Meg sees the two girls coming out of Storage Room Two, Zara’s arm around Kestrel’s heaving shoulders. Meg sees everything in the theater.
She follows them to the dressing room, where the acrid bite of hair singed by curling irons fills the air. Meg waits as the girls dither; unlike the hair and makeup artists, who hover impatiently, Meg knows how to make herself unseen in a room. She waits patiently for Kestrel to go back to her chair, for the hair and makeup artists to do what they can with the mess that is Zara. When they emerge from Zara’s little dressing room, Meg moves quickly toward the closing door. She knocks.
“Come in!” Zara yells at top volume. It’s an amateur mistake. Shouting only showcases the tremble at the center of her voice.
Meg opens the door, putting on her best director’s personal assistant face. She is concerned, capable, here to help. Zara looks up. “Oh,” she says with relief. “I thought it would be Leopold.”
And just like that, Meg is not the director’s personal assistant. She’s an actress, a young one with an improbable starring role, waiting for Leopold to make his rounds before a performance. Meg used to live for those moments. The butterfly of her pulse, Leopold’s beautiful words. He gave her so few that when they came, it felt like the return of the sun after a long, cold season.
“The director is indisposed,” Meg says.
She left him lying in a heap on the floor of his office. There were animal sounds rising from his throat. Meg shook out a dose of Oxycontin, pressed a cool cloth to the back of his neck, and told him to count to one thousand. Sometimes, when his visions are already raging, there’s nothing else she can do.
Meg closes the door behind her, sealing them in.
Zara turns back to her little compacts of paint and powder, pretending to be focused. “Is everything all right?” Meg asks, her voice as cool as a compress. “I saw you and Kestrel coming out of the storage room. You looked upset.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” Zara says, smudging a spot of pancake at her neckline that hasn’t quite blended. “I mean, not nothing. Barrett and Kestrel were dating, and . . . she caught him cheating. I went because she wanted to confront him.”
If this is all about Kestrel, Zara shouldn’t look so pale under her makeup. So cold inside her skin. As though she’s caught at the center of a snow globe that has been violently shaken and won’t stop swirling.
“Is that all?” Meg asks. Zara cuts a look toward Meg, sharp with distrust. Meg takes a deep, supported breath, the kind that actors draw on for their performances. “I know you saw me onstage last night. It must have given you all sorts of ideas. Give me a chance to explain.” Meg doesn’t want to say these words out loud, but there’s no real way around it. Barrett has caused trouble, she can sense it, and she needs to regain Zara’s confidence. So she takes this one sentence at a time, treating her life like a story that happened to someone else. “When I was a girl, not much older than you, I left the place where I grew up, a small town in Louisiana. I came to New York and auditioned for shows. I met a charming director.”
Zara’s eyes, darkly outlined, meet Meg’s in the mirror.
“He made me believe that I was the most talented, perfect creature,” she says. The bitterness has been inside her for so long; it has grown so intense that it feels like poison. “He told me I was the most worthless girl he’d ever seen. While Leopold was building me up, he was also tearing me down. Slowly. Methodically. I didn’t see that until it was too late.”
Zara holds her arms tight across her middle. Fear is making its way through her, finding a proper home.
Good. Meg was never afraid enough.
“Whatever is happening, whatever is troubling you, I can help. That’s what I’m here for. To help the actors. That’s why I keep coming back. Not for him. We’re about to start previews, Zara, and I don’t want you to go on like this. Leopold will notice, for one thing.”
“All I wanted was to be Echo,” Zara says, wooden and scraped.
“I know,” Meg says. A bit more poison leaks out. “Echo is your dream. Our dreams have another side to them, though. We wake up. Sometimes more roughly than others.”
Zara turns around to face Meg fully. “Barrett is Leopold’s son. Did you know that? Maybe that explains why he is . . . like he is.” She holds out her phone, and Meg takes in the picture on the screen. “He did this. Last night.”
Meg is going to kill Barrett. It’s that simple. The stage manager’s hard knock sounds. “Places!” Meg opens the door just a crack; the actresses are lining up. “I need a minute,” Meg tells the stage manager. “Hold the curtain if you have to.”
The stage manager looks like she wants to dismember Meg, but that sort of anger doesn’t touch her. People who need to hurt you don’t always make a show of it. They find quiet ways.
This time when Meg closes the door, she locks it. “You know about Leopold’s visions.”
“They show him how to stage his plays,” Zara says. But the shiver in her voice makes it clear she’s not sure about anything, including the ground she’s standing on.
A strand of Zara’s light-brown hair has broken away from the rest. Meg captures it and gently tucks it back in, adding a pin from the lineup on the table. “He’s been having visions of the deaths before they happen.”
Zara blinks. “Roscoe and Enna? He saw them?”
“Leopold told me that the Aurelia’s curse made a home for itself in his mind,” Meg says dryly. “It took over his visions. They’re not just about the show anymore.” It feels good to let out a small measure of truth. Meg has been holding back so much for so long. That’s how she ends up throwing glasses at the wall.
Zara stares at their shared reflection in the mirror. “Who else did Leopold see?”
“He won’t tell me.”
When Zara speaks again, her pretty voice is in pieces. “Eli told me that people saw someone who looks like Leopold coming out of the Aurelia on the day Roscoe died. But she also said he wasn’t in the city that day. He was with Toby.”
Meg sighs. “After talking to you at the Dragon and Bottle, Toby confided in me. Leopold didn’t go on that trip to his cabin upstate. He asked Toby to lie for him. You know how . . . persuasive Leopold can be.”
Zara falls silent in a permanent sort of way.
Meg sticks a final pin in the girl’s hair and sends her to take her place.