Varya bites her cheek to keep from smiling. ‘I thought you said you don’t believe in it.’
‘I don’t,’ Gertie sniffs. ‘But if I did, I wouldn’t be complaining. If I did, I’d think eighty-eight was just fine.’
At seven thirty, they walk into the dining hall for the magic show. A raised platform acts as the stage; two lamps, set on either side, are spotlights. One of the nurses has hung red sheets over a clothing rack for curtains. Gertie and her friends have dressed up for the occasion, and the dining hall is teeming. An electric anticipation binds everyone in the room, invisible as dark matter. It pulls them together and toward the stage, toward Ruby.
Then the curtain parts, and she appears.
In Ruby’s hands, the stage transforms. The curtain becomes a real curtain, and the lamps become spotlights. Klara excelled at rapid-fire patter, but Ruby has an unexpected gift for physical comedy and a way of including everyone in the room. There is something else, too, that sets her apart from her mother. She has an easy grin, and her voice never wavers. When she drops a ball she was meant to catch, she spends a moment in self-deprecating pantomime before recovering her even keel. It’s confidence, Varya sees. Ruby looks more comfortable – in her skills, in herself – than her mother ever did.
Oh, Klara, Varya thinks. If you could see your child.
All night, Gertie looks at Ruby like a movie she never wants to stop watching. It’s nearly eleven by the time the last residents filter out of the dining hall. Though Gertie agreed to ride in the detested wheelchair, her chest is puffed like a turkey’s. Varya knows that stopping aging is as improbable as the idea that a compulsion can keep something bad from happening. But she still wants to shout: Don’t go.
Ruby wheels Gertie back to her room. Soon, she’ll turn her attention to other miracles: how to suture a wound, to tap a spine, to deliver a child. Tonight, though, there was a bond that linked her to everyone in the room, a network of emotion, and Ruby didn’t let go. When she stood onstage and looked out and felt that feeling, it made her think of the preschool children she sometimes sees walking past her apartment in Los Angeles. To make sure they don’t stray, the children walk in a line with the rope in their hands. Tonight was like that, Ruby thinks. One by one, they came to the rope. One by one, they held on.
‘Why would you want to be a doctor when you could keep doing this?’ her father still asks. ‘You bring people so much joy.’
But Ruby knows that magic is only one tool among many for keeping one another alive. When she was a child, Raj told her the four words Klara always said before a show. Ruby has recited the very same ones ever since. Tonight she stood behind the curtain with her hands clasped. On the other side, she could hear the audience whispering and fidgeting and rustling their cheap printed programs in anticipation.
‘I love you all,’ she whispered. ‘I love you all, I love you all, I love you all.’
Then she stepped through the curtain to join them.