She reaches for a comb that she drags through her hair. A glance in the mirror shows a flushed face and smeared mascara. Hard to believe that mere days ago she was preparing bagged lunches each morning, composing nutritionally rich sandwiches that the twins would let fester at the bottom of their rucksacks, and doing her best to wedge practice time between catering jobs and phone calls from ticked-off vice-principals.
That life, her so-called real life, feels like a dream.
By the time Lucy reaches the kitchen, Trace is pouring boiling water into the teapot.
“I read his palm,” Lucy says.
“Whatever.”
The girl is embarrassed, maybe even disapproving.
Lucy begins scooping crumbs off the counter into her cupped hand; someone around here has to attend to domestic chores. “What do you make of me competing against people half my age?”
Trace looks up and says, “I think you’re brave.”
“Really?” This is just what Lucy needs to hear.
Twenty-Two
Potassium slows heartbeat. Eat one banana in the morning, then another an hour before walking onstage.
Beta blockers? Your heart will still thrum, but your hands can’t shake. The drug increases concentration, but it’s a fuzzy focus at the core, a sort of tunnel vision.
One more thing: never look directly at the judges. This is hard, because they will be looking intently at you, noting the way you move — points for presentation and artistic impression.
The four finalists have been invisible all day, confined to quarters. Tomorrow they will stride onstage for the last time, but now they have gathered for supper with their colleagues.
“Last year I was one hundred percent convinced I would win,” Javier says in elegantly accented English. “But taxi crashes into an autobus on the way to the performance, so I was late and in extreme rush. No good.” He shakes his head in sad remembrance.
You could draw a map of Argentina on his starched shirt cuffs. In Buenos Aires a maid takes care of laundry. Her name — he would be surprised by the question — is Adelita.
“So we all play Villa-Lobos?” Trace asks with an elaborate yawn. “Reckon I should glance at the music.” She hauls herself out of the chair while the espresso machine roars. “Anyone got a copy?”
Someone does and hands it to the girl who chews on a string of licorice as she reads through the score. Toby watches this performance. He isn’t fooled for a minute. She knows the piece backward and forward. They all do.
Lucy sits at the other end of the lounge engaged in ardent conversation with the other dismissed contestants. This is how the room has divided itself tonight. The ones left behind huddle in one corner, chatting, while in the other corner the select few who will head into the final heat stare at the floor and speak in nervous bursts. They are different breeds, though everyone tries to pretend that this is not so. It comes down to the rhythm of heartbeat, that elemental.
Only Marcus roams around the suite, a beer can tucked in his pocket and his hair sticking straight up.
Toby flexes his hands, fire hands that will burn through tomorrow’s program. Practising has gone well today; the vapourized section of Villa-Lobos returned just in time.
Someone has ordered in Chinese, and it arrives in cardboard cartons with tiny pillows of soy sauce. Trace snaps open a pair of wooden chopsticks, then another, and passes them around. For a moment the room falls silent as aluminum lids are pried off the containers, paper napkins unfolded.
Jasper would be horrified by the lurid General Tao’s chicken balls, slick with grease and sugar, but Toby dives in, sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back to the wall.
Trace drops beside him, her plate loaded with rice and vegetables and bony fish.
“No Chinese restaurants on my island,” she says. Her heart-shaped face slides into scalp, no boundary of hair, and the vein at her temple pulses with each chew. “No Chinese people, period, except the brothers who own the marina.” She peers at a frill of brown fungus before popping it in her mouth. “Back home one of my best friends is a quad. You heard of Guillain-Barré syndrome?”
Toby has not.
“Quite the horror. Now her arms and legs don’t work, so sometimes I feed her. One day she goes, ‘Trace, how come you’re avoiding the tomatoes?’ And it hit me that I was feeding her like I feed myself.”
Her small ears nestle close to her head, lobes implanted with tiny silver stars. “It’s not as easy as you think to feed someone,” she says, then plucks a piece of glistening chicken off his plate. “Let’s try.”
Toby pulls back, half laughing. “I don’t think so.”
Briskly, like a mother with a small child, she aims the chopsticks toward his mouth. All that’s missing is airplane noise.
He protests, “I’m not at that stage yet.”
Klaus fed Karen every day at the home. She’d sit at the table in her wheelchair, bib tucked under her chin while he’d cajole, “One more bite, liebchen,” tipping a spoon to her mouth.
“It’s an experiment in giving up control,” Trace says.
“I don’t want to give up control.”
“That’s just the point. Nobody wants to.”
He lets the wooden sticks slither between his lips, just this once. She watches as he chews, and after he’s swallowed, she prongs a flowerlet of broccoli and tips it into his mouth. When a kernel of rice lodges on his cheek, she brushes it off before he can get to it. This is what a mother does — no, this is what a lover does.
Suddenly, Toby can’t wait to get onstage. Momentum surges, a mighty storm brewing. Whatever he’s eating is ammo, is blood juice. He’s tasting himself.
“Enough?” Trace says, lowering the chopsticks. Her eyes are wide open.
“Listen up you buggers on the smart side of the room!” It’s Marcus, who stands on a chair holding a can of beer aloft. “We want you geniuses to know that it’s a hell of a lot more fun at our end. Seriously, we drink to your good fortune, but remember —” he tilts the can to his mouth and says “— you’re playing for all of us.”
There’s a distinct pong of “boy” in Marcus’s dorm room — so reminiscent of the twins’ lair at home. Lucy crouches on the carpet and tucks her legs into a half-lotus, a position she proudly manifests due to rigorous yoga training in the past six months. Half a dozen competition dropouts have made their way here after supper, and it was Marcus who poked her in the ribs and urged, “Join us in the lads’ clubhouse.”
She smiles now, a bit too cheerily, and chastises herself, for she has as much right to be here as any of them. More right, if you take into account the fact she made it to the semis, a sore point with some of these guys, but their fragile egos will repair.
The Bosnian guitarist whose name she never remembers cranks open the window and blows cigarette smoke into the courtyard. He’s wearing a fringed buckskin vest picked up at one of the souvenir shops downtown. Eyeing Lucy, he offers a meaningful nod, which she mirrors, though she has no idea what they’re communicating. Armand, of all people, lights up a monster joint and passes it around. Tex draws in, coughs, and passes it to Lucy, who inhales and instantly feels a jolt in her head. It’s been a while. Because of the twins, she and Mark stay clear of the stuff, allegedly to set a good example, not that it’s done a bit of good. The sense of disembodiment that follows the toke is pleasant, and she wonders