A Lily in the Light(69)
Go away, Esme prayed. Go away, go away, go away.
A light popped above the vanity and shattered on the floor. The other lights went out with it. She’d ruined this room. She’d ruined this show, her relationship with Adam, with Lily, her parents. She was a ghost in the darkened mirror, hair loose, tangled tutu. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t ruin. This was the lie Lily would come home to. I missed you so much, but I lived my life anyway. I made you into a make-believe friend so everything I did or didn’t do would be OK. I forgot you were ever a real person with real feelings, pain, dreams, because there wasn’t room for you, Lily.
Imaginary Lily crouched into a little ball in the corner. She was crying softly in a pile of broken things, but Esme didn’t try to comfort her, because she wasn’t real, and deep down, Esme suspected she also wasn’t sorry.
She wished she could just leave, but there was nowhere else to go. The angry tears prickled over. Esme wrapped her arms around herself to settle the shaking, nauseous feeling in her stomach. She sat against the back of the door to keep it closed and shut off the lights. It felt better to hide in the darkness.
“Why did you even ask me here, Adam? What was the point?” Silence.
She bit her thumb, holding back tears so she could finish her makeup, aware of Adam’s shadow in the thin line of light filtering through the bottom of the door. It was just unfair, all of it. Even if she’d wanted to explain, how could she? Yes, it was easier to ride away with someone on a motorcycle in the middle of the night and regret it afterward than it was to sit alone with eight years of grief, easier to push and push and push until her body was physically beat than to feel that missing piece of her life.
Why had she said yes to the Waltz Girl? She should’ve known it’d mess things up. It wasn’t just another tragic female character: it was that day on the bathroom floor at the theater with Amelia when Lily wasn’t coming back, only there was no more Amelia to lead her away anymore—or Adam.
Everything was changing. She’d been the one who’d left, and it comforted her somehow that at least they were all still there: Nick, Madeline, her parents. It was easy to pretend they were living the lives they’d lost if she didn’t talk to them, even if it was screwed up. This is why, she thought bitterly, it was better to leave people behind before they disappointed her. You can be left behind, or you can leave behind. She’d chosen wrong with Adam.
“Why did you come?” he whispered back, knocking lightly on the door. Esme ignored him. She didn’t know. She wished she could evaporate. Let them whisper, she thought, locking the dressing room door and flicking the light switch on. This wasn’t her company. In a few days, she’d be gone. She slid into the vanity table and wiped away smudged makeup, starting over. She could always just start over.
Later, Esme lay on the stage floor and reached toward Adam. The painful longing was real. What the audience thought was just the Waltz Girl’s desperation was Esme’s apology. Jennifer, the Dark Angel, hovered over them both.
“I’m sorry.” It was only a whisper, lost in the orchestra, unnoticed by the audience, but she heard him. She didn’t answer. If he’d wanted her to, he would have told her another time, not onstage before an audience, not under stage lights or before he was led offstage with covered eyes.
“I’m sorry too,” Esme whispered, taking Adam’s hand before the curtain call, waiting in the wings for their cue. He squeezed her hand gently over the sound of applause before pulling her onto the stage, where she handed him one red rose from a bouquet and all was forgiven.
“Shit,” Ashley said, surveying the broken, scattered mess as Esme swept glass into a dustpan. “I take it you did this, or you wouldn’t be cleaning it up.”
That much was obvious, but Esme wasn’t annoyed. The dustpan was full of dirt and glass. She would catch every last bit and make this room as right as she could.
“I know it’s impossible not to take this stuff personally, but it’s really not. They’ve done worse and probably would do worse to you if not for Adam, so . . .” Ashley’s voice trailed off. “Someone put ink in my mascara once.” She laughed. “It wasn’t funny then, but I’m over it. You know what?” Ashley didn’t wait for an answer. “You need a drink.”
Ashley shimmied out of her tutu and into her robe. She started the shower, and Esme was thankful for the empty room.
“Take a walk with me,” Ashley called over the running water. Esme wasn’t sure if it was pity or not, but there was no one else. Even the hotel gave her the skeeves now, as she knew she might bump into Christophe.
“It’s hard not to think about that,” Ashley said. They were walking to the Palais Garnier, still smelling like Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo from wiping away makeup. The smell reminded her of Lily. It always would, only now it was such a familiar part of her ballet life, too, so separate from the one that remembered baby shampoo at the edge of the bathtub at home.
“I heard it’s true,” Esme said, referring to The Phantom. “There was a fire in the eighteen hundreds. He was a composer or something who wrote music for one of the dancers. She died in the fire, and his face was messed up, and he missed her so much he decided to live under the theater.”
Plates clattered on a café table. A cup wavered in its saucer. Esme was tempted to order something just to watch people pass on the street, arm in arm, strolling under a new moon from one fountain to the next, but she wanted to see the Palais Garnier lit up, surrounded by shops and street cafés with lingering patrons sipping wine into the blur between night and dawn.