Wishing in the Wings (29 page)

Without making any conscious movement, I realized that I was rubbing my fingers together, the thumb and forefinger that were tattooed with Teel’s flame markings. What had my genie done? What magic had he worked at the police station?

“We were astonished to find the mayor out there. Satellite trucks were parked in front of the precinct, and lights, you know, the ones on those tall poles?” She barely waited for me to nod. “It was a press conference. Reporters were pushing as close as they could—the mayor’s security guards had their hands full. But everyone went crazy when we stepped outside.”

If nothing else, I was impressed by how fast Teel had worked. It was one thing to make a few clothes appear, that just required tinkering with universal laws of matter and energy. Even arranging for me to move in to the Bentley had just been a matter of paperwork. But to get the mayor down to the police station? And all of those reporters? Astonished, I asked, “What did the mayor say?”

“He introduced all of us, called us forward like we were some sort of heroes. One of his staffers handed him a piece of paper, and he read off each of our names, calling us one by one to the podium so that we could each be recognized.”

“Recognized? For what?”

“For guerilla gardening!” Dani sounded as amazed as I felt. “The mayor said that he’d been on his way to the police station to make a speech about the city’s need for beautification. He’s been concerned about Manhattan’s appearance for a long time. He’s determined to create and maintain a beautiful city, to make everyone’s lives more enjoyable, and to drive the tourist trade. He had a whole speech prepared, about the dangers of graffiti, of vandalism. But when he got to the precinct house, the sergeant told him about the Grays, about what we’ve been doing. About why we’d been arrested. And he changed his mind, right there, on the spot.”

“Changed his mind?” Even knowing that Teel had had a hand in matters, I was finding it difficult to believe the story Dani was telling.

“One of the mayor’s staff members had an iPhone, and she was pulling information from the Grays’ Web site even while he was talking to the reporters. It was amazing, Becca! The aide would pass a note to the mayor, and he barely looked at it—he just kept talking, folding in the new information, like he’d known about guerilla gardening forever. You wouldn’t have believed it, if you’d seen it!”

I just might, though. Remembering the electric jangle that had shot through my entire body as Teel granted my third wish, I’d believe just about anything. “So, all of you were released on your own recognizance? Without any arraignment at all?”

Dani shrugged. “It didn’t make sense to us, but we weren’t about to argue. The mayor vouched for us personally. One of his aides said that the charges would be dropped in the next couple of days. It was like a miracle!”

Or magic, I thought, but I didn’t interrupt.

Dani said, “The mayor announced that the Gray Guerillas should be a model for all neighborhood activists in the city. He asked me—me!—to write up some materials that he can distribute, from Battery Park to Harlem. He wants me to write about seed bombs and vegetables and—”

Her voice grew thick, and I could see that she was barely winning her fight against happy tears. I reached out to pat her shoulder, and she covered my hand with her own. “I never thought we’d see the day,” she said. “I never thought we’d be officially recognized, that our work would ever be embraced by the mainstream. By the mayor himself!” And then she did start crying, hard sobs that had clearly grown out of years of frustrated hopes.

Her landline phone rang again. She sniffled and stared at it as if it were a living creature. “It hasn’t stopped ringing since I got home. I answered the first few calls. People want me to appear on news shows. They want to interview me for the radio. Three different people called to offer their services as my agent. My agent!”

Wow. When Teel granted a wish, he really granted a wish.

Dani shook her head and shoved the phone under a cushion on the couch, muffling its continued ring. “But what were you saying about Ryan? He’s on some television show himself?”

I told her about the Pantry Channel and the promotional gig that Hal had sprung on Ryan without warning. “He wasn’t happy to go, and he’ll be even less pleased to see me here if it turned out to be a disaster. I should leave before he gets back, so you can share your news with him.”

“Oh!” Dani looked crestfallen. “You’ve been fighting.”

Talk about a mother’s intuition. Or maybe my emotions were just that transparent. I shrugged. “We were both a little…frustrated with rehearsal this afternoon. Okay,” I amended at her skeptical frown, “a lot frustrated.”

“Let me guess. Someone wants to change the play.”

I stared at her. “Not the words. Just the blocking.”

Dani sucked on her teeth. “That’s even worse. I’ve told him over and over again that he’s put too much of himself into that script.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighed. “It’s like none of it means anything, if even a single word changes. Nothing that happened in Africa, nothing that he accomplished with the Peace Corps. The play is some sort of…totem for him, some sort of protection against ever slipping back to where he was with Pam.”

A cold hand clenched around my heart. “Pam?” I managed to say.

Dani froze, like a rabbit trapped outside its burrow. For just a moment, I thought she was going to deny having said the name, pretend that I’d imagined it completely. Instead, she said, “He hasn’t told you about Pam? Nothing at all?”

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. Sure, there were a hundred and one innocent explanations for his forgetting to mention “Pam.” She could have been a long-dead, much-beloved childhood pet. Or the girl who’d lived down the street when he was in elementary school. The resident advisor in his freshman year dorm, or his aged mentor when he started his first consulting job.

But none of those roles justified the stark unease painted across Dani’s face. None of them explained the tight shake of her head as she said, “I shouldn’t have said anything. You have to ask him.”

“You can’t say that now! I can’t just walk across the hall and go home like nothing’s happened! You have to tell me the rest of the story.”

She looked miserable, trapped. She dug beneath the sofa cushion to extract her phone, shaking it as if she could make a call come in, now that she’d welcome the interruption. She clicked her tongue in disappointment, but I didn’t know if the emotion was meant for the phone, or for me, or for Ryan.

“I can’t believe he hasn’t told you,” she finally said. “You know that Ry worked as a consultant, right?” I nodded. “And in his spare time, what little he had of it, Ry wrote a computer program.”

I thought back to the night we’d sat on my couch, sharing a blanket and stories from our pasts. “He told me about that,” I said, as much to reassure myself as to comfort Dani.

“Ry has wanted to be a playwright since he was in college, maybe even earlier. The program was a tool he originally created for himself, to plot out scenes, track blocking, that sort of thing. The busier he got at his consulting job, the more important the software became. He could work on it, even when he was too drained to work on his plays. It meant so much to him—it was everything he wanted to be, everything he wanted to do, for real. Outside his consulting job.”

Ryan’s obsession didn’t surprise me. I’d seen the way he approached rehearsals of However Long, how he’d come to live and breathe the Mercer’s production.

Dani’s voice was clouded by pride as she said, “Ry lived for that code. He worked on it every night, every weekend. He reviewed every line, making sure it was as fast, as efficient, as perfect as humanly possible.”

That was all well and good, but it didn’t explain what I really wanted to know. Needed to know. “And Pam?”

Dani sighed. “When Ry became so obsessed with his program, I worried about him. I worried that he wasn’t meeting anyone, wasn’t spending time with people. Wasn’t having any fun. But then he met Pam at work. He talked about her, more and more, and when he finally brought her over for dinner, I was thrilled.” She darted a quick glance at me, as if she were ashamed of what she’d said. She hurried on. “It wasn’t like they had a lot in common. If they hadn’t worked together, I don’t think they ever would have met. But he finally seemed happy. A mother wants her son to be happy.”

I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “What happened to her? To them?”

Dani shook her head. “Pam’s expertise was in marketing. It just seemed natural that she’d help Ry with the program, try to sell it. He was only too happy to have her work on it—he wanted as many playwrights as possible to have access to it. One of their coworkers suggested they make the arrangement official, form a legal partnership. They did, and three months later, she announced that she’d sold all of their rights to some huge computer company.”

“Without asking him?”

“Without even mentioning the deal before it was final.” Dani’s lips were grim. “The buyers didn’t want to help playwrights. They dropped the code into some home renovation thing. They used Ry’s blocking algorithm to lay out kitchens, to sell granite counter tops and laminate flooring. They paid a huge amount for the exclusive right to the code.”

Exclusive. As in, theater professionals would never get the benefit of Ryan’s work.

I could only imagine how that blow had affected him. Ryan was a teacher at heart, a mentor, a guide. The thought of his creation being exploited by some money-grubbing corporation would have cut deep. But the realization that other people, other artists wouldn’t have the benefit of what he’d done…. That would have been the real blow.

“He was devastated,” Dani confirmed. “It wasn’t just the sale. It was that Pam hadn’t even thought to check with him first. She said she wanted to surprise him. She thought he’d be thrilled. But she never really understood what the program meant to him. Better for them both to find out, really, before they got married.”

Married. If I’d had any teeny, tiny, lingering doubt about how serious Ryan and Pam had been, Dani had just destroyed it.

A lance shot through my heart. I certainly hadn’t expected Ryan to arrive in my life without some history, without some romantic past. But he’d never mentioned Pam. Not once. He’d never told me about a woman he’d considered spending the rest of his life with.

Either Dani didn’t register my distress, or she felt as if she couldn’t respond. Instead, she spread her fingers wide, the gesture conveying loss, concern, fear for her son, sorrow for his lost happiness. “He was just shattered. He applied for the Peace Corps the night he moved out of their apartment, and he was in Africa two weeks later.”

Their apartment.

Wow.

Two weeks, and the entire world Ryan had ever known was left behind. But Burkina Faso had been a whole new life for him. A new world, where he could excel on his own. Without the interference of colleagues. Of lovers. Of liars.

I was willing to bet my entire Mercer salary that he’d written However Long with the program he’d created. He’d used his own software to monitor the incredibly complex story, to work out the blocking for the devastating second act, to track all the individual threads that added up to the astonishing whole. The Mercer’s production of However Long must be an exorcism for him, freeing him forever from Pam’s betrayal. But like any ritual, Ryan needed it to be performed precisely, exactly, without any variation from the perfection he’d created.

Even when the Mercer insisted on changes. When Hal insisted. When I did.

But we couldn’t mount a flawed play, a play with impossible blocking, just because it meant a lot to its author. If only I had known about all this, I could have figured out ways to work around Ryan’s needs. I could have figured out ways to help him understand, even as we solved the problems of his stagecraft.

But I hadn’t known. Ryan hadn’t told me.

Dani chewed on her lower lip. “I’m sorry, Becca. I just assumed that Ry had told you all this. I thought—” She cut herself off, but I knew what she was going to say. She thought that if Ryan was sharing my bed, the least he would have done was share his past.

I stood up and wiped my palms against my thighs. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m sure that he…”

That he what? That he’d meant to tell me before now? That he’d planned on telling me soon? When? Before I could figure out a way to finish off the lie, a key slid into the front door lock. My heart bucked in my chest—it had to be Ryan.

He was talking before he even crossed the threshold. “You would not believe what a madhouse it is down there! Reporters are camped out on the entire block—someone famous must have moved in!” He finally realized that Dani wasn’t alone. “Oh,” he said when he saw me, and all the tension we’d shared before he stalked out of the Mercer came flooding back.

“Oh,” I echoed.

“I’m the someone famous,” Dani answered, her tone so bright, so fake that Ryan stopped staring at me and turned to gape at his mother. Dani sparkled. “It’s a long story, but the Gray Guerillas have become the mayor’s pet project!”

“The mayor’s—” He looked from her to me. I couldn’t meet his gaze, though. Couldn’t think past everything Dani had just told me.

Thankfully, Dani rushed on, filling the conversational void. “Becca tells me that you’ve been on TV! How was the show? The Cupboard Channel, was it?”

“Pantry,” he corrected. “It was fine.”

“What happened? What did you do?”

“I ate popcorn.”

Ryan looked like he wasn’t going to say more, like he was going to press me to pick up our earlier conversation, but Dani asked, “You ate popcorn?”

“Yeah. The way nature never intended it to be. Deli Dill Caramel. Vermont Maple Cheddar. Breakfast in a Bag. That last one is plain with powdered egg and bacon flakes.”

My stomach turned over, but Dani was the one who said, “Those sound disgusting.”

“Let’s just say I didn’t bring any home for you.” He offered his mother a faint grin before casting another opaque look at me. “But I didn’t realize both of you would be here. What were you talking about?”