The news fades away. Toby wraps his fingers over my shoulder and pulls me on top of him. The television is forgotten. He places his lips on mine, and I fully expect that his kiss will be magical, that I’ll be carried away, lifted up to the stars or laid down on the distant mesas. But we stay in this room, on top of the buttercup bedspread. For the first time, I feel the full weight of the magician’s body as we roll over the covers.
I am starting to fall asleep in the hollow of Toby’s collarbone. I can feel the magician slide into his dreamtime conjuring, the semiconscious twitch of his fingers summoning long-forgotten objects. I lift my head. “Toby? Have you ever heard of a magic trick call the Dissolving World?”
He shakes his head. He’s falling back asleep.
“I’ve heard that it’s a perfect trick.”
He’s awake now, his eyes clear, his lips tense.
I rummage through my bag for the playbill I carried from Piet’s.
Toby takes the paper from my hands. “Looks like any old box to me.”
I snuggle back into his shoulder. “It can take you into any world you imagine, if only for a moment.” I sit up in bed, wrap an arm around Toby, and pull his head onto my stomach. I comb my fingers through his tangled black hair, shaking out grains of sand. I tell him everything I know about Theo, Piet, and the Dissolving World. I finish my story. I feel Toby’s jaw tense. Then I add, “I’ve heard that certain magicians can make this trick happen without the box itself. Who knows.”
Toby exhales.
“That is magic I’d love to see.” I close my eyes, willing my dreams to come. Toby stretches out next to me. I can tell that it will be a long while before he falls asleep.
Toby only half listens to me as we drive back to Vegas. His mind is lighting on mesas, running alongside the riverbank of his youth, flying over the roads that carried him out West. Every once in a while, he reaches over and pats my hand, reassuring me of his presence, if not his attention. He lets me off in front of the Winter Palace, barely finding time to kiss me and make a comment about preparing for his private show this evening. Then his eyes find mine, and he’s with me once more.
“You’re coming?”
I nod.
“Before it was only a maybe.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
A gold-embossed envelope is waiting for me in the suite. It contains an invitation to A SOIREE OF MAYHEM AND MAGIC. At the bottom of the card is my name and the explanation GUEST OF THE MAGICIAN. I recognize the name of an established Hollywood actress and one of the fabled private venues in Las Vegas.
The private salons of Las Vegas are the refuge of tycoons, royals, sultans, and sheiks, where women come and go through hidden doorways and their customers vanish through underground tunnels. It was to one of these that Toby had summoned me.
I iron my only cocktail dress, a black silk sheath that had once purred like a sultry lounge singer. I twirl before the mirror. The dress looks bland. Toby unwittingly deprived it of its best feature. I’m dressed too early and pace around the suite. I finger the edge of the silent drapes and look over the expanse of desert that stretches away from the Strip toward the ranch house that will never be ours. I’ve spent my last night in the Cherry Orchard Suite. I’ve already thrown a few things into a suitcase that I’ll probably leave behind. Anyway, I don’t know where I’m headed, and I’m not sure I want to take anything with me.
I glance down at the Strip, now the setting for two conflicting tales of Toby and me, two divergent love stories heading in the same direction, but never reaching the same place. I will always know the magician better than he knows himself. Tricking myself into forgetting would be the only way to move forward. But there is nothing about my life with Toby I will ever willingly let go of. I let the drape fall, then close it altogether, blocking out all the landmarks of our various paths and our uncertain future. Then I sit, relaxing into my choice. I wonder how long I’ve known that this was the only possible ending.
If I could ask my brother one question it would be this: Did he wake up that morning in Bermuda and decide, Today is the day I swim away? Or did something in the water call him with a voice so sweet and insistent that he could no longer come up for air? I have a feeling he had known all along, ever since that day he survived the nighttime river. If I had my quilt, the complete quilt I’d left at Leo’s, I would search it for a clue to the moment I knew that Toby and I had come to inhabit different worlds. This realization doesn’t floor me or send me reeling to the chair with stomach-punch force. It creeps in, a slowly rising tide, on which I’m eventually going to float away. But, like my brother, I have a feeling that this ebb and flow will bring with it a melancholy freedom.
Sandra gives me a look as I pass through the lobby. I’m carrying the invitation in one hand.
“Where you off to, hon?”
“A party. A magic show.”
Her eyes narrow. “Lots of magic this week.”
“Guess Vegas is growing on me.”
“Join me for a drink first.” Sandra looks over my shoulder toward the Red Square bar, then at the envelope in my hand. I glance at my watch and shake my head.
“Suit yourself,” she says, waltzing off to
