Chapter 53
DID YOU FORGET SOMETHING?
Romeo and Juliet was the culmination of everything Trix and I had learned together as partners.
Trust. Musicality. Strength. Artistry. Passion.
Ben was confident in us. Nick was excited.
Every dancer in the company, from the new artists in the background of the marketplace to the other Romeos and Juliets, hurried eagerly to their next rehearsals. The days shone like crystal.
‘Sander, whatever you’re on, can I have a little?’ Salvatore joked after we ran Act I from start to finish. I could not keep from smiling.
In the dressing room, Max moved his feet back and forth over a foam roller.
As my understudy, he and I were becoming better acquainted, hovering somewhere between colleagues and friends.
Since we were the only ones there, he seemed to feel emboldened enough to ask – presumably on behalf of the younger artists who had only ever known me and Trix as principal dancers: ‘Is there a thing between the two of you?’
‘Define “a thing”.’
‘Well, are you – is she your girlfriend, would you say? Are you romantically a thing, is what I’m asking.’
‘You mean, are we having sex?’ I let him look mortified for half a second before adding, ‘If so, then no.’
‘Oh.’
‘But “romantically a thing”?’ I thought of our kiss in Regent’s Park, on New Year’s Eve, and all the other kisses since, given tentatively outside tube stations and playfully while cups of tea steeped.
I thought of the warmth of her hand under my shirt, and how her skin glowed after emerging from a shower. ‘Yes, we are.’
By the end of the balcony pas de deux in the stage call, I think it was obvious to everyone, from the conductor to the prop master, what Trix and I were to each other.
In contrast to our tragic Shakespearean counterparts, we were able to rise from the dead and hold each other tight during the company’s applause.
We were so excited to share our Romeo and Juliet with audiences, to leave artifice behind and create something real, over and over, at the golden height of midsummer.
This feeling, this sunlight that warmed me well after dark each night, made me decide, at long last, to turn imagination into action.
I would meet her at the door after our stage call, and ask if I could come back to her place, so that we could talk about the future.
I dared to picture a point when I was no longer obliged to return to the Silver Realm, when every morning I could wake up next to Trix, and every evening we could walk home – to our home – together, high on the success of another performance, unable to sleep until the early hours.
When we could travel together for reasons other than galas and guest contracts.
When I could make it clear to her parents that I was here to stay.
I had always tripped over the concept of “stay”.
Even if, in some unbelievable turn of events, my kin gave their blessing for me to abscond from the Silver Realm, I would still be an immortal creature in a mortal landscape.
And even if I managed the feat of spellcasting that would enable me to break with my immortality, to share the extra years with Trix like broken bread…
I had witnessed my share of executions, but never death by the invisible hand of age.
Mortality imbued the lives of everyone in the Restless Lands with a meaning I had always craved; it also instilled the same primal terror in me as it did in the rest of my kin.
Road accidents. Train crashes. Plane crashes.
Fires. Drownings. Heart attacks. Strokes.
Cancer. AIDS. I read the newspaper every morning to feed my curiosity about my second world, but was often left mystified that mortals were able to walk around as calmly as they did, when there were so many ways to die.
I had no plan. No atlas by which I might navigate a future with Trix.
But I wanted it anyway. No more shyness.
No more second-guessing. No more secrets.
Sam the exiled Selkie had shown me there was a way, albeit murky and full of obstacles.
I would brave it for her. I would take Trix’s hand and refuse to let go.
And then, after the stage call, we stepped outside and I saw Glen across the street, looking crestfallen, next to my uncle, looking murderous.