As Jordan parked the car in front of The Red Opera House, Mabel said, “What would I have been doing in the pool hall at four years old? And where were you, Lily?”
“Mom needed a break from having a rowdy four-year-old all day long,” Lily said. “And I would have been practically a baby, so he couldn’t have taken me to the bar.” She added, “I would’ve been just about a year old,” pleased with her youth. “It would have been so inappropriate.”
“One foot in the womb,” Jordan said, pinching Lily’s baby-fat cheek.
Mabel’s father quit drinking shortly after that night he treated her to a Roy Rogers. Mabel reached over and combed her fingers through Lily’s ponytail, pitying her because she never got to have a mocktail with their daddy.
“I found a way to break into The Red Opera House,” Jordan said, looking into the rearview at Mabel. Mabel had longed for years to get inside. She’d heard of the curtain hand-painted with birds by a Dutch artist and of ruby-eyed dragonflies in the stained-glass chandeliers. “There are murals on the wall of people in masks,” Jordan said, telling her about how he’d found his way inside only a few nights before.
Lily threw open the car door, got out, and kicked off her too-big shoes. She carried one shoe in each hand as she stormed down the sidewalk, away from the opera house. “Lily!” Jordan called. “Lily! Where are you going? What are you mad about?” But Mabel knew this was another of Lily’s fits—Lily didn’t like Mabel and Jordan’s shared interest in junk and old buildings. Mabel knew that Lily was headed toward the end of the block lit up by Jordan’s father’s barbershop; it was after hours, but Mr. Swain often spent evenings in his barber chair avoiding Mrs. Swain at home. Mrs. Swain, when stewed, which was often, became a comic-strip domestic situation, her brittle bleached hair up in rollers, her housecoat hanging open over a flimsy slip, a rolling pin a weapon in her hand. So Mr. Swain kept a VCR at the barbershop, along with his collection of old Suzanne Pleshette movies and the complete episodes of The Bob Newhart Show. He’d watch the tapes on his black-and-white portable, drinking Windsor and smoking Swisher Sweets. Both Lily and Mabel had terrible crushes on Mr. Swain; he, like their own parents, had been only a teenager when he’d fathered Jordan, so he was an extravagantly young older man with thick yellow hair and a flat stomach. He cut hair in his Levis and tight, white T-shirt and wore a plastic comb tucked behind his ear. Lily claimed to Mabel that he once unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down a bit for her to see a horned red devil with “The Devil Made Me Do It!” tattooed at his lower abdomen.
“Just forget about Lily,” Mabel said, though she knew Jordan could never. He didn’t even hear Mabel say it; he was concentrating on the sight of Lily walking away.
In the stone at the top of the building before them was written “The Red Opera House 1893,” but the bricks had been painted green for as long as Mabel could remember. Mabel wondered if “red opera” referred to the kinds of productions the theater had staged—bloody conflagrations in all red costume against red backdrops, the actors wailing and moaning their music as they fell to the floor stabbed or shot through.
Jordan got out and held his hand into the backseat to help Mabel from the car. Though he moved toward the alley, he didn’t take his eyes from Lily’s back. But once off the street, he cheered up, and he nonchalantly pushed open a hinged basement window with the toe of his boot. After crawling in through the basement, Jordan and Mabel walked up into the grocery store. Jordan climbed onto a corner pinball machine to pull a ladder down from a door in the ceiling, and he and Mabel both stepped up into the opera house of the second floor.
Mabel was anxious to see the walls and the stage of the theater lit by the full moon, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Jordan pushing aside a cobweb to clear Mabel’s path, a web so thick it looked like a nylon stocking. “No one’s spoken a word here for years,” Mabel whispered in Jordan’s ear, thinking of Mary and Dickon and their secret garden. The room was surprisingly cool, and she thought she could hear the drip of a faucet. A painted Ophelia, in a dress with the iridescence of peacock feathers, drowned on the door to the dressing rooms. Lady Godiva with butterflies in her long tresses rode a horse across the ceiling.
“It’s so beautiful in here,” Mabel said, touching the burned wick of a candle on a chandelier that sat in a heap in the corner. “Why don’t they let anyone up to see it?”
“The place is falling apart,” Jordan said, “and it would be too expensive to repair. All the boards are rotten through. We could fall through the floor at any given minute. So walk on your tiptoes and keep yourself as light as you can.” Jordan opened the doors to a wardrobe, and the glassy eyes of a fox stole caught a sliver of moonlight and stared back at them.
“I’m taking Lily to Mexico,” Jordan said. He blurted it, like he’d been waiting and waiting for just the right moment but had given up.
“The beer tastes like skunk down there,” was all Mabel could think of to say. “You have to put fruit in it to drink it.” For years, Mabel’s mother had discouraged Mabel and Lily from visiting her, painting a portrait of Mexico as a place of banditry and bad water, a place where children lost their arms in factory machines and dead hookers were left to rot in the streets. Even when very young, Mabel had seen through her mother’s efforts to disguise her new home as uninhabitable, but Mabel had also grown comfortable with the idea of her mother as virtually unreachable in her foreign land. It was one thing Mabel had been able to rely upon—her mother in a place that children would not want to be, a place where black widows lay eggs in your ear canal and snakes slept curled-up in your cowboy boots.
“I read in the newspaper,” Mabel said, “about a pregnant woman in Mexico whose sister drugged her, induced labor, sold the baby, then told her sister the child had died.” Mabel had clipped the article and held onto it, saving it to put on Lily’s pillowcase when she had her next long fit.
“It’s time Lily saw her mother again,” Jordan said with a shrug, as if saying, Isn’t it obvious? As if saying, Don’t we want the best for Lily?
Mabel walked away from Jordan and looked out a broken window, down to the familiar street. The streets of the town square were all brick with patches of gray concrete. She could hear the rattle and bump of every car she’d ever ridden in as it crossed the streets, could feel the rough ride in her spine. If Jordan took Lily away, even for just a week, even if they never made it to Mexico, everything would change for all of them.
Jordan took Mabel’s hand, and he slipped a ring onto her finger. In the set of the ring was an opaque sphere, and Jordan flipped it open on its tiny hinges to show something could be kept inside. “I found it under the stage,” he said. “There’s all kinds of things under there. Maybe it was good luck for the actors to drop things through the loose floorboards or something.” Jordan lit his cigarette lighter, led the way to the base of the stage, and pushed aside a panel. The stage was so low to the floor that Mabel had to lower herself to her stomach to get beneath.
As she bellied her way across the floor, she could hear Jordan crawling in behind her. Her sandal fell off, and she felt Jordan touch the sole of her bare foot. She felt his fingertips stepping as light as spider’s legs across her heel and up along her ankle. She remembered the afternoon that her mother read aloud her father’s unlikely suicide note and how her mother then took Mabel and Lily to the river for a swim. Naked in the cold river water, the three of them hid beneath the trestle as a train crossed. They shivered and held each other. Unable to hear anything other than the passing train, they sent wordless messages, Mabel pressing her palm to her mother’s stomach, Lily putting her cheek to her mother’s breast, her mother running her