“She told you not to come?”
“I understood. She didn’t have the time. I mean, when you think about her schedule there wasn’t one minute. I wanted to see her in everything. I can tell you that. I really wanted to see her in Our Town again, even if it meant driving up and turning around to drive back after the show, I would have done it but she said it was too much.” He was so careful to avoid any obstacles or breaks in the walkway as he wheeled me to the theater.
“It would have been a lot.”
“Joe did it.”
Joe Nelson! I hadn’t said goodbye to him after the last performance. I forgot that I wasn’t going to see him again. “Maybe we can all go back to the Nelsons’ farm,” I said, thinking I could get another chance. We could live the entire day again! Lunch with Maisie and Ken, the napkins, Sebastian and Pallace holding hands when we went into the woods, Duke running across the beach, Duke lying down in the thick cemetery grass to smoke. I would take all of it.
“We can go anywhere you want as long as we get her here in time for the curtain.”
Her, he said, not him. So recently it would have been Duke’s schedule Sebastian kept his eye on. “Let’s go to the Yacht Club for lunch,” I said. “The three of us could come down in Pallace’s car and meet you.” Duke loved to talk about the Yacht Club, he loved to say the word yacht, to say how Sebastian ruled the world in his tennis whites.
Sebastian stopped at the place where the view of the lake was best, the place where you turned off to take the path to the theater, the place we ran past day after day as we barreled down the grassy slope in the afternoon heat to throw ourselves into the water.
“The club is no place to go,” he said.
A heron raked across the surface of the lake just as we were watching, wetting his toes and coming up empty. “Look at that!” I said. We were both so excited to see the bird. I could have asked him what was wrong with having lunch at the Yacht Club but I already knew. Sebastian wanted to protect her from everything, including the place where he worked.
Unlike Chan, who left me parked behind the last row, Sebastian picked me up and carried me down the stairs. To be fair, it never crossed my mind that Chan might offer to carry me anywhere, and I don’t think it occurred to him either, but it was comforting to be in Sebastian’s arms again. “You know I wouldn’t do this if you were a normal--sized person,” he said, and I laughed, glad for once to be small. This was the big night, and we’d come early for the privilege of sitting in the center of the second row.
The lights were up as the house started to fill. I told Sebastian about the sewing I’d taken on and the things I’d found in people’s pockets. He asked where I learned to sew and so I told him about my grandmother and how I’d been in her shop since a time before memory. Then he told me about his lessons for the week, about a fourteen--year--old boy named Andy with a canny backhand who was the best student he’d ever had. The boy’s parents had joined the Yacht Club just so he could take lessons with Sebastian. The excitement in his voice when he talked about this kid was moving to me. More than once he told me Andy was his best.
I don’t think Sebastian and I had talked about anything much before he took me to the hospital but we were different now, we counted each other as friends. I was, for those few remaining minutes, happy just to be with him. When in the future I would think of Saint Sebastian it was always at that moment in the theater before the curtain went up, his white shirt and navy blazer, his smile as he leaned over to whisper something about the woman who was standing in the aisle, complaining that all the good seats had been taken when the play was set to start in five minutes.
Fool for Love is complete in one act. Sam Shepard in his infinite wisdom knew that, if given an intermission, too many people would make a run for the door. I don’t mean the play was bad. As much as I hated it, I knew it wasn’t bad, but it ran a person ragged, both the actors and the audience. Even if you weren’t the two people in the second--row center waking up to the fact that everything you loved was lost, it was hard to watch. When Eddie and Mae started kissing, Sebastian covered my wrist with his hand and kept it there for the rest of the performance, his eyes straight ahead. Duke was gone and Pallace was gone and all we could do was sit there and wait for the show to be over.
But while we waited we watched them. We understood that there had never really been a world in which Pallace would have stayed with a tennis coach from East Detroit, never any world in which Duke would stay with anyone at all. We were members of the audience and they were slender gods, brilliant and terrifying. They lit the room with the lightning of their drunken grief and extravagant love. How could they get to the end of that show without going home and slamming one another up against the wall, the floor, the bed? Surely some actors in the past had managed, the same ones who swapped the tequila for water, but Duke and Pallace were just kids. Prodigiously talented kids.
When finally it was finished, the audience leapt to their feet to applaud and Sebastian pushed his way down the row and was gone. It was the last I would see of him. I sat there in the pale blue dress my grandmother made and my enormous plaster cast and waited. I hadn’t understood that Pallace and I were in a race but we were, and she had won. The cocktail of grief and humiliation and longing battered my heart with such violence I was sure I could feel the muscle tear. When people asked if I needed any help I told them no, my friend was coming right back, but after another half hour, after every other person had trickled away, I had to concede that not even good old Saint Sebastian was coming to get me. That was when I saw how the backs of theater seats could provide a stable means of transfer. I stood and held one and then the next and the next, hopping my way to the aisle and then hopping my way up the stairs row by row, all the way back to where my wheelchair was waiting. I used the chair as a walker, pushing it through the door until I got outside and got myself seated and got myself very slowly back home in the dark. Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.
18
The storm is all but played out, the thunder rolling off to a place so far away that not even Hazel is alarmed. It’s only rain now, and not the kind of rain that will drown you if you look up. Maisie and Nell are staring at me, drunk with disappointment.
“Sebastian just—-” Maisie swallows. “Didn’t come back?”
“He went to the greenroom to find them. There was some sort of fight.”
“Who told you?”
“Cat came over with the mending in the morning.”