“What about this one?” I recalled myself saying, holding another black dress up. She rolled her eyes and groaned.
“Everything you own is black,” she complained, fishing through my closet. “Why not anything red? Or orange or even yellow?”
“Are those my colors?”
She flicked her beautiful eyes at me. “Your skin is olive, your hair and eyes are dark brown.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
She found a white dress lurking in my shoe rack. “Aha! Here we go.”
There’s a price tag still hanging from the dress. A Stella McCartney, bought on a whim. Back then, my motto was If you can live without it, live without it—unless it’s Stella. Poppy thrust the dress against me.
“This is it,” she insisted.
I shook my head. “It’s far too tight!”
More eye rolling. “Mother, you’re skinny. Flaunt it, okay?”
And now, as her precocious words chimed in my ears, I spied something at the bottom of the box. Something I hadn’t even remembered packing. A white puddle. I reached in and pulled it out, noticing the label. It was the same dress. I hadn’t worn it the night that she insisted upon it. Stella or not, it wasn’t me, I’d argued, to her annoyance.
Now, I strip down to my underwear and slip the dress over my head. Cut elegantly below the knee, one-sleeved, with a modestly straight neckline just under my collarbone and a discreet gold zipper on the seam, the dress still fit perfectly. And it still isn’t me.
At seven o’clock a car horn sounds. I grab my briefcase and talisman and run outside to find Michael standing beside a taxi. He is wearing a navy suit and a white shirt without a tie, his hair combed back.
“Evening,” he says, holding the door open.
I pause, utterly certain that I chose the wrong clothing.
“You look lovely, Dr. Molokova,” he says, giving me a small bow. It’s as if he’s read my mind.
I smile back at him and slide into the backseat.
At the Grand Opera House I tell Michael to go ahead and find our seats while I search for a staff member to take me backstage. I want to be certain that Alex is all right. I spot Jojo’s red head bobbing among the hordes in the lobby and call her name. She turns at the sound, and I wave.
“Is everything okay?” I ask once we find a quiet corner close to the stairwell. “With Alex, I mean.”
“Absolutely fine with Alex,” she tells me. Her face looks strained. “But we’re a man down. Well, a girl, really. Katie, who plays Hamlet? I mean, thank the Lord we’ve an understudy to fill her shoes, but can you imagine? On opening night?”
“What happened?”
She dusts down her dress, a strapless cerise number made of swimsuit fabric, a garish orange feather boa draped around her shoulders. Her gray eyes show that she’s tired and anxious. “Had an accident, poor thing. Broke her leg in six places falling down a flight of steps. Anyway, we’re fine now. And there’s a casting director from London here tonight. Roz Mardell, have you heard of her?”
I shake my head. She tsks in disapproval.
“Roz is casting for the new Tarantino Hamlet, can you imagine?” She fans herself. “I think Alex has an excellent chance.”
“You do?” I felt a sudden mixture of excitement and dread. Excitement at the opportunity this would afford Alex, but dread at what impact it might have on his fragile emotions.
“You know his aunt is here?” Jojo asks me. “She’s upstairs in a box if you want to say hello.”
A teenage boy in a black T-shirt bearing the REALLY TALENTED KIDS logo waves at Jojo from the other side of the foyer.
“I better go,” she says. “You look beautiful in that dress, by the way.”
“Thanks.” I watch her squeeze her way to the other side of the foyer before heading up the stairs to my seat in the Grand Circle.
Along the crescent of filled seats I spot Michael’s blond head. I inch my way across handbags and legs just as the lights begin to dim and take my seat next to him.
“Everything all right?” he whispers, leaning toward me. I catch his smell—the lime tang of aftershave, turf, and macadamia nuts—and forget why he should be asking me if everything is all right. I smile and nod, tugging the hem of my skirt self-consciously across my knees.
The curtain rises to the thrum of a drumbeat from the orchestra pit. A soft mist wafts across the stage, where a figure holding a gun is wandering.
“Who’s there?” a boy’s voice calls fearfully. Another figure backs his way across the stage in the direction of the boy, a hand resting on the holster at its waist. The figures collide.
“Francisco?”
“Bernardo?”
“What are you doing out here in the dead of night?”
“Taking over guard duty from you, you jackass. It’s past midnight.”
“It is?”
Another figure crosses the stage, a boy I recognize instantly as Alex. Dressed in a camouflage suit, his brown hair slicked into an old-fashioned side part, and his feet in heavy black boots, he no longer resembles the nervous, timid boy whom I’ve been treating. Instead, he walks with an air of authority, and when he speaks, his voice is deeper, shot through with command. A wind whips the mist up around him, the sound of strings rising up from the orchestra pit.
“Francisco—where are you off to?”
A moment’s banter. “Bernardo’s on guard duty. Good night.”
A second figure appears behind Alex, thumping his hand heavily on his shoulder to make him jump.
“Marcellus!” Alex shouts. “Speak first next time!”
Marcellus raises his gun to indicate he is armed, then nods at Bernardo. “You’re more on edge than usual, Bernardo. Has the ghost been spotted?”
Bernardo shakes his head. “Not tonight.”
Marcellus turns to Alex. “Horatio says he won’t believe what we’ve seen till he’s seen it himself. Isn’t that right, Horatio?”
Alex pulls the strap of a rifle over his head and sets the weapon down in foliage by his feet. He settles down as if to sleep. “No such thing as ghosts, you idiots.”
“There is,” Bernardo insists, crouching to gather leaves and twigs together before creating a fire—or in this case, a strip of red material blown upward by a small wind machine, lit up from behind with a light. “We saw it last night, just before one. Looks just like the king.”
Marcellus crouches down. “It is the king.”
From the corner of my eye I see Michael turning to me. Half of his face is in darkness, the other illuminated by the spotlight on stage. He throws me a smile in praise of Alex, which I return. The worry that had tugged at my heart—this is Alex’s first public performance, at a time when his private life is anything but calm—is easing now, and at the sound of a slow melody rung out by a piano in the orchestra pit a familiar song rises up in my head. Poppy’s song, the one she was composing the night she died. My mouth goes dry. The events on the stage before me vanish as Poppy’s face rises back into my mind.
But instead of recalling her by my side, instructing me on the rules of fashion and laughing at my decision to wear that blouse with those shoes, I feel her absence so keenly I have to choke back a sob.
“There it is!” I hear Alex shout. “A ghost! Oh, it harrows me with fear and wonder.”
My thoughts enter a territory of my memories that is fenced off with rolling barbed wire, with armed guards at various posts keeping trespassers at a considerable distance. I ignore them, crossing beyond the familiar plains of my memories with Poppy to the day I learned I was pregnant. Poppy’s father was an acquaintance from medical school. Daniel Shearsman, an American researcher spending a semester at University College London. We were never involved, at least not beyond a memorable weekend in Switzerland that started off in the lobby of a ratty convention center for a postdoctoral conference and ended up in a minimalist hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. Daniel never knew about Poppy. I was eleven weeks’ pregnant before I found out, a
nd when I did, I kept her to myself like a guilty secret.
“This ghost,” Alex shouts onstage, his voice trembling. “This ghost is an omen. A sign that something is not right in our nation. Something troubles it.”
I walk on past the guards of that territory of my past, recalling months of sleeping on friends’ spare mattresses throughout my pregnancy in case my mother—in the thick of her own psychosis—harmed the baby; then the birth; Poppy’s small, creamy face presented to me in the nurse’s arms, eyes squinted as if she was closing them against bright sunlight; bringing her home to my student flat, both of us curling up each night in a narrow bed against the window; Edith, the eccentric old spinster downstairs who offered to look after Poppy while I finished my studies; the first day I noticed something was wrong with Poppy. Not wrong—different. It was the day Edith told me she couldn’t look after Poppy anymore.
“Why?” I asked at the time, bewildered.
Edith’s gray eyes had always sparkled when I dropped Poppy off at her apartment, but lately her expression at the door had grown troubled. “She killed my fish,” Edith stuttered, blinking back tears of disbelief. I thought of the large tropical fish tank Edith kept in her tiny sitting room, in which swirled a large purple ribbon that Edith had proudly informed me was a Japanese fighting fish.
“Swiped him clean out of the tank, like a cat,” Edith continued, her lips trembling. “She just stood there and watched him gasp for air on the sideboard.”
“I am so sorry,” I said, horrified. I turned to Poppy. She was standing by my side, so easily bored that she was already doing a little dance and tugging at my arm to leave. I bent and cupped her small chin, turning her face up to mine. I could see Daniel’s face in hers, that high forehead, the dark curls bouncing off her shoulders.
“Poppy, tell Edith you are very sorry and we will buy her a new fish.”
Poppy rolled her eyes away from mine and continued to dance and bounce. Edith shook her head at me. “There’ve been other things,” she said gravely. “Little things, but strange …” Her eyes darted down at Poppy, as if she was something unclean.
“She’s only three years old,” I reasoned, pulling Poppy away from Edith’s legs. She was pretending to claw at her now, snarling and laughing.
“I’m sorry.” Edith had stepped backward into the darkness of her hallway, closing her door for good.
And I remembered, all these years later, that Poppy had never apologized.
“That it should come to this …”
I glance at Alex on stage, noticing that he has managed to keep his body facing the audience while addressing his fellow actors. His dialogue is crisp and clear. I look down at the white hem of my dress bunched tightly in my fists, realizing that now, in my forties, I am finally living a normal life. A life without excuses for Poppy’s behavior. A life without apologies to the parents of Poppy’s classmate who sobbed after she lashed out, without pleas to countless GPs to find the right treatment, without rejection after rejection to potential lovers because my daughter needed a stability that a new relationship would rupture. I’m living a normal life. A life without Poppy.
And, to my horror, a part of me is relieved.
When the first scene ends, a sudden burst of applause startles me out of the past. I give a small start, holding my hands up as if I’d just landed in my seat. Michael turns to me.
“Are you all right?”
The stage clears, the orchestra picking up the theme tune as the wedding procession of Claudius and Gertrude begins to roll from the wings. I get to my feet. “I think I just need some fresh air …”
I stumble past the handbags and bent legs toward the exit, pushing through the doors to the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time to the lobby downstairs. I ignore staff who ask if I wanted to buy snacks and souvenirs, pushing past a queue bristling at the ticket desk toward the front doors. Outside, I take off my shoes, relieved by the feel of the cold, wet pavement, the indifference of loud, busy traffic. I walk a little distance away from the doors and lean my head against the cool wall.
“Anya?”
I turn to see Michael at the entrance, his suit jacket blowing open in the wind. He strides toward me.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” His face is creased in concern. I turn away, anxious for him to leave. I don’t want to have to explain myself, and lying makes me miserable.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I just felt a little hot, that’s all.”
He nods, but the worry in his eyes doesn’t fade. There is a moment when he should get the hint and go back inside. He doesn’t.
“Alex was great, wasn’t he?” He grins, plucking at the thin straws of conversation. I try to return his enthusiasm, but before I can speak I feel a sob form in my throat and my eyes well up. I raise a hand to my eyes, embarrassed.
“I’m fine,” I mutter. “Really. Go on, you’re missing the show.”
I glance out at the traffic, shivering a little in the sweep of cold air thrown up by the stream of cars, watching the lights of the Opera House dance on each new shining vehicle. Michael is still standing there, hands at his sides, watching me. I can see the lines under his eyes, the slight fuzz of gray stubble around his jaw. I want to say please, leave me alone, but he steps forward. I stiffen, startled by the look of pain in his eyes. Without a word, he lifts a hand to my cheek. His thumb gently and deliberately rests across the scar inflicted by Poppy. I search his eyes, wondering what he is doing. It is as if he has ventured as close to the line I have drawn between our professional relationship and an intimate relationship as he possibly can. He doesn’t move forward to kiss me, doesn’t speak. He simply holds his hand there, his eyes intense, burning into mine.
After a few moments he lowers his hand and walks back inside.
17
“REMEMBER ME”
ALEX
Dear Diary,
I did NOT do this to myself, but everyone here thinks I did and I am really fed up. I don’t know what happened. I feel so muddled and weird. Ruen wasn’t around at the time and all Bonnie did was scream. An ambulance came and carried me out in a stretcher. There were lots of people in the street but also lots of demons, too.
All the doctors at the hospital kept asking me “Alex, did you do this to yourself? Did you throw yourself up against the wall? Did you punch yourself in the face?” and then when I wouldn’t answer they asked me why I did it.
But something even weirder happened tonight, right when I was on stage.
I’ll start at the beginning.
It was like the craziest day all day in rehearsals, or I guess not all day but for about three hours before the curtain was going to come up and Jojo was getting sweaty and swearing a lot and everyone kept forgetting their lines. Katie didn’t show up and everyone was worried and finally Jojo told us Katie had had an accident and Aoife would be playing Hamlet. I thought about what Ruen had asked me to do to Katie’s mum and felt bad. He was right. And if I had’ve done what he said, Katie would have been okay.
Then Jojo found out that a casting director was coming, which made her even more stressed out. “Her name is Roz Mardell,” she kept saying, in case we met her and didn’t call her by the right name which would be embarrassing, Jojo said. “If she comes up to you, you shake her hand and compliment her on her outfit and mention that you would love to do an audition.” She fanned herself as if she might pass out. “One of you could end up in a film!”
How amazingly cool would that be? I thought, and I decided right then that I totally would act in films like all Jojo’s famous friends and when I was really famous I would come back to Belfast and run a theater company for kids, just like Jojo. But then I had a sinking feeling, as if a pit of quicksand had landed on my chest. There was no way I could ever end up in a film. I was just Alex with a crazy Mum.
Jojo made us all sit in a circle on the stage with our legs crossed and our hands on our knees and chant “Um,” which made me forget the sinking feeling and I started to
giggle. Then Liam changed the chant to “dumb” and someone else said “rum” and then it became “bum,” and everyone laughed.
Jojo said she’d hired professional makeup artists and technicians for opening night, which really made it all feel real, and then when the orchestra turned up I felt sick with excitement. I know there was over twenty of us in the play but somehow I couldn’t get it into my head that I was a part of something so cool. I had this feeling as if a warm wave of seawater had just passed over me, as if everything was going to be all right.
And then a second later it was as if another wave washed over me but it was icy cold and I had a thought in my head: what if it all goes wrong?
It was just after that thought that I saw Ruen. He was the Old Man, strutting around the front of the auditorium looking over a big black piano that someone had just wheeled in. I could tell he really loved this one because he kept looking inside it at the strings and running his horrible hands up and down the keys.
When the curtain went up all the nervousness left me. I closed my eyes and told myself I am Horatio, and then I forgot about all the stuff that had happened before. I lowered my voice and thought of the way Jojo said Horatio would speak and how important he was at the end in continuing Hamlet’s story.
The orchestra stopped tuning their instruments and all the people who were chatting in the audience went so quiet you would have thought they’d all gone home. But I knew they were there. The lights came on but just slightly. Everyone backstage went tense and nervous.
There were footsteps and shouts on stage. I heard Liam give his line.
Taking over guard duty from you, you jackass. It’s past midnight.
It was my turn to go on. I looked down at my costume, which was a soldier’s costume with shiny lace-up boots and a combat jumpsuit with medals from where I was meant to have done something brave. I had black marks smeared on my face and a big fake gun on my back. I took a deep breath. I stepped out into the spotlight.
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