AFTER HE DROPPED OFF MIRABELLE AT THE GREEK, JULIAN waited for her in the parking lot. The callbacks were closed set.
She was gone only a few minutes. When she came out, she looked dejected, though stunning in that violet gown—like he couldn’t take a deep breath stunning. The girl was making him inarticulate.
“Don’t give up,” he said. “They have to think about it.”
“They thought about it,” she said. “Told me on the spot I wouldn’t make a good Beatrice. Too something or other. I stopped listening when I realized I wasn’t getting the part.”
“Oh, shame. What about the narrator?”
“They have someone for that already.” She shrugged. “C’est la vie. I didn’t want this stupid part anyway. I have more auditions tomorrow. Plus, like I said, Abigail Jenkins is flying in from London next week. That’s the gig I really want. Medea. I’m going to London, I feel it.”
It was a warm sunny late summer morning.
Julian had Buster Barkley to train before his meeting in Century City with a former propmaster from the Scream movies. “Can I take you home?” He smiled lightly. “To your actual home this time. Because I’ve got a full day . . .”
“There’s something beautiful in those hills,” Mirabelle blurted, pointing up to the eucalyptus lining the desert mountain. “It’s like a rainbow wishing well. Do you want to come see it with me? We can only catch it at noon, and only for a few seconds. I think you’d like it. I hardly ever get to go up there. I want to make a wish for London. I need all the good karma I can get.”
What could Julian say but yes to a violet girl asking him to follow her to a wishing well atop a mountain? Where had he seen a girl in a flowing purple dress like this before? For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. She was like a painting.
A painting of a memory.
His palm opened up, as if he could almost feel placing his hand on that dress, on the girl’s back. Quickly he clenched the hand into a fist, hoping she didn’t notice. “You’re going to hike in a dress and high heels?”
“I’ll be careful. But you’re right, the heels are a bit impractical.” Half a minute later, below layers of purple silk, she had her black boots on and laced up. “I’m ready.”
“Lead the way,” he said, taking a swig from his Japanese thermos filled with lemon ice water and offering her some. He took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He knew he’d get too warm after hiking up a mountain.
They began to climb through the bush, keeping to the narrow sandy path. After a few minutes she commended his speed. “You’re keeping up nicely.”
“You mean you’re keeping up nicely.” He raced ahead of her.
“Hey, you can’t be ahead of me!” She tried to catch up. “You don’t know where you’re going.”
“Do any of us really know where we’re going, Mia? To the top of the mountain? How hard can that be to find? I go up, right? I stop when I can’t go any farther? Come on, slow poke. I haven’t got all day.”
By the time they reached the crest, she was flushed. Julian had barely begun to perspire.
“Not bad,” Mirabelle said, panting. “I didn’t know boxers could fight and hike.”
“Boxers can do a lot.”
“Oh, yeah?” She squinted.
He squinted right back.
“I like your spunk, Julian.” She had the most inviting, genial face. It was a face in a permanent state of smile. “You don’t run in vain, nor labor in vain.”
“I try. All anyone can do, really.”
“Yoda says do or do not. There is no try.”
“Yoda is wrong. He doesn’t know everything.”
“Oh, yeah? Does Mr. Know-it-All know there’s magic in these hills?”
“Mr. Know-it-All knows there’s magic everywhere.”
But when they reached where they were going, and up ahead he saw the stone enclosure on a flat mesa overlooking the valley and the city and the ocean—Julian stopped walking.
Mirabelle called for him. “A little farther, Jules. Over here.”
It wasn’t that he couldn’t walk.
He couldn’t walk because suddenly he found it hard to breathe.
“I know, it’s the oxygen,” she said, coming back and taking his hand shyly. “It’s thin up here. Harder to fill your lungs.”
He pulled his hand away from her. He didn’t think that was it. Words for some reason became inadequate. Doggedly he followed her into the center of the stony circle.
“We’re going to catch us some wishes, Jules.” From her bag she retrieved a jagged crystal on a long leather rope. “Are you ready?”
The sight of the crystal had a peculiar effect on Julian. He started to shake. Seeing it, seeing her standing in the sun, holding the quartz in her hands, triggered the heaviest sensation in his chest. He became freezing cold. He had not experienced anything like it, except ten years earlier when he was dying in the desert and saw a mirage named Ashton.
Burning soot filled his throat. She let go of his hand and disappeared into the smoke.
“Please, no,” he whispered. “Don’t go into the fire.”
“What fire? Don’t be scared. Watch and see. Prepare to be amazed.”
“Josephine, no,” he whispered. “Please, Josephine . . .”
“I’m not Josephine, remember?” she said with good humor. “I’m Mirabelle. Mia.”
Dumbfounded he stared at the inside of his bare left forearm, as if the hieroglyphs to explain what was happening to him could be found there.
She positioned herself in front of him, so close she was almost touching him, the stone in her open palm. Julian did not look at her and could not look at her. He did not feel well.
“You look pale. You okay? Don’t look so glum. What time is it?”
He showed her. 11:59.
“Excellent. Almost time. Don’t forget to make a wish.” Her face was enchanted, enchanting, smiling. “At noon, for a brief moment, the stars and the earth and all of creation will be so perfectly aligned that any wish asked for in faith can be granted.”
He wished he had something to hold on to.
“Place your hands under my hands,” she said. “That’s it, like that, like Red Hands. Don’t shake. Is the boxer scared of heights? The boxer should’ve told me.”
“Your heart is a refuge of coiners and thieves,” Julian said. “But I’m the one who has come to steal your life.”
“What?”
His heart grew numb, awash with terrible suffering and blinding fear. When the aurora flash of noon light hit her crystal, bouncing off the quartz stones around them and dispersing into a carousel of color, Julian started to choke. His hands fell from her hands and rose to his throat. He felt old love, and pain that swallowed him whole. His lungs were paralyzed. She stood in front of him smiling, and he was crying. He forgot to breathe. His heart forgot to beat.
She vanished for a moment inside the light, and as she vanished, ugly things reared up to replace her, crowding with Julian inside their intimate seclusion. He fell to his knees, scraping the ground, his palms slamming into the dust to stop himself from plunging face first into the sand.
Blind and deaf, he swallowed fire and then was under ice. Death was falling out of the sky. Sound was everywhere, life was elsewhere. And then sound was nowhere. He was drowning in a vast ocean of want, of impossible struggle, of bottomless sorrow. Was that him who felt these things for her, getting iced in the liquid grief for all she wanted to be and would never be?
Julian, he heard dimly. Julian, what’s the matter?
The bright light receded. His senses came back. He was in the dirt, on his knees, shivering, and she was in front of him holding on to his hands. She wasn’t smiling anymore. She looked very concerned. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
He stared into her face. She was blue, and she was dying. And as she was dying, she said, come then, take the last warmth from my lips.
Julian groaned.
“Anyone can stop a woman’s life,” he said, “but no one her death: a thousand doors open onto it.” He clutched his throbbing right hand to his chest. It felt like blood was pouring out of his missing fingers. Oh my God. What was happening to him?
“What are you talking about, what doors?” Mirabelle said. “Everything’s okay. It’s just a trick of the light. When the sun is at zenith over the meridian, it sometimes does that, disperses in a kind of rainbow. It’s just a pretty earth science thing. There’s nothing to it.”
She tried to help him up, but he lurched from her. Grabbing onto the stones, he pulled himself up and without dusting off, still clutching his hooked right hand to his chest, said, “Let’s go.”
In utter silence he staggered downhill. He didn’t even brush the dust off his knees before climbing inside his spotless car.
“You want to go grab some lunch?” she said. “I’m starved. My treat.”
“I can’t. I got . . . things.”
“You sure? You were so good to me today. I want to return the favor.”
And for some reason he said, “Today?”
“What do you mean?” she said. “As opposed to another day?”
“I don’t know what I mean,” Julian said. He drove her to her house on Lyman.
“Are you really okay?” said Mirabelle. “You are still so pale. What happened to you up there?”
“I’m fine. Probably just oxygen deprivation. Not used to it. Well, here we are.”
“The right place this time, thank goodness,” she said. “One of these days, you’ll have to tell me how you knew about Normandie.” She saw him sitting with the car still in drive, the foot slammed against the brake, his hands on the wheel. “You’re not even going to put the car into park?”
Reluctantly he shifted gears.
“Come in for a minute. I have to give you your dress back anyway. Come on, I’ll make you a cup of coffee. You look like you need it.”
“I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind. I have some calls to make.”
She came back a few minutes later carrying the dress and laid it carefully in the back seat.
Julian didn’t look at her. She began to say something, but he cut her off. “Well, so long,” he said. “You’re welcome,” and peeled away before she could open her mouth to respond.