I’m at just that angle where I’m not sure if I should be addressing her reflection in the mirror or looking at her directly. I go with the reflection. “I dreamt of Emilio and Rachel and the boys. I couldn’t save any of them. You were in my dream too. You tried to save me.”
“Did I succeed?”
“I woke up before anyone could be saved.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “It was just a dream.”
“Yeah.” The moment brings an awkwardness that I don’t like. “How about you? How’d you sleep?”
She brushes her hair quietly for another moment, and when she replies she doesn’t address my question, but I can read an answer beneath her words. “I’m going to miss him, Jev. Emilio, I mean.”
“Me too.”
Then we’re both silent, and time goes on until at last she gestures toward my arm. “How is that this morning?”
“Still stings, but it’s getting better.”
“And your leg?”
“How did you know I hurt my leg?”
“You were limping yesterday. You were trying to hide it, but I could tell.”
“I must say, you are an astute woman, Charlene Antioch.”
“Well, I work with an illusionist. We’re experts at trafficking in deception. I need to be able to tell what’s real and what’s not.”
“Now, see, I prefer the word entertainment to deception. Karl Germain liked to say, ‘Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.’”
“Ah. Quoting the pioneers in your field now?”
“I need to rely on someone for credibility.” Getting back to her original question, I rub my bruised shin gently. “Anyway, yeah. I bruised it when I landed in the water at the base of the falls. Smacked into a boulder. But it’ll be okay. I’ve been knocked around a lot worse than this.”
“So then you’re going to be good for tonight? I mean, the straightjacket escape?”
“I think so.”
“You have to do more than think so, Jev. This effect is dangerous, you could—”
“I’ll be alright. I’m sure I’ll be alright.”
“Have you been practicing your breath-holding?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your time?”
A beat. “It’s sufficient.”
“We could have Seth do it.”
Seth Greene is my body double. When he’s got his makeup on and the lighting is right, you really can’t tell us apart. Well, truthfully, you could, if you were expecting to, but whenever he appears, it’s in a situation where everyone anticipates that it will be me. And so that’s what they see.
After all, people see what they expect to see. It’s one of the three things illusionists rely on to make their effects work — sleight of hand, misdirection, and audience expectation.
I’ve trained Seth to do some escapes, but he’s still learning, and I would never trust him to do the effect Xavier designed for me for tonight. I don’t tell Charlene that, I simply reiterate that I’ll be fine.
She sets her brush down and turns to me. Normally, she would have her cross necklace on, and the fact that it’s missing just reminds me again of Emilio’s death. “Did you think of me?”
“I’m sorry?”
“When you jumped off that cliff. Were you thinking of me — of us, I mean? Of how it would affect me if you drowned or landed on these boulders at the base of the falls?”
“I, well…” I want to tell her that I did, of course I did. After all, the last thing I would ever want to do is to hurt her in any way, but I sense that in this case the truth will hurt her feelings. However, in the end I go ahead, trusting that it would be better not to lie to her, so I just shake my head and tell her, “No. I was just thinking about stopping that guy. About catching him.”
“I see.”
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you, or that I…” I’m really not sure where to go with this. I almost say, “Or that I don’t love you,” but hold back at the last second for some reason I can’t put my finger on.
“I know you care about me.”
“Sometimes I just make snap decisions.”
She goes for her mascara and says softly and without any animus, “Yes. I know.”
I search for the right words. On the one hand I have the sense that I should apologize for not hesitating at the top of that cliff, but on the other hand I can’t understand how she would have expected me to be thinking about anything other than catching the guy who killed Emilio.
Besides, ever since I’ve known Charlene, I’ve been doing escapes that could have proven to be fatal.
She seems to be able to read my mind. “The more I think about us, the more I think about how hard it would be to go on without you.”
Still unsure what to say, I finally just tell her that I’ll see her downstairs, and as I head toward the kitchen, my thoughts circle around me like buzzards closing in on a corpse: She knows what you’re like, what you do for a living, so why did she bring this up now? Should you have chased Tomás at all or stayed with her and Emilio? If you were thinking about her feelings, would you have jumped off that cliff after all?
And honestly, I’m not really sure about the answers.
Flapjacks
As I round the corner to the kitchen I can hear Fionna: “That’s too many chocolate chips, Mr. Wray.”
“You need an even ratio of chocolate chips to pancake batter, right, kids?”
Mandie chirps in her five-year-old agreement.
“At least a one-to-one ratio,” Maddie agrees. “Minimum. Chip-wise, that is.”
Fionna lets out a motherly sigh.
I enter the kitchen and see that Xavier has a spatula and is leaning over the griddle. Fionna is brewing some coffee, and her two daughters are at the table watching Xav as he lifts one of his pancakes that’s dripping melted chocolate and much too large for a single spatula, and flips it spectacularly into the air before it lands, incredibly enough, in the pan.
However, it ends up splattering chocolaty pancake batter onto the countertop and across his faded gray T-shirt, which has a picture of an alien and the words “If found, return to Area 51.”
The girls love it. Fionna just shakes her head. “I’m not cleaning that up off the counter.”
“That’s okay, Jevin will. Hey, Jev.”
“Hey.” I greet Fionna and the girls, and they wish me good morning back.
Maddie, who turns ten next week, has a petite ponytail, studious glasses, and copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Silas Marner resting beside her plate, positioned just so next to her fork. She takes a moment to turn the syrup bottle so that it faces her directly, not angled forty-five degrees like it had been.
Mandie is sitting on a stool instead of a chair so she can reach the table easier. Her enormous stuffed dog, Furman, has his own chair beside her, his paws resting tranquilly on the table.
Keeping the girls’ names straight has always been a bit of a problem for me, so I finally came up with a way to remember who was who — Maddie was born first, Mandie second, and d comes before n in the alphabet, just like Maddie came before Mandie. It’s not much, but it usually does the trick.
“Okay,” Xavier says. “Who’s ready for a pancake?”
Mandie’s hand shoots into the air. “Me!”
He passes his stack of pancakes around the table. After the girls have loaded their plates, I help myself to some as well. I find some ibuprofen and ice, explain simply that I bruised my leg on a rock in the Philippines, and take a seat at the breakfast counter. Holding the ice against my leg with one hand and eating pancakes with the other isn’t easy, but I make do.