“Sam?” the reporter prompted. “I said, are you excited about the wedding?”
“What fella wouldn’t be?” Sam said, looking away.
They played their parts, waving to the crowds shouting their names and pressing themselves against the police barricades hoping for a closer look, hands reaching, needing that reflected glory.
“Miss O’Neill, I certainly hope you can’t read anything bad in these,” Mayor Walker joked as he handed Evie the ribbon-cutting scissors for the new Ziegfeld Theatre.
“Here goes!” Evie said. She snipped through the bow and the ribbon fell away. The onlookers cheered.
Down in the throngs of people, a haunted, hollow-eyed man in a tattered soldier’s uniform pushed his wheelchair toward the platform, muttering to himself. People stepped back as he knocked into them.
“Watch it, buddy,” a man growled, but the broken soldier didn’t hear him.
“The time is now,” the soldier said, over and over.
Onstage, Evie moved to the right and accepted a bouquet of flowers from a fan.
“The time… the time is now,” the soldier whispered fervently as he reached into his pocket for the revolver. All eyes were on Evie, who lifted her arm in a wave, blowing kisses to the crowd.
The soldier raised the gun. It shook in his hand. “The time is now,” he moaned.
Evie’s smile was still bright as she turned in the soldier’s direction. Her eyes saw the gun in his hand but couldn’t quite make sense of it, as if he might be holding a fish or an albatross. Sam was quicker. Time slowed and sharpened at once. Blood thrummed in his ears, blocking out the gasps of the stunned crowd. These people receded in Sam’s mind. There was only Evie, the man, and the gun. Sam wasn’t close enough to tackle the man before he could get a shot off. There was no time to think it through. Sam pushed Evie aside and thrust his hand toward the man with the gun. “Don’t see me,” he growled. He poured every ounce of will into that one movement. Sam felt as if he’d been struck by a tuning fork. His body trembled from the effort. His knees buckled, but Sam held on.
“Don’t. See. Me.”
The soldier’s haunted eyes emptied of all consciousness, like a sleepwalker’s. Sam lunged forward and pried the revolver from the man’s grime-coated fingers. Several people closest to the man with the gun had also gone slack, heads cocked toward the sky, lost in some private reverie.