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that shouldn’t bother her because so many people at school are just in love with her. I just need you to unlock the door so I can get her out
and take her home. Please. May.”
    The old woman lifted the needle from the turning record, bringing silence to the lobby. “I can try,” she said, pulling a blue sweater from the back of her chair. “For you, because you remind me of someone I knew once. Another darling.”
    David didn’t bother to ask what she meant and instead simply followed her into the cold auditorium, down the darkened aisle to the door. She put a key from the ring around her wrist into the lock and whispered, “The manager doesn’t like anyone going up here. We’ve had some problems.” The smell that wafted from the space beyond was intensely sweet, unlike anything David had ever experienced—perfume from another place. And as they ascended the wooden staircase behind the door, he whispered, “Is this where you keep all the movie candy or something?”
    “No, dear,” May said. “We keep that in the basement. This area isn’t for storage.”
    They arrived at a long empty room made of pinewood planks, and it took David a moment to realize that he was looking at a portion of the old vaudeville stage that his grandfather had told him about, complete with rusted footlights and a hinged trapdoor. Abandoned flats leaned against one wall—trees cut from plywood, the circle of a lover’s moon hung from a wire, and finally there was a wooden city, hastily painted yet still evocative—perhaps all part of some long-forgotten act. The city drew David’s attention. Walled and turreted like a medieval fortress, its streets and bridges made little sense, wandering until they eventually disappeared. People could get lost on streets like those, especially if they didn’t know their way. The city was empty—no painted version of Kitty there. He pulled his attention
away from it and pointed at the trapdoor that was wide enough to raise a small piano. “Could she have fallen down there? ” he asked.
    “Was your sister the clumsy sort?” May asked, as she unwound a tattered rope from a hook and allowed the trapdoor to drop, revealing a dark pit, from which rose another potent blast of candied air. David knelt beside the hole and called his sister’s name, and when no one answered, he said, “We have to get some light. Maybe she can’t talk because she’s hurt.”
    “She’s not,” May said.
    He looked at her sharply.
    “She isn’t down there, dear, and she isn’t coming back,” she continued. “I should have told you that before, but part of me just wanted to see you on this stage. They never come back. God knows I’ve looked for my own in here.”
    “Your own?”
    “Common,” she said, reaching out her long arms to David. In the light that seeped through the spaces between the wooden planks, May could have been any age—maybe a girl, looking into another boy’s eyes, years ago.
     
    Our town doctor had once requested that Common Woolbrink sit for an examination so that he might learn the secrets of the boy’s agility. It was at this examination that May Avalon met the handsome young buck dancer, as she was acting as an assistant to the nurse, her braids then as dark as her eyes, and the red stripes of her uniform so bright they could have been woven from flame. She was an intelligent girl and knew when to smile. May and Common chatted while he sat on the doctor’s table, and afterward he invited her to the drugstore for a soda. At the chrome counter of the soda fountain, he told her the real secret to moving so fast—the one he’d never tell
any doctor—he drank a daily dose of vegetable juice infused with a cutting from a mysterious and nameless root, provided to him by a Chinaman in St. Louis. When May pressed him to show her the root, he finally relented, producing a piece of it, which he kept in his pocket as a kind of talisman. The sight of Common Woolbrink holding the shriveled,