Jeevan stood and extended his hand to the sniffling child. “Come on,” he said, “let’s find Tanya. She’s probably looking for you.”
This seemed doubtful. If Tanya were looking for her charge, surely she would have found her by now. He led the little girl into the wings, but the man in the suit had disappeared. The backstage area was chaotic, all sound and movement, shouts to clear the way as Arthur’s procession passed, Walter presiding over the gurney. The parade disappeared down the corridor toward the stage doors and the commotion swelled further in its wake, everyone crying or talking on their phones or huddled in small groups telling and retelling the story to one another—“So then I look over and he’s falling”—or barking orders or ignoring orders barked by other people.
“All these people,” Jeevan said. He didn’t like crowds very much. “Do you see Tanya?”
“No. I don’t see her anywhere.”
“Well,” Jeevan said, “maybe we should stay in one place and let her find us.” He remembered once having read advice to this effect in a brochure about what to do if you’re lost in the woods. There were a few chairs along the back wall, and he sat down in one. From here he could see the unpainted plywood back of the set. A stagehand was sweeping up the snow.
“Is Arthur going to be okay?” Kirsten had climbed up on the chair beside him and was clutching the fabric of her dress in both fists.
“Just now,” Jeevan said, “he was doing the thing he loved best in the world.” He was basing this on an interview he’d read a month ago, Arthur talking to The Globe and Mail—“I’ve waited all my life to be old enough to play Lear, and there’s nothing I love more than being on stage, the immediacy of it …”—but the words seemed hollow in retrospect. Arthur was primarily a film actor, and who in Hollywood longs to be older?
Kirsten was quiet.
“My point is, if acting was the last thing he ever did,” Jeevan said, “then the last thing he ever did was something that made him happy.”
“Was that the last thing he ever did?”
“I think it was. I’m so sorry.”
The snow was a glimmering pile behind the set now, a little mountain.
“It’s the thing I love most in the world too,” Kirsten said, after some time had passed.
“What is?”
“Acting,” she said, and that was when a young woman with a tear-streaked face emerged from the crowd, arms outstretched. The woman barely glanced at Jeevan as she took Kirsten’s hand. Kirsten looked back once over her shoulder and was gone.
Jeevan rose and walked out onto the stage. No one stopped him. He half-expected to see Laura waiting where he’d left her in front-row center—how much time had passed?—but when he found his way through the velvet curtains, the audience was gone, ushers sweeping and picking up dropped programs between rows, a forgotten scarf draped over the back of a seat. He made his way out into the red-carpet extravagance of the lobby, careful not to meet the ushers’ eyes, and in the lobby a few remnants of the audience still lingered but Laura wasn’t among them. He called her, but she’d turned off her phone for the performance and apparently hadn’t turned it back on.
“Laura,” he said, to her voice mail, “I’m in the lobby. I don’t know where you are.”
He stood in the doorway of the ladies’ lounge and called out to the attendant, but she replied that the lounge was empty. He circled the lobby once and went to the coat check, where his overcoat was among the last few hanging in the racks. Laura’s blue coat was gone.
Snow was falling on Yonge Street. It startled Jeevan when he left the theater, this echo of the plastic translucencies that still clung to his jacket from the stage. A half dozen paparazzi had been spending the evening outside the stage door. Arthur wasn’t as famous as he had been, but his pictures still sold, especially now that he was involved in a gladiatorial divorce with a model/actress who’d cheated on him with a director.
Until very recently Jeevan had been a paparazzo himself. He’d hoped to slip past his former colleagues unnoticed, but these were men whose professional skills included an ability to notice people trying to slip past them, and they were upon him all at once.
“You look good,” one of them said. “Fancy coat you got there.” Jeevan was wearing his peacoat, which wasn’t quite warm enough but had the desired effect of making him look less like his former colleagues, who had a tendency toward puffy jackets and jeans. “Where’ve you been, man?”