The Immortalists(53)

She walks to the phone and dials out. Gertie picks up on the fourth ring.

‘Ma.’

‘Klara?’

‘My show is tonight. My opening. I wanted to hear your voice.’

‘Your opening? That’s marvelous.’ Gertie’s breathless as a girl. Klara hears laughter in the background, a stray cry. ‘We’re celebrating here. We’re –’

‘Daniel’s engaged!’ Varya’s voice; she must have picked up the other receiver.

‘Engaged?’ A moment before it registers. ‘Engaged to Mira?’

‘Yes, silly,’ says Varya. ‘Who else?’

Warmth seeps through Klara like ink. A new member of the family. She knows why they’re celebrating, why it means so much.

‘That’s wonderful,’ she says. ‘That’s so, so wonderful.’

When she hangs up, the suite feels cold and abandoned, like a party everyone has just vacated. But she won’t be alone for long.

Magicians have never been very good at dying.

David Devant was fifty when tremors forced him off the stage. Howard Thurston collapsed on the floor after a performance. Houdini died of his own confidence: in 1926, he let an audience member punch him in the stomach, and the blow ruptured his appendix. And then there’s Gran. Klara always assumed she died during the Jaws of Life in Times Square because she fell, but now she has her doubts. Gran had recently lost Otto, her husband. Klara knows what it’s like to hang on to the world by her teeth. She knows what it’s like to want to let go.

She opens her purse and retrieves the rope, which is coiled like a snake. It’s the first one she ever used for the Jaws of Life, back in San Francisco. Klara remembers its rough, strong weave, its sudden snap. She stands on the living room table and ties it around the neck of the massive light fixture above.

She’s been waiting for something to prove that the woman’s prophecies were right. But this is the trick: Klara must prove it herself. She’s the answer to the riddle, the second half of the circle. Now, they work in tandem – back-to-back, head-to-head.

Not that she isn’t terrified. The thought of Ruby in day care – toddling across the room on her plump legs, shrieking with glee – wrenches every cell in her body. She halts.

Perhaps she should wait for a sign. A knock – just one.

She’s so sure the knock will come that she’s startled when, after two minutes, it hasn’t. She cracks her knuckles and remembers to breathe. Another minute passes, then five more.

Klara’s arms begin to shake. Sixty more seconds and she’ll give it up. Sixty more seconds and she’ll pack her rope, return to Raj and perform.

And then it comes.

Her breath is uneven, her chest shuddering; she cries thick, sloppy tears. The knocks are insistent now, they’re coming fast as hail. Yes, they tell her. Yes, yes, yes.

‘Ma’am?’

Someone is at the door, but Klara doesn’t pause. She hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the knob. If it’s housekeeping, they’ll see it.

The living room table looks expensive, all glass and sharp corners, but it’s surprisingly light. She pushes it toward the wall and replaces it with a stool from the kitchen bar.

‘Ma’am? Miss Gold?’

More knocking. Klara feels a flash of fear. She crosses to the kitchen and takes a swig of whiskey, then of gin. Dizziness comes on so suddenly that she has to bend over and drop her head to keep from vomiting.

‘Miss Gold?’ calls the voice, more loudly. ‘Klara?’

The rope hangs, waiting. Her old friend. She climbs onto the chair and ties her hair back.

One more look outside, at the stream of people and the lights. One more moment to hold Ruby and Raj in her mind; she’ll speak to them soon.

‘Klara?’ shouts the voice.

January 1st, 1991, just like the woman promised. Klara takes her hands, and they tumble through the dark, dark sky. They flutter crisply as leaves, so small in the infinite universe; they turn and flicker, turn again. Together, they illuminate the future, even from so far away.

Raj is right. She’s a star.





PART THREE


The Inquisition


1991–2006

Daniel





20.


Daniel saw Mira three times before they ever spoke: first in a study carrel at Regenstein Library, writing in a small red notebook, then at the student-run café in the basement of Cobb, striding out of the door with a coffee in hand. Her gait had an electricity that he felt as she brushed past him. He noticed it again a couple of weeks later, when he saw her running along the perimeter of Stagg Field, but it was not until May of 1987 that she approached him.

He sat in the dining commons, eating a pulled pork sandwich. (Gertie would have had a heart attack if she’d known he was eating pork. He’d even developed a taste for bacon, which he kept in the refrigerator of his Hyde Park apartment and which he swore she could smell on him whenever he returned to New York.) At three p.m., the space was nearly empty; Daniel ate at this time because his clerkship rotation ran from six a.m. to two thirty. He felt a gust of air as the front doors opened, another chill as he recognized the young woman in the frame. Her eyes whisked through the room, and then she began to walk toward Daniel. He pretended not to notice her until she stopped in front of his four-person table.