Gleeks Ahoy Chapter 48--conclusion

48 Goodbye Love

The scene was just like Hastings described it.  Everyone stood frozen with horror while the battle between Mrs. Morris and Wanda Zurlich tumbled across the stage toward the dropped gun—then it went off—

And in a moment, Cora’s aunt stood over Wanda Zurlich, who was rolling on the stage in agony, clutching a shoulder which seeped blood over her hand.  The gun was in Mrs. Morris’s hand, leveled in deadly earnest right at Wanda’s head.  It was, to me, nothing short of miraculous; from many nights and days in her home with Cora, I’d seen Cora’s Aunt Sandy as a mother, a friend, sometimes almost like a big sister.  I’d seen her giggle and tease with us, I’ve seen her put Cora’s weeping face on her shoulder like Cora was her own baby girl,  I’ve seen her be lovingly stern with either of us or both of us.  I’d seen her in every way I thought she could be with us—and then I saw her face as she stood over the prostrate Wanda.  Her sweet blue eyes, normally sparkling and soft, were frozen blue steel as she glared down at Wanda, and then she spoke with a wintry blast of ice in her voice such as I’d never heard from her before—

“For one rusted penny I’d end you right here.  Go on, bitch—just one inch toward my little girl, so I can kill you with a clear conscience.”  Mrs. Morris’s eyes were taunting Wanda, daring her to move so she could shoot again and kill her—but now that she’d been stopped, Wanda Zurlich was a whining bundle at Mrs. Morris’s feet, incapable of anything but whimpering.  “Cora Lee isn’t a thing!  She’s not anyone’s project, and she’s no one’s revenge!  You just try it again, Wanda—and sorority or no, I’ll kill you and smile about it!  Come on, you filthy coward—get up and try!”  Fortunately for Wanda, Detective O’Malley jumped up and put herself between Mrs. Morris and Wanda—

“It’s over, Mrs. Morris.  Wanda won’t be hurting anyone anymore, I’ll see to that.”  Mrs. Morris still looked like she wanted to kill Wanda—“Give me the gun, and go take care of Cora.  She needs you now.”  And indeed she did; Cora was shaking wildly, as much as her bonds allowed her, and her eyes were blank with terror.  The detective’s words reached Mrs. Morris, and one glance at Cora turned her instantly from the image of Vengeance to frightened mommy.  She ran for Cora—as fast as I did!—and feverishly undid her bonds.  While Detective O’Malley handcuffed Wanda, whose shoulder had been merely grazed, and called in more officers to take her to the jail, the rest of us rushed to free Erica from her own bonds.  Erica too was shaken, especially since she had long been comfortable with her solitude and isolation.  She shrank back as soon as she was freed, but Detective O’Malley went to her.  “Erica Kozlowski,” she said quietly.  “You’ve been in hiding for years, but the authorities have been fairly sure you were alive.  You’ve been through a terrible ordeal, I understand, but there’s an arrest warrant out for you I have no choice but to enforce.”

And nothing—absolutely nothing!—could have rallied Cora from her horror faster than hearing the detective say that!  “You can’t!” she said, breaking away from her aunt and me and rushing to Detective O’Malley.  “It wasn’t her fault!  She was upset, ashamed!  She didn’t mean to hurt anyone—she just wanted to get away from everyone!  She didn’t want to inflict herself on them!  It was wrong, but did it hurt anyone, really?  You can’t just throw her in jail like some common criminal!  She doesn’t need arrested—she needs help!  Please, Detective, you can’t”—

“No, Cora,” Erica said softly.  “She’s right.  I did something wrong, and I have to pay for it.  I’ll go with you, ma’am.”

“No!”  Cora was practically feverish!  “She…I need her!  The dress rehearsal is tonight!  I need her help!  I can’t do it without her help!”

“You don’t need my help, Cora.  Not a minute ago, Wanda had a gun to your head, and look how strong you are!  It’s enough for me to know you’ll be wonderful.”

“Jan, I have to agree with Cora.”  Mrs. P was much less agitated than any of us.  “She deserves to see Cora tomorrow night, because she’s done as much as anyone to get her ready for both shows.  If I promise to bring her to turn herself in after opening night, would that work?”

Everyone was silent, especially Detective O’Malley.  After what seemed like forever, she smiled!  “Get me an opening-night ticket, Mrs. Pillsberry, and it’s a deal.”  It was over!
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Yeah, over.  All the mess that had started with that first stalker note way back in August, boiled up into Dick Boggs trying to blow up Darius Allen High during the GleeFest, and climaxed with his illegitimate daughter Wanda Zurlich trying to murder Cora had ended that afternoon in the Lyceum, was finally done with.  My detective club was back in business, the same mother who wanted to kill me for sneaking around working on the mystery was now promising to buy new copies of all my mystery books now that I’d helped bag Wanda Zurlich as well as her sicko father, and all we had to do was tie up the loose ends of the case.  It turned out the reason Wanda had managed to stay hidden turned out to be easy; she was seeing Troy Hendrickson and he was keeping her in her own place.  Typical of those holier-than-thou types to be cheating around, is all I have to say about that!  Tanner is really lucky to be finished with him!  He was feeling horrible after the whole GleeFest thing, so the whole club pitched in to make it clear to his mother that there wasn’t anything wrong with him.  Taylor wouldn’t let anyone pick on him, and Leslie…well, I’ve got a weird feeling about her and Tanner, let’s just leave it at that.  At least she’s not as old as Kellie Kirk was, so if anything happens, it’ll only be a little weird instead of a lot!

Wanda knew about the tunnels beneath the school from her father Boggs, who had taken her under his wing when she was discharged from Allenbrook House and fixed her up with Hendrickson.  Of course, after her twisted little meltdown, guess where she’s probably going back to?  Considering that she had it in her head that Mrs. Pillsberry was trying to keep her away from Erica Kozlowski when it was nothing more than her misreading the friendship Mrs. Pillsberry had with her, and considering that she had committed arson to get rid of Mrs. P, and considering that she was about to murder Cora to get back at her, yeah, you can’t be surprised about that, can you?  As for her sick father, he copped a plea deal on the domestic-terrorism charges he faced for trying to bomb GleeFest.  He might make it out of jail eventually, at least if he lives to be about 120 years old!  Sounds about right to me!

Oh, and about Cora.  She made it through that dress rehearsal (yes, I stayed and watched—I deserved that much for helping save her life!), and rested all the next day for opening night.  I can’t say I thought about much that whole day besides how well Cora was going to do for Jason Geldstein!  Joey and I made the play a date night; dinner at Pietro’s Italian Bistro, and seats only one row back from where Jason Geldstein and his plus-two—some man I didn’t recognize, and the actress that played one of the stage mommies in the show—were sitting.  I wished Abbie could be there, but she was up in the light booth with her brother Richie helping with the lights, so it was just Joey and me, watching Jason Geldstein as much as the play!  See, for me it was a kind of fun mystery for once instead of a scary one; I wanted to see if I could tell what Jason Geldstein thought of Cora’s performance just from watching him.

At first there wasn’t much to see, just Geldstein and his plus-twos talking quietly among themselves before the opening curtain.  Even during the first number they whispered to each other as if the show hadn’t really started.  Well, after all, they were there for Cora, so you couldn’t blame them for not paying attention when she wasn’t the center of attention!  They paid some attention during the first scene where Benny argues with Mark and Tyler’s Roger about the rent—and then Tyler started singing “One Song Glory,” and boy, did they ever sit up and notice!  Just casually at first, but by the time Tyler was done, they were hanging onto every note!  They were surprised as heck about him!  And then, the scene where Cora came on with “Light my Candle,” and they were watching her like they were teachers and Cora was a student giving a presentation in front of them—right up until she wiggled her butt at Roger while she was searching the floor for her lost stash of heroin, when Geldstein and his plus-two started nodding and whispering again.  I thought even then that she’d really impressed them with that scene!  Then, not long after that, she did her whole “Out Tonight” dance in a micro-miniskirt I’d be embarrassed to wear in my own bedroom, much less on stage in front of a ton of people, and then the argument with Roger, and they were really nodding and whispering!  I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other, but from the smiles on their faces, I was sure it was good!  It was the same with every number in the first act, including that “La Vie Boheme” thing that had her so nervous, and when intermission came up they practically ran to the lobby chattering like crazy!

Then, in the second act, I finally heard them while Cora was singing “Without You” with Tyler as Roger—“…soft without getting breathy,” in a way that made it clear that was a good thing.  And when Jason Geldstein nearly cried when Cora sang “Goodbye Love,” I was sure she’d really impressed them!  Their mouths practically hung open when Tyler sang “Your Eyes” to Cora at the end, and when the curtain fell at the end, they were the first ones up for the standing O they got!  I was sure Cora and Tyler had blown them away, but I had to be sure, so I dragged Joey backstage following Geldstein and his friends.  The place was crazy—even holding hands, I almost lost Joey a bunch of times for all the people hanging around!  It took a while to pick and shove past all those people and finally get backstage, and the first friend I saw was Abbie with her family around Tyler.  They were all standing dazed and shocked—except for Tyler, who was grinning like crazy, and Abbie practically dancing!

“Tyler’s getting a screen test!”  She was so excited I could barely understand her!  “They think they want him in the show, and they’re sending him out to test for it!  They love him!”  Talk about OMG!  Tyler Dwight on Gleeks?  If he impressed them that much, how did Cora do?  I pushed through even more crowds until I saw Cora with Leslie between her Aunt Sandy and Uncle Stuart, and there was Geldstein and his friends.  This is what I heard and saw:

Cora recognized him, of course, and her eyes went bright, but frightened too, like she wasn’t sure if things were good or bad.  “Mr. Geldstein…was I all right?  Am I good enough to be in the audition show?”

For one second I saw a little glance between him and the woman.  If I hadn’t seen that glance I would have reacted like Cora did when he spoke—

“Ms. Peabody, we don’t need you in the audition show.”  For a moment, Cora was puzzled, and so was Leslie, but I thought I saw recognition in her aunt’s and uncle’s eyes—Cora’s face began to fall—

“We need you in the cast.”  Cora had been so stunned that she really hadn’t heard him, her face was still so stunned, so the woman spoke up, gently, as if she knew Cora wasn’t completely with it.  “Cora, I played Mimi on Broadway.  Your Mimi could play there too.”

Cora slowly seemed to be realizing what was happening, but couldn’t speak.  Geldstein did.  “Ms. Peabody, I heard what happened here yesterday.  If a young woman like you can go through that a day ago, and then come back tonight and show me the Mimi I saw tonight, I have to have you in my cast.  I have to, Ms. Peabody.  To hell with the audition; tonight was your audition, and I need you in my cast.”  That was when she realized what had just happened to her, and somehow she stayed on her feet.  I realized it too; my friend Cora Peabody, the girl I went to school with, the girl who sat with me at the detective-club table—she was going to be on TV.  She was going to be a face on TV that everybody could see every week.  Her life had completely changed—and so had all of our lives, because she has been so much a part of ours.  How can I even describe it?
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I still have my mother’s diary, the one she wrote in until she was too weak to write anymore.  I still read it frequently, and did that night after I finally made it home after the show, after Mr. Geldstein came to me and put me in the cast of Gleeks.  It was like it fell open to just the words which described what I had been feeling, and that I still feel even now—  

Now that I know I cannot escape it, I find myself looking at everything as if it was fresh and new, like it is something unique I will never see again.  I know now that that will be soon, and I look at everything with absolute intensity—the way the sun shines through the curtains when I open my eyes in the morning, the smell of the grass, the play of light and shadow on Cora’s hair as she sleeps innocently.  I know I will see and hear and smell these things only for a short time, and I savor and delight in every one of them…

So it went for me in those days after that night.  Everything around me I saw as if for the first time, and for the same reason; I knew I would see them no more, just like Mom knew.  Every little thing had my attention like it was new and fresh, and everything carried a sense of ending.  I cried so many times!  The first was the Monday back in school, when I went in and heard my music stand squeak as I adjusted it as I always did, unthinking, to practice.  Mrs. P had already picked out our acts for next year’s GleeFest; the theme was the 1970s, and we were doing ABBA.  And when I heard that stand squeak like it always did when I adjusted it, that was when the realization first struck me that I wasn’t doing ABBA next year.  It finally realized that I was only a few days from leaving Darius Allen High forever, that I was going to leave the music room and never come back in.  And I cried.  Everyone rallied to me—Devan, Hastings, Tommy Mooney, even the girl replacing my part, Morgan Emrick from the detective club.  Mrs. P was already home on her bed rest before giving birth to Adam, and Mrs. Minter—who had helped save my life—held me too.

I had to say goodbye to Mrs. Giles and her children Penny and Ella and Aidenn, whom I had sat for so long, so many days and evenings while their mommy wrote, and my heart broke.  When I talked to them that day, Mrs. Giles had already told them I would be leaving to go be in a TV show, but they were still upset.  Aidenn, so small, wasn’t very affected, but his big sisters were distraught.  Penny, so quiet and self-contained, had dry eyes, but the set of her lip as she said she was happy I was going to go off and be famous told me more than any words of hers could say that her heart was wounded.  Ella—oh so demonstrative, as she always has been—wept, hugged me so tight I thought she would never let me go, and there were even tears in Mrs. Giles’ eyes.  Their neighbor Aisha al-Fashir had already agreed to take my place sitting them, and she cried too.

To this day, Kellie’s body has never been found.  There have been groups of people who went looking for her, but no body has turned up.  Part of me hopes that somehow, by some miracle, Kellie survived, but after so many months with no one having seen her, especially through the hard winter we had, there’s little reason to hope that Kellie is still alive.  But the pond where her last things were found has been dragged thoroughly, and no body was there, so who knows?  Miss Erica herself had disappeared for such a long time, and yet she came back!

And speaking of Miss Erica, not everything was sad.  I was called to court in Chambersburg where she had pleaded guilty of charges from her breaking into that new grave for the body she wanted everyone to mistake for her.  I was surprised to find that people were at the court taking my picture, but I realized that our episode of Real Gleeks—advertised as “a very special episode” because they told about me being put straight into the cast—had been shown the evening before, so to them I was already a star.  In any case, during the sentencing hearing I told the court about how much she helped me get ready for GleeFest and Rent, and I stayed to hear the judge’s sentence.  In exchange for getting psychiatric counseling and submitting to having her brother Dr. Kozlowski be her legal guardian, the court would suspend or vacate (or whatever it is) the charge, so it wouldn’t appear on her record.  That was so thrilling to me that Miss Erica could come out of her shadowy little world and be loved by her brother and Mrs. P—and her two children!  Shortly after Erica’s hearing, Mrs. P had her baby, and little Adam is so beautiful and healthy!  Life was going to go on, and even though I wouldn’t be there, Mrs. P told me I would always be connected to her and her family.  I love them all!

But there was one love I had to leave.  Leslie had cheered like everyone else at the news that I was going to be on Gleeks, but in her eyes I saw a sadness—a sadness that she had realized before I had—that we would be apart.  She would be in Snowden, and I would be on the opposite side of the continent.  She had lost Kellie, and in the process Jimmy, and now she was losing me.  One of the things I had first seen clearly, in the way Mom had seen, was this loneliness in Leslie; I wanted to take her with me, but I knew I could not.  She would have to watch me leave, and go home alone.

By the last night we shared in my old home, she had begun to befriend Lexie Archer—I had hinted to both of them that they shared certain things—and, through her, Tanner Hendrickson, who was still wounded from everything that had happened to him.  But she would not let herself close to either of them until she had seen me off; we agreed that we could not expect each other to be lonely for the other’s sake, so let each other be free.  But not until we had had that last night together.  Aunt Sandy, who agreed to go out west with me until I was set up and comfortable—and most likely, until I was eighteen at least—knew we needed that last night together, and left us alone.  She expected, no doubt, that Leslie and I would “misbehave” one last time, but we didn’t.  All that night, we held each other close one last time, all night, opening our hearts to each other, sharing our worries about the new life we would both have.

Leslie rode with us to the airport, in the back seat holding my hand and talking quietly while Uncle Stuart drove.  She went with me to the terminal, still with her hand in mine.  Soon it was time for Aunt Sandy and me to board, and I knew what Ella had felt the day she said goodbye to me; I held Leslie so tight, and I never wanted to let her go!  Only at the last moment possible did I force myself to let her go, and I looked at her until I could no longer.  The last I saw of Leslie was her beautiful green eyes, moist with tears I knew were also in my eyes.  Our lives were split apart, and we could not know if they would ever be put together again.

And that’s how I find myself here in the airplane seat writing this last part of the story, Aunt Sandy’s hand soft and encouraging on my elbow.  Right now, at this very moment, I’m frightened, truly frightened.  But it’s not the fear I felt when Wanda Zurlich’s gun was at my head, or the fear I felt while struggling in the reservoir that night, nor even the fear I felt when Mrs. P had gotten in trouble on Thanksgiving.  It’s a fear that comes from preparing to start a new life, not sure what that life is going to be like.  All I know for sure is that I am loved—not just by Aunt Sandy, but so many others who have taken me in and guided me to where I am at this very moment, toward a new life with the chance of fame before me.  And I love all of them back!  I hope they keep me in their hearts, just as they will always be in mine.  

The pilot has just told us to turn off all electronic devices, so I have to close now, and face my new life.  Goodbye, and I love you all!

finis