A Lily in the Light(71)
Tonight had been her final performance. After today, she’d be a soloist again. She’d leave Paris and Adam and go back to her regular life. She was exhausted. The weight of this week, of Christophe and Adam, Madeline, Liz and Lily—especially Lily—hung on her. Tonight she’d felt the crushing weight of falling on cue, forcing herself back up again. It hurt to push herself from the floor when all she wanted was to stay down, to accept that Adam would be led away with covered eyes, both onstage and off, that she was losing Madeline, that she’d already lost Lily and the person Lily was supposed to be. She was bone tired of falling and getting back up, of imagining Liz’s life, of losing her north, her south, her east, her west and wandering alone. When they’d carried her tonight, the pressure of hands around her ankles and knowing they’d catch her if she actually fell had been a relief. The show ending was a relief. She’d leaned back one last time with her arms stretched above her head. The stage lights had warmed her face and made lights behind her eyes, reds and yellows, oranges and blues. One review said she was pain in motion, the pull between struggle and hope. She had been struggling, she realized, for eight years, ever since she’d seen Serenade with Amelia and it had given her pain a voice for the first time. The audience had seen all that compressed pain, the struggle between hoping and giving up. They’d come to see Serenade, but they’d seen Lily’s story instead. They’d caught a glimmer of the harshness Esme lived in behind the ethereal thing she was supposed to be onstage. They’d seen all of the colors and imperfections of a lily.
Whether Liz was Lily or not, Esme was ready to let that story be carried away. She’d finally had a place to tell her story without words but with an audience to listen. Carrying it alone again would be unbearable, so she tucked the pain into all the old familiar places until she was just Esme again, pure white from a distance.
It was late but not late enough. She didn’t want to go back to her hotel and risk seeing Christophe. It was too embarrassing, but disappearing wasn’t the answer. She took a deep breath and spun through the revolving door. The hotel was quiet. The lobby wasn’t the usual flurry of people whirling in and out like dust devils. Christophe was behind the counter reading something in the glow of the computer screen. He looked surprised to see her, as if she’d wandered into his make-believe world instead of hers.
Muse, she thought, inspiring but superficial. No, that wasn’t right. Escape was the right word for riding away at night with a stranger. The world on the beach was its own isolated place, suspended in time like floating dust. It didn’t belong here, with this Esme or this Christophe.
He took the little box of beach glass out from under the counter. “It was from me,” he said. “The seashell too.”
He closed her palm around it. The glass was cold against her skin. She hadn’t suspected it would be Christophe. What else wasn’t she seeing?
“I’m sorry,” she started to say but stopped. For what exactly?
Christophe shook his head. “They have something in common, the shell and the glass. They’ve both been pushed around by the ocean. It doesn’t make them any less beautiful or exciting to find, does it? Only more so.” Christophe paused.
Esme was surprised by how insightful he was. She listened carefully, relieved, wondering if there was another message in his words like the lily on her mother’s church pew.
“Last night was a beautiful surprise too,” he said finally. “And I don’t expect anything more.”
The phone rang behind the desk. He smiled apologetically and reached down to answer it, stopping only to kiss Esme’s hand, still closed around the beach glass. It eased away the tension in her shoulders, the disappointment in herself.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
She left the little pile of beach glass in a nook beneath the phone booth seat. It seemed fitting to leave it there. The phone booth almost felt like an altar. The grooves in the wood, chiseled out by people listening to news from somewhere else, would be etched in her memory because of Lily. It might be the phone booth where she learned her sister was coming home. Or it might not, but she left the glass anyway, proof that she had been there. She wandered the hallways, too restless to sleep, following the floral pattern in the rug. It was worn thin from years of walking feet like hers.
Was she really so broken that other people could see it on her like a battered shell? She’d tried so hard to hide it, but letting it go onstage tonight had been a relief. Even hearing Christophe acknowledge it had been a relief. Maybe she wasn’t such an ugly thing on the inside after all. And maybe this feeling was why her sister had gone to therapy, for this same temporary peace, acceptance. She finally understood, but Adam still nagged at her. She couldn’t leave it like this, and maybe she didn’t have to.
When they were students, Adam had gotten mono. His throat had been so swollen he couldn’t speak, and all he’d wanted to do was sleep, but he’d been picked for a show, and Esme hadn’t. Esme had put ice cubes in the blender and fed the ice chips to Adam. She’d brought him fresh orange juice with ginger and soups from the cafeteria. She’d done his homework so he could sleep between rehearsals. In those miserable moments between spoons of ice with a throbbing throat, Adam had reached for Esme’s hand. “It’ll be over soon,” she’d whispered. Being needed had eased the sting of not being picked, lessened the line between them. After that final performance, Adam had given her his flowers, and she’d saved the petals. She wished there was something she could do now to bring them back together.