INTO HIS HANDS

What Theo Does

Ten days before opening night Theo Reeves does something that makes me understand exactly who he is underneath the warmth and the easy smile and the coffee appearing from nowhere.

He finds me crying in the equipment room.

Not the dramatic version of crying. The specific private version I have been doing every morning for a week when the session ends and the company disperses and I have approximately seven minutes before the next thing begins. The version I have been hiding from everyone including Zane because Zane sees everything and I am not ready for him to see this specific thing yet.

It is six forty in the morning.

The equipment room is empty.

I am sitting on the floor behind the second equipment rack with my knees pulled up and my chalk bag beside me and the specific quality of someone who has given themselves exactly seven minutes and is using them efficiently.

Theo comes in for his morning kit.

He sees me immediately.

He stops.

I look up.

He looks at me.

He does not say: are you okay. He does not say: what's wrong. He does not perform the concerned expression or reach for the helpful words or do any of the things people do when they encounter someone crying and do not know what to do with the encountering.

He sits down on the floor beside me.

He leans his back against the equipment rack.

He says: I won't stay if you want to be alone.

I say: you can stay.

He says: okay.

He stays.

He does not say anything else.

He just sits beside me on the equipment room floor in the six forty morning and lets me have the remaining four minutes without making them about him or about fixing anything or about the fact that I am Ivy Calloway who holds everything together and is currently on the floor behind the second equipment rack crying.

After four minutes I stop.

I wipe my face with the back of my chalk hand which does nothing useful but is what you do.

He says: better?

I say: yes.

He says: good.

He stands up.

He gets his morning kit from the rack above me.

He says: Augustus ate his entire breakfast this morning without pausing to look at me suspiciously. He says it to the kit bag. That's a significant development. He's been pausing to look at me suspiciously since I arrived.

I say: he does that with everyone at first.

He says: I know. He looks at me from above. He didn't pause with your father apparently.

I say: no.

He says: he sounds like someone Augustus would approve of immediately.

I say: he was.

Theo looks at me.

He says: tell me something about him. Something specific. Not the funeral version. Something real.

I look at the equipment room floor.

I say: he used to talk to the rigging. Not to himself. To the rigging specifically. He would walk the big top in the morning and he would say things to the cables. Telling them what was expected of them that day. Rosa thought it was eccentric. He said you had to respect the equipment enough to talk to it.

Theo is quiet.

He says: that's not eccentric.

I say: I know.

He says: that's someone who understood that everything alive deserves to be spoken to. He says it simply. Including the things that are only alive in the way that things cared for become alive.

I look at him.

He looks back.

He says: he sounds extraordinary.

I say: he was the most ordinary extraordinary person I have ever known.

Theo nods.

He picks up his kit bag.

He says: seven minutes tomorrow. Same place if you need it.

He walks out.

I sit on the floor of the equipment room and I think about the most ordinary extraordinary person I have ever known and I think about someone who understood that everything alive deserves to be spoken to and I think about Theo sitting down on the floor without being asked and leaving without making it more than it was.

I think: this man is genuinely good.

I think: the reader is going to love him.

Then I think: that is a strange thought to have.

I go to the cookhouse.

Mira is at the corner table with Cole.

Not notebooks. Not coffees. Just the two of them at the corner table talking in the specific way of people who have moved past the point where they need a reason to be in the same place.

Mira looks up when I come in.

She reads my face.

She says: equipment room.

I say: yes.

She says: Theo found you.

I say: yes.

She says: and.

I say: he sat down and didn't say anything useful and then told me about Augustus and asked me about my father. I sit down. And then he left.

Mira looks at me.

Cole looks at his coffee.

Mira says: he sat down on the floor.

I say: yes.

She says: without being asked.

I say: yes.

She says: and didn't try to fix anything.

I say: no.

She is quiet.

She says: Ivy.

I say: I know.

She says: that's.

I say: I know Mira.

She looks at her coffee.

Cole looks at his coffee.

Both of them are very interested in their coffees.

I say: it's not. I stop. It's not that.

Mira says: I didn't say anything.

I say: you were about to say something.

She says: I was going to say that's a specific kind of person. She looks at me. The kind who sits down on the floor without being asked. She pauses. Those are rare.

I say: yes.

She says: Zane checks the rigging at three forty five.

I say: yes.

She says: Theo sits on the floor.

I say: yes.

She says: different languages.

I say: yes.

She says: same thing.

I look at her.

She looks back.

She says: I'm not saying anything else.

She picks up her coffee.

She drinks it.

Cole says without looking up: the ending is better than you're expecting.

He says it to his cup.

Mira looks at him.

He looks at his cup.

She smiles.

I drink my coffee.

I think about different languages and the same thing and I think about chalk white hands and equipment room floors and I think about ten days.

Ten days.