In Broken Places (30 page)

She placed a hand on my arm in a gesture calculated to be comforting. “These are sad times,” she said quietly. “Losing a mother is one of the hardest blows life deals us.”

I wanted to laugh. I really did. But unexpected tears somehow shoved their way past my strained sense of humor. Trey saw them and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, walking me from the shadowed quietness into the pastel bustle of grief.

THE FADED COLORS
of Lewis’s living room and the austere grandeur of the professors’ dining hall had replaced the blank, bare stage. We’d even constructed a backstage area and wings by hanging temporary curtains from the beams high above and propping up makeshift walls with two-by-fours and bricks. The transformation had sublimated the performances of the students as they were carried by the sets and props to a time and context none of them had known. The only unfinished item was the wardrobe, the centerpiece of the set, critical to the story, which Scott was in the process of assembling onstage. He’d recruited the help of some of his basketball players for the job, but it still was proving to be a frustrating, unwieldy task. The pieces weren’t coming together as planned, and after two hours of effort that should have taken only minutes, with ten cast members waiting to take possession of
the stage for a critical rehearsal, things didn’t seem anywhere near a resolution. I approached him to ask when he thought he might be finished, but his only answer was a scowl followed by “I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”

So I retreated to my front-row seat and tried not to let his shortness get the best of me. Meagan and I spent the wait going over a laundry list of small details needing attention, while the cast occupied their time in various forms of stress release and Shayla wandered around the stage in tight circles engrossed in a loud and seemingly endless version of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Seth paced back and forth across the back of the room, practicing his final monologue at breakneck speed. Two other guys made ape sounds and flounced around in the balcony in a semblance of jungle warfare. And several others were involved in an animated discussion about the social and cultural importance of Paris Hilton. Jessica thought it was commendable that she’d made such a name for herself when all she’d been before was a pretty girl with a pedigree, while two of my more outspoken male actors compared the hotel heiress to a hollow-headed manipulator masquerading as a trashy debutante. It was an entertaining conversation, to say the least. As their voices blended with the ape noises coming down from above, the murmured lines at the back of the auditorium, Shayla’s singing, and Meagan’s incessant commentary on the goings-on around us, I wondered if I might have somehow gotten trapped inside the psychedelic chaos of Ozzy Osbourne’s mind.

“Hold that side higher, Kenny,” Scott instructed in a tight voice, lightly hammering his side of the structure so it would line up with the set wall next to it. Kenny strained to lift the bulky frame a little higher off the ground, and in doing so, raised it so high that he pushed Scott’s side off-kilter.

“No, Kenny!” he said in exasperation, wiping sweat from his
forehead with his sleeve. I heard him mutter something under his breath as he slammed down the hammer and used brute strength to force the heavy wood back into place.

Thomas and Kate chose that moment to step onstage and begin a sort of demented parody of the play, their voices raised in a comical British cacophony of ridiculous dialogue. On the other side of the stage, a Korean stagehand named Simon nearly stepped off the edge as he tried to maneuver a large, framed painting around the professors’ grand table. Meagan jumped into action, screaming his name as she rushed over to catch him if he were to fall.

The noise and confusion were increasing exponentially, and as I found out too late, so was the frustration of the amateur carpenter onstage. He managed to control himself right up until the moment when Simon, who was still trying to position the frame, rammed the end of it into the wardrobe door. Kate screamed in mock horror at the gouge in the wood, which attracted the attention of the rest of the students in the room. The apes in the balcony started yelling down at Simon, giving him a hard time, and Simon started yelling back that actors were an ungrateful bunch of egotists. It was all in good fun, of course, and I was chuckling in the front row when Scott stopped what he was doing and rounded on the students with so much impatience that it scared me.

“Hey! Would you all mind keeping it down?” he yelled, hands on hips and anger like shrapnel in his voice. “Kenny can’t hear a word I’m saying and he’s only two feet away! Just . . . chill out!”

And he turned back to work with a stiffness I’d never seen in him before, ordering Kenny to put more pressure on the base of the wardrobe structure.

Standing in the middle of the stage in her favorite purple corduroys and matching flowered shirt, Shayla was dumbstruck. Her bottom lip came out, her chin started to tremble, and she looked at
me as if willing me to leap onto the stage and whisk her away from the man she’d never heard yell before. I felt the same way she did.

Behind her, Scott had stopped working and was kneeling there, hammer in hand, doing nothing. Kenny still held his half of the wardrobe and seemed rather unfazed by what had just happened. Then again, he’d probably witnessed similar displays on the basketball court. So when he saw Shayla’s face, he let go of the wardrobe without hesitation and went to her before I’d had time to rise from my chair.

“Hey, Lady Shay,” he said, crouching down beside her, “whatsa matter?”

She didn’t say anything. She just turned her head toward Scott as her chin started to quiver in earnest.

“What—him?” Kenny said in a nonchalant voice, pointing over his shoulder. “He’s just ticked off ’cause he can’t get his wardrobe to work.”

“He yelled at me,” Shayla said in such an unsteady voice that someone at the back of the room giggled. That seemed to release the tension enough that others started to talk. The crisis had passed. But not onstage. Scott straightened and walked over to where Shayla stood. She watched him come with a frown so thunderous that it would have been comical under different circumstances. Kenny squeezed her arm and moved aside.

Scott took a moment to look down at her, considering the expression on her face and probably assessing the risk. Then he sat down cross-legged in front of her, looked directly and sincerely into her eyes, and said, “I messed up, didn’t I?”

She took a shaky breath and said, “You yelled at me.”

“You’re right, Lady Shay. I shouldn’t have.”

“You sca-yod me.” She gave a little hiccup and swallowed hard.

“I didn’t mean to scare you—”

“You should say sowwy.”

Scott raked his fingers through his hair. “I am sorry, Shay. I wasn’t mad at you. I promise I wasn’t. But I was mad at that wardrobe because I can’t get it to work right.” He took her hand and kissed her fingers. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

She seemed to consider that for a moment, then propped her fists on her little hips and said, “Don’t do it again.”

Scott smiled, though I could still see tension in the lines of his face. “I’ll try not to.” He tweaked her nose. “Forgive me?”

She hesitated, playing a little hard to get as all good girls do, but then she nodded and Scott scooped her up and sat her down in the crook of his crossed legs. She leaned back against him while he whispered something in her ear that made her giggle. They sat like that for a while, and I looked on from the first row of the audience, blinking hard.

I’d learned three things in the simplicity and spontaneity of an impatient moment. One, Scott was human—which was a great relief to me, because I’d started to think I was the only one with monumental flaws like bouts of verbal diarrhea, a tendency to cry at Hallmark commercials, and an occasionally runny nose. Two, anger didn’t always harm, at least not long-term. He’d lost it, he’d realized it, he’d fixed it. Period—pass the donuts. And three, I could think of no more beautiful, heart-stirring sight than my daughter wrapped in the arms of a man who loved her and whose tenderness toward her was stronger than his anger.

As opening night drew closer, the days grew longer. I woke up with a to-do list screaming in my brain, and I went to bed dejected at how little I’d actually accomplished. And in between? In between,
I tried to wrangle ten actors hyped up on adrenaline into some semblance of performance, I taught English classes that were sadly ill-prepared, I spent hours with Shayla learning the German words for shapes, colors, and animals, as her teacher had encouraged me to do, and I reveled in the luxury and mystery of being pursued.

My educated and researched view on being pursued was this: good stuff—even though my brain still told me to be careful, to expect disappointment, and to enjoy Scott while I could, because all good things invariably came to a bitter, painful end. So each moment with Scott hummed with the delicate tension of absorbing the wonderfulness and bracing for the horribleness. I found that our times together galvanized me and elevated my emotions to a level of optimism they’d seldom reached before. But I knew that the second I was alone at home again, I’d relentlessly relive the moments in my mind and sift through the happiness in search of something wrong. He hadn’t decided to dislike me yet. But a ghostly voice told me that if I gave him more time, he eventually would.

To be honest, my expectations for being pursued were slightly skewed, for which I blamed Keith Jacobs, my almost-date to my college formal. He’d made pursuit into a competition sport in which I’d said no in every way I could and he’d ignored me. I’d rather have played croquet. Keith had been the Arnold Schwarzenegger of pursuit, blending the subtlety of Conan the Barbarian with the romance of the Terminator. He’d attempted to woo me with a kind of rabid sense of purpose that had bordered on maniacal, and I’d spent my last semester of college developing running skills I neither wanted nor enjoyed.

But Scott was different—in every important way. He wasn’t out to convince me of anything. Nor was he attempting to seduce my hormones into overtaking my brain. He was simply there, coming in and out of my life during the day with casual touches
and healing smiles, helping when he could, and always willing. We laughed together, we took walks together, and we even prayed together, which was teaching me more about his nature and about my own faith than any amount of conversation might have done.

On Monday nights Shayla and I headed to the gym, where I watched BFA’s male staff members trying to prove they were still fit by engaging in merciless games of geezer-ball. It had all the trappings of basketball, but apparently none of the rules. We usually played in the bleachers until an injury on the court forced me into my unofficial paramedic role. I found the geezer-ball tradition dangerous and pointless, but who was I to interfere with Scott’s need to be macho once a week?

Shayla had caught some of his excitement for the sport. He had taught her how to dribble a basketball, and she now walked around the apartment yelling “swoosh” at random moments, which, I decided, was one of the greater downsides of being pursued by a sports enthusiast. The other was that he was determined to coax me toward at least an appreciation of football, which meant spending hours on his couch with his laptop on a tray table in front of us, watching the Chicago Bears getting beaten by other teams.

It would have been excruciating except for the sitting-on-the-couch part. That much I liked. So I pretended to be horrified when the quarterback dropped the ball and used my horrification to snuggle a little closer to the man whose strength and character made me proud and who seemed adept at only this one form of multitasking. He could watch a game and hold me, which was a pretty cool trick indeed.

“I’m getting shoulder pads,” I said on one occasion, when Shayla was sleeping in the armchair next to the window and Scott and I were in our usual places on the couch watching the Bears getting trounced again.

“Yeah?” He was only half with me. I’d discovered that the rise in testosterone caused by football had a direct relation to hearing loss. Go figure.

So I tried it again. I nuzzled his neck a little—because I was allowed to do that now that we were pursuing and all—and said in as husky a voice as I could muster, “Scott? I’m getting shoulder pads.”

I had his attention. And his confusion. “Planning on taking up football?”

“No, but look at those guys!” I was back to my own voice as I motioned toward the TV. “Their shoulder pads make their butts look tiny.”

“My girlfriend the athlete.”

“Your girlfriend the bored nonathlete who sits on the couch and watches games with you because she knows it makes you happy. Your girlfriend who has, however, been sitting on this couch too long tonight because her daughter is asleep in your armchair and should really be home in bed. Your girlfriend who still thinks it’s a little bit weird for adults in their midthirties to be using the term
girlfriend
when really this is just a game of if-you-pursue-me-I’ll-put-up-with-your-blasted-football-game.”

“You through?”

I thought about it. “Yup.”

“Good. For an English teacher, you sure use a lot of run-on sentences.”

“For a phys ed teacher, you sure do a lot of sitting on the couch.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Should we break up?”

“Sure—I have to go home anyway. Can we make up in the morning?”

“Sounds like a plan.” He got up and slipped into his coat. “I’ll carry Shay out to the car.”