“Let’s try it,” Leo said.
Inside we found two mirrors with lightbulbs around them, five chairs, a garbage can, a fan, and a tiny fridge. I opened it up and found bottles of festival water, a moldy orange, and a candy bar. A few lipsticks and a comb and a bottle of makeup remover had been left on the tables. The chairs looked newish, like office chairs from Kmart or something. But the mirrors looked old. I leaned in, wondering who I might see.
Only me. And Leo.
“They probably use this for some of the fast changes,” Leo said. “Since the other dressing rooms are back down the tunnel near the costume shop.”
“I’m sure Lisette came in here,” I said.
“Yeah.”
Leo shone his flashlight on all the corners of the room. Spiderwebs. Cracks in the wall. A bobby pin, the shiny silver lid to a tube of lipstick. The empty room felt thick with memories, but none of them were ours. We could imagine, but we couldn’t know.
Leo and I went back out into the larger space under the theater and I shone my flashlight on the ladder in the middle and the sign hanging near it.
TRAPDOOR.
“Let’s go up,” I said to Leo. “You first.”
The ladder was made of black wood with white tape on the rungs that caught the light so you knew where your next step should be. I heard Leo push on the door at the top, and it swung open to more black. I held on to my flashlight with one hand and started to climb.
Leo was waiting for me at the top. We came out onto the stage in the dark. Without saying anything, we both switched off our lights.
Rows and rows of seats in front of us.
They could be full, they could be empty. It was too dark to see.
“The actors say that when you’re onstage, the lights make it too bright to see the audience,” Leo said.
So this was like that, only dark instead of light.
The breeze still smelled like last night’s rain. It came in through the open roof of the theater and stirred the dark leaves behind us, the ones from the forest of Arden.
Lisette would have stood right here. It was where she stood for The Tempest. What did she see, if anything, in the audience that night? What did she see in Roger Marin’s eyes?
“So about the ring,” Leo said.
“I found it in the costume shop,” I said. “In the box that had part of Lisette’s costume for the display.”
“And you asked Meg about it?”
I wanted to tell Leo the truth. “Yeah,” I said, “but first I stole it.”
“You stole it?”
“I took it,” I said, “and I put it on my windowsill.”
“Why?”
“Someone had been leaving things there for me all summer,” I said. “Not every night. Every couple of weeks or so. For a while I thought it was you. But it wasn’t. Anyway, that’s why I took the ring. I put it on the windowsill for whoever was leaving stuff.”
“Did you think it might be Lisette?” Leo asked.
“Sort of,” I said. I didn’t want to explain that I wanted it to be Ben. Not even to Leo.
“Did anyone come?”
What if she had come? Lisette, slipping up to my window in her Miranda dress, her eyes bright?
What if Ben had come, quiet, smiling, with his hair sticking up in back and his favorite blue shirt, worn soft with wear? Would I have reached out to try and touch him, or would I have been grateful just to see him?
“Yes,” I said. My voice didn’t work. I tried again. “Yes. Miles. He was the one leaving things.”
“That was nice of him,” Leo said.
“Yeah,” I said. “He told me I had to return the ring. So I did.”
“Was Meg mad?”
“A little,” I said. “But she let us come out here.”
“We should probably go back,” Leo said.
“I know.”
Neither of us moved.
What if we think we’re alone, I thought, but we’re not, and there are creatures all, all around us, watching? Ghosts in the audience? Birds high in trees?
I turned on my flashlight. Leo did the same. “You go first,” I said, swinging my light toward the trapdoor. When he opened it up, some of the light below seeped onto the stage. He went down. I watched the top of his head. “One second,” I called to him, “I’ll be right there,” and I shut the trapdoor and flicked off my light.
I stood there all alone onstage in the dark. I closed my eyes.
“Dad,” I said. “Ben.”
I flicked my light back on but I didn’t shine it over the seats to see who might be there. I said their names. I left the stage.
9.
Leo and I went back and found Meg in the Costume Hall. “I decided I’d do this one tonight,” she said. I looked into the case and saw Lisette’s costume from The Tempest. The mannequin already wore the dress and the jacket. Meg smoothed down the cuff, her hand lingering on the blue-gray velvet.
“You’re three minutes late,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”