Echo After Echo

by Amy Rose Capetta

  They fall on Zara’s arms, burden her like a secret. She brushes them off, not wanting to ruin the white dress. It has nothing to do with being the perfect Echo or making people love her. She doesn’t want to hurt the costume that Cosima worked so hard on — even now, she’s a little afraid of the costume designer.

  The snow is so thick it’s almost like a curtain has been drawn. Zara fights her way forward, into the wind. Leopold is on the far side of the roof, standing gently on the stone margin, his palms upturned.

  For a moment all Zara can do is appreciate the artistry — the scrawl of the city reduced to a backdrop for an epic scene. Noise and life below them, darkness and eternity above, and Leopold caught between the two.

  Even now, he is directing.

  Even now, he is maddeningly good at it.

  But there’s an emptiness at the heart of his work. He has no idea how to tell a true story. He’s just following the pattern. That’s why he needs his actors to be hollow, to be his. He’s made a little set of puppets to play with, and he uses them to tell the same tired stories over and over again.

  Leopold dangles one foot off the edge, into the darkness. The wind up here has muscle and teeth, and it is searching for something to destroy. One moment of grappling with it could send him over the edge.

  Zara walks toward him — it’s a wide roof, littered with protruding vents and strange slanted bits. Even taking a few steps feels treacherous. Snow seeps through the fabric of her shoes.

  “What are you doing?” Zara shouts into the wind.

  Where is the third victim?

  Leopold looks over his shoulder like she’s come up here to consult him about an acting note. “Echo,” he says, a tremor in his voice contradicting his body’s calm state. “You should be downstairs. The play is about to begin.”

  She takes another step toward him — but what if he is waiting there so he can pull her over the side? What if he set this scene for her, like setting a trap? What if Zara is the third victim? “I’m not coming any closer.”

  “Good,” Leopold says. “I wouldn’t suggest it.” He runs his hands through the cold plumes of air, toying with them like ribbons. He dances a few steps forward, then places one foot back to find his balance. “This is it,” he says. “The final act.”

  Zara is cold down to her bones, and even farther. There is a pit of cold in the center of her brain. She needs to keep Leopold talking until she figures out what to do. “I know about the first two visions,” she says. “The ones that told you to kill Roscoe and Enna.”

  Leopold blinks at her like she’s a mirage. “My visions come true.”

  Heat rises in Zara. Her voice should be able to scald the snow into melting. “You make them come true.”

  Leopold lifts his arms, as if to summon a different explanation from the night, from the darkness. “You think I wanted them in my head, screaming? You believe I’ve relished the notion of my own death?”

  “Your death?” Zara asks.

  “What — did you think I was taking a little stroll on the edge of the roof for no reason?” Leopold rattles on, as if all he wants is to be listened to. “The curse took Roscoe and Enna. It’s here for me now.”

  “You didn’t kill them?” Zara asks. She feels dizzy, then burning, then numb. She wonders how long it takes frostbite to set in.

  “Of course I didn’t.” His eyes are on fire — a terrifying, truthful blaze. “What have I been telling you this whole time? What have you ignored so often? I need this play to be —”

  “Perfect,” Zara says, stepping on his line. She can see Leopold’s motivation clearly now. If he knew he was going to die, he would need his final production to be flawless. But — “You hurt people. That’s what you do. Over and over again. Roscoe and Enna are dead. And you want me to think —”

  “I don’t care what you think,” Leopold says, his voice blunted by the cold. “Why are you up here again?”

  “Meg,” Zara says blankly.

  “She told you about my visions, did she?” Leopold asks with a bitter wisp of a smile.

  Meg didn’t tell her that Leopold was on the roof, but she obviously knew. She did tell Zara about the visions, about Roscoe and Enna. She never said that Leopold killed them, though. She just led Zara to the cusp of the idea and let Zara push herself over the edge.

  “Wait,” she says, her mind suddenly kindled, working against every cold thing about the night. “Meg knew you were going to do this? Come up here and . . . jump?”

  Leopold curls a wrist, such a natural movement. Zara wonders how long it took to cultivate. How fully he had to train himself to become the person in front of her, to erase the nobody from Indiana and become a set of careful lies. She thinks back to the costume shop and the hollow set of clothes that looked like Leopold Henneman. That’s all he’s ever been.

  “Meg knows everything,” Leopold says.

  And the fire inside Zara’s mind starts to rage.

  “She told me about the first two visions,” Zara says. “Meg wanted me to think that you killed Roscoe and Enna. But she said you wouldn’t tell her who died in the third vision. She let me think you were going to kill someone else tonight. Probably so I would be afraid and stay away from you.” Every step, every action, every death could have been carefully staged. “I think — I think she made this happen. I think she’s trying to kill you.”

  “Impossible,” Leopold says with a smile that calls on all of his old charms. “Meg is in love with me.”

  “No,” Zara says. “She isn’t.” The Meg she saw in the little dressing room — that version spoke with honesty and telling flares of emotion. That version is closest to the truth. “Meg despises you.”

  Leopold doesn’t seem to hear her, or if he does, it doesn’t dent his belief. In Leopold’s mind, Meg still loves him.

  He looks down at his watch, adjusting the dial, squinting at the face in the dark, and the action is so grounded in the ordinary that it almost convinces Zara everything will be back to normal soon. No murders. No impossible choices. No pulse beating so fast that it feels like wings about to take flight.

  “It’s time,” Leopold says. “Go downstairs. Take your place.”

  Zara’s whole body strains toward the theater. Her dreams are downstairs, waiting for her to play a starring role in them. She could slip into that so easily, like a warm robe, like a full bath, like a kiss.

  Zara could let Leopold go over the edge. She has as much a reason as anybody else to want that.

  He sent Eli away.

  Zara’s skin remembers Eli’s skin. Her lips remember Eli’s lips, spread into a smiling kiss. Her hands remember the first and last times they tangled up with Eli’s, and all the times between.

  Her heart remembers everything.

  Zara could let him fall.

  Standing on the roof of the Aurelia, Zara decides — this is not how opening night is going to begin.

  “If you don’t come down from there, the play doesn’t happen,” Zara says, taking a step back, the snow lashing her. “You can be known as the director who killed himself because he failed. The man who couldn’t keep one little nobody actress in line. I won’t go onstage.” He peers over the edge, like he might have misjudged how far it is to the ground. “Is that the legacy you want?”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Leopold says, laughing. The sound is as cold as everything else on the roof, but also fragile, like if Zara reached out and touched it, his icy voice would shatter. “You wouldn’t do anything to stop Echo and Ariston. You love this show. You want it too much.”

  He still thinks that Zara let Eli go because she cared too much about Echo to walk away. Which means he really didn’t kill Roscoe and Enna. If he’d done it, he would have been able to guess that Zara stayed because she was afraid of the threats he made at previews — about what he’d do to her if she tried to leave the Aurelia.

  Leopold isn’t a murderer. But that doesn’t make him right.

  Echo is the role Zara has
always wanted, but not like this. She’s already let Leopold write too much of her story, scribble too much of himself into her margins. He isn’t going to decide how this plays out.

  Not tonight.

  Zara crouches on the roof, keeping herself out of the wind as much as she can. She looks up at Leopold.

  She watches. She waits.

  Downstairs, they must be holding the curtain.

  Up here, she is rubbing her hands together so fast it feels like she should be able to start a fire.

  When Leopold steps down from the marble beam, he looks angry enough to kill her. She believes that he won’t, but she makes him walk first across the roof, just in case, and keeps a hand on Eli’s knife.

  The lights dimmed long ago. Evening gowns rustle around Meg like restless leaves before a storm.

  The curtain should have risen on Echo and Ariston nine minutes ago. Meg has a good view of the waiting audience from her seat, third row center. At her side is an empty chair, even though every other seat in the house is taken.

  This one is reserved for Leopold.

  Meg savors that empty chair.

  Leopold told her about the third vision before the production started. At first, she thought it was a joke. Another little cruelty. But then she heard the worry in his voice. Worry became fear, which deepened into panic. He truly thought that seeing himself die meant it was going to happen. He believed in his visions with the white-hot fervor of a saint. Leopold questioned everything in the world except his own genius.

  But his one mistake was trusting Meg, not thinking that she was smart enough to eventually figure out how her career had withered, and hate him for it. Of course, she buried her loathing under admiration and helpfulness.

  She is a very good actress.

  The woman next to Meg digs into her purse and comes up with a chocolate bar. She makes a crinkling mess of the wrapper. Meg wants to turn to her, take it from her hands, eat it very calmly in long, even bites, and then stuff the wrapper down the woman’s throat.

  The lights blink — a magical, firefly blink — and the audience resettles. This can only mean one thing.

  The show is about to begin.

  When the curtains sweep apart, Zara is standing in the wings. Her hands loose at her sides, her breath a tightened knot. The audience is out there — so many people. They bring a weight to the room, a heat, a sheer force of wanting.

  Zara takes a step onstage.

  She thought it would be impossible to let go of what happened with Leopold on the roof, but everything drops away. Everything but this. Her skin drinks the light. There is a potent silence. She can feel her heartbeat pounding in each fingertip.

  Zara has been trying to get to this moment for so long. Since before Leopold and Meg, before Enna and Roscoe.

  Even before Eli.

  This is what she wanted. But it doesn’t feel like Zara has arrived. It’s more like she’s just getting started. She stretches and slides into this new reality, finding Echo. Her chin tilts. Her feet arch differently. Her shoulders pin back.

  For once she isn’t afraid of taking up space. She wants an Echo who can fill this world, the world that everyone at the Aurelia created — bounded by the wings on both sides, the cyclorama behind her, the steep drop-off of darkness that waits past the stage lights.

  The chorus joins her now, weaving in from every direction. Kestrel gives Zara a slight, almost invisible nod as she passes.

  And then Kestrel’s voice takes over the room. She is different tonight. Less polished, more truthful.

  “Echo refused a love

  To find a path,

  Not knowing that it would lead

  Past love, to death.”

  All Zara has to do is take one step backward, to find the beginning. The innocent girl who doesn’t see where this is all headed. She’s lived through her own Echo and Ariston. She doesn’t have to imagine. She knows. Her hands curl and tighten around the truth. She will give those people out there in the dark something better than Leopold’s perfect. She will give them trying, failing, seeking. She will give them living, breathing, dying.

  Being an actor is all about finding keys from the real world that open imaginary locks. Zara will toss every key she’s found into the air and watch where they land.

  Meg is watching Zara.

  She can’t stop.

  This Echo is stronger than ever, a diamond-bright surface over a deep sea of urges and needs. Meg tries to escape what Zara is doing, but it’s there when she closes her eyes — Zara’s sweet, breathy voice pulling Meg under.

  Zara shouldn’t be able to do this, to make Meg almost believe in love again; it’s been a wrecked ship on the shores of her life. This girl, who just lost the person she loves, shouldn’t still be able to blaze like this, to believe.

  At intermission, Meg stands up, careful not to look too eager. She waits as her row shuffles out, holds her head up as she walks through the lobby, avoiding the rest of the audience as much as possible. They are suspended in a dream. She is firmly rooted in the real world.

  As soon as Meg has the double glass door in sight, she knows that something is wrong. Or rather, not wrong. There should be lights, sirens.

  Leopold should be dead by now.

  Meg leaves the lobby and goes back to the place where she left Leopold pretending to be brave. Snow roars down, blotting out the sky. Meg’s black dress leaves her shoulders bare; she can feel everything. There is lightning embedded in the clouds, thunder to match the enraged wind.

  She finds Leopold huddled under the lip of the roof, helps him to his feet. She runs her hands up and down his arms to stop his shaking.

  “She made me go downstairs,” Leopold babbles into Meg’s shoulder as she holds him a bit closer. “She told me to leave. But she can’t do that. The Aurelia is my theater. So she told me to stand in the wings, where she could watch me. But she’s not supposed to be watching me.”

  Meg pats his back in circles, soothing him like a child. Every second of being this close to him is pain and revulsion. “Who told you all that?”

  “Our little Echo.” He looks up at Meg, his hair a matted mess, his eyes the color of a soiled winter. “She said you’re trying to kill me.”

  “That’s absurd,” Meg says.

  Meg is a very good actress.

  “The visions come true,” Leopold says, holding tight to that idea but losing his grip on it just as quickly. “If I haven’t jumped yet . . . maybe this one won’t come true. I might live,” he says, his voice circling from confusion to hope and back again. “The visions come true, they always do,” Leopold repeats, a broken mutter.

  “Yes,” Meg says.

  She’s been making sure of that.

  She knows what she has to do. The failsafe was always in place, in case Leopold lost his nerve. She can’t push him over the edge; he would take Meg down, down, down with him, she has no doubt.

  She slowly unzips the little purse at her side and lowers her hand in, fishing around as if she’s looking for tissues. But her fingertips are brushing the cold metal of a knife. It was a gift from Barrett in prop storage. He was a terrible person to involve in her plans; she can see that now. Impulsive, selfish, disgusting to a fault. She still can’t believe the idiot threatened Zara in her own bedroom. Like that would really keep the girl from asking questions.

  Still, Barrett gave Meg a very good knife. It’s not the kind that actors use for stage fighting. It’s an ornamental dagger that would be used for set decoration, perfectly heavy and just sharp enough.

  This won’t look like a suicide anymore. Zara ruined that for everyone. In one minute, she destroyed all of Meg’s careful work. A perfectly woven story, one thread tugged out of place.

  Leopold only has long enough to be surprised before the knife slides into his chest. There is no pain in his eyes. No betrayal. To feel those things, you have to care first.

  He doesn’t even scream.

  Zara is losing her grip on Echo.

 
; After everything she did to get here, and everything she did to stay, Zara is losing her.

  She made it away from Echo’s parents and through the woods. She found Ariston and fell in love. All of that felt right, but now the end is coming. The stark blue water. The fall.

  She keeps thinking about Leopold and Meg. The story that she stumbled into, the one that’s bigger than Echo and Ariston but made out of the same fabric — love and death. There’s still so much that Zara doesn’t understand.

  She doesn’t have to. Not right now. She just needs to let Echo’s next line bloom from her throat. The words are ready, waiting, wanting to be said. But Zara can only think about Meg and Leopold and love and death.

  And Eli — always edging in at the corners of her mind.

  Always Eli.

  Adrian is keeping a hand on her arm tonight, even when it’s not part of the blocking. He must be able to tell something’s wrong. Zara can feel that he wants her to come back and finish the play. She’s barely onstage with him, even if her feet are planted on the boards.

  Adrian lays her down gently, and her mind is there, tangled up in the heat of kissing him and the memory of kissing Eli. And then her mind slips, and it shows her other people kissing. Meg and Leopold, Kestrel and Barrett, Carl and Enna, Toby and Michael — all of them twined up together.

  All of them in love, and doomed.

  Meg, touching her hands and telling her not to worry. Roscoe falling from the ceiling, Roscoe lying at her feet. Enna, cold on the dressing room floor.

  Eli, Eli, Eli.

  She was the answer to the question that Leopold asked at auditions: Who do you love most?

  Zara just didn’t know it yet. But time has doubled over on itself, and she can see the whole story, laid out beginning to end. Eli was in this room when Zara first stepped onstage. Eli saw Zara with the curtains and thought — something. She never did tell Zara what.

  When she makes her next cross, she notices a new terrible thing. Leopold is missing from the spot where she planted him backstage so she could keep an eye on him during the show.