Maeve smiled, mouthed the word doctor.
The usher nodded. “If you need something, you let us know.”
“We just need to sit here awhile.”
“Take your time,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry,” Maeve said. I wiped down her face. The test strip reported her sugar at thirty-eight. It should have been ninety and I would have been happy with seventy.
“You should have told someone you weren’t feeling well.” Celeste moved the ice to the top of Maeve’s head.
“Ah, that’s good,” Maeve said. “I didn’t want to get up. I thought—” She inhaled deeply, closed her eyes.
I told her to take another sip of juice.
She swallowed, began again. “I’d be disruptive?” Maeve was wearing a blouse with a sweater over it, wool slacks, all of it wet.
Celeste had Maeve’s hair gathered up in one hand, the ice pack in the other. “I’m going backstage to get May and we’ll go on to dinner,” she said to me. “When she’s feeling better, bring her over to the house.”
“Danny should go,” Maeve said. She still hadn’t tried to look at either of us.
“Danny isn’t going to go,” Celeste said. “There’s a big crowd and no one will miss him. It’s a detente, okay? You’re sick. May’s going to want to see you, so plan on coming back to the house.” She handed me the shards of ice, the sopping napkin. The glucose was doing its job. I watched the life come creeping back into my sister’s face.
“Tell May she was a good mouse,” Maeve said.
“You’ll tell her,” Celeste said.
“I have to get your parents home.” Maeve’s voice, which had a tendency to boom in other circumstances, was so light I don’t know how Celeste could have heard her. It floated up towards the high ceiling.
Celeste shook her head. “Just do what Danny tells you for a change. I have to go.”
I leaned over and kissed Celeste. She was more than capable of rising to the occasion. She passed the ushers who were coming back down the aisles to pick up the scattered programs from the floor, sweeping the candy wrappers into their dustpans.
Maeve and I sat together in the theater seats. She let her head rest on my shoulder.
“She was very nice,” Maeve said.
“Most of the time she is.”
“Detente,” Maeve said.
“You’re feeling better.”
“A little. But it’s good to sit.” She took my handkerchief and blotted her face and neck. I took her hand and punched another hole in her fingertip to test her blood again.
“What is it?”
I peered at the strip. “Forty-two.”
“We’ll wait another minute.” She closed her eyes.
I looked across the sea of empty seats, inhaled the mix of perfumes hanging above us in the air. The mice and the snowflakes and the Christmas tree and the living room set, the audience who sat in the dark to watch—everything was gone now, everyone was gone, and it was just the two of us.
It had been just a minor miscalculation. Maeve would be fine.
I started to think I could put Maeve in my car and drive her around to see my buildings. I could drive her to Harlem and show her the very first brownstone I ever bought, then go to Washington Heights and show her the Health Sciences building that sat on top of the two parking lots I had owned for five months. I could give her the entire tour. Maeve may have known my business to the last dime but she’d never actually seen it. We could wind up at Café Luxembourg when we were finished, eat steak frites before going home. Kevin and May would be so happy to have her in the house that maybe Maeve and Celeste would see it was time to put it all to rest. If it was ever going to happen then this would be the day, lost as we had been to The Nutcracker and then the precipitous drop in blood sugar. Celeste had come to her aid, after all, and Maeve had been grateful. Even the oldest angers could be displaced. After a glass of wine, if she felt up to a glass of wine, Maeve would climb the stairs to May’s room, push the stuffed animals off the second bed so they could lie across from each other in the dark. May would tell her what the world looked like from those two cut-out eyeholes, and Maeve would tell her what she had seen from the fourteenth row. Upstairs in our own bed, Celeste would tell me it was okay that my sister was here, or better than okay. She’d finally been able to see Maeve as the person I had always known.
“No,” Maeve said. “Drive me home.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s a big night.”
She picked at the neck of her sweater. “I can’t wear these clothes for the rest of the night. I don’t even know if I can stand them on the drive home.”
“I’ll get you some clothes. Do you remember when I came and stayed with you in college? Dad dropped me off without a toothbrush, without anything. You took me shopping.”
“Oh, Danny, are you serious? I can’t go shopping, and I can’t spend the evening talking to the Norcrosses about ballet. I can barely keep my eyes open sitting here. My car’s at the train station. I have a meeting at work in the morning. I want to eat something and fall asleep in my own bed.” She turned to me in her seat. Soon enough we were going to wear out our welcome at the New York State Theater.
She was right, of course. I should have been thinking about how I was going to get her to the lobby, not how we would take a tour of the city and then stay up half the night. Fragility wasn’t a word I could attach to my sister but everything in her countenance made it clear. She took hold of my hand. “I’ll tell you what: you drive me home and spend the night. You haven’t spent the night in how many years? In the morning we’ll get up before the birds. I’ll be fine then. You can drive me to the station to get my car and then drive straight back to the city before the traffic. You could be home by seven. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that, would there? Celeste has her family here.”
There was plenty wrong with it, but I didn’t know what else we could have done. While everyone was off at May’s dinner, before the mouse-shaped cake that Celeste had taken over to the restaurant had been served, Maeve and I took a taxi back to the house. I knew that May would be disappointed and Celeste would be furious, but I also knew how sick Maeve had been, how exhausted she was. I knew that she alone in all the world would have done the same for me. Maeve sat on a little bench we kept by the front door for pulling boots off and on in the winter, and I ran upstairs, packed a bag and left a note.
Maeve slept in the car most of the way home. It was early December and the days were short and cold. I drove to Jenkintown in the dark, thinking all the time about the dinner I was missing, about May dancing in the mouse head. I called as soon as we got to Maeve’s house but no one answered. “Celeste, Celeste, Celeste,” I said into the machine. I pictured her in the kitchen, looking at the phone and turning away. Maeve had gone straight in to take a bath. I made us eggs and toast and we ate at her little kitchen table. When we went to bed it wasn’t even eight o’clock.
“At least we each have our own bedroom now,” I said. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”
“I never minded sleeping on the couch,” she said.
We said goodnight in the hallway. Maeve’s second bedroom doubled as her office, and I looked at the bookshelf full of binders that said conroy on the spine. I meant to pull one down for kicks, to take my mind off the disasters of the day, but then decided to close my eyes for just a minute and that was that.
When Maeve knocked on my door, she woke me from a dream in which I was trying to swim to Kevin. Every stroke I took towards him seemed to push him farther out, until I was struggling to see his head above the water’s chop. I kept calling for him to swim back but he was too far away to hear me. I sat straight up, gasping, trying to make sense of where I was. Then I remembered. I had never been so happy to be awake.