July 1930
Iowa City, Iowa
“And now, the incredible child phenomenon, Jacqueline DuMonde!” Tebow’s voice thundered from the loudspeakers, as ten-year-old Cecily, standing on Prince’s back, raised her arms, pasted on a smile, and clicked to Prince. Stagehands pulled the tent flaps back, and Prince was in motion, cantering for the ring, his ears perked to the cheers of the crowd.
They were in Iowa City, and Cecily wanted to put on the best show of her life so far, in this, her third season with Sax & Tebow—just in case. Somewhere in the shadowy grandstands—she tried to see into them, but could not—somewhere sitting watching, high in the rafters or from the front row, could be her mother, Madeline.
The band played Cecily’s number, “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” As Prince cantered to the rhythm, she flipped frontward and landed on her feet on the rippling muscles of his back to the crash of a cymbal, clutching his hair with her toes. The crowd whooped; she steadied herself. Prince shook his mane, basking in the cheers as he continued round the ring. Cecily counted to the music, then—at the exact planned moment—jumped down into the dust and vaulted right up onto Prince’s back again, holding up her hands as the cymbal crashed once more. She loved the smell of sawdust and popcorn, the shouts and gasps of the crowd, the feel of Prince’s body under her feet. Quickly, she sat sidesaddle, then hung upside down off his side, hooked on with just her legs, the dust of the ring inches above her sparkling tiara. She swung back up and posed again, then did another flip to another cymbal crash, Prince’s back moving under her feet. She heard the song’s words in her mind as the band played: Five foot two, eyes of blue, has anybody seen my girl? The crowd roared. She held out her arms, then did a little curtsy, as Prince cantered round and round.
“Good job, boy,” she said to him afterward, out back in his stall in the stable tent, rubbing his nose and feeding him a carrot. In the ring now was Isabelle, and Cecily, listening to the distant oohs and ahhs of the crowd, imagined her leaping from Doc to Wyatt to Virgil and back again. Tebow wanted Cecily and Isabelle to combine acts, but Isabelle had so far resisted. Cecily still wasn’t tall enough to work with the big horses; at least, that was the reason Isabelle gave, though Cecily suspected Isabelle just didn’t want to wonder, when she heard the crowd cheering, if it was really for her.
Cecily didn’t blame her one bit. What else did they really have?
That and each other, anyway.
Cecily stood on Prince’s back for the curtain call with all the performers—they marched out waving to the crowd, then processed around the ring and back out again. The instant Cecily was out from under the Big Top, she leaped down and asked Isabelle to take charge of Prince. “Sure, sure, go on!” Isabelle said, smiling and waving her away. Whenever they were in Iowa, she always let Cecily go out to watch the crowd exiting. Again, just in case.
Cecily ran around the Big Top, removing her tiara as she went, as if that alone might make her look like a normal girl, like Cecily McAvoy, a girl whose mother would know her. When she got to the corner, she peered around. The grounds were dark, the crowd a bit disoriented. The menagerie and sideshow tents had all been taken down while the big show was underway, the canvas and poles hauled back to the train on wagons by the roustabouts.
Cecily watched the backs of the dispersing crowd. How would her mother know she was waiting? Maybe this had been her trouble all along—keeping too far out of sight.
She squared her shoulders, tossed her hair, and stepped into view, striding out toward the crowd. Someone saw her. “It’s Jacqueline DuMonde!” A boy ran over, asking for her autograph. A dozen more people lined up behind him. Cecily smiled and signed for them all, even as she watched the crowd filing past.
Suddenly, a dark-haired, pretty woman stood before her. The woman had to be about the age that Cecily’s mother would be! Was there a chance? Cecily had to think: yes!
The woman smiled. “My daughter would very much like your autograph. She admired you so much. She’s just a little shy to ask.”
The hope that had shot through Cecily at the first two words crashed down. Of course this woman had a daughter. Who was shy; who lived a normal life, with parents who brought her to the circus.
But that daughter was not Cecily.
She signed the woman’s program, made hasty apologies to the rest who were waiting, and dashed back behind the Big Top.
She stopped, doubled over, trying to catch her breath, her chest aching like she’d been torn in two. Why hadn’t she realized it before? It had been just a foolish dream, that she’d ever find her mother in Iowa. It was never even anything Dolores had really said—
“Hey, kid, get out of here!” a workman yelled. He must not have recognized Cecily in the darkness. The Big Top was going dark, the side poles being removed. Another man shouted, “Let her go!” Cries came as a few stragglers ran out from inside. Tears stung Cecily’s eyes, as she backed away into deeper shadows.
Another shout: “Now!” Immediately, the bale rings slid down the poles, and fifty thousand square feet of paraffin-treated canvas settled toward the ground, swelling and billowing on the air underneath. Pole-riggers grabbed the bale rings and swiftly unlashed the canvas, while the men at the stakes all around pounced onto the mountain of collapsing canvas, climbing up the seams, unlacing the leather cord that bound the sections as they went.
Cecily felt the collapse like it was her own hope—a thing she’d been carrying all these years without even realizing the weight of it.
She looked at the tiara in her hands and wanted to throw it into a ditch. To run away forever.
But where would she run to? She had nowhere. She had no one.
She wiped her face, put the tiara back on her head, and began walking toward the train. Cecily McAvoy was dead. She was Jacqueline DuMonde forever now.
The horses were stashed away in the stock cars by the time Cecily got to the train, and she hated that she’d missed her usual nightly routine with Prince: helping Janey groom him, giving him carrots and apples, leading him to the train, bidding him good night. Now, Janey had already led him up the ramp and into the car, where he was wedged in with twenty-six other horses, all standing so close together that they couldn’t move, so they couldn’t fall over in transit and get hurt.
In the distance, the front part of the train was still busy, as the wagons full of canvas and poles were being loaded onto the flatcars. At the back, though, at Cecily and Isabelle’s caboose and the real caboose behind it, where the conductor rode, all was quiet and dark. Only Isabelle and Cecily stayed to the rear of Tebow’s private car. The other performers stayed in bunk cars up ahead, and the roustabouts and grooms stayed far out in front of that. Some workers even slept out on the flatcars, if the weather was nice enough, because a hundred of them were assigned to sleep in a car with only fifty bunks in it.
The rear door to her caboose was open. Cecily bounded up onto the vestibule, but froze outside the door when she heard Tebow shouting: “We’ve got to do something, Belle!” Cecily crouched so she wouldn’t be seen, though the two of them were on the opposite end of the car, in the compartment where Isabelle’s bunk was. Cecily could see them through the passageway, in the light of Isabelle’s lantern. Isabelle was still in her red costume, eyeliner smeared, red lipstick chewed away.
“We’re losing money hand over fist,” Tebow said. “Gate sales keep going down. Nobody’s got the money to go to the circus. But they’ll find money for things they really want. I’ve had more than one man talk to me about it. They said they’d pay up to a dollar to see her dance.”
“No! No, no, no! She’s a child! What is wrong with you, even to think of it? It won’t be three days before someone grabs her out back and rapes her! You know that as well as I do.”
Tebow ran a hand over his hair, seeming almost ashamed, which Cecily had never seen him be. “I’m desperate,” he said, as if that made up for something.
“There are a thousand things you can think of! Or I’ll do it! If you’ve got to have a peep show, for God’s sake, take me and not her. This place is my life. She’s still got a chance at a different one.” Isabelle turned her back on him and leaned on the doorframe of her compartment, arms folded.
“Isabelle.” Tebow sighed. He moved close up behind her and put his mouth against her hair. “You know I’d never share you. Bad enough to watch them all ogling you in the ring.” He slipped his arms around her waist.
Cecily covered her mouth with her hand.
Isabelle stayed standing with her arms folded, looking at the floor. “You like to pretend you’re not unscrupulous,” she said. “But you’re so very willing to do unscrupulous things.”
Tebow sighed. He nuzzled her neck. “Belle, you want to blame me for things that aren’t my fault. I’m trying to feed people. Keep them employed. It’s getting rougher and rougher out there.”
“You know that kid’s like a sister to me. And she’s only ten! Four years younger than I was when you started with me. A child. You’ve got to promise me you’ll let her alone!”
Another sigh. “All right, Belle. I don’t want to argue.” Tebow’s hand cupped Isabelle’s breast.
Isabelle flinched, but, after a second, leaned back into him, letting her eyes drift closed. Cecily stayed frozen, afraid they would hear her in the overpowering quiet.
“You’d better be extra good to me, though,” Tebow added, pulling Isabelle closer. “She’ll be fourteen before you know it, and you’ll be old by that time, Belle.”
Isabelle’s eyes snapped open. Her face went pale, and Cecily thought for an instant that she might’ve whirled and stabbed him, if only she had a knife in her hand.
Then, her expression shifted to a strange grimace. She seemed to be deciding something.
She freed herself from Tebow’s grip, wriggled her red pantalets and attached stockings down. She turned to unbuckle Tebow’s belt. “I’m the one you want. Don’t forget it,” she said. She about-faced again and braced her hands on the doorframe, while he let his pants fall down.
Cecily felt frozen in place, still afraid to make a sound. Isabelle’s skirt hid what they were doing, but Cecily knew, because she’d seen animals, and she could see Tebow’s and Isabelle’s faces. Tebow, with his eyes closed as his body moved behind Isabelle’s. Isabelle, who seemed to be smiling, grimacing, and crying at once; Cecily could see tears glistening on her face, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming and running to tackle Tebow to try to get him off her—but some part of her must have known that that wasn’t something she should do.
Tebow, eyes squeezed shut, made a deep Oh! sound. Isabelle smiled, opened her eyes—and saw Cecily.
Her eyes got huge. Tebow moaned again and sighed, his eyes still closed.
Cecily jumped up and ran into the darkness, her breath pounding in her ears.
“So,” Isabelle said much later, standing in the doorway between her and Cecily’s compartments. Cecily had run straight for the front of the train, but Prince was already wedged into the stock car, and all she could do was try to talk to him through the slats. She imagined she heard him huff in response, but, for all she knew, she might’ve been talking to any horse at all. She’d wandered the shadows of the trainyard for a while, but, with the train unmistakably leaving soon, she’d slinked back to the caboose. Hoping to avoid Isabelle altogether, she’d washed her face and brushed her teeth as quietly as possible, then crept up into her bunk and stretched out like a corpse. But Isabelle had come out, long black cigarette holder dangling from her hand. “Now you know.”
Cecily said nothing.
“Look, I’m sorry you had to see that. You probably were scared. But there’s no need to be scared, all right? Do you have any questions?”
Cecily bit down hard on her lip. She supposed Isabelle meant about the mechanics of things. But Cecily had no interest in that. Flip had shown her his boy parts once, and she had not found them impressive.
Other worries were top of mind now. She didn’t want to judge Isabelle. She’d spent so long believing Isabelle was always right. But, no matter how she wanted to, and though she told herself it was childish to care so much about everything—even to be clutching her old Saint Jude card like she was right this minute!—she could not hold in a: “How could you?”
Isabelle gave a short laugh. “Listen, he’s not so bad. Sure, I didn’t like it much, at first. I was pretty young then. Now, I guess I love him, in a way. I think he loves me, too.” She blew out smoke. “In a way.”
Cecily had always dreamed that one of the glamorous aerialists would fall in love with Isabelle; that it was only a matter of time. Now she knew that Isabelle was fooling herself about what love was; that Isabelle seemed to feel she didn’t even have a choice.
“Listen, kid,” Isabelle said. “How do you think we got the caboose? Why do you think we don’t have to stay in the bunk car with the other girls? He pays a whole fee for this car every single leg we travel. We’ve got our own private bathroom with water, for God’s sake!” She paused, and her tone went lower. “How do you think you got Prince?”
Cecily bit down harder on her lip. She bit until she tasted blood. She hated being mad at Isabelle—and what right did she have to be mad at her for this? She knew Isabelle was only trying to protect her.
And she knew, without Isabelle, she’d be lost, she’d be nothing.
She thought again of her mother and started to cry.
“Oh, kid!” Isabelle said, though Cecily hadn’t thought she’d made a sound. “Listen, will you come down here, please?” She stubbed out her cigarette, and Cecily, feeling helpless, climbed down and let herself be gathered into Isabelle’s arms. The older girl was too thin to really sink into, but Cecily tried, leaning on her shoulder, letting go of all her stored-up tears of the years without her mother, as Isabelle rubbed her back and whispered, “You’re going to be all right, kid, I promise you. You’re gonna have a better life than I do, okay? I’m gonna see to it,” and Cecily tried and tried to believe her.