After we all sailed off in different directions, we all…somehow kept in touch with each other's lives All except you You know nothing about any of us, and I have no real idea what you've done with yourself since you walked off the stage with your diploma."

  "She's got something deep dark and terrible to hide," Quincey said, grinning.

  "So do we all," John said.

  "I know all about everyone's lives I knew it before everyone else knew it, sometimes. I knew about Simon's book long before it was a book," Olivia said, suddenly feeling as though she was supposed to defend her life and her attitudes. "I read it when it was an embryo of a draft. I know more about the origins of it than you all…" She broke off, took a deep breath. "I read Ellen's books when they came out. Ellen and Simon got married. Quincey got married, divorced and married."

  "Only because you were invited to the weddings. But you didn't come."

  "I kept track. I know who's had kids."

  "Only because we're here today because Ellen and Simon's Abby turned 21 yesterday. And that's odd too - you don't come for their wedding, but it's okay to come to a reunion of the old crowd, in this place, on the flimsy excuse that Simon and Ellen's daughter is turning 21 and you weren't even going to the party?"

  "I got her a present," Olivia said.

  John raised an eyebrow but said nothing, sipping his coffee. Olivia suddenly shivered, looking around at the dimly lit room.

  "I can't believe this place is still here," she said in a low voice, as though she was trying to prevent the cafe from overhearing. "I was fully expecting it to be gone by now, probably gone for a good few years - the whole shebang, the red curtains, the checked tablecloths, the secret recipe for Irish Coffee, the guitars, even that wretched picture of the bullfight, everything. I thought it was a memory, only living on in my head. And yet my feet brought me here by themselves, apparently without any conscious effort on my part, and it's all still here, exactly like I remember it. I could almost swear that the same guy was behind the counter when we first came here. And you don't think that's weird?"

  The door to the cafe opened and closed again. Quincey swiveled around in her seat, Irish Coffee precariously tilted, to peer through the arch and back into the entrance hallway And then swiveled back, placing her glass on the table with slow deliberation.

  "It's Ellen," she said. "No sign of Simon."

  "He may be parking the car," John said. "I had to park a couple of blocks away - circled this one twenty times before I gave up on finding anything closer."

  But that wasn't what Quincey had meant.

  "Livy," she said quickly, turning to Olivia, "you really haven't seen Ellen since college?"

  "I've seen the author photograph," Olivia said. "I know she's turned rather gray, that she doesn't dye it, and that she's cut her hair. I also know that she's not…."

  "I wasn't asking if you would recognize Ellen in the street. Have you actually spoken to her at all since…?"

  Olivia shook her head mutely, and Quincey was out of her seat in one fluid motion, apparently wrapping herself at right-angles around the corner to head off Ellen at the pass.

  "Ellen! You made it! We've a basket of garlic bread on order, but for once you arrived before the emergency provisions…"

  Quincey's voice was bright and chatty, but Olivia's face was white and pinched, and John, his eyes snapping from Quincey's back as she retreated around the corner to Olivia's expression, frowned slightly.

  "I have a feeling I am missing something," he said.

  Olivia managed a wan smile. "I daresay you won't be, by the time this night is over. You may want to watch for sudden ice in your coffee…depending on how Ellen plays this…"

  The voices from beyond the archway had dropped into near-silence, but now they lifted again, into a more normal range. Quincey stepped back out into the main room wearing an odd, slightly fixed smile.

  "Is it safe?" she mouthed at Olivia.

  Olivia's reply, a slight toss of her head, was ambiguous in the extreme - but they were out of time, and Quincey was followed into the room by another woman, shorter than Quincey by a head even in reasonably high heels, her silver-gray hair falling about her face in carefully styled waves. She wore a shade of lipstick that was perhaps a little too garish for the circumstances, leaning rather too far into scarlet to sit comfortably on any face other than something from a publicity poster for a Hollywood starlet of an era where they still showed lovers smoking in bed after the fade-to-black scene - it was as though she had tried to cast about for a way to recapture a lost youth, and missed. But her eyes were the same eyes that Olivia remembered - an unusual shade, a warm golden brown, what Olivia had once called cat-amber. The scarlet mouth was curved into a slight smile, but it had not yet reached those eyes - the eyes were a little wide, wary, sweeping swiftly around the room and then homing in on Olivia's own gaze, which they met and held.

  Some part of Olivia was aware of her surroundings - aware of the way that Quincey's breath was suddenly held for a little too long, of the way that John's expression deepened in puzzlement - but mostly she saw only Ellen's face, curiously superimposed on the face from her own memory of an Ellen two decades younger, and trying to recapture something of what the two of them had shared back then.

  The smile she had painted on her face for John widened a small, painful notch.

  So did Ellen's.

  "It's been a while," Olivia said at last, because somebody had to say something.

  Quincey let her breath out slowly.

  "Yes," Ellen said faintly. "Hasn't it."

  "Scootch up, Livy," Quincey said with sudden determination. "I'll squish in next to you and Ellen can perch on the end."

  Olivia obeyed meekly, shifting even further along the Naugahide bench, reaching out to pull her Irish Coffee after her along the countertop. Quincey, who seemed to think that it was a good idea to keep a warm body between Olivia and Ellen, at least for the first part of the evening, slid in after her and Ellen obediently sat down on the same outside corner which Olivia herself had started out at, trying to get John to choose the chair rather than the bench.

  There was a slightly awkward silence, and then Ellen smiled.

  "I'd forgotten about the Irish Coffees," she said. "Are they still as good?"

  "Better," John said. "I've had twenty years to wait for one. The anticipation kind of adds to the spice."

  Ellen caught the eye of one of the passing waitresses, and then pointed to Quincey's glass "Another," she said.

  Olivia drained hers, and put the empty glass with its foam-smeared side back on the table rather too hard. "Make that two."

  "My God," Ellen said, placing her hands on the table before her and lacing her fingers tightly together before finally giving the room a closer appraisal, "it's like a time machine…"

  Quincey coughed slightly over a mouthful of coffee, and Olivia looked away, into her empty glass.

  "Hasn't changed," she said. "We have."

  Ellen appeared to gather together whatever shreds she could of dignity and civility and grown-up politeness - but also a veneer of cautious coolness in her face - and turned to Olivia across the barrier of Quincey's rangy body.

  "We may as well get it over with," she said. "You didn't stick around long enough, before. But for what it's worth, I'm sorry. For the circumstances, possibly not for the event itself, given the outcome - which was, after all, Abby, who is now improbably enough 21 years old and is the reason we're all here in the first place. Possibly it was rash and misguided - but we were both so young…"

  "Simon wasn't," Olivia said.

  "Simon was misguided," Ellen snapped.

  And then, somehow, they both managed a real grin, in unison. This was going to be one of those nights. Simon's words had come full circle - he had called Olivia the same thing once, in this very place, and now Ellen was turning the tables.

&n
bsp; Ellen leaned over and stuck out a hand across Quincey.

  "Truce?" she asked. "Please? If you want to we can have a catfight outside later. But for now - when Simon comes back in after finding a parking spot hopefully within the same zip code as this place - truce?"

  "Truce," Olivia said, reaching back to slip her hand into Ellen's briefly - very briefly, without squeezing, it was truce after all and not a peace accord.

  "Oh, thank God," Ellen said, sitting back. "I was actually dreading tonight. Just a little. At some point, I can probably explain - but until then, let's not talk about it."

  "About what?" John muttered under his breath.

  Olivia favored him with one stern glance that made him subside in his chair, looking rebellious and suddenly very much younger, as though he really did belong with the young bodies which had begun to cluster around the tables surrounding theirs.

  When Olivia turned back to Ellen, it was to a deeply understanding smile which, this time, reached into cat-amber eyes. Ellen had noticed the exchange.

  "So, tell me," Olivia said. "How are the books doing?"

  "Mine or his?" Ellen asked.

  "The family oeuvre," Quincey said, happy to nudge the conversation into less fraught channels.

  "His…critically acclaimed, and up for two major prizes this year. Mine…selling like hot cakes, thankfully, but being rather sniffily reviewed, if they are reviewed at all. The latest one I let get under my skin spoke of the wife of the acclaimed novelist who has published a few - what did they call them - 'slight' volumes of children's stories on her own behalf. As though I've ridden Simon's coat-tails all the way into this. As though it is possible to ride those coat-tails and get to the place that I am at - which is on a different planet from him, really. We are so not writing the same…"

  "Whoa," John said, laughing, flinging up both hands in a defensive gesture. "Feels like someone kicked over a wasp nest."

  Ellen shut her mouth with a snap, flushing a little. "Sorry," she said. "Sometimes it just bugs me. And it isn't often I get a chance to let it out when Simon isn't over there in the corner, listening in. It feels rather too much like sour grapes when he's listening. And it's not - it's not. It's just that it's all so different and all anyone ever sees is…" She stopped again, closed her eyes for a moment as though she were centering herself, and then turned to Olivia again.

  "Seems everything's unsteady ground," she said, with a lopsided grin. "Well, there's mine, in all its boggy grandeur. Your turn?"

  "Nothing much," Olivia said. "This and that. Never quite got around to using the actual degree. Floated on the surface of the stream, waited to see where I'd wash up."

  Ellen glanced at Olivia's hands. The ring finger was bare, but she wore rings on other fingers and the bareness suddenly seemed to stand out in stark relief; Olivia surreptitiously folded her left hand under her right, hiding the evidence.

  "I thought I read in the society pages that you did get married," Ellen murmured, and then bit her lip.

  "Oh-ho?" John said. "The society pages?"

  "She married a Vanderbilt," Quincey said, with just a touch of acid, but the look she turned on Olivia was sympathetic - You might as well get it over with, it said.

  "A Vanderbilt?" John said, sitting up. "I thought they were extinct."

  "They're a family, not a clutch of Velociraptors," Quincey said, a little sharply. "Of course they aren't extinct. But even so, it was meant as a metaphor."

  "Boyes," Olivia said faintly. Her voice was very soft, but every one of the others turned toward her instantly, as though she had shouted the name out loud "His name was Brandon Boyes, all right? And yes, he's a 'Vanderbilt', if you want to use that as a qualifier - his family's got money, and we moved into an apartment in New York, Upper West Side, and all that jazz."

  John blinked. "And?"

  "And what?"

  "Well, you're here. And there's no point in sitting on your hands, we all noticed there's no ring. You don't have to tell us anything, Olivia, but we used to be friends."

  Olivia flushed darkly, staring down into her lap. And then, looking up, met the eyes of everyone at the table for a moment.

  "Fine," she said, and she felt as though she was trying to talk through a mouthful of molasses. "If you have to know. The whole thing was a cliche, really. I met Brand because he collided with me in a coffee shop and poured scalding coffee down my arm - luckily I was wearing a padded jacket and it didn't actually burn me but the thing was dripping wet with hot coffee and it did drip down onto my hand and it was still hot, and I dropped the book I was holding and then just stood there and looked shell-shocked while he fussed around and apologized fourteen times in the space of the next five minutes…and after that I found myself having dinner in posh places which were so exclusive there were no signs outside the building that indicated there was a restaurant there at all…"

  "Kind of like this place," John murmured.

  Quincey cut him down with a look, and he subsided.

  "The courtship lasted four months, and then he asked me to marry him and I said yes because he turned my head," Olivia said. "It took the next six months to mollify his mother, and I suppose that should have been the clue I needed - I kind of went home in tears several times, but Brand said not to take it personally, that she was a bitch to everybody - well, he didn't say that, he would never say a bad word about momma, but that was the gist of all the paraphrasing that he did - and that all I needed to was to learn to ignore her. Just like he did. Or so he said."

  "What happened?" Quincey asked gently.

  Olivia shrugged. "We got married, eventually. That was the society pages, Ellen. I wore a designer gown, and the flowers I was carrying cost more than a dinner for four in the Village. There were pictures. Everyone said I looked very happy. Everyone said that mother-in-law tried to look happy. I learned very quickly, after, that she really was the power behind the throne. There was no decision in our household that didn't need to be vetted by Mother, and if Mother said no then that was that. And she said no rather a lot, especially if she thought that the idea she was vetting had originated from me. Particularly then. And when I was married for less than half a year she began planting the seeds - that I was still not pregnant, that the only reason her precious boy had married me was because he wanted a kid, and when was I going to, um, so to speak, deliver? And the thing is, it didn't really matter to us - not then, not in the beginning, if the children came they would come. But then Brand started getting obsessed with the idea, and the more he did the less I wanted it - because it had started to feel a lot like I had been bought and paid for, and only to be used for the purpose or creating the next generation to inherit it…."

  Quincey said nothing, only reached out and covered Olivia's hand with her own.

  "Well," Olivia said, taking a deep breath. "To cut a long story short. It came to a head. Hurtful things were said…and meant. Brand didn't exactly raise his hand to me, not right then, but the look in his eyes told me that it could come to that…if his precious Mama told him to do it. And if I did have a child in this toxic atmosphere it would be taken from me at birth and indoctrinated with the proper attitude, until I was no more important than the wallpaper in the nursery. That was the end of it. I felt like I'd just woken up from a nice pleasant dream - but that nothing in that dream was mine. I walked out of the apartment while he slept, at two in the morning, and I took what would fit into an overnight bag, and my computer, and the bear my mother gave me when I was two years old because the poor thing might have been stuffed and inanimate but I couldn't even think about leaving him behind in that apartment. He was mine, I took him there, and it was up to me to take him out. That, as they say, is that. From there…to now."

  "So what have you been doing since you walked out?"

  "This and that. Made do. I've had what people like to refer to as an interesting life. It did seem to consist of jumping from ice floe to ice floe on a dark river while the ice was breaking up under my feet and tryi
ng to keep my balance. My father had a Mencken quote stuck above his desk for years - I don't remember it precisely, but what it boiled down to was that truth and error are not opposite, that the opposite of an error may simply be another error, sometimes worse than the first…"

  "I kind of remember it," John said. "Something along the lines of, 'The world makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth, that truth and error are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort.' And that when the world is cured of one error it usually turns to another, probably worse than the first…"

  "So you think you made a mistake, leaving?"

  Olivia shook her head., "Some romantic remnant in me sometimes thinks so. But that particular ice floe disintegrated long ago. All right, we've done me. Can we change the subject now? Or, rather, you guys do. Excuse me for a sec I think I need to go visit the restroom and give myself a bit of a pep talk in the mirror."

  She had begun sidling out of the bench before she finished talking, and slipped free as she finished, grabbing her handbag by its long handles as though she were strangling it by the neck and making her escape through the archway before any of the others could react at all.

  "Wow," Ellen said, after a beat. "I had no idea I'd break that dam. Serves me right, trying to deflect fire from my own petty concerns."

  "Is she going to be all right?" John said anxiously, trying to peer after Olivia through the archway.

  "I think she'd rather a moment of being alone right now," Quincey murmured.

  But Olivia, who had paused by the coat racks to lean unsteadily on the wall with one hand and try and catch her breath, was not allowed any such luxury. In her hurry to leave, with no real destination in mind other than to be momentarily free of others' eyes, she had forgotten they were expecting another companion, and had turned her back to the door.

  When the voice came from behind her, familiar and barely changed by the twenty years that had passed, she froze for a moment, like a hunted hare.

  "Olivia…?"

  She turned on her heel, sharply, her arms not so much crossed as grasping one another, her fingers and knuckles white with pressure where they gripped the complementary elbow.

  Simon's hair had also turned gray, but he had kept all of it, and almost kept the old style he used to wear it in - slightly longer than a respected novelist and a University professor ought by rights to wear it and be considered respectable, waving back from his forehead just like it had used to do when he was still her brother's best friend, and her own heart's desire.

  Her mouth curved in what might, in other circumstances, have been described as a smile but there was something in her eyes that made Simon actually take a step back as if he had been struck. It might have been a smile, once. Right now, it was a slash of pain.

  "For God's sake, what did I do?" Simon demanded, his eyebrows coming together in a bewildered frown.

  "You remind me," Olivia said savagely, skipping small talk entirely.

  "Of what?"

  "Of all the things you were. Of all the things that David could have been."

  "David…?" Simon sounded thrown. That was a name from the past, and not, for better or worse, one he had come here armed to deal with. He made a valiant effort to regroup. "David made his own choices. I was hardly his conscience."

  "You were his friend."

  Simon shut his mouth with a snap. "Not his keeper," he said finally, tightly leashed, his control of the words that left his mouth almost visible. "But I don't think David is really the matter."

  "He was the origin."

  "Of what?"

  "Of my own life. Of the things that I went on to do Once David chose what he chose - and then you weighed in - everything went bad, after that."

  "Let's see If I remember correctly, David enlisted and went to the Gulf. Your family shredded into political streamers and your mother is still not talking to your father who is not really speaking to you - well, that was the situation, and I think it's still pretty much current, knowing what I do about your father. And you, once upon a time, talked to me about it…"

  "I told you all the things that David told me. I showed you the letters. You were his friend."

  "Yes…and then I wrote a book about it," Simon said "That's one of the flashpoints, isn't it?"

  "You used him," Olivia whispered.

  "Used him? Liv, I wrote about the horrors of it I wrote what you thought. Not what David wrote about. He was proud of what he was; I don't think you will find much of that in the book that I wrote. I was against the damned war. Same as you."

  "You were against it for all the wrong reasons." Olivia said.

  "Which are? Does it really matter?"

  "It mattered then," Olivia said "It mattered enough, back then, to make for a nice bonfire, anyway. One I burned a lot of things on."

  Simon crossed his own arms, leaning back a little. "You built it," he said. "The bonfire."

  "You betrayed my confidence, and your friend," Olivia said. "And then, when I called you on it, when you showed me the first draft of the book…"

  "I remember it well," Simon said. "I've never seen you that furious, or that inarticulate. You shrieked."

  "I never shriek."

  "You did then My neighbors came around after you stormed out to ask who won World War Three. You don't even remember it."

  Olivia tilted her head a little. "It's a little…hazy."

  "Incandescent rage will do that," Simon said dryly.

  "And then you slept with my best friend," Olivia said, her voice suddenly flat and level, icy. The best friend in question was currently only the thickness of a brick wall away - Simon's wife, now, mother of his children. "Was that payback?"

  "I thought you had just broken up with me," Simon said.

  "But…Ellen," Olivia said helplessly, unable to articulate the burden of all the hurt and betrayal that she had carried with her through the years, and yet managing to stuff it all into a single word, that name. It had all the impossible weight of a black hole and, like one, was sucking in the light and air that was between the two of them in that hallway.

  "She was there," Simon said, after a short, painful pause. "And she said yes."

  "But you asked."

  "It takes two to make that decision. Olivia, what do you want from me?"

  Olivia turned away, bowing her head, letting her hair fall over her face like a concealing curtain. "I have no idea," she said dully. "I just wish…if all of us had made different choices, I might have had a different life." After a moment she glanced up again, her lips twisting into another small bitter smile. "You were a lousy teacher."

  "That's not true," Simon said, stung.

  "Oh, but it is. You were of the 'it's never going to be good enough' school, and you passed that on, more than you knew." She paused. "You called me misguided once, right here in this place, the night after graduation, remember?"

  "Yes," Simon said warily. "I said that."

  "I took it at face value, back then I never asked. I'm asking now. Why?"

  "Because you had just walked away with a degree that would never make you happy," Simon said. "The diploma was still hot off the presses, and you were making plans about where to go from here, and already the regrets hung about you like a shroud."

  "I was happy," Olivia said. "If you were right…I ought to have been miserable. So how come nobody else noticed but you?"

  "Because I knew you," Simon said gently. "Your passions were always words, not numbers. If you were to have anything to do with science, it was going to be writing poetry about the gas nebulae or visions about what it meant to be human as they unraveled the human genome."

  "You think I wasn't capable of doing the actual science behind those things?"

  "Who said you weren't capable?" Simon asked. "Don't put words in my mouth. But the capability itself wasn't going to make you happy. You could have probably designed a star drive - but what you really wanted to do was be on that rocket ship wh
en it left this planet and send back poetry about the strange new worlds it would land on. A scientist, Olivia, cares about the how of things - you always cared more about the why, or the who. Dissecting a flower or a frog or a human being might have made you enlightened, but it would never have made you happy."

  "Damn you," she said, after a pause.

  "What does that mean? Do you forgive me?" Simon asked, and then tossed his head in a frustrated movement, spreading his hands. "Will you tell me what it is that you forgive me for?"

  Olivia made a small sound that was halfway between a sob and a giggle. "If you don't get it, Simon, there's little point in it. Excuse me, I need to pop into the restroom and stick something cold on my eyes before the others start asking questions back at the table."

  She turned away without another word and the door of one of the two bathrooms swung closed behind her. Simon stood speechless, staring after her.

  "If you want to use the other one, that's okay," Ariel said.

  He had slipped from behind the counter somehow without Simon noticing, and now stood beside Simon, his expression pleasant but somehow alert as if he was expecting Simon to offer some sort of secret password which he knew he had to be on the look-out for.

  Simon stared at him. "It says 'Out of Order' on the door," he said.

  "Oh, that. It's only there to keep out the uninvited."

  "You have to be invited into the restroom?" Simon asked, furrowing his brow. "That's a new one. Come to think of it, you've always had a bathroom out of commission. Ever since I can remember, and I've been coming here for years. For decades."

  Ariel said nothing, merely smiled, and held out a folded piece of paper. Simon instinctively reached out and took it.

  "What is this?" Simon said.

  "Instructions," said Ariel. "Should you choose to follow them."

  Simon unfolded the paper and glanced at it. There were only a few lines, in copperplate handwriting looking rather as though the entire thing had been penned by an old-fashioned nib pen, the kind you had to dip into an inkwell - the language, oddly old-fashioned and portentous, had the same feel of a weight of age on it. And yet the paper looked rather like it had been torn from a mass-produced notebook available in any stationery store for a few bucks, and the ink looked barely dry.

  His eyebrows rose as he read.

  Your life is filled with crossroads and you are free to choose one road or another at any time. Stepping through this door narrows your choices to only two - the choice to live a different life, or the choice to return to this one.

  You make your first choice when you pass through the portal. Once you do, you will not remember the life you have left behind…until one single moment, when all memory will return. In that moment you must choose if you wish to return to your previous existence…or renounce it forever.

  Remember this before you decide. Here, you change the world around you; there, you have to change to fit the world. Both are harder than you think. Choose wisely.

  "Choose wisely," Simon said dryly as he finished scanning the paper. "Take a step into a bathroom and flush a life down a toilet. Some choice…?"

  But when he looked up again, Ariel had gone. The counter was deserted, too, but the cafe had started to fill up, like it always did as the evening wore on, and there was an ever-louder buzz of conversation as voices rose to be heard above the background noise. It was not the weekend, but it was technically the Eve of the End of the World, which was a sort of special occasion - and there was even a young man clutching a guitar by the throat, fussing with the connections of mike and amp by the high stool of the musician. He gave Simon a half smile as their eyes met and held briefly.

  Even as he looked away again, the writer part of Simon's brain was turning the idea over and over, dissecting it from different angles. You could choose? You could - in a manner of speaking - unchoose? Life was there to be sifted through and you could pick the bits you wanted, erase the things you would rather had never existed? That couldn't be right - it wasn't fair - you couldn't unwrite something that had been written, simply unremember something that you wished to forget. But still - it glittered before him like a jewel, the temptation, the chance to start again, to be young again and to have the world unfolding in front of him before he narrowed it down by the things that he thought, that he believed, that he had allowed to happen to him and to twist him…

  Simon pursed his lips, folding the paper and pushing it into his pocket.

  "What the hell," he muttered. "The world ends tomorrow morning anyway."

  He hesitated briefly at the door to the second bathroom, with the tattered 'Out of Order' sign that hung on the doorknob, but nobody called out to tell him that he was an idiot and couldn't he read the sign. His hand landed on the knob, at first very lightly, and then it tightened and he turned it with rather too much pressure, as though he was expecting it to be locked and unyielding - but the door swung open at a mere touch and hung ajar, showing only darkness beyond.

  Simon shook his head.

  "That's it," he said to himself firmly. "I've finally, officially lost it."

  And then he pushed the door open all the way, and stepped through.

  The door closed behind him. The sign swung lightly on its doorknob once or twice, and was still.

  "Midnight at Spanish Gardens" now AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER, direct from the publisher

  Details of trade PB edition to be announced later this year.

  About the Author

  Novelist Alma Alexander once drank Irish Coffees in the real-life version of Spanish Gardens, the semi-mythical setting of her new novel Midnight at Spanish Gardens - in her other life as a graduate student of Molecular Biology - and she can vouch that real magic truly existed in that place. After leaving science behind in order to follow her true vocation as writer, Alma has published eleven books in fourteen languages in the past fifteen years, not to mention numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies and a mound of non-fiction (reviews, bloggage, etcetera). You can find out more about Alma at her website at AlmaAlexander.com or the website devoted to her YA series, Worldweavers, at WorldWeaversWeb.com - or you can join her more informally at her LiveJournal blog or her Facebook page. She is also on Twitter (@AlmaAlexander)

  About the Book

  Spanish Gardens is - or at least was, it's been gone many years - a real place and the worst-kept secret ever. Its existence was passed along, one generation to the next, at the University of Cape town; it was impossible to find, otherwise, or even stumble upon accidentally, because there were no obvious signs pointing down the nondescript alleyway down which it lay, and it tended to be open at night, keeping hours during which it was improbable that "passing custom" would drop by. You went there because you knew about it, you knew it existed, and really, you couldn't get a better Irish Coffee anywhere in the world. Thirty years later people who went to the place independently of one another and sometimes YEARS apart, and who have never met each other in person, will describe it to you in eerily identical words, with the same vivid details springing to life, as though the place existed outside time and place, never changing. I was neither the only one nor the first one to describe it as a "dimension portal". It was inevitable that such a place would eventually find its way into my stories, into my fictional world. I have given it a contemporary edge, bringing my characters together there on the eve of the Mayan "end of the world", giving their choices and decisions a certain sharp urgency (whether or not they believe the world is about to end in a puff of smoke). But the charm of this story lies in the fact that most people will put it down and remember their OWN version of Spanish Gardens - and yes, everyone has one! - and might well begin looking on the next day of their own lives as the beginning of a brand new world, no matter on what calendar date they happen to have read this particular novel.