There is nervous thunder in Zara’s chest — and then she realizes it’s someone running up the steps. Barrett joins Zara on her little platform. He’s tall and broad and there’s hardly room for both of their bodies.
Barrett smiles down at her, a smile she knows because she’s seen him give it to other girls. It involves all of his teeth and two very convincing dimples, but his eyes are dead.
He holds two lengths of rope in his hands. “I’m going to show you how to do these binds,” he says. “Ready?”
Zara wants to say no, but then Leopold will know she’s causing trouble for the production, which is behind schedule in every possible way. Zara just has to keep agreeing for two more weeks. Previews will come and go, the show will open, Leopold will leave, and Zara will have everything.
Echo and Eli.
“So what I did,” Barrett says, “is I tied each of your wrists with rope, and you have to keep your wrists together. Don’t forget, that’s your job. Keep those wrists together, no matter what. It will make your hands look like they’re bound, even though you’re essentially wearing rope bracelets.” Zara breaks her wrists apart, puts them back together.
Like a magic trick.
“Good girl,” Barrett says, and the way his voice curls around her makes Zara wish she was wearing an extra layer of clothing, just so there could be more between him and her skin.
Zara has a sudden flash of the night before that won’t be held down. A dark room, a single bed, little mounds of clothes everywhere, like offerings. Eli’s face bright in the shifting gray-white city light. Her hands all over Zara’s skin. Her mouth, sliding down to Zara’s breasts, testing the waters. Zara’s body might be at the Aurelia, but really she’s with Eli in the soft hold of those sheets, two girls batting their legs into each other, like they’re learning how to swim.
“Are we prepared?” Leopold asks. He waits for nods from the stage manager, from the stagehands, even the costume girl. Zara tries to wipe the remnants of last night from her expression.
Leopold can’t know.
Not how good it was. Not how Eli breathed warmth onto every inch of Zara’s cold skin.
The water below is a frigid blue. Zara has no interest in jumping. But the words that come out of her mouth are “I’m ready to die.”
“Messenger, downstage right,” Leopold says, “and Ariston will be held by two of the soldiers upstage right.” The actors carefully find their marks. “Since Meg has been so instrumental to this staging, I’ll let her explain the rest.” Leopold pats his assistant on the shoulder.
Meg looks at the tableau with a brisk, assessing stare. “Here’s how it will go. Zara, at the midway point of the messenger’s speech, you jump from the block. As soon as you’re in the water, there should be a certain amount of splashing, struggle. Keep it realistic, though. No need for hysterics. Echo lets herself go under, and as soon as that happens, we’ll go to blackout and the hydraulics will lower the tank beneath the stage. The rest of the messenger’s speech will be delivered in the darkness, while the stagehands reset.” She spreads her palms, flips them. “When the lights come up, the stage will be whole. The tank will be gone.”
“Echo will be a memory,” Leopold adds. Because he can’t possibly let someone else have the last word.
Zara shifts her toes to the edge of the platform.
“Meanwhile,” Meg says, “under the stage, Zara will surface and a stagehand will help her out of the tank.” Zara tries to imagine that far into the future — just a few minutes, really — but her mind is stubborn.
Stuck on the fall.
“Zara, as soon as we go to black, you’re free to surface and breathe.” Meg must be able to see that Zara is reluctant because she adds, “It’s perfectly safe. We had several stagehands test it.”
Zara didn’t see any of those tests. The Aurelia’s curse comes back to her all at once, a landslide of worries that haven’t been able to touch her for so long because she’s been too busy with other things. Too busy with Eli.
These things come in threes.
The first two deaths seemed like accidents — what could look more accidental than new staging that doesn’t work?
Zara tells herself that she’s just making up reasons to worry. She’s found this pure, intense, white-hot happiness and she’s afraid something is going to come and snatch it away — that’s all. The play has conditioned her to expect it. But not all love stories end like that, in cold, blue silence.
In death.
The messenger starts in on his speech. “I saw her on the cliffs above, and even from such a distance she was proud and held no hesitation.”
Zara has to look as if she’s choosing this, even though every muscle in her body screams against it.
And then light moves over her — a web of shimmering blues and greens — a gentle reminder. Eli is up in the booth. Eli is watching her. Zara stands taller. Tonight, this will be just another thing they laugh about while they kiss each other.
And that makes Zara brave enough to jump.
A few weeks ago, if someone told Eli that she would have Zara pressed up against a decorative screen in prop storage, hands linked, lips one yes away from kissing, she would have laughed. And then secretly hoped they were right. And then laughed again. Now that she’s here, her nerves are so deafening she can’t even enjoy it.
“I don’t want you doing that jump,” she says. “There’s no time to practice. It’s totally unsafe.”
Zara sighs, leaving behind a miniature frown. That just makes Eli want to attack her lips. To fix things with kissing. But she’s started an argument, an important one, and she has to see it through.
“Remember that speech you gave me about doing your job?” Zara asks. “Well. This is mine.” Her teeth clack, bone on bone. Zara has been shivering from jumping into the swimming pool of the damned. Eli is doing vigorous, nonsexy things with her hands to keep Zara warm.
“Maybe you can talk to Meg about it. I mean, you obviously can’t talk to him.” Eli doesn’t want to say Leopold’s name. It makes her as sick as the sweet garbage-y scent that rises out of random vents in the street.
Last night, Zara let loose the stories she’d gathered of just how dangerous Leopold could be. Lies, manipulation, rape. “He shouldn’t be able to tell anyone what to do. Especially not you.” She feels this inner spinning, this dizzy sickness. She wonders if it’s what Roscoe felt like before he fell. “I want you safe. Forever.”
Zara laughs, a short stab of sound. “Ariston tried that with the cave, and it didn’t work out so well.”
“We’ll need something better,” Eli says. “Towers are pretty traditional, right?” She spins a glance around the room, only half-kidding. “I could put together something impossible to scale. With an Eli-only door.”
Zara’s finger finds Eli’s belt loop. “The problem with towers,” she says, “is that girls don’t like staying locked up.” Zara walks Eli backward until they’re pressed against an old armoire. Their lips meet: easy. The new challenge is keeping them apart. Eli slides her mouth to Zara’s throat, and a groan spills out. Someone might hear them. But the whole thing is so unspeakably hot, Eli has a hard time caring. Zara steps up the kissing from sweet to intense, running her hands up and down and everywhere.
Under the stage, in her living room, Eli had tried to put a dimmer on her hopes: a chorus of what if she changes her mind? In Eli’s bedroom, Zara changed Eli’s mind. Or melted it. Now, in the overheated dark center of a kiss, the only thing Eli is afraid of is someone trying to stop them.
Her back slams into a loose drawer, and the whole armoire rattles. Zara and Eli hold tight. No one jumps out from the shadows or bursts into the room, but Eli can’t shake the feeling that something bad is coming. “Hey,” she says. “Did Kestrel recover from the snap-fest she had last night?”
Zara’s face does a nervous flicker, like a fluorescent that can’t decide if it’s broken or not. “She looked sick at rehearsal today, but I couldn’t tel
l if it was guilt or just a hangover.”
“Jesus,” Eli mutters.
Zara picks at a handle on the armoire. “I was just scared last night. Of everything. I don’t think she’s really going to hurt me.”
Eli feels like she’s getting brighter and brighter and that soon she might be burning to the touch. “She attacked Carl.”
“That was really, really bad. But . . .” Zara shakes her head, as if there’s something in there she can’t get out. “I’ve been around her every day for two months. She’s weirdly . . . innocent.”
Eli stops in front of Zara to rub her shoulders again. “You forget that I grew up in suburban Connecticut. Kestrels everywhere. Kids who thought they could get away with anything. Mostly because they did.”
Zara sighs. “She’s definitely in her own world. She took a Xanax right before the gala, and I thought it would help her stay calm, but it was like the medicine didn’t even touch her.” Zara speaks to her shoes, which are covered in dark spots from all the dripping. “I think I have to go back to the apartment tonight.”
Eli lets her hands drop from Zara’s shoulders to that curve in her back, the one that she touched the night before. Over her dress, and then under it, and then without anything on at all. “You can come home with me. You can always come home with me.”
Zara tugs at a piece of her hair, which has gone clumpy and lank from the cold water. “What if Leopold notices?”
Eli wouldn’t really be surprised if Leopold started to stalk Zara’s movements. She thinks about going to the police again, but what would she say? Leopold Henneman raped one of his actresses twenty years ago and they have no proof? He told lies, tricked people? Got Zara drunk and forced her to kiss the same guy she willingly kisses onstage every night?
Tension builds along Eli’s inner wiring. She kicks at the nearest prop with the toe of her boot, until she realizes it’s a creepy doll — one in a row of creepy dolls — and promptly stops.
“You could leave, you know,” Eli says, hating the words. Asking Zara to give up her dreams should be unthinkable. The idea of one of them at the Aurelia without the other is physically painful. But the idea of Zara getting hurt is worse.
White-hot. Untouchable.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Zara says, crossing her arms over her wet, glorious chest. “Enna told me not to.”
“Really?” Eli asks.
Zara goes into that middle distance, where the memories of the dead seem to live. Like they’re always just beyond where the eyes settle, and all a person has to do is look a little farther to find them. “She said don’t leave, no matter what. That’s letting them win.”
“Yeah, and look at how that turned out for her,” Eli says, forgetting to be gentle because she’s so afraid.
Zara gathers herself, as if she’s making a stand. Her nose is only a few inches away from Eli’s, but kissing seems miles away. “If Roscoe told you to do something, would you trust him?”
Eli nods. Grudgingly.
“You really think I would give up the only two things I’ve ever wanted this much?” Zara asks.
“Two things?” Eli teases out the words.
Zara smiles, and that warm, bright look on her face closes the distance between them. “Right. Two things. Echo and . . . Ariston.”
“Ariston!” Eli says. “Now with way more estrogen.” She wants to stay in the land of bad jokes for a while, but she can feel her nerves creeping back up, like the inching of a waterline. “Promise me you won’t let Leopold near you.”
Zara pulls her closer, douses her in chlorine. She kisses Eli like she can’t imagine a better fate. They are so busy turning themselves from girls into steam that Eli almost misses it.
Zara doesn’t promise.
Zara has been called early for a costume refitting. Cosima isn’t in the shop, but one of her assistants cracks the door. The heat has been turned down so low that the cavernous room might as well be carved out of ice.
Zara clenches everything.
“Wait here,” the assistant says, waving at one of the butcher-block tables. Zara sits there dutifully for a few seconds. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she sees Leopold, and panic brushes over her.
What is the director doing here?
Did he know she would be here, alone?
Leopold raped Enna. Zara is still taking that in, a little bit at a time, because it’s not something she can understand all at once. There was the look on Carl’s face when he said it. The way it confirmed Zara’s worst fears. The light it shed on the talk she had with Enna, right before she died. This story isn’t told in a single straight line — it’s more like ripples. Some bleed into Zara’s thoughts slowly. Others hit her in shock waves.
Zara hops down from the table, gathers her coat in one arm, and heads for the door. But the figure in the corner doesn’t move. If Leopold really is back there, she should hear breathing, or the rustle of movement. She should feel the charge in the air that seems to follow Leopold around — the same buzzy feeling that Zara gets on her skin before a storm.
When she turns back, the costume shop is perfectly still. Zara thinks she might have imagined the whole thing.
“Hello?” she calls.
No answer.
She pushes her way through racks of fabric, into a forest of wool and linen and silk. A smell rises from the costumes — baked moisture from the steam cleaner, with an undertone of bodies. Heady, spicy, sweat, the aftermath of a thousand performances.
As she gets closer to the place where she thought she saw him, Zara comes to the slow understanding that it isn’t the director — just a jacket and pants and a wig that, when put together, look like him.
A perfect imitation of Leopold Henneman.
The door to the shop bangs open with authority. Zara runs and is back in place at the cutting tables just as Cosima looks up from her garment bag.
“I make this costume,” she says, taking out the death-scene dress, holding it aloft. “Now I make it go underwater.” She digs into the stitches with a seam ripper, small and metal and toothy. “He says everything is perfect, see you next season. Two days later I am in here making a wetsuit.”
There is a fray at Cosima’s edges. One more rehearsal before they put the show on its feet, and Leopold won’t stop changing things. Won’t stop talking about how perfect his show needs to be.
It makes Zara want to throw up. He acts like he’s the only one who’s going to be judged.
Cosima picks up a needle and starts to sew with a fury.
Zara keeps very still and tries not to think about the upcoming previews. Five minutes later, Cosima tugs the new version of the dress over Zara’s head. It flows around her, heavier than the old one, like it’s trying to drown her without help from the water.
“How did you do that so fast?” Zara asks, marveling at the panels that spill from her waist like waterfalls.
Cosima scowls at the dress, dismissing it with a turn of the wrist. “This is nothing.”
“It’s beautiful,” Zara says. And it really is. Like armor is beautiful.
Cosima helps Zara slide back out of the dress. The fitting is over and Zara knows that it’s time for her to leave. But she stays, after her jeans and T-shirt have been tugged back on.
She hears Carl’s voice, reasonable and cold.
People die in the theater. Ask Cosima, if you don’t believe me.
Cosima has picked up a pair of long-armed scissors and gone back to work. She’s putting the finishing touches on something white and delicate — Echo’s act 1 dress, the one from Leopold’s vision. Three months ago, all she wanted was to stand onstage in that white dress. She didn’t want to think about how strange it was that her director called late at night and kept her up, sliding feverish words in her ear. Two months ago, she showed up at the Aurelia and found Roscoe, and it didn’t make her change course, or even dream of running back home. In the story she told herself, saying Echo’s lines in that dress in front of hundreds of people e
ach night was the only thing that mattered.
“You knew Enna, right?” Zara asks.
“Horrible woman,” Cosima says without looking away from her fabric.
Who says that about someone who just died? But then Zara remembers — most people think Enna got what she deserved. These were the stories that people told themselves, to make it easier to sleep at night. Leopold was a genius who could do no wrong. Roscoe was a crazy old man, destined to fall. Enna wrote her own tragedy without anyone else’s help.
But that’s not the whole story. People carve words on each other’s hearts, scribble their sadness on anyone who stays put for long enough. For the first time, Zara almost understands her parents. Avoiding love, the all-consuming kind, means they’ll never have to deal with losing it.
“Carl told me someone else died in the Aurelia.”
Cosima drops the fabric she was tacking. It flutters to the ground, but she doesn’t stoop to pick it up.
“It was someone you knew?” Zara asks.
“Vivi,” she mutters, carving the sign of the cross, forehead to chest, then across her shoulders.
“Vivi?” Zara repeats.
When the costume designer speaks again, she is on the edge of something — tears or fury. “Idiot girl.”
The tide has turned against Zara, but she keeps pushing. She’s come this far. “Please. I need to know —”
“Out,” Cosima says, scissors pointed at her, the blades wide and the stabbing points leveled at her throat. “Stop asking questions and get out.”
Adrian has one dress rehearsal to make things right.
He thought the kiss at the gala was a good idea, and then Zara ran away. She hasn’t really talked to him since. Obviously, they’ve still been kissing, because Echo and Ariston are always kissing. Adrian has to put his hands on Zara’s hips, his lips on her earlobe. Earlobes make things awkward.
Echo After Echo Page 18
