When Stars Collide

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  She found herself wedged between him and the side of the building. She lifted her chin and gazed down the length of her nose at him. “What?”

  He knew her tricks, and he wasn’t intimidated. “You said you had a cold.”

  Her distorted reflection looked back at her from the lenses of his sunglasses. “I told you that.”

  His perfect mouth set in a deadly line. “You lied.”

  “I told you that, too.” She wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  He whipped off his sunglasses and drilled her with those ridiculous green eyes, which now seemed exactly the same color as a particularly virulent patch of poison ivy. “Guess what, babe? You’ve had a miraculous recovery.”

  “You don’t understand.” She tried to get away from him, but he shifted his weight to block her.

  “Oh, I do understand.” He shoved his sunglasses in his jacket pocket. “You’re Olivia fucking Shore. The greatest mezzo in the world!”

  “I’m not the greatest—”

  “You’re at the top of your game. In the starting lineup! A fucking tornado, not some twenty-year-old pretender afraid to open her mouth!”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not—”

  “Stop being such a pussy.” He gripped her by the shoulders. “I heard you loud and clear this morning. Sitzprobe. It means everything to you, and you only have five rehearsals to get ready for it. You’ve worked too damned hard to give in to this crap. Your voice is exactly where you need it to be.”

  “You have no idea—”

  “You’re going in there right now, and you’re going to sing your ass off.” He actually shook her! “Do it one-legged, standing on your head, or with your eyes crossed. I don’t care. You pull yourself the hell together and show them exactly who they’re dealing with. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Louder!”

  “Yes!”

  “Good.”

  He stalked away.

  * * *

  She straightened the collar of her trench coat and glared at his back—the ignorant jock. She marched from the abandoned garden. It was easy for him to say. He didn’t understand. He knew nothing about the kind of pressure she faced. Nothing about the critics who were waiting to gnaw on her bones, the fans who would desert her, the reputation that would turn to dust. He never had to face—

  But he did. He knew exactly how she felt. He’d played hurt. He’d played with the crowd booing him. He’d played in blistering heat waves, frigid snowstorms, and with the clock ticking down to its final ten seconds. He’d played under every kind of pressure, and he understood what she felt as well as she did.

  She marched directly to the maestro’s office and rapped on the door.

  “Avanti.”

  She stormed in. “Maestro.” She dropped her tote by the door. “I know I’m early, but . . . I’m ready to sing.”

  It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t horrendous. She didn’t have the breath support she needed to make her vibrato dependable or keep from falling off some of the notes, but she didn’t once go flat.

  Sergio still believed she was suffering from the aftereffects of a cold, and he wasn’t overly concerned by what he heard. “Most important now is for you to take care of your voice.”

  Back in her dressing room, she made a phone call. The voice that answered sounded distinctly displeased. “Olivia Shore? I do not recognize this name.”

  Olivia ignored that. “Can I come in today? I have a long break at one o’clock.”

  “I suppose. Bring me plums. The purple ones.” The connection went dead.

  * * *

  The old woman met Olivia at the door of her musty Randolph Street apartment. She wore her customary black serge dress and pink bedroom slippers run down at the heels. Her coarse, gray-streaked black hair was knotted on top of her head, with wiry strands escaping around her wrinkled face, which bore her customary scarlet lipstick.

  She greeted Olivia with a gruff, “You may enter.”

  Olivia replied with the gracious nod of her head she knew Batista expected.

  Batista Neri was one of Olivia’s longtime vocal coaches, and someone Olivia had been deliberately ignoring since she’d lost her voice. Batista had once been an accomplished soprano. Now she was one of the best opera coaches in the country. She was maddeningly condescending, but also highly effective.

  Olivia set the bag of plums on an ornate mahogany side table near the door. “My voice . . . ,” she said. “It’s gone.”

  “Ah, well.” Scorn dripped from Batista’s every word. “Now you will find a husband to take care of you, and you will make him gnocchi every night for supper.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Enough of this bullshit. Let me hear you.”

  * * *

  When Olivia reached the rehearsal stage later that afternoon, she found Lena Hodiak moving through Amneris’s blocking for the Judgment scene in act 4. Olivia watched as Lena mouthed the lyrics, “Ohime! Morir mi sento . . .” Alas! I shall die! Oh, who will save him?

  Lena waved as she spotted Olivia and quickly moved into the audience to give Olivia the stage.

  It felt like midnight instead of late afternoon. Olivia had sung badly for the maestro and only a little better for Batista. At least Batista had abandoned her crotchety prima donna routine and gotten serious when she heard the state of Olivia’s voice.

  “Lift your palate, Olivia. Lift it.” At the end of the lesson, Batista had prescribed bee propolis throat spray and more abdominal exercises and ordered Olivia to come back the next day.

  Arthur Baker, the aging but still handsome tenor playing Radamès, came in, along with Gary, the director. A few hours later it was time to rehearse the second scene of act 1, where Amneris tricks her servant Aida into revealing her true feelings for Radamès with the lie that Radamès is dead. Sarah was meticulously prepared, as always, but the chemistry they’d once shared onstage was gone.

  Olivia had never been happier for a day to be over. At five o’clock, as she opened her dressing room door, she saw Thad sprawled on her chaise waiting for her. “How did you get in?” she demanded.

  “I’m a famous football player. I can go wherever I want.”

  Witnessing her lover playing the part of the arrogant asshole lifted her spirits. “I should have known,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  “Bad news.” He idly crossed his ankles. “Someone stole your car.”

  She regarded him suspiciously. “Any idea who that might have been?”

  “Probably Garrett. He’s a punk.”

  “I see.” She remembered the spare set of car keys she’d unwisely left on the dresser in his guest bedroom. “And under whose order might he have performed this particular act of felony?”

  “I’m fairly sure he thought it up all by himself.”

  “And I’m fairly sure he didn’t.”

  He tilted his head toward her private bathroom. “Want to get it on in there?”

  Her answer was as surprising to him as it was to her. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  They locked themselves in the small bathroom, pulling at their clothes and groping each other, exactly what she needed to wipe out her day. They ended up partially naked in the cramped shower, water not running, Olivia against the wall with her pants pooled around one ankle, Thad’s jeans at his knees, both of them awkward and frantic—out of their minds. It wasn’t the third night. It was the fifth day, and this wasn’t supposed to happen because she couldn’t keep loving a man who wasn’t part of her world, but at that moment, she didn’t care.

  Afterward, she did. “What’s wrong with me? This only makes everything tougher,” she said, as she reassembled herself.

  “Only if you want it to be.” He closed the lid of the toilet and sat on top, watching as she finished pulling herself back together. “Not to criticize, Liv, but you’re way too uptight.”

  “Taking care of my career is not being uptight,” she retorted, sounding uptight. She grabbed a hairbrush. “What did
you do today? Other than arrange for my car to disappear?”

  “I bought a couple of new stocks and nosed around in your portfolio again. You need to dump Calistoga Mutual Fund. It’s been underperforming for years.” His leg brushed the back of hers as he crossed an ankle over his knee. “I also spent some time with Coop and his wife, Piper. That’s Cooper Graham, the Stars’ last great quarterback.”

  “Until the idiot came along.”

  “The idiot’s not in that category yet.”

  “But he could be.”

  “I guess,” he said begrudgingly.

  “It’s good you have something to do.” She picked up a makeup brush, stalling for time. “I sang for Sergio Tinari this morning,” she told him.

  “Did you now?”

  She turned on the bathroom faucet. “And I went to see my old voice teacher.”

  He ignored the broader significance of that. “How’d you get there?”

  “I walked.”

  “Not smart.”

  “It’s hard to get abducted in the Loop at midday. And I need my car back. I have to look at apartments.”

  “I’ll do it for you.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “You’re working. I’m not. It’s only fair.”

  The offer was enticing. The last thing she wanted to do after a full day of rehearsals was go apartment hunting. On the other hand, the sooner she found her own place, the better it would be for her, especially after what had just happened.

  * * *

  That night, he went to her room, testing the new boundaries she’d set. “I think I’ll sleep in here,” he said. “But no touching, okay?”

  She gave him a soft smile and held out her arms. “No touching.”

  He laughed, got in next to her, and pulled her body to his. As he kissed her, he thought how much he loved being with this woman. Not love-love. But pure-enjoyment-love. What meant the most, however, was how well someone who wasn’t part of his world understood him. If The Diva had been a guy and athletically gifted, she’d have made a hell of a teammate.

  He rubbed her earlobes with his thumbs. Kissed her. It wasn’t long before she was making those beautiful, throaty sounds. They traveled together, climbing, reaching, falling . . . The world splintered into a million pieces.

  Afterward, God help him, she wanted to talk. He snuffled into his pillow and pretended to be asleep, which didn’t do anything to discourage her.

  “This is only temporary, Thad. Temporary insanity on my part. It all ends on opening night. I’m serious.”

  He muttered something deliberately unintelligible. Mercifully, she said no more.

  He didn’t get it. Career or not, even prima donnas needed a private life, and he wasn’t high-maintenance like her. Sure, he attracted a lot of attention when he went out, but she wasn’t exactly invisible. And yes, now that the tour was over, he had a lot of catching up to do—putting in extra hours with his trainer, digging deeper into his sideline work. There were people he needed to see, meetings he had to take, rookies who wanted to talk to him about managing their money. And maybe he hid more of himself than she did, but all that didn’t add up to him being high-maintenance, right?

  In the end, she fell asleep long before he did.

  * * *

  Wednesday. Thursday. The rehearsals ticked away. Olivia worked with Batista every day and started feeling a little more like herself. But it was never good enough. Next Monday’s sitzprobe hung over her head like a guillotine blade. She could mark through Tuesday and Wednesday’s technical rehearsal, but not sitzprobe and not Thursday’s final dress rehearsal, where there would be a selected audience. Friday was a rest day, and then opening night on Saturday.

  She sensed members of the company talking about her behind her back. Their highly trained ears noticed the muting of the dark, tonal luster in her low range. They detected the occasional wobble, the awkward phrase. But everyone believed she was recovering from a cold, and only Sergio had begun to look concerned.

  Lena, in the meantime, had become Olivia’s shadow, watching everything Olivia did during rehearsals, asking the occasional question, but also never being intrusive. Despite her youth, Lena was the consummate professional, yet Olivia had begun to hate the sight of her. She’d never felt this way about any of her other covers, but then she’d never felt so threatened by one. She was ashamed. Lena wasn’t a vulture standing on the sidelines waiting to fly off with Olivia’s bones. She was hardworking and respectful, doing exactly what she’d been hired to do, and once this was over, Olivia would make up for her unjust thoughts by buying her a great piece of jewelry or treating her to a spa weekend or . . . What if she fixed her up with Clint Garrett?

  The last idea seemed genius until she saw Lena kissing a long-haired young man she later identified as her husband. Jewelry, then.

  * * *

  Thad picked her up at the Muni after his first day of apartment hunting. As it turned out, he’d found fault with every place he’d seen. One was too noisy, another too dark, the third had no place for her piano, the fourth had a Jacuzzi, but no decent shower. And the fifth . . .

  “Smelled like dead rabbit,” he said. “Don’t ask me how I know this.”

  “I won’t.”

  On Friday morning, she had three hours of free time while the company rehearsed Aida’s famous Triumphal March—a complex piece of staging that involved over a hundred performers, twenty-six dancers, and two horses, but fortunately, no elephants, not for this production. She used the time to schedule a meeting with her real estate agent and wasn’t surprised when Thad decided to tag along.

  Refusing to meet Thad’s disapproving gaze, her Realtor showed her three of the apartments Thad had rejected. One, as he’d reported, lacked enough natural light. The second was almost perfect, but would be crowded with her piano. As for the third . . . It had a doorman, video camera surveillance, and plenty of room. The location was great, she could move in right away, and it smelled nothing like rabbit.

  “I’ll take it,” she told her Realtor.

  “You’ll regret it come Easter,” Thad said.

  17

  Of course someone had broken into her dressing room at the Muni while she was gone! Why not, when everything else was so messed up?

  She whipped off her coat and tossed it on the chaise. Dressing room thefts happened. A dozen keys floated around. It could have been anyone. Maybe this was simply coincidence.

  But she no longer believed in coincidence, and she began what had become an all-too-familiar routine of trying to see if anything was missing.

  Unlike all the other times, something was. The thief had made off with her snack pack of almonds.

  She sank onto the chaise. What did this person want? The only item of value she had with her was her Cavatina3, and that had been on her wrist. When was this going to end? If she told Thad, he’d plant himself at the Muni to watch over her, and that would make it look as if she’d turned her famous lover into her lackey. He’d do it, too, because that’s who he was.

  Unthinkable. She wouldn’t let him humiliate himself.

  * * *

  Her Realtor pulled off a miracle, and Olivia used Sunday, her day off, to settle into her new video-surveilled, concierge-secured, furnished apartment. Her piano sat by the front windows, but she’d only begun opening up the boxes of mementos the movers had packed and delivered under Thad’s supervision.

  He emerged from her kitchen with a banana. “I don’t know why you had to do this so fast.”

  She held up a notepad she’d scribbled with the words, I’m on vocal rest.

  “Only when it suits you.”

  She smiled at the softness in his voice. He understood how much was at stake for her tomorrow. He understood everything.

  “Grab your coat,” he said, after he’d polished off the banana. “This mess isn’t going anywhere, and there are some people I want you to meet.”

  * * *

  The Cooper Graham and Piper Dove Graha
m household was a noisy one. Their three-year-old twins, Isabelle and Will, fought over possession of two identical cardboard boxes while their father stood idly by. “Survival of the fittest,” Coop declared, as he showed Thad and Olivia into the family’s spacious, toy-cluttered great room at the rear of their Lincoln Park home. “Piper and I try not to get too involved unless bloodshed is imminent.”

  Cooper Graham was the Stars’ former quarterback and Thad’s best friend. The instant the twins spotted Thad, their tug-of-war over the boxes turned into a race to see who could get to him first. Thad diplomatically scooped them both up at the same time, one under each arm. “Look what I’ve got. A pair of elephants.”

  “We not elephants!” Will squealed.

  “We monkeys!” Isabelle shrieked.

  “Truth,” Coop said.

  A pretty, dark-haired woman in leggings appeared and gave Thad a hug. Thad introduced them. “Liv, this is Piper, Coop’s deluded wife and the owner of Dove Investigations. Piper, this is the great Olivia Shore.”

  Piper Dove Graham didn’t look anything like Olivia’s idea of a detective. No cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth, and the leggings she wore instead of a dirty trench coat revealed no sign of a paunch. “I feel like I should curtsy,” Piper said.

  Her grin was so engaging that Olivia immediately laughed. “From what Thad’s told me, it should be the other way around. I’ve never met a detective, let alone a female one.”

  “We’re pretty great,” Piper declared, with an even bigger smile.

  “Liv’s on vocal rest,” Thad said. “And in case you’re wondering, that means she talks whenever she wants, but not if I ask her a question she doesn’t want to answer.”

  Olivia nodded agreeably. “That’s true.”

  Isabelle wanted Thad’s attention, and she grabbed his face between her hands. “Where do piggies keep all dey money? In a piggy bank!”

  Both twins found this hysterically funny.

  “Good one, Izzy,” Thad said, setting them both down. “Although you might work a little on your delivery.”