My shows draw hundreds of women — but who am I fooling?

T

here’s no such thing as magic. I think we need to get that out of the way. There’s illusion, there’s distraction, there’s practice. Now you see it. Poof! Now you don’t. Once upon a time, Daddy was ten feet tall. Poof! One day I was looking at him, and his eyes were suddenly level with mine.

No magic.

Now we can move on to talk about that tiny little mistake. A slipup so inconsequential, of course no one noticed.

But I have to tell you about that chain of silly little messes, that confluence of circumstance that led to all my hard work being unraveled. About me, curled up into incoherence by an infection boring its way through my inner ear canal and down my neck, waiting for antibiotics to kick in. About the new event organizer I hired this time around, eager to please and even more eager for a fatter income than she was already getting. About Dani, preoccupied with some investment that took a bad turn.

That’s all.

I knew nothing, of course. I wonder now if there would have been a way to mitigate the damage, had I seen the ads the next day. The next week, even.

Probably not, methinks.

As it was, I got my first inkling of what had happened when an unfamiliar clamor stole into my dressing room on the third floor. I put my compact down on the table and went to peer over the windowsill.

There were crowds. What should have been neat and quiet lines of humanity had somehow clotted and congealed into clumped-up clusters of jabbering, gesticulating women. And from the tone of whatever I could hear from my vantage point, they were not-very-happy women.

I wrenched open the door to my room, the old handle rasping painfully against my palm, and ran to find that incompetent organizer. There were never crowds at my performances. Never noise. Never overflow. Orderly, booked seating. Understated entrance.

Someone had messed up.

If you’ve ever been backstage in any kind of reputable theater, no matter how old and at what stage (ha!) of disrepair it’s in, you’ll know how confusing it can get.

It took me too long, scuttling up and down labyrinthine corridors, banging into a ragtag assortment of lighting technicians, props, crew for the props, and yards and yards of sequined material and stuff before I ran up against someone I knew.

“Cheyenne! What is going on out there?”

My makeup artist actually stammered. And even in the badly lit hallway, I could see her chignon coming loose. That, more than anything, told me what state of mind she was in.

“Uh… Ava? Why are you down here?”

“Because of the noise outside, what on earth?”

Her blue eyes flicked up and down and around me. Anywhere but at me.