Chapter 17
Gabe goes fully off book the Monday before opening night. This should be a good thing.
He knows every word of the play, in order. He doesn’t paraphrase or transpose. He can stand in the middle of the stage, delivering a word-perfect soliloquy… in the tone one would read aloud a home insurance policy.
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,” he says, evenly, at a reasonable volume, “the handle toward my hand?”
The delivery is perfectly informational. He sounds like he’s confirming that it is, in fact, a dagger, and that the handle is, as suspected, toward his hand, and that he’ll be with you shortly regarding the blade.
Both he and Englebert — and consequently, me, since Englebert can’t drive — arrived an hour before rehearsal officially starts with the intention of hammering out any last details in Gabe’s performance.
They’ve been at it for forty minutes so far.
Englebert started the evening with real craft notes — “The dagger isn’t just in front of you, Gabriel, it’s in the front of your mind!
” — and has been sliding down the ladder of pedagogy ever since.
“The witches have promised you a crown,” he calls from his stool. “Have you ever wanted anything, Gabriel? A parking spot? A sandwich? You must want the sandwich.”
“Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,” Gabe says, wanting nothing.
“You are speaking to a floating dagger. A dagger is floating in the air. React as you would if it happened in your parlor.”
“If it happened in my parlor I’d assume it was some magical mishap and ignore it and wait for an explanation.”
“Then LIE to me, Gabriel. That is the entire profession.”
The trouble is that the two of them are working from different books.
Gabe is treating the text like a eulogy — something to be learned thoroughly and presented respectfully, with a firm commitment to not making any of it about himself.
Englebert wants blood and passion. What they’ve produced between them is a Macbeth who could perhaps pass a written exam on his own ambitions, but certainly couldn’t express them aloud, let alone act upon them.
“Gabriel.” Englebert descends from the stool and crosses to him. He sits at Gabe’s feet and looks up. “We will try a new approach. Forget the audience. Forget the verse. Pretend the audience is a casket, Gabriel. You are wonderful with caskets.”
“What does that even mean?” Gabe says, burying his face in his hands.
“I don’t KNOW,” Englebert says. If he had hands, I’m sure he’d be throwing them up in exasperation. “I am running out of ideas, so kindly, just make it work.”
* * *
Pru is late, which has genuinely never happened. At ten past, Vivian stands up, scans the gym once, and lands on me.
“Mari. Get up here.”
“I’m working,” I say. “The blog. I need to take notes.”
“There’s nothing happening to take notes on.”
“You never know.”
“We’re doing the letter scene. Gabe needs a Lady Macbeth to aim at, and everyone else in the room is a witch, a lord, or a child.” She points at the stage with her pen. “Read in. You don’t have to act. God knows nobody up there is going to make you feel self-conscious about it.”
“Marvelous,” Englebert says. “Fresh instincts.”
I climb the steps toward Hannah’s plywood castle while the company arranges itself to watch, which I truly could have done without.
The letter scene, for the uninitiated: Lady Macbeth reads a letter from her husband, decides on regicide with remarkably little agonizing, asks the powers of darkness to fill her with cruelty, and then Macbeth enters and they have their first scene together.
I read the letter portion off the page in what I hope is a neutral, journalistic tone.
“You are reading a grocery list,” Englebert says.
“I’m trying my best.”
“It is a letter from your husband, informing you that the crown of Scotland is loose upon the table. Read it like a leak from a source.”
Irritatingly, that helps.
I get through ‘unsex me here’ by staring at the back wall and refusing to think about the fact that the mayor is watching me demand cruelty from spirits. There’s a ripple of applause from Dorcas’s row. Moonbeam calls out something supportive about my throat chakra.
Gabe enters, crosses to me, and says, “My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night,” and the entire room leans forward at once.
They then have to pretend that they didn’t, because what he does with the line is…
nothing. Off stage, we have chemistry. No one can deny it, as much as I’d like to.
On stage, though, I am apparently merely a colleague he is informing about Duncan’s travel schedule.
“And when goes hence?” I say.
“Tomorrow, as he purposes.”
“Oh,” I say, “never shall sun that morrow see.”
I look up from the script and catch the house. Hannah has her eyes on the ceiling. Dana is studying her clipboard. Cody, at the light board, is examining a cable. The entire company has become fascinated by its own shoes.
Emma doesn’t have this problem, though. She’s busy scribbling on her clipboard.
“Gabriel,” Englebert says, from the wings. “The woman before you has just proposed a murder on your behalf. She is offering to handle everything. Has anyone, in the whole of your life, offered to handle everything?”
“No,” Gabe says.
“And if she did?”
Gabe looks at me and there’s a single second where he seems to be more than plywood, and everyone in the building sees it. He delivers “We will speak further” to a spot slightly above my head, and Englebert puts his face down on the stool.
“We will speak further,” Englebert repeats, muffled. “You are closing the door on your own conscience. It is more than a mere scheduling matter.”
“I’ll get there,” Gabe says.
“You had it. For one instant, you had it, and then you put it back.”
The lobby doors open.
“Don’t stop on my account,” Pru says, which gets a laugh, because that’s Damien’s line. She comes down the aisle unwinding her scarf. She’s out of her work clothes, which is new for a weeknight.
“You’re forty minutes late,” Vivian says.
“I had to get honey,” Pru pats the tote slung on her shoulder. “For my mother. She’s been leaving voicemails about it with escalating menace. If I show up at Hemlock Hill tomorrow without honey, she’ll tell the whole staff I starve her.”
Pru drops her bag on a chair.
“How far did you get?”
“We will speak further,” Gabe says.
“Mari,” she says, appraising the situation. “Have you been un-sexed?”
“With aplomb,” Englebert says, lifting his head.
I go back down to the third row of chairs, where I belong, and Pru takes the stage.
* * *
Things come apart during the snack break.
Cody is fifteen and unflappable — he’s rewired that light board twice under Englebert’s supervision without complaint — but the sound he makes from behind the castle wall as he’s adjusting a light fixture is a sound I’ve never heard.
“MS. ARCHER. MS. ARCHER, IT’S LILY, SOMETHING HAPPENED TO LILY—”
Half the company converges on stage left at once. I get there in time to see Cody backed against the plywood with his phone out, thumb hovering, a nine and a one already dialed, his face gray.
Lily is on the floor behind the castle. She’s flat on her back with her limbs at four careful angles.
There’s red everywhere — it’s pooled under her head, streaked down one arm, with one small handprint dragged along the base of the castle wall.
Beside her lies a rubber dagger. Around her entire body, in blue chalk, someone has drawn an outline.
The corpse opens one eye to check the size of her audience. Hannah shoulders through the crowd and takes in the scene.
“Lily. Archer.”
“I’m a crime,” the corpse says.
“You are covered in corn syrup from your ears to your socks is what you are.”
She is. The bowl is sitting three feet away, scraped clean. She has presumably ignored the label, eaten some of the evidence, and worn the rest.
“You drew a chalk line around your own body?” Hannah asks. “How did you—” She stops herself, because the answer doesn’t matter and she doesn’t actually want it.
Cody sits down on a crate and puts his head between his knees. Dorcas brings him a cup of water and a muffin.
“I almost called 911,” he says, to the floor.
“It’s the outline,” Moonbeam says, gazing down at the scene with real appreciation. “The outline is what sells it. She’s telling a whole story. The death and the investigation.”
“She’s six,” Hannah says.
“Spielberg was six once.”
Vivian arrives at the edge of the circle, and I brace for a speech, but instead she looks down at the crime scene and starts to laugh.
She laughs until she has to hold the castle brace, and beside her Dana starts in too, and the two of them stand there, howling, leaning very slightly toward each other in a way I haven’t seen them do since the article.
“We needed more blood mixed anyway,” Dana finally manages.
“Put it in the program,” Vivian says, wiping her eyes. “Crime scene by Lily Archer.”
“I want it in the program,” Lily says, sitting up. Corn syrup has bonded her hair into a single clump.
“Bath first,” Hannah says. “Program never. Up.”
* * *
Dana is mopping up the corn syrup when we discover another problem.
“The dagger!” She calls out.
“What about it?”
“The good one. The wooden one that Hannah painted. It lives here.” She taps an empty outline on the prop table with the mop handle. “It was here when I did my check.”
“Lily had a dagger.”
That dagger is already back in its outline, sticky and rubber and accounted for.
“It’s started again,” Ms. Pelham announces to the gym. “The curse. It let us rest and now it’s started again. First the man, now the blade.”
“Nobody said the name!” Emma calls out. “I’ve been listening all night! Nobody said it!”
“Then it’s worse,” Ms. Pelham says. “It doesn’t need the name anymore.”
Two lords go out to spin preemptively. Through the lobby glass I watch them, turning in the evening breeze. Moonbeam offers to smudge the props table. Dana refuses her, using fire code as an excuse.
Emma arrives at my elbow with her clipboard. She flips to the ‘VANISHINGS’ page and holds it out for me to see. The list has grown since I saw it last.
“It doesn’t fit,” she says.
“What doesn’t?”
“Everything else on the list is little.” She holds her hands apart, dagger-width. “This is big. It’s the first big thing. Either whoever’s taking things changed, or this one’s different.” She clicks the pen. “You’re supposed to notice when a pattern breaks. That’s when it’s information.”
“Who taught you that?”
“You did,” Emma says.
Behind us, Vivian claps twice and gets the room back. Rehearsal will resume from the top of Act Four the moment the lords come in from the parking lot.