Carla!
That was what the voice said, and so distinctly that she spun around to see who had come up behind her.
No one.
Shrugging, chalking it up to her nerves, she continued toward the exit a few feet ahead of her.
Carla!
There it was again.
She had heard it that second time or thought she did but still could not tell the direction from which it was coming.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Why are you doing this? Leave me alone.”
Carla reached the exit door.
Don’t leave, please.
“Stop it!” she screamed. “I can’t go out in front of those people and pretend that I feel like entertaining them!”
Yet pretense had been a part of her life since the beginning of her career.
As an actress, she always pretended to be someone else when she played a role in a movie. As a singer, she was role-playing, too, someone happy and bursting with energy, someone an audience would pay to see so that they could have a couple of hours of escape from their own problems.
“I’d only garble the lyrics, get the rhythms all wrong, miss the cues, make a fool of myself,” she said. “Tens of thousands of people would leave and talk, how, yes, yes, how they would talk, about me washed up, that I should have retired years before, and not tricked them into paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit and watch a broad like me pretend that I had no crosses to bear.”
Carla hesitated, half expecting the voice to say something else immediately.
She was wrong.
Only sounds from the auditorium behind her could be heard as Albert told the awaiting thousands something that the speaker system magnified a little too loudly so that the volume had to be turned down.
“Carla Gearhart will be with you soon,” he said.
Feet began to stamp in impatience and protest.
“Now I want to tell you why there is a delay,” Albert continued, pausing for effect, then continuing.
She held her breath.
Albert is pretty smooth, she acknowledged. He should be able to keep them from walking out for a little while, anyway.
Her insides were trembling.
What about later? she worried. What if they leave the auditorium and start spreading the word about me? What will happen to my career then?
She was instantly ashamed of that egocentric thought, and pushed the exit door open, a winter chill hitting her cheeks full blast, feeling like a hand slapping her across the face.
An alley.
She gasped as she saw it.
An alley, a dismal, dirty alley, beset with odors that seemed more Like those in a filthy rest room…
Inside the theater building were once-adoring thousands of clerks, accountants, teachers, computer salesmen, housewives, many others, along with the requisite bright lights, glitter at every turn, however fake it might have been, as well as all the other aspects of a million dollar engagement.
Yet outside—
None of this was unusual except on Broadway perhaps, and even in that fabled district of Manhattan, derelicts managed to hide briefly behind trash Dumpsters or use sections of each alley as not-so-private outdoor rest rooms.
Oh, God, Carla thought prayerfully. This is where I’m headed if I don’t stop myself tonight. Oh, God, I need Your help’ I can’t end up this way, my guts eaten up by drugs or maybe in a cheap motel, dying after taking a hundred sleeping pills.
A filthy back alley seemed a metaphor for what her life would have been like without Kyle Rivers—dark and filled with all manner of trash and with no real hope that any of this would ever change.
Go back inside…
That voice!
She pressed her palms against her ears but it would not stop since she now realized that it seemed to be coming from within her.
Kyle loves you, Carla. Whatever happens, remember that. And don’t give up. That’s what the enemy of your soul wants.
She answered instinctively, pointing out the sheer ugliness of that alley, and its putrid odors.
“Yes, I know that he loves me,” she spoke. “And I love him enough to know that without him in my life, what do I have left? This is where I could be someday, eating scraps that others have thrown away.”
God is with you.
“Sounds like an old story, often repeated,” Carla retorted sarcastically. “Isn’t there anything new to say?”
She clenched both hands into fists.
“Why give me hope, and then snatch it right from my grasp?” she begged. “Why show me my true love and—?”
Never mind any of that, Carla. You must go back inside and trust God Without trust, your faith is a charade.
But still she resisted though less certainly, taking one step, then another away from the stage door and down the alley toward the street beyond it.
Suddenly she saw movement.
A middle-aged derelict had pushed aside a pile of cardboard boxes under which he had been sleeping. In his hand was an old rusty trumpet.
Carla walked faster, a bit afraid because she was well dressed, obviously “from money” and he was a typical panhandler. Normally these people, she had heard, were not violent but then desperation was a wild card in anybody’s life.
She was almost at the end of the alley, just a few feet from the street outside.
“You can just walk ‘way and leave everythin’ and everyone behind you,” the derelict spoke. “I can’t. I’s stuck where I am, can’t do nothing about it.”
…you can just walk ‘way and leave everythin’ and everyone behind you.
Carla stood still. Suddenly she could not move.
Her band.
She was leaving every member of it behind her, betraying them along with fifty thousand customers, part of that great mass of people who had made her the success she was.
How can I do this, Lord? she prayed. How can I stab them in the back like that?
She took one more step toward the street.
The derelict let out a cry of despair that hit her like a very large block of ice, chilling, it seemed, every nerve in her body.
Slowly Carla turned, and saw him standing in the middle of that alley, and seeming very much a part of it, as dirty, as smelly, as filled with debris but his trash was different, for apart from his wretched clothes, it was inside him, the refuse of a life that apparently had been inexorable in driving him to that alley that night. She walked back into the alley, and approached him, standing there, wanting to say something but not yet quite sure what the words should be.
“Hey, lady, what are you starin’ at?” he snarled defiantly, having learned the bad habit of being offensive to everyone.
“You,” she told him honestly.
“What about me? You ain’t seen no bums before?”
“None with a trumpet in one hand.”
He looked at it,