I scanned the room, but I didn’t see Bertie. To me, she’d always be the woman in a pantsuit, her hair clipped back, embracing me as sheuttered the words “it’s her,” words that would set the course of my life and bring me back here, to this same studio, twenty-some years later. My orbit was shorter than the comet’s, but predictable all the same.
“Please,” he said. “After all we’ve done for you.”
“What about me? What about my life?”
Charlie reached forward and squeezed my wrist. His eyes penetrated my own. For a moment, I saw Halley in them. I saw someone else, too. I thought he might hug me, but then he spoke. His words were sharp. Spittle hit my face. “You ungrateful girl,” he said.
At that moment, the producer called for everyone to be silent and take their places. A band began playing theStars and Shadowstheme song, but all I could hear was thumping and that sound, calling to me from a distance.
“Roll cameras,” Elliot yelled. “Roll sound.” The audience hushed. Lights blinked. The soundboard clapped. The actors took their places.
Bianca Dupont and Celeste had forgiven each other, and now Bianca was the maid of honor, gripping a bouquet at the back of the church. The flower girl held a basket of rose petals. A few other actresses adjusted their strapless dresses, hiking up their sagging breasts. The wardrobe director was doing final touches. What most people don’t realize is just how crowded a soundstage can be. I could hear Vincent bloviating about how love exists beyond the plane of time and death. The “Bridal Chorus” began to play, and at that moment, I jumped in line.
I loved the exhilaration of the camera, the heat of the lamps. The brightness washes the world with light. It’s true that stage lights blind you, but an actress doesn’t need sight. She needs imagination. She needs vision. She needs to consider a world that doesn’t exist and then will it into existence.
I marched down the aisle with the rest of the bridal party.
At that point, Elliot finally saw me. “What are you doing?” he mouthed from behind the camera. “Get out of the scene.” He hitched his thumb.
I shook my head defiantly.
Elliot couldn’t do anything—couldn’t call security and have me hauled away—unless he wanted to stop a live shot, which he didn’t. Primetime, baby.
“You’re dead,” he mouthed.
I mouth back: “I’m never dead.”
1910
At least Colonel Bloodworth had the courtesy to cover the windows. They stood in the librarian’s office, eleven stories up. Opal’s clothing lay at her feet. Just last month President Taft had spoken here, at the Mercantile Library, to a crowd of six hundred and fifty. She’d seen pictures of him; he was 350 pounds, so big he once got stuck in the White House bathtub. Likely, the president himself occupied this room, but Opal doubted he’d been asked to disrobe before his speech.
She hadn’t seen the Colonel since his house, when she’d pushed him too far to help her, and he’d grown cold. Now, because he was also a medical doctor, he’d been tasked with examining Opal to ensure she wasn’t hiding any props or special effects, no trumpets to help throw her voice or thread she could use to move objects about the room or waxy ectoplasm that might spill from her mouth or her ears.
The Colonel clutched the lapel of his vest as he circled her. His mannerisms were formal; his face, tight. He smelled of wind and gasoline, of the long drive from Indian Hill to the city. Opal opened her mouth wide. The Colonel peered inside it, then drew his fingers along her gums and teeth. His touch was so different now, cold and clinical. He ran his fingers through her hair and down her neck. He stuck hispinky finger inside her ears, one at a time. She lifted her arms, and he stood face-to-face with her.
She was certain he’d break his silence, soften his touch, admit familiarity with her body. “My darling,” she whispered when his ear was close enough.
He cleared his throat.
“It’s me—Hazel.”
He lifted her breasts, one at a time, and felt beneath each with the back of his hand. He moved some ledger books from the desk, and he motioned for her to sit. She imagined she was President Taft, whose favorite foods were wild game and steak and potatoes. He could eat a pound of meat in a single sitting. She imagined she was Hazel. What foods might she have liked? What foods would she have cooked for her husband as a token of her love? What else might she have given to him except all of her?
Opal spread her legs. The Colonel crouched and lifted her slip. She felt a pulse at her seam. “Hazel Grouse,” she whispered. She felt his pooled breath on one knee, then the other. He ran his fingers up and down the insides of her thighs, around to her buttocks, until he was satisfied that she was hiding nothing.
“You may dress,” he said.
THE SÉANCE WOULD BEGIN ATeight o’clock. At a quarter till, the large library was already full, buzzing with anticipation. From where she stood, hidden between two shelves of books that smelled like binding glue, Opal tried to count the number of people milling about the room. She counted the velvet-seated chairs arranged in rows. She counted the rows. The counting calmed her nerves. One, two, three. She touched the tip of her tongue to the roof of her mouth as she marked each number to one hundred before she recognized Dixie Ellison. Dixie wore a green peacock hat; her cane was propped on the chair beside her. She hunched forward, scribbling notes. Across theroom, near the back, a group of Earthshine Girls huddled together conspiratorially. She saw Maria and Gilly and Pearl. Amanda Mahooney was turned away from the rest of them, watching Charles Tuttle with his wife, Bertie, on his arm.
The elevator dinged again, and another group of patrons arrived, Clara Dowd among them. Tuttle and Bertie greeted her familiarly. The two women hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks. They stood next to an alabaster statue of a woman with her index finger pressed to her lips, a replica of a statue a library member had seen in France.
France—how far away it seemed, how impossible.
The windows were covered in black muslin to achieve pitch-darkness. At the front, an oval table. Affixed to one of the chairs was a leather strap attached to wires that led to one of the Colonel’s boxes.
The elevator dinged again. Ding. Ding, incessantly, like an unanswered telephone. Like the bell she’d rung in her parlor when the committee first visited her—only she hadn’t been the one to ring it.
In the background, piano music played a tune Opal recognized, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” The lyrics came to her now:
