08 Illusion (32 page)

“Two girls, two boys,” she said. Just like Mandy’s prizewinners.

“They’ll need names,” said Mr. Collins.

“Names …” Looking into those attentive little eyes, she didn’t care if Mandy Whitacre’s life was delusional, it was still hers. She reached into the memory, grabbed this one small corner of it, and hauled it into this room, where it could be real. She studied each dove and got to know its markings, the shape of its head, the curve of its beak, and then announced its name. “This little fella, his name is Bonkers. And this little girl, she’s Lily. And you—yeah, cutie, I’m talking to you!—you’re Maybelle, aren’t you? And that means
you
must be Carson. Glad to meet you.” She added only in her thoughts,
again,
then looked away to dab her eyes.

She heard, then saw Mr. Collins sink into an old plastic patio chair, his hand over his mouth as if he’d seen the Red Sea part down the middle. He looked as if
he
would cry.

“Mr. Collins?”

He smiled away the emotion and wagged his head at a thought he didn’t share. “Call me Dane,” he said.

chapter

28

E
loise dubbed them the Gleesome Threesome—herself, Shirley, and Dane—a crew bent on a goal and getting a good old feeling getting there. Lifting, rolling, dragging, and hand-trucking tires, wheels, a ringer-washer, a couch, an old desk, and other rusted, mouse-chewed, bent, and seized-up junk out of the barn and carting it all to the dump was dusty, dirty, and difficult, but it was a pleasant kind of misery. Daddy always said hard work was good for the soul, and each evening, as Eloise zonked out on her bed, her soul felt better.

Working alongside Dane—and being able to call him that—sure added a shiny side to it. Handing to, getting from, struggling, lifting, hauling, cracking jokes, and having laughs with that man were healing, as if a big, lost chunk of her life was finding its way back. Sitting on a stool beside him at his drafting table, studying his drawings of the stage he had in mind, and making out a materials list for the lumber store was a sweet flashback. She’d done the very same thing with Daddy when they built the aviary for her doves, the raised bed garden behind the house, the coop for the chickens. That day, not only did her soul feel better, she also went home feeling special, and that night she fell asleep with little movies of her second daddy playing through her head.

Wednesday morning they moved the tiller, box scraper, tank sprayer, brush hog, and backhoe out of the shop and into the barn, which cleared floor space in the shop for a stage. By midmorning, the materials arrived. Eloise wore Dane’s nail apron and wielded his hammer, Dane did the cutting and layout, Shirley ran the power nailer and drill, and by quitting time on Thursday the Gleesome Threesome had completed a rough, unpainted stage, fourteen by fourteen, in portable sections bolted together. No lights, no curtain or backdrop, just a big frame and plywood box about three feet high with steps at either end.

“That’ll do for the immediate future,” Dane said, snapping a picture. He’d snapped a lot of pictures during the process. Eloise was always smiling for the camera. “We’ll dress it up as we go along, but tomorrow we have to get you up there and start filling out a show.”

The thought made her tingle. She climbed the steps and pranced onto the stage, imagining the shop as a theater, Dane, Shirley, and the Kubota tractor as her audience. She did a pirouette into a ta-da pose, arms outstretched.

“How’s it feel?” Dane asked, looking up at her.

She said, “Real good,” but that didn’t come near the feeling. She wasn’t just on this stage; she was also on this stage in this shop on this ranch with that man sitting down there in front of her, watching and caring about her. She added, “Like where I belong,” and that was more like it.

Joy bubbled up and burst out in a squeal as she did another spin, flinging out her hand as if materializing something.

A microphone flew from her hand across the stage. There was a gasp from the audience of at least five hundred—especially from the sound crew. The mike slowed, then stopped in midair. Eloise flashed a bedazzled look at the audience, stared at the mike as if she hadn’t a clue how it did that, and then, as if getting an idea, struck a dancing pose and drew it back toward herself with a beckoning wave of her hand. It floated toward her then, obeying her fluid gestures, halted just beyond her reach, tumbled end over end, then spun laterally like a bottle. Eloise was loving it and so was the audience.

She was dressed in her best, a silk blouse and gold cravat, black slacks, black vest with gold embroidery, hair done perfect and shining in the lights. Her audience was dressed in jeans, sweatpants, sweatshirts, snow boots, camouflage pants and shirts, beer logo T-shirts, and billed caps. It was the annual Community Christmas Show at the Wallace High School auditorium in Wallace, Idaho.

The gig came up suddenly. A barbershop quartet had to bow out, leaving an open twenty-minute slot between the combined Kellogg and Wallace High School concert bands and the Christmas Carol Collection Community Choir. Someone telephoned Roger Calhoun, who telephoned Eloise, and Dane thought it was a great idea, a perfect way to test new material on a big stage.

With a fluid, pulling gesture, she made the mike float past her and sang a note into it as it went by. It kept on singing the note as it circled behind and around her like a moon around a planet. When it came back around, she let it pass behind her hand, and as it did, it split into two microphones, exact duplicates. The first continued orbiting while Eloise sang a second note into the second mike, which set it in motion, and now two mikes were orbiting about her head singing a continuous chord in her voice. Mike One came around and passed behind her hand again. Presto, Mike Three! Eloise sang a third note, Mike Three carried it into orbit. A fourth mike joined the others and they sang a four-note chord that became the opening bars of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” a bow to the barbershop quartet that couldn’t make it. The folks got it right away. They laughed, she milked it.

Dane and Eloise had six days to put a twenty-minute show together, six days of eye-to-eye, mind-to-mind brainstorming, discussing and arguing, trying this and then that to see how it looked, working out the dance moves, the props, the appearance of everything for a bigger crowd and bigger stage. They worked all day, talked and debriefed through lunch and dinner, kept at it until nine each night, when she drove home to sleep. It was intense, grueling, focused.

She loved it. She never felt so alive.

The microphones held the last chord of the song as they orbited faster, approaching blurring speed. Abruptly, Eloise put out her hand, caught Mike One as it came around, did a graceful spin, flung her hand outward …

The mike became a dove that flew out over the audience in a wide arc.

Eloise caught Mike Two, did a spin, flung out her hand …

Another dove flashed into view and followed the first in a wide circle over the heads of the audience.

Another catch, another fling, another dove. Three doves fluttered along the same trajectory like white-feathered boomerangs. Another spin, another fling …

The fourth dove set out to fly the big circle just as the first was finishing.

Ooooh! Ahhhh! Laughter. Astonishment. Applause.

Dove One flew in close to Eloise, but she waved it on. It circled the room again, the others followed, and then they came home, one, two on Eloise’s right hand, one, two on her left. She brought her hands together in front of her, bowed with the birds to receive the applause, then straightened, threw her hands upward …

The doves became a flurry of snowflakes sparkling in the lights, settling ever so slowly to the stage floor.

Backstage, Dane gently put Carson the dove back in his cage. “Good work, little buddy!”

Then he watched her work the crowd with wonder in her eyes, her childlike expression reaching the back row and saying,
Wow! Did you see that? How did I do that?

So alive. So free.

On the left side of the auditorium, sitting on the very top row of the bleachers toward the back, a man in his thirties, wearing a crisp, new Cabela’s camouflage jacket and a billed cap, was honestly enjoying the show while he watched the screen of his laptop computer. In a small window in the corner of the screen was a video stream of Eloise’s performance, captured through the tiny camera mounted atop the screen and time-coded. On the main screen, locked into the same time code, columns of numbers rolled faster than the eye could follow, wave patterns rose and fell, blue shapes like time-lapse clouds formed and dissolved against the vertical and horizontal axes of a graph, and all in concert with every stunt and illusion produced by the girl onstage.

The data were streaming in faster than he could study and analyze in real time, but it was easy to see the trends and appraise the situation. The readings from the coffeehouse were confirmatory and alarming.

These readings were worse.

The lights in the living room dimmed except for the multicolored lights on the Christmas tree and the glow from the fireplace. “And can you turn off that lamp?”

Dane reached over and switched off the table lamp, then settled back on the couch.

“Ta-daaa!”

Eloise made her grand entrance into the living room, face glowing and eyes sparkling in the light of six candles atop a fancy chocolate cake. She didn’t just walk into the room, she made a procession of it, bearing the tea tray out in front of her as if conveying the crown jewels into the presence of the king. “Merry Christmas to you, and happy birthday to you …” When she came to his name in the song she sang it for several counts, grinning at the privilege, then set the tray with the cake, two plates, and two forks on the coffee table. She sat on the love seat opposite, elbows on her knees, chin propped on her knuckles, eyes giddy. “Make a wish!”

All he could do was gaze at her while the candles burned.
Make a wish?

His birthday was on the sixteenth, but Christmas on Saturday was the ideal opportunity to celebrate both, and Eloise leaped at it. She prepared a dinner, Chicken Kiev, and baked the cake in his kitchen, accepting help from him only with questions that began with “Where do you keep the … ?” and “Do you have any more of … ?” She set the table in the dining room with his best silverware and dishes and brought some candles for the centerpiece in case he didn’t have any, which he didn’t. Dinner was at six o’clock, and at her request, he wore a jacket and tie. She made all the meal preparations wearing her jeans, blouse, and running shoes, but then, with a magical flair, she vanished into the guest bedroom and reappeared for dinner in a dress. It was black, cute, and tasteful, conforming to her waist and draping from her hips to a teasing hem above her knees. The diamond earrings twinkled just below her haircut, and the diamond necklace adorned her neck. She sat with her ankles crossed, and around her right ankle was another surprise: a silver anklet.

The candles kept burning, and her eyes softened from giddy to serene. She eased back, folded her hands in her lap, and said nothing more about the wish. She just returned his gaze, then playfully shrugged a shoulder, her smile closing the distance between them, her hair a sunrise in the glow of the fireplace.

What he thought, he couldn’t share: he was sitting across from a perky, take-on-the-world, blue-eyed kid, but in the eyes of this girl were the depth, the spirit of a woman—the woman he would make his own and share his life with for the next forty years—forty years ago.

Oh, he could make a
lot
of wishes.

“What?” she finally asked.

All he could tell her was as much truth as his best wisdom would allow. “Ellie, I am compelled to say that you look absolutely lovely tonight, and you have made my Christmas a manifold and uncontainable blessing. Thank you so very much.”

And without a wish, he blew out the candles.

Eloise stared at the candle wicks as they smoked and smoldered down to a cold, black nothing. There was a dead space. No words.

Oh, and she wasn’t smiling. She put her smile back on and gave a little clap. “Yay!” Then she stepped to the wall and eased the lights up about half.

Was he happy? Was he having a good time? She hurried back to her seat and met his eyes, looking for … well, just the look he had a moment ago. It was sort of there, but now … well, the candles weren’t lighting up his face anymore, the lights were half on, the wishing was over.

The cake was a little crooked, but it came out great otherwise; all he had to do was taste it. The Chicken Kiev could have been a little more crumbed and maybe a little lighter on the pepper, but he loved it, he really talked about it, he ate a bunch of it.

She just had to know, “Are you having a good time?”

“Very much. You’ve no idea.”

She cut a slice of cake for him—he wanted only a little one—and one for herself, just a little smaller. “So, how does it feel being sixty? Is it … I mean, I can’t imagine being that old …” Her hand went over her mouth, and she laughed at the gaffe.

But so did he. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance, Lord willing. I kind of like it. I get a big kick out of asking people where they were when they first heard Kennedy was shot. Used to be you could ask anybody and they’d know.”

She took a bite of cake instead of telling him: seventh-grade music appreciation class with Mr. McFaden. “I guess you’ve lived through a lot of history.”

“So will you. Someday you’ll be the only one who remembers where you were when you heard about 9/11.”

“I … I suppose you remember the Beatles.”

Big, oh-yes nod. “Grew my hair out long, bought all their records, got a lot of flak in church about it. I can remember standing in line outside the Paramount Theater in Seattle waiting to see
A Hard Day’s Night.
”