A Lily in the Light(59)
Christophe moved the flowers to the lobby table. It hadn’t been roses last time. It had been something purple. The roses were especially thorny, amplified in the curved glass vase. The buds curled into themselves, shocked to be in a hotel instead of the garden they came from. How could a woman who gave vegetables to her neighbors keep someone locked in a basement? It didn’t make sense. The phone booth was too small. She was boxed in. The psychic was a stupid thing to hope for. It always had been, but still.
“It’s just the weather now. I’ll call you if they say anything else. Oh! And Esme?”
“Yeah?”
“Congratulations.”
“For what?”
“You must have done really well tonight. You never say anything about the shows you’re proud of.”
“That’s not true.”
“Trust me—it is.”
They said good night. It would be so nice to say good night to someone so close. She stepped out of the phone booth, thankful for the rush of fresh air. The first hint of a Charlie horse started under her arch. She needed an ice bath and to roll a tennis ball under her foot. Even the carpet felt like jagged rocks.
She was going to be an aunt. What did aunts do? Maybe being an aunt wasn’t that different from being a big sister, but that . . . that . . .
Esme was back in her house again, the lock swinging on the front door. The pink sequined shoes were missing, without so much as a mark on the carpet, her mother’s panicked voice to the 911 operator while spaghetti chilled on the table, drying on Lily’s Lion King plate. No one would ever eat them.
Esme dropped the bag of cheese. It landed with a soft thud.
“Miss?”
Christophe stepped out from behind the desk. He was a charcoal sketch: dark eyebrows, dark hair that fell over his face in sharp, fresh-cut threads over cedar eyes. Long fingers on the keyboard, a coil of arms and legs, fixing the leaking tub in her room on her first night at the hotel. Christophe had two voices, the one he used with guests and another whispered into the phone when guests weren’t checking in or out or tubs leaking or flowers waiting to be arranged. The dark lines around his eyes knit into shadows during those secret calls. He was about her age, maybe younger, too young to hide the wounded look when someone left change on the counter, a dismissal. Alternate versions of his own life swept in and out of the revolving door, but he was always here, trapped in his red-and-black uniform.
Truthfully, she was glad there was someone to call if she needed something stupid. There wasn’t anyone else. He picked up the bag from the floor and handed it back to her. She didn’t want it anymore but didn’t say so. The red rose waited on the table.
“This came for you.” He held out a small jeweler’s box, wrapped in silver paper, tied with pink ribbon. No note. Her curiosity sparked the small space between them.
“Who’s it from?” Other dancers had gotten gifts from fans, but this was her first. She had done well tonight; she knew it. The success scared her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The phone rang. He slipped around the desk to answer it, eyeing her carefully beneath his lashes. The cord dangled. Hadn’t there been an upside-down phone that night? Upended, dial tone beeping until it had gone silent?
She felt trapped, as boxed in as she had been in the phone booth. She wished she could curl into herself like a rosebud and stay nestled in her own safe self—or someone else’s. Adam. She rounded the corner to his room and stopped.
Jennifer lingered outside Adam’s door in a pair of electric-blue leggings and a shredded black T-shirt. It fell off her shoulder on one side. Her right foot rested against the inside of her left thigh. Tree pose, but instead of a calm forest tree, everything about Jennifer was electrified. Esme sensed she’d burn the whole place down just to find herself unscathed in the ashes, those blue eyes cold as ever.
She’d ignored Esme on that first day at the studio when everyone had introduced themselves, yawning theatrically when Adam had introduced his friend from school in a way that had made Esme feel like a mom of a childhood friend, someone who made really good meatballs and let kids play Nintendo all night or made waffles with ice cream for breakfast in dumpy mom jeans and a bleach-stained sweatshirt.
The Adam she knew would have hated someone like Jennifer, who’d probably had a stage mom and all kinds of stuff they’d never had. Adam’s door closed behind Jennifer, but her presence lingered in the hallway, so strong and uninviting that Esme took a different staircase to her room. Where was the Adam who slid in beside her and shared peanut M&M’S, the “diet” kind? Or visited her last year in San Francisco just to see her first performance as a soloist? She was still the same Esme, still struggling for the next level, whatever that was.
Part of Esme was relieved. She didn’t know how to be something more with Adam. The normal part of her that should’ve known what to do at nineteen didn’t quite work. She could hide it well enough when she was doing normal Esme things, but when something new like Adam came along, she felt broken. The little box with silver paper reflected a blurry version of herself, dark haired and alone in the empty stairwell.
She waited until she reached her room before untying the ribbon and lifting the lid. A pale-pink seashell rested on a bed of white sand. She held it up to the light, admiring the gentle spiral of the thumb-size shell. It was perfect compared to the wildly uneven intersecting lines in her hand, her bitten-down fingernails. Everything about her was crude compared to the ethereal thing she was onstage.