by Mindy Klasky
“Are you allowed to do that?” I blurted, glancing at the lamp, which still lay on my desk.
“Of course,” Teel said with a sweetness that made me just a little suspicious. “That’s the bargain. You have however much time it takes to make your wishes. And I have my freedom.”
“But how am I going to find you? What about when I’m ready to make my next wish?”
She nodded toward my hand, the one that was embossed with my own faintly flickering flames. “We already went over that. Just press your fingers together and call my name.” She tossed one end of her scarf around her neck and breezed over to my office door.
“Teel!” I called, before she could open it, before she could disappear into the Mercer hallways, into the New York City streets. She turned back with one eyebrow arched into a question. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
“Oh.” She chortled, and her stern lawyerly facade crumbled before my eyes. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
CHAPTER 5
AND TEEL WAS RIGHT.
I’d had an image in my mind when I’d described my dream apartment. I’d pictured enough space to move, a little open air to breathe, enough room for a couch and a love seat in the living room.
But I had never, even in my wildest dreams, imagined living in the incredible condo that I now, um, owned.
Picture the coolest apartment you’ve ever seen in a movie, the most incredible airy Manhattan loft. Make sure to include floor-to-ceiling windows. Toss in unbelievable furniture, fresh from the catalog of your choice—just make sure that there are a few hints of the softest teal, of dusty rose, of wintergreen, all used as perfect accent colors to offset the classic upholstery of the couch, the love seat, two chairs, matching ottomans, side tables, and a full-size coffee table. Yes, all of that furniture—picture it!—just in the living room!
Add a kitchen, and a couple of bedrooms, and a view of the river, and you’ll soon understand why I was unable to summon two consecutive sentences as Maureen Schultz showed me around my new home. I’m sure she thought I was nuts—Teel’s magic somehow had her believing that she and I had met many times before, that we’d actually weathered a long business relationship with plenty of failed visits to other buildings before I’d set my heart on the Bentley.
I tried to remember basic English sentence structure as one part of my mind gibbered, “Mine, mine, mine!” and another chanted, “Eat your heart out, Dean Marcus!” I was still grinning like an asylum escapee when I stood in my doorway, waving Maureen toward the elevators. Yes, elevators. Plural. “Thank you!” I said, pumping her hand once again.
“No,” she said with a throaty chuckle. “Thank you!”
I barely kept from squealing as I gazed down the carpeted hallway (carpet!) and watched the whisper-quiet doors whisk away my fairy real estate godmother. Before I could turn back to explore my domain further, the door across the hall opened. Still reeling at my personal good fortune, I grinned and took a step forward, forgetting New York City’s unspoken Good Neighbor Rules, the ones that mandated silence and polite disinterest in all public interaction with strangers. “Hi!” I said, extending my hand.
The woman in the doorway could have been the cover model for the debut issue of Earth Mother magazine. Her elaborately embroidered blue cotton workshirt hung loose over faded jeans. The pants were too long for her; she’d rolled them up in cuffs that displayed beat-up Birkenstock sandals. Bright red socks peeped out between the shoes’ leather straps. Her face was weathered, as if she’d spent long hours in the sun, and her eyes were the color of well-watered earth. A long braid hung down to her waist, generous strands of gray twining around dark chestnut.
“Hello,” she said, and her voice was soft, like a brown paper bag that had been reused so many times it felt like cloth. “You’re the new neighbor?”
“Becca,” I said.
She shook my hand firmly, and I felt the rasp of calluses on her palms. “Dani. We were wondering who would move in here.”
“We?” I looked behind her, into the violet-tinged shadows of her apartment. From the hallway, it looked much smaller than mine.
“My son and I.” She sighed, sifting a layer of sweet fondness across her placid features. “He’s new to the building, but I’ve lived here forever. The Bentley is a perfect place for gorilla gardening.”
Okay…What was that supposed to mean? Did she raise primates for the Bronx Zoo? I resisted the urge to take a deep sniff in the direction of her apartment. Nothing seemed too strange there, no bizarre noises, no caged-animal stink. There was the slight flicker of the purplish lights, though…. I tried to smile. “Um, gorilla gardening?”
“Guerilla,” Dani repeated. When I still stared at her without comprehension, she enunciated the word with care, trilling an exaggerated Spanish accent: “Guer-ee-ya. As in ‘warfare’?”
“Guerilla gardening,” I repeated, a little relieved that I wasn’t going to have giant apes across the hall. The purple cast must be from grow lights. But growing what? My pulse surged momentarily, and I wondered if Teel had dropped me into the middle of some clandestine West Village marijuana-growing cooperative. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what that is.”
Dani nodded patiently, as if she were accustomed to people admitting such ignorance. Her earthen eyes twinkled as she said, “It’s my passion.”
“Passion?” The psychedelic embroidery on her blouse made my throat seize up. I pictured police raids throughout the building, being thrown out of my new home before I’d even settled into it. Out of the frying pan, into the fire…I fought to swallow my panic.
Obviously unaware of my reaction, Dani elaborated with a rapturous smile. “We call ourselves the Gray Guerillas. Most of us are over seventy—who else has time to do this sort of thing?” She shook her head. “There’s so much space that goes unused in the City—on rooftops and fire escapes, in those cutouts of dirt by trees on the sidewalk.” Her sing-song voice told me she’d recited her words a thousand times. “We can reclaim that space. We can use it. Guerilla gardeners create little havens, right here in the middle of Manhattan. Today, we might be growing a few sprigs of parsley, some basil, some sage. But tomorrow, we’ll have peppers! Tomatoes! Flowers of all kinds! Treasures you don’t even realize you’re missing!”
Her enthusiastic words melted into laughter, an infectious joyousness. She wasn’t trying to break the law. She wasn’t going to attract police raids. She was talking about regular plants, legal plants, perfectly ordinary, everyday, green, growing plants.
I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder, blinking gratefully at the golden flood of an early-spring sunset splashed across my living room. “Oh, my!” Dani exclaimed. “Just look at that light! You could start seedlings right now, have everything ready for a mid-April planting! It’s such a joy to see things sprout, to see new life begin!”
And when she said it, I believed her. Me—I thought about joy. Me—the woman who had spent the entire day wallowing in doom, disaster, and the breakup from Hell.
I had a fresh beginning. Courtesies of Kira and Teel—and Dani now, too—I had a chance at something new.
Before I could say anything, though, my cell phone trilled from the pocket of my black trousers. Jenn’s ringtone, probably alerting me to some disaster back at the Mercer. Er, some new disaster back at the Mercer, I amended to myself. I clenched my teeth as all of the day’s disgraces swept back to the front of my consciousness.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Dani, torn between answering the phone and learning more about guerilla gardening.
“Go,” my new neighbor said, sharing another smile that warmed me to my bones. “We’ll talk more. Welcome to the building.”
I grinned and managed to grab the call just before it rolled over to voice mail. “Hey,” I said, slipping into my condo (my! condo!) and closing the door.
“So,” Jenn said without preamble, as if we were already in the middle of a conversation. “You rushed out of here s
o fast, I didn’t have a chance to ask if you’re coming to the Pharm.”
The Pharmacy. The neighborhood bar that regularly provided the Mercer cast and crew with whatever form of liquid medicine they needed.
I sucked a regretful breath between my teeth. I knew that Hal had conducted rehearsal for the Shepard one-acts that afternoon, even though I hadn’t bothered to attend. In fact, he had integrated some substantial changes to the blocking, to where the actors stood when they said their lines. I’d actually been the one to recommend the changes—the new blocking emphasized the common elements among all three of the short plays. Hal had agreed with my suggestions the day before—a lifetime ago, or so it seemed. Nevertheless, he’d predicted that the cast would be on edge, would have a hard time handling so much transition this close to opening night.
I owed it to him to show up at the Pharm at least. I could take the cast’s temperature, figure out just how traumatic the changes had been. I could explain Hal’s vision again, make clear the reason for modifying things, reassure everyone that the extra effort was worth it so that we could realize the full potential of the production.
That sort of psychological jiggering was one of my informal, but vital roles. I never would have shirked it, on a normal day.
“Bec?” Jenn said. “We really need you. This afternoon was rough on everyone.” I blinked hard, thinking about the trauma of the rehearsal, how it must have been compounded by the gossip about Dean. About me. I shivered and tugged at the collar of my sweater. The golden sunset had winked out over the horizon; my incredible new home was now chilly in the grey of early-spring twilight.
“Yeah,” I said, before Jenn could think that I’d gone mad. Or any madder than I’d already proven myself to be. “I’ll be there.”
“Great! We’re heading out in about fifteen! Ciao!”
“Ciao,” I said, but I was already speaking to the static of an empty line.
The Pharmacy was even more crowded than usual. Mercer folks were gathered around three tables in the back, and from the sound of things, they were already well into their second round. At least. Pete, the ever-patient bartender, nodded a greeting from behind his long stretch of polished mahogany. “The usual?” he asked, already reaching for a cocktail glass and a bottle of rye.
My usual. A Manhattan. Dean had bought me my first Manhattan.
I shook my head. “Let’s try something new,” I said. I didn’t need Dean. I was infinitely better off without him. I had my fairy godmothers instead. Kira. And Teel. And Maureen Shultz.
That reminded me of a drink I’d had at a cast party once, for Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods, a musical about fairy tales gone nightmarishly bad. There. That was a perfect antidote to Dean-driven memories, a great reminder that there was no such thing as a Prince Charming. Ever. Anywhere.
I said to Pete, “How about a Godmother?”
Always the perfect bartender, Pete nodded, without my needing to define the drink. If he realized the importance of my decision to change my poison, he hid it well. He grabbed a highball glass and poured a generous amount of vodka. As he swirled in the requisite Amaretto, I couldn’t help but remember the cascading fog that had billowed out of Teel’s lamp. I glanced down at my fingertips, but it was too dark to make out my subtle flame tattoo. I knew the mark was there, though. I knew that I still had three wishes to harvest.
Pete handed over my drink with a professional nod. He’d run a tab for me. He always did. I tried not to think about the lonely twenties in my wallet, the three hundred dollars that weren’t going to see any companions until my next pay check. I picked up my drink. Some splurges were worth it. Necessary, in fact, for the preservation of mental health.
“Becca!” Jenn exclaimed in an overloud voice as I made my way back to the Mercer crowd. A momentary silence flickered over the gathering, just enough to make me certain that they’d been talking about me. They were actors, though, trained professionals. It only took an instant for them to adlib new lines, to exclaim about the bitter wind outside, about some actor’s total embarrassment in an audition the day before. No one even mentioned the blocking change from the afternoon’s rehearsal—it must not have been too traumatic, after all.
Jenn waved me to her side. She was sitting with a couple of long-time Mercer performers, Kelly Reilly and Rob Cornell.
“Here, Becca,” Kelly said, rolling to her feet. She was hugely pregnant; she looked like she might deliver triplets right there in the Pharm. “Rob and I are heading home. Steal a chair while you can!”
I appreciated the cheerful way she addressed me, looking me directly in the eye, as if I weren’t the scum of the theatrical earth. Maybe those were the type of good manners that Kelly had mastered in her native Minnesota. Rumor had it, her father ran a great bar for the theater crowd there—that was where she’d met Kira Franklin, how Kira had ended up at the Mercer, way back when. The theater world truly was as small as a frontier village.
Not that that boded well for anyone disgraced, the way I was.
Rob pushed Kelly’s chair toward me. I was grateful, given how crowded the Pharm was. “Thanks,” I said, but I was spared more small talk as Kelly and Rob made their way to the door.
Jenn watched them leave before she clinked her glass of beer against my Godmother. She said, “I’m glad you came.”
I looked at the remaining actors wryly, pitching my voice so that only my assistant could hear. “You made it sound like they were desperate for me. Like they were prostrate with grief over the old blocking.”
She shrugged. “I figured you needed to get out. Spend some time with friends, instead of holed up home alone.” She obviously thought that I’d been at my old home, at the place I’d shared with Dean. Well, no time like the present to share my incredible news.
“That’s the thing,” I said. “That’s why I rushed out of the office today.”
“What?”
I took a healthy swallow of my drink, fortifying myself before I said the words out loud, words that would have made me think I was crazy if I just happened to overhear someone else saying them. “I know this is going to sound nuts,” I said, hunching over my glass so that Jenn had to lean closer. She cocked her head at an angle that mirrored one of her beloved cockatiels. “You know what happened in the meeting this morning, right? You know about Dean?”
I could see her start to lie, start to say that she had no idea what had taken place behind the closed conference room door. But we both knew that was absurd. We both knew the Mercer had no secrets. She nodded and looked sympathetic, but I hurried on before she could say anything. “Well, you know that Kira came in to my office afterward, right?”
“I saw her walk down the hall. With a box or something, right?”
“Right.” My heart pounded as I remembered the moment I’d picked up the brass lamp. I barely resisted the urge to rub my marked fingertips together. Jenn waited expectantly as I counted out three beats, applying the perfect sense of timing that I’d built in a lifetime of watching rehearsals. “One of the things in Kira’s box was a—”
My voice cracked and my words faded away, as if I were a teenage boy.
Jenn leaned closer. “What?”
I cleared my throat and raised my voice. “There was a—”
Again, my voice broke. I’d spoken loudly enough that the people closest to us turned to look at me. I flashed them a smile, acutely aware of the fact that they’d think I was talking about Dean, think that I’d been silenced because I was overcome with emotion about that bastard. They looked away, embarrassed for me.
I wiped my sweaty palms against my pants and tried again, precisely measuring out each word. “Kira.” So far, so good. “Gave.” No problem. “Me.” I was fine. “A.” Okay, so I must have imagined the entire thing, dreamed up the whole inability-to-talk thing.
Except I couldn’t say the next word.
Lamp wasn’t coming out. I tried lantern, but that stuck just as firmly. I reached out for adjectives, as if I cou
ld sneak up on the concept, sort of like a graduate student padding out a late-night paper with extra words. Magic was a no-go. Genie wasn’t going to happen, either. I sputtered, angry with myself, my cheeks flushing as Jenn waited, as our nearby eavesdroppers pretended not to be waiting with bated breath for whatever I was going to choke out.
Finally, Jenn reached across to pat my hand. “It’s okay, Bec. I know what Kira brought you.”
“You do?” My relief was like a cashmere wave.
She nodded. “I went into your office after you left. I saw the box on your desk. Don’t worry! They totally look like normal clothes. No one will know that you’re wearing costumes. I mean, no one who isn’t working on the show.”
Clothes. She thought I was getting all choked up about clothes.
“That isn’t—” I started to say. But then I thought better about my protest. Something strange was going on here. I’d have to ask Kira, or Teel, the next time I summoned the genie. Some sort of magic—or was it MAGIC, the trade association?—was keeping me from talking. I forced myself to laugh, and then I said, “That beer isn’t going to last you the rest of the night. Can I get you another?”
“Just a sec.” Jenn glanced around at the cast, obviously making sure that everyone else was distracted. (Not that distraction was difficult with this group—they’d already forgotten my near-confession about Teel and had moved on to chattering about some flubbed line from the afternoon’s rehearsal.) When Jenn was satisfied that no one was paying attention, she leaned down and pulled a cardboard banker’s box between our chairs.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“ShowTalk has been nuts all afternoon.” ShowTalk. The Internet gossip mill. The theater community’s discussion boards must be red-hot.
“Has anyone seen Dean?” I asked bitterly.
Jenn shrugged. “That’s not the biggest story today.”
“What do you mean?”