The Pickwick lighthouse gave a rattling protest at the erratic shuffle of feet at its top platform and shuddered warningly when two bodies smashed against the railing.
"You weaseled your way into this production!" Ben hissed as he pushed the older actress farther into the corner of the platform, where the crooked detective would find his end in less than three hours' time—or so he thought.
What followed was so astounding, so atrocious that Ben couldn't for one second believe he was to blame. Was it his fault that Loretta wouldn't stay put? That she dug those frightened delicate fingers he had always known could turn into iron claws so impertinently into his coat that he had to shake her—hard—to loosen her grip? Was it his fault that she cocked her head backwards to avoid his burning glare or that he had to shove her against the railing for a second time to get her attention?
"No—let me go, you fucking p-!" The throaty growl that he'd seen bubbling beneath her benevolent surface a long way off was cut short by a hollow gasp when the latch that kept the railing in place and was supposed to release only so that the actor could free-fall off the lighthouse platform on his own and in the right direction at the end of the play opened. Loretta, her fingers grasping at indifferent air when Ben recoiled, tumbled sideways from the lighthouse and a deafening moment later a thump reminiscent of the twelve splats the theatre hall had rung with fifteen years prior echoed through the empty space.
Ben recovered from his rage within seconds and his feet dragged him over to the open gap in the railing, to the intoxicating repugnant sight of the heap of costume and woman below him.
"What the hell's going on?"
Sooner than the horrifying moment would have called for, Charles's confused demand pushed Ben into action and he turned to dash down the stairs, coming face to face with the older actor apparently trying to spot Loretta on the platform behind him. "Down…" he said curtly, flying past Charles and around the lighthouse with the older man at his heels. "She's down there!"
As if his shoes had glued themselves to the parquet, Ben came to an abrupt halt before he could get too close to her, before the vicinity of the woman's unmoving body could convince him of the reality of the scene. Charles, untouched by the ghostly hand of guilt, collided with his suddenly rigid back but hurried past the young actor and to Loretta's side.
"Loretta! Oh my God!" he called out in alarm, with more convincing emotion than Ben would have given him credit for, and crouched down next to the woman. Loretta had fallen just a touch too far to the side—half of her body was on the mat meant to catch the detective, her face had fallen hard against the cool floor.
"Is she dead?" Ben gulped hoarsely. "Please tell me she's not dead."
Charles's arms twitched at his sides and his irritation was obvious in his clipped voice when he snapped, "She's not dead. Get some help!"
Unconsciously listening to the man he had sworn never to take any orders from ever again, Ben rushed off the stage and downstairs, fleeing from the ugly black blot that was seeping over his conscience. At the foot of the stairs, killing two birds with one stone, he broke apart a disgusting kiss and managed to fulfil his mission.
"Guys! You've gotta call for help," he declared, eyes dashing between his two producers. "You've got your phone on you, right, boy?"
"It's Cli-"
"What's happened?" Donna intervened sharply, her keen trained producer skills kicking in before the two men could start nagging on each other once again. "What's wrong?"
Ben waved vaguely towards the stage. "Loretta just fell from the lighthouse."
With a loud gasp and a scandalized glare, Cliff took off towards the stage, taking three stairs at a time. Donna hurried after him, shuddering, "Loretta? That sweetheart?"
After a moment of flittering about uneasily in the hallway, Ben turned on his heel to march into his dressing room, thinking he could do with something sweet to calm his wrecked nerves. That was not to be for two reasons—firstly, he wasn't allowed to keep anything sweet around for his CoBro diet and secondly, because his documentary guy had chosen that moment to show up and shove his camera into his face.
"Right," Tobert said with jolly enthusiasm. "Are we doing this?"
"Not now!" Ben barked at him, desperately irritated, but held himself back from shoving the man back. It wouldn't have done him any good to display that kind of restlessness now, not when people were bound to start asking questions about the fight call. Instead, Ben changed course once again—and nearly stepped onto his director's toes.
He recovered his cool with incredible speed and his annoyance with his documentarian tipped to the very back of his mind at the caring fatherly smile with which Oliver always tried to meet him. "Oliver!" Ben was even sorry to disrupt the man's proud opening night momentum. "The show is off. It's not happening."
Quick to reassure him, Oliver shook his head with a confident smile. "Nonsense, Ben," he said, putting his hands out in that calm explanatory way he had. "You're all right. Everyone gets opening night jitters. I can-"
"No, it's Loretta," Ben cut him off, and he wondered if, had he taken a nasty fall instead of his universally beloved colleague, the director's eyes would have filled with even a quarter of the terror that they did at this news. "She took a fall. I don't think she can play."
"What?" Oliver's appalled demand came in a weak rasp and his expressive face was caught in such a stony and pale mask of horrible apprehension that he hardly looked like himself. "Where is she?"
Ben was dumbfounded by the heavy age and dim purposelessness that tinted the older man's troubled expression—and it struck him that the woman he had seen topple into the yawning void below the set lighthouse must have been just as old and just as fragile as him.
"Wha- She's on the stage," he stammered out, and when Oliver rushed up the stairs, the actor tried to will his steps more nimble. "It was an accident!"
"Don't let them open the doors yet," Donna's tersely melodic voice sliced through the loud drumming in his ears as Oliver ran onto the stage. She was talking to KT who, in turn, spat orders into her headpiece. "This is a disaster," the producer muttered, clinging to her son's arm. Cliff's face was halfway hidden behind a distraught hand clasped over his mouth.
"Everyone out of my way!" Oliver demanded, flinging his arms in front of him as he sprinted over to the back of the lighthouse, and like the Red Sea the small group of cast and crew hunched over the mat parted before him to let their always unflappable but currently thoroughly agitated director pass.
"Oh my God! Oh my God! Loretta!" he fretted and with entirely unbelievable youthful vigour dove to kneel next to her.
The precious object of his worry, whose undetectably battered head had been placed onto a pillow folded out of Charles's coat, attempted to smile up at him weakly. "I'm okay," she claimed softly, but her voice seemed to be coming from behind some sort of a barrier—perhaps teetering on the threshold of disbelief that she was still alive to make the sound. "It's just my shoulder."
Oliver's alarmed gaze was drawn to his leading lady's torso and he grunted uncomfortably at the unnatural angle at which her right shoulder seemed to be fixed.
"She took a pretty nasty fall," Charles offered in a tone that reminded Oliver why he was the calm and reliable and reasonable one of his friend group.
Forcing the insistent imagery of a heart-wrenchingly terrified Loretta out of his head, Oliver studied the woman's pale face, his eyes clouded over with worry. "Did you hit your head?" he worried. "Where does it hurt?"
Loretta bravely willed the pain out of her trembling voice as she repeated, "I'm telling you I'm all right."
"I heard a splat," Charles put in.
Oliver winced at the ugly word that triggered a repulsive series of twelve thumps at the back of his mind. "No, don't say splat. Please!"
"Sorry," Charles took back his words, sounding almost as ashamed as he should have been. "A thump, then."
"I can still play," a little voice drew their attention back to the woman starting to stir between them. "I just gotta get up from here…" Channelling, it seemed, all of her strength, Loretta started to push herself up from the mat but with a sharp gasp and a shuddering wince she shifted her weight onto her left arm only.
Suppressing his urgent impulse to scoop her into his steadying arms, Oliver watched with sympathetic pain lingering in his eyes as Loretta's movements froze and she concentrated on calming her startled breathing.
"Well, you're not going on like this," Oliver muttered even before the momentous meaning of this decision had fully taken form in his head. It did strike him a moment later and with the heavy, numbing sensation of his whole world and dreams caving in on top of him, he rasped over his shoulder at the producers, "We're off, she's not going on."
He was distracted from the two identical pairs of scandalized eyes by an insistent hand fumbling for his arm and his attention. Charles was immediately behind Loretta, supporting her, so that she wouldn't fall back onto the mat now that her good hand was tangled in their director's sleeve.
"No, Oliver," she protested with a devastated plea in her agitated eyes. "It's your show…"
Covering her hand with his, Oliver said with calmness he didn't feel but with certainty the likes of which he had never known before, "I would rather live in a world without Death Rattle than in a world without you."
A breathless, disbelieving moment passed between Loretta and Oliver, and although they felt the rest of the crew's stares on them, the pair of them couldn't tear their eyes away from one another, waiting, challenging fate for a sign that the funny showman's unequivocally sincere claim was no more than a cruel hoax. He couldn't believe he had said it himself, or that he was at all capable of truly feeling something like that—something so selfless and at the same time so entirely selfish; that he had somehow dared to reveal his secret devotion to this amazing woman, who was gaping at him as though she didn't believe she could mean that much to anyone.
Performing a flicker of a smile, Oliver pried Loretta's hand away from his sleeve. "Let's get you looked at," he said softly, adjusting his hold on her hand and supporting her by her good arm when Loretta struggled to stand up.
"There's a doctor on the way," KT informed them as Charles took the better part of his colleague's weight onto himself and heaved Loretta to her feet, holding her discreetly under the arms from behind.
The faint determined smile on the actress's face faltered when she staggered wildly on the spot with a low, "Woah…"
Oliver wrapped an arm around her waist, drawing closer to her by instinct as he started leading her off the stage. The connection, after his outburst, was unexpectedly and discouragingly tense, and although Loretta was indubitably wobbly on her feet, her body had never been more hesitant to follow Oliver's kind direction.
"Donna, Cliff," Oliver addressed the producers to distract himself from the looming dread of his leading lady collapsing right in his arms, "tell everybody. The show is cancelled."
With a snap of resolute heels that blocked out Loretta's heart-broken whimper of regret, Donna stepped up to the staggering pair, and her considerate doe eyes lingered on the drained face of their star. "Are you sure, Oliver?" she asked pointedly. "She doesn't look that bad."
"She can't stand, Donna!" Oliver yelled harshly—and no one held it against him.
In a stroke of luck, it was just as Oliver had helped her to the chair at her dressing room mirror that Dickie decided to look in on her. Loretta didn't think she could bear to look at the director right now—not when she had ruined his beloved production.
"Oh, great, Dickie!" Oliver turned to the younger man hesitating at the door. The word had, apparently, spread fast because Dickie looked justifiably panic-stricken. "You stay here with Loretta," Oliver ordered, already marching out of the dressing room. "I've got a showbiz catastrophe to see to."
As the director's steps tapped rhythmically down the hallway, Dickie eased tentatively into the room. "Dear God…" he muttered, disheartened by Loretta's dishevelled state and by the thin veil of composure stretched across a face ready to break down in tears. "What happened?"
Swallowing the bitter ache that Oliver's leaving without sparing her another glance had left her with, Loretta averted her eyes and almost unconsciously ignored the question she could not bring herself to answer, not to her sweet boy. Instead she slightly cocked her head back, inviting him closer almost by sheer willpower. Her fingers fumbling with the buttons on her costume, she asked, "Would you help me with my coat? I don't want to move my shoulder."
Even through the haze of the pain that shot through her body when she stood and stumbled, Loretta knew steadfastly that she loved the quiet meek eagerness with which her son hurried forward to help her. "Yeah, sure," Dickie replied softly, undeterred by the abruptness with which Loretta had to put out her hand to the dressing table or the way she was breathing heavily through her mouth, her eyes squeezed tightly shut.
During the next minute—or however long his careful intervention took him—Dickie was somehow at the same time right in front of her and all around her. Without so much as touching her, Loretta felt as if he were embracing her. She seized on that precious nearness, focussing on that instead of the searing throb of a pain in the right side of her body when her son's unwavering hands tenderly pulled away the heavy coat.
When the intensity of his closeness faded as Dickie retreated to hang up the coat, Loretta carefully dropped back into her chair.
"So… Ben's not talking to me," Dickie confessed and with a click returned the coat-hanger with the outer skin of the Nanny to the rack. He turned back to study Loretta's deliberately guarded expression. "I couldn't get an answer from him. But he was with you at fight call, right?"
"Yeah," Loretta agreed quietly, keeping the accusation out of her voice.
Even so, whether Dickie was more perceptive than she had dared to give him credit for or the previous events of the evening had alerted him, his voice thin and strained, he felt the need to ask, "Did he… Did he push you?"
The disgusting truth ringing in her ears for the first time, Loretta stared at him in anguished disbelief. She could already taste the bitterness of the lie before she released it into the formerly trusting sacred friendship that had grown between her and her son. "No," she breathed out, twisting hollow pretence into convincing nonchalance. "No, of course not. We were rehearsing and I…" Her lines caught jerkily at the tip of her tongue and threatened to give her away. "It was just an accident."
For some impenetrable reason, the surprise that Dickie's expression assumed had a tinge of sadness to it. Loretta could not believe that it was because the man had wanted his brother to be responsible, but perhaps he also didn't want there to be no one to blame for this tragedy. In moments of distress people always sought out a scapegoat, and there was no doubt in Loretta's mind that she would be blamed for the show being shut down. Perhaps Dickie didn't want fate to continue to be so unkind to Loretta, who in his eyes didn't deserve anything but the greatest happiness.
"Hm," the man made a reluctantly accepting sound but within moments the distinctive caring attentiveness in which Loretta had always seen a wishful reflection of herself returned to his gentle eyes.
"Can I get you anything?" Dickie wondered, averse to staying idle. "Some water? An ice pack?" He cracked that little smile of his that was always tinted with just a touch of melancholy. "A hug?"
Her heart swelling with grateful longing, Loretta smiled back at him fondly but had to refuse. "I would love that, but I don't think my shoulder could take it." She replied to Dickie's concerned gaze with brave reassurance, "No, I'm gonna be all right."
Dickie nodded, willing himself to believe that she would be, that the unmistakable weary wretchedness in this brilliant woman would pass sooner than any of them dared to hope.
"Should I maybe take off your hat?" he offered, ever the committed helpful manager, as he stepped up behind Loretta.
"Please," Loretta replied with a low breathy sigh of sweet relief and soon enough felt both the hat-pin and the prickling clip below release her hair and slip away.
"And the braids?"
Loretta didn't get the chance to give him permission to undo the remaining mirage of her character because the door her son had left ajar was pushed open once again and Oliver's sobering presence unwittingly shattered the comfortable mellow harmony that had developed between her and Dickie.
Oliver looked thoroughly deflated, and the kind eyes that had dimmed into misty grey and lost their singular lively twinkle turned with heavy expectancy to the man standing behind her instead of addressing Loretta.
With a subtle clink the Nanny's hat was placed on the vanity table beside her, and Dickie said, "I guess I'm gonna go. You two probably have things to discuss."