by Mindy Klasky
But he never said a word to me.
I felt like I’d become invisible, like I was only imagining that I was in the show. I knew that I’d been bad, but so bad that Ken wouldn’t even talk to me? I sank deeper into my chair, wishing I could disappear.
Wishing… In the back of my mind, every time I’d flubbed a line, every time I ‘d made a mistake, I’d heard a little voice urging me to summon Teel. Press my fingers together, say his name, that’s all I had to do and my genie would get me out of this mess.
I couldn’t do that, though. I didn’t want to succeed solely because of magic. It was one thing to hone my singing and dancing; I’d never claimed to be a musical theater star, before auditioning for Menagerie!
At heart, though, I was an actor. I was supposed to know how to deliver lines. If I spent my final wish perfecting my acting skills, then I’d be admitting failure to myself. I’d be admitting that I had fooled myself all along, every single time I’d ever dreamed of a successful theater career. If I summoned Teel, I might win the battle of Menagerie! but I would lose the war of my independent, self-respecting acting life.
I couldn’t do it. No matter how disastrous the afternoon had been, I couldn’t admit utter failure by making my fourth wish.
At last, Ken dismissed the rehearsal, reminding everyone to arrive half an hour early the next night, for our first preview performance. Everyone rushed away, chattering like squirrels, making plans to go out for drinks, promising to run lines just one more time. Ken stood at center stage, staring at the elaborate walls of the Wingfield apartment, the perfect recreation of their cluttered, stultifying home.
I finally excavated the courage to croak out two words: “I’m sorry.”
Ken shook his head. “It’s not your fault. It would have been impossible for anyone to step in this late.”
“Maybe we can delay the premiere? Cancel the first week of previews and brush up on things?” I sounded like I was haggling for a trinket, bargaining at a flea market.
“Not a chance. The Times is coming tomorrow night. And the Washington Post is sending someone up—they’ve asked to take a backstage tour. They’re doing a whole article on late-summer can’t-miss getaways.”
Can’t miss.
I swallowed hard and forced myself to meet Ken’s spaniel eyes. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say that you’ll go over the lines tonight. Say that you’ll do your best tomorrow. That’s all we can ask for.”
I should have appreciated his support. I should have thanked him for his calm acceptance. But something inside me knew that he was speaking out of resignation, not confidence in my ability. I nodded and stalked toward the theater doors. I barely managed to wait until I was outside before I phoned Amy.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, immediately picking up on my despair.
“I’m playing the lead in Menagerie! Starting with tomorrow’s preview performance.”
I thought that I could hear her raucous war whoop, all the way from New Jersey. “That’s amazing! What did you do? Poison Martina?”
“Pushed her off the stage,” I muttered.
“What? Just a second.” Amy covered her phone, and I heard her shouting to some riot in the background. “Quiet down! I’m on the phone with Aunt Erin.” She returned her attention to me. “I could swear that you just said you pushed her off the stage.”
“Okay, I didn’t push her. But she fell. And I think it was my fault.”
More muffled noise as Amy tried to quiet the troops. “What happened?” she finally asked.
I started to explain, started to describe the freak accident, but I only got partway through the story when I realized Amy couldn’t hear a word that I was saying. “What is going on there?” I asked.
“Dr. Teel is here. He and Justin just cooked steaks on the grill, and Justin is setting the table so that we can eat before I head out to my Services Marketing seminar.”
“Justin is setting the table?” I wondered if Amy was worried that aliens might have taken over her son’s body.
My sister laughed—the first carefree belly laugh I’d heard from her in months. “You wouldn’t believe it! He actually made his bed this morning without my asking—because Dr. Teel was coming over today!”
Amy babbled on for a couple more minutes. I could hear the joy in her voice, the release from stress. It wasn’t the same lighthearted chatter that we had shared before Derek went overseas, but it was close enough. “Oh!” she finally cut herself off. “They’ve got everything on the table. I’ve got to run.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “Are you going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. I didn’t need to worry much about acting. Amy wasn’t really listening.
I shook my head as I terminated the call. Even if I’d considered using Teel to get out of my theatrical mess, even if I justified forfeiting my pride, the entire foundation of my acting career, I couldn’t do that to Amy. Not now. Not with Justin showing so much improvement. Not with him behaving for the first time in two years. I couldn’t let Teel escape to the Garden just yet.
I was a big girl. I could take care of myself. I just needed to get home, to read through my script, to study my notes. I had a whole night ahead of me—more than enough time to perfect the role of Laura Wingfield.
I was halfway through the first act, reciting my lines like a madwoman, when the apartment disappeared.
“Teel!” I bellowed, more exasperated than I’d ever been before. “I do not have time for this!”
He was wrapped in his doctor guise—wickedly glinting blue eyes, perfect hair more pepper than salt, a pure-white dress shirt slicing into perfect charcoal trousers. I couldn’t believe that he’d actually spent the evening standing over a hot Weber grill; he looked completely unruffled, more ready for a night at the opera than an evening of child care.
Speaking of which… “Aren’t you supposed to be taking care of Justin?”
“He’ll never miss me. My time with you will only be a heartbeat for him. Unless…”
“Unless what?” I snapped. “Unless I make my fourth wish, and free you to go into your Garden, and you abandon him just when he’s happy for the first time in months?”
“Well,” Teel said, shrugging eloquently. “When you put it that way…”
“What other way is there to put it?” I was practically shouting. I didn’t have time for this rigmarole. I had to get back to my apartment, back to my script. Fewer than twenty-four hours remained before I was making my Broadway debut, and I wasn’t going to let my genie screw up anything. I glared at him. “How do you even know about what’s going on with the show?”
“Amy told me, right after she got off the phone with you. She was really worried—she said you sounded completely overwrought. She almost skipped class, to come spend the night with you.”
Great. My floundering theater career was going to make my sister fail out of business school, as well. I let my concern for her boil over into anger. “She had no right to tell you what’s going on with me. I’m supposed to have some privacy, you know? I’m supposed to have a way of living my life, without your constant magical interference! I’m supposed—”
Teel took a step back, raising his perfectly muscled hands in front of him, pushing back at the invisible nothingness between us. “Erin, you really need to calm down. This sort of hysteria isn’t going to help anything at all.” He twisted his wrist and produced a prescription pad out of thin air. I thought that he was going to offer me some sort of pharmaceutical assistance, but instead he said, “Make that last wish, and everything will work out just fine. Doctor’s orders.”
I heard the seductive note in his voice. I’d felt the rumble of this incarnation’s laugh, deep in his throat, as he held me close. I’d swooned beneath the attention of those lips….
Without thinking, I took a step closer to the unseen Garden. Another. Another.
And then I shook my head, throwing off the vest
iges of control that my genie had cast over me. “Teel, stop it. I can’t. I can’t make my fourth wish now.” I offered up the most selfless of the tangled reasons behind my thinking. “I can’t leave Amy stranded. She needs you to help out with Justin.”
As soon as I saw the scowl on Teel’s handsome brow, I regretted saying the words. I’d tipped my hand. Like some sort of idiot child playing Go Fish, I’d announced exactly what I was looking for. “That’s what’s keeping you from wishing?” Teel said incredulously. “Because Amy needs me to babysit Justin?”
There was no way to unsay the words. I was left trying to explain. “It’s not just the babysitting. It’s the way he acts around you. You get him to help out around the house. He remembers what’s right and what’s wrong. He’s a good kid, with you around.”
“I do all that?” Teel asked, and his cultured doctor’s voice was astonished. It sounded as if he’d never considered the possibility before. But then, he rapidly came down to earth. “Well, you don’t need to worry about that anymore. I’m through with babysitting. Effective immediately.”
“You can’t do that!” I heard the sheer panic in my voice. He couldn’t leave here, leave the Garden, and never go back to Amy’s home. He couldn’t leave Justin alone, unattended. Even if I sprinted to the bus station the instant that Teel freed me from the Garden, it would take me almost two hours to get to my nephew. Two hours when he could go climbing on the roof, playing out in traffic, running away from home, whatever other life-risking disasters his young mind could think of.
Teel shot his cuffs, as if he’d wrapped up some particularly difficult patient consultation. I caught the glint of his tattoo, but I refused to look at it. Instead, I stared into his cobalt eyes. “So help me, Teel. If you abandon Justin tonight, I will never make my fourth wish. I’ll keep you waiting until the day I die.”
He stared at me. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Test. Me.”
That steel was born of more than fear for Justin. I was tired of being manipulated. I was tired of being powerless. Tired of being buffeted by fate, by coincidence, by the power of a genie intent on seeing his Garden-bound lover sooner, rather than later.
I was tired of Teel interfering with my love life. With my family.
His kisses weren’t real. They weren’t true. I had exempted them from the Master Plan because they had nothing to do with my real life. And I was ready to take control again over that real life. I was ready to make my own decisions.
I raised my chin, and I said, “I won’t do it, Teel. I’ll hold on to my wish, until long after Jaze has left the Garden. He’ll go on to grant a hundred more wishes, a thousand more, whatever total your genie rules require. He’ll go back to the Garden again, three times, four, and you will never set foot inside there. Do not threaten me. Do not threaten Justin. And keep away from the theater. Keep away from Timothy.”
Something inside Teel collapsed. I couldn’t define what it was—he still had the broad shoulders of a medical Adonis. He still had the perfect hair, the flawless eyes, the sculpted lips that beckoned to me.
But something crumpled inside him. Some perfect certainty, some absolute knowledge that he was right, that he could manipulate me, that he could get his way in this, as in all other things.
“All right,” he said, and he used the same tone of voice that the other surgeon had used back at the hospital, the doctor who had come to Amy and me in defeat to say that Justin was lost forever. “You win.”
“Really?” I couldn’t help but question his submission.
“I won’t drag Justin into this.” His eyes were pulled back to the unseen fence, to the invisible Garden beyond. “Justin is safe tonight. You know I’d never hurt him. But after tonight, I’m through. After Amy gets home from class, I won’t see him again.”
“That’s not fair!” I protested. “He won’t understand!”
“You’ll find a way to explain it. Tell him that I had a job to do. Like his father.”
“Teel—”
“I won’t give you this power over me. I won’t give you that reason to hold back your wish.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t being fair, that he was using a little boy to get what he wanted.
But I heard the hypocrisy before I even formed the words in my mind. I had just been willing to use Justin for my own cause. I could hardly blame Teel for doing the same. Both of us made me sick.
“And Timothy?” I asked, because I had to say something.
Teel looked surprised. “I don’t care about Timothy. Your love life is your own responsibility.”
“You’re the one who kissed me!”
“If I recall, you kissed me back.”
And he was right, of course. I had kissed him back. I’d told myself that it didn’t matter, that it was outside the Plan, that it was separate and apart from my actual life. But nothing was separate. Everything was all entwined—Amy and Justin, Teel and Timothy. My life was a knot of family and friends, and I was the only one responsible for unraveling the tangle I’d created.
I should just let Teel go. I should wait until Amy got home, then use my last wish to guarantee a perfect performance. That’s what I’d wanted, from the very beginning. That was how I’d intended to shape my career.
But I couldn’t. I still needed to prove to myself that I could make Menagerie! work. Under my own power.
“Fine,” I said to Teel, heaving a huge, exhausted sigh. “Just take me back, for now. I have a lot of work to do, and it all has to be done tonight.”
Silently, Teel raised his fingers to his earlobe. His face was carved with a fatigue I’d never seen there before, and I realized that our emotional skirmish had exhausted him. He tugged twice, and electricity shot across every last one of my nerve endings as I was catapulted back to my own living room.
Four hours later, I was seriously considering leaving a ransom note, faking my own kidnapping and disappearing from New York City forever.
I had started through the script five separate times, muttering my lines in an auctioneer’s patter. If I flubbed the words three times in any one scene, I forced myself back to the beginning. The rule made sense—I needed to know the lines so thoroughly that I didn’t have to think about them. They needed to be a part of me, ingrained so deeply that I could concentrate on the songs, on the dance, on everything that made Menagerie! magical.
The biggest problem was that Ken had changed a lot of the original Tennessee Williams dialog. I could no longer put my finger on when he’d made all of the modifications—it wasn’t like he’d started out to write a better play than the master. No, the changes had happened because Martina had wanted a larger part, more central staging, more time onstage. Try as I might, my memory kept lapsing into the original, into the finely crafted show that I’d memorized years before, on the college stage.
In a perfect world, we could have transformed it back. Without Martina around to complain, we could have returned to Tennessee Williams’s pure, lyrical scenes, we could have deleted all of the accumulated garbage that had piled up in rehearsals.
But it was too late for that. The other actors had memorized their new lines; they knew their entrances and exits based on the new script. There was no way to go back; I could only forge ahead.
Somewhere along the way, I started pacing. I moved from table to couch to chair, back and forth, across the row of floor-to-ceiling windows. For the first ten rounds, Tabitha shadowed me, weaving between my ankles in death-defying feats of feline attention-getting. When I showed no sign of stopping, however, she commandeered one of the throw pillows on the couch and began the meticulous grooming of her paws. I forced myself not to pay attention to her as I started round 1,427 of line recitation.
All the while, one part of my brain was vaguely aware that the late-summer sunlight was slipping away. Lights twinkled on in the buildings between the Bentley and the river. The sky turned indigo, then violet, then black.
I was running ou
t of time.
Still, I paced. I wrestled with the script. I tried to pour the disjointed words into my skull, connect them to my tongue, wire them to my arms and legs as if I could invent a robot Laura, a guaranteed creature that would never fail the show, fail the cast, fail Ken. Fail my dream of who I wanted to be.
I was so intent on muttering lines that I almost missed the knock at the door. I froze, certain that I was imagining things. I glanced at my watch and was astonished to see that it was after ten o’clock. Tabitha was curled into a tight ball on the couch, one of her paws covering her nose and eyes, as if she could not bear my presence any longer.
Before I could convince myself that my panic was bringing on auditory hallucinations, there was another tap at my door. I peered through the peephole and was astonished to see Timothy. I threw open the door. “What are you doing here?”
He flashed a tight panther smile. “I figured you’d be frantic about now.”
I started to react indignantly, but gave up the emotion halfway through making the face. “Come on in.”
He stepped inside. Neither of us looked toward the couch. I ran my hands down my sides, trying to shove my fingers into my trouser pockets. My sweatpants didn’t have any pockets. I had to fill the silence that was gumming up the air between us. “I guess Lucky Red Dragon wasn’t so lucky, was it?”
Timothy shrugged. “The stuff is probably toxic. She’s better off not drinking it.”
A month ago, I would have laughed. Now, my face felt like it would break if I reacted to anything he said. “Look, Timothy. About Teel—”
