Wishing in the Wings (2 page)

Experience that I was never going to have now, due to legal wrangling.

I read the e-mail again, this time inserting the words between the printed lines. The grad student’s family must have sued Evan Morton. There was an electronic attachment to Elaine Harcourt’s e-mail. I clicked on it, and a legal document sprang to life on my screen, numbers marching down the left side, setting off each line. My eyes automatically jumped to the title of the document: Order Granting Temporary Restraining Order. I skimmed the legalese. I didn’t understand every word, but the overall sense was clear: the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York was prohibiting us, and anyone else, from producing Crystal Dreams until the underlying copyright dispute could be resolved.

I felt sick.

Auditions were scheduled to take place in ten days. I’d already spent weeks doing background work on the play, research about meth and prosecutorial misconduct and the difficult personal relationship that might—or might not—be at the core of the play.

Forget my work, though. Forget the designers who’d built set models, sketched costumes, planned a lighting grid. Forget the actors who had prepared audition monologues based on our announced show.

We suddenly had a gaping hole in our schedule. A hole that needed to be filled immediately.

I stared at the four rejected scripts I’d read through that morning. There wasn’t anything there that we could salvage. And truth be told, all the rest of the over-the-transom scripts on my desk were likely to be the same level of garbage.

I scrambled for my phone, punched in the four-digit extension of my assistant, Jennifer Davis.

“Hey!” she answered, her cheerful greeting the absolute opposite of the dread that chewed at my belly. “I didn’t know you were here! Can you come up front for a minute?”

I ignored her question and asked one of my own. “Is Hal in yet?”

Jenn’s desk was in the Bullpen, a space she shared with our all-purpose office manager and a couple of interns. She was within easy shouting distance of the Mercer’s artistic director. “He’s here,” she said, obviously a little puzzled by my question, “But he’s in a meeting. In the large conference room.”

“Damn!”

“Can I help with anything?”

I shook my head, momentarily forgetting that she couldn’t see me. I was going to have to interrupt the meeting. Hal needed to know the bad news immediately. “No,” I said, finally remembering to use my words. Then I recalled that she’d asked me to come up to the front. “I’ll be out there in a sec.”

I hung up the phone and stood, wiping my suddenly sweaty palms down my thighs. My heart was pounding as if I’d run a 10K. I worked my fingers through my hair, automatically twisting its wild waves into a loose knot at my nape. A few strawberry strands twined around my hands; I shook them into my trashcan and forced myself to take a steadying breath before heading out my office door.

I glanced toward Dean’s office. His light was still on; the door was still open. I walked close enough to see that the cup of coffee I’d left was still on the corner of his desk.

If possible, my heart beat even harder. Where was he? Worry for his safety twined between my jangling nerves. I turned on my heel and rushed to the Bullpen.

Jenn stood by her desk, her own obvious anxiety twisting her smile into something painful. Her expression was a direct contrast to the perky cockatiel screensaver that stared out from her computer. Jenn loved the birds; she owned a half dozen of them. Now, she turned her head to a distinctly parrot-like angle as she asked, “Are you okay?”

I shook my head, but I didn’t actually answer her question. “Have you seen Dean?”

“Not since… Wow, Monday, I guess.” Day before yesterday. Not good. “Um, Becca—”

I ignored her, glancing toward the large conference room where Hal was holed up. The door was closed and the shades were down, covering the floor-to-ceiling windows. That was strange—meetings around here were always open. “Any chance he’s in there?” I nodded toward the room.

Jennifer shrugged apologetically. “I don’t know. It’s a board meeting.”

“A board meeting? Hal didn’t mention one yesterday.”

“I don’t think he knew about it yesterday. Everyone was grumbling as they came in—I think it’s some sort of emergency.”

Emergency. The word shot another arrow of adrenaline into my heart. Something must have happened to Dean. Hal must have been working late last night, too, must have been here when Dean got sick. Seriously sick, if the board was already in an emergency session to figure out what they were going to do without a functioning director of finance.

But where was Dean? Was he in the hospital? And why hadn’t Hal called me? Why had he called in the board, but not reached out to me? It wasn’t like Dean and I had kept our relationship a secret. I folded my arms around my waist, trying to hold in a rising tide of nausea.

“Um, Becca,” Jenn said again. When I surfaced momentarily from my self-recriminations, she nodded toward the corner, toward one of the intern desks.

I followed her movement, only to find that a stranger was sitting in the intern’s chair. His winter coat, a ratty beige ski parka that had seen better days, was collapsed across the desk in front of him. The laces on one of his Chuck Taylors were working loose, and the tails of his shirt peeked out from beneath his moss-colored sweater. His dark curls still bore the marks from a comb, although they were struggling to break free.

Before I could say anything, Jenn said pointedly, “Becca, can I talk to you for a second?” She stalked across the Bullpen, trusting me to follow her into Hal’s office. I longed to refuse—I needed to get to the clandestine board meeting—but a tiny part of my mind gibbered that I didn’t want to know what was going on behind that closed door. I didn’t want to know about the emergency. I followed Jenn because she represented the path of least resistance.

“Don’t be angry with me,” she said as soon as the door was closed.

“Why would I be angry with you?” I heard the tension in my voice, but I didn’t bother to repeat my question, to sound less annoyed.

Jenn started toying with her wedding band, flicking her fingers across the celtic knotwork. We’d been working together for six months. I knew that fidget meant she was trying to sneak something past me. With her voice pitched half an octave higher than normal, she said, “Oh, forget it. You’ve obviously got more important things to worry about. I just had a stupid idea. I’ll take care of it.”

“Take care of what?” My nerves made the last word come out a lot louder than I’d intended.

“Shhh!” She glanced toward the closed door.

“Jenn, what is going on? Who is that guy?”

“One of the stalking list guys who came by to drop off a script after I told him that he needed to give it to you personally.”

“What?” She’d spoken so quickly that I barely caught the gist of what she’d said. “I could have sworn you just said that guy is on the stalking list.”

The stalking list. The short list of up and coming new playwrights that Jenn and I admired, the authors whose work we thought we might some day produce here at the Mercer. Jenn and I kept an eye on their Web sites, on their blogs, on ShowTalk, the social networking Web site for New York theater professionals. Basically, we tracked any place they might post online to share their creative process or their personal angst or what they’d eaten for dinner the night before. The important stuff, in other words. The stuff that would let us know when they’d written a new play, when they were ready to unveil a masterpiece-in-waiting to a sympathetic audience.

The whole idea, though, was supposed to be that we stalked them; we kept an eye on what they were writing. They weren’t supposed to come to us. They weren’t supposed to show up before the office even officially opened on a random Wednesday morning in the beginning of March. But Jennifer was obviously pretty invested in this whole thing. “Which one is he?” I asked, intrigued despite myself.

Jenn twisted her hands in front of her. “I’m sorry, Becca. I know I should have just sent him away. But he looked so cute, standing there, like a little boy turning in his English homework.”

“Jenn, I just read four of the worst plays I’ve ever seen. You know that we don’t accept submissions over the transom.”

“But we do, unofficially. And he’s on the list!”

She had a point. Possibly. “Who is he?” I asked again.

“Ryan Thompson.”

I blinked. Ryan wasn’t on my stalking list. Jenn had found him, just a few weeks before. She’d read some comments he’d posted on a public blog, something about the role of the modern playwright in creating a communal dialog about social responsibility. She’d been intrigued by what he had to say. (Yeah, we folks in the Mercer’s literary department were total theater geeks.) Mostly, though, she’d been impressed with how he’d said it. In fact, she’d been interested enough to track down a copy of his first play, something that had been produced once, at a university in the wilds of Roanoke, Virginia.

And now the guy was sitting in our office, waiting to talk to me. “Jenn, I don’t know anything about him!”

She bit her lip and then said, “Trust me. Remember? He’s the Peace Corps guy.” Peace Corps… Ryan had just returned from a two-year stint abroad—in Africa, somewhere. I nodded slowly, vaguely recalling what Jenn had told me. She apparently interpreted my nod as acquiescence about reading his play. She clasped her hands in front of her, the very picture of riotous joy. “You won’t regret this, I’m sure.”

“I haven’t agreed to do anything yet,” I grumbled.

“Please, Becca? Just take his envelope. Tell him you’ll read it in the order received, and send him on his way.”

“You could have done that!”

“Yeah,” she said, sulkily. “I should have.”

Before I could argue with her anymore, a phone started to ring out in the Bullpen. Jenn sighed and opened Hal’s office door, rushing to her desk to answer the line. Apparently, the caller wanted to reorganize the United Nations into something only slightly more bureaucratic—at least that’s what Jenn implied with her body language. She was clearly too busy to return to the matter at hand. Too busy to talk to Ryan Thompson and send him on his way. Too busy to save me.

I sighed and threw back my shoulders, trying to look professional as I crossed the room. I’d take the stupid manuscript, remind this Ryan guy of our submission policy, and get back to the morning’s serious work of tracking down Dean. And then I’d tell Hal about the Crystal Dreams disaster. Joy, oh joy—the theater life just didn’t get any better than this. My belly churned again, as I glanced over my shoulder at the conference room.

Our visitor stood as I approached him. “Ms. Morris, I’m Ryan Thompson,” he said. His shoulders hunched, as if he didn’t want to frighten me with his full height. He turned his head a little as he introduced himself, smiling shyly and looking at a point somewhere beyond my left ear. “Thank you for taking the time to see me,” he said.

Well, technically, I hadn’t agreed to take the time. In fact, technically I didn’t have the time. I had to say something, though, so I introduced myself, even though he obviously knew who I was. “Rebecca Morris.” And then I remembered my manners. It wouldn’t kill me to be polite, for just a minute. “Jenn said that you’ve just returned from Africa?”

“I’ve been back in the States for a couple of months.” I glanced at his heavy sweater, at his rumpled coat. Despite their appearance, they must be new—he certainly wouldn’t have needed them in Africa. He cleared his throat, drawing my gaze back to his face. When he spoke, his words were slow, as if he were used to thinking in a foreign language. “Jenn was kind enough to read some comments I made on the Internet. She said you wouldn’t mind reading my new play. It’s called However Long.”

He looked so nervous, so pitiful, that I had to respond. “However Long?” I asked.

“It comes from an African proverb. ‘However long the night, the dawn will break.’”

Despite myself, I shivered. What did this guy know about long nights? I looked down the hallway, toward my office, toward Dean’s empty one. It was well past dawn, well past time I should have heard from my absentee boyfriend. Well past time for me to wrap up this conversation and find out what was going on in the conference room.

I reached out for Ryan’s envelope. The manila corners were crisp and neat, as if he’d carried his treasure carefully all the way to our office. He’d used a computer to print out his address label, putting both his name and my own in clear, legible type. The plain white square was centered precisely on the envelope.

Given the muck of unsolicited manuscripts I’d already waded through that morning, the condition of Ryan’s submission seemed to be a sign from some benevolent heaven.

“I can’t promise anything,” I warned him. “Ordinarily, we only take submissions through agents, and even then, it can take several weeks for us to get around to reading them.”

Again, he gave me that shy grin, and he buried his hands in his pockets, as if he wanted his clothes to swallow him whole. “I completely understand. I wouldn’t have bothered you at all, if Jennifer hadn’t said…” He trailed off, obviously worried that he was going to get my assistant in trouble.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

His relief was almost palpable. “I won’t take any more of your time, Ms. Morris. I enclosed a card with all of my contact information. I really appreciate the chance that you’re giving me.”

“My pleasure,” I said automatically, tucking his envelope under my arm to symbolize that we were done with our conversation. He nodded, taking the hint, and then Jenn magically concluded her phone call. Suddenly suspicious, I wondered if she’d been chattering on a dead line for the past few minutes. “I’m afraid, though, that I’ll have to let Jennifer show you out. I’m on my way into a meeting.”

Jenn stepped out from behind her desk, a smile broad across her face. She started to walk Ryan toward the door, taking only a moment to look over her shoulder, to mouth a heartfelt, “Thank you!” to me. I nodded and barely waited until they were out of sight before I turned toward the conference room. My hand shook as I opened the door.