But she knows they might lose the job if she pushes back more. She lets the costumer raise her hemline by five inches and lower her neckline by two, fit the chest with padded cups. During rehearsals, Raj stands proudly, but Klara is shrinking. The radiance she felt during the audition is becoming dimmer every day – it’s washed out by the five-hundred-watt spotlights, obscured by the fog of the smoke machines. She thought the Mirage wanted her as she was, but they want her cubed, larger than life. They want her Vegas. To them, she’s as much a novelty as the pink volcano outside the hotel: their very own girl magician.
Ruby’s cartilage is turning to bone, and her bones are fusing. Her body is seventy percent water, the same percentage of water on Earth. She has delicate canine fangs and one set of knobby molars. She can say go and no and come me, which means come with me, which turns Klara’s heart to goop. She shrieks with delight at the sight of the pink lizards that crawl through King’s Row and holds pebbles tight in her fists. When the show opens and they get their first big paycheck, Raj wants to sell the trailer and rent an apartment, look at preschools and pediatricians. But Klara is running out of time. If the woman on Hester Street was right, she’ll die in two months.
She doesn’t tell Raj. He’ll think she’s even crazier. Besides, she rarely sees him: between rehearsals, he stays at the theater. From a grid ninety feet above the stage, he rigs a system of customized lines and pulleys to steel pipe battens. He uses the stage’s traps and sloats to devise a disappearance for Klara after her Breakaway bow. He builds a new card table with the construction crew and helps them carry props from the shop to the stage. The stage manager loves him, but some of the techs are resentful. Once, on her way to pick Ruby up from day care, Klara passes two stagehands. They’re standing just inside the doors to the theater, watching Raj mark the stage with tape.
‘You used to be the one to set the marks,’ one says. ‘You aren’t careful, Gandhi’ll take your job.’
Klara walks to Vons, pushing Ruby in her red plastic stroller. She nicks eight cans of Gerber sweet potatoes from aisle four, which clink in her purse as she walks toward the exit. The sliding doors open, and she feels a rush of warm air. It’s evening in late November, but the sky is still denim blue. She sits down beneath a street lamp, opens one of the Gerber jars, and feeds Ruby with her index finger.
Two orbs of white light grow closer, larger, and a silver Oldsmobile rolls to a stop. Klara covers Ruby’s eyes and squints, but the car doesn’t keep moving: it pauses in front of her like she’s blocking the way out of the lot. In the driver’s seat, a man is staring at her. He has rumpled strawberry blond hair and pale gold eyes and a mouth hanging open. He looks exactly like Eddie O’Donoghue, the cop from San Francisco.
Klara scrambles to her feet and pulls Ruby onto one hip. In the process, she drops the jar of food, which cracks and spills orange mush, but she doesn’t stop – she walks and then she starts running back to the anonymous crowds of the Strip. She’s weaving through tourists, pushing the empty stroller crookedly with one hand and remembering the thrust of his tongue in her mouth, when she slams into the back of a heavyset woman with two long, brown braids.
Klara’s blood freezes. It’s the fortune teller. She grabs the woman’s shoulder.
The woman turns. She’s only a teenager. Beneath the dancing lights of the Stage Door Casino, her face turns red, then blue.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ The girl’s pupils are dilated, and there’s a bullish thrust to her chin.
‘I’m sorry,’ Klara whispers, withdrawing. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
Ruby screams from her waist. Klara fumbles ahead, past Caesars Palace and the Hilton Suites, past Harrah’s and Carnaval Court. She never thought she’d be so glad to see the Mirage volcano’s stupid hot pink froth. Only when she enters the hotel does she realize she left Ruby’s stroller in front of the Stage Door, empty.
She doesn’t want to hear the knocks – she wants them to go back where they came from – but they’re only getting louder. Simon is angry with her; he thinks she’s forgetting him. An hour before their first dress rehearsal, Klara walks into the women’s bathroom at the Mirage and sets Ruby on the counter next to a vase of fake flowers. She takes out her watch. Meet comes quickly, as before. Thirteen minutes later, she hears a fifth knock: another M. In five minutes, there’s an E.
She thinks he’s starting the same word over when she realizes what he’s telling her. Meet me. After sixty-five minutes, she has another one.
Us.
Simon and Saul. Us. The bathroom seesaws. Klara puts her hands on the marble counter and drops her head to her chest. She’s not sure how long it’s been when she hears Ruby’s voice. The baby isn’t crying; she’s not even babbling. What she says is clear as day: ‘Ma. Ma. Ma-ma.’
Inside Klara, a long stalk keels and snaps. Always, it’s like this: the family that created her and the family she created, pulling her in opposite directions. Someone’s beating on the door.
‘Klara?’ Raj shouts, coming inside.
Instead of his usual outfit – a white T-shirt, smudged ashy, and an old pair of Carhartts – he wears his costume: a custom-made swallowtail coat and top hat, smooth and black as a penguin’s pelt. Ruby sits on the other side of the counter. She’s crawled into one of the Mirage’s gaping gold sinks and is playing with the automatic soap dispenser. There’s blue froth in her mouth, and she’s wailing.
‘What the fuck, Klara? What’s wrong with you?’ Raj takes Ruby in his arms and helps her spit, flushing out her mouth with his hands. He wets a paper towel and gently wipes her eyes and nose. Then he puts both hands against the counter and leans forward, resting his chin in the baby’s dark hair. It takes Klara a moment to realize he’s crying.
‘You were talking to Simon,’ he says. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘The knocks. I’ve been timing them. I wasn’t sure if they were real before, but I know it now: they are, they just spelled –’
Raj leans in as if to kiss her. But he pauses with his nose at her cheek before withdrawing.
‘Klara.’ When he looks at her, there’s something vivid in his face, something alive, something she thinks is love before she realizes it’s fury. ‘I can smell it on you.’
‘Smell what?’ asks Klara, buying time. She downed two mini bottles of Popov in the trailer; they were supposed to help her steady.
‘You must be some kind of masochist, to do this to us now. Or do you just think I’ll always be here to pick up the pieces?’
‘It was one drink.’ She hates the way her voice shakes. ‘You’re controlling.’
‘Is that what you tell yourself?’ Raj’s eyes widen. ‘Years ago. If I hadn’t found you. Where do you think you’d be?’
‘Better off.’ She’d be in San Francisco, doing gigs on her own. She’d be lonely, but in control.
‘You’d be a drunk,’ says Raj. ‘A failure.’
Ruby gazes at Klara from Raj’s arms. Blood rushes to Klara’s cheeks.
‘The only reason you’re still doing what you’re doing,’ Raj says, ‘is because I met you. And the only reason you were getting by before you met me was because you were ripping people off. You stole, Klara. Shamelessly. And you think all you were doing was giving people a good show?’