08 Illusion (31 page)

But many had heard about it, some had brought friends they’d told about it, they would have been disappointed, so Mr. Computer got the illusion and plenty of numbers and undulating patterns to watch and now Dane was kicking himself. He should have warned Eloise, given her more complete coaching: yes, of course the show is for the audience, it’s about them, but not to the point of endangering yourself. Whatever it is you’re doing up there, the risk has to be strictly illusory. You never take chances!

Dane’s first priority had been to corner that guy immediately after the show, but Eloise’s nasty fall preempted that. Now she was safe and stable—and the man’s table was empty. Dane weaved and jostled through the crowd to the front door and pushed through to the sidewalk, looking up and down the street.

Of course, the man was gone.

“Aren’t you acting a little … young?” Eloise wanted to know.

Seamus was trying to keep his voice down, but a temper was showing. “You just about killed yourself out there.”

She brought her head forward and checked the bloodied napkin. “I’m abundantly aware of that.”

“And this”—he indicated her appearance—“was this another idea of his, this … what is this, your new look?”

“Seamus, you helped pay for it. And I like it. I like being myself.” It dawned on her and she stared at him. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

He rolled his eyes. “Have you noticed any pictures of his wife around the house?”

“No.”

“Does he ever talk about her?”

“Seamus, aren’t you the one who laid down all the rules about he and I not getting into personal matters?”

He came in close, finger pointed. “This could get personal if—”

“If what?”

“If—pardon me—if he happens to be a lonely old widower who enjoys the company of a pretty young girl.”

“Woman.”

That stopped him short. “Now, I find that interesting.”

“Seamus. I’m going to tell you this one last time, and I’d like it to be a matter of record between us: if anything, Dane Collins is like a father figure to me. That’s my own view of it, I haven’t given him any indication that I feel that way, but I’m not ashamed of it.” She kept looking him in the eye. She surprised herself.

“So noted.” He looked away as if reading labels on the coffee bags, then deflated a little as he let out a sigh. “By way of explanation, I guess I’ve gotten a little attached to you.”

She applied a fresh napkin to her nose. “Well, I’m flattered.”

Which was all she wanted to say about that.

chapter

27

I
t snowed on Monday morning, so Eloise left for the ranch early. The little Bug made it to the gate and up the long driveway with time to spare—time to tap on the door—“Come in!”—go into the kitchen without taking off her coat and ask just to know for sure, “Is everything okay?”

Mr. Collins was just finishing his oat flakes and toast, and looked at her over his last sip of coffee. “I would say so, especially now,” he said. “How are you?”

“I just …” Groping for words again. One of these days, she deeply hoped, she’d be able to tell him everything.

“Your face looks like you lost a fight,” he said. “How’s the rest of you?”

“Sore.” She’d spent Saturday and Sunday trying to find a comfortable way to lie down while waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. “I had to cancel the rest of the weekend.”

“I figured as much. Have a seat. Want some coffee?”

“Oh, no, thanks. Shirley wants to check me out on the tractor so I can plow the driveway. I just wanted to make sure … you know …”

“This’ll be on company time.” He gestured at the chair across the table from him, and she plopped into it with her coat still on. “You’re still troubled over Friday night.”

“Way troubled. It was a disaster.”

He put up his hand. “No, no, now don’t say that. The ending could have used a little work”—he winked at her—“but overall you pushed on through and made the best of it. I couldn’t have asked for more under the circumstances.”

A sack of bricks lifted from her shoulders and she let herself smile. “I’m so glad to hear that.”

He smiled back. “I’d just like to know, what were the circumstances?”

“What do you mean?”

He set down his coffee cup with a firm motion that sent the same message she could read in his eyes. Daddy used to do the same thing. “You know better than that.”

Her eyes dropped. It would be quite a list if she told him all about the tea-stained soup of hallucinations that messed up her show and got her hurt, the miserable night she spent in her apartment going over and over what happened and wondering if she’d gotten mixed up in the occult or a permanent drug trip or was being tormented by aliens or was just plain nuts and bound for worse and never better. That would be just the thing to tell him when all she could conclude during the last two miserable days was that she wanted to be here in this safe, real place more than anywhere else in the world.

She met his eyes. How much of the man she imagined—well, yeah,
dreamed
—him to be was he really?

He was waiting.

She could try a small step—as if a small step off a cliff wouldn’t hurt as much as a big one.
Well … Geronimo!
“It’s … I guess it’s my mental difficulties.”

“Don’t be afraid. Just tell me.”

“I was having flashbacks of the hospital.”

He crinkled his brow. “The hospital …”

Had he forgotten? “Yeah, the hospital, you know, where they thought I was crazy and had me locked up and then sent those guys after me.”

He cleared up and nodded. “Right.
That
hospital.”

“It was like being in McCaffee’s and the hospital at the same time, stumbling around trying to figure out where I was and I couldn’t control it. I could see the hallways and the doctors and … and a really weird room.”

He was about to take a bite from his toast but set it down.

“It was dark, and there were lights and control panels like the inside of a spaceship, real sci-fi-looking. And then there was this big, empty room like a basement and two guys …” This was going to sound so weird! “And they were burning dead monkeys.”

He raised an eyebrow and his face was one big
Huh?

“I know it sounds crazy. That’s because it is.”

“Describe it to me.”

Why? “Well, they had a black plastic bag full of dead monkeys and they were throwing them into a big furnace to burn them up.” And she didn’t want to go any further.

He seemed to be envisioning it. “Well. Those were quite the circumstances.”

“So I think … I think I need a breather—not from magic altogether, just from the weird stuff. I think it would be great—if I could, I mean—just to work here, just do whatever you need to have done and rest my brain, and then you could help me learn things that are, you know, from this planet, stuff I can get my hands on and work with and be … be here and not way out there.” Was he sold yet? “I’d work for free and you wouldn’t even have to train me.”

He tried that on for a second, then gave his hands a little toss. “Well. Okay. So what do the Calhouns say? How soon do they want you back?”

“As soon as I heal, I guess.”

“And you need to rest your brain.”

“I sure do.”

“Well, we could just make you an apprentice. I want to finish cleaning out the barn so we can move stuff out of the shop. Then we can make room in there for a working stage and develop a stand-up show featuring you. If you can show up every day—what would you like, a four- or a five-day week?”

She was trying to keep her emotions steady as she worked up an answer. “Umm … five, if we can work around my magic gigs.”

“Got a few?”

“Some birthday parties. I can show you my calendar.”

“We’ll work around your gigs. Always. You need to be out there.”

“Right, right.”

“Five days a week, and working around your magic gigs, which includes McCaffee’s when you’re ready?”

She was getting wide-eyed, nodding as her heart raced.

“I’ll get you on the payroll as an employee. You’ll earn an hourly wage while we put a show together and see if we can make it fly—uh, when your brain’s ready. Sound good so far?”

It sounded so good she was afraid it might not happen. “I want to work. I want to work and get my mind together, get my life together, get in charge of things …”

“Instead of things being in charge of you.”

Who
was
this guy? “Absolutely.”

“I’m all for that. All right. Why don’t you help me clean up the dishes here and then we’ll go unearth some history.”

The crates, trunks, and travel cases, all the imagined, designed, and painstakingly built props and illusions that brought thrill and sparkle to the Dane and Mandy stage for forty years, now rested in a great, squarish heap in the middle of the barn. To the farthest reaches of Dane’s knowledge, the stage lights blackened and the final curtain fell on Dane and Mandy when the last corner of the tarp was tucked in and the last knot in the rope was tied. He never imagined he would return, never thought he would look back, could not have dreamed that he would be standing before this monument with young Eloise. What an image: the finish and the start in the same moment gazing up at the span of time between them.

“Wow,” she said.

Yes. Wow.
“Let’s see if we can get this rope undone.” He worked on one side, she worked on the other. The knots could be stubborn. He worked one loose. “How you doing?”

“I think I got it,” came her voice.

The rope went slack. He pulled it over to his side and let it fall. “Okay, come around and let’s ease this tarp off.”

They gently, even reverently, drew the tarp over and down, letting it gather in crackling folds at their feet, and then he gave her time to take it all in: the ruggedly built travel cases with steel edges and corners, the plywood crates nicked and scraped from years of touring, the solid wood trunks with their metal latches and hinges.

And stenciled on the side of every one of them were the words
DANE AND MANDY, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, USA.

Her eyes rested on the words. He remained silent, pretending to look things over and tuck away the tarp as he watched.

She lingered, her mouth open, then faintly smiling in amazement as she tilted, then wagged her head. “Her name was Mandy?”

“That’s right.”

She gazed at the name as if gazing into a face and then, reaching as a child reaches for her parent, she placed her hands flat upon either side of the name and framed it. “Whoa!”

“Forty years.”

“That is just so cool.” She studied the name as if reading it for the first time. “You know, I really like her.”

He was thinking of Mandy and looking at Eloise as he said, “So did I.”

She withdrew her hands and her eyes searched out every appearance of that name on every container, her eyes arcing over the stack as if she were in awe of a rainbow.

This would be enough. He could feel his soul, his insides warning him to move on. “I guess we’d better …”

She snapped out of it. “Oh, absolutely, yes. Didn’t mean to … It’s personal, I understand.”

“No problem.” He had to do a little acting, had to push them onward. “Now what I want to do is re-create a stage such as you would find in a small to medium venue, something with more geography. I’d like to build it in the shop and use some of this stuff to create a setting, just give you some things to work around, handle, bump into, use if it fits your style. Going from close-up to stage means everything has to be bigger, wider. Here’s a Zigzag. You know what that is?”

“The optical illusion. The lady stands in the box and then it looks like you remove the middle part of her.”

“Right. I … I don’t see you doing this as part of your act, but working with some larger props might be a good exercise to help you think in bigger, wider concepts.”

“I’d love the experience.”

“Here’s a sub trunk—uh, substitution trunk.”

“Metamorphosis!”

“Okay, you’ve seen this one.”

“The magician’s assistant gets tied inside a bag and locked inside the trunk. The magician raises a shroud around the trunk and then bammo! The magician trades places with her, just like that.”

“It uses a lot of basic principles: timing, misdirection, creating an expectation, and then defying it—and just plain physical ability. We could try that out to hone the basics. It’s easy in principle, not so easy to perform convincingly. Once again …”

“The magic is in the magician.”

“You get an A.” Now he had to laugh. “And this one … this is our old levitation. It’s a dinosaur. There are so many better designs out there now—which I guess you’re aware of.”

“I guess.”

“Mandy and I worked it into a gag routine and put a whole new life into it. That’s another lesson right there: even an old trick that everybody’s seen before can be fresh if you give it a little twist—which brings us to another little idea of mine. Considering how good you are with tennis balls and quarters, this might be just the thing.”

Just the thing?
This was more than “just the thing,” this was a God thing, a reunion, an awakening of an old happiness she remembered but hadn’t thought was hers. She muffled a squeal behind her hand, laughed through her tears, and gave Mr. Collins a hug.

Four little pairs of dark eyes looked warily at her through the wire cage; four heads bobbed as the snowy white birds ruffled and sidestepped on their perch, checking her out. Newbies, she could tell. Everything was unfamiliar to them.

“I remember you told me you raised doves,” said Mr. Collins. “Well, I just got these in and they’re going to need taming and training. I thought you might be interested.”

She leaned close to the cage and the timid faces just inside the wire. She cooed at them, spoke gently, and they watched her, not afraid but not so sure either. They were four little angels, a visitation from that beloved dream—the return, in their own way, of her first loss.