A Stillness in Bethlehem(116)

Reggie had reached the third dressing room on the other side. Candy’s was the last on this one. She retreated behind the flap and counted to ten in her head. Then she bent over and very carefully put on the shoes she had brought with her for just this occasion. The shoes had been a risk. She had had to go back to the house and get them, moving very quietly so that Reggie didn’t hear. He had still been in the basement then and still bellowing. She’d had to sneak into the bedroom and get them out of her closet and get back into the car again. She’s done it just before she’d gone to see Kelley Grey. When it was over, her chest felt so tight, she didn’t think she would ever be able to breathe again.

The shoes were one of the three pairs Reggie had bought for her special. Candy didn’t wear shoes like these for herself, because the heels were too high and too pointy and she didn’t walk well in them, and because the toes came to so sharp a point they made her own toes ache. These were made of pink patent leather and had little straps instead of heels at the backs.

Cara Hutchinson saw her putting them on and said, “You can’t wear those on stage. They wouldn’t look right.”

“I’m not going to wear them on stage,” Candy said, whispering instead of talking.

“You should speak up,” Cara told her. “I swear, I don’t understand how anyone hears a thing you say out there. You’re always such a little mouse. You have to learn to project.”

Candy’s private opinion was that the thing she’d most like to project at the moment was Cara Hutchinson’s rear end, right out into the snow, but she didn’t have time for that now. There was serious business to take care of. She leaned toward the flap and looked out again. Kelley and Chief Morrison were still talking, still blocking the front entrance to the dressing-room tent. They should have realized that Reggie would come in from the back, the way most of the actors did.

Reggie got to the fourth of the dressing rooms on that side. Candy let the flap fall in front of her face and held her breath again and counted to ten again and tried to remember how to pray. It had been such a long time, all she could remember was “Now I lay me…” and then everything went blank. Reggie said hello to Evan Underwood in a false hearty voice that recognized how little he and Evan got along. He moved on to the fifth of the dressing rooms, and in that dressing room somebody did what Candy had been expecting all along. Somebody told Reggie where she was.

“Right across the aisle,” she heard Reggie say.

Candy stepped back into the tiny room and positioned herself so that she was facing the slit at the center of the flaps. She looked around and saw that Cara Hutchinson was absorbed in her make-up but Mrs. Johnson was quiet and watchful, alert, ready for something to happen. Just don’t get in my way, Candy told the old lady, silently, in the back of her mind, while she was still not breathing. And then the canvas flaps opened and he was there.

“Candy,” he said, the smile starting to spread across his face, the smile she knew so well. They all had smiles like that. That was the odd thing. They all had smiles that were exactly alike. Reggie filled the flap opening now, the canvas pulled back above his shoulders, his legs spread wide so that she wouldn’t have room to pass. It was beyond his comprehension that she might not want to pass.

Years ago, when she was still in junior high school and still naive, Candy had worked very hard to make the cheerleading squad. She had practiced for months doing splits and kicks. She had worked up dance routines and learned to jump three feet in the air. That was before she realized that girls like her never did become cheerleaders, no matter how good they were; they had reputations instead, and it didn’t matter how they’d gotten those reputations in the first place. She had thought that the only thing that mattered was being the best, and for the only time in her life she had worked herself to death, singlemindedly, to be the best. And it had worked. She hadn’t made the cheerleading squad, but on the day of the tryouts she had done the cleanest split, jumped the highest jump and turned cartwheels with her body so straight she looked like a spinning snowflake. She had also done the highest and fastest and most elegant kick in the history of cheerleading in Bethlehem, Vermont.

“Candy,” Reggie said again.

That was when Candy did it again, high and hard, as high and as hard as she had that day back in junior high school, but this time in a pair of spike-heeled shoes with the stiff sharp tips of the toes aimed straight at the one thing Reggie George had ever given a damn about in his life. He saw what she was doing and stepped back, more surprised than angry, but not fast enough. She caught him squarely in the center underneath and he screamed.