“You really don’t remember?”
“No.”
“This is heavy.”
“Did I—”
“Marvellini offered you a job as his stage assistant and you took it, right there on the spot. We thought it was kind of a lame move, I mean, you were dropping out of college to go on the road with a nickel-and-dime magic act, but … we could see the little sparks between you and Dane and you know, he was one hunk of a guy. He was only nineteen, no older than we were, but he was cute, real cute!
“Anyway, you were Marvellini’s stage assistant until he retired—or quit, just depends on which story you believe. He handed the whole show over to Dane and you, and by then you two were inseparable, so you got married”—she threw in a pause to let that sink in—“on June 19, 1971 … and you started up your act and you called it Dane and Mandy, and the rest is history.”
Dane and Mandy. She remembered seeing, touching those names on all those crates in Dane’s barn. All the dreams, all the years, all in the past. “I know Dane Collins!”
Joanie looked at her quizzically. “You know him? You mean, now?”
Mandy nodded.
“And how did this happen?”
“I worked for him! He coached me!”
“When? I thought you never met him.”
“I did, but not back then!” Mandy tried to explain how the Gypsy Girl and then the Hobett met up with Dane Collins and became his protégée and worked on his place and learned how to put on a show, and how he never talked about his wife unless she asked him and didn’t have any pictures of her in the house and how she just had to be around him and how she didn’t know why she had to try on Mandy’s costumes and dresses, she just had to, and by the time she got to that part she was in tears. She didn’t say anything about their parting; she just couldn’t.
Joanie dabbed her eyes with a napkin. “And let me guess: you’re in love with him.”
That was a question Mandy feared more than anything. She deflected it. “What did my dad think?”
“About?”
“About Dane and me …”
Joanie smiled. “He gave you away at the wedding. You know how the minister asks, ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ Your dad said, ‘Her mother and I do,’ and he put your hand into Dane’s and just held it there for a while. He liked Dane. He told me, and I heard him say to other people, too, ‘Eloise would have liked him.’ I don’t think he was ever worried about you.” She laughed at another memory. “He helped you fix up the first house you rented, the one near Seattle. It was a rebuilt chicken coop. It didn’t have any insulation and the water came from a spring up the hill.” She shook her head at the memory. “I came by to see it once. Holy cow!”
“But we were happy?”
“It was like that line from Fiddler on the Roof,‘They’re so happy they don’t know how miserable they are.’ You had all your money in that old moving van with your show gear in it, and, I tell you, you ran the wheels off that thing. You’d come through Spokane and Coeur d’Alene about twice a year, and every time your show was better. I knew you were going to outgrow the little county fairs and high school assemblies and I guess you did.” Joanie found her a box of tissues, and Mandy pulled out several. “Come on, let’s go on the Internet.”
They went into the den where heads of deer, elk, and one bull moose stared into space from the walls. Joanie had a computer sitting on a desk in the corner. She placed a chair beside her own for Mandy, flipped open her Mac, and showed Mandy the steps to get online.
“Now you just type ‘Dane and Mandy’ into the search box up here …”
What came up was more than Mandy would be able to read in that one visit, but Joanie’s mission for the moment was to find picture after picture of Mandy through the years, and the earliest ones … well, they were pictures of the Girl in the Mirror. Joanie hit the print command, and the printer zip-zip-zipped out hard copies.
“And let’s see, if we go to the Social Security death index … and enter Arthur Whitacre …”
Daddy’s name came up in the little boxes on the screen along with his Social Security number and the date of his death, March 12, 1992.
Tap tap. Zip-zip-zip.
“Can you bear to see more?”
By now Mandy felt numb, unable to fight or fathom it. She could only receive it, store it, let it season. “Please.”
Joanie did a little more searching and brought up an obituary from the Coeur d’Alene Press.There was a photograph of Daddy, so much older than she remembered him. Joanie scrolled down to the part that read, “He is survived by his daughter, Mandy Eloise Collins …”
“That’s you,” said Joanie. “Do the arithmetic and you were … forty-one when he died. And I remember you inherited the Wooly Acres Ranch, but there hadn’t been any cattle or horses or llamas on the place for quite a while. Your dad got so he couldn’t keep up with all that.” Tap tap. Zip-zip-zip. “How’re you doing? You okay?”
What could Mandy say? It was more than she could contain, and it all rang true. “What … what became of the ranch?”
“Uh, all I know is, you eventually sold it to a developer and now it’s stores and parking lots.”
Oh, that stung. How could I?
“You okay?”
Mandy couldn’t say yes—she couldn’t say anything—but she couldn’t stop, either. She wordlessly asked for Joanie to go on.
“Okay then. Here’s where the story ends. Here’s the part I have to be honest about, just put it in front of you and hope you figure it out. I’ve been to this site plenty of times, printing out copies.” She entered Mandy Collins, got a list of results, and scrolled directly to the one she wanted. It was a news story from the Las Vegas Sun:
FIERY WRECK KILLS MAGICIAN
Mandy Eloise Collins, best known as the witty and offbeat wife and partner of Dane Collins in the magical duo Dane and Mandy, was killed yesterday and her husband, Dane, injured when the Collins’s car was sidestruck by another motorist, also killed in the crash. Dane Collins, riding in the passenger seat, escaped and was subsequently injured trying to rescue his wife from the burning vehicle …
Joanie printed a hard copy so Mandy could take all the time she needed to read it. “It’s hard enough trying to explain how you weren’t at the fair when you were, and you didn’t see Marvellini when you did, and you didn’t meet Dane when you did and you even married him. Now we have to explain how you can be sitting here right now when you’re dead.”
Mandy’s head was spinning. When she met Dane he was a widower still mourning his wife, and now she was his wife? Were there two Mandys? Had one of the other Mandys she’d seen or become or even been, met Dane in 1970 while she, the Mandy sitting here, was wandering around the fairgrounds in a hospital gown …
Hospital gown.
She read more of the article and let out a gasp, then an audible whimper when she saw where Mandy Eloise Collins had died: “… rushed to the Clark County Medical Center, where she died of extensive burn injuries …”
Clark County Medical Center. She’d just recently visited those hallways, rooms, names, and faces she knew as if she’d been there a thousand times. Dr. Kessler knew her, too, that was plain to see.
“Mandy?” Joanie asked. “What is it?”
She scanned the copy looking for the date. “When did I die in the hospital? Is there a date anywhere?”
She found it at the top.
September 17, 2010.
She put her head down between her knees. Joanie ran for a glass of water.
She died in the Clark County Medical Center and awoke in a hospital gown at the Spokane County Fair on the same day.
chapter
44
Dane sometimes wondered if Parmenter would have been happier hiring a Pony Express rider to carry their messages back and forth. Four days—four days!—after their last phone conversation, Dane got another letter by U.S. Mail and made another call from a pay phone in Athol, Idaho, this time wearing a raincoat and a billed cap and feeling overtly melodramatic.