The Magician's Lie (21 page)

We slept in each other's arms without making love, the first time we'd ever done so, and in the morning, I left.

***

I took a passenger train instead of the private railcar. Somehow I thought it might help. I didn't want to feel pampered. I wanted to feel anonymous. I missed Clyde terribly—hiding in his arms might let me forget things, at least for a few blissful moments—but it was best that I was alone. I was melancholy and not fit company. If Clyde had been there, I just would have pretended things were fine, and things weren't fine. So I let myself be melancholy and settled into a dark frame of mind.

Regret for what I'd done quickly bloomed into fantasies of what I might do, what I could do. I could just disappear, I realized. I could get off this train anywhere, and no one would have to know. I could make a new life somewhere else, anywhere else, where no one knew me as a magician or a dancer or any of the other things I'd been. I could start over. It was a beautiful fantasy, and indeed I almost followed that whim. I found myself standing, even, to make for the door. Had I had even a little money with me, perhaps I would have done it.

Then my fantasy turned even darker. I wouldn't even have to wait until the train stopped moving in order to step off. Taking a life meant it would be fair if I lost mine as well, in some fashion. Dying would mean no more torment, no uncertainty, no regret. But quickly I let go of the idea. People would think some weakness or hidden fault had gotten the better of me—
Drink? Gambling? A secret love affair?
they would speculate—and I didn't want that to be my legacy. And it would destroy Clyde. I had to get back to him, to be with him, even if I wasn't ready just yet.

As I stared out the window at the countryside, I felt as if the train was bearing me back in time. Back before I'd cut Ray's throat, before I'd had my heart broken and my lungs burned by the Iroquois Fire, before I released Clyde from his promise and he laid his hands on me and we fell headlong in love. I'd taken great joy headlining my own act as the Amazing Arden, no question. But in a way, the happiest time of my life had been before that. It had been when I was a member of Adelaide's company, learning the ropes and forging my way ahead into the unfamiliar world of stage magic, making it my own. And then I knew where I needed to go and who I needed to see.

She was more mother to me than my own mother had been. Neither of them had instructed me tenderly or shared their feelings with me, but Adelaide and I were more of a piece: canny and distrustful on one hand, but on the other, whores for the crowd. She had trusted me, encouraged me. She had handed something meaningful down. If I was going to leave the stage and its attendant world behind—which it had just occurred to me I might—I'd be wise to talk to someone who knew exactly what that was like.

***

Adelaide's farm looked like it had been copied from the pages of a picture book. There was a wooden mailbox at the end of the gravel-lined drive and rows of tall trees that flanked the lane. The farmhouse was faded but clean, the worn lines of its white clapboard sides still straight and true. The one detail that stood out as odd, which I only noticed as I mounted the steps to the porch, was the tiger sprawled out in the sunbeams that fanned out from the slats in the porch railing.

The weather had turned shockingly warm for the season, and Adelaide was sitting in the porch swing with an open book on her lap, her bare feet almost but not quite brushing the tiger's back. There was more gray to her hair; the same was true of the fur around the tiger's muzzle. “Same tiger?” I asked.

“The very same.”

“Is he safe?”

“For now, she is. She's just had her supper.”

I noticed then there was a thin chain running from the tiger's collar to the thickest post of the porch railing, and I breathed a little easier. “You bought her at auction?”

“I did.”

“I'm sorry I didn't ask you before selling the animals.”

“That's why I gave you the company, no strings attached,” she said. “I expected you would do with it what you wanted. I didn't want you to ask me anything. I wanted you to make your own decisions.”

“I seem to remember there were two strings attached,” I said.

“Eighty percent of a great deal is far better than one hundred percent of nothing. You're doing quite well for yourself, it seems.”

She was bold, but she wasn't wrong. I said, “I suppose it was the other string who told you that.”

“And that one's worked out in your favor as well, hasn't it?”

“Yes, he's done a great job with the business.”

With a sly smile, she said, “I'm not talking about the business. Not the money kind of business, anyway.” I realized he must have told her what had happened between us. Well, we hadn't hidden it from anyone in the company, so why hide it from Adelaide? I wanted to ask if she was happy for me, but it didn't seem right. If she wanted me to know how she felt, she'd tell me.

“You look wonderful,” I said.

“You've become a better liar,” she replied.

The tiger sighed in her sleep, a deep rumbling noise, and stretched one paw farther out before settling back into stillness. I watched the soft, pale fur of her underbelly rise and fall, almost imperceptibly, with her breath. It was hypnotic.

“So what's the occasion?” said Adelaide at last.

“I almost died in a fire,” I said. I left out the part where I'd cut a man's throat; in case someone figured out the connection and came to accuse me of the crime, I didn't want to ever have spoken aloud of it. The less she knew about that, the better.

“But you didn't,” she said. “That's life.”

“But I don't know what the point is anymore. Playing tricks on people. It's a frivolous thing. Night after night, the same games, fake flowers, fake pictures, a fake world. That whole crowd came to the Iroquois to escape their ordinary lives for a couple of hours, and it killed them. I don't know if I can ever look out over an audience again without remembering that.”

Adelaide said, “Are you going to give up?”

“I don't know.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“Never thought of you as a girl who gives up, that's all. The strong ones don't quit.”

Without thinking, I said accusingly, “You did.”

“That's different, Vivi. And I suspect you know it. I lived an entire lifetime onstage, and it was glorious. I wouldn't trade those years away for anything. But then it wasn't my time anymore. It's still your time. Why would you toss that away?”

“It's hard.”

“We deal with the hard parts because we have to. What's the alternative? Not living?”

I thought back to the horrific scene in the burning theater, and to Ray looming over me among the shrouded dead, and how I'd felt lying there helpless on the ground. “Maybe.”

“Good Lord, girl. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's embarrassing.”

“I almost died,” I said again.

She seemed unmoved. “Life's a bullet catch.”

“You're pitiless, aren't you?”

“And I suspect that's why you're here. You don't want someone who'll coddle you and tell you you're right. You wanted a level head, and here I am. You almost died? You've got fear and amazement in you. Use them.”

I looked down at the sleeping tiger and smiled. “Is it all right if I stay the night, then?”

“If you promise to drop this malarkey about how the world owes you a bucket of fine red roses.”

“Consider it dropped.”

She rose gingerly from the swing and folded her book closed with an audible thump. “Then let's have a steak and talk about the time you got arrested in Poughkeepsie. I've been dying to hear your side of the story.”

The weight on my heart lifted. I followed her into the house, saying, “It started with a man at the back, in the middle of the act, shouting, ‘Charlatan'…”

Janesville, 1905

Four o'clock in the morning

“You don't just heal your body. You heal your mind,” says Holt.

She stares at him, wordless for once.

“I mean, you clearly have some way, some magic, beyond what normal people have. To keep you going.”

The magician cocks her head. The half-brown eye blazes.

He goes on, the words drawn out by her silence. “A disaster like that fire, it stretches the mind beyond imagination. People aren't the same afterward. They just give up.”

“I almost did,” she admits.

“But you kept going. You're still going. Despite Ray, despite everything. And it's like you draw your strength from disaster. You only get more determined the more of these horrors you endure.” Her story is so real to him now; he imagines he can almost smell the smoke and blood. The room around him is unchanged, but it feels darker somehow, as her story takes more and more sinister turns.

“I don't know that it works like that,” she says. “And anyway, you're wrong. My mind doesn't heal like my body. I remember everything. Being able to go on, the kind of determination you seem to admire so much, it comes at a price.”

“Your soul?”

She laughs, but bitterly. “That's just newspaper talk. The Devil and whatnot. I'm just a woman, a human woman.”

“Despite your magic.”

“Yes. That doesn't mean I'm any more or less human than anyone else.”

“Doesn't it?”

She rattles her hands in the cuffs. “You tell me.”

“Well, you cut a man's throat,” he says, hoping to jar her. “Whatever he'd done to you, however horrible he was, he was human too. What did that feel like?”

Nothing changes in her posture or her manner. She only says, matter-of-factly, “I wished to God I could have taken it back. I tried to heal him. I tried my best. But the wish didn't work.”

He can think of a dozen reasons her healing power might have failed her in that moment, but he doesn't want to focus on that right away. He has another question for her first. “Why did you tell me that story? You must know it makes me more suspicious of you. To know you've killed before.”

She is slow in responding. When she does speak, her voice is still matter-of-fact. “I'm telling you the whole truth. The whole story. So why wouldn't I tell you that part?”

“Because you're trying to convince me to let you go?” He doubts she truly needs to be reminded. It's life or death for both of them now; that kind of thing doesn't slip a person's mind.

“As I said. It's the truth. I need you to believe me. I think the best way to do that is to tell you the whole story, warts and all.”

“Tell me this, then.” A dark question has been nagging at him, and as many questions as there are to ask her, he can't help putting this one next. “Why did Ray do what he did to you? What makes a man like that?”

She shakes her head. “It's impossible to know. I think the fever he survived as a child, the one that killed his sisters, left him touched in the head. Not that it made him stupid, but it changed him. Burned away some part of his brain. And made him think he was better than human. He thought he had some godlike healing power, and he thought I did too, and that gave him rights to me somehow. I don't know. I don't want to talk about Ray anymore. Do we have to talk about him?”

“No,” says Holt. “We can talk about the murder instead.”

She's staring up with those otherworldly eyes. He wants to ask her to close them. He wants her to look away. But if he told her that, she'd know she's getting to him. And he feels so close to knowing the answer now.

She's dangerous. She slashed a man's throat open, let his life drain away. And she and this Clyde were in love, but they'd also fought each other. Disagreed. He sees clearly how she could be guilty. Almost every piece of the puzzle is in place.

He taps the folded razor on his wrist again. And realizes what he's holding, all of a sudden. Almost involuntarily, he drops the razor, which clatters loudly on the floor.

“That's it, isn't it? His,” he says.

“Yes.”

“That's awful.”

She swallows hard and says, “Yes, it is.”

“Why do you keep it?”

“I didn't mean to,” she says. “I took it with me so I wouldn't leave it there with him. It was just a reflex. And then—well, I'll tell you that part in a bit.”

“Tell me now.”

“First, can you do something for me?”

“What?”

Looking up at him with the fairy eye, she says, “Take off another pair of handcuffs.”

“Why?”

The words pour out of her in a flood, unchecked. “Because I'm asking you to, Virgil. Because none of this matters, does it? The how and the why? I'll end up dead whether I did it or not. We both know that. And I am so, so scared of dying. And my only hope is that you'll show me mercy, but the longer we talk, the more I think maybe it's already too late. Maybe at first the easier thing to do was to let me go, but the longer I'm in this chair, maybe the easier thing to do is to keep me. Maybe you've already made up your mind. And I'm not asking you to release me right this minute. I'm not asking for your answer. I'm just asking you…could you just make me a little more comfortable?”

He makes her wait while he pretends to consider it, although he already knows exactly what he'll say and why. He bends down and picks up the fallen razor, which feels like it's burning his fingers, now that he knows its history.

Then he walks around the desk, to the far side so it's between them, and crouches behind it. He tucks the razor into the right drawer, the one he can get to fastest if he needs it because it doesn't lock, but low enough that he knows she can't see which one he's using. He nears her again and stands facing her. He touches the key at his belt, as if absentmindedly, but really the furthest thing from it.

He watches her watching him, that unsettling gaze so flat and level, and stares hard and straight back at her until, at last, she blinks.

“Not until you do me a favor,” he says.

“What favor could I do for you?”

“I think you know,” he says.

She opens her mouth to speak, appears to think better of it, and closes it again.

He feels a surge of power so strong that it makes him light-headed. There are two pairs of cuffs left, chaining her firmly to that chair. Unbreakable, inescapable steel. Two is enough, he tells himself. She has no way out unless he lets her out. She has to know that. So once he makes it explicit—the favor only she has the power to deliver for the release only he can grant—she'll jump at it. She has to.

She stares down, down at her stockinged feet in their dangling shackles and the scattered sequins shed from her dress in the struggle. The loose tendrils of her hair fall to obscure her face. He can imagine what she's thinking, but he doesn't want to imagine. He wants to hear it straight from her mouth.

He reaches out and pats her knee. It feels like the right thing to do, somehow.

“I said I don't want to talk about him,” she says. “But I can't avoid it.”

“Ray?”

“Ray,” she says, barely whispering the name.

He's confused. “But you told me the whole story already, didn't you? He attacked you, and you killed him for it. What else is there to say?”

She gasps. “How can you be so glib about it?”

“I didn't mean—”

“No!” she shouts, and fresh tears spring to her eyes. “You don't realize. You don't have any idea! I was a child when it started. A child! And him following me, tracking me, watching me, every single day! Do you have any idea what it's like, to live on the knife's edge like that? Knowing yesterday you stopped it, but tomorrow you might not? There's only one thing worse.”

“Giving in?”

“Yes.”

“So—you gave in?”

She slumps in the chair, her eyes shadowed. Her hair and her clothes and her posture all give her the air of perfect defeat. “I can't do this anymore. With you. These questions. I can't.”

He doesn't speak right away. He waits and watches her face, trying his best to read it. There is something about her now that seems emptied out, and he chooses to believe her. She seems to be well and truly overcome.

At length, he says, “Then what shall we do instead?”

She says, “First I want you to wipe my face before the tears dry on it.”

Reaching out with the handkerchief, he dries the nearer cheek with a light and tender hand and asks gently, “And then?”

“And then I want to tell you the rest of the story. When things took a turn. When it all started going bad, and I couldn't stop it.”

“Good,” he says, drying the other cheek. “Good. That's what I want to hear.”