“Why haven’t you thrown that away?” I ask him now.
He looks at me like, What a question.
“Because I can always paint over it. Use it again. I like to salvage things where I can,” he says. Not smiling. Because he’s bandaging my leg. Trying to salvage me.
“I think you should burn it,” I tell him.
“And I really think you should get stitches for this,” he says.
* * *
Second hiccup: Ellie. Don’t get me wrong, Grace. She’s wonderful, she’s luminous. More luminous perhaps than ever before, thanks to being presumably dumped by Trevor. He appears to have switched allegiances again—a Bertram to the core. Each day he and Briana enter and leave the theater together, walking slowly to accommodate her dragging gait. Briana leans heavily on his arm like he’s a crutch. And Trevor bears her weight like a stoic Englishman at a country dance who has no choice but to take the debutante for a spin. He doesn’t dare look at Ellie, and neither does Briana, who still holds on to Ellie’s water bottle. The pain on Ellie’s face as she watches them is palpable. Her eyes are always red. Her face is gaunt and pale. She looks fantastically thin in her red dress with matching cloak, which is the costume we decided on for Helen’s return from the dead. I want the audience to see her beauty immediately, I explained to the costume designer, a senior in the fashion department. I want it to blaze like the sun.
But Grace said she should look like a wretch.
There again, Grace, I had to smile at your intrusion, our little collisions of interpretation around Helen. I missed you in that moment, I did. But you need your rest, of course.
Well, Grace isn’t here, is she? Besides, Grace and I discussed it again, at length. A lie to the students, Grace, is probably easier in this case than the muddy truth, I’m sure you’ll agree.
And happily, now we all agree. Helen needs to look hot. And formidable.
When Helen—I mean Ellie—first tried on the dress, she took my breath away. And nothing these days takes my breath away. She would have taken your breath away too, Grace.
Oh, Helen, I said. You look beautiful.
And Helen looked at herself in the mirror, and she burst into tears. Overcome, I suppose. How could she not be? She’s lived so long in the shadows. She cried and cried and cried. A little too intensely. I wanted to tell her to calm down, really.
All of this emotion should only help Ellie’s performance, of course. Should work so wonderfully for her Helen. When she’s onstage, delivering the lines All’s well that ends well yet, though time seems so adverse, and means unfit, I shiver, Grace. And I tell her this, I tell her, “Ellie, you’re making me shiver.”
The problem, Grace? The problem is it’s incapacitating her. She’s running to the bathroom a lot, presumably to cry. She stops in the middle of her lines like she’s lost.
The final day of tech week: I call the line and Ellie doesn’t speak it. She just looks at me like I’ve spoken gobbledygook.
“Do you want the line again, Ellie?”
And she just continues to stare at me like she isn’t sure who I am.
“Is something wrong?” I ask her.
Then her expression shifts. “Miranda,” she says quietly, “can I talk to you, please?”
And can I tell you that when she says that I know exactly what’s coming? Because how many ledges have I talked them off over the years? How many tears have I wiped away from their cheeks? How many hyperventilating bodies have I told to breathe, just breathe, my dear. Watched their small chests heave as they tried to just breathe. Now, I’d say, talk to me. And then they’d tell me their stories. Depression stories, anxiety stories, misfit stories, bullying stories, parents-who-don’t-understand-me stories, so many dead grandmothers, so many dearly departed dogs. Stories that make them stammer, that make them look at the floor, that make their eyes well up again to tell. Hyperventilate anew. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Always the same ending: Ms. Fitch, I just don’t know if I can be in the play after all. I just don’t know if I can go up there.
Stories that tighten my chest, that make me heavy with panic, that make my heart go like a drum. That have kept my spine a different shape. Made it bow like a branch. That used to light up the red webs. Grace, it’s no wonder, really, that I had a dead leg for so long.
I look at Ellie now. Standing there like she’s about to faint. Her fingers twitching of their own accord at her sides. It’s so perfect, her anguish. So scene-appropriate. If only she would speak her line. All’s well that ends well yet, though time seems so adverse, and means unfit.