Zara is back in New York — finally.
Her parents made her promise to get off at Penn Station and immediately take the subway uptown, but after a few hours of that flattened train feeling, Zara follows a new impulse through the doors of the subway car, into the tight press of bodies in Forty-Second Street Station.
Zara climbs the stairs toward the gray sky, her suitcase announcing each step with a clunk.
If you need anything, come directly to me.
Broadway is awash in tourists. There are probably people from twenty different countries and as many states on this block alone. Each square of sidewalk holds something new — mismatched buildings, forty posters for the same album on a construction wall, roasted-nut vendors, obsessively brisk women in heels.
The sky simmers with bad weather.
Zara’s new roommate is expecting her. Zara knows she will turn up at the apartment late, probably wet. She fiddles her phone out of her purse and sends a quick text. Wanted to see the theater.
Then she’s off, wheeling as quickly as she can, bumping the suitcase over tiny breaks in the sidewalk. She can’t help running through the important dates in her head. It’s November 5, the day before the first read-through. Echo and Ariston opens on December 29.
The Aurelia is there, waiting for her. The white marble gives her the same feeling as good poetry.
I’m going to be with you, from the moment you arrive.
Leopold might not be in the building right now. Zara knows that. If she can’t find him, she’ll call, but it would be better to see him in person. They’ve had a dozen late-night talks and it hasn’t been enough to banish the worst of Zara’s nerves.
She isn’t ready for this read-through. She still feels like she should be sitting in the theater instead of up on the stage.
Zara presses her forehead against the glass doors. She jolts the bars. Locked.
When she goes around back, she assumes that the stage door will be locked, too — but it pushes right in. The audition signs have been cleared. The emptiness of the hallway pulls her toward the wings.
Zara steps onto the stage. It’s all hers. No one waiting in line, pushing to take her place. She tells herself: If the door was unlocked, it must be all right for me to be here.
She tells herself: I belong here.
Heel-toe, one step at a time, she starts to walk the boards. One of her directors taught her to do this, and it stuck. It’s about learning the space, that director said. It seemed important to Zara, like learning the body of a person you love. She spent time on every boy she dated, finding out their details. She savored that part: the freckles, the skin, the secrets. Zara spent time on girls, too. Certain ones. Maybe it was just theater — how it’s supposed to make you notice everything — but Zara found herself painstakingly aware of the way one girl would tilt her head when she sang her scales, how another would smile to herself as she waited for her entrances.
Zara discovers the Aurelia, one step at a time. Heel-toe, heel-toe. The stage is giving her a grounded feeling that nothing else could. This is better than going straight to Leopold. Now when she sees him, she won’t be frantic and afraid. He’ll know that he made the right choice when he cast her. If she comes up with some new insight into Echo, he might even be impressed.
As she walks, she tells herself the story of Echo and Ariston.
I was born to inhabit a kingdom, but that’s not a blessing.
Zara pinches off bits of the stage with each step.
We’ve been at war since before I was born.
More steps. More stage.
My father promised me to the heir of the neighboring kingdom, a boy I’ve never met. Ariston. So I ran away. I ran through the woods, and I made it to the sea. I met a boy, and I didn’t know he was Ariston — of course — so I fell in love with him, of course. A series of famous love scenes follows. Zara’s blood rises and swells. This play taught her everything she knows about being in love.
But the story doesn’t end there. Echo and Ariston share everything, except their true identities. That’s what makes it a tragedy. Ariston doesn’t figure out who Echo is until it’s too late to save her.
So Echo dies.
Of course.
The ending shouldn’t have the power to hurt Zara after reading the play so many times, but it does. Zara has to stop. Breathe. The darkness of it wraps around her, so when she takes the last step, to the edge of the orchestra pit, she almost doesn’t notice.
There is darkness down there, too.
And the outline of a body.
“Hello?” Zara asks. She thinks she must be seeing something wrong — that it’s a trick of the shadows. They’re different in theaters. Heavy, like the curtains that sway at the edges of the stage.
“Hello?”
There is no answer, and Zara has almost convinced herself she was wrong. But then she hears a thin groan. She sits down and pushes herself off the edge of the stage into the orchestra pit. It’s dark down there — she uses the firefly glow of her phone to light a vague area. A man on the ground. Blood spreads from his body, a shade darker than the carpet and the seats.
Red and red and red.