The After-Room

by Maile Meloy; Illustrated by Ian Schoenherr

  “That’s funny,” Benjamin said. “I thought people liked their kids’ magicians to reek of alcohol.”

  Doyle raised an eyebrow. “Don’t ruin my mood,” he said. “Things are good!”

  Benjamin laughed, and there was a lightness and happiness in his laugh that made Janie’s heart lift.

  A very short old man in a tuxedo walked up the red carpet, with a tall young woman in a long purple gown on his arm.

  Doyle saw them and his eyes widened. “Joey Rocco is here?” he said.

  “Sal asked if we would invite him,” Benjamin said. “As a favor.”

  Janie studied the little man. So that was Joey the Haberdasher. He didn’t look anything like his cold-blooded cousin—he looked like an ancient tailor.

  “I’m going to pay my respects,” Doyle said. “I want to tell him no hard feelings, and all that.”

  “Don’t let him invite you to a poker game,” Benjamin said.

  “Of course not!” Doyle said, as he took April’s arm. “I’m reformed!”

  “He really is a different person now,” Valentina said, when they were gone.

  “Does he still do the trick where he steals stuff?” Janie asked.

  “Yes, but it’s not so mean,” Valentina said. “He might take a watch that needs winding, but he doesn’t make fun of everyone.”

  Pip and Evie were posing for a photographer from the Detroit Free Press. The Italian papers, promoting the movie, had been full of the stars’ fairy-tale romance, and Evie wore a white silk dress with a gauzy, layered skirt, calculated to suggest princesses and weddings. Her short hair was very fetching: platinum curls around her ears.

  In real life, Pip and Evie had started to fight before the shooting wrapped, and now they weren’t talking to each other. They spoke only through Janie: “Tell Pip not to wear that awful aftershave, I can’t stand the smell a minute longer.” “Please tell Evie to stop flirting with the reporters interviewing us, it’s embarrassing.”

  “Are those the movie stars?” Nat asked.

  “Come on, we’ll introduce you,” Janie said, and she took Valentina by the hand to weave through the crush of the crowd. Pip was talking to a reporter in a pink trenchcoat, and he leaned close to hear the woman’s questions over the noise of the crowd, with an attentive and respectful look on his face.

  “He’s really cute,” Valentina whispered.

  “You think so?” Janie said.

  Valentina nodded, watching Pip.

  “It’s funny,” Janie said. “He was just this infuriating kid, the first time I met him. And then he became my friend, and now he’s grown up and handsome and kind of famous. I can’t get used to it. He’s amazing in the movie, wait’ll you see him.”

  Pip wore his thoughtful, talking-to-the-press expression as he turned from the reporter. But then he saw Janie and Benjamin waiting, and their friends. His smile spread across his face like sunshine, and it was Valentina who got the full dazzling effect.

  Chapter 65

  A Letter

  The Los Angeles premiere felt like an anticlimax, after Ann Arbor. Janie’s yellow dress came out of the suitcase looking like a wilted daffodil, but there was no time to find anything else. She had seen the movie too many times to be excited about sitting through it again. She was freezing, as usual, and Benjamin had given her his jacket to wear around her shoulders. They were standing in a corner of the crowded lobby, Benjamin gazing into the distance with his hands in his pockets, when a couple slipped in late, through a back door.

  Jin Lo wore a close-fitting Chinese cheongsam, bright green, and her long black hair hung loose and shining. She outshone every actress who had come down the red carpet. A camera flash went off, but Jin Lo had already turned her back, showing the camera only a silken curtain of hair. The man behind her had ducked his chin, hiding his face.

  Janie couldn’t stop herself, she shrugged off Benjamin’s jacket and ran over and hugged Jin Lo. “You came!” she said.

  “I forgot about cameras,” Jin Lo said, wincing at a distant flash.

  “That dress is going to attract them,” Benjamin said.

  Jin Lo flushed. “We were trying to blend in. Ned said I had to dress up.”

  Benjamin turned to Ned. “So she does what you say?”

  “Almost never,” Ned said, smiling easily.

  “We didn’t meet properly before,” Janie said, putting out her hand. “I’m Janie, and this is Benjamin.”

  “My husband, Ned Maddox,” Jin Lo said.

  “Husband!” Janie said.

  “Congratulations,” Benjamin said, shaking his hand.

  Jin Lo flushed deeper.

  Ned Maddox was tan against his white shirt collar, and his eyes were blue-green. “I’ve heard a lot about you two,” he said.

  “That we’re a pain in the neck, always doing things wrong?” Benjamin asked.

  “No, that you’re the hope for the future—something like that.”

  “She said that?” Benjamin said.

  “Not in so many words.”

  Ned looked kind, and Janie was glad of that. She hoped Jin Lo would be kind to him, too, and not too impatient.

  A green silk bag hung from Jin Lo’s arm, and she took out a small package wrapped in brown paper and handed it to Janie. “Open it only in the dark,” she said.

  Janie nodded and clutched the package tight.

  Jin Lo turned away from another photographer’s flash. “Will the film start soon?”

  “Let’s go inside,” Benjamin said. “There aren’t any cameras in there.”

  There were so many things Janie wanted to ask that they tumbled over each other in her mind. “Where’s the uranium?” she whispered as they walked into the theater.

  “The U.S. Navy has it, but it is harmless now,” Jin Lo said.

  Ushers were directing them down toward the front rows. “And Danby?”

  “He became a penguin,” Jin Lo said.

  “A penguin!”

  “He escaped in the water,” Jin Lo said. “I don’t know if he survived.”

  Janie imagined a dark shadow looming up from the ocean’s depths. A frantic paddling of feet and flippers. A shark’s white teeth. They slid into their seats.

  Pip and Evie came into the theater, clearly furious with each other, but Pip broke into a glorious smile when he saw Jin Lo. He kissed her hello and shook Ned’s hand. Evie, whose now-famous pixie haircut had been discussed in magazines and requested endlessly in salons, flounced off to her seat. Evie had turned into a real pill, as Janie’s mother would say.

  But Pip had taken Valentina Doyle’s address, and Janie had high hopes. When the two of them met, Janie had felt an odd sense of the future stretching out ahead, almost visible in the distance.

  The little brown paper package rested on her lap, and she wondered what was inside it. It was nerve-racking to have Jin Lo here. The police officer standing near the emergency exit seemed to stare at them a little too long, but that could have been because of the green dress.

  The lights went down, and the heavy red curtain parted. Janie knew the movie by heart and kept her attention on Jin Lo and Ned Maddox beside her—they were holding hands!—but still she missed the moment when they slipped out. When the lights came up, she turned to see what Jin Lo had thought, and they were gone.

  The applause after the movie was thunderous, and Janie’s parents were mobbed. It wasn’t until Janie was squeezed between Benjamin and her father in a chauffeured car on the way to the hotel that her mother turned from the front seat and asked, “Who were those people you were sitting with?”

  “What people?” Janie asked.

  “That fabulous-looking couple,” her mother said. “The girl looked Chinese.”

  Janie shook her head, feigning confusion.

  “Green geisha dress,” her father
prompted.

  “It was a cheongsam,” Janie said, before she could stop herself. “Geishas are Japanese.”

  Benjamin elbowed her from one side, and her father grinned.

  “Gotcha,” her father said. “You do know who we’re talking about.”

  “Are they actors?” her mother asked.

  “Sort of,” Janie said.

  “Help us out, here, Figment,” her father said. “She’s hiding something.”

  Benjamin laughed. “Maybe, but you won’t get it out of her.”

  “I wonder who their agents are,” her mother said, settling back against the front seat in her silk wrap. Janie could see her parents beginning to imagine a movie starring Jin Lo and Ned Maddox. Janie settled back, too, close against Benjamin’s side, and let them imagine it. They wouldn’t be able to track down the Chinese actress and her date, and something else would distract them in the meantime.

  • • •

  Back in Michigan, Janie opened the little package in her bedroom’s dark closet, and felt an unspooled roll of slick film inside. As soon as her fingers touched it, she understood: It would have been exposed if someone had taken the package and opened it in the light.

  She got the keys to the photography lab, and after school, when no one was around, she and Benjamin developed the film in the darkroom and hung it up to dry. Then they made prints, sinking the paper in the trays of chemicals to develop and fix them.

  When Janie needed a pair of tongs from across the darkroom, she held up her hand and the tongs slapped satisfyingly into her palm. She had to remember not to move things with her mind when anyone except Benjamin was watching. The other day she’d been reading at the kitchen counter and wanted an apple from the fruit bowl. A moment later it was in her hand, before she’d realized she’d summoned it.

  In the low red light, they saw that some of the photographs Jin Lo had sent were maps and overhead views of buildings. One was a list of names. A few were blurry images of faces, taken from a distance. There was a mailing address for Jin Lo in Seoul, with instructions on how to code letters.

  There was also a three-page letter. It wasn’t in code, having been put into Janie’s hand on the unprotected film. It was written in neat cursive on lined paper. Janie switched on a lamp, and she and Benjamin read the letter in the locked darkroom:

  Dear friends,

  I wanted to tell you some things, because we might not see each other again for a long time.

  I have sent you what information I have about the North Korean nuclear program. Please keep it safe. China, too, will have nuclear capabilities soon. Vili will continue tracking the Soviet project. He believes he can recruit a promising physicist there. There are also France and Pakistan to consider, and of course England and its Commonwealth.

  The two of you are uniquely positioned to grow up with the program in the United States, to enter its ranks as the scientists you will surely become. Even if war does not break out, the possibility for accidents to occur is great. Human error is inevitable, and you can help protect against it.

  Such a course may require lies and deception, and lies erode our sense of self. Dishonesty can become a habit of mind. It will help that you have each other, someone with whom you can be truthful.

  I am putting all of this in a letter, in spite of the risk of discovery, because I want you to have time to think and consider. If I asked you face-to-face, you might simply agree, out of friendship or a sense of duty, and then you would feel an obligation. Ned says that I fail to consider other people’s wishes, when I think that I am right. (He is helping me with my English spelling here, so that I do not embarrass myself.)

  I do not wish to sway your decisions. You may choose to lead a less dangerous life. You might find some other vocation that calls to you.

  You have a gift for this work, but that does not mean that you have a calling. You might owe your loyalty or your love to your friends, but you do not owe them your talent. You have to determine if this work is the thing you want most, or only something that was forced upon you by an accident of birth, or an accident of circumstance.

  You are still very young. And you may each make separate decisions, when the time comes. You must destroy this letter now, but I hope you will keep these questions in mind. And we will remain in contact.

  Your friend,

  Jin Lo

  Janie looked up when she finished reading, and again she had that odd feeling of the future as a visible plane, stretching out in front of her, ready to be filled with people and events. The sharp smell of the developing chemicals was in her nose, and she knew she would always associate the smell of a darkroom with this moment.

  Benjamin stood over the counter, reading the last of Jin Lo’s words. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “About which part?”

  “Well, would you want to be a nuclear physicist?”

  “I don’t think it’s that specific,” she said. “I think I could still be a chemist, like Jin Lo. It’s just about trying to keep people safe.”

  “She says we don’t have to decide yet,” Benjamin said, stacking the pages of the letter and lining up the corners. “There’s still time.”

  Janie had become better at deciphering Benjamin’s expressions and moods than she used to be, even though mind-reading skills hadn’t come along with the telekinesis. Right now, for example, he was afraid to hear her reply, afraid she might not join him in what was, without question, his destiny.

  “I’ve already made my decision,” she said.

  Benjamin’s face was uncertain, his eyes anxious, the light revealing those copper flecks that she loved. “About which part?” he asked.

  “About everything important,” she said.

  is the award-winning author of The Apothecary and The Apprentices, as well as four books for adults: the short story collections Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It and Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter.

  www.mailemeloy.com

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