A Lily in the Light(68)
There were so many episodes about forgiveness. Esme imagined herself on that set over the years, Oprah’s hand resting over hers as she told Birdman she was sorry they’d made him into a Boo Radley, sorry he’d lived up to it because everyone pushed him into being an outsider, sorry for naming him to the police and for the grief that had caused him. That should have been the moment Oprah’s eyes welled up and Esme hugged Birdman, but it was not, because there was one more piece she could never get past.
I know it was you. The police couldn’t prove it, and I’ll never know for sure, but I’ll always know it was you somehow, because who else could it be? She’d played it out over and over again at different stages in her life, and it didn’t make sense any other way. It had to be him, and if he’d made Lily feel what Esme had felt that day in the hallway or worse, she’d never forgive him. Even if Oprah believed forgiving others was really a gift to ourselves, it didn’t matter. She’d never forgive him.
And besides, Birdman was dead. He’d never have a chance to make things right. He hadn’t wanted to. Or maybe he’d never done anything wrong, but Esme would never know. It had been an aneurism, quick and painless. The police had found him slumped at the table with a cup of tea and carried him out on a stretcher under a white sheet. What had happened to those doll parts on the table? That hair in the box?
Birdman never had been a former marine. He’d never eaten a poisoned orange, and he wasn’t half-deaf. He’d been some kind of mannequin maker for storefronts, designing worlds behind glass windows, and he’d made them at home because he suffered from terrible anxiety, his sister had told Mrs. Rodriquez once, though she’d never said why.
Knowing hadn’t comforted Esme. It disturbed her that any window display in the city could’ve been Birdman’s take on freezing people in time, capturing life as people wanted it from the perspective of an old man with milk-bottle glasses and an empty pigeon coop on the roof, waiting for messages that never came.
“We tried,” his sister had told Mrs. Rodriquez when she’d come to clean out his apartment, carrying one box after the next to the curb. “And I’m sorry,” she’d said, “if he was a little odd. We did the best we could.”
What a joke, Esme thought. “The best you could” was keeping a girl locked in your basement. What good had keeping someone from her family and taking her life away done? She hated them both, Birdman and his sister, whoever she was. She was glad they were both dead.
Esme closed the office door quietly behind her, winding her way down the hall to her dressing room, where she’d sew pointe shoes and put her makeup on as if the only important thing tonight was pretending to be someone else.
“You’re late.” Adam hovered outside her empty dressing room, arms crossed. “And you missed rehearsal.”
The mascara wand in Esme’s hand stopped. “Yeah, I know.”
“I looked everywhere and couldn’t find you. I was really worried.”
She’d covered her sunburn with layers of pancake and two layers of tights. The heat throbbed through them. The mesh fabric stung her skin. She busied herself with makeup, avoiding his reflection in the mirror.
“Do I have to ask you why?”
“I really don’t have a good excuse.”
“Well, maybe you should remind your new boyfriend that you have a commitment to this show. I asked you to be here, Esme, because I thought this was important to you, but now you’ve just embarrassed me, and everyone’s whispering about it.”
Esme spun in her chair. “Whispering about what exactly?”
“About you riding off with some guy and missing your shit, sneaking phone calls in the office. Think about how that looks.”
Her half-finished makeup looked ridiculous, but she was too furious to care. “You don’t know half of it.”
“Well, if there’s something more important than being here, maybe you should just go. It’s unprofessional, and it makes me look bad.”
“Oh,” she pushed back, “but slutty Jennifer hanging around your room is fine, right? Because you can do whatever you want.”
Esme shoved the newspaper in his face. étoile. “And really? This makes you look bad? You should be thanking me, Adam. All of my ‘unprofessional’ shit got you this review. No, wait. You’re not even mentioned. Maybe everyone’s whispering about that too.”
The words were hot and bitter in her mouth. She hated herself for saying them. She slammed the dressing room door in his face, but the door wasn’t enough. Her fist opened and closed. She kicked the garbage can. It skittered across the room and knocked over Jennifer’s chair. Then she reached for brushes and bottles. They cracked against the wall and pooled on the floor.
“Stop,” Imaginary Lily said from the corner, eyes wide, face hidden behind the hair she wrapped around her thumb and stuck in her mouth. She wasn’t supposed to suck her thumb. Lily knew that.
She was a liar, impersonating Lily’s pain onstage, twisting it into some public thing she could use for herself, for the Waltz Girl, tapping into a cheap well of things she wasn’t willing to think about or talk about unless it benefited her. This was the big sister Lily would come home to: someone who hadn’t looked sorrowful or done any of the right mourning things, who’d skipped almost every memorial, every new search, because she was dancing and traveling while her sister lived in a basement. When they were little, she’d made up stories for Lily not just because Lily enjoyed them but because it made Lily easier to control. It kept the peace. The whole thing was a lie. She’d never worked hard for Lily to worship her. Four-year-old Lily couldn’t see that, but real Lily would. Real Lily would see everything.