CHAPTER 31
I TELL MYSELF it’s a dream, surely, that Grace and I are sitting here together. That I’m still in the black box, I never left. Or perhaps I’m dead. I’m in a coma and these are my last minutes of consciousness, and in my last minutes of consciousness, my mind decided to play this palliative trick. Because surely Grace is dead or deathly ill or else she’s calling the police. Surely we are not sitting together in the Canny Man of all places with the red walls all around us and the black animal eyes gazing at us in welcome, welcome. She wanted us to come here.
Why not go to our old haunt? Grace said as we left the theater, walking leisurely, easily, in the parking lot, like nothing bad had ever happened between us in a parking lot or anywhere else. And I kept taking her hand, Grace’s hand, in disbelief, in gratitude, a hand that was not cold anymore, and though she looked surprised, she didn’t pull away. She let me take it. Took mine right back.
Pub? she said again. I’m dying for solid food, and those fish and chips are just what the doctor ordered.
A fog had come rolling in. And I thought, Don’t go back there, don’t ever go back there. But I looked at the miracle of Grace holding my hand in the dark, impossibly alive and smiling and wanting to celebrate in our old haunt, and I said, Of course, sure, whatever you like, Grace.
By the time we reached the Canny Man, the fog was so thick you could barely see the wooden man swinging from his hook above the door.
Thought it was supposed to be a clear night, Grace laughed as she groped for the door. I felt a drop. Did you feel a drop?
I felt a drop, I told Grace. Felt their anger in the filthy air. Felt the sword above my head. Felt my doom in the thickening night as we drove here. Three silhouettes looming in my side mirror, loping along the shoulder like wolves. But the dread had strangely left me in the dressing room. I even smiled at the fog all around as I parked the car and walked toward Grace. Walked, not limped. Not yet. I held up my aching hands to the drizzle. Go ahead, I whispered to the black clouds gathering. Come for me.
What was that, Miranda? Grace asked, smiling at me through the fog.
Nothing.
And I went through the door with Grace.
I thought any minute surely something would give, the seams around this scene would split, revealing the black, starry void of death or else the lip of a stage, an audience watching in the dark.
Nothing. Just us smiling at each other over the thin orange flame of this bar candle, smiling at each other by its red, mottled light and the fog outside thickening and the rain starting to gently fall. She’s playing a song on the jukebox just for me. “Me and My Shadow” by Judy Garland. I’ve been humming it so much lately, she says. All season. Such a strange season it was, she says. And I agree. It was. Such madness this time of year, we both agree. Always madness.
“Tonight especially,” Grace says now. “Lots of curve balls, wouldn’t you say?”
“Lots.”
She tells me that she got to the theater late. Didn’t think she was feeling up to it at first, but then she suddenly felt better. Almost like something had lifted, she says, looking through the window at the fog outside. When she got there, they’d already started the show, and she couldn’t find me anywhere, it was madness, a full house, did I see that?
“Yes.”
So she just watched from the back. Standing room only. And then at the end, there I was on the stage suddenly. She saw me fall. Heard the terrible crunch of my bones when my body hit the floor. She heard it from all the way at the back of the theater. It was so loud it almost sounded fake, like a sound effect. She thought that surely I was dead, that she heard my soul leaving my body. Grace doesn’t believe in souls but what else to call that awful, anguished gasp that seemed to escape not through my mouth but from my whole body, making my chest cave into itself, like all the air and flesh and blood was leaving all at once? Quite a spectacular fall, it was. Quite the scene, it was. Quite the scene stealer, I was. She smiles. Doesn’t say anything about me crashing the stage in a tablecloth, reciting those lines from Macbeth. Maybe she’s chalked it up to production madness. Me being alone on opening night.
“And then those doctors,” she says.
“You saw them?” I ask. And my pulse quickens. Did she recognize them from that awful night here, in the basement?
“Nice men,” Grace says, “but a little intense. Weird-looking. One was incredibly fat and sick-looking for a doctor. Another was thin and tall and sort of beautiful. And then the other one, he looked a little like a sleazy salesman. The salesman did most of the talking.” She couldn’t believe their diagnosis, but then who is she to question the authority of not one but three doctors, right?