And then.
Wind stills.
Thunder quiets.
Rain stops.
I hear the music switch. Judy isn’t roaring about getting happy anymore. She’s singing softly again about shadows. Like she never stopped. Just the sad, familiar swell of strings filling the air. It’s gone. Gone from me, gone from the bar. Taking the cold dark with it. And I’m still here. I open my eyes, where there are tears now. There I am in the cracked mirror, sitting in the shattered bar. No blooms of flame around my head or rope of smoke at my throat. Just my sea-straggly hair shimmering with small flowers. Just my hands around my miraculously unspilled Scotch. And my tear-streaked face impossibly smiling. Not the brightly beaming face of the young woman from the old Playbill photo, not anymore. No more eyes like stars, no more blinding eclipse. This face shines another light. This face says I have lived, I’m alive. This face says I’ve known joy and pain, known them both. I’ll know them both again.
The woman beside me is looking at me now. She smiles like she saw nothing at all, like she’s only just now seeing me for the first time.
Something sparks at the base of my spine. A small, familiar fire. I smile at her.
She raises her golden drink to me.
I raise my Scotch with its dead flower. Only the flower doesn’t look so dead anymore. Seems to be blooming now. The whole drink seems aglow with its own rosy light, a dancing shimmer of green. I recall the waves flashing around me when I stood in the sea. Those strange colors shimmering in the black water. Shimmering with god knows what. Maybe actual magic. Maybe something that saved me. Maybe just a trick of the light.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TO MY PARENTS, James Awad and Nina Milosevic, and to my dearest friends and readers, Rex Baker, Alexandra Dimou, Laura Sims, Chris Boucher, Emily Culliton, Teresa Carmody, Ursula Villarreal-Moura, and McCormick Templeman, for their support. Special thanks to Jess Riley, without whose friendship, faith, and genius, I would be lost.
To my brilliant editor, Marysue Rucci, for making this book better with her insights and artful suggestions. Also to my wonderful Canadian editor and publisher, the one and only Nicole Winstanley at Penguin Canada. So grateful to you both for your excellent feedback, dedication, and support of my work. To Chris White at Scribner UK, for giving All’s Well a dream home across the pond.
To the amazing teams at Simon & Schuster and Penguin Canada: Anne Tate Pearce, Elizabeth Breeden, Zack Knoll, Brittany Adames, Hana Park, Steve Myers, and Meredith Pal.
To my new Syracuse University colleagues, students, and friends. So much thanks to George Saunders, Mary Karr, Dana Spiotta, Jon Dee, and the amazing Dympna Callaghan for reading and for their early and generous support of me and this book. To Jeff Parker and my former MFA students at UMass Amherst for giving me a job I loved while I was writing, and a weekly drive from Boston that helped me dream.
To Julie Slavinsky at Warwick’s （and to Warwick’s） for keeping me in great books while I drafted this novel in La Jolla. And to Angela Sterling for the beautiful space in which to work.
To the wonderful Shakespeare productions and innovators from which I drew inspiration: Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More in New York; Rupert Gold’s 2010 film production of Macbeth; Alan Cumming’s brilliant audio performance of his one-man Macbeth, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well directed by John Dove.
To the pubs that helped me conjure the demonic Canny Man: Canny Man’s and Bennets Bar in Edinburgh, Scotland; Rockafellas in Salem, Massachusetts; and the Irish Snug in Denver, Colorado.
To everyone at the Clegg Agency—Simon Toop, David Kambhu, and Marion Duvert—and to Brooke Ehrlich at Anonymous Content for their hard work and commitment to my books.
Endless gratitude as always to my infinitely wise agent, Bill Clegg, for being the absolute best reader and champion I could hope for.
And last but never least, thanks most of all to Ken Calhoun, to whom this book is dedicated, and without whom there would be no book.