“Professor Fitch, I’m so sorry,” Ellie says.
“It’s fine, Ellie,” I say. I smile. “I’m sure everyone will be coming along any minute now.”
Ellie looks at me like I’m insane. “Professor, I’m sorry, but I really don’t think anyone is coming.”
“Of course they are, Ellie,” I say. Why am I saying this? “There’s a rehearsal.”
And then I lean against the lip of the stage as though I’m actually waiting for them to show up. I attempt to phone Grace under Ellie’s furtive gaze. No answer. Sometimes Grace will work out at the school gym before rehearsal. Strength day, she calls it. She’ll show up at the theater still in her ostentatious workout clothes, clutching a giant sports drink. Or she’ll change back into her vest and slacks, showered and shining with health, her still-wet hair gleaming. Looking so recharged and content I can barely stand it. But I’d give anything to see her walking briskly into the theater now. I call again. I text, Where are you???
I look up at Ellie and smile as if I expected all of this. As if my body were not an emergency. As if I were not sometimes seeing two of her. As if all were well.
I say to Ellie, “Well, Ellie, since we’re still waiting for people to show up, why don’t you go ahead and practice Helen’s soliloquy?”
Ellie looks at me confused. “But Briana is playing Helen,” she says.
“Well, Briana isn’t here, is she?”
“No.”
“And you’re her understudy, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So why not rehearse? In case anything should happen. In case anything should befall poor Briana. Accidents. Illness. The flu. Mono. You never know, Helen.”
“Helen?”
“I mean Ellie. Ellie, why not practice Helen?”
Ellie looks around her. “But there’s no one else here.”
“You don’t need anyone else here!” I say this shrilly. And then I gather myself. A few deep diaphragmatic breaths as I was instructed to do by Mark, back when Mark still had a plan for me, for us, back when he believed I could be healed.
“You’re the only one on the stage in that scene, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So go on, then. I’ll be back. Everyone should be along soon. I’ll just go out into the hall and check.”
But the hall outside is violently empty too. No Grace. No students milling around. Just the hum of vending machines. Framed posters and photographs of our past productions on the concrete walls. The Tempest. As You Like It. Romeo and Juliet. Me lurking darkly in the far corner of each photo like I spawned them all. As if I actually chose this life. But my face, which looks increasingly pained with each production, gives me away. Eyes more hollow and sunken. My hunched body swallowed by a darker, drabber dress. Meanwhile, Grace looks the same in every photograph. A grave young woman in a flotational vest. Same Joan of Arc cut to her fox-brown hair. Forbidding smile of the hunter posing beside her kill. She will eat the meat, of course. She will tan the hide. Mount the head on her rose foam wall. It used to be that I could do no wrong in her eyes. I used to hold such charms for her. I saw you onstage in Boston once, she told me when we first met during my campus visit. In A Winter’s Tale. You played Perdita. You were good, Grace said. And I already sensed that from Grace this was the highest praise. Later, when we went for drinks, she revealed that she’d had acting aspirations at one point in her life. She’d even played Lady Bracknell, the ruthless mother, in a college production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Lady Bracknell? I repeated, and made a face. Talk about bad casting, I said. Thinking of the pink ballet slipper key chain I’d noticed poking out of her purse. All of her earnest, bright-eyed questions about my summer as Snow White. I think you were a born Cecily, I told Grace. Cecily, the pink rose, emblem of elegant femininity. Grace looked at me over her pint. Her eyes shone.
We should do the play together, she suggested after my first semester.
We should, I agreed.
How far from Grace I’ve fallen. Still, she wouldn’t abandon me like this, would she? I look at my phone. Still no text from Grace.
“What is happening?” I ask the hallway.
Then I notice the workshop room door is half-open, spilling light into the dark corridor. Hugo’s lair. I hear faint music coming from inside, the sound of thrashing guitars. My heart drums inside me. He’s there. Still working on the play, my play. Making the world of it palpable.
When I enter, the sweet smell of wood hits me like a drug. Suddenly I’m filled with peace. Late-afternoon light shines down on me from the large high windows. All around the room, propped against the walls, are half-painted flats. Some depicting the interior of a French court, others the exterior of pastoral Italy—blue sky, green leaves, climbing vines, all illuminated by the sun. The sky and leaves and vines of All’s Well.