The Lightness of Hands

by Jeff Garvin

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Please be aware that this novel deals with issues of suicide and self-harm.

  DEDICATION

  For Ami,

  who always remembers to turn on the light

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Jeff Garvin

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  THE TRICK WORKED LIKE THIS: I entered the gas station first, playing the part of the suspect teenager, the apparent shoplifter—misdirection incarnate. I prowled the chip aisle, fingering noisy snacks, and then, just as the clerk started to get suspicious, Dad would walk in. There was nothing flashy about the setup, no pyrotechnics or vanishing objects, just a story to obscure what was really happening. That’s what magic is, after all: a lie that’s more satisfying than the truth.

  Outside, our rickety RV with its attached ten-foot trailer sat at the farthest pump, where it would suck diesel until the prepaid Visa ran dry. I hoped fifteen bucks would buy us enough time. Other than the two twenties in Dad’s money clip, it was all we had left.

  “Good afternoon, young man,” Dad said to the clerk in his stage baritone. A wry smile turned up the corner of my mouth; even at a backroad gas station in the middle of nowhere, he couldn’t help being the Uncanny Dante.

  “How can I help you?” the clerk said. To judge by the mass of his neck muscles, he had probably played linebacker on his high school football team.

  “Two packs of Chesterfield mediums, please.”

  Dad had quit smoking when he got his cardiomyopathy diagnosis. Also, Chesterfield didn’t make mediums; Marlboro did. It was all part of the trick—and it worked. The clerk turned away to scan the cigarette display, and I made a beeline for the front door. On the way, I knocked a few cans of Hormel chili off the shelf.

  Rule number one: Magic is misdirection.

  The clerk spun at the sound. “Hey! Stop!”

  I was halfway out the door when he grabbed my arm and yanked me back inside.

  “What did you take?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I replied, basting my tone with indignation.

  Over the clerk’s shoulder, I saw that Dad had already completed his part of the grift; the old man was fast.

  “Give it up,” Linebacker said, “or I’m calling the cops.”

  “Go ahead.” I glared, trying again to yank my arm from his grasp. “I’ll tell them how you assaulted me!”

  Now Dad approached, frowning. “Purcilla! What are you doing?”

  Every time we pulled this bit, he gave me a fresh pseudonym, each more ridiculous than the last. We got a kick out of it.

  “Forgive my daughter,” he said, putting a hand on Linebacker’s shoulder. “She’s troubled.”

  He let go of me.

  “Now do as he asked, Purcilla.”

  I rolled my eyes and unzipped my hoodie, revealing a can of BBQ Pringles and a package of Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins. Dad was on me in a heartbeat, shaking me by the shoulders.

  “You little thief! I didn’t raise you like this!”

  “Take it easy,” Linebacker said, oozing with counterfeit chivalry. It was okay for him to manhandle me, but not my own father. What a hypocrite. “I just want to make sure she didn’t take anything else.” He glared at me. “What’s in your pockets?”

  I showed him they were empty. He seemed satisfied and was turning back toward my dad when I said:

  “Oh, wait. I do have these.” I reached into my back pockets, then presented both middle fingers.

  Dad’s eyes narrowed. “All right, Purcilla. Back to the bus with you.”

  I rolled my eyes again, pushed through the doors, and headed for the RV, leaving Dad to close the ruse.

  The prepaid Visa had run out as expected, but when I squeezed the handle, the diesel started flowing again, this time free of charge. While I had been distracting the clerk, Dad had reset the pump.

  As the tank filled, I took a few deep breaths, trying to slow my heart. The adrenaline rush from a grift was almost as strong as the high from performing—but it faded quickly, leaving me to worry how we were going to book the next job. Get the next meal. Survive.

  I opened the secret pouch I had sewn in my hoodie and took out what I had lifted: two unripe bananas, a bag of pork rinds, and Linebacker’s wallet. He only had fourteen bucks, but I removed his driver’s license anyway and jotted on the back in Sharpie: $14—Dunlap, IN. I stuffed our convenience-store lunch back into the pouch and leaned back on the RV. Dad was supposed to be on a low-fat, low-sodium diet for his heart. I couldn’t keep feeding him this crap. We needed decent food. We needed money.

  We needed a real gig.

  Five minutes later, the RV was sputtering south on US 33.

  “You’re sure we’re clear?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Dad was paranoid about security cameras—but these old gas stations always had out-of-date technology. It had taken Dad only a fraction of a second to reach over the counter and reset the pump; if the move showed up on camera at all, it would be a momentary flash, and whoever was watching would be more focused on the girl stuffing chips down her shirt.

  Still, Dad maintained his grim expression, his mustache turned down at the ends. I didn’t ask why; I already knew. He hated stealing and insisted we keep track of every penny we took. Someday, he said, we’d “make restitution.” I hated stealing, too, but unlike Dad, I didn’t believe we’d ever pay it back doing birthday parties and bar gigs. And in the meantime, we had bills to pay.

  “How are we on time?” Dad asked. The gold Breitling watch he’d inherited from his grandfather clung ever present on his right wrist, though it had stopped working years ago.

  “It’s ninety minutes to get back to Fort Wayne. We’ll make it.”

  Right now, normal high school juniors were shouldering backpacks and piling into cars, heading off to football games or fast-food joints to hang with their friends. I was on my way to work a wedding with my sixty-four-year-old father.

  As he drove, I opened the pork rinds. The aroma that rushed out of the bag triggered a flood of memories. Pork rinds had been our thing, Mom’s and mine. We would polish off a whole bag while watching Ratatouille for the thousandth time, licking the red salt from our fingers and snorting with laughter. I popped one into my mouth, letting the familiar tang of vinegar overwhelm my senses. It was like I was six again, sprawled next to her on the couch.

  I ate another one, but it turned bitter on my tongue and was hard to swallow. Outside, rows of dead corn zipped past, and I wished I we
re home. I missed the warm, dry breeze of Las Vegas. I missed the sun.

  I missed my mom.

  I had been a little kid during Dad’s Vegas years; now I was living every sixteen-year-old’s dream, residing in a forty-foot RV with my dad at the Cedarwood Mobile Estates in Fort Wayne. I’d spent more than half my life here, but it would never be home.

  “What about closing with Sub Trunk tonight?” Dad said, eyeing me from the driver’s seat. “Get you back on the boards? You haven’t performed in weeks.”

  I shook my head, felt my jaw tighten.

  “I’m behind, and I can’t afford to let my grades slip any further.” I kept my eyes on the barren cornfields outside, but I could feel Dad’s gaze like a spotlight. We’d had this conversation a hundred times; I had to be the only teenager in Indiana whose father was urging her not to study.

  “I’m sure you’d make a great nurse, Ellie. But performing is in your blood. You’ve got it on both—”

  I cut him off before he could mention Mom. I didn’t want to think about her right now.

  “The party is half a mile from Eastside,” I said. “There might be people I know.”

  It was a good excuse; Dad knew I didn’t want to be recognized. Ellie Dante, the semihomeless chick who had dropped out halfway through sophomore year.

  “I see how your eyes sparkle when you’re onstage,” he said.

  When I’m onstage, sure. But what about afterward?

  “Can I just stay in the RV? Please?”

  Dad sighed and scrubbed a finger across his mustache. “All right, you don’t have perform. But I need you to stage-manage.”

  Before I could argue, my ancient prepaid phone buzzed in the cup holder, and I snatched it up. The call was from an unfamiliar number with a Las Vegas area code. It might be a client, and we needed one—badly. I answered, but there was only a hiss of static before the call dropped. No service out here in the land of corn and soybeans. I unclicked my seat belt and stood up.

  “I’ve got homework.”

  I made my way toward the back, holding on to bolted-down furniture as I went. Behind the captain’s chairs, two couches faced each other. At night, one of them folded down to form a bed where Dad slept. Beyond them was the kitchenette: a tiny sink, a propane stove, and a mostly empty pantry, its door secured with bungees so they wouldn’t fly open on a curve. A half-sized restaurant booth occupied the port side—that was where we ate and I did homework on my obsolete laptop. The bathroom was behind it, and at the very back of the RV was my luxurious eight-by-ten “suite.”

  I closed the flimsy accordion partition behind me and flopped down on the mattress, feeling the rumble of the diesel engine beneath me. I had tried to cover every inch of the faux-wood walls with posters, but it was still nothing like a normal teenager’s room. Normal teenagers had closets instead of cubbyholes. Desks instead of fold-out tables. Beds that didn’t vibrate at sixteen hundred RPMs.

  Someday, I would live in a real house with a real shower and a back door and a foundation.

  I sat up, trying to banish my spiraling thoughts. I needed to take my history test online before midnight, so I grabbed my phone and checked my usage stats: only two megs of data left, not nearly enough. I would just have to hope that tonight’s gig site had Wi-Fi so I could take it while Dad was performing. In the meantime, I opened my dusty copy of The Grapes of Wrath and tried to focus. My phone dinged with a new text.

  Ripley: Existential crisis pending. Assistance required. Are you alone?

  Me: Out of minutes. Can you text?

  Ripley: Ugh. Really need to talk. Where are you?

  Me: On the road. Will try to get wifi and call after show

  The three dots bounced for a moment, then disappeared. Maybe Ripley had been interrupted while composing his reply, or maybe he’d just given up. I couldn’t blame him if he had; I was the most unreliable friend ever.

  The adrenaline from the heist was wearing off, and I could almost taste the stress hormones turning sour in my bloodstream. In harmony with the low rumble of the engine beneath me, the chorus of an old Rihanna song began to play on a loop in my head: Ella, ella, eh, eh, eh . . . Over and over. I tried to shut out the song, to summon any other melody, but “Umbrella” only corkscrewed itself deeper into my mind. This happened off and on—some jagged shard of a song would get lodged in my mind and play itself back relentlessly. Once it was “Wrecking Ball,” and another time it was “Believer” by Imagine Dragons. Those weren’t so bad—but during the whole first semester of freshman year I’d had “It’s a Small World” stuck in my head, and I’d nearly flunked out—and then for no apparent reason it had just stopped. The depression that followed had been long and deep and colorless. So I’d come to recognize these repeating song fragments as a warning that gray days were coming.

  I reached into the drawer next to my bed and grabbed my prescription bottle. A single pill rattled inside the orange plastic cylinder, and I felt an invisible belt tighten around my chest. I wished I could save this last one for an emergency, but that wasn’t how the medication worked. It had to build up in the bloodstream; if I stopped taking it, the effects would wear off quickly. How many days did I have left? Three? Five? A week?

  I tapped the tablet into my palm and swallowed it dry. I had to be on tonight.

  We needed the money.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHILE DAD PULLED PROPS OUT of the equipment trailer we towed behind the RV, I mounted the steps to the big Victorian house and rang the bell. A moment later, the door opened, and a boy stood on the threshold, shouting over his shoulder so that I didn’t immediately see his face. He was slim but muscular, probably ROTC or crew team, maybe home from college for the weekend.

  “I don’t know anything about the centerpieces,” he called back into the house. “I’m on bar duty.” He turned and looked at me, and my skin turned to ice.

  I knew him.

  His name was Liam Miller, and we had worked together during Eastside’s winter production of Damn Yankees when he was a senior and I was a sophomore. He joined the cast as a distraction between baseball seasons, and I designed the special effects for the show. We rehearsed together for a month, and I thought we had formed a sort of awkward, unlikely friendship. But when the play ended, he went back to being a sports god, and I was still a sophomore theater nerd.

  Liam tilted his head. “Ellie Dante? What are you doing here?”

  He remembered my name. For a moment I considered bolting back to the RV. Instead, I did my best not to scowl.

  “My dad’s the magician.”

  “Oh, right. Dante.” He shook his head. “I’m an idiot.”

  I agreed, but I didn’t say so. How was I supposed to act around this guy?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “My sister is the bride.”

  “Oh.” Now who was the idiot? I should have recognized the last name when his dad booked us.

  Liam smiled, revealing a deep dimple on his left cheek. “Come on in.”

  I stepped inside—and tried not to gape. The foyer was opulent: marble floors, grand piano, massive crystal chandelier. His parents were obviously rich; I wondered why he had even gone to a public high school.

  “We’ve got a dressing room for you,” he said, gesturing at the wide marble staircase. “Upstairs, second door on the right.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “I’ve got to go lift heavy things for Princess Becca. See you later?”

  “Unless I disappear,” I said. Liam gave me a quizzical look, and I wanted to break my own skull against the door frame.

  I watched him retreat into the house, his back muscles moving against the fabric of his T-shirt. Was he strutting like that on purpose? It might have worked on the baseball groupies at Eastside, but it didn’t work on me.

  A moment later, Dad appeared on the doorstep carrying two heavy trap cases and a shoulder bag. Despite the cool air, his temples were already damp with perspiration.

  “Le
t me,” I said, taking one of the cases. He protested, but I shut him down. Carrying heavy things up stairs was on his doctor’s no-no list.

  The dressing room turned out to be Liam’s bedroom. It was twice the size of our whole RV and impeccably clean, probably for the occasion. There were posters on the wall—the 2016 Chicago Cubs, Panic! at the Disco—but instead of being thumbtacked, they hung in expensive frames. A photo of the Manhattan skyline dominated one wall, and a Notre Dame baseball pennant in a shadow box was mounted above the hardwood dresser. I stared around in envy. My whole “suite” would have fit inside Liam Miller’s closet.

  I opened a set of French doors and stepped onto a stone balcony overlooking the backyard. Three tents draped with fairy lights stood on the perfect lawn, sheltering a wedding setup for at least a hundred guests. Round tables with red cloths; an explosion of roses; an archway of satin ribbon over a temporary stage where a band was setting up their amplifiers. I imagined myself standing on that stage, feeling a hundred pairs of eyes on me. Sensing the energy from the audience, controlling it, drawing their attention wherever I wanted it. I felt tingles crawling up the sides of my face—it was a rush, having that power.

  I released the railing and took a step back, and the twitch of mania receded. I wouldn’t be onstage tonight; I would be hiding up here, taking my history exam.

  Ella, ella, eh, eh, eh . . .

  “Do you see those thunderclouds?”

  I turned and saw Dad leaning against the door frame.

  “An outdoor wedding in northern Indiana in October.” He shook his head. “I don’t envy the groom. Come on,” he said, beckoning me back inside. “Let’s get cracking.”

  He had already unlatched one of his cases and was setting aside decks of cards and various props; I hadn’t heard any of it. Spacing out was another symptom of impending gray. I needed to hold out for few more hours. Then I could crawl into my vibrating bed and curl up in the fetal position.

  “What should I close with?” Dad asked, shutting his case. “Dove Production? Spoon Bender?”

  I frowned. “Doves won’t work if it rains.”

  “Good point,” he said, rubbing at his mustache.