Leopold never would have picked her if he thought she couldn’t handle this role. He cares too much about his own reputation. About perfection. He knew from the start that she was good enough. But he also knew she was young and hungry and unsure. He chose her out of nowhere, spun her life in a circle and clothed it in the prettiest dreams. He wanted an Echo who would be desperate to please him. An Echo he could control.
Zara rushes into act 2, already midflight. Running away from Leopold gives her plenty of motivation.
She pulls up the hood of the rich cloak that Cosima made. It’s just Echo and the woods now. This part of the play has always spoken to Zara in an urgent whisper — there is something here, a feeling that lies underneath the rest of the story, sliding against the happiest moments, rubbing off on them in ways that foreshadow the ending.
Trees made of darkness crowd her path. Roscoe’s stencil created these patterns, but it’s Eli’s touches that have turned the woods truly menacing. The lighting is perfect. One more thing Leopold was wrong about.
“I must find a way
To a place that does not know
The girl I once was.
A place that does not know
The name I left
Like a leaf, shed and dying.”
As Zara spins through the woods — talking to herself, to the trees, to the strangers she meets along the way — she notices that people are collecting in the wings. Everyone presses to the farthest edges of the curtains — Kestrel, Toby, even Carl. Everyone is watching her. No one knows what to expect from this Echo.
She is burning. Bright. Alive.
Her certainty has lit her up in a new way, and it leads her back to Eli. The thought of Eli, warm in her mind. The memory of Eli, hot on her skin.
When she enters the market scene, she’s ready to fall in love. Ariston marches in from the other side of the stage. He says his lines beautifully — they slide out of him like he’s not even trying. But no amount of acting can cover up the anger trapped in his arm muscles, the hurt flinch in his eyes that only Zara is standing close enough to notice. Zara hoped that a day apart would calm him down. But everything that went wrong on the landing is still there.
“I dreamed of a beautiful girl,” he says. “To see you is to watch that dream wander on new shores.” The words are the same as always — Adrian has learned them well — but tonight he uses them to sting her.
Eli’s light is there, like a firm hand at Zara’s back. It reminds her of how she felt when she was at her brightest and most beautiful. The Aurelia is full of Zara’s voice and Eli’s light, and Zara soars through the rest of the scene on a feeling that no hate or fear can force back to earth.
And then — Adrian stops trying to fight her. All the sweetness that she’s seen in him, the need for love, it’s there in the way that he puts his hand on her waist. In the way that his eyes warm up before he smiles. Soon they are in some rarefied atmosphere, breathing the dizzy-thin air.
The lines burn up fast. Here is the love scene, begging to be played like it never has before. The bed that Ariston made for Echo is the only thing onstage. As Zara climbs onto it, she wills herself to forget that Leopold chose this bed. She does a furious rewrite in her head, turning it into a bed from another story.
She thinks Eli. She wants Eli. And when she closes her eyes and kisses Adrian, she is kissing Eli.
In all of her time sitting in theaters, watching stories play out scene by scene, Eli has never had to make it through a performance like the one Zara’s giving. It feels like watching the girl she loves set herself on fire.
Like any good fire, the result is beautiful. Like any fire in the history of fires, standing close to it is scary. Up here in the booth, Eli usually feels safe: there’s distance between her and the stage.
Not tonight.
Eli listens to the stage manager over the headset. She calls the cues to her board op. They’ll reach the end of the play soon, and then Eli can find Zara and help her do a reverse phoenix. Unburn herself. Everything will be fine two scenes from now. Eli just has to keep hitting the cues.
And she has to stop thinking about Zara’s trashed room. About what might have happened if Zara had been in that room instead of rolled up inside a curtain with her.
One scene left before the end. The soldiers come for Echo and Ariston. The love bubble gets burst, every time. They drag Echo away by the roots of her hair while she screams a bright-red scream. The two strongest soldiers pin Ariston’s arms behind his back. Adrian Ward isn’t a movie star tonight. He’s Ariston, in messy doomed love with Echo, and Eli can feel what he’s feeling.
She takes them to black, but there’s no relief in it. The audience can sense the ending coming now. They know where Echo’s story is headed, faster than a falling body.
This is why Eli hates the play, the real reason, the secret that she hasn’t told anyone. Eli is a romantic. And the ending of this play hurts. To wrap herself in those words of love, to watch the flare between Echo and Ariston, and then every night, to see her gutter out — Eli needs to believe that love doesn’t have to end this way night after night.
Echo after echo.
When the lights come back up, the platform is set. The cliffs rise above the stage, fleshed out from a metal skeleton into a harsh outline of rock. The water waits below, dark, blue, patient.
In the corner of the stage, Ariston puts up a fight, but not a winning one. Shouldn’t he be trying harder? If he really loves Echo, shouldn’t he be finding some way to stop the soldiers? But he can’t.
He can’t.
Zara trembles at the top of the platform, her breath a shallow mess. Is she acting? Or terrified? Eli can’t tell. The lines between this play and life have gone past blurry. They’ve vanished.
Eli takes out her Leatherman and pushes the blades around, setting them against her skin without letting them cut. The touch of the metal is a comfort, because it reminds Eli what’s real.
Zara trembles at the edge of the platform. She’s supposed to jump, and then Eli will call the blackout.
But Zara isn’t moving.
The messenger’s voice sounds the final notes of the play, even though Zara hasn’t jumped yet. “She was pulled down, where love could not reach. Her old name died with her, before it could be revealed that she was Echo, the same Echo that Ariston should have wed. He returned to his kingdom and wept every day for a year, and when he had cried enough tears to drown himself, he woke and ruled his people.”
Zara is still standing there, unmoved. She spreads her arms, a bird stretching sleek wings. She takes a tiny step backward. And when she leaps —
“Go,” Eli says.
The board op hits the blackout, and Eli reels in the fresh darkness, an image of Zara burned into her eyes. Zara still on the platform. She didn’t jump. Her toes left the ground, but she never took flight. There’s the sound of a body smacking. Eli drops the Leatherman, which she forgot she was holding. “Houselights,” Eli says to the board op, skipping the last several cues. The play is over, anyway. “Go. Go!” Hard white hits the theater.
She tears off her headset and runs.
Eli’s boots are thunder by the time she arrives backstage. None of the stagehands pay her any attention. They’re all watching the stage, which they’ve just finished resetting, waiting for the cue from the stage manager to start the curtain call.
Leopold made a huge deal about his choice to keep Echo out of the curtain call. It made Eli so angry the first time she heard it. Zara did all that work and Leopold insisted that she stay backstage while everyone else took their bows because it breaks the illusion of her death.
Now Eli is just glad that everyone else is busy and she can get to Zara faster.
Eli rushes for the handle in the floor backstage, the one that opens to the traps below. When she tears it open, Zara is climbing up the ladder, right toward her. She’s favoring one hand, but otherwise she seems okay. Eli breathes for the first time since she left the booth. When Zara sees her, her ey
es do that flashburn thing, the one that makes it very, very clear that Zara wants to kiss her.
Eli pulls her up the last step, the water from the pool spreading into Eli’s clothes.
“Are you okay?” Eli asks in low tones, surprised by how husky her voice is. It sounds like she’s been crying.
“Yeah,” Zara says, holding out her left wrist. “I hit the edge of the pool, but it’s just a bruise, I think.”
There are waves of energy coming off Zara. “I have to tell you something,” Zara says. “Not here.” Eli nods, her face a bare inch away from Zara’s. Their bodies barely touch. Their hands linger for a second, then part.
That’s all they can have for now.
It isn’t enough.
It’s too much.
Because when Eli pulls away from Zara, Leopold is rushing toward them through the wings. And if she wasn’t sure whether he saw them, the way he looks back and forth between them, so knowing, so smug, so playful, proves it. Eli swears under her breath in Spanish, the most bristling and barbed words she knows, and hopes that Leopold doesn’t understand.
Actually, she hopes he does.
Eli changes the blocking at the last second. She stands as close to Zara as she wants, presses their arms side by side, knots their hands. If he already saw them together, there’s nothing else to lose.
“Miss Vasquez,” Leopold says. “I’ve been informed by the stage manager that you called your cue early.”
This isn’t what Eli was expecting.
“I should have known you were too young, too inexperienced to take this seriously. I never should have kept you on after Roscoe’s terrible accident.” Eli used to flinch at that word. Accident. Now it batters her like a massive wave. It takes her down. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask that you leave the Aurelia.”
Last night, Eli thought she couldn’t hate anyone as much as Barrett. But now he has company.
“What?” she asks numbly.
“Leave,” Leopold repeats coldly.
Eli’s been living in fear of those words since the first day she got here, and when they finally come, it’s like a cut: so deep and clean and fast she doesn’t even notice until she starts to bleed.
“You can’t do that,” Eli says.
The stagehands are watching, gathered in a little fringe, a tiny audience. They can’t look away from her misery.
“I can, and I’m afraid I must,” Leopold says. “For the safety of my actors.”
“So that’s it,” Eli says, challenging his truth. “One bad cue?” She knows that she’s being sent away because of what Leopold just saw. She wants him to say it. She wants the real truth, out in the open.
Everyone else should have a chance to see how ugly it is.
“It wasn’t just any cue, my dear,” Leopold says, acting like he’s so concerned for everyone’s well-being. Leopold shakes his head heavily, but there is a glint in his eyes, just for her. A dead giveaway. “Roscoe would be so disappointed.”
“You don’t know shit about Roscoe,” Eli says.
She’s saying whatever she wants now, whatever is true. But Zara’s silence is starting to worry her. At the mention of Roscoe, she goes brittle against Eli’s side. Glass to Eli’s live wire.
“You knew him for a few short months. I knew him for half his life, Eliza,” Leopold says, and it rings so damn false. Nobody calls her that. She is Eli. She is Luzecita. She is Zara’s girlfriend. She is Roscoe’s assistant. His friend. These are her truths. Leopold’s are all the wrong color. Dark as bruises. Dark as storms. “Roscoe would be very distressed to see what has happened here. A lighting designer who jumps the most important cue in the show? Who puts the entire production in danger?”
“I’m not hurt,” Zara says, her voice this weak little thing.
“Please,” Leopold says, his eyes still on Eli. “For the good of the Aurelia, gather your things and leave.”
Eli doesn’t have power here. She never has. But there’s one thing she can do: she turns to Zara and holds the wet tips of her hair in both hands. Zara is as cold and pale as a whiteout sky.
“Come with me,” Eli says.
Zara’s lips part, but the words come from Leopold, as if he’s changed the wiring and he can speak through her now. “Miss Evans is currently under a contract that binds her for the duration of the play. If she were to step away from it now, the consequences would be quite unpleasant.” Leopold digs back into Eli, harder this time. He’s done with the fun and games and now he wants her to know that he means what he’s saying. “This little career you’re trying to build is already in trouble. Fired from a major New York theater at such a young age? That’s not going to sit well with directors. Of course, if I call and give you a reference . . .”
Eli looks him directly in the eyes and says, “Fuck your reference.”
Leopold laughs, as if all the fight in Eli is just a little light amusement before the real show begins. “If that’s the way you feel. I can turn things in a different direction if you’d rather.”
It’s true that Leopold has influence. But there’s no way he controls the entire theater world, like he seems to think he does. This is Eli’s dream and she doesn’t want to lose her grip on it, but right now, it isn’t Leopold that makes her scared.
It’s Zara’s silence.
“Come on,” Eli says, tugging and tugging at Zara’s unhurt arm. “This isn’t real. He can’t hurt us.”
Zara looks at her like she has no idea how wrong she is. “I think you should go,” she mumbles.
“Zara . . .” Eli says.
Zara shakes her head, this tiny brush back and forth, and Eli’s heart does the most predictable thing in the world.
It breaks.
She turns her back on the scene, rushes past the red, red curtains, and bangs through the door that leads out of the backstage area. Just a few more steps and she is away from the Aurelia.
One more door between her and the nettles of snow on her skin. Eli needs the bottomless cold and the fractured pavement. She needs the lights that never turn off, their harsh, predictable glow.
She needs to get away from this story.
This is how it goes: siempre, siempre.
Leopold is alone in the theater on Christmas Eve when he feels it coming on. The prickle of a headache, like the air waking up, electric, before a storm. There is a weighted feeling in his limbs. When he closes his eyes, the curtain rises on his third vision.
It’s opening night at the Aurelia. Leopold isn’t in his body, not yet. He’s floating, detached. A sort of spirit. Or perhaps he is the theater — he can feel a hollow sense of expectation as the doors open.
Warm lights line the lobby. The coat check is accepting a flock of black and gray wool. Tickets are inspected and programs with shining white covers handed out. Patrons murmur in low voices, cut by a sparkling cry of excitement.
Leopold enters the lobby from the top of the balcony staircase, looking as delighted as he ever has. Echo and Ariston, his Echo and Ariston, has come together beautifully. All eyes turn to him.
A chime sounds with a muffled underwater quality. The sound goes on and on, which means that it’s time. There is no turning away. The patrons laugh and talk as they bleed into the theater.
Leopold waits, a comfortable smile on his face. He is vaguely aware that his body is in pain outside the vision, that it is imploring him to stop. But the Leopold within the vision doesn’t care about that.
He has to let this scene play out.
Three visions, and each one ends with a death. Leopold still doesn’t know if the Aurelia’s curse is living through him, or if he has simply known the story for so long that it left a lasting shadow on his imagination.
In the end, does it matter?
All the patrons are in the theater now. Leopold has a seat reserved in the center of the orchestra section, as always, but he doesn’t want to be there now. He stays in the lobby, watching through a slitted door as the audience settles.
Soon, Echo and Ariston will unfold with elaborate precision, like a clock that he has made and wound himself. This is how the human heart keeps time. Stories like this one.
The houselights go down.
Darkness spreads and contracts, blurring out the details. Leopold hears himself telling Meg that he needs a few moments. He sees himself pulling away from the great doors, walking down the hallway. The vision contracts, narrowing on him like a relentless spotlight.
Leopold, no matter how he fights, is forced into his body. Into the pain. It feels like a thousand bright screams passing through him, a candle that flares dangerously bright, and then — nothing.
Leopold can feel himself dying.
Zara spends Christmas Eve wandering around. She takes the subway, packed with last-minute shoppers and holiday travelers with bulky bags, but when Eli’s stop comes, she can’t get herself to move toward the door.
Zara made her choice when Eli walked out of the Aurelia. There’s nothing she can do to change that now.
She pockets Eli’s Christmas present: two tickets to Hamilton.
Zara spent a ridiculous amount of her Aurelia money on them, but she’s never really had money to spend before and this is the best thing she could imagine. Sitting in the dark with Eli. Whispering together before the curtain goes up. Remembering why they do this — why they love this. Now it seems so stupid and hopeful. The date on the tickets is April 16.
She drifts back to Kestrel’s apartment. The little potted tree twinkles on the coffee table. There’s a black-and-white movie on in the background — Miracle on 34th Street — but Kestrel isn’t watching. She’s looking out the window. The moon is a lidless eye, and Kestrel has gotten into a staring competition.
“You’re back late,” she says without turning around. “Did you make up with your girlfriend?”
The question hits Zara like a dropped counterweight. No one has ever called Eli that — not outside Zara’s own head. And now it’s gone: the girl, the word, the possibilities that went with it.
Zara never should have believed that they could make it through this show together. Eli was right, to stay away from her for so long. To keep her distance. Her silence.
Echo After Echo Page 22
