15

15

No one’s around when I get up in the morning. When does that ever happen? I make so many sandwiches and take them to the barn, then head to the orchard where I find my girls already hard at work. The work is always biting at our heels. “Good morning,” they say, keeping their eyes on their hands. We talk about how many rows we mean to pick today. We talk about the weather. Emily says some neighbors have posted that they’ll be selling whitefish this afternoon and we decide that whitefish is today’s answer to the eternal question of dinner. No one says anything about the movie. My guess is that they can’t make sense of what they saw, or maybe it just made them too sad. Maisie’s already been back to the Otts’ early this morning because the Otts think that Happy, their ancient yellow Lab, has had a stroke. She’s walking in circles, Maisie tells us, holding her head at an angle, one eye closed. She’s vomiting, falling over.

“Oh, not Happy!” Emily says. “She came by the blanket last night.”

“It’s not a stroke,” Maisie says. “At least I don’t think it is. I’m pretty sure she has old--dog vestibular disease.”

“Happy’s dizzy?” I ask.

Maisie nods. “I called her vet and they’re going to fill some prescriptions for her. She should get straightened out, unless I’m wrong, in which case it’s probably a brain tumor.”

“You saved Happy’s life!” Nell says. The girls have known Happy since earliest puppyhood. No one is interested in the possibility of a brain tumor.

Joe comes by on the Gator to collect the first round of lugs. He whistles at our productivity.

“We haven’t been talking as much this morning,” Nell says.

“Well, that’s a first,” Joe says. “I would have thought you’d be taking the movie apart.”

The three girls look at him, stricken, and it occurs to me that they must have stayed up half the night doing exactly that.

“I can’t blame you,” he says, answering what has not been said. “I have regrets about seeing it again myself.” He looks at me. “Was it that sad the first time?”

“It was,” I say, and then wonder if he knew I was there.

We help him put the lugs in the back, grateful to use our bodies some other way even for a minute, then he waves and is gone.

“Was Dad a good Stage Manager?” Nell asks, watching the Gator crest the hill.

“Excellent,” I say.

Maisie pulls over the ladder and goes to clean off the top of her tree. “He’s not what you’d call theatrical,” she says. “For someone who used to work in the theater.”

“That’s what made him good. Your father was a relief. He never tried to call any attention to himself. He acted the same way he directed: He was there to set up our scenes and move us around. But he was very steady, very—-” I stop. “What’s the word I want?”

“Trustworthy,” Nell offers.

Never has a word been so exactly right. “Trustworthy.”

“It must have been strange though, to be onstage with Uncle Wallace one night and Dad two nights later. They must have been so different.”

We are nearing the end of my brief career as an actress, and I’m still trying to remember what acting was like. “They were as different as chalk and cheese but they were both right for the part. I stood so close to them. That’s what I remember. The audience is far away but the people you’re acting with are so close. You can smell them. Uncle Wallace smelled like mouthwash and Royall Lyme cologne. And then your father—-” What did Joe smell like? It was nothing like mouthwash and cologne.

“Daddy smells like this.” Nell closes her eyes for a minute, sniffing the breeze.

“Like what?” Emily asks.

“He smells like the cherry orchard,” Maisie says.

“Yes.” I’d been too young to understand it then. He smelled like the cherry orchard.

When it came to breaking rehearsal early, Cody was the uncontested champion. Maybe he was right to let us go. The entire cast was only four people after all, one act, and if those people were all drinking tequila and if the director wanted to run a scene a second time, a great deal of thought had to go into marshaling resources. On the days we had Our Town—-Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday—-he had to be especially careful to keep the drinking in check. Other people knew what was going on over at Fool for Love, and while some actors might have found our methods gritty and inspired, the management saw us for the ticking time bomb we were. We could not slip up, which was to say Duke could not slip up. He drank his flooding amounts of water and shook the aspirin straight from the bottle into his mouth. He dove down into the bottle of tequila, dove down into the glittering lake, then swam back up, breaking the surface with the full force of his life.

We never knew when Sebastian was going to be there. Probably Pallace knew. Everyone wanted to play tennis in the summer. The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club was right on Lake St. Clair and the breeze blew gently across the courts, just enough to dry the sweat from a player’s brow but never enough to alter the trajectory of the ball. Every hour of Sebastian’s weekends was booked in advance, so weekends were out, but as soon as he could cobble two days together he drove up to see us, or he drove up to see her. I don’t even think Duke had much to do with it anymore. Sebastian must have gotten up in the dark to be there so early on a Tuesday morning. I saw him sitting in the back of the theater with Pallace, his arm around her, her head tipped towards him, the two of them watching us drink and slam and scream at one another. I didn’t care about the rest of them anymore but I hated that Sebastian was there. I suspected that Cody called the rehearsal early that day because he couldn’t stand to see me act anymore, but maybe it had something to do with Sebastian. Like Pallace, Cody had a weakness for quiet, handsome men who weren’t actors.

“Saint Sebastian!” Duke shouted when he saw his brother. “Tennis!”

“Too hot,” Pallace called from the comfort of her boyfriend’s shoulder. “I want to go swimming.”

“He was mine first,” Duke said. “And anyway, you’re off tonight. You can swim all you want.” One night Our Town, one night Cabaret. We worked and then Pallace worked and on Monday everyone was off. It dawned on me then that Sebastian must have driven up last night. He’d come in and hadn’t told us.

“Okay.” Sebastian leaned over to give Pallace a kiss. “We’ll play a game.”

How could he have stood all that tennis? It was hot and I wanted to swim too, but like Pallace, it never occurred to me that we could have just gone without them. If our boyfriends played tennis then we would sit at the edge of the court and watch them play. Cody tagged along for the first set but Pallace and I ignored him so completely he finally said something about having work to do and went away. Duke was getting creamed.

Sebastian pulled back as convincingly as possible but Duke was missing the lobs. This must have been what every day was like for Sebastian—-hitting balls to talentless automotive engineers hellbent on winning. Duke stopped abruptly, his racquet straight down, his head tipped back. The yellow ball bounced twice then rolled away.

“Peedee?” Sebastian asked, all of us thinking that Duke was about to start screaming, but instead he went briskly out the gate and vomited in the grass by the walkway. I understood. The heat of the sun and the fast--moving ball made everything tilt. I went to stand beside him. I was getting good at this.

Turned out an afternoon swim and an afternoon game of tennis registered differently when the morning had been spent drinking tequila. Duke hadn’t known that before and now he did. Sebastian appeared with a bottle of water and Duke rinsed his mouth then vomited again, his hands braced against his knees, his black hair wet and clinging to the sides of his face. Sebastian waited another minute before giving him a towel. Tennis pros had bags like doctors.

“Let’s get you back to the room,” Sebastian said.

Duke shook his head very slowly so as not to upset his equilibrium further. “I’m going to lie down for a minute,” he said, meaning on the ground.

I thought Sebastian would object but he patted his brother’s back and then walked him onto the court where Duke stretched out parallel to the fault line.

“Keep playing,” he said, his voice subdued, his hand making a little circle in the air. “I don’t want to ruin the afternoon for everyone.”

“Too late,” Pallace said.

“Do you want to play a set?” Sebastian asked her.

She shook her head, lifting up her leg to flex and point her foot. “Ankle,” she reminded him. Pallace had a flare--up of tendinitis in her left ankle and if she wasn’t dancing she tried to rest it. She was sitting on the court near Duke’s head but had nothing to do with him.

Sebastian turned his racquet at me. “You’re up.”

I hadn’t had that much to drink but it took very little. Despite Duke’s predictions, my muscle for consumption remained weak. “Let’s go to the lake.”

Duke had his arm across his eyes, the tender underside of his wrist turned towards the sun. “You can’t move me and you can’t leave me here. You might as well get a lesson out of it.”

Now I was sorry for having chased Cody off. Cody would have sold his mother to play a game of tennis with Sebastian. I asked Duke how he was feeling.

“Potentially better. Not better right this minute but I can see how this could really help in the long run.”

“Oh, fantastic,” Pallace said. “Now you’re bulimic on top of everything else.”

“Quiet,” Duke whispered.

“Come on.” Sebastian handed me a racquet. “Unless you’ve been drinking, too.”

“A little bit,” I admitted.

Duke gave his head a very slow shake. “She fakes it.”

My beloved, sick and stretched out on the ground, how I felt like kicking him. Not hard. Only once. I told Sebastian I would play.

On that day I was a bad girlfriend, a bad actress, a bad drinker, but by god I could play tennis. The magic that tequila had brought to the performances of Duke and Homer and Sal came to me on the tennis court. Who knew? I started slow and built my game. I knew that Sebastian was probably operating at two percent of his ability and I didn’t care. I was confident, loose. I gave him everything. I slammed my return to the opposite corner of the court and got one honest point off of him. Pallace whooped and called my name. Duke turned gingerly onto his side and opened one eye. I remembered myself in that backlot pool, in the bikini I still wore. They had wanted to see if I could swim.

“The cricket’s coming for you, brother,” Duke shouted, inasmuch as he could shout.

I was running, reaching. I didn’t care how I looked. Again and again I found a way to get the ball back over the net. The universe had conspired to grant me a single decent game of tennis, and I went in with everything I had. I could see the light change in Sebastian’s eyes. He was taking me seriously, not as an opponent, but as a person on the other side of the net, and the attention enlivened me. He shouted instructions, encouragement. He was a wonderful teacher, and he was doing his best to improve me. I leapt for a serve beyond my range, leapt and lunged and was felled by something like a gunshot I hadn’t heard. That was my exact thought, not that I had fallen but that I’d been shot. I crumpled onto the hot surface of the court. Duke was still there, lying a dozen feet away. He wiggled his fingers at me. How had he been lying on the court all this time? It was hot like a cookie sheet straight from the oven.

“You get used to it,” he said.

Sebastian was crouching down beside me, his dark eyes warmed by concern. All summer long I had conscientiously failed to notice his beauty but having his face that close to mine made it unavoidable. “Hey,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder gently. “Just stay there a second, catch your breath.”

“I’m fine.” I blinked. I was fine, more surprised than hurt. “I didn’t scrape my knees.”

“Is she okay?” Duke raised up on one elbow for a moment then eased himself back down.

“I don’t know yet.”

“She might be faking it,” Duke said. “She doesn’t like it when I get too much attention.”

Pallace was there, her hand on my face, her face so close to my face. “Are you very hurt?”

Everything had stopped and everyone was watching. I felt so foolish. I pushed myself up to a seated position. I swayed at first and then sitting seemed fine. Still, the question of what had happened, the explosion inside my calf that had very clearly come from outside my calf, was unresolved. “Did someone shoot me?” I asked her.

Pallace rocked back on her heels. “Oh, fuck.”

“Oh fuck what?”

“It’s her Achilles,” Pallace said to Sebastian.

Sebastian squeezed my shoulder. He did not disagree.

“You ruptured your Achilles?” Maisie asks.

“How did we never know this?” Emily asks.

I lean over and pull up my right pant leg, show them the thin white line that runs from my heel up the middle of my calf. “Apparently they’re much better at this now. Now they only make a tiny incision.”

Maisie leans over, runs the tip of her finger down the scar. “How have I never seen this before?”

“I’ve had this scar a lot longer than I’ve had any of you.”

“How did Pallace and Sebastian know what had happened?” Nell asks.

“Dancers and tennis players know about legs. If someone falls over and says they think they were shot, chances are they’ve ruptured their Achilles.”

“Partial or complete?” Maisie is still marveling at the neatness with which her mother was reassembled.

“Total rupture. Go big or go home.”

“Could you walk at all?” Emily asks. Why does it matter so much, the way she’s looking at me this minute? Like I am on the tennis court curled on my side and she is there, her hand on my shoulder.

Maisie shakes her head. “She can’t walk.”

“Wait,” Nell asks. “This happens to dogs?”

“Yep.”

“So you had to go back to the hospital,” Emily says. “Was Uncle Wallace there?”

I shook my head, smiling. “Elyse had already taken him back to Chicago. That would have been something though, wouldn’t it? Uncle Wallace and me in a double room.”

“Pallace had to take your part,” Nell says. “She had to go on that night.”

Sapphire sky, diamond clouds, emerald leaves, ruby cherries. The magic with which Nell understands overwhelms me at times. Her sisters turn and stare. “You’re doing it again,” Emily says.

“What?”

“You’re thinking about the performance, the understudy, and not your own mother lying on the ground with a ruptured Achilles.”

“You did the same thing with Uncle Wallace,” Maisie says.

Nell won’t bite. “She’s on a tennis court. Sebastian is there. It’s not like she’s facedown in the dirt.”

Emily is irritated with Nell, which is noteworthy because none of us get irritated with Nell, the sweet one, the small one, the baby. “But why do you always care about the understudy? Why is the most important thing in life whether or not the show goes on?”

Nell is standing beside me. She puts her arm around my waist in solidarity. “You’re not getting it,” she says. “This is when everything changes. This is the beginning of the second act. She can’t walk. She can’t walk for—-” She stops to look at me.

“A long time,” I say, though walking can be defined in different ways. “No cast, no crutches, it was probably six months.”

“So it’s not just Emily Pallace is going to play. She’s going to play Mae, too. Pallace is going to finish out Our Town and do the entire run of Fool for Love. Why can’t you understand that?” she asks.

“We can understand it,” Maisie says. “But we’re more worried about Mom than we are the play.”

Just like that Nell is crying and then sobbing, a fierce storm blown up out of nowhere. She turns her back on Maisie and Emily in shame and presses her face against my breastbone, both of her arms tight around me now. I don’t for a minute think she is crying because of her sisters, though surely part of her is crying for herself. She has lost these months to the pandemic, being stuck on the farm with no idea how much longer she’ll have to stay. She is losing this time when she is beautiful and young in a profession that cares for nothing but beauty and youth. But really, she is crying for me. While her sisters stand and stare in utter bafflement, Nell the Mentalist has snapped all the pieces together. She knows I am finished.

I insisted on trying to stand, and so Sebastian got on one side with Pallace on the other and together they lifted me like a marionette whose string had been cut. My leg was rubbery, almost liquid. “I need to rest it for a minute,” I said.

Sebastian shook his head. “You need to go to the hospital.”

“She doesn’t need to go to the hospital,” Duke said, his voice clearer now. “She just tripped on her tiny feet. Give her a minute.”

He had vomited and I had fallen and in just a minute, everything would be fine.

A minute, a minute, a minute. I could feel Pallace shifting beneath my arm. “Let’s put her down,” she said to Sebastian.

And so they sat me down again and Pallace sat beside me. She looked at me hard but kept hold of my hand. “I wish we had more time,” she said. “But we don’t so I’m just going to say it: You’re not going on tonight, and I’m going to have to go get ready.”

Emily. I had forgotten her.

Duke was sitting up now. “What?”

“She can’t walk.” Pallace looked at Duke like maybe I had been shot and maybe he was the one who’d shot me. “She’s not going to be able to walk. I’ve seen this happen.” She looked at Sebastian. “Have you seen this happen?”

He nodded, the sun behind his head lighting up his black hair.

Pallace touched her finger to my ankle so lightly I couldn’t feel it. “It doesn’t matter if you go to the hospital right this minute or if you wait three days, I’m telling you the truth. You’re going to go to the hospital and they’re going to sew your tendon back on. Like it or not, I can pretty much promise you that’s the way this is going to go.”

Now Duke was on his feet, leaning noticeably to the left as he came towards us. I expected him to make a joke, to say that Pallace was scheming for my part, but instead he leaned over and patted my head. He asked his brother if he could drive me to the hospital. Duke and Pallace wouldn’t be able to come with us, of course. They had to get cleaned up. They had to be onstage in a couple of hours, the two of them, Editor Webb and his daughter Emily.

Sebastian leaned over and picked me up like a towel, a tennis bag, and again, I waited for Duke to make a joke but he didn’t. Maybe he was already Editor Webb, maybe he was going over his notebooks in his mind, or maybe he was worried about me, I guess it was possible, maybe he didn’t know what to say. The parking lot where Sebastian left his car was nowhere near the tennis courts and so he carried me, past the path that went down to the lake and past the path that would have taken us back to the theater. He carried me all the way to the company housing. Would Duke have carried me under different circumstances? No, Duke would have gone and gotten the car. That was the difference: One brother would take the girl to the car while the other would bring the car to the girl. It was such a strange sensation to be carried, to be so high up. I looped my arms around Sebastian’s neck and gripped my wrist, trying to somehow make myself lighter. I could smell my own sweat. Pallace went ahead to get my purse and came back with the nightgown I hadn’t worn all summer, two pairs of underpants, socks, a clean T--shirt and shorts, hairbrush, toothbrush, all in a plastic bag.

“Don’t worry about anything, okay? It’s going to be fine,” she said once I was settled in the passenger seat of the Plymouth.

I nodded, though I didn’t know if she was talking about my leg or the play. I knew she was anxious to get away from us. She had so much to do, and if she was excited—-and she would have been excited, wouldn’t she? after so much waiting around—-she wouldn’t have wanted me to see it. Duke and Pallace stood beside one another and waved as we drove off, like they were my parents sending me into the world.

I rolled down the window, my mind remarkably blank. I understood what was happening but not that it was happening to me. The cherry trees at Tom Lake were shaggy and didn’t have much fruit; feral cherry trees left over from some other time. No one bothered to pick them, much less prune them. “What do you know about the Achilles tendon?” I asked Sebastian.

“Can you flex your foot back then point your toe?”

I could not.

He nodded as if that were the entire conversation. “I played mixed doubles once with a woman who swore I’d sliced the back of her calf with my racquet even though I was nowhere near her. From what I’ve been told, it feels like something exploded inside your leg.”

“That’s it.”

“So they’ll reattach the tendon, and after a while you’ll walk again, and a while after that you’ll play tennis again.” He looked over at me. “If you ever want to play tennis again. I’ll tell you, you were killing it today.”

“Damn it,” I said, closing my eyes.

“What?”

“I forgot to tell Pallace good luck for tonight. I don’t mean good luck. I mean ‘break a leg.’?”

“You mean, ‘rupture your Achilles’,” he said, and we both laughed because what else was there to do?