The stage at five to ten was lit in two stages — work lights flat and white from the grid, and a single warm wash that had been left on overnight from the previous load-in and that nobody had bothered to kill. Lane stood center and let the warm one find her. Her shoes she had left at the wing.
The third row had a coat over the back of one seat. Tweed, dark, lined; not there an hour ago, when she had walked through the empty house on her way to the stage door. Adam was somewhere in the building.
She let out the breath she had been holding without knowing it. The acoustic returned it off the back wall a half-beat late, the way it had returned her opening line yesterday. A working room.
Vivien Soul came in through the house, not the wings. She wore her rehearsal layer already — soft pants, a wrap top, a cardigan over both — and she walked the center aisle like a person who had walked it five hundred times. Instead of climbing up, she set her bag on the lip of the stage, set a second water bottle on the lip beside the first, and looked up at Lane in the warm light.
"Marsh."
"Soul."
"You read in for me last week."
"At the audition."
"Mm." She tugged the cuffs of the cardigan down over her wrists. "He'll start with the corridor scene. Don't sit between cues. He hates it when people sit between cues."
"Thanks."
It was the kindness Vivien would extend to anyone in her place, and Lane took it without making weight of it.
Behind Vivien, at the back of the house, a man came in carrying a paper cup. He did not call hello. He took the next-to-last seat in the back row, took a script out of an inside pocket of a thick wool jacket, turned to a page, and waited. Silver hair, broad in the shoulders, a stillness that read as a working actor's economy. Vivien glanced back, registered him without a flicker, and turned again to Lane.
"That's Tom. Don't try to make him laugh in the morning. He's a person after one."
"Noted."
Adam came in through a side door at the front, jacket already off, sleeves rolled to the elbow once and not twice. He went up the four steps to the apron, said good morning to Vivien with a single hand on her shoulder and immediately removed, looked at Lane and said, "We'll do the corridor scene. Marsh, you're in. Thomas — when she's set, do me the favor of reading in Marcus from where you are."
"Happy to."
"From the threshold. Vivien, you cross at her line. Marsh — you've already been in the room an hour. We pick up from there."
He went down off the stage and along the center aisle and dropped into the third row beside the coat. He folded his arms without picking up a script.
Lane took her position. Stage right of an imaginary doorway. The boards under her socked feet were warm where the work light hit and cool where it did not, and she let her weight settle through the floor as she had been settling weight on stages since she was nineteen. She set her hands at her sides. Her face she set at neutral.
Vivien crossed from up left, hit her mark inside the imaginary doorway, and said her line.
Lane responded. Three lines went between them. Vivien added a small turn at the third line that she had not made on the audition tape, and Lane registered the change and answered to where Vivien now was, not where Vivien had been.
"Stop."
Adam's voice carried up clean. He did not stand.
"Marsh. When Soul turns at the line, what do you do?"
"I follow her with my eyes."
"Why."
She paused. "Because she's moved."
"That's a description. Why."
The acoustic, this time, returned nothing because nothing had been said. Something inside her ribs did a small unexpected thing.
"Because I'm trying to read where she's going."
"Why are you trying to read where she's going."
"Because — " She let the answer come up. "Because I haven't decided if I trust her."
"Good. Go again. The eyes go because the eyes are looking for evidence. Not because she moved."
He sounded like a man at work. They went again.
The scene ran six minutes. He stopped them four times. Each stop was a question, and each question was about Lane, not the line, and each question required an answer she did not have ready and had to find on the floor of her body before she could speak it. By the fourth stop she had stopped trying to be clever. She said the simplest thing she could say. Twice he said good. Once he said, "That's a guess. Try again." Once he said nothing and waited for her to walk past her first sentence into the second.
Vivien played beside her like a machined component. There was a moment when Lane caught Vivien's eye and Vivien blinked once, slow, as an old hand blinks at a new hand to mean: yes, this is what he does.
At eleven-forty Adam called break. Vivien went straight off through the wings. Thomas stayed in his seat and read his page. Lane went down off the stage in her socks and stopped at her shoes at the wing and put them on slowly because her hands wanted something to do.
A voice came across the house from the back row, low and well placed and untroubled.
"Marsh."
She turned.
Thomas had not stood. He was looking at her over the top of the script. The look held a beat past the end of address — a beat and a half, perhaps. Then, conversationally: "He'll keep doing that. The questions. Don't let him pull you out."
"Thanks."
"You answered well." A small pause, careful. "The hand."
"The hand?"
"You had it open at your side at the third line. Most people make a fist."
"Oh."
"Where did you learn that."
She had not learned it anywhere. She had grown up next to a person who had it. She kept her face level and made her voice belong to a stranger.
"I have no idea."
He made a small sound that was not a laugh and was not anything else, and he went back to his page.
She walked up the aisle.
Adam was standing at the third row, not for her but because he was due somewhere in the next ten minutes and was already moving toward it. He waited until she was level with his row.
"One thing." His voice was pitched low enough to require pitching, although nothing in this building required pitching, because the acoustic carried everything anyway. "When she turns at the line — don't follow with your face. Just the eyes. The face stays at the door. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Good." His hand found the coat. "Go."
That was the whole exchange. The kind of note a director gave any actor who could use it. She went through the doors at the back of the house and out into the corridor that smelled of paint, like yesterday, and she was on the wrong side of relaxed before she had identified that there was a side to be on.
The afternoon ran two more sessions. By six, the warm wash had been killed, the work lights were down to half, two stagehands were resetting chairs in the second row, and Vivien had gone home with a nod that meant she would do this every day. Thomas had left at four.
Lane was at the wing pulling her sweater back on when Adam came up the aisle.
"Marsh. Two minutes."
She turned. He was standing at the apron with a manila folder in one hand. The folder was the kind every actor in the troupe got handed at some point — Carroll Stage standard, a small blue stamp at the corner, no name on the tab.
"Material for the role," he said. "Have it for Thursday. There's a USB inside. Files labeled by date. You don't need to watch all of it. The audition's the relevant one."
"Of mine?"
"No." His face did not change. "Of someone we used in a similar part once. To see how they came at it. Standard practice. I do this with new people."
"All right."
He held the folder out across the apron. She came down the steps and took it. Their hands did not touch. The folder weighed what folders weighed; the small drive inside it shifted with a faint sound.
"Thursday," he said.
"Thursday."
He turned and went up the aisle and did not look at her again. The stagehands kept resetting chairs. She stood at the foot of the stage with the folder in her hand and the corridor smell of paint on her clothes.
The understudies' dressing room sat at the end of a back corridor — four mirrors, four lamps, four chairs, all four chairs at the moment empty. She took the seat closest to the door. The radiator under the counter was on too high; the air had the dry, faintly metallic taste of overworked heat at the back of her tongue. She put the folder under the lamp. She took her laptop out of her bag.
The drive had a paper sticker on it. The sticker had a date in handwriting that was not Adam's — clerical, unfussed, the kind of writing a stage manager used. The date was seven and a half years ago.
She put it in.
A folder opened. Three files. Two of them were named for actors whose names she did not recognize. The third was labeled with three letters and a date.
The three letters were initials.
She knew the initials. She put on her headphones and clicked.
A black square gave way to a wide shot of an empty stage seen from approximately the third row. The same boards. Out from the wing came a young woman in jeans and a black sweater, with the wrong shoes for stage and the right face, and she walked to the center and put a hand on the back of an upright chair that had been left there for her and turned it forty-five degrees and sat. She raised her face to the front.
Clara at twenty-eight. Not yet who she would be — not polished, not yet a name pronounced in low voices in rooms in this city. The hair was longer. The face was unguarded in a way the face had not been in any photograph Lane had seen of her sister since.
She gave her slate. The voice of Clara at twenty-eight was an octave lower than the voice of Clara on the phone last night, and there was no varnish on it.
She began the monologue.
A page in, mid-sentence, the line broke into a held silence. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. The next word came clean.
The bulb in the mirror over Lane's left shoulder began a low electrical hum that meant a filament was going. It found the room. It did not find her.
The screen kept playing. Clara on the chair on the stage kept moving her mouth, and the words came out at a different pitch from the pitch on the phone last night, because this was the voice before the room had taught it to defend itself.
Lane did not press stop.
The blue of the laptop was on her face. The yellow of the desk lamp was on her hands. Outside the dressing-room door the corridor had gone quiet, because the stagehands had finished and gone home, and the building had handed itself over to its night staff, and the only sound in the small room was the bulb starting to fail and the small clean voice of a woman at twenty-eight giving her sister a piece of evidence she had not known she was carrying.