“So . . .” Eli says. And Zara can tell that it’s time to revisit what happened to Roscoe, to crawl back inside that moment. She doesn’t want to tell it numbly, the way she did to the police. She takes her time, looking for words that have the shine of truth. The keys to the story. “I was walking the boards. When I got to the edge of the stage, I saw Roscoe in the orchestra pit. I didn’t know who he was then. I rushed down the rehearsal stairs. And I . . . I knelt down. And I called 911. And I talked to him, although he never talked back.”
Zara wants to rush ahead — past the part where worry and fear hit her in a fresh wave — but she holds herself in the moment by force. “No. I’m sorry. I’m wrong. I asked all these questions and he never answered them, but he mumbled something. I don’t know if he even knew I was there. He was staring up and he said . . .” Zara can’t quite grab the word. It’s there, like a character waiting offstage, impossible to see behind the curtains.
Eli waits while Zara presses her fingers to her forehead. “He said . . . angels.”
Eli cants one dark eyebrow. “Angels?”
Zara asks weakly, “Was Roscoe religious?”
Eli puts a thumb to the soft hollow of her neck. “I wore a rosary one day and he went out of his mind with happiness.”
“You’re Catholic?”
The question almost asks itself.
Eli shrugs. “It’s how I grew up. I converted to theater. They have a lot in common: rituals, costumes, a voice that fills this big echoey space and makes you believe in something.” She smiles, and there’s teasing in there. “What about you?” She bounces on the balls of her feet, still crouched on the railing, and Zara feels it in her nerves. “Let me guess. Episcopalian. No. Lutheran.”
Zara knows her last name throws people off. Her dad’s father converted when he married Zara’s grandmother, the one with the theater heritage and the perfect sufganiyot recipe.
“I’m Jewish.” And since there are a hundred different ways to be Jewish and Zara is only one of them, she adds, “Culturally Jewish.”
Eli nods. She drums her fingers on the wooden railing. Zara’s eyes are drawn to her wrists, where the tattoos start. She follows the path all the way up Eli’s arm, to her slim shoulders. There are stars and moons, islands and seas. Flowers that bloom in unexpected places. Zara wants to tell her it’s beautiful.
But that’s not why they’re up here.
“So what do you think it means?” Zara asks. “Angels?”
“Roscoe saw some, I guess. White beams and whatever. He was probably trying to figure out how to do a light plot for it.” Eli’s smile dies a quick death. “What else?” She’s been patient so far, but now there’s an urgent boil underneath her words.
“That’s it,” Zara says with a useless shrug. “Angels.”
She feels it again, how high up they are. Zara looks down at the floor of the balcony, littered with cables and cardboard boxes that hold extra bulbs. But looking down just reminds her that Roscoe fell a very long way.
So she looks up instead.
On the plaster ceiling right above her head, there are paintings of gods and men. And angels. Not the kind with gentle smiles and softly feathered wings. These angels have faces that storm with righteous anger.
Zara taps at Eli’s wrist. She points to the fake sky.
Eli jumps down from the railing to the balcony. She works a cluster of keys from her belt and puts one into the wall right below the angels. Zara doesn’t even notice the door until it’s opening.
On the other side is a sort of dark cave. Its floor is the plaster ceiling of the theater, and a few feet over that, a walkway spans the empty space. It’s even less safe-looking than the balcony. A skeleton of metal and air.
“Where does this go?” Zara whispers. The theater has secrets everywhere, and it feels like speaking too loudly might shake the wrong one loose.
“This leads to the lighting booth,” Eli says. “Only people who know the Aurelia would come this way.”
Eli strides onto the walkway like it’s nothing.
Zara takes a step, looking straight ahead. Eli doesn’t look back, expecting Zara to be brave. But Zara’s nerves tell her that she’s falling. She reaches out and grabs one of Eli’s hands.
And everything stops.
Eli turns around to face her, long, delicate fingers twisting to lock with Zara’s.
Eli holds on tight.
Eli asks herself: What if someone used this walkway to come up behind Roscoe? What if someone planned it? What if someone pushed?
She lets go of Zara’s hand. Ay, carajo. She crushed the girl’s fingertips. Of course she did.
She leads the way out of the Aurelia, tucks Zara safely into a cab, and starts walking. Eli needs to give the police one more chance, even though they haven’t earned it. Ten minutes later, she reaches the precinct, a gray slab of a building where they make her wait for hours. She spends the time in limbo scribbling equations about voltage. The Aurelia’s master electrician will help her wire whatever she needs, but first she has to show him that she’s not just some girl Roscoe took a chance on for no reason.
“Can we help you?” an officer finally asks.
“It’s about Roscoe. Gregory Roscoe.”
The policeman takes Eli to a little room where she waits in an even less comfortable chair. Another policeman comes in and faces her across the desk. She tells them about Roscoe’s final words. The angels on the ceiling. The details of the hidden walkway. “Did you see the hidden walkway?”
The uniformed man nods, but she doesn’t know if that means yes or I’m-nodding-so-you’ll-stop-now. “Thank you, Miss Vasquez. We’ll let you know if there are any new developments.”
Eli keeps trying to talk, but the officers are already leaving the room.
She spends the rest of her day collecting newspapers from various stands, even though she’s supposed to be on a train to Stamford for her niece’s dance recital. She sends a quick e-mail to her parents and brothers: Have to stay in the city. Mi trabajo. Tell Lia I’m sorry and give her un abrazo fuerte. Eli reminds herself that her parents believe in hard work, they’re proud she landed this job. And this is part of the job: caring about Roscoe.
Guilt knuckles down. It turns every step into a crush of regret. She should have been there when he fell. Why did she leave him alone?
When she gets home, she stacks up the newspapers and adds every online article she can find. There’s a surprising amount of coverage. Eli does her best to look past the staging for some new piece of truth. Around one in the morning she settles onto her bed, coffee in one hand, laptop balanced across her knees. She wades into the sewers of the online comments. That’s when she finds a mention of a man caught on CCTV outside the Aurelia and confirmed by witnesses — an older man in a dark-blue suit, with a mane of wild gray hair.
It’s quiet in her apartment. Too quiet for Washington Heights, which is always throwing sound in great big handfuls.
What if Leopold pushed Roscoe and paid off the cops? Leopold had access, but even a director as intense as Leopold Henneman wouldn’t kill someone over a bad lighting design.
Eli looks down at her own bad lighting design.
That night, she doesn’t get anything that looks or feels like sleep.
The next day is Roscoe’s funeral, and everyone from the Aurelia is at the wake — everyone but Zara and Leopold. No family. Roscoe didn’t have one, which makes Eli their stand-in.
The company mills around in little groups, reminding her that she barely knows these people. They’re surrounded by cheap fake flowers, the kind that smell like dust. The arrangement of lilies her family sent sings out in comparison. The funeral home’s soft lighting makes everyone look like wax versions of themselves.
Roscoe’s casket is closed.
Eli walks up to Toby. He’s the friendliest of the actors. They’ve never really talked, but he gives her that quick look of understanding that comes when you can tell someone else is a member of the
Rainbow Club.
They trade hellos, and Eli plunges right in. “I’m putting together a memorial piece. Can you tell me how you spent Roscoe’s last day?” she asks, completely aware of how weird that sounds.
“Oh, love,” Toby says. “That day. I was upstate. Leopold said he needed time to think over the production, and I offered him my cabin. I have a little cabin, you know. You can find it on Google Maps and smell the pine trees. It’s lovely.”
Eli feels her stupid theory wither. “Thanks.” She crosses Leopold and Toby off her mental list. She walks over to the nearest group of Aurelia people. As long as Eli is prying, she might as well pry hard.
She asks everyone what they were doing that day.
Enna was in her high-end apartment building, complete with doormen who would know if she was lying. Carl went to a matinee at another theater. He even has the ticket stub in his wallet, which he offers to give her if she’s collecting mementos. Meg sat in on a series of meetings about Echo and Ariston merchandise. Kestrel was waiting for her new roommate, which she says as though Zara Evans is some exotic disease she picked up. Eli grits out a thank-you and moves on to Barrett, who spent Roscoe’s final hours sleeping with some girl he met at a bar. He provides the information with glee, like they’re both people who sleep with girls and therefore she should be proud of him: gross.
Everyone has a story.
Eli goes home and turns on all the lights in her little apartment. Roscoe never got a chance to see it, but without him this place wouldn’t exist. Eli would be back in Connecticut, her career over before it even started. She was going to invite Roscoe over here someday, for sandwiches and café con leche.
She sits down on the flowered couch that her mom insisted on and her brothers wouldn’t stop laughing at. She gets back to work on the lighting design. Because Eli can’t lose all this. Roscoe would hate to know, from beyond the grave, that she’d messed up the chance he gave her. Even if, when she closes her eyes and pinches them tight, Roscoe’s death is still the wrong color.
Gray: like a bruise. Like a storm gathering under the skin.
A day passes, then two, and Zara is hoping that Eli will text again. On the third day, she lets it go. It’s probably for the best. She’ll be in rehearsals soon, and thinking about Roscoe won’t help.
That’s the only reason Eli wanted to talk to her, anyway.
When she eventually returns to the Aurelia, Zara follows the signs on the wall to the meeting place Leopold picked. They’re not in the studios. She checks every door to see which leads to Storage Room Two. That’s what her call sheet says. Storage Room Two. Evans, Ward.
She’s going to meet Adrian tonight.
Ariston.
But Zara’s call time is a half hour earlier than his. A half hour with the director — doing what? Zara feels a sick wash of nerves and excitement.
Storage Room Two is as tall as a warehouse, with the same concrete slab floors. Every inch of space is packed tight with props. There are no neat aisles — as Zara picks a direction and walks, she realizes there are no aisles at all. She passes trunks of age-stained photographs and artwork in a strange array of styles. Daggers drip from the walls. She bumps her hip on an old-fashioned painted carousel horse.
Leopold is supposed to be here, but Zara doesn’t even know where to start looking for him. It would be easy to lose a person in this mess. Does the props master — Barrett — keep it this way on purpose? Zara tries to picture him, with his dark hair and his perfectly sliced smile, stuck in this room all day and night, only props for company.
Zara makes four wrong turns before she clears an ornate paper screen and finds Leopold in a bare spot among the mess, like a clearing in the woods.
He is sitting on a bed.
A huge, rough-hewn bed with the sort of posts that must remember being tree trunks. Work lights have been set up around the space, throwing hard shadows. There is no script in sight. No stage manager or AD. Not even Leopold’s assistant, Meg. This isn’t a traditional rehearsal. But after that audition process, why would she expect a traditional director?
Leopold pats the spot next to him, a patch of untouched white sheet. “Come. Sit.”
Zara tells herself that this can’t be what it looks like. She’s heard about casting couches, but a casting bed? To wait until she already had the part is a bit of brutal genius. Leopold must know how grateful she is right now. How little she wants to loosen her grip on this role.
Zara puts down her purse. Takes out her script. She doesn’t know what else to do.
Leopold sighs. “I suppose you don’t have to follow the first direction I’ve given you.”
Zara dismisses her worries. They’re just a product of the strange room, the surprise of finding him here alone. Leopold is her director. She has no reason to think that he’s doing anything other than directing her.
“Have you forgotten how to use your voice as well?” Leopold asks, teasing her. “A lack of words will give us some difficulties in rehearsal.”
“No,” Zara says. And then, because the sound came out much too small, she tries again. “No.”
Leopold changes, like a wind hitting her from a new direction. “You look beautiful down here. Something about the broken light.” Zara can feel his eyes taking a slow path up and down her body. She crosses her arms. His attention is making her awkward, twitchy. She should be used to it, though. Being an actress means people take stock of every inch of her.
“Is this the bed for the love scene?” Zara asks. She’s trying to keep her head in Echo and Ariston.
“This is my hope,” Leopold says, touching the sheets. His smile is edged with boyish charm. “If Barrett can make it look like driftwood. He’ll have to bleach it to that special bone color, if he can manage.” There is a scrape of disgust in Leopold’s voice. Zara stands up a little straighter, a prickle at the base of her spine. She never wants to give Leopold a reason to talk about her like that.
Zara walks into the bright circle cast by the work lights. “Why are we meeting down here?”
“Questions instead of trust,” he says. “Is that really how you want to start?”
Zara’s worries gust inside her, gathering force, changing direction. All of a sudden she feels desperate to prove herself. “A studio is a blank page. This bed gives an actor more to work with — right?”
“A bed is more than just a prop,” Leopold says. “This is the center of the story. The focal point of Echo and Ariston’s passion for each other. I thought you, of all people, would be able to see that.”
Zara can’t let Leopold find out how little she knows about love. She has to keep this part of herself away from him. Safe.
She edges onto the bed.
They’re not sitting any closer than they were at the read-through, but there is a soft shock in this closeness. Maybe because they’re alone. Maybe because Zara still has the faintest worry that he might touch her.
But no touch comes.
“Was that really so hard?” he asks, and the teasing is back. But he drops it quickly, putting on his most brisk and professional manner. “Now before we begin, you and I have something important to talk about.”
Zara nods. She is sitting in profile, his face at the very edge of her vision.
“There’s very little I can do about Adrian Ward and his movie-star ways. The production schedule is a disaster; we’ve had to carve around his promotions and events. This play cannot thrive, it cannot be anything close to perfection, unless you are different. I will have to depend on you in a way that I can’t depend on Adrian. And so I need to know that you have no outside commitments. No distractions.”
Yes. This is what Zara wants. This is why she’s here. To throw herself into this role.
To drown in it.
“Of course,” Zara says, turning to face Leopold. “I’m here to work.”
His hand falls on her wrist. She forces herself to stay perfectly still. Leopold smiles, and she can see pores in his skin, dark hairs run
ning wild through his gray waves, and pinpricks of light in his eyes. “Good girl.”
Adrian Ward is back in New York.
(Finally.)
There were shoots and reshoots, events and interviews, parties that had to be partied and clothes that had to be packed. Private planes and sleeping pills and his personal assistant telling him it was time to leave for the theater. Now Adrian Ward is at the Aurelia, in something called Storage Room Two.
He almost bumps into a fake horse.
There are voices a little farther off. One of them sounds girlish, and he knows that it has to be the new talent he’s playing opposite. Adrian reminds himself to smile. (People like it when he smiles.)
He shouldn’t be nervous. He should just breeze into this rehearsal like he’s done this a thousand times before. But that’s the thing. He hasn’t. Here is what they’ve been saying online, as if Adrian is not an actual person who can do a Google search: They cast Adrian Ward because of his fans. They cast Adrian Ward because he demanded the part. They cast Adrian Ward because his abs are more famous than anyone else in the show.
Adrian turns a corner and sees something that brings his thoughts to a stop. There’s a monstrous bed, with a girl and a somewhat old man sitting on it. They’re talking in quiet, excited voices. Adrian already feels left out. Although he’s not really sure that he wants to be a part of whatever is happening on that bed.
The girl leaps down. The old man turns to Adrian.
It takes him a second to recognize the director, Leopold. They met once in L.A. He had looked out of place there, like a slightly European vampire. Here, he looks perfect. Like part of the scenery.
“Hey,” Adrian says. “Sorry I’m late.”
The girl is staring at Leopold. (Most girls would be staring at Adrian. Not that he needs the attention. He just can’t help but notice the difference.)
“Adrian,” Leopold says, gesturing around the bizarre room. “Welcome. You understand, we have only a short time together, so I’m going to skip the pleasantries. We’ll begin with act three, scene four.”
Echo After Echo Page 5