Wishing in the Wings (31 page)

Ryan’s fingers folded into fists. He refused to look at me, refused to acknowledge my rage. Instead, he turned to my assistant. “I’m sorry, Jenn,” he said, in a voice so low that, against my will, I stepped closer to hear. “I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t capable of dealing with Ronald. I only meant to say that you shouldn’t be required to work with that maniac.”

Jenn? Why was he apologizing to Jenn? I was the one he had insulted!

Anger erupted inside me, flinging a white-hot curtain across my eyes. I knew that there were words—scores of them, hundreds of them—words that I could use to express myself with perfect eloquence and precision. But I didn’t want any of them. I didn’t want to modulate my voice. I didn’t want to be demure and ladylike and polite.

I wanted to blast Ryan out of the room.

“Don’t talk to Jenn!” I shrieked. “Talk to me! Explain to me!” The cast was close now; I could sense some of them standing directly behind me. The tide of my fury was too high, though, to cut short my tirade. The force of my rage ripped through me, releasing the tension of the past month, cutting away the tightrope I’d balanced on for weeks as I tried to be the perfect dramaturg and the perfect girlfriend. “Ryan, you owe me that much! You owe me more! Tell me about the computer program you wrote! Tell me about Pam! Tell me about how Africa gave you back your life! You owe me—”

And everything disappeared.

Suddenly, I was no place. Nowhere. There wasn’t a roof above me. There weren’t orderly rows of red velvet chairs around me. There wasn’t a group of people, dozens of cast members, pressing in against my back.

There was just an endless sea of gray.

Gray. And Teel, dressed in her Anana costume, holding on to her old woman form.

“What did you do?” I asked, and my voice sounded very, very small.

“I figured I’d better get you out of there, before you said anything else you were going to regret. I thought it might be helpful if the two of you finished your conversation on neutral ground.”

“Two—” Before I could finish the question, though, Teel jutted her chin toward my shoulder, sweeping her wrinkled hands before her in a grand gesture of welcoming. My breath froze in my throat, and I barely managed to turn around.

Ryan was staring at me, his own jaw slack with disbelief. “You have a genie, too?” he asked.

“TOO?” I ASKED, so shocked that I couldn’t put together a true sentence, couldn’t express the utter confusion that buffeted me.

Ryan asked, “Anana is your genie?”

“Teel,” the meddling old creature said by way of self-introduction. She extended her hand to shake his, letting her sleeve creep up to reveal her flame tattoo. The individual tongues of fire wove back and forth, twisting around themselves as if they were excited by their proximity to the Garden. Ryan’s attention was snagged, stolen by their hypnotic spell.

Irritated by the feeling that everyone else knew what was going on except for me, I clapped my hands to get Ryan’s attention. The brief sting of my palms fed the block of ice that was settling in my belly, freezing my anger into a righteous ballast. “Hello! ‘You have a genie, too?’ So you’re saying that you’ve got one? And you never told me?” As Ryan spluttered a nonresponse, I rounded on Teel. “And what the hell are the odds on that?” Teel whistled tunelessly, a snatch of song that her character sang in the first scene of However Long. “You had to know! Don’t give me that innocent act!”

She pouted. “Well, I did tell you about Jaze, didn’t I? That I was hoping to share my time in the Garden with someone special?”

Yeah, she’d told me. Over and over again—but I’d always assumed that Teel’s romantic dreams were just a touch of added drama, cheap manipulation to get me to speed up my wish-making. “Jaze is Ryan’s genie? And you’ve known that all along? Without telling me? Telling us?”

Teel raised one lined hand. “Guilty as charged.” She shrugged, her shoulders moving as if she were a much younger woman. “What can I say? MAGIC fired us up. The Decadium got us all excited to get into the Garden. It made your human world seem…boring. But Jaze and I thought it might be entertaining to see what happened when two of our humans got together. We wondered how long it would take for the two of you to figure it out. You really weren’t very clever, were you?” Teel must have recognized the look of fury on my face. She blurted out, “It was all Jaze’s idea.”

“I don’t believe it,” I shouted. “You’ve been manipulating me—manipulating us—from day one!”

“You got your wishes,” Teel said sullenly.

Before I could retort, Ryan finally succeeded in dragging his eyes away from Teel’s wrist. The expression on his face was so dazed, though, so confused, that I half-expected his eyes to swirl like pinwheels when he looked at me. “I never dreamed you had a genie too.”

I whirled back to Teel. “So let me get this straight. You and Jaze purposely brought Ryan and me together, just to see what would happen? Like we were some sort of experiment? Some sort of rats in a maze?”

Teel said, “Not exactly. Or not completely.” She looked at Ryan and prompted, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

When he didn’t answer, I snapped, “Ryan! Did you know about this? Did you just forget to mention it, like you forgot to mention Pam? Like you forgot to mention your software project?”

“No!” The vehemence of his reply chased away the last of his hypnotized response to my genie. “I never knew you had…Teel,” he said. “And I didn’t think I could tell you about Jaze. I thought the words would just get stuck in my throat. You know, the whole silence thing?” he said.

Yeah. The silence thing. Like he’d been silent about Pam, about his past.

I let some of the ice inside me freeze my words as I glared at Teel. “Could you give us a minute alone?” I waved my hand, indicating the general direction of the Garden. “Can’t you go watch the birds fly, or something? Spend some time smelling flowers through the gate?” Teel’s eyebrows drew together in consternation, and I thought that she was going to refuse my request. “That’s why you brought us here, right? You wanted to give us a chance to talk?”

“I thought that was what you wanted.” Teel’s old woman voice was stretched tight with a curious haughtiness. “I thought that you wanted to discuss lies, and the type of person who tells them. You know, to supposed friends.”

Even as I tried to parse those words, tried to figure out what I could possibly have done to earn Teel’s scorn, my genie pulled herself up to her full, if diminutive, height. Her silver hair gave her a halo of dignity as she stepped toward me. Stepped toward me, then glided around Ryan, then took several steps away into the gray distance.

Only when she raised her hands, curling her fingers around invisible iron bars, did I realize that I’d completely mislocated the Garden. In my frustration with Ryan, in my absolute surprise to find him there, I’d forgotten to wait for Teel’s cues, forgotten to stall while she let me know exactly where the Garden was, exactly what she was seeing.

I was totally busted.

But first things first. I clenched my arms around my frozen core and turned back to Ryan. “Go ahead,” I said. “What other things did you forget to tell me? Let me guess. You’re actually a government spy from a super-secret agency, and you’ve got a license to kill? No! Wait! You’re the heir to an Eastern European throne, with millions of dollars locked up in Swiss bank accounts. No! Better! You never actually wrote However Long, you just found the manuscript on a table in a coffee shop, and you decided to pretend that it was yours!”

The disappointment on my tongue turned my words as bitter as kola nut—with or without cheddar popcorn. “That’s not fair,” Ryan said. “Becca, I know this must be a shock, finding out about Jaze, but there was no way for me to tell you about her. At least, I didn’t think there was, since I didn’t know you had your own genie.”

His words pricked my conscience with enough guilt that I recalled my own efforts to talk about my magical encounters. I thought about that day, weeks ago, when I’d tried to talk to Jenn, when I’d tried to tell her about the bizarre gift that Kira had left for me. I remembered the way my throat had closed up, the way the words had just stopped.

Okay. So, he had a point. About the genie. “But what about Pam? Oh, I know! She had supernatural powers, too! She made you go silent whenever you tried to say her name!”

He sucked in a quick breath, and I knew I’d scored a point. I also knew that he was going to run his fingers through his hair, ending with the curls that were just a little too long, the ones that brushed against the back collar of his shirt. I knew that he was going to hunch his shoulders and sigh. I knew that he was going to look up at me through his eyelashes.

I knew Ryan.

Except, I didn’t.

I knew all those superficial things, all those mannerisms, all those actions that anyone in the world could see, if they only watched him long enough. But I didn’t know his thoughts. I didn’t know the way his mind really worked, the way he chose what to share and what to keep buried inside forever. I didn’t know the real, true him. Just like I hadn’t known Dean.

“Pam…” He started, but he trailed off as if he were searching for an answer. Well, he could stare off into the nonexistent scenery all day long, but he wasn’t going to find any guidance there.

He squared his shoulders and tried again. “Pam was part of my past. A part that I’m not proud of. I let myself get sucked into the world I thought that we—that she and I—shared. I let myself believe we had a future together, that we had a real relationship. But it wasn’t based on anything. Not anything real. And when she sold the software, when I finally realized…” He shook his head as he trailed off. “Something just broke inside of me. I started to question everything I’d ever done, everything I was.” His hands worked, clenching and unclenching. “Becca, I needed to build a whole new life for myself. I know you’ll never understand, but I needed to start from ground zero.”

But he was wrong. I did understand. At least a little bit.

When Dean disappeared, he tore down the ramparts of both my professional and my personal life. His embezzlement revealed his true colors, but money wasn’t all he’d stolen. He’d taken my confidence. My faith in myself.

And I’d selected However Long as my path back. My method of rebuilding my own identity.

The brick of ice in my belly started to melt, especially when I thought about how little I’d told Ryan about Dean. Not that I’d really needed to share that dirty laundry. There was plenty of gossip about Dean and me posted on ShowTalk. I said to Ryan, “Okay, so maybe I can understand your need to separate the past from the present. But to never even mention her? To wall off a part of you that is so important, that made you who you are today?”

He caught my gaze and held it. “You’re right. I should have told you about Pam.”

The admission was so honest, so frank, that I caught my breath in astonishment. Unable to let the argument drop so suddenly, though, I said, “I was embarrassed to hear about her from your mother.”

“I understand,” he said. “That must have been really awkward.”

I continued the debate, even though he wasn’t engaging. “I mean, Dani hardly seems like your mother, like anyone’s mother, but she thought I knew, and I had no idea, and it was so uncomfortable for both of us—”

“You’re right,” he said for a third time. The chunk of ice inside me splintered, shards of bitter cold breaking away like an iceberg calving into the ocean. At least until he said, “But there’s more I need to tell you. More that you should know, more that I think you’ll understand, since you have…Teel.”

I didn’t want Ryan to tell me more. I didn’t want to hear anything else that might break my heart. But we’d had enough of supposedly protective silence between us. I braced myself and said, “Go ahead.”

“You need to know about my wishes. I found Jaze’s lamp in a used bookstore, four, almost five years ago. My first wish was to make Pam, um, love me.”

Love him. Somehow, I couldn’t picture a guy making that wish—it was too princess-and-pony, too dream-date-for-the-prom. “Sure,” I said. “Love.”

He blushed. “Okay. I wanted her to…want me.” He shot another look at me from under those eyelashes. For a man who made his living by words, he seemed completely uncomfortable with the ones he was choosing right now. “That was part of the problem between Pam and me,” he wobbled on. “I started things under…under false pretenses. And when I thought I really loved her, she wasn’t interested. Had never been interested. Had only been caught by Jaze.”

Ouch. I decided to let him off the hook about word choice. “So what was your second wish?”

“I wanted to sell the writing software.” I nodded in sudden understanding as Ryan went on. “The way it all played out, I was furious with myself for not making my true wish clearer. I blamed Jaze for playing tricks on me. I blamed Pam. If she’d just told me about the deal before making it final, if she’d warned me about the exclusivity clause, I probably could have fixed things. But she didn’t, and everything just collapsed around me. Around us.” He shook his head. “She was so proud of herself for making the sale. And I was so angry with her. And she was still being driven by…manipulated by…my first wish, so we ended up hurting each other even more, understanding each other even less.” He closed his eyes against the old emotions. When he continued speaking, his voice was very soft. “I’d made huge mistakes, with both my wishes.”

His hurt was so obviously raw that I settled my palm against his arm, trying to soothe him. He jumped a little at my touch, and his eyes flew open. I held his gaze and said, “And your third wish?”

“The Peace Corps. I’d thought about it before. I’d imagined the things that I could do, the places I could go. I came back to it seriously, though, when I realized what a mess I’d made of everything in New York, everything with Pam. I thought I could…redeem myself by going to Africa.”

I heard the doubt in his voice, the judgment he was casting on himself. “But?” I prompted.

“But using the wish was cheating. I mean, people apply to the Peace Corps and then wait months, even years for placement. I just spoke to Jaze, and bam! I was heading to Burkina Faso in two weeks, job, visa, inoculations, all in order.”