Chapter Twenty-Four
1903
Feathers without Birds
“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said, falling on his knees next to me, reaching for my face but not touching it, just like all those years ago. “I knew it was, once I saw your posters, even though the name wasn’t yours. Who else could it be? But I thought maybe somehow I was mistaken. I was afraid of that, deep down. But it isn’t so. My God, Ada, I’ve missed you so much. You’re my other half. The only one like me. I haven’t felt complete without you.”
I was glad in that moment for my wrecked voice, as I didn’t know what to say. My mind reeled. Maybe I was dreaming. I prayed I was. But as long as I’d feared Ray, as many years as the memories of what he’d done to me had haunted my waking hours, he had never appeared in my dreams. This was all too real.
“You’d be proud of me,” he went on. “I’m a doctor now. I told you I was a healer. I came here to Chicago since I knew you’d been here…”
The card to my mother, I realized. I am well. I’d sent it from here. Years ago. All unknowingly, I’d brought us both to this moment.
“…but then you weren’t, but I just trusted to fate and stayed. It’s been years, you know, but this place was as good as any other. I worked and waited. Then finally I saw the posters for the Amazing Arden. And I knew it was you. You were coming back to me, and I’d be complete at last again. I bought a ticket for your show. I knew we were about to be reunited. But I didn’t know it would be today. Today—today is unexpected.”
I croaked out, “Today is horrible.”
“Oh—well, yes,” he said, seeming to sober and take in our surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time. “I’m sorry I had to put you in here with these people. I came to help, we all did, and there were so many we couldn’t save, so there had to be a place for them. And someone brought you to me, they weren’t sure if you were alive, and I saw my chance. It was like it was meant to be. I planned to be back before you woke up. I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you. But now it’s all right. Here we are.”
I closed my eyes.
“Ada?”
I didn’t, I couldn’t, respond.
“Open your eyes,” he said, “or I’ll open them for you.”
I complied.
He shed his doctor’s coat. He rolled up one sleeve and showed me the scars on the inside of his arm, a solid mass of lines that followed the bone of the arm, right up the center. He unbuttoned his collar and other cuff and reached one hand up to the back of his neck to grab his shirt and then pulled it off in a long single stroke, and I was powerless to look away.
In the intervening years, he had made a project of his scars. Now they showed every bone. Not just the rib cage but the breastbone, the shoulders, everything. The pale, clustered shapes outlined his whole skeleton. He turned slowly so I could see the scarred curves of each knob in his backbone, the wide triangles of his shoulder blades. Either he was infinitely talented and patient with the razor or he’d had help. He shrugged back into his shirt again and then his spotless white coat, and no one looking at him now would know what a danger he was on the inside.
“You’re not impressed?” He sounded petulant.
I only said again, “Get the hell away from me.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do that, Ada. I’ve been searching for you all this time. And now I’ve found you.”
I made to sit up, and he put the palm of his hand in the center of my chest and pushed me back down.
“Now,” he said, “let’s catch up.”
And in his other hand was the old straight razor with its worn bone handle and its sharp square blade.
I couldn’t fight anymore.
Lying on the floor of that room, the life force drained from me. The world shrank and almost disappeared, and all I could feel was an enormous ache wrapped around my skull and the cold bare floor under my broken body. I’d fallen too low and could see no way out. It was all I could do not to stretch out and surrender to sleep, like a girl in a fairy tale who would either awaken transformed, or not at all.
He leaned over me with the razor, pushing my dress and underskirt up almost to my waist, and began to cut into the flesh of my thigh. I didn’t move. It must have disappointed him, my lack of reaction, because he lifted the razor and brought it toward my face instead.
“You’re hurt. Let me fix you,” he said in that old long-ago voice, and that was what gave me the strength to move. Just one more time.
I moved fast.
I closed both of my hands over his fist with the razor in it and immediately shoved as hard as I could, bending his arm back toward his body. Surprise was on my side. The upturned razor blade slashed across the front of his neck, and blood immediately began to fountain out.
His eyes were stunned, unbelieving. He dropped the razor, and his hands went to his throat, clutching at the wound. The blood still seeped out between his fingers, running over his white coat and shirt, running everywhere.
I threw my body sideways. With what little presence of mind I still had, I grabbed the discarded razor so he couldn’t use it on me. I pushed it against the stone floor to fold it and tucked it into my bodice. There was so much blood.
And then I looked at Ray. His eyes were wild, panicked. I knew who he was, and I knew he’d caused me so much pain and anguish. He’d driven me from my home when I was little more than a child. He was damaged and he was dangerous. But he was also a human being, frightened for his life, and I felt no joy at what I—I!—had done.
Desperate to take it back, to do whatever I could, I pressed my hands over his hands, the slick blood coursing, and said out loud, “I wish you well again.”
Nothing happened.
The blood kept coming, red and warm. The calm that had come over him when I spoke quickly disappeared, and his eyes were even wilder. He opened his mouth to speak but of course he couldn’t. And I, horrified, knew that if I couldn’t heal him, there was only one thing I could do. Escape.
I left him there. I dashed up the stairs. There were two doors at the top. I opened the colder one. This took me outside, and I slammed the door behind me, exiting into an alleyway between the theater and the restaurant next door. Standing next to the restaurant’s window, I could see the entire room was full of survivors from the fire, standing or crouching or laid out on tables, and white-coated doctors were moving from person to person, giving directions, pointing, shouting. It seemed clear they were separating patients into those who could be helped and those who couldn’t. I’d been in the restaurant’s storeroom. The warmer door would have taken me inside. Someone might use it at any moment to take more of the dead down into that awful room. I couldn’t be nearby when they found Ray, untouched by smoke or ash, dying or already dead.
I plunged my hands into a snowbank to wipe away as much of the blood as I could. I looked around to see if anyone was watching me, but the scene was so frenetic that no one had time or inclination to take any notice of someone who wasn’t visibly injured. The fact that I was on my feet and moving meant I could safely be ignored, and so I was.
I forced myself to walk, heading up the alleyway toward the street, and stared for a moment at the firefighters, still battling the blaze. From here, I could feel the dreadful radiant heat of the fire on my face. The firefighters were curiously silent. Then I realized I couldn’t hear anything at all, as if the sound of the world had been wiped away. I wished everything else were as easily gone. With no warning, I vomited on the stone of the alleyway.
I felt my life would now be divided in half: everything that came before this, and everything that came after. I didn’t want everything after to begin.