The Truth About Celia (15 page)

“I don’t believ—
ow!
” Micah snatched his hand from the candle. “Ow. Dang it. I burned myself.” He plugged his ring finger into his mouth, then pulled it loose and showed it to Stephanie. It had a tiny red mark the size and shape of a wood spider on it. Lentini dipped a corner of his napkin into his water glass, righting it just before it toppled. He pressed the napkin to the burn, and Micah surrendered a groan. “I’ll still be able to perform on Saturday, won’t I?” he asked.

Lentini gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Don’t worry. It’s not your thumb, and it’s not your index finger, so there’s no real loss of dexterity. You should be fine.”

Stephanie found a Band-Aid in her purse. “Here you go, honey,” she said, and after Micah had taped it around his finger, she asked, “So you’re
really
not going to tell me what I’ve volunteered for?”

“We’re really not,” said Micah. “It would spoil the surprise. I can only tell you—” But before he could finish, the waiter arrived with their meals, and he lapsed into a grinning silence.

Stephanie had ordered the escargot, Lentini the salmon filet, and Micah the inevitable hamburger from the children’s menu. As she smoothed the napkin over her lap and reached for her plate, Micah took hold of her wrist. He shook his head, then leaned in as if to confide a secret. “What is it, M.? Ready to tell me?” she asked.

“You know those are snails, don’t you?” he said.

Later, when she was finally home from the magic show, the cut on her neck bandaged and the soot washed from her face, she would read about the fire in the newspaper. A trio of Central American acrobats had been invited to perform as the exhibition’s final act, and they were assembling their props behind the curtain when an arc light burst overhead. A spark, or perhaps a fragment of hot glass, touched the ring of flash paper they had prepared, igniting it. The fire ought to have died away then and there, but the safety curtain had been removed for cleaning, replaced with a curtain of untreated cotton, which collected the flame and carried it into the rafters. Live cinders and feathers of ash began raining down over the audience, and within minutes the entire auditorium was ablaze, the air weaving and swaying in the heat. The fire inspector attributed the conflagration to “the careless employment of flammables,” and the State Office of Recreational Safety promised to lobby the legislature for the prohibition of flash paper, “the inventor of which,” the newspaper reported, “himself died in such a discharge while drying sheets of the material in his cellar.” Two people were killed and dozens more injured in the blaze. The wooden joists of the Shrine Convention Center rose above the ashes like a blackened rib cage.

But on Saturday afternoon, as she changed into her blouse and skirt, Stephanie was anticipating the show with the same blend of fear and nervous excitement as Micah. She had watched the signs of his restlessness all week, absorbing scraps and pieces of it into herself. He spent the better part of Saturday morning tossing a rubber ball onto the roof while she dusted the recesses of her keyboard with a Q-tip and then cleaned between the tines of her comb with a straight pin and then organized the books on her bookshelf according to the color spectrum. As he muttered to himself in his bedroom, rehearsing the act one last time, she found herself pacing between the stove and the refrigerator, singing a song about a giraffe that she must have learned in Micah’s nursery school days.

A few minutes before they left, she came out snapping a loose thread from her skirt and discovered Micah waiting for her in the living room, paging through a magazine in his magician’s outfit, a tuxedo with tails and a long black cape. He looked up at her. “You’re not going to wear that, are you?”

“I was planning to, Micah.”

He shook his head. “No, no, no,” he insisted. “Wear pants,” and so she went back to the closet and changed into a pair of khakis.

It had been raining lightly, intermittently, for most of the afternoon, and as she drove to the Shrine Convention Center she watched the drops stippling the pavement, a network of shifting white splashes that resembled a swarm of gnats flickering around each other in the sunlight. She found it hard to keep a watch on the traffic. It was as though her center of awareness had traveled in a split line from her brain to her eyes. She would be the perfect audience today, she thought, the ideal mark, easily distracted by flashes of color and light.

She let Micah out beneath the covered drive and then parked the car and walked back inside, carrying the two umbrellas she had brought, one hooked over each arm. The rain was at a lull, with only the barest scattering of drops blowing from the trees, and she did not need to cover herself.

Lentini was squatting precariously in the foyer, straightening Micah’s bow tie. He braced himself every few seconds with his palm. When he noticed her, she said, “This is for you,” and handed him the extra umbrella. It was a mahogany cane umbrella with a thick plaid canopy, and she had knotted a ribbon around the handle. “It’s a good luck umbrella. Guaranteed to last you through even the worst weather.”

He stumbled to his feet, his cape brushing grit from the floorboards. “It’s the perfect present,” he said, his eyes shining with a sidelong light. “And I mean that. Thank you.” He took her hand. “But we have to go backstage now.”

“Okay. I’ll be ready for my moment in the spotlight.”

“We’ll look for you in the audience.” And he bowed to her, prompting Micah to do the same.

After they had left, Stephanie took the back door into the auditorium and selected a seat along the center aisle, two-thirds of the way from the front. The chairs were made of an old, yellowing wood with strips of lacquer curling from the armrests like pencil shavings, and she could feel the bristles scratching against her skin whenever she shifted her posture. Someone had pulled a strand of carpet loose at her feet, and it stretched halfway across the aisle, a zigzagging brown ligament with hanks of white matting at the twists. The other chairs filled slowly around her. Just before the lights dimmed, she felt a rough hand grasping her upper arm and heard a voice say, “Ruth.” She turned to look.

It was the man sitting behind her, his arm extending through the gap between the seats. “Oh my God. I’m sorry.” His face lost its color, and he retrieved his hand. “It’s just . . . from this angle . . . I thought you were someone else. Please excuse me,” he said, and he hid his face behind his program.

This sort of thing happened to her all the time—more often, she suspected, than it did to most people. She would be waiting in line at a restaurant or testing the tomatoes at the grocery store when someone would stop short and call her by the wrong name, mistaking her for some old friend or cousin or ex-lover. Once, on a trip she took to New York City, an older man had caught hold of her sleeve in the lobby of a hotel and asked her if she was somebody named Sheila, or Sally. Even when she told him she wasn’t, his gaze remained peculiarly insistent. He repeated the name a few times (was it Sheila or Sally?), striking hard at it, like a hammer rapping a nail, and when he reached for her cheek she had fled to the elevator. She had seen him walking toward her as the doors closed. There was a haunted look about him, as though he couldn’t quite decide if she was real. This was years ago, on her last vacation with Micah’s father, and when she told him about the incident, he had laughed as though it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. She had not been back to New York since.

She could hear the conversations around her dwindling to whispers as the auditorium fell dark and an overlapping chain of spotlights blazed onto the stage. There were more than thirty performers in the exhibition, and every time one of them finished his act a crackling of applause would fill the air, thousands of palms meeting and parting in delight or polite obligation. Every single seat in the room was taken, and when Stephanie swiveled around to look up the aisle, she saw a clutch of bodies standing against the back wall. Where had all these people come from, she wondered. She saw conferences advertised almost every weekend on the marquees of the local hotels—PINEWOOD LODGE WELCOMES THE REGIONAL SCRABBLE–PLAYERS CON– VENTION . . . GREETINGS FROM BUDGET INN TO THE RETIRED AUTOWORKERS ASSOCIATION—but she had always imagined them as just a few tired bodies gathered around a card table or a cheese tray. Were they always this crowded?

Late in the second act, the curtain drew shakily closed and the emcee announced, “Now, before our final performers, the Acróbatas Puntarenas, we have one last act. Please welcome local magician Frank Lentini and his assistant Micah.” At that, Lentini wheeled a long, shallow cabinet onto the apron, and Micah followed behind him carrying a pedestal. Most of the earlier performers had been true professionals, more than merely capable—there was the man whose clothing changed color each time he turned his back to the audience, and the woman who made her three large collies disappear through a pair of hoops— and Stephanie was worried that Lentini and Micah would embarrass themselves. The only blunders they made, though, were so ridiculous that she was sure they were deliberate.

First Lentini covered the pedestal with a scarf and called upon “the dove, symbol of purity” to appear, but when he whisked the scarf away a pigeon was strutting around there, preening in the white disk of the spotlight. “Marlboro!” Lentini scolded. “How did you get here?” Lentini wandered to the other side of the stage, where he told the audience, “We call him Marlboro because he’s always looking for another light, folks. Micah, will you do the honors?” The pigeon pivoted its head around, nibbling sourly at a ruff of feathers, and Micah draped the scarf back over it. When he pulled it away, the pedestal was empty. Then he said, “Rise,” and tapped the pedestal three times with his wand. To Stephanie’s fascination, it gave three lunging hops across the stage, hovering in midair for a second each time before it landed. Though she looked carefully, she could not see the glint of wires around it, their finely drawn slant through the dust and the light, and she wondered if Lentini had concealed some sort of motor-and-spring arrangement inside it.

When the pedestal had arrived at his feet, he said, “Now let’s see if we can convince our friend the dove to join us,” and he placed his top hat on the stand and struck it with his wand, then reached inside and pulled out an upright cane umbrella, the same one she had given him earlier. “That’s strange,” he said, scratching at his scalp. “I could have sworn I put that dove in there.” He batted his hand around inside the hat and found nothing, but when he opened the umbrella, absentmindedly twirling it over his head, the dove dropped out onto his shoulder. The audience laughed.

Every so often the curtain behind him would give a weak ripple and then bulge forward suddenly—it reminded Stephanie of nothing so much as a swamp releasing bubbles of methane—and she was watching for it to happen again when she heard Lentini saying, “And now for our final illusion, we need a volunteer,” and before she knew it, she was standing next to him on the stage.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked.

“Stephanie. Stephanie Burch.”

“Okay, Stephanie Burch. Are you ready to see what it’s like when one part of you is over here and the other part is
waaay
over there?” he said, pointing across the stage, and then he put his hand to a long, shallow cabinet, patting its side. “Are you ready, that is, to see yourself cut in two?”

Oh, Lord, she thought, and she had a fleeting vision of herself spilling great cataracts of blood from her waist. But she said, “I guess so,” and Lentini led her to a stool at the head of the cabinet.

Micah was waiting to hold the top half of the lid open for her. “Curl your knees to your chest,” he whispered as he escorted her inside. “You’ll be okay. We’ve got another lady in there.”

She felt her feet pressing up against a ledge as she slid inside, and a pair of hands took her ankles from below, securing them safely behind it. She was surprised by how much space there was around her, a sort of hidden basin that curved around her back, deep enough for her to sink into quite comfortably. When she stuck her head out the end of the cabinet, she saw Lentini hovering over her. The glare from the footlights bleached the tips of his mustache into a glistening white trail. She could have sworn she heard the sound of breaking glass, and then a sizzling rush of air, but when nobody else seemed to notice, she decided she must have been mistaken.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lentini said, “We have secured the locks. I will now attempt to slice Ms. Burch in two,” and he winked at her. A quick second later she heard the
shnikt
of the blade entering the cabinet, and she gasped. Her toes twitched involuntarily—which meant that they were still there—and she felt a hard pulse of heat against her face. When Lentini wheeled her around, she caught a glimpse of two feet projecting from the other half of the cabinet, churning around like paddles, and then she looked at the ceiling. She must have been the first person to see the flames crawling along the timbers, a dozen blazing lines reaching all the way from the flies to the gallery. It was not until a long petal of burning wood floated down, throwing off yellow sparks, that the first shout arose from the audience.

Afterward, everything happened so quickly. The sixty-year-old oak of the rafters began to blacken and crumble, sending chunks of cinder into the aisles, and the seats with their peeling lacquer went up like tinder. Her head was facing toward the curtain, which was a wavering sheet of flame, but it was not difficult to hear the tumult in the audience. The outcries of people singed by falling embers. Their footfalls as they ran toward the exits. The explosive crack of one of the doors being wrenched off its hinges. She pushed at the lid of the cabinet, but it would not open, and when she called for Micah, he did not answer.

Then she heard him saying, “We need to unlock them. They’re stuck in there,” and Lentini shouted, “There’s no time. We’ll have to roll them outside ourselves.”