by Ann Claycomb
The night before dress rehearsal, Robin woke abruptly from a dream he hadn’t had in years, in which he carried his baby daughter on a puzzled and then panicked search of their tiny house, looking for Moira. He got out of the bed and made his way to the bathroom, nearly tripping on Tae’s tote bag beside the sofa. He’d come in for the tech and dress rehearsals, plus final meetings with the orchestra and the conductor and a composing master class that the conservatory had asked him to do. It was too long a stay for a hotel to make sense, so he’d rented a short-stay apartment. Tae had gotten in last night. The apartment was attractive, open-concept, and high-ceilinged. In the dark, though, it was as disconcerting as any unfamiliar space.
Robin ran water into a glass and drank it, reminding the shadowy figure in the mirror that an anxiety dream at this moment hardly needed analysis. Naturally he was nervous about how the show would go, how it would be received, as well as worried about Kathleen, who was clearly doing so well, flying so high, that it felt like both an imperative and a betrayal to wonder what would happen to her when the show was done. These present anxieties had simply gotten tangled up with his old fear for Moira, which had haunted him long before and after he’d actually lost her.
He got back into bed, where memories insinuated themselves around the fragments of the already-fading dream. He had carried Kathleen with him that morning, from the bedroom as soon as she woke screaming for Mama, out to the main room and the little kitchen, then outside and around back, still no sign of Moira until he saw her footprints on the beach. Even then he hadn’t been worried enough, because Moira went down to the beach every day, every chance she had. But that morning he’d stood there, holding the wailing baby, and stared at the footsteps that didn’t make sense. How could they go in the direction they went, up into the rocks and then out toward the sea again, the impressions deeper in the soft wet sand of the last few yards, as if she were weighted down? How could her footsteps go out right into the water and not come back?
Robin turned onto his side, putting a hand in the indentation of Tae’s waist to feel her breathe. He used to hold Moira this way. After she’d had a bad spell and had drifted into an exhausted sleep, it had comforted him to feel her breath rising and falling under his palm. But she’d slipped away from him easily enough that last time. He hadn’t even known she’d left the bed. The feeling that threatened with that recollection—of waking to Kathleen screaming and feeling the bed empty beside him, long empty, no warmth or smell of Moira lingering—was a black, howling fear that made sleep impossible, because Robin couldn’t tell himself to stop being irrational. Tae might not slip away or stop breathing beneath his hand in the night, but it could happen. It had happened to his wife. It could happen to his daughter. She seemed to have slipped free from the curse for now but she had not really escaped it. Believing she had was not rational. You didn’t just slip away from a curse that drove a young mother out before dawn to fill her pockets with stones and walk into the sea.
THE NEXT MORNING, nerves jangling from little sleep and too much coffee, Robin walked over to the girls’ apartment. Harry let him in, a half-eaten bowl of cereal in her hand.
“Kathleen’s getting dressed,” she said. “And before I forget, I have your tickets for tomorrow—you and Tae, Mr. Charpentier, and the Dolans.” She gestured to five tickets fanned out on the kitchen counter. Robin picked them up.
“I tried out a couple of different rows when we started rehearsals in the space,” Harry said, “to see which one had the best sightlines. I got you row five. And the ticket office keeps trying to get them back, so I must have been right about those being good seats.”
“Why do they want them back?” Robin asked. He slid the tickets into his wallet.
“Because we’re sold out,” Harry said, “and as director I’m only allowed two myself. So they keep trying to tell me I’ve reserved too many—my parents are coming, of course, and they’ll be sitting next to you. And I have to remind them, again, that these are for the composer and the underwriter and—what’s Allan’s job again?—the artistic director of a major opera company that might want to stage the production.”
Robin eyed her as she ate the last of her cereal. “You’re doing an excellent job of sounding aggrieved about this situation,” he said.
“Aren’t I?” She grinned at him. “Sold out! All of opening weekend! It’s so inconvenient.”
Robin laughed. “It certainly is.”
Harry put her cereal bowl in the sink. “Also I got you aisle seats, not center row, in case you and Jim have to get up.”
“Why would we have to get up?”
Harry raised her eyebrows. “To take a bow? To come up on stage and let people clap for you?”
“We can just stand up where we are,” Robin protested. “Jim and I don’t need to come up onstage.”
“No way,” Harry said. “First of all, it’s an opera, for God’s sake. You wrote all the music. You don’t get off with discreet recognition.”
“Hear, hear!” Kathleen added from the bedroom.
“And second of all?” Robin asked.
“Second of all,” Harry said, smiling slightly, “Jim Dolan is too short.”
“Too short? For what?”
Kathleen popped her head and shoulders around the door frame, her braid swinging. “Daddy! Don’t be dense!” She vanished again.
“How am I being dense?”
Harry laughed. “Kathleen has pointed out that in the event of a standing ovation—”
“When there is a standing ovation!” Kathleen called.
“The audience wouldn’t be able to see Jim. So,” she said, shrugging, “you and Jim have to sit on the aisle so you can easily get up to the stage.”
Robin shook his head. “I’m glad to see someone is confident about tomorrow night.”
BUT AS HE and Tae sat in the dark later that morning during the dress (he took the seat Harry had selected for him because she was right—it was very good) he remembered Kathleen’s fizzing assurances about a standing ovation and could not argue with her. This thing they’d made together, the three of them—it was hard to believe that they had made it, that he had written those notes, those phrases. It wasn’t just that it was good, better than good; it seemed to unfold inevitably, such that every choice on the stage, every line sung or movement made, seemed to be the right choice, the only choice. And seeing the opera unfold was very strange after having only heard it, but heard it so deeply and so much. The choreography brought out dark undercurrents that were at once mesmerizing and difficult to watch. Finding the Mermaid washed up on the sand, the prince removed his cloak and tenderly lifted her onto it, singing, “You poor thing, you beautiful girl. You’ll catch cold out here, the sand will rub your white skin raw. Take my cloak, wrap up in that. It’s velvet, feel it, how soft it is, how warm?” Robin remembered writing those lines, fitting the music to words Harry composed. He had wanted to capture both tenderness and powerful attraction, but also a certain pat quality to echo the shallow reassurances the prince was offering, so inadequate to the agony the mermaid was experiencing in her new human body. He had thought he’d succeeded, but now onstage it went further, into a frightening dissonance between word and action as, instead of wrapping the mermaid in his cloak, the prince unbuttoned his pants and lowered himself onto her as the lights went down.
Robin flinched. Onstage Tom helped Kathleen to her feet and they slipped into the wings. Several black-clad techies crept out to shift the scene from the beach to the prince’s castle.
“Staging not working for you?” Tae asked quietly.
“I wouldn’t say that. What did you think?”
“I’m not sure it would have worked any other way,” she said. “I’ve wondered how you were going to get us to the point of knowing that she has to kill him, of siding with her when she does.”
“Well, I’m not sure I had anything to do with it.”
Robin was glad when the lights came back up on the castle, airy drap
ery and piled cushions signifying decadent royalty. He knew all about how a piece could slip away from you, for good or for bad. When he’d been a pianist, there had been nights when he’d lost himself in a song, forgotten the audience entirely, only to look up and find people listening with eyes shut and tears on their cheeks. When he’d begun composing, he’d known he was good when the professor had played a piece for the class and Robin hadn’t recognized his own work at first.
With this opera, though, had he done that essential stepping outside of himself that made the piece more than the sum of its parts, or was that all Harry’s contribution, or the singers’ gifts? He wished it didn’t matter, but he sat tense and coiled in his seat as the mermaid acclimated to life at the castle and accepted the prince as her lover. The mermaid sang of the terrible pain in her feet and in her mouth, her voice made to sound in danger of fraying by the trick of a taut, minor scale that would have been impossible for many vocalists. Into her silences and sometimes overtop her—he couldn’t hear her, after all; to him she was mute—the prince sang of his feeling of protectiveness for her, and of the sexual obsession that he justified as part of that protection. His voice was occasionally impassioned, but grew only more beautiful in those moments, sung in the sweet spot of the tenor range and never flawed by uncertainty or pain.
Watching the two of them face off on the stage, he chasing her, often looming over her (and that was a neat trick, considering that Tom was barely Kathleen’s height), was so unsettling that after a few minutes, Robin shut his eyes and just listened. Yes, the tension was there in the music, not just in the words or the dance of seduction taking place onstage. He was ashamed of his relief, and then abruptly, remembering his dream, ashamed of what might have subconsciously informed the music he wrote for these two. He had held Moira as she cried from the pain, or simply lay in bed shivering from it, and had wanted her. His tenderness for her had always been tangled up with desire for her. He thought he’d forgotten that part of life with Moira, the endless, guilty longing for her even as she unraveled and slipped away.
Robin opened his eyes to watch the prince telling the mermaid he was going to marry a foreign princess. The liquid quality of Tom’s voice, the ease of it, made his blithe assurances nearly plausible, sung along a melodic line that was almost sprightly, almost a pop tune, but less interesting than it could have been, a little repetitive, a little cold.
The prince sang, “You mustn’t worry, this doesn’t mean anything for you, you’ll always be my little love.” He stroked the mermaid’s hair as she crouched at his feet. It was like he was petting his favorite dog. As the brief aria ended with her still huddled beside him, he crooned the last line—“Do your feet hurt, my dear? Shall I take you to bed?”—and leaned over, not to lift her, but to sweep her hair aside to kiss the back of her neck. The lights went down on him crouched over her, predatory, with a spotlight on the triangle of the mermaid’s exposed white skin. As the prince’s notes faded, the cellos were set briefly adrift from the rest of the orchestra to heighten the strange richness of their sound. The music of the deep sea that had opened the first act washed over the tableau.
Robin was on his feet before the house lights were up, turning restlessly in place and unable to look at Tae. He wanted to hit something, to hide his face, to shout or curse or run—somewhere. Away. Tae grabbed his wrist.
“Rob.”
He ran his hand through his hair, still not looking at her, not even facing her.
“Robin,” she said. “Do you want to go?”
He shook his head. Yes. No. “What is wrong with me?”
“You’re brilliant,” Tae said, and when he whipped his head to glare at her, to shake her off, he froze at the expression on her face. She was not crying, not Tae, but her eyes were warm and very bright with what he recognized at once as mingled tenderness and desire.
“Did you think I was making fun?” she asked softly. “I’ve worked with brilliant, remember? I’ve played beside it, played for it. I’ve even been brilliant once or twice. I know what it does to a conductor or a musician when they come off the stage after pulling off something like that.” She waved her free hand at the stage. “And you’ve had to sit and watch it after it’s done. It must feel . . . strange.”
He leaned down and kissed her, too hard, they didn’t do this in public for God’s sake, but she went up on her tiptoes and gave as good as she got, tipped her head back when he moved his mouth to her jaw and her throat. By the time she pushed gently on his forearms to ease away from him, he felt saner, even if he did want to grab her again.
“You should go see Kathleen,” she said, “and Harry.”
Robin grinned at her, feeling himself loosening into his body as he did. “Not right now I shouldn’t,” he said. “I might need a minute.”
Tae laughed but then peeked over his shoulder and stopped.
“Harry’s coming,” she murmured. She stepped in front of him, which would have made him grin more, given the reason he needed Tae as a shield, but then he saw Harry’s face and felt his hilarity and arousal drain away.
“It’s fine,” Harry said, hurrying up to them. “Everything’s fine. Kathleen’s fine. She just can’t breathe.”
KATHLEEN WAS PACING her dressing room. She’d changed into the blue dress she’d wear for the rest of the opera, for the wedding and then the murder. The little room smelled of sweat and perfume and also unmistakably of salt water, so much that Robin looked at Harry and Tae. Could they smell it too? Harry caught his eye as he sniffed again and nodded slightly, her face still strained. Yes, she could. Whatever that meant.
“No, no, I can breathe fine,” Kathleen was saying. “I can. And it’s going away already.”
“What’s going away?” Robin asked. He reminded himself that what appeared to be the hectic flush of fever along her cheeks was just stage makeup. Nonetheless, she was clearly breathing funny, drawing in deep, audible breaths with the visible effort of someone having an asthma attack.
“The pain,” Kathleen said. She made a face. “I was so mad, that’s all, or I wouldn’t even have said anything.” She shot an almost resentful glance at Harry. “It’s been so much better, the pain going away completely the whole time I’m onstage, but then today, for the dress, it decides to come back.”
“The pain in your feet?” Robin asked.
“Yes,” Kathleen said, “only—” She hesitated. “It felt different. It went up my whole legs for a while there.”
Robin remembered Tom helping her to her feet. He hadn’t thought anything of it. “But it’s going away now?”
She nodded. “Gone, see?” She held her skirt away from her body and took several dramatic strides toward him. “Fine.”
He nodded. “And the breathing?”
“No, I told you,” she said, “I can breathe fine. I could always breathe fine. Didn’t I sound like I was breathing fine?” The frown on her face was such pure frustrated diva that Robin smiled.
“You know you did,” he said. “But you look like you’re having trouble breathing.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Kathleen said. “It did start to hurt while I was singing, but almost as if I was breathing too well, as if my ribs were going to crack or—” She broke off and shuddered slightly. “It felt weird. That’s why I told Harry. It just felt . . .” She turned to Harry, who was standing clutching her clipboard to her chest, and seemed to finally register Harry’s pale, set face.
“Oh no,” Kathleen said, her voice softening. “No, no, it’s all right. It’s fine,” she said, moving to Harry and putting her arms around her. “I shouldn’t have gotten mad at you,” she crooned. “I’m fine now, really.”
Harry burst into tears, dropped her clipboard, and hid her face on Kathleen’s shoulder.
Tae put a hand on Robin’s arm. “Four’s a crowd,” she murmured.
He followed her out into the hall and turned to shut the door, even as the stage manager came striding past, slapping her hand on dressing room do
ors and bellowing, “Five minutes, people! This is five! Curtain up in five.” She skirted around Robin and Tae to roar her warning into Kathleen’s dressing room, but Kathleen herself stuck her head out.
“Got it, Abby,” she said. “Thanks.”
Abby nodded and kept going. Kathleen turned to Robin and Tae. “She’s got a future as a drill sergeant, don’t you think?”
“I think she’s got a future as a stage manager,” Tae said.
“Kathleen—” Robin began. She held up a hand.
“Hey, my hands hurt too!” she said brightly, then shook her head when Robin took a step forward. “Daddy,” she said, “I’m fine. I think now everything’s starting to hurt from sheer nerves. It’s hard to sustain this level of brilliance in one body, you know?” She gave him her best preening smile and he laughed despite himself.
“I’m sure it must be very taxing,” he agreed. And now he’d have to wait until later to ask if she was joking about her hands hurting, or if, despite all her assurances, he should go back to being frightened for her, and about what. He heard Harry blowing her nose behind the door. Someone, anyway, had never stopped worrying.
“I’ve got to go talk to her a little more, or she’s not going to make the five-minute call,” Kathleen said.
Robin nodded. “We’ll be in our seats,” he said. “You know, row five, on the aisle.”
“Go practice getting up and taking your bow,” Kathleen said as she closed the door.
“I DON’T KNOW who to be more worried about,” Robin said as they sat back down, “Kathleen or Harry.”
“Harry is stretched thin,” Tae said. “We talked about it a little last night.” She slid her tote bag under the seat in front of her. “She was worried about the knife.”
“The knife?”
“I think,” Tae said carefully, “she wanted to make sure it didn’t make its way into the performance. Remember when they left our house and we thought she’d left it there, with us? Apparently she thought she had too.”
“She—” Robin checked himself. He didn’t need Tae to spell out the implications. “Where is it?” he asked instead.