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“I know that too,” Marty said, bringing me back into his embrace. “And so is she.”
“I don’t know what comes next,” I said, pulling away and wiping my eyes against the crook of my arm. “You’re the director, Marty. Direct.”
“Her parents are throwing a party for us at the Renaissance in Braxton. Watch the play, and then come with.”
“Her parents?” I asked. I shook my head. “No. I need to see her alone.”
“It would be better, methinks, if you saw her in public place. She can decide for herself if she wants to talk alone, or remain with her friends. Her support. Fair?”
I hesitated and Martin gripped my shoulders.
“Don’t waste one more second,” Marty said. “Every second that goes by is another mile between you. The distance is long enough already.”
“Does she want to see me?” I asked, feeling as raw and exposed as I ever had in my life. The kind of naked emotion I’d turned into silence, to bury and protect myself.
“I don’t know,” Marty said. “But if I had to guess…” He held up his hands, his smile kind and full of hope. “I’d say it’s never too late.”
Marty had a cancellation from a ticket-holder in the front row. Me sitting there was out of the question, so Marty played a little musical chairs and got me a seat in the last row where Willow couldn’t see me.
The houselights dimmed. The murmured talk of five hundred people quieted. The lights came up onstage and I laid eyes on Willow for the first time in three years.
I sucked in a breath. She was so beautiful. Almost twenty-one years old now, she carried herself with the grace and dignity of someone much older. Someone who’d been through hell and back and was still standing.
Over the next two hours, she took her character from a naïve, hopeful young wife, to a woman ready to stand on her own in a society where being married and having children was the ultimate goal.
She was brilliant. Electrifying and subtle at the same time. But it was in the final scene that she mesmerized. She sat in a chair, her hands folded in her lap. Perfectly still and straight. The eye of the storm that was her husband. Len Hostetler as Helmer, circling around her in confusion and then panic.
“Playtime shall be over, and lesson-time shall begin,” Len said.
“Whose lessons? Mine, or the children's?”
They argued. Or rather, Len argued. Willow conveyed her lines with a quiet certainty. And dignity.
“I must stand quite alone,” Willow said, her face to the audience. She could’ve been talking to me. Or to her father. Or Justin Baker or Xavier. To all the men in her life who tried to make her into something she wasn’t.
“I am to understand myself and everything about me. It is for that reason that I cannot remain with you any longer.”
Len was every man who watched the woman in his life tell him she no longer needed him. The jilted boyfriend. The failed pick-up in a bar. The online rejection after an unsolicited proposition was shot down.
“You are out of your mind! I won't allow it! I forbid you!”
“It is no use forbidding me anything,” Willow said calmly “I will take with me what belongs to myself. I will take nothing from you, either now or later.”
“This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties to your husband and your children?”
“I have other duties just as sacred.”
“That you have not! What duties could those be?”
“Duties to myself.”
I sank in my chair, my hand pressed to my lips. The pain of losing her, once so sharp, mellowed and transformed as I watched her. As I listened to her.
It was so easy to blame her for what happened. For not standing up for us when I was willing to risk everything. But the truth was she’d stood up for me, and I had let her fall. She’d been trying to protect me and I couldn’t convince her I didn’t need protection. That I would’ve gladly suffered the slings and arrows her father threw at me.
What I hadn’t taken into account was that she could not.
I’d only added my weight to the tremendous pressure she carried. The fact she hadn’t been crushed was a testament to her bravery and strength. Sitting there, watching her perform, I felt a fierce pride I didn’t deserve. I had nothing to do with her success or talent or courage. She owned every bit of it herself.
