The door opened and closed, and I discerned a shape in a white coat. A doctor. Familiar somehow. He drew nearer, smiling at me with a broad, open grin. The sight of a living, breathing person was almost as welcome as the scent of fresh air in the burning theater had been, and I thought, Thank goodness, this isn’t just a nightmare, and I smiled at him until I heard him speak.
“Ada.” He breathed out, and the longing and the triumph in that single word, it nearly destroyed me.
My joy fled and left me hollow. All the pain, and more, returned.
Even if I’d wanted to return the greeting, to call him by his name, I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak. My burned throat, healing but not healed, wouldn’t yield up any sound.
My smoke-stung eyes, however, could see well enough who it was. The years had changed him, weathered him. His hair was cut shorter but still showed the wave of the ringlets he’d worn in his teenage years. The thickness of his limbs was still evident. He’d grown larger and stretched out somewhat. He was taller. And, I suspected, even stronger.
Ray had finally found me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1903
Feathers without Birds
“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said, falling on his knees next to me, reaching for my face but not touching it, just like all those years ago. “I knew it was, once I saw your posters, even though the name wasn’t yours. Who else could it be? But I thought maybe somehow I was mistaken. I was afraid of that, deep down. But it isn’t so. My God, Ada, I’ve missed you so much. You’re my other half. The only one like me. I haven’t felt complete without you.”
I was glad in that moment for my wrecked voice, as I didn’t know what to say. My mind reeled. Maybe I was dreaming. I prayed I was. But as long as I’d feared Ray, as many years as the memories of what he’d done to me had haunted my waking hours, he had never appeared in my dreams. This was all too real.
“You’d be proud of me,” he went on. “I’m a doctor now. I told you I was a healer. I came here to Chicago since I knew you’d been here…”
The card to my mother, I realized. I am well. I’d sent it from here. Years ago. All unknowingly, I’d brought us both to this moment.
“…but then you weren’t, but I just trusted to fate and stayed. It’s been years, you know, but this place was as good as any other. I worked and waited. Then finally I saw the posters for the Amazing Arden. And I knew it was you. You were coming back to me, and I’d be complete at last again. I bought a ticket for your show. I knew we were about to be reunited. But I didn’t know it would be today. Today—today is unexpected.”
I croaked out, “Today is horrible.”
“Oh—well, yes,” he said, seeming to sober and take in our surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time. “I’m sorry I had to put you in here with these people. I came to help, we all did, and there were so many we couldn’t save, so there had to be a place for them. And someone brought you to me, they weren’t sure if you were alive, and I saw my chance. It was like it was meant to be. I planned to be back before you woke up. I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you. But now it’s all right. Here we are.”
I closed my eyes.
“Ada?”
I didn’t, I couldn’t, respond.
“Open your eyes,” he said, “or I’ll open them for you.”
I complied.
He shed his doctor’s coat. He rolled up one sleeve and showed me the scars on the inside of his arm, a solid mass of lines that followed the bone of the arm, right up the center. He unbuttoned his collar and other cuff and reached one hand up to the back of his neck to grab his shirt and then pulled it off in a long single stroke, and I was powerless to look away.
In the intervening years, he had made a project of his scars. Now they showed every bone. Not just the rib cage but the breastbone, the shoulders, everything. The pale, clustered shapes outlined his whole skeleton. He turned slowly so I could see the scarred curves of each knob in his backbone, the wide triangles of his shoulder blades. Either he was infinitely talented and patient with the razor or he’d had help. He shrugged back into his shirt again and then his spotless white coat, and no one looking at him now would know what a danger he was on the inside.
“You’re not impressed?” He sounded petulant.
I only said again, “Get the hell away from me.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do that, Ada. I’ve been searching for you all this time. And now I’ve found you.”
I made to sit up, and he put the palm of his hand in the center of my chest and pushed me back down.
“Now,” he said, “let’s catch up.”
And in his other hand was the old straight razor with its worn bone handle and its sharp square blade.
I couldn’t fight anymore.
Lying on the floor of that room, the life force drained from me. The world shrank and almost disappeared, and all I could feel was an enormous ache wrapped around my skull and the cold bare floor under my broken body. I’d fallen too low and could see no way out. It was all I could do not to stretch out and surrender to sleep, like a girl in a fairy tale who would either awaken transformed, or not at all.
He leaned over me with the razor, pushing my dress and underskirt up almost to my waist, and began to cut into the flesh of my thigh. I didn’t move. It must have disappointed him, my lack of reaction, because he lifted the razor and brought it toward my face instead.
“You’re hurt. Let me fix you,” he said in that old long-ago voice, and that was what gave me the strength to move. Just one more time.
I moved fast.
I closed both of my hands over his fist with the razor in it and immediately shoved as hard as I could, bending his arm back toward his body. Surprise was on my side. The upturned razor blade slashed across the front of his neck, and blood immediately began to fountain out.
His eyes were stunned, unbelieving. He dropped the razor, and his hands went to his throat, clutching at the wound. The blood still seeped out between his fingers, running over his white coat and shirt, running everywhere.
I threw my body sideways. With what little presence of mind I still had, I grabbed the discarded razor so he couldn’t use it on me. I pushed it against the stone floor to fold it and tucked it into my bodice. There was so much blood.
And then I looked at Ray. His eyes were wild, panicked. I knew who he was, and I knew he’d caused me so much pain and anguish. He’d driven me from my home when I was little more than a child. He was damaged and he was dangerous. But he was also a human being, frightened for his life, and I felt no joy at what I—I!—had done.
Desperate to take it back, to do whatever I could, I pressed my hands over his hands, the slick blood coursing, and said out loud, “I wish you well again.”
Nothing happened.
The blood kept coming, red and warm. The calm that had come over him when I spoke quickly disappeared, and his eyes were even wilder. He opened his mouth to speak but of course he couldn’t. And I, horrified, knew that if I couldn’t heal him, there was only one thing I could do. Escape.
I left him there. I dashed up the stairs. There were two doors at the top. I opened the colder one. This took me outside, and I slammed the door behind me, exiting into an alleyway between the theater and the restaurant next door. Standing next to the restaurant’s window, I could see the entire room was full of survivors from the fire, standing or crouching or laid out on tables, and white-coated doctors were moving from person to person, giving directions, pointing, shouting. It seemed clear they were separating patients into those who could be helped and those who couldn’t. I’d been in the restaurant’s storeroom. The warmer door would have taken me inside. Someone might use it at any moment to take more of the dead down into that awful room. I couldn’t be nearby when they found Ray, untouched by smoke or ash, dying or already dead.
I plunged my
hands into a snowbank to wipe away as much of the blood as I could. I looked around to see if anyone was watching me, but the scene was so frenetic that no one had time or inclination to take any notice of someone who wasn’t visibly injured. The fact that I was on my feet and moving meant I could safely be ignored, and so I was.
I forced myself to walk, heading up the alleyway toward the street, and stared for a moment at the firefighters, still battling the blaze. From here, I could feel the dreadful radiant heat of the fire on my face. The firefighters were curiously silent. Then I realized I couldn’t hear anything at all, as if the sound of the world had been wiped away. I wished everything else were as easily gone. With no warning, I vomited on the stone of the alleyway.
I felt my life would now be divided in half: everything that came before this, and everything that came after. I didn’t want everything after to begin.
***
After an infinite amount of time, when I could hear again, I toddled like a child to the street. Someone in a dark blue uniform with a high collar asked me where I lived. I whispered the name of my hotel.
When next I thought about it, I was there. I lay sprawled across the bed on my back, still wearing the soot-smudged dress, surrounded by smears of ash on the white coverlet. I closed my eyes, and when later I opened them, I saw I was no longer alone: Clyde had arrived.
He leaned in and cradled my face and whispered, “Oh, thank the good Lord. Beloved, come join the world.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.” It felt too soon.
“You have to.”
“No.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked and pointed toward the front of my dress. I looked down at a great dark streak of blood all the way across my bodice, and all of a sudden, I stank of death. Was it Ray’s blood? My own? Another victim’s? Was it the blood of a living person, or a dead one? I leapt out of the bed and attempted to tear the dress off my body, my shivering fingers fumbling with the buttons.
He said, “Let me help you,” and reached out for the buttons, and I slapped his hands away, even though I was shaking too hard to manage them. One at a time, struggling every moment, I tore at them, breaking the button or tearing the fabric more often than not. When I finally got the dress off, I threw it on the floor and stepped away from it. I backed away and backed away until my body bumped into the wall and there was nowhere else to go. I huddled against the wall, half naked, shivering in my undergarments and not just from cold. Clyde wrapped his arms around me, and I sagged against him, crying.
“Here,” he said. “Here.”
I sobbed in his arms. It already would have been the worst day of my life, the horror of that disaster, all those dead mothers and children, and then Ray had found me. And I had done what I had done. I could still feel the folded straight razor inside my corset, cold against my skin. It was too much. All of it.
“Here, get back in bed,” he said, and he helped me lie down and pull the covers up over myself. He sat on the edge of the mattress, looking down into my face and brushing my tangled, stinking hair away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is so awful. I’m so sorry. What can I do?”
The answer sprang to mind immediately. “Cancel the next month of shows. Take me off the road.”
It was plain my answer had shocked him. He had probably been thinking I wanted tea. But I’d almost died because he’d sent me there, all unknowing. I could feel a faint burning still in my throat and lungs, and only because of my gift did I have a voice at all. If I hadn’t been there, the fire would have been only a headline, not a memory. It would have been someone else’s tragedy. Now everything was different. My life was horror, and I was a murderess. I couldn’t tell him what I’d done; I never could. We were well beyond tea.
Quickly, he was all business. “We can’t cancel. You know how much that costs?”
“No,” I said honestly.
“I suppose that’s why you have me,” he said. “The answer is too much. It’s not even the money. No one will trust us again if we cancel so many shows on such short notice. Word spreads like wildfire when you go back on a booking. We have to protect your reputation.”
“Less, then. What about three weeks?”
I could see him calculating. “No.”
“Two weeks, then? I can’t. I’ll panic.” Even just thinking of the hardwood boards of a stage, I could smell the smoke. My knees ached, and I felt the hard landing from my leap over the orchestra pit all over again. Then I saw Ray’s face looming above me, and blood, a fountain of blood. I backed farther into the bed, clutched the pillow across my chest like a shield.
“No.”
“You can’t force me,” I said a little hysterically. “Let someone else do it.”
“No one can take your place. You’re the one people come to see.”
“Dress someone else up like me. Tell them it’s me. How will they know?”
He said, “They’ll know, Arden. Maybe we should wait and talk about this later, when you’ve had some more time.”
“No, now,” I said firmly. “I won’t change my mind.”
He thought about it. Nervous, still trembling, I watched him think.
“Ten days,” said Clyde at last. “We can cancel the next show, the one in Moberly. It’s a small venue and they don’t talk to anyone. And of course the show here is canceled.”
“They won’t shift it?”
“The mayor closed all the theaters in Chicago. For six weeks. I don’t think you realize how bad it was.”
“I know how bad it was!” I yelled, angry at myself and him and the world. “I was there! I watched people die! I could have died, because you sent me there! Don’t tell me I don’t know!”
“Do you know how many people are dead?” he yelled back. “Six hundred! The world didn’t stop for them, and it’s not going to stop for you.”
On any other day, I would have found it a stunning number. Today, it didn’t even make a dent.
But I could hear the anger in his voice, and if both of us flew off the handle, things would come to a bad end. I couldn’t take that on top of everything else. I was sad and furious, but I knew what I needed to do next, and shouting wasn’t going to accomplish it. I could only tell him the truth.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I need to go back to New York,” I said. “To rest. To think.”
He sighed and said, “Okay. I’ll change my plans. Canada can wait.”
“No.”
“But you can’t be alone.”
“I have to.” With effort, I set the pillow aside. I reached for his hands and held them. His fingers were cool and dry. “I would love to go to Canada with you, but I can’t. And I can’t stay here. I can’t be on the road right now. I need to be alone with my thoughts. New York is the best place for that. I need to go, and I need to do it today.”
“Tomorrow?” he said, ever the negotiator.
I relented in the one small way I could. “Tomorrow.”
He brushed his lips against my forehead with such a gentle, feathery touch that it made my whole poor body dissolve.
We slept in each other’s arms without making love, the first time we’d ever done so, and in the morning, I left.
***
I took a passenger train instead of the private railcar. Somehow I thought it might help. I didn’t want to feel pampered. I wanted to feel anonymous. I missed Clyde terribly—hiding in his arms might let me forget things, at least for a few blissful moments—but it was best that I was alone. I was melancholy and not fit company. If Clyde had been there, I just would have pretended things were fine, and things weren’t fine. So I let myself be melancholy and settled into a dark frame of mind.
Regret for what I’d done quickly bloomed into fantasies of what I might do, what I could do. I could just disappear, I realized. I could get off this train anywhere,
and no one would have to know. I could make a new life somewhere else, anywhere else, where no one knew me as a magician or a dancer or any of the other things I’d been. I could start over. It was a beautiful fantasy, and indeed I almost followed that whim. I found myself standing, even, to make for the door. Had I had even a little money with me, perhaps I would have done it.
Then my fantasy turned even darker. I wouldn’t even have to wait until the train stopped moving in order to step off. Taking a life meant it would be fair if I lost mine as well, in some fashion. Dying would mean no more torment, no uncertainty, no regret. But quickly I let go of the idea. People would think some weakness or hidden fault had gotten the better of me—Drink? Gambling? A secret love affair? they would speculate—and I didn’t want that to be my legacy. And it would destroy Clyde. I had to get back to him, to be with him, even if I wasn’t ready just yet.
As I stared out the window at the countryside, I felt as if the train was bearing me back in time. Back before I’d cut Ray’s throat, before I’d had my heart broken and my lungs burned by the Iroquois Fire, before I released Clyde from his promise and he laid his hands on me and we fell headlong in love. I’d taken great joy headlining my own act as the Amazing Arden, no question. But in a way, the happiest time of my life had been before that. It had been when I was a member of Adelaide’s company, learning the ropes and forging my way ahead into the unfamiliar world of stage magic, making it my own. And then I knew where I needed to go and who I needed to see.
She was more mother to me than my own mother had been. Neither of them had instructed me tenderly or shared their feelings with me, but Adelaide and I were more of a piece: canny and distrustful on one hand, but on the other, whores for the crowd. She had trusted me, encouraged me. She had handed something meaningful down. If I was going to leave the stage and its attendant world behind—which it had just occurred to me I might—I’d be wise to talk to someone who knew exactly what that was like.
***
Adelaide’s farm looked like it had been copied from the pages of a picture book. There was a wooden mailbox at the end of the gravel-lined drive and rows of tall trees that flanked the lane. The farmhouse was faded but clean, the worn lines of its white clapboard sides still straight and true. The one detail that stood out as odd, which I only noticed as I mounted the steps to the porch, was the tiger sprawled out in the sunbeams that fanned out from the slats in the porch railing.
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