Eli has company in the lighting booth.
Leopold Henneman dropped in to make her life extra hellish, just for fun. He leans over the board, his body crowding the equipment, the notebooks, all the things she’s started to think of as hers.
“Show me again,” he says.
Eli’s hand slides in from an angle to work the buttons, because now Leopold has taken her seat. In front of them, the stage pulses with light. Cue after cue — orange, crimson, gray fog, blinding white, blackout.
Leopold whispers, “Roscoe would be so disappointed.”
Frustration makes a home for itself in Eli’s chest. She can’t keep down the argument that’s rising. “You saw the light plot. You said you wanted to keep elements of Roscoe’s design.”
“I want to honor his creative intent,” Leopold corrects.
“So . . . change it?”
Leopold grabs a lightbulb from a crate and throws it against the back wall. The movement is compact, his arm strong. The lightbulb is there one second — thin glass on a breathtaking arc — then gone, splinters vanishing.
“Artists don’t wait for permission,” Leopold says calmly.
Eli goes stiller than Zara pretending to be a statue. She thinks Leopold might throw something else. But then his eyes close and his shoulders melt downward. It’s like he’s not in the booth with her anymore.
“Are you having a vision?” she asks.
Leopold’s lips flatten. “Only a daydream. A very nice one. In which I hurt you as much as you are hurting my show.”
If the lightbulb was enough to fire up her worries, Leopold just added a splash of gasoline. But Eli can’t be afraid of her director. She’ll never get any work done. And that’s what she’s all about, the work. Leopold is just an aging director who’s taken too many shots of privilege and is staggering around drunk. Apparently his brilliance comes with a Get Out of Being an Asshole Free card.
Eli is vaguely aware that her brain is making jokes because it’s too paralyzed to do anything else.
Leopold takes one more deep breath, opens his eyes, and looks at her with fresh attention. “You’ll fix it,” he says. “All of it.” When he leaves, Eli’s anger trails him like a long shadow.
“Fuck,” she says to the lighting board. “That’s fucking impossible!” she yells at Roscoe. It doesn’t matter if he can’t hear her or not: the yelling helps, either way. She sweeps up bits of glass, and the swears keep coming, a constant lineup in English and Spanish.
“Is this a bad time?” asks a voice — a girlish one.
Eli remembers Zara’s text this morning. They made plans to meet, but Eli isn’t prepared: for how soon Zara showed up, how many plastic containers of leftovers are strewn through the booth, or how pretty Zara looks right now.
She’s flushed. The kind of pink that comes after a good dream or a hard run or a long kiss.
“You can come in,” Eli says, aware of how long she’s been staring. Zara moves into the booth and perches on the arm of the couch that Roscoe called home. The last traces of ugliness that Leopold left behind are gone. “So what was the thing you wanted to talk to me about?”
Zara goes digging in her bag. “I brought something for you.”
Delight settles over Eli like sunshine. She loves gifts: giving them, getting them. Zara hands Eli a newspaper article about Roscoe. It’s not what she expected, but in a way it’s the nicest thing Zara could have brought.
It means that Eli’s not alone in this. Even if she never figures out what happened to Roscoe, at least one other person will remember that he mattered.
“Thanks,” Eli says. “I thought I had all these. But this one’s new. So — thanks.” Dammit. She already said that part.
She skips like a stone over the article, not wanting to sink in deep. That would mean taking her eyes off Zara for longer than a few seconds, and who knows how often she’s going to come up here, searching for Eli? “I’ll read the rest later,” she says, setting the scrap of flimsy paper next to her enormous stack of notebooks. “Right now, I have to hit my head against this desk for an extended period of time until a better design leaks out.”
Zara’s eyes are big and shining, like she’s trying to beam Eli the strength to keep going. “Can I help with something?”
Eli laughs. She can’t seem to shake this girl. “Yeah. Sure.”
Zara claps her hands and stands right in front of Eli, tosses her hair back, tilts her chin up. Eli swallows, remembering what it felt like to angle her chin up a little bit more, to help match Zara’s body to Echo’s. “Where do you want me?” she asks.
Dangerous question.
“On the stage,” Eli says.
Zara bounds out of the booth. It feels smaller when she’s not there. It feels less.
“Fuck,” Eli adds under her breath.
Zara takes center stage. Eli turns on the microphone, the one that lets her talk down from the booth like some fuzzy-voiced goddess from on high. Ever since they went to the Met, Eli has been aware of how much she told Zara about herself. And how nonmutual the sharing was. “Tell me your story,” Eli says.
“I was born to inherit a kingdom . . .” Zara recites.
“No Echo!” Eli says, warming up to the task of lighting Zara. She can feel it in her hands, the prickle of skin coming back to life after it’s been out too long in the cold. “I don’t need Echo. I know her already.”
Zara shifts off her mark. Shadows scribble in at her edges.
“If you won’t tell me about yourself, I’m going to have to start making stuff up,” Eli warns.
Zara looks vaguely terrified. “Ummm . . .”
Eli brings down a few dials, brings up a few others. Bright blue rains over Zara. It’s a decent imitation of twilight, the time of day when a person is most likely to pour secrets. Zara wavers.
“You were born in a commune upstate,” Eli says. “Your mom’s name is Star of the North. Your dad believes in the healing powers of goat cheese. You have three sisters, Peace, Love, and —”
“No!”
“Peace, Love, and No?” Eli does some fancy finger-work on the board, and the blue light is replaced by a friendly apricot color. “See, that’s interesting.”
“Eli . . .”
“I’ll stop, I’ll stop.” She can feel her smile growing devious. “Once you tell me who you are.”
Zara’s throat tightens. “I —”
“You have a tragic past,” Eli narrates into the microphone. “You’ve already been married. Twice! You’re one of those women who makes up young-people personas to get roles. Does Adrian know he has to kiss a thirty-seven-year-old?”
Zara’s laughter is nervous around the edges. “Eli.”
“You’re right, he would think that’s even more awesome.” Eli’s hands move without her having to think about it, like a musician at the high point of a song. “Come on. You’re making me do all the work here.”
Zara pulls it together. But she doesn’t speak.
“All right,” Eli says. “You —”
“I was born to inherit my father’s weird knees and my mother’s quiet nature. Other than that, I don’t want to be like them.” She takes a deep breath. “They had a baby, before me. I think he lived . . . two weeks? My grandparents, my mom’s parents, say my mom and dad were different before that. So in love. I never knew them like that. There are these other versions of my parents that I’ll never meet.” Eli can see that Zara wants to stop, but she struggles her way through it. “What would they be like? Would they still be so in love? I think that after it happened, they sort of shrunk in on themselves, tried to feel less. Or maybe they didn’t try. Maybe it just happened.” Zara pauses, like she doesn’t know where to go from there, and then dives in a new direction. “I used to play the oboe! God, they loved that. They hated it when I started acting. Even though they were the ones who took me to plays when I was younger, and my dad used to tell me about his relatives who were in the theater.”
“Really?” Eli asks.
Zara nods, eager gulps. “A long time ago. Yiddish theater. There was a whole district in the Lower East Side.” She rushes forward to the edge of the lit circle. “Did you know that the first kiss between two women on Broadway was in a Yiddish play in the 1920s?”
Eli clears her throat, and the sound crackles through the auditorium. “Uhh. No. That’s . . . interesting. What play?”
“God of Vengeance.”
“Okay, based on that title, I’m gonna take a wild stab and guess that the girls don’t get a pretty ending.”
“No.” Zara winces. “And the whole cast was arrested on obscenity charges.”
Eli pauses to consider. “That’s pretty badass for the twenties.”
Zara looks up, cutting a path through the house, straight to Eli. “And think about how good the kiss must have been.”
Is Zara trying to tell her something? Is Eli reading way too much into this? Zara probably only brought it up because she knows that Eli is queer: it’s a little rainbow-wrapped present for her.
That’s all.
She looks down at her fingers on the board. Walks the conversation back to a safer topic. “So why do your parents have such a problem with it?” Crap. That made it sound like she was talking about girls kissing. “The acting thing, I mean.”
While she waits for the answer, she tries out Roscoe’s favorite lighting cue, the one that Eli nicknamed Wrath of God. A rain of golden fire falls around Zara in a curtain, her own personal meteor shower.
“I think it scares them. They stopped wanting to feel all the time. I get on a stage and I feel so much.” Zara’s fidgeting gets more intense. The glow coming through her movements gets brighter. “I have this theory . . . I think that acting is about finding keys for whatever is locked up inside the play. So I’m always looking for things that fit just right. Once you start paying attention, you see that most of life is a wrong fit. And then it’s hard because you want this thing that you don’t have, this thing that might not even exist. I never told my parents about that. I probably shouldn’t have told you.”
“Right,” Eli says. “Because. The oboe.”
Zara doesn’t laugh, but she does look up at Eli in a tight-lipped, well-teased kind of way. Zara dapples with gold, but Eli can still see the blush that takes her face over slowly.
Eli stops the godly precipitation, leaving Zara in the dark. This feels like the best choice she’s made so far. The blackness has a texture like heavy cloth. It makes Eli want to lean in so she won’t miss a single one of Zara’s words. Of course, they can’t do the whole damn play in a blackout.
But it feels like Eli is on to something. “Thank you,” she says.
In the darkness, Zara’s voice is everything. “For what?”
“Giving me so much to work with.”