Chapter 6
The first blog post is due at noon, and so far it consists of a title.
I’m on the porch with coffee and my laptop and the cursor has been blinking on the blank document for the better part of an hour.
The editor emailed this morning with the subject line ‘heard your lead collapsed???’ and the body was a single exclamation point.
Who knows how word got from a Duskboro gymnasium to a magazine office in Manchester overnight.
Englebert is on the porch railing, pacing its length, four steps one way and four steps back. He’s been awake since five. I know this because at approximately five-fifteen he sat on my chest and announced that we had preparations to make.
“Read them back to me,” he says.
I pick up my notepad. Page one is my notes from the run-through.
Page two is my notes from after the run-through.
Page three is a numbered list that I took down under dictation at the crack of dawn, titled, in Englebert’s exact words, ‘PROPOSALS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF THE PRODUCTION, TO BE PRESENTED TO V. OLEANDER AT NINE O’CLOCK. ’
“Item one,” I read. “The show must go on.”
“That is the primary thesis. Continue.”
“Item two. In the event Mr. Carter recovers by Wednesday, resume the full schedule with an added Thursday run-through to restore momentum.”
“Reasonable. Continue.”
“Item three. In the event Mr. Carter does not recover by Wednesday, the role of Macbeth shall be assumed by a member of the production staff possessing complete knowledge of the text, decades of theatrical experience, and availability.”
“Yes.”
“Englebert, this is a description of you.”
“It is a description of the ideal candidate. That the description also fits me is a happy coincidence I am prepared to accept with humility.”
I put the pad down. “Walk me through it. You’re on stage. A packed audience. Pru says, ‘My hands are of your colour,’ and turns to her husband, who is a cat.”
“Lady Macbeth has heard worse news than that in this play.”
“Half the waiting list is from out of town, Englebert. Burlington. Montpelier. Those people didn’t grow up here. They don’t know what this town is. You’d be performing the Scottish Play and simultaneously outing the entire magical population of New England for eight dollars a ticket.”
He stops pacing.
“There are precedents,” he says. “Puppetry has an ancient and dignified history. We bill it as an artistic choice. Avant-garde. The Japanese have an entire tradition—”
“The Japanese puppeteers are visible humans operating a puppet. You would be a cat, alone, doing a soliloquy.”
“And doing it correctly, which is more than can be said for—” He catches himself, sits down on the railing, and wraps his tail over his feet.
“He’d gotten better,” I say.
“He had gotten better,” Englebert says, somberly. “Three weeks I spent on that man’s vowels. Tuesday he found the back wall of the gymnasium on the first try and I thought, there it is. There is the actor who survived two deaths on daytime television.” He looks out at the yard.
Below him, on the porch boards, Maude has arranged himself in the exact spot where the morning sun will arrive in roughly twenty minutes. Englebert notices, and for once doesn’t seem to have the energy to protest.
Just then, Annabel’s truck comes up the driveway.
She parks in front of the carriage house and comes across the lawn instead of going inside. She’s still in the raincoat over the pajamas. Her garden clogs have acquired a coat of gravel dust from the Carter driveway. She looks like she’s been awake all night, presumably because she has.
I go in and pour her a coffee without asking. When I come back out she’s sitting on the top step, and Englebert has relocated to the railing directly above her.
“He’s alive,” she says. “Same as last night. Breathing deep, heart slow and steady, but he still won’t wake up.
His mother’s with him. Skye’s with him.” She takes the coffee in both hands.
“I sat with him until morning and then I needed to not be in that house anymore. Ms. Carter kept offering me banana bread. I couldn’t take any more banana bread. ”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s not sick in the traditional sense.” She drinks. “He’s over-full. There’s too much magic in him and his body has shut down. That’s what the sleep is. It’s not a curse and it’s not a coma, not the hospital kind. He’s processing.”
“Processing what?”
“Potions. More than one.” She sets the cup on the step beside her.
“A potion leaves a signature. When somebody’s taken one, I can usually smell it on the breath and name it, the way you’d walk into a kitchen when someone is cooking a soup and say, like, ‘that’s onions’.
Last night I leaned over him and it was like walking into a kitchen where somebody’s been cooking ten different stews all week.
I know there’s more than one ingredient, but I can’t name a single one. They’ve all boiled together.”
“How many is more than one?”
“More than two. Past that I’m guessing.”
“Was it an accident? Did he do it to himself?”
“I don’t know.” She pauses. “Potions don’t play well together.
Every witch who brews learns that first. You don’t take mine with somebody else’s, you don’t stack them, you finish one before you start the next.
But people who buy potions don’t always get taught that.
So we can easily picture a man who purchases a tonic for his voice from one person, and something for his face from another, and something to sleep from a third, and so on, and never mentions any of them to any of the others. ”
“That fits him,” I say.
“It fits a lot of people. I’ve gotten orders like that,” she pauses.
“There is another possibility, though. That somebody else fed it to him, dose by dose, until last night one more dose tipped him over. I just don’t know.
I can’t tell you when the last dose was, and I can’t tell you whose hand it came from.
I don’t know whether it was his own or someone else’s. ”
“Can you fix him?” Englebert asks.
“Not until I know what’s already in him. You put the wrong thing on top of that mixture and you make it worse. You don’t put out a grease fire with water.” She glances at me.
“That was one time,” I say.
“It was a formative time.” She almost smiles, but then doesn’t have the reserves for it.
“The likeliest thing is that he burns it off on his own. It could take days. Could take weeks. His body is doing the right thing, it just has a lot to get through. I’ll check him morning and night.
But if somebody did this to him on purpose, we need to find out. ”
Down the porch, the sun arrives on schedule and Maude begins to purr in his stolen square of it, the only creature present having a good morning.
“One more question,” I say. “Potions leave residue on the person. Do they leave it anywhere else?”
“On the vessel,” Annabel says. “The cup, the bottle, whatever carried it. On the hands that brewed it, for a day or so. On the cup for longer, even washed. Fainter, but it’s there.”
“How much longer?”
“Depends on the potion. A few days, even weeks. Years. It depends.”
“The goblets,” Englebert says, standing up. “He drank from a goblet, during the toast. Nobody was thinking about doing dishes last night. The banquet table will be exactly as it was when he collapsed.”
“Get dressed,” I tell Englebert. “You can meet with Vivian in person. I’ll drive.”
“Marigold,” he says. “I’m always dressed. And of course you’ll drive.”
“Get in the car.”