And then he smiled, a great, toothy grin of the sort I had never seen from him. He had exactly one word and it was spectacular.
True fact: I had seen only one production of Our Town and that was when I was in seventh grade. The high school put it on and I thought it was spectacular. Every line in the play was new to me. I had no inkling that Emily would die in the third act. I cried so hard when the Stage Manager takes her back to her mother’s kitchen that I had to cover my face with my hands while my grandmother fished through her purse for Kleenex. All of which is to say you don’t see a play when you’re in it. You might see pieces, but you don’t know how it looks from a distance, the whole thing put together. Aside from the Emily I saw in seventh grade, and the Emilys I saw auditioning years later in our high school gymnasium, I didn’t know how other people played the part. That night I was going to see Pallace in Our Town.
Sebastian parked on the street and came around to give me my crutches. I crutched heroically, halfway up the drive, holding that Christmas ham of an enormous cast behind me until I had no choice but to stop. My arms were shaking.
“Come on,” he said, his steadying hand on my back. “I’ll carry you.”
It was one thing to have been carried off the tennis court or into the hospital, but something else entirely to just be carried around. I was sweating as I stared up the steep pitch of the driveway. I had done this to myself. I drank the tequila I knew not to drink, played the tennis game I didn’t want to play. It might not sound like much but it cost me everything.
Sebastian picked me up, letting the crutches clatter to the ground. He gave me a bounce to get me situated in his arms and once again I clasped my arms around his neck like a bride. “Lucky for me my brother fell in love with someone small,” he said.
Love, he said. It was the single mention of that word during my relationship with Duke.
This was how we entered that sunny cottage, Sebastian using his foot to push the door open, Sebastian taking me straight to the bed and laying me out, using the extra pillows to elevate my foot. Someone had cut a bunch of poppies and put them in a drinking glass on the nightstand and I didn’t ask who had done it for fear the flowers would be from him as well.
“I’m going to find you a wheelchair,” he said.
“I don’t need a wheelchair.” What I needed was a minute of sleep.
“Think about how far away the theater is. I really do have to go back to work now, and Duke and Pallace can’t come and get you. It’s the only way you’re going to see the play tonight.”
Sebastian went back for my crutches and leaned them against the foot of the bed. He put my pills and my book on the nightstand. Sebastian kissed my forehead with kindness, the same way my brothers had kissed me as a child. He would get me a wheelchair. He would make sure someone took me to the play. I think I was asleep before he was out the door, and then I was awake again and Duke was kissing me, the startling taste of tequila filling my mouth. He must have come straight from the lake and into my bed. He covered me with his pervasive dampness. “You’ve been gone forever,” he said, pushing off his espadrilles.
“Did Duke come and see you before the play?” Emily asks, her brow knit with concern. Joe has gone off to the goats while the girls and I wash dishes. Cherries, cooking, goats, dishes, the past. Days are endless and the weeks fly by.
“He did.” I lean into the pan to scrub off bits of whitefish. “In between rehearsal and the performance.”
Maisie shakes her head. “Knock yourself out, Duke.”
“They were busy days,” I say.
“Not that busy,” Nell says.
I smile. “No, you’re right. Not that busy.”
“Your girlfriend’s laid up in bed,” Maisie says.
“And she doesn’t get to finish her run of Our Town,” Nell says.
“In fact, she never plays Emily again,” I say, joining them for a moment in the third person. Nell had already come to this conclusion but I can see that Emily and Maisie didn’t know.
“Never?” Emily asks.
I shake my head.
“It’s just like Uncle Wallace,” Nell says, then catches herself. “I don’t mean that. It’s nothing like Uncle Wallace.”
Emily puts down her dish towel. “Never Emily or never anything else?”
“I stopped acting after that.”
“When you were twenty--four?”
“Twenty--five. I turned twenty--five in the hospital.”
“I really can’t stand this,” Maisie says.
“It redefines the quarter--life crisis,” Emily says.
“The what?”
“Quarter--life crisis,” Nell says. “It’s when your life falls apart at twenty--five or thereabout. The pandemic is our quarter--life crisis.”
“Ah.”
“But yours was so much worse,” Nell says.
“Not getting to act in Our Town again is not worse than the pandemic,” I say.
“Did you really go and see her be Emily?” Emily asks.
“Sure I did. All my friends were in that play. I had to be there for them.” I can’t remember if this is true, if this is the person I was at the time or the person I became later. Certainly we preached it to the girls growing up: Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.
“You went in a wheelchair?”
No one is doing dishes now, and I clap my hands the way their father does to restart their engines. “I went in a wheelchair. One of the swings from Cabaret came to get me. This isn’t a Dickens novel.”
“So how was Pallace?” Nell asks. This is the question all three of them want answered: How was Pallace?
I tell them the truth. She was spectacular.
I knew Chan from the lake. He was easy to be around, a good swimmer with a solid connection to a guy who sold top--quality weed in Detroit. He made me feel like he just happened to be walking past the cottage with an empty wheelchair in case I felt like riding along because he was going to the theater anyway. The world isn’t full of people who can pull that off. The sky was tipping into pink as he wheeled me down the path, what was left of the daylight shimmering gold on the lake.
“People are saying that you returned the serve and that it was totally magnificent,” Chan said to me as merrily we rolled along. “It cost you your leg but you did it.”
“It isn’t true,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. All that matters is what people say. Hey, do you want some cherries? We don’t want to be the first ones there.”
I did want some cherries.