But now, I wish dearly that Kintyre was here, so that he could tell me if any of my preparations, my concerns, my predictions are anywhere near good enough.
“Forsyth!” Pip hisses at us as she crosses the expansive hotel lobby to where we stand, just inside the grand entryway. “This is not the side door.”
Elgar, clearly travel-fuddled, plane-rumpled, and hazy from pain medication, stands his wheelie suitcase up to balance on its own in the middle of the crowded hotel lobby, and says, quite eloquently: “What?”
“The side door,” Pip says again, crowding up next to him, trying to get her body between him and the open windows of the front wall. Of course, she will never be able to completely block him. Elgar is both taller and wider than my wife. “Remember how you were supposed to come to the exit near the—?”
“It was locked,” I interrupt. “We tried.”
Pip grimaces, then waves it away.
She tries to hustle us toward the elevator banks, but Elgar’s brain clearly hasn’t caught up with the rest of him. He tries to twist his head to follow her, but his feet stay planted and he stumbles. I catch his arm, and he winces and bites back a groan. He’s holding himself stiffly. He is not as well as he thinks he is, and he is overdoing it because he is vainglorious and ridiculous.
And I will admit, he is not the only one of us who is feeling fuddled and sore. Oh, how I hate airplanes. How Pip looks so energetic is beyond me, and so very unfair. Her plane only landed two hours before ours. She has checked into the hotel on our behalf, but she cannot have had the opportunity for a nap and a shower.
“Christ, you’ve lost weight,” Pip says, staring at where her hand landed on Elgar’s chest to keep him from falling.
“Yeah. Living in utter fear for three months does that to you,” he says, trying for a light, jocular tone and nearly getting there. Pip allows my creator the hug he is obviously angling for, though it’s more like he collapses around her shoulders than hugs her. They are not as awkward as they have been in the past, and that is something, at least. Though Pip does wince when his meaty hand lands between her shoulder blades. Elgar doesn’t notice, of course. It seems I am the least injured of the lot of us, which doesn’t fill me with confidence for the coming days.
“I’m pretty darn pleased to see you again,” he says softly. “Nearly thought I wouldn’t.”
“How’s Juan?” Pip asks, breaking away to grab the handle of his large wheeled suitcase. She is subtly trying to shove him toward the elevator again. He is still not catching the hint. I scan the crowd around us, checking to see how many people noticed him stumbling in through the front door.
Too many for my liking, is the answer.
“Another week in the cast,” Elgar says. He mimes a covering from shoulder to fingertips. “But they set his nose real nice.”
“Come, we’re attracting attention,” I point out, and indeed we are. Around us, fans wheeling their own suitcases and carrying their large costume props have paused in filtering toward the check-in counter. Elgar’s silhouette is distinctive. Before a gaggle of young ladies standing just to one side of us have managed to screw up their courage and set off a domino-chain of fans approaching us, I thread my arm through Elgar’s, as if he were a vaunted magisterial elder, and maneuver us toward the elevator banks. Pip is watching both of us, keeping his bag between us and the rest of the people in this tiny hallway.
Déjà vu settles hard between my eyes as we wait for the elevator to arrive. Two summers ago, when Pip was enormously pregnant, we traveled to this very city to meet Elgar for the very first time. And here Elgar and I now are, staring at each other via the reflective mirrored walls, pretending that we aren’t terrified of what’s to come.
I take a moment to really study Elgar, for his weight loss was not as startlingly apparent to me, as I have seen it happening bit by bit. Elgar’s face is a bit more gaunt than the first time I met him, his double chin turning to sagging jowls. He’s covered it well by letting his beard grow in a bit more, but the salt-and-pepper of his hair has given over entirely to salt now. He looks tired. His cheeks are flushed, and his eyes are slightly glazed. He is blinking unevenly, swaying a little on the spot as we wait. His clothes are just slightly too baggy. All in all, he’s probably lost about twenty pounds, but I cannot fault him if his appetite has been off since the stalking began, and that he hasn’t been eating much at all since the salad incident.
In short, he looks more like my life-worn, alcoholic father than ever, and I must forcibly remind myself that the man beside me is Elgar, not Algar. The dim, inadequate lighting and bronzy hue of the mirror does much to try to fool me of this fact, though, so I must look away to regard my creator’s profile instead of the reflection, to see the difference. A twist of fear that I had not realized had screwed itself into the place behind my sternum uncoils. The thrum of adrenaline is unexpected, as is the remnant of childhood terror that had kept me small and quiet around my father. In my own reflection, I see that my shoulders have rounded down, my face lowered; I am trying to be small and unobtrusive. In my mouth, my tongue flutters.
Blast and rubbish, and damn all that to all seven of the hells, anyway.
I take a calming breath, force myself to stretch my spine, to raise my eyes to Elgar and smile as reassuringly as I can. He is
