A Tender Thing

by Emily Neuberger

  After their kiss, the music changed to something else, dark and beautiful, deep brass and cello, a minor key. It made Eleanor’s stomach churn in delicious apprehension.

  Eleanor could feel the audience with them. Her energy twisted, and she felt electrified. They held the kiss for another beat, feeling the suspension of the moment, and the audience’s eyes. Many of these people had never seen a kiss like this before. She felt her blood pound through her heart, felt the triumph of the moment. She knew then that no matter what love came into her life, this would be her most momentous kiss.

  When they pulled back, Luke quivered. They could not stop staring at each other. Molly couldn’t feel her feet and hands. Luke touched her lips.

  The music changed again, this time to something exciting, bubbling up with lots of percussion and strings and staccato brass.

  They began to sing.

  * * *

  Before the act one finale, Eleanor waited backstage. She was hit with a wave of anxiety so horrible that she had to grip her stomach to keep from heaving. Her breath was short.

  “You’re just nervous for the next scene,” Franny, her dresser, said. She helped Eleanor into a chair and directed her to hang her head between her knees.

  They were approaching the scene where Molly invites Luke to stay in her bed.

  Eleanor breathed deep. This was more than nerves. It was a wave of dread so severe that she fought not to moan. She imagined critics writing about her, articles that would go all the way back to Wisconsin, about her sordid actions onstage. They would write about how she kissed without a hint of chastity. How she directed Luke’s hand to her breast. How her nightgown slipped up to her thighs as she lay back on the bed. She imagined her parents reading the article over the breakfast table. She imagined them in church, the glares of parishioners.

  Another wave of nausea.

  “This scene has not bothered me in a long time,” she whispered to Franny.

  Franny gave Eleanor’s shoulder a squeeze. “You’re an actress, remember.”

  It was time for Eleanor to get back onstage. There was one moment where she was conscious of the audience, but then she heard Luke, calling for Molly, and she focused herself. All that mattered was Luke and being with him.

  The opening notes of “Morning ’Til Night” began to play. Her mind flashed to her audition, Don’s playing for her. She sang with every ounce of herself. When it came time to invite Luke to stay, she felt no fear.

  * * *

  “It’s going well,” Charles said during intermission. She heard rumblings from behind the curtain. Harry stood backstage in his suit.

  “The audience is with you.” Harry smiled, genuine emotion breaking through his controlled front. He looked ten years younger. “You’re all on fire out there.”

  He gripped Eleanor’s hands and kissed them, then did the same to Charles before exiting.

  “I never thought we’d get a real compliment out of the man,” she said.

  “Let’s not let it go to our heads.” Charles looked delighted. “Still have to get through act two.”

  * * *

  Act two was more challenging, beginning with the new song. But Molly’s thoughts and feelings came to her so readily. Eleanor understood why they’d rehearsed and rehearsed; she stepped into Molly like a skin. The costumes and music helped; she felt like a new person, and all of the emotions were there. She sang about doubting her relationship with Luke, questioned if she could give up her family.

  At the end, she realized that none of the things in her life would matter if she wouldn’t fight for them. She decided to run away with him.

  Racing backstage, Eleanor held out her arms for her costume change.

  A rush of cool air hit her back. The door to the alley was propped open.

  “Why is that open?” she asked Franny.

  “No time for that. You’ll miss your entrance,” Franny said. “We need to get you back onstage.”

  Franny zipped Molly’s navy dress. Otis rushed over to her and gave her the wedding ring she wore in the finale, which she slipped into her pocket to wait for the last scene. Under her breath, she murmured, “And, with you / Forever now, with you . . . ,” while she waited for him to retrieve the gun. The metal was freezing, and heavier than she remembered. Everything felt heightened that night, brighter, sharper, colder, more intense. Eleanor gulped some water and made it onstage in time for her scene with her parents, in which she is caught packing a suitcase. From that moment on, Eleanor had no breaks for the remainder of the show, until the curtain dropped.

  She argued with Duncan, her voice breaking as she told him he could not keep her. She wrenched the suitcase from him and raced out of the house, running back to her meeting place with Luke. She threw her arms around Luke and held on for a second, opening her eyes and looking backstage.

  Eleanor recognized a familiar shock of red hair. Her stomach lurched. But then the person moved into the shadows, and she had no time to worry about it; she turned back to Luke.

  “We’re never going to get away.” She pulled the gun out of the pocket of her coat. “I don’t want to use it. Just scare everyone a bit.”

  Luke shook his head. “God help us, Molly.”

  She grasped his hands. “Of course God will help us. God himself brought us together.”

  Molly pocketed the gun; they exited stage left, in time for the mob to enter stage right and cross. They sang, a layered collage of earlier music, the ensemble broken up into interlocking lines from the white chorus, the black chorus, Molly’s and Luke’s families. Don had woven together different melodies in an organized clash, so if the listener didn’t pay attention it sounded like chaos, but they could just as easily weed out every individual line. It brought chills down Eleanor’s back. The music swelled into a moment of cohesion, all the choruses making a magnificent chord.

  Molly and Luke ran across the stage, hand in hand. Just then, Molly’s uncle pulled out a knife and aimed it at Luke.

  Her hands were shaking; she gripped the gun with trembling hands and pointed it back at her uncle. “Don’t you dare!”

  The crowd went silent, the music cutting off in one staccato note that hung in the house in a ringing echo.

  Her father stepped forward, calling for Luke to let her go.

  Molly raised the gun again. “Don’t speak to my husband that way.”

  A ripple went through the audience. Molly heard it in the crowd before her, watched her father’s face crumple in pain and disgust.

  Protests erupted from the crowd, Luke’s family or friends, maybe; Molly didn’t hear them. The world had begun to blur.

  “You’re going to hurt someone,” Luke said to Molly. “Give me the gun, Molly, let’s get out of here!”

  She didn’t want to, but she reached the gun toward him.

  A moment of real life pierced through the scene. In Eleanor’s heightened state, her palms had gone sweaty. She fumbled the gun, and Charles lurched to catch it. Instead of gripping around the handle, his fingers splayed like a crab around the barrel and the bottom, grasping where he could. He jerked and was adjusting his grip, fighting not to drop the gun, when his finger pulled the trigger.

  It happened so fast that, in hindsight, Eleanor could not say for sure she even remembered it. She had not thought to pay attention.

  She felt the force of the explosion before she heard it, right in her abdomen. The sound was enormous, and painful, and it was several seconds before her brain processed it. Her awareness came like jumpy frames of a film, until she realized moments later that something had happened. An explosion, the sound of breaking glass, and then heat.

  Sparks rained down from above. Eleanor looked up, in a daze. At first all she noticed was the beauty, the flames around her. Her eardrums rang, and the world had gone quiet. Pieces of glass sprinkled the floor. Too slow, she reached up to cov
er her face. A shard pierced her cheek, right under her eye.

  Moving her arms away from her eyes, she looked at Charles. He was still, his hand on the gun, his eyes on the broken spotlight above them. A spark landed on the curtain behind Charles, then extinguished when it hit the flame-retardant fabric.

  Charles looked at her. Their eyes met, and she saw pure terror.

  “That’s a real gun!” someone yelled.

  Eleanor’s awareness snapped back into place. Someone in the audience let out a high peal, wrenching beneath her skin like claws. The audience seemed to collectively gasp, something she had only heard on television. After the initial scream, no one spoke. Tiny shimmers of fear ran through the crowd. Eleanor could see the audience members now that the spotlight had gone out, and she looked out into a sea of people gripping their seats, eyes wide and fixed on Charles.

  He gripped the gun until the flesh beneath his fingernails had gone white. Eleanor watched him look at the gun and then the broken spotlight above them, and then all around as if searching for a victim. The rest of the cast were all standing.

  “What happened?” she whispered to no one.

  Sounds began to rumble from the audience, first a sob, then another; before long, the cast had cracked their freeze. Someone screamed again, and then another yell. The petrified atmosphere shattered, and the audience broke into panic.

  “Get out of here!”

  “He’s got a real gun!”

  “He’s gonna shoot up the whole fucking place!”

  The cast began to run off the stage like lost mice, bumping into each other, falling, scrambling to their feet in an effort to get offstage. The audience was pure pandemonium—they were crawling over each other toward the door. Someone was speaking over the house microphone, but she couldn’t make out words. The screams masked everything. Charles gripped her shoulder, holding her in place, behind him.

  She looked out once more, and saw someone advancing toward the stage, arm raised.

  Eleanor screamed, clawed her fingers against Charles’s shirt, trying to pull him toward the wing. His feet didn’t budge, and they both stumbled.

  “Eleanor?” He was clearly in shock.

  “Get offstage!” She couldn’t speak; she screamed, her emotions coming straight out of her throat. “Charles! Go!”

  He was still rooted to the spot. In a fit of panic, she wrenched at the gun. “Give it to me, Charles!”

  It was as if he had been waiting for her instruction: he dropped it like a red coal. She caught the gun before it hit the floor and held it between her fingers. She had no idea what to do next; her heart was pounding and she looked left and right.

  The man coming toward the stage, was he still there? Was he going to shoot?

  She raised the gun up, toward the ceiling. “It’s all right!” she yelled. “It was a mistake! He’s not trying to hurt anyone!”

  Suddenly, someone grabbed her arms with a grip that almost caused her to drop the gun. She screamed. It was Rosie, her face an inch from Eleanor’s. She shook Eleanor by the arms and when that didn’t work, knocked her back with a slap.

  Rosie’s grip held fast. “Eleanor, get out of here. Move your feet.”

  “Give it to me.” It was Tommy. In her numbness, Eleanor didn’t realize how strange it was to see them onstage, and felt that she could relax now. Like Charles, she handed over the gun at once. Tommy pulled a lever on it, opened it up so metal bullets spilled into his hand. He swore, then slid the gun into his coat pocket.

  “Why was it loaded?” Eleanor asked. Rosie gave her another shake and pushed her toward the wings.

  Dimly, she was aware of the screaming crowd and police sirens swirling over it all. A voice, spoken over the house microphone, saying words she didn’t catch.

  Tommy grabbed Charles by the upper arm, wrenched him around, and pointed him toward the wing. “You! Get out or you’ll be shot!” Tommy shoved. Charles caught the momentum and began to run, his long legs gummy under his weight, like a foal.

  “Come on!” Rosie pushed her again. “We have to go!”

  But still Eleanor could not move. She stared out at the audience. Many of the seats were clear by now; red velvet reflected back at her as people pushed and shoved through the aisles to get out. The doors to the street had all been slung open, and beyond that, she saw red and blue lights flashing, spilling into the lobby.

  In this haze, she looked across the top of the crowd for Don. In all of this, she had not thought of him, but she could not leave without knowing where he was.

  Rosie was screaming her name. Eleanor knew she should move, but her legs did not obey. After another moment, Tommy grabbed her around the waist. He threw her over his shoulder, knocking the wind from her lungs, and carried her off the stage and into darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  You have nothing on him!” Eleanor slammed her hand on the desk.

  “He drew a gun on a crowd,” the officer said without expression, as if now that Charles was locked away the situation had become boring.

  “I had the gun first! You don’t even know how the show works,” Eleanor said. “Otis, our props master, gets the gun from a safe. He hands it to me. Charles takes it from me, onstage. How could he have gotten to it?”

  “Miss, if you don’t calm down, I’ll be tempted to throw you in there with him.”

  Eleanor was about to yell again when Rosie took her by the hand and led her to the plastic chairs against the wall.

  “I’ve got seventeen dollars,” Tommy said under his breath. “You two have anything?”

  Eleanor didn’t have her wallet. Rosie only had a beaded clutch with a five-dollar bill inside for emergencies.

  At the theater, Charles had had no way of protecting himself against arrest; hundreds of witnesses had seen him fire a gun. Backstage, police officers had taken the gun from Tommy and thrown Charles to the ground. With a knee to his back, the police arrested him despite insistence from a dozen cast members that it had to be a mistake.

  “Right now, we know he fired a gun in a theater.” Two officers had brought him out through the front door, displayed to a crowd of onlookers. Reporters took photos. The atmosphere was energetic and sharpened by fear and adrenaline, like a hunt. When Charles passed by the crowd, audience members booed and screamed foul things. Charles kept his head down as they pushed him into the car. Eleanor tried to follow, but Rosie held her and did not let go.

  It had taken an hour to break through the crowds surrounding the theater, and another forty minutes before an officer would speak to them. Rosie brought up the idea of going home to clean her rainy-day fund from her sock drawer, but Tommy wouldn’t let them separate. It was useless—even cleaning out their savings, they wouldn’t have enough to bail Charles out.

  They heard someone running down the hallway. The door swung open and a sweaty, panting Harry walked through. Eleanor could never remember being happy to see him before.

  “That gun was safe before the show,” Harry said to the cop. “I checked it myself.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Damn it, I’m the director. Who are you?”

  “Language, sir. I’m Officer Heizer.”

  “Well, Officer Heizer, you think I would allow a gun on my stage without taking all the precautions?” Harry’s slender body crouched over the desk like a feral cat. “That man is innocent. Did you even see what happened?”

  “Sir, I’ve been working all night, not attending plays.”

  “It’s not a play, it’s a musical. And if you had attended, you’d know that he could have done a lot more damage if he wanted to. This lady dropped the gun, he caught it, it went off and hit a spotlight. Thank God no one was hurt. The question is—who loaded the gun?”

  “Someone was backstage.” The memory came back to Eleanor as she spoke; the events of the night had jumbled everyt
hing up. “I remember, the door to the alley was open.”

  Harry turned to her, his eyes like lasers.

  Officer Heizer sighed. “Why is this just coming out now?”

  Harry took a step closer, examining Eleanor. “Has anyone offered this woman something hot to drink?” He turned to the officer, then the clerk behind the desk. “She was onstage, right next to him, when the gun went off. Don’t you think she’s your best witness?”

  Harry didn’t wait for a reply and steered her into a chair. He waved a hand at Rosie, who disappeared to find coffee. “Eleanor, tell me what you know.”

  “Someone was backstage. I have my quick change right before the final scene, you know, and I remember I felt cold air blowing on my skin.”

  “That door is locked during the show.”

  “It wasn’t tonight. Ask Franny, she noticed it too.”

  “Otis is the only one who touches the gun until it goes onstage.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “The gun was freezing. It felt different tonight. Otis always gives me the wedding ring, then the gun. Someone must have switched them when he was giving me my ring.”

  Harry turned to the officer, snapping his fingers. “Write this down.”

  “Sir,” Tommy said, “I don’t think ordering them about is going to help.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Tommy Murphy. I’m in the navy.” Tommy turned to the officers. “Officer Heizer, Miss O’Hanlon named someone else who can back her up—Eleanor, what was her name?”

  “Francine Garber,” said Harry. “I have her contact information at the theater, as well as everyone working on the musical. Otis Johnson, props master. I’ve worked with him eighteen years.”

  “Look, sir.” Officer Heizer rubbed the bridge of his nose. “People need to see someone behind bars for this.”

  “And we’ll find that person,” Harry said. “It’s not Charles Lawrence.”