The Blue Line out toward O'Hare ran nearly empty after eleven, and Lane sat in the third car because the third car was usually the emptiest, and because she had a habit she would not have called superstition. Two stops past the river the lights inside the car flickered, found themselves again, and held.
She had not gone back to the apartment.
Outside the window Pilsen had given way to a darker horizon — warehouses, the curve of an expressway ramp, the orange underside of bridge lights. The vinyl seat was cold through her coat. She had been carrying the coat under her arm when she left the theater, and she had not put it on until she was already on the platform; she had walked the four blocks from Carroll Stage in the wrong layer for the temperature, and her body had told her about it the way bodies told you about small mistakes you made when the head was elsewhere.
In the right pocket the ring sat quietly. Her hand found it without lifting it out, the small weight registering against the side of one finger, and she let it go.
Three voicemails on the phone. None of them open.
She rode out to the end of the line because the end of the line was a thing with a published time. The train would sit at the platform with its doors open for nine minutes before it turned around, and nine minutes was a number she could absorb.
At the terminus the doors opened on a wind off the runways. A janitor pushed a wheeled bucket along the far end of the platform. Two men in rumpled suits got off and disappeared up the escalator without looking at anything. Lane stayed in her seat and turned the phone screen up on her thigh.
The first voicemail had come in at twelve thirty-two. She pressed the icon.
"Tell me you haven't changed your mind."
That was all. There was another two seconds of breath and then the click of disconnect, and inside the breath was the thing Lane had not wanted to hear before she got on the train. Clara's voice carried a register Lane had heard maybe four times in her life. Consonants put down too carefully. Spaces between phrases too generous. The sound of a person performing sobriety into a phone she had not noticed was recording her.
Lane closed the message. The other two stayed unopened. She called.
Three rings. Four. The line picked up on the fifth, and Clara's "Hi" arrived a beat later than a hello arrived from a sober person.
"I'm in," Lane said.
A small intake of breath on the other side. The kind that traveled before the speaker had decided whether the news was good. Then: "He cast you."
"Understudy. Supporting third lead."
"Understudy."
"It's the way in."
The pause that followed was Clara's pause, not the six-count, the indeterminate kind that ran while a person upstairs decided where to land. Inside the small acoustic of the phone Lane heard the distant ceramic sound of a glass being set on a counter.
"Good," Clara said. "That's the way in. That's where you start."
There was a question Clara had not asked, which was how the audition had gone. There was a question Lane had not offered, which was the one she had ridden the train for, which was the name of a man in the third row who had stood up. The shape of the conversation built itself around the absence the way water built itself around a stone.
"Are you all right?" Lane asked.
"I'm fine."
"It's almost one."
"I'm fine, Lane. I had a glass. I'm fine."
"Get some sleep."
"You too."
Lane hung up first. That had not been the plan. She put the phone face down on the seat beside her and watched, through the open door of the car, the janitor sweep a candy wrapper along the platform with the side of his foot. The wrapper went one way and then the other and finally settled near the rail.
She had told her sister she had been cast. She had not told her sister that the man casting her had spoken her name into the room from three rows back. The omission had cost her nothing. It had passed across her teeth without leaving a mark.
She sat with that for the nine minutes the train sat at the platform.
At seven forty in the morning she was on the second floor of Carroll Stage with her coat on and the phone silenced in the bag.
Noreen King's office sat two doors past Adam's. Noreen was already at the desk when Lane came in — glasses on a chain around her neck, a pot of coffee that smelled, by the strength of the air around it, to have been brewed at six. A printer hummed behind her. On the floor near the radiator was a low cardboard box marked PROGRAMS — FALL.
"Marsh," Noreen said. "Sit."
She sat.
The contract was three pages, paper-clipped at the corner, with an additional one-page rider. Noreen walked her through it with the efficiency of a woman who had done this several hundred times — finger down a margin, pen turned and offered, a small cleared throat at the place where the rehearsal-schedule clause sat.
"You're aware we go six days a week starting Monday."
"I'm aware."
"Tech week is the week of the eighteenth. No exceptions. Funerals included. I tell everyone."
"Understood."
"Bank account."
Lane recited the routing and account numbers from memory; she had opened the account in the Lane Marsh name six weeks ago, at a branch on Western Avenue, and she had been keeping the digits on the surface of her mind ever since.
"Emergency contact."
The pen, just lifted, hovered.
"I'll bring it tomorrow," Lane said. "I have to check a number."
Noreen wrote a small dash in the box and moved on. "Bring it. Headshot we have. W-9 you'll fill in here."
The signature line was at the bottom of page three. Noreen set the page in front of her and rotated it to face the right way.
The hand had been doing this signature for six weeks. It had done it on bank forms and on a sublease and on a delivery slip for a chair Lane had not needed. The hand knew the loops. The wrist knew the place where the L curved back into itself.
She signed.
It looked like a signature. Noreen took the page back without a word, bound it with the others, applied a stamp from a pad on the corner of the desk, and slid a copy across the wood.
"Welcome to the troupe."
The phrase landed two beats slower than an identical phrase the night before, in the same building, in a different mouth. Lane took the copy and folded it once.
"Mr. Carroll's expecting you on the stage at ten," Noreen said. "He's in the building."
In the corridor the morning had begun to assemble itself. Two of the technical staff were carrying a flat between them, sideways, calling instructions back and forth in the abbreviated language of a crew that had been working together a long time. A vacuum ran somewhere on the lower floor.
Adam came out of his office carrying a mug and a roll of pages and a pencil tucked behind his ear. He walked the center line of the corridor, not the side. He saw her.
His eyes crossed her face like a column in a chart — taking the value, registering it, continuing on to the next. The pencil behind his ear stayed where it had been. The mug stayed level. He inclined his head a fraction, the fractional inclination that was, in this building, the daily greeting between a director and a member of his troupe.
Then he was past her.
Behind her, two doors down, his door closed with the small deliberate firmness of a man who closed doors as a habit and not as an opinion.
The corridor smelled of paint and coffee. Her coat was still on her shoulders. Her contract was folded once in her left hand. She had been welcomed twice in twelve hours by the same building, and the building did not seem to have noticed either welcome.
She stood there a moment, and then she walked.
The apartment was on the third floor of a building on Eighteenth, three stops from the theater, sublet through a friend of a friend who had moved to Madison for a year. It came with one chair, one bed, one lamp, a kettle, and the previous tenant's collection of unopened condiments in the door of the refrigerator. She had brought a single suitcase from her own apartment in Logan Square and had not finished unpacking it after eight days, because finishing the unpacking would have meant a position on how long she was staying.
She stood in the doorway with the contract still folded in her hand.
Then she went and unpacked the suitcase.
She did it in the wrong order, which is to say she did it in the order in which the things came out, not the order in which they would eventually go. Sweaters on the chair. Two pairs of jeans on top of the sweaters. Toiletry bag onto the bathroom counter. A paperback on the floor by the bed because there was nowhere else for paperbacks to go. The empty suitcase she set on its side against the wall and looked at, briefly, and left where it was.
At the bottom of the suitcase, under a sweatshirt she had brought to sleep in and not used, was a manila folder.
She took it out and put it on the kitchen counter under the lamp.
Inside, three things. A copy of a W-2 from her last legitimate job, two years old, in her real name. The lease on the Logan Square apartment, in her real name. And the resume on which she had written, six weeks ago at a kitchen table in another part of the city, the name LANE MARSH at the top.
She lifted the resume.
The signature at the bottom was hers. Black ink. The loops of the L the same as the loops on the contract she had folded into Noreen's office an hour ago. The small flourish on the s at the end — the flourish she had been making since she was twelve, when Clara had taught her how to sign her name at the kitchen table because she'd said somebody one day was going to put a paper in front of her and she should not look at it like a child.
It was not a forgery. There was no forger. The hand was hers. Only the name was wrong.
In a forger's signature you could see the place where the body had stopped trusting itself. There was no such place on the page. The hand had agreed to do this. The hand had lied without telling her.
She opened the second drawer of the small dresser in the corner, the drawer that held a folded grocery receipt and nothing else. She placed the resume in the drawer, signature side up, and closed it.
She stood with her hand on the drawer pull.
Out on Eighteenth somebody started a car. The kettle in the kitchenette had the small ticking sound it made cooling, although she had not boiled it. The phone on the chair, under the jeans, did not ring.
Two voicemails were still unopened in it.