Tom Lake(69)

Maisie leans over, runs the tip of her finger down the scar. “How have I never seen this before?”

“I’ve had this scar a lot longer than I’ve had any of you.”

“How did Pallace and Sebastian know what had happened?” Nell asks.

“Dancers and tennis players know about legs. If someone falls over and says they think they were shot, chances are they’ve ruptured their Achilles.”

“Partial or complete?” Maisie is still marveling at the neatness with which her mother was reassembled.

“Total rupture. Go big or go home.”

“Could you walk at all?” Emily asks. Why does it matter so much, the way she’s looking at me this minute? Like I am on the tennis court curled on my side and she is there, her hand on my shoulder.

Maisie shakes her head. “She can’t walk.”

“Wait,” Nell asks. “This happens to dogs?”

“Yep.”

“So you had to go back to the hospital,” Emily says. “Was Uncle Wallace there?”

I shook my head, smiling. “Elyse had already taken him back to Chicago. That would have been something though, wouldn’t it? Uncle Wallace and me in a double room.”

“Pallace had to take your part,” Nell says. “She had to go on that night.”

Sapphire sky, diamond clouds, emerald leaves, ruby cherries. The magic with which Nell understands overwhelms me at times. Her sisters turn and stare. “You’re doing it again,” Emily says.

“What?”

“You’re thinking about the performance, the understudy, and not your own mother lying on the ground with a ruptured Achilles.”

“You did the same thing with Uncle Wallace,” Maisie says.

Nell won’t bite. “She’s on a tennis court. Sebastian is there. It’s not like she’s facedown in the dirt.”

Emily is irritated with Nell, which is noteworthy because none of us get irritated with Nell, the sweet one, the small one, the baby. “But why do you always care about the understudy? Why is the most important thing in life whether or not the show goes on?”

Nell is standing beside me. She puts her arm around my waist in solidarity. “You’re not getting it,” she says. “This is when everything changes. This is the beginning of the second act. She can’t walk. She can’t walk for—-” She stops to look at me.

“A long time,” I say, though walking can be defined in different ways. “No cast, no crutches, it was probably six months.”

“So it’s not just Emily Pallace is going to play. She’s going to play Mae, too. Pallace is going to finish out Our Town and do the entire run of Fool for Love. Why can’t you understand that?” she asks.

“We can understand it,” Maisie says. “But we’re more worried about Mom than we are the play.”

Just like that Nell is crying and then sobbing, a fierce storm blown up out of nowhere. She turns her back on Maisie and Emily in shame and presses her face against my breastbone, both of her arms tight around me now. I don’t for a minute think she is crying because of her sisters, though surely part of her is crying for herself. She has lost these months to the pandemic, being stuck on the farm with no idea how much longer she’ll have to stay. She is losing this time when she is beautiful and young in a profession that cares for nothing but beauty and youth. But really, she is crying for me. While her sisters stand and stare in utter bafflement, Nell the Mentalist has snapped all the pieces together. She knows I am finished.



I insisted on trying to stand, and so Sebastian got on one side with Pallace on the other and together they lifted me like a marionette whose string had been cut. My leg was rubbery, almost liquid. “I need to rest it for a minute,” I said.

Sebastian shook his head. “You need to go to the hospital.”

“She doesn’t need to go to the hospital,” Duke said, his voice clearer now. “She just tripped on her tiny feet. Give her a minute.”

He had vomited and I had fallen and in just a minute, everything would be fine.

A minute, a minute, a minute. I could feel Pallace shifting beneath my arm. “Let’s put her down,” she said to Sebastian.

And so they sat me down again and Pallace sat beside me. She looked at me hard but kept hold of my hand. “I wish we had more time,” she said. “But we don’t so I’m just going to say it: You’re not going on tonight, and I’m going to have to go get ready.”

Emily. I had forgotten her.

Duke was sitting up now. “What?”

“She can’t walk.” Pallace looked at Duke like maybe I had been shot and maybe he was the one who’d shot me. “She’s not going to be able to walk. I’ve seen this happen.” She looked at Sebastian. “Have you seen this happen?”

He nodded, the sun behind his head lighting up his black hair.

Pallace touched her finger to my ankle so lightly I couldn’t feel it. “It doesn’t matter if you go to the hospital right this minute or if you wait three days, I’m telling you the truth. You’re going to go to the hospital and they’re going to sew your tendon back on. Like it or not, I can pretty much promise you that’s the way this is going to go.”

Now Duke was on his feet, leaning noticeably to the left as he came towards us. I expected him to make a joke, to say that Pallace was scheming for my part, but instead he leaned over and patted my head. He asked his brother if he could drive me to the hospital. Duke and Pallace wouldn’t be able to come with us, of course. They had to get cleaned up. They had to be onstage in a couple of hours, the two of them, Editor Webb and his daughter Emily.