I shook my head, a little sad that I couldn’t make him understand. “No. I won’t. Dad, you’ve taught me that I can do anything. You’ve given me all the training I need, taught me to stick with what I’ve chosen. I’ve chosen the theater. And down the road, in five years or ten or twenty, if I change my mind, if I realize I actually want to be a lawyer, I can choose that, too. And I promise that you’ll be the first person I’ll share the news with.”
I was astonished to see tears glinting in his eyes. “Kira, you’ve chosen something so difficult. You’ve made your life so hard.”
I glanced again at my mother. “I’ve chosen what’s right for me. That’s what you always wanted, isn’t it? Both of you?”
He stood up. He walked around the desk. He looked at the framed photograph, for long enough that I imagined he and Mom were having some sort of silent conversation. And then he held out his hand.
Our handshake. Just like we’d always sealed our agreements. Just like we’d always reconciled, ever since I was a little girl.
My fingers closed around his, and I pumped once, firmly. Then, I let my father hug me. He kissed my forehead, and he said, “I suppose you already have everything worked out about the house? With Maddy and Jules?”
“Of course,” I said, smiling in relief. “But I’ll tell you about it later. You have a two o’clock meeting.”
“I’ll tell Angie to hold it. I want to hear your plans.”
* * *
I fortified myself with a final Club Joe coffee before returning to the scene of my theatrical crime. The crew was set to arrive at five. Instead of setting up the show for a full run-through, though, we were going to take apart the set. We’d likely get the lion’s share done in one night; it was always easier to tear things down than it was to build them up in the first place.
The theater was full of life lessons like that, I mused as I sipped my coffee, browsing through my food diary. It had taken me days of recording every single bite of food that I consumed, every sip of milk-fortified caffeine. And yet, I could destroy the entire compilation with one well-placed spill of coffee.
Or not. That would be a waste of perfectly good java. I tore out every page of the diary as I reviewed what it said. My father and my friends had meant well when they’d demanded that I keep the records. They had only wanted to help me gain control over my life.
But I knew the truth. I knew that scribbling a few words in a notebook was never going to do that. Continuing to track my behavior so closely was only going to drive me insane. I wasn’t anorexic. I’d never been anorexic. My keeping the diary had been a lie, as much as my saying I would study for the LSAT.
It was time to toss the pretense.
As I walked out of Club Joe, I dumped the ravaged food diary into the trash can.
I was still marveling about how much lighter my backpack felt when I arrived at the Landmark. I started to fumble for my keys, but the door swung open before I could find them. I jumped back just in time to let Drew and Stephanie step into the light of the setting sun. She had her arm slipped through his, and their heads were close together, as if they were sharing a secret.
“Oh!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Whoops. That sounded more accusing than I’d intended.
Stephanie only smiled, though, pulling Drew closer. Her ostentatious gesture highlighted her bare hands—no mega-diamond in sight. A tiny part of me hoped that she hadn’t returned Norman’s ring.
Drew nuzzled her neck before answering me by holding up an envelope. “Picking up our paychecks,” he said.
It felt strange to talk to him. Strange to stand beside him and Stephanie. Strange to realize that Drew and I had spent night after night rolling around between my sheets, at the same time that Stephanie was bedding my former fiancé.
Now Drew and Stephanie were quite obviously together, and I felt…nothing.
Okay. I felt a little surprised that Drew was such a fast worker. I’d only freed him from Teel’s spell at, what, midnight? And he was already attached to Stephanie like a limpet? Of course, she had been throwing herself at him the night before, and her costume malfunction could only have furthered her cause. But they both got high marks for speedy recovery on the romance front.
I shrugged. I didn’t feel a hint of the anger that had bolstered me through Norman’s abandonment. I didn’t feel a ghost of the thrill when I’d first crushed on Drew, that burning longing for him to look at me, to talk to me, to do anything at all to acknowledge my existence.
Nothing.
“What are you guys going to do?” I asked, when I realized that the silence was stretching on too long.
Drew answered; Stephanie was busy weaving her fingers into his belt loop. “Bill is casting the Scottish Play. He’s asked us both to read for him.”
A thousand questions crowded my mind. Macbeth? I wanted to scream, even though I knew that any actor within earshot would cringe, frightened off by the old stories about the show’s title bringing bad luck. What theater was idiotic enough to ask Bill to direct another show? When had he managed to land the job, in between ill-fated Romeo and Juliet rehearsals? How was he planning on corrupting that bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays? But most important: who would be stupid enough to sign up for another round of Bill Pomeroy-destroys-the-classics?
Drew grinned, and I pictured him waltzing into the next round of rehearsals, riding the wave of Bill’s destructive creativity with nondiscriminating good nature. He’d make a gorgeous Scottish laird. And if the costumer put the men in kilts, every woman in the audience would be so taken with Drew’s muscular legs that she wouldn’t realize just how bad the show was on stage.
As for Stephanie? She could play a manipulative madwoman, I was certain.
“Well,” I said. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Drew said. “I’ll see you around, right?”
I thought about telling him that he wouldn’t. I thought about telling him I was leaving the Twin Cities. I thought about telling him how much my life had changed in the past twenty-four hours, how I’d finally decided to stand up for myself, for what I believed in, for what I wanted to be.
But we’d never talked like that. Our relationship had never been about what we thought, how we felt.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll see you around. Take care, both of you.”
Stephanie smiled vaguely. I was actually grateful she was there. Her presence eliminated some awkward leave-taking with Drew that I didn’t really want. I darted inside the Landmark before anyone needed to say—or do—anything else.
The stage already looked like a war zone. A cold breeze told me that the loading dock was open in the back; I could hear a truck engine revving, and I assumed that the manhole-cover screens were being carted off to their final rusty reward. I hoped that someone could melt them down, redeem the scrap for something worthwhile.
Two members of the crew were pulling up the plastic sheeting, exclaiming about the stench of trapped water, even as they mopped up the stage. Another person was sitting in the audience seats, fiddling with the projector for the supertitles. Two different lighting technicians were up on the catwalks, collecting the gels from the lighting instruments that hung over the audience. The colored pieces of plastic would be saved for the next production that required the re-creation of a cold, gray dungeon.
I exchanged greetings with everyone in sight and announced that I’d be back in the dressing room. Ordinarily, the Landmark stored its costumes, in case they could be used in future productions. I had my doubts, though, about whether anything could be redeemed from our slick, glued bodysuits.
The dressing room was chaos. Dispirited by the audience’s reaction the night before, the actors had left their stations in utter disarray. They’d be coming in, one by one, to collect their personal belongings as they picked up their paychecks, but for now, it looked as if a bomb had gone off in a fetishist’s closet.
I shook my head and tried to figure out where to start. One
corner was as good as another. I picked up a wet suit equivalent of a Verona ball gown and shook it out, releasing a cloud of baby powder into the air. I sneezed three times in quick succession.
I love the theater. The theater is my life.
As I thought my mantra, I had the strangest attack of déjà vu. I’d been here before, cleaning up a costume shop. I’d sneezed before, standing under bare fluorescent lights. I’d shrugged before, knowing that I had chosen this career; I had chosen to be a stage manager, no matter what disasters might occur on stage.
And then it all flooded back to me. The costume shop at Fox Hill, the day I’d found Teel’s lantern. As if I were allergic to the memory, I sneezed again.
“Bless you.”
I knew his voice before I looked; the Texas twang just barely seeped into his vowels. When I turned around, John was leaning against the door frame, watching me. He seemed taller than he had in days. Stretched out. Relaxed.
“Thanks,” I said. “It looks like you got a good night’s sleep.”
“For the first night in a long time,” he said. “Without all this to worry about.”
“I know what you mean.”
It should be strange talking to him. It should be uncomfortable. He had invited me to move halfway across the country with him, and I had refused. He had watched over me, riding herd, following me home when I was at my most distraught, but I had told him I didn’t have room in my life for him.
But it wasn’t strange to see him. It wasn’t uncomfortable.
It just felt right.
“About last night,” I said, and then I laughed as the ghost of Mamet’s play raised its head again. “Is your offer still open?”
“New York?”
I nodded.
“Absolutely.”
He crossed the room and took the costume out of my hand. Without hesitation, he crammed it into the nearest trash can, dusting his palms off when he was done. “I can’t promise anything, Franklin. I know I’ve got a job, and a place to live. And I have a dozen friends who know who’s who and what’s what. And they have friends. It’ll be rough for a while, though. Sink or swim.”
The image called to mind our underground Verona. We both smiled at the same time. “I think we can handle that,” I said.
“You said you have things to take care of here. Family. Friends.”
I shrugged. “Sometimes things get taken care of faster than we expect. Sometimes things change.”
He closed the distance between us with the easy confidence I’d come to trust. His fingers twined in my hair as he kissed me—a long kiss that hinted at the passion banked behind his honesty and left me clutching his arms for support. “Some changes are long overdue,” he said. I laughed as his lips moved down my throat.
He pulled back enough to look me in the eye. I recognized the desire on his face. But I could read much more. I could read the thoughts of the man who had rescued me from myself, saved me from a life I’d outgrown. I saw the man who had talked to me about hopes and dreams and a lifetime of plans, all while sharing slices of pie in a diner that had no name. I saw the man who set me on my feet, who gave me the strength to walk away from my old demons. The man who gave me a choice. “You’re sure?” he asked.
“I couldn’t wish for anything more,” I said, and then I paused. “Except…”
He took a step back, eyeing me with curiosity. Amusement. Confidence. “Except what?”
“Do you think that we could grab dinner at Mephisto’s when we finish up here? Burgers and fries? And we can sit there long enough to finish every last bite without any disaster making me run out of the place?”
His laugh was contagious. “I think we can manage that,” he said. “Dinner’s on me.”
We started planning our move to New York as we cleaned up the chaos in the costume shop.
THANK YOU
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SNEAK PEEK
Teel's adventures continue in Wishing in the Wings, when the magic lamp is transferred to another lucky woman. Here’s your chance to read the first chapter of that novel, absolutely free!
* * *
B— GOTTA RUN. Don’t wait up.
That’s what Dean’s note said, the one he’d stuck to the refrigerator some time that Tuesday morning. The one that had obviously been written in haste, his customary tight scrawl spread wide across the sticky note. The one that he’d scratched with a dried-out black marker from our kitchen junk drawer, instead of his customary red-ink fine point Bic.
After a long day at the Mercer Project, the theater where we both worked, I’d tried to follow his instructions. After all, I knew this was crunch time for Dean. March was the high-water mark for tax season; the Mercer’s books had to be balanced, copious obscure documentation needed to be completed, all in time for our April filing. Dean thrived on the detailed requirements; he reveled in the hard-charging challenges of tax time.
I would not survive one single day as director of finance.
Lying in bed, fighting sleep despite the clear instruction in Dean’s note, I tossed and turned, staring first at his nightstand, then at my own. His bedside table was almost completely bare—he had a functional, white gooseneck lamp, precisely angled to shed light on whatever spreadsheet he brought to bed. An alarm clock hunched in stainless steel solitude, its red numbers winking balefully.
My table was a little more, um, crowded. I hated resetting my alarm clock after power failures, and I could never remember to replace batteries to keep a clock running without fail, so I relied on my cell phone’s alarm feature. My phone charger was tangled on my night stand, looping around one lamp, four books, a bottle of hand lotion, a glass that had held water a week before, a stray earring forever separated from its mate, a notepad, a souvenir pen from the Statue of Liberty that said BECCA in glittery letters, a small stuffed rabbit (gift from my literary associate at work on a day when I’d been in a particularly bad mood), a partridge, and a pear tree.
Yeah. It wasn’t readily apparent to people why Dean and I had put up with each other for the last three and a half years. I tried to explain that opposites attract, but I don’t know that I was always convincing.
I spent most of the night trying to find a comfortable position, repeatedly punching my pillow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept in our bed alone. Or not slept, as the case might be. I woke up over and over again, spending large stretches of the night watching Dean’s clock tick through its glaring red paces.
At 2:00 in the morning, I administered some emergency chocolate, indulging in the last three pieces from the giant Godiva heart I’d bought myself for Valentine’s Day. I’d justified the extravagance by making my purchase on February 15, taking advantage of the post-holiday markdown. I was sure Dean would have been proud of my fiscal conservatism, if he’d even noticed. The poor guy had been so busy with Mercer work that Valentine’s chocolate had completely slipped his mind nearly three weeks ago.
I finally gave up trying to sleep at 5:00 a.m. After showering, I pulled on black slacks, and I dug out my warmest sweater from the top shelf in our bedroom closet. The calendar might have said that we’d shifted into spring, but the weather hadn’t caught up yet. The temperature was well below freezing, and hillocks of dirty snow still held their grips on shaded parts of the sidewalk, left over from a late February squall.
The streets were quiet, at least by Manhattan standards, as I made my way across Greenwich Village, stopping for two of the largest cups o
f coffee I could find. I arrived at the theater by six, grateful that I had my own key to the office space.
Dean’s office light was on. His desk was pristine, not even a Post-it note out of place. A single blank pad of paper was centered on the surface, a single red pen uncapped beside it. The adding machine was a convenient reach away from the telephone, its power switch in the “off” position as it sat like a good soldier, waiting for morning muster.
In other words, Dean had obviously just stepped away for a minute or two. His impeccably organized life was proceeding as usual, even after a night of bleary-eyed number-crunching. I left a cup of coffee on his desk, using his pen to draw a big red heart on the pad of paper, adding a flourished B by way of signature.
My own office was down the hall. It was much smaller than Dean’s—he was the director of finance, after all, and I was just the theater’s lowly dramaturg. Dean had also been with the Mercer for two years longer than I had.
Of course, I didn’t really mind the size of my office. A lot of people in my position worked at anonymous desks in open spaces, an easy bellow away from their company’s artistic director. I was incredibly lucky to have landed the job I had six months earlier; there were maybe a hundred dramaturg positions in the entire country. A lot of theaters weren’t financially secure enough to hire a trained scholar solely to provide literary support on each and every production.
Besides, if my office had been the size of Dean’s, I would have drowned in the accumulated detritus.
As at home, my professional space was the opposite of Dean’s. My single guest chair was piled high with coffee-table books, lushly illustrated volumes that I’d paged through the week before, trying to educate the cast of our upcoming Sam Shepard one-act plays on the eerie beauty of the American Southwest. A dozen banker’s boxes were scattered across the floor, each containing a collection of mementos for one play or another, random artifacts that I’d used to explain the significance of various playwrights’ sometimes-opaque words.
Act One, Wish One Page 30
