A Lily in the Light(70)

Everything was suspended in time. If this was really Lily, and it might be, there’d be another line drawn through her life again. Lily before, without, with. She wanted to linger a little longer before the line was drawn.

“That’s so sad.” Ashley adjusted the bag on her shoulder. “It doesn’t sound like she loved him back.”

“No,” Esme said, imagining dark tunnels dripping with dampness, rats, and roaches. It was the wrong place for a brilliant composer. Then she thought of the basement in New Jersey and shivered, wrapping her arms around herself to push the thought away. “If someone admired you that much from afar and did all these things for you, wouldn’t it creep you out a little?” A couple rode past on a scooter, hidden in helmets, wrapped around each other and the bike, one entity instead of three.

Ashley studied Esme carefully. “Well,” she said slowly, “I guess if I wasn’t interested, I might feel that way, or I might not notice at all. Or maybe she just wasn’t ready to see it.”

“Maybe,” Esme mused. It was easy to feel like a horse with blinders, aware of only the track ahead, heart pounding, the jockey pushing onward. It made her wonder what else she couldn’t see, what was outside her own set of blinders.

A man dropped a coin. It glittered in the streetlight as it rolled along the sidewalk and into the gutter. “Merde,” he mumbled, and Esme smiled.

“Maybe he was just nuts.”

“Maybe,” Ashley said. “We’re probably all nuts.”

The outline of the theater rose above the Rue de Mogador, glowing like a beacon over shops and tall steps. Esme wished she could go back to the 1800s and see the Palais Garnier without streetlights or the bleating of a siren in the distance or cars accelerating or slowing to a stop. She wanted to see it lit by candlelight, glowing at the end of the street like a new star in a galaxy all its own, calling people to a world of imagination that didn’t exist anywhere else. Candlelit chandeliers and women dancing en pointe in daring ankle-length dresses had been magic then. What they did today could never compare to those early dancers. Everything they did now—especially in America, where ballet was still young—would always feel a little like children in dress-up clothes.

She would have liked to come here with Adam. It was the kind of thing they would’ve done before their lives had split. This week must mean something, Esme decided. There had to be a reason so much was happening at once, why so many threads of her life were tangling together after years apart.

“Wow.” Ashley tipped her head to take it in. The names of famous composers hung above them. Rossini, Beethoven, Mozart. The steps were littered with people. A man played a guitar, strumming chords and singing softly in French, a song Esme didn’t understand but wished she did, while others sipped from bottles in paper bags. No one on the steps was a dancer, but they were drawn here all the same. Esme’s dance journey had started here, long before she was born, when ballet had been new and shocking.

This place was refreshing, a welcome pause from everything she’d still have to fix. It felt like a kind of mecca, a pilgrimage, and it gave her hope. If she could make it here, no matter how she’d gotten here, she could fix other things too.

“Wow is right.” They stood in silence, staring at the building that had shaped so much of their lives from so far away. It didn’t look nearly as big as she’d imagined, and yet it was bigger somehow.

“The sad part is”—Ashley sighed—“we’ll never dance on that stage or the Mariinsky. They’d never want us.”

“No,” Esme said, “but that’s OK. When I was dancing kid parts on some community college stage, this was unimaginable too.”

“It never really stops, though, does it? It always feels like something’s out of reach.”

“A glass ceiling,” Esme said.

“That’s a good way to say it.”

The guitar stopped and started again. Someone laughed as the traffic lights changed.

“Does Adam know?” Ashley asked.

Esme could pretend she didn’t understand the question, but she did understand, and she was tired of pretending, tired of holding back, and relieved that someone else could see what she felt.

“No.” She sighed.

“You should tell him how you feel,” Ashley said. “You might be surprised.”

The traffic light changed again, and the line of cars slid to a stop. Ashley yawned, stretching her arms above her head as the first wave of fatigue melted over Esme. Maybe Ashley was right. She took one last look at the Palais Garnier and its golden angels before following the same road home, aware of the light falling over her back, struck by the idea that sometimes great journeys ended in the same place they began.





Chapter Eighteen

From far away, a lily was a perfect white trumpet of petals. But up close, its inner petals were a clown’s tongue of splattered pinks and yellows coupled with a funeral home smell, old and static, that made Esme’s skin crawl. They had been everywhere after Lily had gone missing, part of a campaign her mother had come up with to raise money and awareness: Lilies for Lily. She’d sold them on the street, at church, at grocery store checkouts to make people remember. It was dangerous for people to forget, especially when it took only one small memory, a tiny detail, to splinter a cold case. It always pained Esme that lilies were so beautiful from far away and disturbing up close. There was nothing harder to look at than a lily in the light.