Wishing in the Wings (27 page)

“Uptown?” Ryan asked, darting a glance at me. His desire to escape the Mercer was clearly legible on his face.

“To the studio. It’s up near Rockefeller Center.”

“What studio?”

“What’s his name, Ronald Barton? Your Popcorn King?”

Ryan laughed in disbelief. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’re going to be guests on the Pantry Channel? He called a week ago, said you’d already agreed to it. That was the only reason I agreed to go.”

“The. Pantry. Channel.” Ryan could have been talking about the Spanish Inquisition.

Hal grimaced. “I take it he never talked to you?”

Ryan shook his head. I could feel him shutting down. His shoulders slumped. He twitched away from my concerned hand, leaning against the far armrest of his chair. He sighed, as if the world were coming to an end. His frustration was obviously about more than missing the guerilla activity we’d planned for the evening. He was clearly questioning the wisdom of our ever accepting the Popcorn King’s filthy lucre.

“Um, what’s the Pantry Channel?” I asked, trying to buy a minute to work out some semblance of a solution.

Hal shrugged. “Some local cable thing. A bunch of people who couldn’t sell their shows to the Food Network. Every Wednesday night, they host a news show about local food trends, and tonight features the Popcorn King. He’s going to hand over the second check to Ryan, right there, live and on air. He said something about our testing new popcorn flavors, too.”

“I can’t do it,” Ryan said.

“Yeah, right.” Hal shrugged on his leather jacket. “Maybe we can just pretend to eat the popcorn.”

“I’m not kidding. I can’t go.” Ryan’s voice ratcheted higher. He looked miserable. Miserable, but absolutely determined. My heart went out to him. He was trying to balance so much—making However Long into the best play it could be, juggling meetings with the Popcorn King, keeping his long-standing obligation to the Grays, building…whatever he was building with me.

Hal didn’t have quite the same perspective. His laser eyes locked on Ryan. “Look, I’m pissed off about being manipulated, too. But this is actually a great opportunity for us. The Pantry Channel might only have a few thousand viewers, but those are people who’ve probably never even heard of the Mercer before.”

Ryan appealed to me, looking as if I were a teacher who could write him a hall pass. Knowing he was going to be unhappy with me, I shoved honest regret into my voice as I said, “Hal’s right. I know we were looking forward to the Grays. I know you promised Dani, but she does have lots of other people to help her.”

I glanced at my boss, who gave me a satisfied nod. I was making the argument he wanted me to make, even if he didn’t know anything about the Grays or Dani or any other details from my non-Mercer life with Ryan. “Look,” Hal said. “I’m going to pick up some promotional brochures from my office. We can grab a cab in what, five minutes?”

He didn’t wait for Ryan’s confirmation before he strode off. I couldn’t help but notice, though, that he did look back at me from the doorway. His hawk eyes watched to see if I continued to play my role properly. If I brought Ryan around. If I was the good dramaturg.

Instead of the good girlfriend.

“Ryan, we’re almost through here,” I cajoled. “We’ve only got two more weeks of rehearsal, and then your time will be your own again.”

“I’ve been here day and night for a month. We were looking forward to this break tonight—both of us.”

“Hey, I’m disappointed too. But we’ll do the next seed bombing together. I promise.”

He pulled away from the hand that I put on his arm, the hand that I intended to be a symbol of comfort, of support. When he muttered a response, he sounded like a cross between a tortured artist and a spoiled five-year-old boy. “Do you really think that my appearance on some stupid local access TV show is going to make a difference?”

“It can’t hurt. Like Hal said, we need every bit of advertising we can get.”

“Sure. Just like we need those idiotic T-shirts. Just like we need to slap that goddamn logo all over the set.” He scrambled in his pocket for his cell phone. Flipping it open with enough force that I worried the device would snap in two, he snarled to an imaginary caller, “Pop off!”

“Ryan,” I soothed. “You knew that staging your play would be a collaborative process.”

“But I never expected you to drink the Kool-Aid, too! I never thought that you would sell out to the Popcorn King.”

His words were so sharp I felt like I’d been slapped. Tears leaped to my eyes. “We didn’t sell out, Ryan. The Mercer needed the funding.”

“Not we, Becca. You. You, personally. Why exactly are the Mercer’s finances so rocky? Why did you feel so responsible that you had to line up a sponsor no matter what, no matter who? That couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that your boyfriend emptied the coffers, could it?”

“That is not fair, Ryan! This doesn’t have anything to do with Dean. You went to those funding meetings with me. You know how hard it was to get a commitment from anyone. We were lucky to get the Popcorn King. You know how hard I tried to find someone else.”

“About as hard as you tried to get Hal to stick with my blocking this afternoon.”

“Is that what this is all about?”

“This is about the mincemeat all of you are making out of my play. You’re gutting it!”

“I can’t help it if you wrote an impossible script!” The words were out of my mouth before I thought them through. Once they were free, though, I had to continue. “There’s nothing wrong with our actors, Ryan. Your dream sequence just can’t be done. No one could ever stage it the way you’ve written it. No one could ever make it work.”

“It’s not that complicated!” He leaped onto the stage with a speed I might have found admirable, under other circumstances. “Fanta stands here!” He darted upstage. “She moves here!” He ducked behind the wall. “She moves here!”

The crash was louder than anything I’d heard all afternoon. My well-trained ears immediately identified the clatter of crockery scattering, followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor. My heart leaped into my throat as I scrambled backstage.

“Ryan!”

He was lying on his stomach, his arms stretched in front of him, as if he’d tried to break his fall. I rushed to his side as he slowly pushed himself up onto all fours, his head hanging almost to the floor. He gaped like a goldfish out of water, unable to draw a full breath.

“Oh my God! Ryan!” I seized his shoulders, trying to ease him into a seated position. He held up one hand, effectively freezing me in place.

“I’m okay,” he rasped. “Just…winded.”

I fluttered my hands around his shoulders, unable to do anything to help. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

“No,” he choked out. “I’m fine.” He celebrated that pronouncement by rolling onto his back. I watched his chest rise and fall as he finally managed to catch a handful of proper breaths.

“Just a second.” I rushed into one of the dressing rooms. A collection of battered coffee mugs ringed the sink. I grabbed the one that seemed the least dirty, filled it with water, rushed back to the stage. “Here. Drink.” I knelt beside him, carefully easing him up until he was half-sitting, half-leaning against my shoulder.

He folded his hands around the mug, downing one noisy swallow. He closed his eyes and pulled away from me, huddling into himself like a homeless man on some anonymous sidewalk. “Thank you,” he said, settling the mug on the floor with a terrifying note of finality.

“Ryan, I—”

“Yeah,” he said, and he sighed deeply before hauling himself to his feet.

“Wait here. I’ll tell Hal that you can’t go. We can take a cab home. We can talk about this some more.”

He shook his head. “No. I’ll go with Hal.”

“But you were right—”

“No, Becca.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “You were right. The play isn’t about me. We all have to do things to make it happen. We all have to make sacrifices.”

“Let’s talk about this, Ryan!”

His smile was sad. “We’ve talked enough. Hal’s probably going insane out there, waiting for me. I’ve got to go.”

“But we’ll finish this conversation later, won’t we? You’ll come by when you get home?”

“I have to go.” He eased himself off the stage gingerly. I waited until the door closed behind him, hoping that he would turn around, certain that he would say something else. Anything else. Even one single, solitary word.

The theater was very quiet when I stood alone.

When I’d run out of excuses for Ryan to come back, I forced myself to pick up the chipped coffee mug. I rinsed it out in the dressing room, holding it under the running water until my fingers started to pucker. I headed back onto the stage, stopping long enough to collect the pots, to stack them all for the next morning’s rehearsal. I walked from stage left to stage right, trying to figure out a different configuration for the scene, a different way to have the actors move, so that they wouldn’t kill themselves or each other, while still making their entrances at Ryan’s specified places.

And all the time, I tried to keep from hearing Ryan’s quiet pronouncement: he had to go.

I should have been pleased. He was falling into line, helping the Mercer. He was sucking it up, meeting with the Popcorn King. How difficult could one little half-hour segment be, anyway? Ryan was being a man.

Ryan was being a man, but there was a part of me that wanted to chase after him, to beg him not to go, to plead with him to stay with me, to join me and the guerilla gardeners. But it was far too late for that.

I was halfway to the audience seats when the music started. R.E.M.’s Gardening at Night. For a second, I couldn’t figure out what I was hearing, then I realized it must be Ryan’s phone. He’d had it out, mimicking the Popcorn King. It must have gone flying when he’d tripped.

Michael Stipe reached the chorus as I rushed backstage, looking frantically for the device. I hadn’t seen it when I picked up the pots; it must have skittered underneath—there! The phone was vibrating on the floor, lodged against the ominous wall.

Mom, the Caller ID announced.

I flipped the phone open without thinking. “Dani, it’s me. Becca.”

“Thank God!” The connection sounded like it was coming from Mars. “I didn’t think anyone was going to pick up.”

“Where are you? It sounds like you’re in a cave.”

“Close enough,” her voice echoed. “I’m at the police station. Is Ryan there?”

“No.” I looked around in exasperation, as if I somehow expected him to reappear. “Why are you at the police station? Are you all right?”

“I’ve been arrested.”

“You what?” I tried to picture Dani sitting in a jail cell. I couldn’t reconcile the image of her Birkenstock sandals and her denim jumper behind bars. And yet, the Grays had been executing a raid….

“They’re charging us with felony vandalism.”

“Felony! What happened?”

“We got started early. The weather forecast said that the rain was going to start coming down hard after nine o’clock.”

I wanted to rush her through her weather report, but my mind was reeling. Dani had been arrested, and she was obviously trying to reach Ryan with her one call. He was impossible to get ahold of now; he must be deep in the heart of the Pantry Channel’s television studio. I was going to have to take care of this myself.

“Becca?”

I shook my head to clear it. “Yeah, I’m here. But I don’t understand. Why are they calling it a felony?”

“Lorraine Feingold was our mission commander tonight. That means she got to choose our target.”

“What did she choose?”

“We seed-bombed Temple Beth Torah.”

I shivered. Dani and the Grays were already skating on thin legal ice with their guerilla gardening. Half the members had received warnings in the past—Dani had shown me her own citation just a few weeks before. Even though I was afraid to know, I asked, “What happened?”

“We staged our attack from a little bodega, around the corner from the synagogue. Each of us brought our own grenades. We planned on carpet-bombing the side yard. We wanted to see it full of wildflowers by summer. There isn’t anything but mud there now, and the children play outside on breaks from their classes.”

Even though she couldn’t see me, I nodded. I could imagine what had happened. The Grays had thrown their clods of dirt at the synagogue. A passing patrolman had witnessed the bombing. Or the bodega owner had reported them as suspicious characters. Or someone inside the synagogue had called in the attack.

Vandalism plus a hate crime. On top of the numerous warnings individuals had received, all spring long. The police would throw the book at them.

Dani’s brave report was winding down, and I heard a quaver in her words. “They’re keeping us here tonight, Becca. They say we’ll be arraigned tomorrow. But if the judge decides we’re a threat, he won’t let us go. He’ll hold us without bond!”

I wanted to reassure her, but I wasn’t certain that I could. After all, actual hate crimes were serious things. And the Gray Guerillas had broken some laws. And they’d been warned before. Dani’s own blog had listed tips for evading the police.

I’d watched enough Law and Order to predict what would happen. Some promising young district attorney would make a name for himself, prosecuting the Grays in the highly political, symbolic, never-ending battle for safe city streets.

“Okay, Dani,” I said, trying to make my voice reassuring. “Let me make a couple of phone calls. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Becca, be careful when you go home tonight. They say they’re going to raid our homes. They’re going to collect evidence, find our ‘implements of destruction.’”

My blood froze. I knew what it was like to have the police go through my home. I knew what it was like to be locked out of everything I knew, kept away from everything I owned, from everything that mattered to me.

There was no reason to think that the cops would cross the hall into my apartment. But they’d commandeer Dani’s place. And Ryan’s.

Ryan would be as powerless to protect his possessions as I had been.

I thought about the compost container in Dani’s kitchen, the delicate ecological balance that she had nurtured for years. I pictured the purple grow-lights, suspended over the workbench, the collection of buckets, the peat cups and seeds and all the other gardening supplies.