by Minnie Darke
“Then there was a star danced,” Nick murmured to himself, and the girl smiled at him across the elevator.
“And under that was I born,” she returned.
“What did you say?”
“Then there was a star danced,” the girl repeated. “And under that was I born.”
Nick blinked. “You know it?”
“Of course. It’s Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing. And I would have thought you’d have already known that…Romeo.”
Nick winced. “You two were at the Gardens tonight?”
The pair nodded.
“So you saw the dog? You saw everything?”
“Yup,” the girl said. “It was amazing. The way you just stepped into the role, without knowing the blocking or anything. You could hardly even tell that you weren’t the real Romeo.”
“Thanks,” Nick said. “I got the dog to the vet. Right after the show. I think he’s going to be all right. I’m Nick, by the way.”
“Phoebe. And he’s Luke.”
“She’s an actor, too,” Luke said.
“You are?” Nick asked.
Phoebe did a humble face.
“You would not believe how much she loves Shakespeare. She’s really amazing,” Luke said, and now Phoebe colored. “She knows all these quotes, and soliloquies and everything. Insults, too. She can be really scary when she gets going. Try her out. Go on. I bet she knows anything you can throw at her.”
Nick shrugged. There wasn’t much else to do.
“O Time,” he quoted. “Thou must untangle this, not I…”
“It is too hard a knot for me t’untie,” she said, without so much as an attempt at humility. “Viola, Twelfth Night.”
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” Nick challenged.
“The witches in the Scottish play,” Phoebe said, tapping the side of her nose. “Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
“See?” said Luke.
“I have a friend just like you,” Nick said to Phoebe. “She has a freakish memory, too. She only has to see a script once and it’s just about burned into her brain. She can be kind of scary, too, but she’s great to run lines with. Well, she was.”
“Was?” Phoebe asked, her interest piqued.
Nick sighed. “That’s a really long story. And, with any luck, we won’t be here long enough for you to hear it.”
Beyond the glass, on the bank of electronic billboards, the highest and largest of the screens was refreshing itself. A glitzy hot pink and gold promotion for a stage musical gradually pixelated into blackness, and when a new advertisement appeared, Nick realized it was an image that he knew all too well.
There stood Laura, waist deep in a lily pond, her perfect torso covered in a dress whose bodice rose up over her breasts in pink, pointed petals. Her expression was somewhere between meditative and seductive; her hands were held aloft, her wrists curved sensuously outward, the tips of her index fingers touching the tips of her thumbs. In stretched-out capitals at the bottom of the image was the single word: WATERLILY.
Nick made a grim snort of laughter.
“What?” asked Phoebe, confused.
“That’s my girlfriend,” Nick said.
When Phoebe swiveled her head, her thick curls barely moved. “What? Where?”
“There, on the billboard.”
“The Waterlily chick? Are you serious?” said Luke. “Whoa. You’re a lucky guy.”
Phoebe thought. She frowned. She began to say something. Then stopped. At last she settled for asking Luke, “How do you know?”
“How do I know what?” said Luke, baffled.
“How do you know he’s a lucky guy? I mean, I do hate to sound like the token whiny feminist in this elevator, but just because she’s beautiful doesn’t mean he’s lucky.”
“No, but—”
Phoebe looked to Nick. “Love looks not with the eyes?”
“But with the mind,” Nick answered.
“Therefore?”
“Is winged Cupid painted blind.”
“Very good, Nick,” Phoebe said, and took a sip of the Green Ginger Wine. “Should we try the emergency phone again?”
“You try,” Nick said. “Maybe you’ve got the magic touch.”
After Phoebe pressed the button, the speaker let out several irritating, overlong bleeps. Then there came a voice, although it was hard to tell, at first, if it was being produced by a human or a machine.
“Hello, you have reached CTG Building Management Services. You are speaking with Nashira. How may I assist you?”
* * *
At that precise moment, as in every other, the sky’s celestial bodies were connected in a unique and momentary web of magnetism. When the world turned—as it always did, for there was no stopping it—that web pulled tight, and a brand-new soul was dredged up out of the darkness into the starlight, sparkling. Long, newborn legs kicked out into sudden mysterious space, and an outraged mouth drew in unavoidable gusts of the strange new lightness of air.
Here was Rafferty O’Hare—Capricorn, future owner of enormous blue eyes, outrageously long eyelashes, mishap-scarred knees and the besotted indulgence of all women who were related to him, and a great many who were not. To tell the truth, he had already—though he was bright red and covered in smears of vernix—taken instant possession of the hearts of his mother, Zadie, lying utterly spent on a hospital bed, his grandmother, Patricia, perched on the bed’s edge with tears in her eyes, and his aunt, Larissa, who looked almost as wrecked as her sister.
Over the past hours Zadie had been wrenched, stretched, cracked and forced open, and now she felt a swamping tide of love flooding into all the new spaces inside her. Soon she was overflowing with it, and it had to have somewhere to go. She grabbed at her mother’s hand and held it to her cheek.
“Mum?” she said, gasping. “I love you, Mum. I love you so much. Rissy? Riss? God, I love you. You’re the best sister anyone could ever have.”
Then she turned to the other side of the bed, where Simon Pierce the midwife was wiping his hands on a white towel, watching these four humans fall in love. Always, this was his favorite part. Even though it wasn’t his miracle, he was allowed to touch the edges of it.
“Simon,” said Zadie passionately. “I love you, Simon. I love you so much.”
In one way this was completely true, and in another way it wasn’t. Well, not yet, anyway.
* * *
By the time the local elevator technicians had made their way through the heaving city streets and climbed the stairs to the plant room on the roof of the Galaxy casino, it was 1:05 a.m. and Fern Emerson and Caleb Harkness were no longer at the scene. They were at Caleb’s residence—a tubby little motorboat that he kept moored on an outer arm of a less-than-salubrious marina—where Fern was realizing that not every New Year’s Eve was necessarily anticlimactic.
As the technicians inspected the damage, and man-bitched about having drawn the short straw of working on New Year’s Eve, Laura Mitchell stood in the neon-lit powder room on the top floor of the Galaxy casino, angrily dialing Nick Jordan’s telephone number for perhaps the hundredth time that night. Also for the hundredth time that night, her call went through to Nick’s voicemail, and although this didn’t surprise Laura in the least, it nevertheless added another pennyweight to the growing mass of her fury.
It didn’t take the technicians long to diagnose the problem, and it wasn’t a serious one; the broom handle had only tripped a circuit breaker.
When Nick Jordan, Phoebe Wintergreen and Luke Foster felt their elevator jerk back into action, Phoebe jumped up and down, and looked as if she might be about to hug Luke. Luke, missing this cue entirely, slugged the final sip of Green Ginger Wine.
“Well, halle-fucking-lujah,” said Nick.
* * *
Blessed Jones
stood center stage in the Galaxy casino ballroom with Gypsy Black in her arms, her musicians and backup singers arranged in a casual arc behind her. The final set of the concert was almost over and Blessed could feel sweat trickling down between her breasts and dampening her dress between her shoulder blades. Her hair was extra-frizzy from her own perspiration, and her throat was beginning to feel the effects of her hours of singing. And yet, she was entirely happy. For this was where she belonged: here, in this spotlight, on this stage, with this guitar, singing to these hundreds of people whose attention she held on a string made of nothing but breath. Blessed plucked a chord and signaled to the guy at the sound desk for a tiny bit more of Gypsy in the foldback. As she stepped forward to the microphone, she felt the crowd lean in to meet her.
“Here’s a song that I wrote when my heart was broken,” Blessed said, and that was all she said. Just those words, but they were enough to make the Galaxy ballroom crowd break out into cheers and whistles.
“Oh,” said Blessed, with mock surprise. “Do I get the feeling some of you have been waiting for this song?”
The cheers and whistles intensified and a chant broke out. Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows. In the months since she’d written it, “Hidden Shallows” had accelerated up the charts and boosted Blessed Jones’s popularity to stratospheric heights.
Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows. Everyone in the crowd—including those who’d never before seen Blessed Jones perform live, and those who owned none of her albums, and those who’d never even heard of her six months earlier—was aching to hear this song.
“You know, it’s strange,” Blessed said to the crowd, and paused, feeling the power of being able to pause like this and have everyone wait for whatever it was that she would say or do next. “It’s a mystery. How things arrive in our lives. Because I got the words to this song from a guy in a bar…”
She was half singing by now.
“A guy whose heart was broken just like mine, and wherever that guy is tonight, I want him to know that my heart is mended now and I hope that his is all better too.”
The crowd cheered and chanted. Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows. And Blessed began to pick the opening strains on Gypsy’s strings.
“You’re really sure this is the tune you want?”
Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows. Hid-den Shallows.
“All right then.”
The crowd gave one last cheer before quieting down to listen to Blessed’s fingerpicking, to her silk-and-sandpaper voice. As Blessed sang she felt herself travel backward in time, to the shock of the naked girl by the fridge, and the ache that came after the sucker punch of betrayal, and it was out of that pain that she sang.
Standing in her bright pool of light, Blessed couldn’t see the entirety of the room, but she could see the spotlit faces of the people swaying on the dance floor at her feet. And she could see, over by a lighting rig, a guy standing on a chair in a tux, his bow tie untied, and the bib of his white shirt covered in what might have been blood. He was young and he was beautiful, with dark hair and an open face, and he was staring at her with a look of such recognition that Blessed knew that, this night, she was singing this song for him above everyone else. She turned her body just a little toward him. As she shifted into the third repetition of the chorus, she met his gaze and sang.
* * *
Nick Jordan didn’t know how music worked. He only knew that it did. He knew it wasn’t only the words, and he knew it wasn’t only the tune. He knew it wasn’t only the small woman with the big crazy hair and the bittersweet voice, and he knew that it wasn’t only the gleaming black guitar with the ornate mother-of-pearl detailing. He knew it was all of these things together—and something else as well—that was swelling up his heart so that it hurt in the best possible way.
Standing on a chair—a chair he had climbed upon for its view of the room, in order that he might catch a glimpse of Laura Mitchell—Nick Jordan had found himself in the spotlight of Blessed Jones’s heartbroken gaze, captured by the peach skin of her voice. She was singing her most famous song. To him.
I looked for your depths, but all I found were your lies
Learned I could just wade, never swim, in your eyes
You’re a skit, not a drama, a bare diorama
A beautiful charmer, no Trench Mariana
I searched but never found in you
Dived but never drowned in you
Now I’m aground on you
You and your hidden shallows
As her words went in through his ears and down through his mind and soaked into the deep red sponge of his heart, Nick knew that it wasn’t Laura Mitchell who was the waterlily, and it never had been. It wasn’t Laura who had nothing going on underneath but straggly, sickly roots. It was he, himself. And Justine had known it all along. In the person of Leo Thornbury, she had tried every which way she could to tell him to look deeper, dig deeper, go deeper. Be deeper.
Justine.
Blessed Jones and her stage band played a long, instrumental interlude that conjured a montage of memories in Nick’s mind. There was Justine, dwarfed in his jumper on a cold night on her rooftop, its too-long sleeves flapping like a pair of boneless wings. And Justine on the twelfth-floor landing, yelling like a shrew that he was flushing his talent down the toilet. And Justine with her eyebrows formidably fixed as she wrestled the Battle of Waterloo checkers from a rival trash and treasure hunter. Justine in smeary silver makeup, with her lips all sticky and red from a toffee apple, raising her face to Nick’s. Justine standing outside Evelyn Towers looking heartbrokenly into the open back of the removal van while he stood with suitcases in his hands, pretending not to see her.
Justine hadn’t messed with his horoscopes to fool him, or to laugh at him. She’d done it because she was trying to tell him something that he ought to have known for a hundred other reasons: she was the one for him.
Blessed Jones sang the chorus one last time and closed her eyes to sing the final, soaring, bittersweet notes, and when the song came at last to its very end, she opened her eyes to look straight at Nick once again.
“Thank you,” he mouthed, and Blessed Jones nodded her frizzy head in a barely perceptible gesture of you’re welcome before the New Year’s Eve crowd went wild for her.
* * *
There were many women in the world who didn’t know how to walk properly in high-heeled shoes, but Laura Mitchell was not one of them. When Nick looked away from Blessed Jones to see Laura walking in through the door of the Galaxy ballroom, his first thought was that she walked so elegantly in those strappy black heels that they might almost be part of her actual legs.
Nick leaped down from the chair and pushed his way toward the door through a steamy crowd that smelled of sweat, tequila and jubilation. When he was close enough, he called to her, “Laura! Laura!”
As she registered several things in quick succession—that he was here, that he was coming toward her, that he was a mess in a bloodied shirt and a rumpled tuxedo—her face reminded Nick of a squally day that had everything from sun showers through to thunder and hail. By the time he reached her, though, she had settled her features into permafrost.
“You’re alive then,” she said.
“I’m so sorry. I would have called. I wanted to call, but I dropped my phone in a pond,” Nick said. “I’ve been trying to get here. For hours. Laura, I’m so sorry.”
Nick reached into the pocket of his tuxedo and pulled out the ring box.
“Here?” Laura said, looking around her, incredulous. “Now? Are you serious?”
Nick flicked open the ring box, and he saw Laura try not to look at the ruby within.
“Not now,” she said. “This isn’t right. You’ve completely fucked New Year’s Eve. Now we’re going to have to wait until Valentine’s Day.”<
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“No,” said Nick. “I think now is perfect.”
He took her hand, but he didn’t turn it over the way you might if you were going to slip a ring onto someone’s finger. He gently turned her hand upward and placed the ring, box and all, on her palm, and Nick saw the weather on her face flicker once again between sunshine and rain.
“I want you to have this ring. As a farewell present.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Laura, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You are perhaps the most beautiful woman I will ever see in real life. For all my life, I will see you on the billboards of the world and wonder at your beauty. When you are one of those silver-haired women advertising age-defying skin cream, I will look at you and be grateful that I ever had the chance to admire you at close range.
“You are also one of the strongest and most hardworking people I know. You will be an extraordinary success, and as I watch that success from afar, I will admire it and applaud you. But, I’m not going to marry you.”
“You’re breaking up with me? With a ring?”
“Listen, Laura. I’m never going to be who you want. I’m never going to be what you want. I can’t promise that I won’t be riding a bike and eating two-minute noodles when I’m sixty. I’m sorry, Laura, but I’m not right for you. But somewhere out there”—Nick gestured vaguely in the direction of the city, the country, the world—“is the person who is. I want you to go find them.”
Nick leaned in to kiss Laura’s cheek. “Make sure Eve and Sergei see you home safely, yeah?”
“I don’t believe this. Where are you going?”
Nick didn’t answer. He just stepped away, giving Laura a fond salute.
