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mention of her life in Manhattan. No Doyers Street, no theater name—nothing that gave a clue as to where she might be. Why had she waited so long to write? And why, if she were so downhearted, wouldn’t she simply come home, where she was loved and safe? Odile pressed her nose to the paper but couldn’t smell anything beyond the briny musk of the dressing room. You are me and I am you. When they were girls they used to hold their index fingers, hooked like crescent moons, up in the air and try to divine each other’s thoughts. After a while—when they were scared or upset, when they were banished to opposite ends of the room for misbehaving, when they saw each other on the boardwalk from a distance too far to speak—it became their own private signal, a flash of alliance andsympathy. Sometimes at night Odile would still reach out toward the empty bed, her finger curled in the dark, and wonder if somewhere her sister could read her mind.
    “A little heads-up,” came a voice over her shoulder. Quickly she folded up the letter and slid it back into the box.
    Leland the dwarf stood behind her, blotting his face with a handkerchief. “Guilfoyle’s got a bug up his britches,” he said. “How’s the boo-boo?”
    “Pretty ugly.” She turned her knee to the light. The bandage was already rusty with blood.
    Georgette, still damp from the stage lights, trailed in and sat down beside her, crossing both pairs of legs. “What happened, pet?” she whispered. Her hand, soft and slender as a little girl’s, fluttered up Odile’s neck and leafed gently through her hair. “Is it your back again?”
    “No!” Odile said, a little too sharply. “I’m fine. Really—it’s practically a paper cut.”
    She was grateful that Georgette laughed and began gossiping about something else—the woman in the audience who’d screamed and fainted, and who was now crying into her handkerchief outside the theater, proclaiming this entire place the devil’s playground . The Daring Devil’s, Odile thought.
    She slipped behind the screen and peeled off her beaded costume. Half of her wanted to tell Leland and Georgette about the letter, but she didn’t know quite what to say. She hadn’t talked to anyone about Mother or Belle, not in months. After the fire Belle had grown so quiet and withdrawn. Everyone must have been whispering about it all along: what poor work Odile was doing, looking after her! When Belle left, Odile began to notice that people lowered their eyes—they turned their heads from her and looked bashfully away. If they saw her coming down the boardwalk, they pretended to study their pocket watch, the menu at the frankfurter stand, atangle of kites in the sky. When she came home at night, there would be food on her porch—gravies and aspics in stained crockery, soaking under damp squares of cheesecloth—but no one was there to welcome her or share her table. She dumped the food over the railing in the back. Bone-thin dogs, no longer scared away by the scent of tigers, waited for her in the wide sandy alleyway, wagging their tails and howling.
    She knew people felt nervous, unsure of what to say to her, but it seemed as if they feared contagion. She wouldn’t be surprised if they choked into their handkerchiefs as they passed her on the street—as if her bad luck, a pungent curse, steamed from her body like a vapor. Whenever she caught them looking at her sideways, she knew what they must be thinking: the last of the Coney Island Churches, Belle’s sister and Friendly’s child, the reedy echo of a thunderous sideshow song. It puzzled them all, perhaps, to see her standing alone on the porch of the house on Surf Avenue—seventeen years old, an orphan, wearing a faded fur coat and flexing a tiger switch in her hands.
    But now. Odile-on-the-Wheel.
    She straightened her shirtwaist and buttoned up her skirt. When she emerged from behind the screen, she saw Mack sitting at the mirror, slouched over in his slacks and