“I knew you wouldn’t.”
“It was too much effort.”
“No. That’s not why.”
Caleb went to the bathroom to get Adrienne’s brush and makeup bag in case they wanted to admit her to the hospital. When he opened the bag to shove in her toothbrush and toothpaste, he found a tube of white grease paint and a set of small makeup brushes with wooden handles, none of which belonged to his wife. All her cosmetics and accessories were Southern Blue brand, and these were not. At the bottom of the bag, Caleb also found a crumpled envelope with a smudged address. Recognizing the letter as Henry’s, Caleb felt a jolt of jealousy.
“Adie?” he called to her. “Why do you have all of Henry’s shit in your makeup bag?”
“Huh? I don’t.”
“You’re wearing whiteface regularly now?”
“I bet he swapped our bags. I gave him one that looked like mine. I didn’t know; I haven’t touched my makeup since you left.”
Curiosity overtook Caleb, and he found himself taking the letter from the envelope and reading it. At first he thought the letter was written by a child. The letters were too neat, as if the writer had to think about how to shape each one consciously. The spelling was atrocious. As he read the letter, though, it became apparent that it was written by a grown man. The boy’s brother. There were several references to their father and mother, and while none of them said so directly, it was clear to Caleb that their mother was dead and had been for many years. It was also clear that the brother was afraid of their father.
The letter asked Henry to go with his brother to their house. The brother, whose name was Andre, had something he needed to do, and quietly, in every line, was his fear of doing it. Caleb was still so angry with Henry, still hot with jealousy. But this letter, and the memory of Henry grasping for it on the day Caleb found him giving himself heatstroke in the trailer, dampened his anger, turned it into a bitter kind of pity.
He replaced the letter in the envelope and set it next to the sink. The letter was old. The date which the brother proposed for meeting with Henry had passed. But Caleb didn’t think it was right to throw the letter away, or to destroy it. He thought of what Seamus had said: that talent needed something to burn. Whatever Henry set alight night after night when he performed, Caleb realized then, it had everything to do with this brother—and it was burning out.
CHAPTER 18
ONE NIGHT AFTER CALEB HAD left, somewhere between Indianapolis and Detroit, Henry overheard Lorne say that Henry behaved unnaturally—that, mark his words, the boy was the one who would put the nail in Feely and Feinstein’s coffin.
The rest of the circus seemed to believe this. They hid his things. His costume went missing hours before a show, and he tore through his trunk looking for it. He got so frustrated trying to find it that he bloodied his knuckles punching the lid of his trunk. The costume later turned up in the contortionist’s backpack, and she returned it to him without a word. He wore white gloves during that performance to cover his injuries, but the blood seeped through, a dark spot on his second knuckle. The gloves went missing the next night.
After performing for a surly audience in Fort Wayne, Henry found dog shit in his bed. When he asked Sue about it the next day, she burst into sobs, causing her mascara to dissolve. The contortionist came and comforted her and wiped the black tears from her face, looking at Henry like he was the one who had done something filthy.
Henry found his mirror shattered. His alarm clock went off at strange times. He had no idea if they had planned it, or if it was an unspoken understanding, but there was no doubt they were attempting to punish him for what they saw as his betrayal of Caleb. They sought to drive him out of his mind. And it was working. He got paranoid, constantly checking all his belongings to be sure they were clean, checking his trunk to be sure his costume was there, assuming that every whispered conversation was about him.
He found it hard to sleep, but when he did, he dreamed an old dream, the one where the stars were whizzing past him like a snowstorm—where his mother was Princess Leia and they were hurtling through space, riding in a ship. Her hair curled like ram’s horns about her ears. She was holding baby Frankie, slipping a finger into his mouth, sliding pink gel over his gums, as Henry had watched her do when Frankie was teething. Then it was Henry’s own tongue gliding over her knuckle, her oval nails. It was as real as anything, her skin, her body, touching his again. But as close as they were, he still could not make out the features of her face. Between her Leia buns was a flat, smooth nothing. When he awoke, the taste of her finger in his mouth disappeared, and she was gone again.
“Rylan Bell,” he said, hoping that the sound of her name would bring back the memory of her face. He took a deep breath. He was going to say her name again, but he was afraid to wake up his bunkmates. He lay quietly, then, trying to picture her, until the sun came up.
That morning, Azi and Henry were still in their beds while everyone else had gone to breakfast. They were quiet, watching the dust float in the sunlight for a moment, listening to spoons against bowls and the chatter of the performers as they got their breakfasts off the meal truck.
“I’m sorry about the shit in your bed,” Azi said, when he finally sat up and pulled on his socks.
“Thanks.”
“It’s not you, really. Something’s up, though. They all know it.”
“With what?”
“Caleb left.”
“Adrienne is sick.”
Azi shook his head, mashing his heel into his massive boot. “That’s not the whole story. He met with Feely in Indianapolis. They’re not telling us, but I think we’re all out of a job.”
Henry sat up in his cot. “How do you know?”
“I don’t,” he said. “I’m guessing. Been thinking about it a lot.”
Azi finished tying his boots and glanced in the mirror, swiping his hand over his head as if smoothing hair he didn’t have. “Don’t talk about this,” he said, and left Henry alone in the trailer.
IN DETROIT, HENRY AND AZI watched the Delaflotes rehearse their flying before the show. Every time the Delaflotes paused, Azi would stop speaking to him. Caleb had left Azi in charge so if it seemed like Azi and Henry were buddies, the circus would turn on Azi, too, and then nothing would get done. Remy and Chuck passed Lola back and forth, a jagged bolt of black lightning in her tights and leotard.
“She’s a fox,” said Azi, as Lola arched her back, hanging by her legs from the trapeze.
Henry smiled. “You know anything about her? Sue said you know about everyone.”
“Hm. Sue. She should talk. No, I don’t know about Lola. Except she’s a fox.”
“She’s French. I know that.”
Azi snorted. “She’s French-American. When Feely and Feinstein folds, I’ll have to go back to Nigeria. She can stay here.”
“You can marry her and stay here, too. Be one of those strong men that pull cars and locomotives and shit.”
“I’m not that strong, kid.”
“You don’t want to go back?”
“No. But I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a green card. Caleb applies for me and the application disappears—they stick it in a box and bury it and forget about it. I think if you start digging anywhere in the country you’ll find a box with someone’s green card application in it. That’s what they do with them.”
“My teacher had one of those. He was Russian. But he was here for a long time.”
Now Chuck was the one being passed from hand to hand. Lola could catch, too, she and her brothers being not too different in size. When she caught him, and their hands and elbows collided with a slap, Chuck grunted, and Lola made a sharp “ah” noise. They did this every time.
Azi asked if Henry’s teacher was really Russian.
“Yes,” Henry said, and then Azi didn’t say anything else for a minute. When the Delaflotes were in the air again, he asked if Henry was trained in a school, like Kylie.
“We practiced in a s
chool,” said Henry, “but I wasn’t a student. Not officially.”
“You stole your Russian circus education.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Then you’ve always been as you are.”
“How?”
“Lucky,” he said.
Chuck slipped from Remy’s hands and plummeted into the net. Henry studied the fall—it was nothing like the kind of falling a clown would do. Clowns rolled and tumbled, compromised with gravity by working with it. Flyers surrendered to it, went limp and heavy as if they had died on the way down.
A clomping of hooves came from the left side of the tent. Lorne led Ambrosia in by her bridle. He wore riding boots and muddy overalls over his costume. He stopped before he reached the middle of the ring, surveying the space, then climbed onto the horse and dug his heels into her. She raised her head and broke into a high-kneed trot. Her shoulders flexed and her white mane rippled like a silk flag.
“What do you know about that one?” asked Henry.
“Man or horse?”
“Man.”
“Lorne’s not so bad,” said Azi. He pulled something from his pocket and started fiddling with it. They were little packets of explosives, the homemade version of those little poppers kids threw on the Fourth of July.
“Is he like Vroni and Jenifer? Circus freak by birth?”
“You ought to be careful who you call a freak, kid,” Azi said, making the little packets snap between his fingers. “Caleb isn’t around anymore.”
Henry snorted. “Like Caleb gives a shit about me.”
Azi looked up from his explosives, fixed Henry with eyes that were so black they seemed without pupils, without centers. And Henry remembered that though Azi was his friend, he was also what he was: big as a bear, pyromaniacal.
“Caleb likes you. I’ve known him a long time. You should be grateful for such a friend.”
Ambrosia reared up, took two steps on her hind legs. Lorne struggled to hold on to the reins.
Azi went back at the sawdust and gunpowder in his palm and sighed. “Lorne isn’t circus by birth. He was adopted by Bulgarian trick-riders when he was thirteen. I guess his mother wanted a kid, and his father’s balls were shot from all that time bouncing around on top of a horse. So Lorne can ride. But he isn’t great at it. He isn’t great at anything.”
“If he isn’t great at it why is he here?”
“He loves the animals. Let me tell you, he told me this thing, about when he was in the circus with the Bulgarians, one of their horses got attacked. These boys rushed it with jackknives and yo-yos and took its eye and its lip. Broke its jaw, its leg … who knows why? Who could explain such a thing? But Lorne, he went after those boys. Chased them for hours, he said. And Lorne, he can’t lie about this stuff. Trust me, that guy doesn’t have the kinda brain that can make something like that up. When he got back, his parents told him that they had called the ASPCA to take the horse away and fix it up, and he believed them. He believes them to this day,” Azi said and shook his head. “Hours. Can you believe it? Over a horse. He never caught them.”
“Doesn’t that just mean that he’s crazy? What would he have done if he caught the kids?”
Azi waved his hand as if Henry was being ridiculous. “The reason his parents told him that the ASPCA took away that horse is because he was too tenderhearted to know they probably shot the thing in the head soon as the crowds were gone. And he still is.”
ON THE CIRCUS’S LAST NIGHT in Detroit, Henry prepared to run away. Azi and the others were afraid of what would happen to them if the circus disbanded, but Henry, after the second broken mirror and the shit in his bed, was ready for another end.
He went to the trailer where Sue, Kylie, and Lola Delaflote slept. He planned to snatch Sue’s keys again. He figured he would just drive and see where he ended up. If it was somewhere good, he might consider staying there.
He slipped inside their trailer without a sound. It was dark except for the light of a neighboring campfire coming through the windows. The dogs, three piled at the end of Sue’s bed, and three on the floor beside it, lifted their heads when he entered. He cringed at the jangle of the tags around their necks. To keep them from jumping off the bed to greet him, he sated them with scratches behind their curly ears, while their pom-pom tails beat the bed in muffled rhythmic thuds. They licked the sweat from the palm of his hand.
Sue’s keys were on the floor, in a cluster of personal items that included her canvas wallet and a pile of pins she used to restrain her hair. As he bent to pick them up, his gaze fell on Kylie’s bare arm, which was slung over the side of the bed opposite Sue’s. The tips of Kylie’s fingers grazed the floor and her shoulder blade jutted out from beneath a thin blanket.
He noticed she looked stronger. Her arms were still lean, but her biceps were more defined, and her forearms were thicker. What had she been doing to get this way? Push-ups? Pull-ups? Handstands? Maybe she’d decided to cushion herself a little more, provide her skeleton with a shield of muscle. Whatever she was doing was working to make her a better clown. She was doing well. Getting a lot of laughs. Getting hurt less.
At the base of her neck was a silver clasp, a shining circle with tiny letters that read Tiffany & Co. Maybe also a present from her rich grandfather, or her parents. Seeing this didn’t fill Henry with the kind of envy or bitterness it might have a month ago—because so far, no loaded, doting family had shown up to see Kylie perform. He kept expecting people with monocles and fur coats, or at least designer jeans and fresh facelifts, to rush her after the show and shower her in praise. It had not happened yet.
He had the urge to touch her fingers.
Like he’d suspected from the beginning, it was best to keep his distance from her, that they would both do better work and be happier if he let her be. Still. It was hard for him not to imagine that she was lonely—that, like him, she wouldn’t mind if she woke up to someone holding her hand and admiring her. He knew this was the kind of thinking that got him into the whole Adrienne mess. Still.
He left the keys on the floor and slipped back out through the door. Because, if he left, Adrienne would be disappointed. And what if, without Henry to compete with and hate, Kylie slacked off? And what if, somehow, the shit in his bed made him a better clown? What if this was exactly where he belonged, after all?
He paced back and forth outside the trailers, grinding his teeth. The energy that made him want to run or destroy something was the same energy that propelled him though his acts, through his stretches, the energy that Christiakov had told him to make for himself. Now it had nowhere to go.
He walked away from camp and found himself climbing a tree, just to keep moving. The limbs creaked and there were spiders and ants that scurried over his hands and feet as he bore himself upward, but he climbed fast, another rehearsal for his angel act.
Near the top, Henry heard a pop like thunder, and the branch beneath him broke off, separating from the tree with a burst of splinters. The only reason he didn’t go down with it was that he had a firm grip on the branch above him. He hung there, thinking of letting go, thinking of Jackie Chan, of the epic fall. It would be a simple thing, he thought. Lift two fingers and that would do it.
But it wouldn’t be epic if there was no one there to see it, would it? You could hardly call that art. You would have to call it a theatrical suicide, suicide with a quirky punch.
Not that again.
Then he would be Pierrot, a sad idiot, a stock character.
He pulled himself back onto his branch and sat until the urge to fall or run or hurt someone subsided. Until it seemed foreign and distant, and really, kind of stupid.
CHAPTER 19
THE FIRST TIME ADRIENNE HAD surgery to remove her pituitary tumor, they’d entered her skull through her forehead. She couldn’t describe to Caleb what it looked like or felt like, even though she had been conscious for the surgery. That time, the surgery had been invasive and risky, the tumor probing its way into her “cavern
ous sinus,” which sounded to Caleb like a spacious place with plenty of room to house a tumor and a surgeon’s instruments while he dug the thing out. This was not the case. A cavernous sinus was a bad place for a tumor to get to, a place where a surgeon and his instruments had to be especially precise. Doing a surgery like this, Caleb figured, would be like recreating a Van Gogh with a child’s watercolor brush, knowing that if your stroke was off by half a millimeter, someone could die.
This time, they would not open her skull, but go right in through her nose, pluck the tumor out, and stitch her up.
“Trust me,” the doctor had said. “Your surgeon will walk into the operating room whistling, because he knows you’re an easy fix, another feather in his cap.”
And this time, she’d follow up with her appointments. She would let herself be monitored for any future growth, because if she pulled what she did last time, and didn’t get her GH levels checked regularly, she’d end up right back here again.
There was no need to be afraid, but Adrienne couldn’t seem to hang on to Caleb’s arm tight enough during the surgical consultation. He had to turn to her once and say, “Honey, you’re hurting me.”
In pre-op, the surgeon smiled at them, and it seemed the doctor was right; he looked like he would go into the operating room whistling. Caleb tried to be comforted by this, but it was unnerving, the idea that a surgeon was a person, one who might wake up with a Madonna song in his head and whistle it right before he sent a camera and a blade up his wife’s nostril.
Just before they took Adrienne to the operating room, Caleb told her that he loved her. He said that he would never, never leave her, and then was told politely by a nurse that he could head to the waiting room now. Caleb squeezed his wife’s hand in defiance, but Adrienne peeled his fingers away and the nurses pushed her bed down the hall.
For three hours, Caleb was welcome by the hospital to pray in their interfaith meditation center, to buy things in the gift shop, or to pace the mile-long footpath that flanked the hospital. He was also welcome to sit in the waiting room and eat five consecutive PayDays, which was what he chose to do. He thought primarily about spinal meningitis (the remotest and most horrifying risk of Adrienne’s surgery), and about love, and how he would live if he lost Adrienne. He wouldn’t have her forever, maybe twenty more years at the most, but Jesus, if he could get even another month of her, his healthy, joyful wife, then he would damn well make something of it.
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