***
I took a passenger train instead of the private railcar. Somehow I thought it might help. I didn’t want to feel pampered. I wanted to feel anonymous. I missed Clyde terribly—hiding in his arms might let me forget things, at least for a few blissful moments—but it was best that I was alone. I was melancholy and not fit company. If Clyde had been there, I just would have pretended things were fine, and things weren’t fine. So I let myself be melancholy and settled into a dark frame of mind.
Regret for what I’d done quickly bloomed into fantasies of what I might do, what I could do. I could just disappear, I realized. I could get off this train anywhere, and no one would have to know. I could make a new life somewhere else, anywhere else, where no one knew me as a magician or a dancer or any of the other things I’d been. I could start over. It was a beautiful fantasy, and indeed I almost followed that whim. I found myself standing, even, to make for the door. Had I had even a little money with me, perhaps I would have done it.
Then my fantasy turned even darker. I wouldn’t even have to wait until the train stopped moving in order to step off. Taking a life meant it would be fair if I lost mine as well, in some fashion. Dying would mean no more torment, no uncertainty, no regret. But quickly I let go of the idea. People would think some weakness or hidden fault had gotten the better of me—Drink? Gambling? A secret love affair? they would speculate—and I didn’t want that to be my legacy. And it would destroy Clyde. I had to get back to him, to be with him, even if I wasn’t ready just yet.
As I stared out the window at the countryside, I felt as if the train was bearing me back in time. Back before I’d cut Ray’s throat, before I’d had my heart broken and my lungs burned by the Iroquois Fire, before I released Clyde from his promise and he laid his hands on me and we fell headlong in love. I’d taken great joy headlining my own act as the Amazing Arden, no question. But in a way, the happiest time of my life had been before that. It had been when I was a member of Adelaide’s company, learning the ropes and forging my way ahead into the unfamiliar world of stage magic, making it my own. And then I knew where I needed to go and who I needed to see.
She was more mother to me than my own mother had been. Neither of them had instructed me tenderly or shared their feelings with me, but Adelaide and I were more of a piece: canny and distrustful on one hand, but on the other, whores for the crowd. She had trusted me, encouraged me. She had handed something meaningful down. If I was going to leave the stage and its attendant world behind—which it had just occurred to me I might—I’d be wise to talk to someone who knew exactly what that was like.
***
Adelaide’s farm looked like it had been copied from the pages of a picture book. There was a wooden mailbox at the end of the gravel-lined drive and rows of tall trees that flanked the lane. The farmhouse was faded but clean, the worn lines of its white clapboard sides still straight and true. The one detail that stood out as odd, which I only noticed as I mounted the steps to the porch, was the tiger sprawled out in the sunbeams that fanned out from the slats in the porch railing.
The weather had turned shockingly warm for the season, and Adelaide was sitting in the porch swing with an open book on her lap, her bare feet almost but not quite brushing the tiger’s back. There was more gray to her hair; the same was true of the fur around the tiger’s muzzle. “Same tiger?” I asked.
“The very same.”
“Is he safe?”
“For now, she is. She’s just had her supper.”
I noticed then there was a thin chain running from the tiger’s collar to the thickest post of the porch railing, and I breathed a little easier. “You bought her at auction?”
“I did.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask you before selling the animals.”
“That’s why I gave you the company, no strings attached,” she said. “I expected you would do with it what you wanted. I didn’t want you to ask me anything. I wanted you to make your own decisions.”
“I seem to remember there were two strings attached,” I said.
“Eighty percent of a great deal is far better than one hundred percent of nothing. You’re doing quite well for yourself, it seems.”
She was bold, but she wasn’t wrong. I said, “I suppose it was the other string who told you that.”
“And that one’s worked out in your favor as well, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, he’s done a great job with the business.”
With a sly smile, she said, “I’m not talking about the business. Not the money kind of business, anyway.” I realized he must have told her what had happened between us. Well, we hadn’t hidden it from anyone in the company, so why hide it from Adelaide? I wanted to ask if she was happy for me, but it didn’t seem right. If she wanted me to know how she felt, she’d tell me.
“You look wonderful,” I said.
“You’ve become a better liar,” she replied.
The tiger sighed in her sleep, a deep rumbling noise, and stretched one paw farther out before settling back into stillness. I watched the soft, pale fur of her underbelly rise and fall, almost imperceptibly, with her breath. It was hypnotic.
“So what’s the occasion?” said Adelaide at last.
“I almost died in a fire,” I said. I left out the part where I’d cut a man’s throat; in case someone figured out the connection and came to accuse me of the crime, I didn’t want to ever have spoken aloud of it. The less she knew about that, the better.
“But you didn’t,” she said. “That’s life.”
“But I don’t know what the point is anymore. Playing tricks on people. It’s a frivolous thing. Night after night, the same games, fake flowers, fake pictures, a fake world. That whole crowd came to the Iroquois to escape their ordinary lives for a couple of hours, and it killed them. I don’t know if I can ever look out over an audience again without remembering that.”
Adelaide said, “Are you going to give up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“Never thought of you as a girl who gives up, that’s all. The strong ones don’t quit.”
Without thinking, I said accusingly, “You did.”
“That’s different, Vivi. And I suspect you know it. I lived an entire lifetime onstage, and it was glorious. I wouldn’t trade those years away for anything. But then it wasn’t my time anymore. It’s still your time. Why would you toss that away?”
“It’s hard.”
“We deal with the hard parts because we have to. What’s the alternative? Not living?”
I thought back to the horrific scene in the burning theater, and to Ray looming over me among the shrouded dead, and how I’d felt lying there helpless on the ground. “Maybe.”
“Good Lord, girl. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It’s embarrassing.”
“I almost died,” I said again.
She seemed unmoved. “Life’s a bullet catch.”
“You’re pitiless, aren’t you?”
“And I suspect that’s why you’re here. You don’t want someone who’ll coddle you and tell you you’re right. You wanted a level head, and here I am. You almost died? You’ve got fear and amazement in you. Use them.”
I looked down at the sleeping tiger and smiled. “Is it all right if I stay the night, then?”
“If you promise to drop this malarkey about how the world owes you a bucket of fine red roses.”
“Consider it dropped.”
She rose gingerly from the swing and folded her book closed with an audible thump. “Then let’s have a steak and talk about the time you got arrested in Poughkeepsie. I’ve been dying to hear your side of the story.”
The weight on my heart lifted. I followed her into the house, saying, “It started with a man at the back, in the middle of the act, shouting, ‘Charlatan’…”