When the bear man and the snake girl removed their masks, Lenka saw that the girl was about her age, with very fair skin and very dark hair cut in a square bob. She made her compliment to the audience without a glimmer of a smile, one arm raised, her knee cocked, pivoting to acknowledge the applause.
“Very professional.” Mama approved.
The next act was Battina, capeless, and with black velvet cat ears sticking out of her thickly coiled hair. She swept in, proud as a queen, heading a procession of seven cats, their tails and heads held high.
Lenka had seen cat acts before — mostly on YouTube. Cats are cats. Even when they’re trained, they tend to wander off or roll belly-up or wash themselves. Not Battina’s cats. They walked a slack rope, jumped through hoops, balanced on a pole, and most remarkably of all, performed a kind of kitty synchronous dance routine in perfect unison, guided by Battina’s chirps and meows.
“The woman’s a witch,” Mama muttered.
“Shh,” Lenka said.
When the lights came up for intermission, Papa turned to her anxiously. “You like?”
“She’d better,” Mama said.
“The cats were way cool. And the contortionist is the bomb. Can I get a Coke at the bar? I’m really thirsty.”
After the break came a female sword swallower, a Japanese girl on a unicycle, and a slack-rope walker in a striped unitard that covered him to the knees. Lenka judged them all better than competent, but uninspired.
The contortionist reappeared, cartwheeling out between the curtains and down the runway, a simple effect made spectacular by the shimmering bat’s wings that stretched from her ankles to her wrists. Reaching the center of the ring, she reached up, grasped a previously invisible bar, and rode it slowly upward. Lenka’s throat closed in pure envy.
About six feet up, the trapeze stopped and the girl beat up to standing, bent her knees, and set the trapeze in motion, her wings rippling as she swung.
“She’s going to get those tangled in the ropes,” Mama muttered darkly.
She didn’t. Lenka watched the girl flow through her routine, twisting, coiling, somersaulting, hanging by her hands, her neck, one foot, an arm, as if the laws of gravity and physics had been suspended just for her. She must be incredibly strong. She must be incredibly disciplined. She must not have any friends, or go to movies or play video games or be on Facebook, just train and perform and sleep and do her chores and her lessons and train some more. It wasn’t a normal life. Mama and Papa said Lenka would learn to like normal life, if it turned out that she couldn’t perform.
Mama and Papa were so totally wrong.
Lenka knew her parents. No matter what her letter said, they’d look for her, and the first place they’d look was the Cirque des Chauve-souris. She spent a couple of days hiding out, mostly in the Cleveland Art Museum, on the theory that it was the last place on Earth they’d expect her to be.
After the Cirque des Chauve-souris’s last show, she gave herself a quick sponge bath in the museum john and headed downtown.
Lenka had been hoping to slip in under cover of the mob scene that was a circus breaking down. When she found the backyard deserted, she was a little freaked out, but she didn’t let it stop her from slipping through the stage door.
A voice spoke out of the darkness. “We wondered when you’d show up.”
Lenka froze.
“Don’t worry,” the voice said. “We won’t call the police.”
“The police?”
The contortionist stepped into the light. Close up, she looked smaller and paler. “They’ve been here twice, looking for Lenka Kubatov, age eighteen, five foot six, brown-brown, hundred fifteen, kind of fragile looking. That’s you, right?”
Fragile looking? Lenka shrugged. “That’s me.”
“You ran away from home? Why? Do your parents beat you?”
“No,” Lenka said. “My parents are great.”
“Then why.?”
Lenka squared her shoulders. “I want to join the circus.
The contortionist laughed. “That’s a new one,” she said. “Well, you’d better come talk to Battina.”
The ringmistress of the Chauve-souris was helping the strong man unbolt the booth partitions and banquettes from the walls. There wasn’t a roustabout in sight.
“The runaway,” she said when she saw Lenka. “Hector, I need a drink.”
The strong man laughed and slotted the partition into a padded wooden crate. “Later,” he said.
Battina settled herself on a banquette, for all the world as if she hadn’t been lifting part of it a moment before. “You must call your parents,” she said severely.
Lenka shook her head. “I’m eighteen.”
“The police said you are sick.”
“I
“What was wrong with you?” Hector asked.
“Cancer,” Lenka said shortly. “Leukemia.”
Battina and Hector exchanged unreadable looks.
“What do you want?” Battina asked, as if she didn’t much care.
Lenka’s heart beat harder.
“I want to come with you,” she said. “I know I’m not up to performing, but you look like you could use some crew. I can put up rigs, I can clean cages, I can handle props. And I’m good at front-of-house stuff. You don’t even have to pay me — not right away.” She felt her eyes prickle with rising tears. “Without the circus, I’m not really alive. Please. Let me come with you.”
Her voice broke. Disgusted, she fished in her shoulder bag for a Kleenex and blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said hoarsely. “That was unprofessional.”
“That was truth.” Battina tapped her teeth with her thumbnail. “I can’t deny we could use help — someone who understands American
“I’ve never done it,” Lenka said truthfully. “But I can try.”
“Our manager we lost in New York,” Battina said. “He left us with big mess — papers, engagements in cities I have never heard of. I am artist, not telephone operator. You think you can fix?”
Lenka wanted to say she was an artist, too. But she wasn’t — not while she was sidelined. “Yes.”
Battina’s gaze shifted over Lenka’s shoulder. “What do you say?”
Lenka spun around to face the performers of the Cirque des Chauve-souris, who had gathered behind her so silently that she hadn’t even known they were there. Skin pasty under the work lights, they measured her with narrowed eyes.
