The day of Enna’s memorial, Zara starts to file into the theater with the rest of the company, but Leopold gently detaches her from the group and puts a hand on her back, steering her away, toward the greenroom. He’s been busy for the last six days, bringing Enna’s understudy up to speed while Zara has been floating from rehearsal to apartment to rehearsal. She’s afraid that Leopold wants to say something about how off-kilter her acting has been, even though she’s not the only one who’s been pitched sideways by a second death at the Aurelia.
Leopold closes them into the greenroom together, even though there’s no one left in the hallway outside. The building is silent and vast and impossibly still. Zara has never been on a boat in dead water, so far from land that the safety of shore is only a memory, but she imagines this is exactly how it would feel.
Leopold is wearing a tasteful black suit, perfectly tailored and obviously worth more than everything she owns put together. It only highlights how ragged Zara is in the knee-length black skirt she bought at the mall. The director’s hair is untamed, his presence giving off the faint electricity that always makes Zara think that touching him might involve a shock.
Leopold tells Zara that he doesn’t want her at the memorial.
“Let me explain,” he says. “I don’t want you to be seen before the gala.”
“What do you mean?” Zara asks, struck by a vision of herself locked away in Kestrel’s apartment. Not able to come out unless Leopold says so.
“No large public events. Not yet. I want the press to love you,” he says in his most practical tone. “If the press loves you, the world loves you.”
Zara still wants to be out there with the rest of the company. “Maybe it would be good if the press sees me now. Gets used to me.” She likes that idea — it takes some of the pressure off the gala and the previews and opening night.
“You’re worried that you aren’t what they want,” Leopold says, pinpointing her fear so easily that it makes Zara feel transparent. Leopold shakes his head, soft and understanding. “You’re not the first actress to feel that way.”
He doesn’t tell Zara she’s wrong, though.
Leopold waves her toward a couch. He touches her shoulder, the spot where it shades into her neck. It’s strangely intimate, and she wants to swat him away. But she can’t swat Leopold Henneman. “You’re underestimating how much people love stories about girls like you.”
“Girls like me?” Zara repeats in a dark, empty voice. A shadow voice.
“Lifted from obscurity. As plain as plain can be. You will be everyone’s dream, coming true,” he says. “But we have to follow the rules.” Zara is highly aware of him stroking her hand. “This is not a process we want to rush.”
Zara blinks hard. This feels wrong. She shakes her head, clearing away the nervous debris. The conversation has gone so far in one direction that she’s lost sight of what today is about.
“Enna —”
“Will have plenty of people to mourn her,” Leopold says. “She was loved, once upon a time.” His lips spread. His smiles have sharp edges, like they’re trying to pry things out of her. “You and Enna hardly knew each other. Is there some other reason you want to be out there today?”
Eli.
Zara has been doing her best to avoid Eli since Meg talked to her — but Zara’s best is getting worse by the minute. Zara lives in a fever dream between Eli’s texts. They call each other sometimes — not in the middle of the night, like Leopold used to. In the morning, when the light is still coming in pink and soft. They wake each other up.
Leopold is still looking down at her, and Zara gets the feeling that she needs to say the right thing in the right way. It’s like rehearsal, but worse. Zara is living the actor’s nightmare, where she steps out onto a stage and the lines have scurried away from her. No amount of fumbling or fear will bring them back. How is she supposed to keep talking to him, being as open as he wants her to be, without mentioning Eli?
If she did, would it really be as bad as Meg made it sound?
She wipes sweat off the back of her neck and immediately regrets it. “Enna and I were in the same play, and that means something.” Zara brushes the sweat from her palm to her knee. “It’s intimate.”
“True,” Leopold says.
But there’s more to it than that. Enna’s death has been a tricky knot in Zara’s chest since the minute she found out. There is sadness tied up in it, and a dark thread of guilt, like she could have done more to stop this. She was right there in the dressing room with Enna, days before she died. Shouldn’t Zara have noticed something was wrong?
There’s also a fear that keeps visiting her.
These things come in threes.
“Enna was my friend. At least, she was friendly with me. Before she died.” Zara hadn’t realized how important that had been to her — another actor treating her like she belonged at the Aurelia — until it was gone.
Leopold is studying Zara with deep concern. “I think we should be meeting much more regularly. There is so much happening right now. We mustn’t lose sight of one another.”
Zara nods before she can even think about what that means. How they could possibly be meeting more regularly. More rehearsal? Just — talking? Will the phone start ringing at two in the morning again?
Leopold gets up and switches on the monitor mounted over the door. “You can watch in here, if you like.”
She is left alone with the grainy TV. It’s up there so actors can keep track of performances. Kestrel told Zara that one year Toby attempted to rewire it so he could watch the Thanksgiving Day parade, which he called gayer than Pride, but the monitor stubbornly refuses any other stations.
It’s all Aurelia, all the time.
The stage has been cleared. They should be moving into tech tonight. Instead, hundreds of people have gathered to say good-bye to Enna. Over the podium a spotlight appears, bright as a splash of pain.
Leopold comes onto the screen.
It doesn’t feel real, seeing him out there when he was just in here, sitting so close. But the audience breaks out in clapping and cheers, so it must be him. They love Leopold Henneman. They always love Leopold Henneman. Still, applause feels out of place. Is that what actors are supposed to want, even when they die? Flowers tossed at their cold feet? A standing ovation?
Leopold pours out words with ease. “Enna brought brightness to a grim world.” This doesn’t sound like the sharp-minded woman that Zara shared a dressing room with, or the nightgown-clad butterfly that wafted in and out of rehearsals. It’s like Leopold invented a perfect actress so he could praise her.
As soon as Leopold finishes, Carl takes the stage. The image on the TV is black and white and wavering. But Zara can see his eyes, bright blue, hovering a few inches over her face.
Carl clears his throat.
“When I met Enna, she was twenty-two. When I found the courage to speak to her, she flipped me off.” The audience gives a surprised, grateful laugh. This Enna makes sense to Zara. This Enna, she can imagine. Carl clears his throat, as if the rest of his speech has gotten painfully stuck. “When I found the courage to speak to her again, it changed the world.”
Zara remembers what Kestrel told her.
I could never get myself to hate her. Not like Carl did.
Either Kestrel was lying then, or Carl is now. He could just be an actor putting his talent to use, but this is the not the voice of a man who hates his ex-wife. It vibrates with honesty, a string plucked at just the right pitch. Carl goes on and on about their life together, sticking to the early years.
So far, no one has mentioned the version of Enna that Zara met a month ago. No one is talking about how she died. An overdose. The full autopsy still needs to be done, but there’s no real question.
Enna told Zara that she didn’t drink anymore. No pills, either.
Zara’s breath is fine one moment, and then it’s not. She can’t stay in the greenroom and listen to the rest of this. She pretends to be calm, walking down the backstage hallway, the monitor still leaking words about Enna’s talent. Zara’s feet carry her toward the dressing room. She’s only been in there once. When she talked to Enna. It’s where Enna felt like a real person — unpredictable, imperfect — not like some pretty lie they were all making up together.
The outer dressing room is an explosion of costumes in different colors, rows of shoes that stand empty and waiting. The open door to the little dressing room is covered over with a line of yellow police tape.
Even if Zara has been telling herself that Roscoe’s death was an accident, that he fell and wasn’t pushed, Eli has given her doubt, and that doubt is like a crack in her mind — prying it open with possibility.
She puts one leg over the tape, careful not to touch it. Every crime show she’s ever seen tells her she needs gloves. With so many costume pieces lying around, she might be able to find some, but that seems too much like admitting that she’s really doing this. She pulls her sleeves down over her hands instead.
The little dressing room would be upsetting even if someone hadn’t died in it. Chairs are upturned, the mirror cracked at one corner. And there are words — slashed in bright-red lipstick and smudged with eyeliner.
HAS-BEEN and IMPOSTOR and SLUT.
Zara turns a full circle. She’s struck dizzy by the truth. If she told people the awful thoughts she has about herself, it would look something like this. Different words, but the same ragged scrawl of fears. Zara doesn’t think she’d be able to write straight onto the Aurelia, though. She doesn’t think her worries are important enough to merit the wall space.
Zara takes out her phone. The shutter sound clicks again and again as she takes pictures of each wall. She gets on her knees to capture a few close to the ground. Down there, with the dust-and-spice smell of old costumes, Zara finds tiny, cramped words on the underside of the makeup table.
I PRAY YOU, PARDON ME.
Zara knows these words.
It’s not an obscure line — any theater person would know it. I pray you, pardon me is what Gertrude says in the final act of Hamlet, right before she drinks from the poisoned cup.
Right before she’s killed.