Chapter Sixteen
It began with a sniffle. Evelyn first noticed it early the next morning on set, during rehearsal of the third song in act two, while the Ghost of Christmas Present—a large blue-and-green bedazzled creature—swung happily between a trio of dancers, arms outstretched.
Kairo Jones, the stand-in for Jared Sparks, had a tiny droplet of snot pooling at the tip of his nose.
“Stop!” Evelyn said, rising from her chair. “Stop. Stop. Stop.”
The entire cast and crew fell into silence. She waved Kairo over.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Fine.” Kairo beamed, and then coughed.
Evelyn took a tiny step back. The worst thing to happen to any production, but especially a live production where singing was involved, was for a cast member to catch a cold.
Kairo might have only been a stand-in, but he was important to their success.
Outside of Jared Sparks, he was the only one in their cast who knew all the songs, dance steps and lyrics to the part of Ebenezer Scrooge.
“Are you sure?” Evelyn asked again, her eyes wandering up to the beads of sweat pooling all over his forehead. “Because I can’t help but notice you seem a little sick, and I really don’t want you working if there’s a chance that you’re ill. It’s not good for you and—”
He cut her off right there. “I’m fine.”
She sighed and decided to take him at his word.
But by 3:00 p.m., her worst fears had been confirmed.
Kairo’s drippy nose had turned into its own musical serenade of snorts and snivels.
The show tunes he had been belting out so beautifully all week turned brittle inside his throat.
But it wasn’t until he began coughing during a duet with the Ghost of Christmas Present, leaning over his own knees in desperate pants and inhalations, that Evelyn was forced to confront her worst-case scenario.
Kairo Jones was sick.
“Stop!” Evelyn said, calling the cast to order. “Stop. Stop. Stop.”
The entire room fell silent. Well, everyone except Typhoid Standy, who was now fully hacking up a lung all over her puppet.
“You,” she said, pointing to the plague-bearer. “Grab a mask. Follow me. Everyone else—” she glanced around “—go wash your hands.”
David was on level two hundred and thirteen of SpudzMash when his mind wandered to Evelyn.
Last night had felt different. Good. They had managed to stop fighting, and maybe even began to inch their way back to friends.
It was good news all around. Especially since this evening, he was scheduled to go on his second date with Claire.
“David!” Evelyn said, storming into his office. “I need your help. Now!”
He was caught so off guard by her entrance that he dropped his phone. Juggling it, he finally secured the damn thing by seizing it between open palms and wrestling it into submission like some flapping fish.
When he looked up, he realized that Evelyn had not come alone. She was being trailed by a man wearing a mask.
“Oh boy,” David said, and dug his phone into his pocket. “Let’s see what we have here.”
“This is Kairo,” Evelyn said, pointing back toward the man. “He’s our stand-in for Jared Sparks. And he doesn’t seem to be feeling well.”
Kairo mumbled through the mask, “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” Evelyn spat back.
David narrowed his focus on the man in his office.
The idea that people looked sick was a bit of a misnomer.
In David’s professional opinion, it tended to be more of the opposite.
A person could look totally healthy on the outside but be walking around with stage-four and fully metastasized cancer.
Or, like his sister, could have EDS but go misdiagnosed for years.
Kairo, however, looked sick. His skin, from what David could see of it beyond the mask, was clammy.
His cheeks were red and he was wheezing.
While David understood the passion many actors had for their work—the singular, almost obsessive focus required to get to the level where they could work for CBS7-T studios—it was his job to protect both cast and crew, sometimes even from themselves.
Quickly, he reached for masks, putting one on himself, handing one to Evelyn.
“I’ve been around him all day,” Evelyn said. “The entire cast and crew has been around him all day.” He could tell she was nervous because she was chewing on the skin around her nail.
“Still.” He smiled comfortingly in her direction. “It couldn’t hurt.”
She snapped the mask from his hand.
David headed to the cabinet to search for the necessary medical items. Thermometer.
Rapid strep and flu tests. A Covid test, too, even though the protocols on these things were rather a moot point at this stage.
No one shut down sets for Covid anymore.
But a sick cast member—especially one super-sick cast member who had worked a full day of rehearsal, singing and dancing, exhaling virus particles all over the place—could easily shut down a production if enough cast and crew fell ill.
“Tell me what happened,” David said, and began working.
He swabbed Kairo for testing, then set a timer on his phone for fifteen minutes.
Meanwhile, Evelyn filled him in on the details.
Stand-in for Jared Sparks. Necessary cast member for rehearsal.
This can’t be happening. Plus, she was pacing.
Every time he looked up from taking a swab, she was located somewhere else in the room.
“You should sit down,” David warned her.
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Stress isn’t good for the immune system.”
“I’m not stressed,” she said.
“You’re going to give yourself another migraine.”
Evelyn threw her hands up and, finally, acquiesced.
Taking a chair at the side, he went and grabbed her a bottle of water.
Begrudgingly, she took it. Not that water could entirely prevent migraines—or colds, flus and viruses—but he reasoned it couldn’t hurt.
When the fifteen-minute timer for the rapid tests went off, Evelyn shot out of her seat.
“Well,” she said, racing to peer over his shoulder. “What does it say? Is it Covid?”
“You lucked out on that one,” David said, tossing the test into the medical waste disposal. “He’s negative for Covid.”
“Great.” Evelyn sighed, relieved.
“No so fast.” David grimaced, holding up the RIDT as evidence. “He’s got the flu.”
“What?” Evelyn whispered.
Kairo shook his head, incredulous. “That’s impossible.”
“Apparently not,” David said, tossing the positive test in the trash with the others.
“Well, what does that mean?” Kairo asked, twisting in his seat between them. “I mean, I can still work, right? I just take some medicine or something, and get back to the stage. It’s no big deal, really. I’ve worked through the flu before. Covid, too. Please . . . I need to work, you know?”
The room fell into silence. David glanced toward Evelyn.
“Can we talk privately for a moment?” she asked David.
“Of course,” he said, and followed her into the hall.
When they were finally out of earshot of Kairo, she spoke openly. “So how bad is this?”
“We could do another test, just to be certain, but given the symptoms, the hacking cough, the quick onset and the positive test . . . I’m fairly confident we have flu on our hands. He’s done, Evelyn. He can’t work on set anymore. I’m sorry.”
“Well, is there anything we can do?” she said, flustered. “Give Kairo something to take the edge off so he can keep working? That’s clearly what he wants.”
David sighed. “I can write him a prescription for Tamiflu, but even if he’s in the forty-eight-hour window for effectiveness, we’re still talking cutting the disease process in half, at most. It could still be several days before he’s well enough to return to work.”
“That’s unacceptable.”
“Evelyn—”
“You don’t understand, David!” she snapped back at him.
“You don’t understand how much making art can mean to a creative person.
This could . . . No, this will absolutely break his heart.
And you’re asking me to tell him to go home.
How am I supposed to do that? Kairo probably gave up Christmas with his family, sacrificed his whole holiday, worked his ass off for years and years in dance classes .
. . just to get to be a stand-in on this show. ”
His heart lurched into his throat. It was the old Evelyn. His cowboy. His fearless sidesaddle rider. The irony was that when it came to her own health, she never fought for herself . . . but man, could she fight like hell for others.
“What if we get him a vaccine?” Evelyn asked.
“It’s too late.”
“And the rest of the cast and crew? Can we start them all on Tamiflu or something?”
“That’s not really an option, either.”
“So, what? We just hand out orange juice and hand sanitizer and hope for the best?”
“It’s a virus, Evelyn. Unfortunately, it needs to run its course.”
Her eyes fell to the floor. He knew her producer mind was now running through ten thousand what-if scenarios.
What if more cast members got sick? What if they had no choice but to shut down production?
Obviously, the flu running through a set was not her fault, but as the executive producer of a multimillion-dollar budget production, it would blow back on her all the same.
“Look,” he said, trying to be optimistic about the situation, “We have no choice but to send Kairo home. But if we test everyone in the cast and crew now, you can just pop in another stand-in for the role of Jared Sparks. It shouldn’t be that disruptive to the overall rehearsal schedule.”
“Except I don’t have another stand-in.”
“Wait . . .” He was certain he hadn’t heard her right. “What?”
“It’s not my fault, okay?” she said, throwing her arms up into the air. “Jared Sparks was really freaking expensive, and I had to cut costs in the budget somewhere. I figured I would take the gamble. One stand-in instead of two. It was only for a few days. What were the odds?”
David dragged one hand down his face. “Jesus.”