Janie. Worse, he’s in love—not even in your dreams, Janie. Not even in your dreams.”
Yet, however much I tried, I could not squash those dreams and wayward fantasies. Daniel Glass was my world. I breathed for him more than for myself.
My hard work and obsession with pleasing him did pay off though. Seven months later, I was nominated for a Tony award. I didn’t win, nor did I expect to. I lost out to the invincible Natasha Jürgen. Lost out in every way. She had it all. The man. The beauty. The talent. The glittering career.
And then, one day, she didn’t.
Just like that, it was all over.
2
I HEARD THE NEWS six months after we finished the play. I was at my parents’ house in Vermont. Well, Mom had been dead for several years, but I still referred to it as my parents’ house. I was at the pottery wheel, throwing a bowl, and when the news came on the radio, my suddenly unsteady hands caused the clay to flop all over the place and spin off the wheel in an oozy mess. My late mother was a professional potter, and my dad was a carpenter; both having given up acting and music to pursue other interests—those that could actually pay the bills. He still kept the workshop and business, where he sold their one-of-a-kind, custom-made artwork which, after years of hard work, had now become quite profitable. I was spending time with him and my younger brother, Will, at our house near Stowe for a few weeks, until I started a new job in New York: a guest role on a TV show.
A female voice interrupted the music I was listening to on the radio: Brahms, I think it was.
“The Tony award-winning Broadway actress, Natasha Jürgen, has tragically and unexpectedly died. She passed away in the early hours of this morning, at Lennox Hill Hospital, New York City, where she had been admitted after an accident with a swerving bicycle while she was crossing the road in Central Park, yesterday. Apparently, the actress seemed uninjured even though she had bumped her head in the fall. Witnesses say she got up and laughed about it, refusing to be admitted to the hospital, after an ambulance had arrived at the scene. However, a few hours later, she complained of a headache, and her husband, director Daniel Glass, insisted he take her to the hospital. She fell into a coma last night. The cause of death was an epidural hematoma. The family thanks everyone for their kind condolences and ask for privacy at this very sad time. A funeral will be held later this week in an undisclosed location.”
You would have thought I would have been . . . how can I put this . . . secretly hopeful . . . wishful that Daniel would choose me to fill his unhappy void, to be his shoulder to cry on, be his special friend. That one day he could love me the way he loved his wife. But, no. I was horrified by her death. Sickened. Literally. A nauseous wave of bile rose in my throat, and the pottery wheel spun around, my hands, thick and withered with wet clay, which was embedded also in my fingernails. I got up and stumbled over to the washbasin, shoving my hands under the flowing tap, and I vomited as if all my insides would spill out.
I hated myself.
I really did.
Because only a few days before I had let my mind wander again to my Daniel fantasies, wishing that something would happen to make them split up, that she would turn out to be a raving lesbian and not want Daniel, and that he would turn to me for comfort, fall madly in love with me and forget all about her. Or, that she’d get snapped up by Leonardo di Caprio and that Daniel would decide that Natasha had been wrong for him all along. Many scenarios had passed through my mind, but death? That, I had never imagined, not even in my wildest fantasies. No way. But I had obviously jinxed her. I had killed Natasha Jürgen, unwittingly, with the power of my wishful thoughts.
Knowing this made me to never, ever, want anything to do with Daniel again.
3
“THE PRODUCERS ARE GOING to love you,” my friend Star cajoled, in her domineering ‘I-know-what’s-best-for-you’ voice. “The role is made for you.”
Her beautiful face was on my iMac screen—we were on Facetime. She flicked back her long blond