Me. Tom Cruise is here to see me. Of course he is, though part of me thinks, It can’t be. I notice he’s holding a red rose pointy with thorns.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Hollywood?”
When I say Hollywood, I think of Mother, even though she’s the last person I want in my head right now. Hollywood’s where she wants to go eventually. Because how is she ever going to be the star she’s meant to be in Montreal, for fuck’s sake? Doing theater? A commercial here, a film there? She’s tired of being a big fish in a small pond, making peanuts in Ladies Apparel. Someday we’ll get there, Sunshine, she whispers to me at night, gripping my hand in the dark like it’s my dream, not hers.
Tom Cruise shakes his head. He’s still smiling at me. “I had to see you,” he says.
“You did?”
“Definitely.”
The rose glows in his hands. The rose, I know, is for me. My heart flutters, brightens. We’re swaying to this music that’s suddenly playing. That song I love from the movie, the one about breaths being taken away. Tom takes a step closer to the glass that separates us. He looks serious now. His jaw tightens, just like it does in the movie when he feels the need for speed.
“Can I come in?” he whispers. Tom is asking like the mirror is a door I can open. Will I open the door for him?
“Yes,” I hear myself say. “Please.”
And then? Tom Cruise walks through Mother’s mirror. The mirror is like jelly. As Tom walks through, it makes a sucking sound that reminds me of squids. And then he’s here. In Mother’s closet with me. Standing on the same floor I’m standing on in Mother’s very high-heeled red shoes. So high that Tom’s eyes are only a little above my eyes. His face is inches from my face. And everything seems to happen in slow motion then. Like a movie. A movie I’m inside of. He smells like the ocean, like the sky over the ocean, the breeze the water brings. My body is swimmy. I can’t breathe because Tom’s taking my breath away. He’s smiling at me just like he smiles at that blond woman in the movie, like Chip smiled at Mother just now. I’m fire. I know no words but his name. There are no eyes but Tom Cruise’s eyes, which aren’t blue-green anymore. They’re red. Red and shining like the shoes on my feet, like the rose in his hands.
What’s wrong with your eyes? I want to ask Tom. But I don’t want to be rude. And maybe very close-up like this, Tom’s eyes were always red and I just didn’t notice before. But wouldn’t I have noticed before?
“Here,” Tom says, handing me the rose. “For you.”
“Thank you.” No one’s ever given me anything like this. I can’t wait to tell Stacey—
“Don’t tell anyone,” Tom says, knowing my thoughts. Knowing my heart. He looks very intense.
“I won’t,” I whisper. And though I’m sad about Stacey, I love that Tom doesn’t want me to tell. That it’s a secret.
“Our secret,” Tom says. “From Mother, too.”
“Mother, too?”
He nods. Takes a step closer to me. He cups his hands around my face. Tom Cruise does. His hands feel slightly sticking and cold. I shiver at his touch. “You know about secrets, don’t you, Belle?”
“Yes,” I tell Tom.
He smiles. “Good.” Even with his red eyes, he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. More beautiful than any of my dumb dolls. More beautiful than any prince or Snow White. Way more beautiful than Gabriel Gardner or even Val Kilmer, the actor from the movie where I first saw Tom Cruise. Iceman, Stacey sighed in the theater, and now her bedroom wall’s plastered with his cold, smirking face. I thought, How is it possible to see Iceman when there’s Maverick? I didn’t say anything though. Iceman, I agreed, but I thought no, never in a million years. Tom’s skin gleams like glass. He has red lips like he’s wearing Mother’s Russet Moon lipstick or like he’s been eating cherries. He wants to dance with me. With you, Belle. Like Mother, he calls me Belle too. He bows a little, like he’s from a fairy-tale world. He holds out his glossy hand and I take it. It feels just like a hand would feel except lighter, colder. More jellylike.
“Take My Breath Away” is playing all around us in Mother’s dark closet. Tom and I are dancing. I’ve never slow danced with a boy before, apart from once in Stacey’s dream. I watched Stacey do it with Gabriel Gardner at our grade six dance, while I waltzed with Ms. Said. They put their hands on each other’s shoulders and rocked like they were on a boat. Their arms were so straight, like zombies. Later, Stacey said it was so hot.
Slow dancing with Tom Cruise is nothing like that. It is incredible. His cold, sticking hands on my shoulders, only a little lower than his thanks to Mother’s shoes. His red eyes locked with my eyes. His smile making my skin shiver and burn like it’s freezing and on fire at the same time. He’s lighting me up on the inside. Like I’m a candle in Grand-Maman’s dark church. He tells me he has a castle by the sea. In a land far away. He doesn’t tell me this in words so much. We speak in another language. A language of eyes. Tom’s eyes. And his smile full of white teeth, sharp and long.
“I like your shoes,” Tom says, just like Tom would. He’s very serious about it. “Wow,” he whispers, shaking his head at my feet. “They’re so pretty.”
“Thank you,” I whisper. I don’t tell him that they’re Mother’s.
“So pretty,” Tom repeats. Not looking at my feet anymore. Looking into my eyes, the color of mud. “Like you.”
And when he says this, tears fall. I lower my head so Tom can’t see.
“I’m not,” I say, shaking my head. I shouldn’t be telling him the truth about how I feel. “Mother’s the one who’s beautiful,” I say to the red shoes. “Not me.” The words just fall from my mouth like leaves from a tree. There’s a game the girls at school play called Honestly. We sit in a circle and take turns closing our eyes. When you close them, you ask the circle, Am I beautiful? and people raise their hands if they think Yes and don’t raise them if they think, No, sorry. And someone counts the hands for you, and that’s how you know honestly. The last time we played, every girl, when she closed her eyes, sang, No one is raising their hand, no one is raising their hand, and we all laughed, though mostly we raised our hands. When it was my turn, I closed my eyes and sang, No one is raising their hand, no one is raising their hand, and no one laughed. How many hands? I asked when I opened my eyes. One, said Valerie, who was our Counter, who Mother said looked like a gopher. She’d had three hands. Well at least now you know honestly, Ashley said. She’d had five. I nodded. Now I knew honestly. Ashley looked at me like sorry, like maybe she was the one who’d raised her hand. But I knew who it was because I’d peeked. Stacey. She’d even glared at everyone like seriously? Later, I told Mother about this game and she looked at me for a long time. I don’t want you playing that fucking game ever again, she said.
Why?
Because it’s stupid, that’s why. She lit a cigarette. On the TV screen, Grace Kelly was about to change from a beautiful evening dress into an even more beautiful nightgown while Jimmy Stewart sat in his pajamas and watched from his wheelchair. Go, Mother said to me, eyes on the screen.
I thought we were watching right now.
I don’t want you watching right now.
Where do I go?
She shook her head at the screen. I don’t know. Run. Climb a tree or something, okay? Climb a rock. Be a kid.
So I went outside and sat on a rock until it was dark. Until I heard Mother’s voice calling me. Sounding soft now. She looked beautiful in the doorway watching me walk toward her. If she closed her eyes in any circle, I know everyone in the circle would raise their hands.
Now Tom lifts my chin so my eyes look right into his eyes, blue-green again. Tom’s face is inches from mine. Still serious, a little angry, maybe. Glowing like he’s lit by his own personal sun. So beautiful, I can’t breathe. “Forget about Mother,” he hisses.
“Forget about Mother?”