Kept Key

Lyssa had the needle halfway through the last petal of a rose when her phone buzzed on the tray beside her. She lifted the needle off Dee's skin, set the machine down, and wiped the excess ink off with a green cloth. The rose was finished. The line under it was not.

"Hold that thought," she said. "Don't move. I mean it, Dee, one more twitch and your shoulder blade is a mess."

Dee, who was twenty-six and had been lying on the table for two hours and change, groaned into the face cradle. "You said that twenty minutes ago."

"I lied twenty minutes ago. This one's real." Lyssa picked up her phone. Alan. She almost didn't answer, because Alan texting her at seven on a rainy Thursday usually meant a problem, and she was already behind on Dee's sleeve. Then she read it and felt her stomach drop.

Actress bailed. You're the only one who fits the dress. Get here NOW.

"What the hell," she said, out loud, to nobody.

"What?" Dee lifted her head. "What happened?"

"The theater. The dress rehearsal thing I told you about. They need me on stage tonight."

"I thought you were just doing the set piece design."

"So did I." Lyssa looked at the half-finished line on Dee's back and felt she was the worst person in the coastal town of Harrow Bay. "Okay. Here's the deal. I wrap this line, bandage it, and you come back Saturday. I'll do the shading then. I can't be two places at once, even though I've tried."

"You're really leaving me like this?" Dee said. "Half a rose and no apology?"

"I'll buy you a coffee from the cart. The good one. With the bacon in it."

"The bacon thing in the latte? Okay, now we're friends again."

Lyssa wrapped the line fast, wiped everything down, and got Dee squared away with an aftercare card and the promise of Saturday at two. She pulled on her rain jacket, locked the parlor door behind her, and jogged the two blocks to the Riverview. Rain came down hard enough that her hood was useless inside of a minute, and by the time she hit the theater steps her hair was stuck to her neck and her leggings were soaked to the knee.

The wall of keys was the one dry thing on that side of the street, under the overhang by the stage door. Hundreds of old keys nailed up there over the years, going back longer than anyone in town could actually say. Every performer who ever worked the Riverview nailed one up, tied to a wish or a memory or sometimes just a good show. Lyssa had put hers up two years ago, the night before her one and only show here. She swiped her wet hand across the whole mess of them the way she always did, feeling the cold metal edges, and said, "Come on, don't embarrass me tonight," which was her usual ask.

Then she pushed through the stage door and the noise hit her.

Zach was pacing across the main floor, thirty-five years old and already dressed in half a costume, some kind of naval coat with no shirt underneath, waving his phone at the ceiling. Alan was coming down the stairs from the dressing rooms holding what looked like a very small, very complicated corset, saying something to him about lights and calling. Somewhere up on the set, somebody was arguing about a boat.

"We have forty minutes," Zach was saying. "Forty. She texted me from the highway. Who quits on a dress rehearsal from the highway?"

"Everyone's going to know it's my fault," Alan said, holding the corset out like a shield. "The county theater association is coming. The guy who writes for the paper is coming. And our leading lady is going to be a tattoo artist in a borrowed corset."

"Lyssa!" Zach spotted her and pointed like she was a rescue helicopter. "Thank God. You got the text. You're a life saver, an actual life saver."

"I'm a last resort is what I am," Lyssa said, peeling off her jacket. She was twenty-seven and soaked and hadn't done any real stage work since college, but the dress did fit her, they all knew it fit her, because she had measured the costume mockups herself when she helped build the set pieces. "What happened to Jenny?"

"Her mother. Emergency. Real one, not a fake one, I checked." Alan handed her the corset before she could argue. "Arms up. We're lacing you in the next five minutes."

"On the main floor? Where people can see?"

"Everyone here has seen a corset, Lyssa, it's a period piece."

She got the gown half on while Zach filled her in on her blocking, which was, as far as she could tell, walk down the gangplank, say a line, get kissed, say another line. The kiss part she'd known about and had agreed to over text, mostly because the actress had dropped out and the whole production was going to fold without a body on stage. She'd said yes because she liked Alan and she liked the theater, and it was one kiss in front of thirty folding chairs.

"Wait, wait, hold still." Alan pulled a lace tight. "Breathe in. No, breathe in!"

"I am breathing in."

"Breathe in more, you're built different than Jenny."

"That's a very generous way to put it."

And that was when she heard the voice.

It came from up on the stage, where the set designer, a nervous man named Petro who talked with his hands, was standing next to the boat. The boat was the centerpiece of the whole set, a half-built dory that sat at an angle stage left, and somebody had built it beautifully, the kind of woodwork that made you want to touch it. It was also, apparently, cracked.

"The mast step is split," the voice said. "I told you I'd be here at four. If you'd let me look at it at four, this would be done."

Lyssa froze with one arm in a sleeve.

She knew that voice. Two years of knowing that voice. Low, careful, the kind of voice that never got loud even when it was arguing. It had read her recipes out loud on Sunday mornings. It had said her name a thousand ways. It had also, six months ago, said a few things she'd spent the whole time since trying to sand out of her head.

"That's Yuki," Petro was saying. "The boat builder. He custom built the whole thing, he's doing us a favor fixing the crack, but he's got some ideas about how to do the scene around it."

"I have some ideas about how you treat a hand-built dory," the voice said, dry, not loud.

Alan didn't notice. Alan was cinching the last lace. "Okay. There. You look incredible, honestly, Jenny could never get the lacing right."

"Alan." Lyssa's voice came out flat.

"What? Is it too tight? I can let it out a little."

"Who built the boat."

"The boat? Oh, a guy from the boatyard up the coast. Yuki. Real craftsman, the chamber of commerce guy connected us. Why, do you know him?"

Zach knew something was wrong before Alan did. Zach had known Lyssa for three years and had half her artwork on his arms, and he watched her face the way people watch weather coming in off the water.

"Lyssa," he said carefully. "Do you know him?"

She looked up at the stage. The lights were half up for the rehearsal, and there he was, Yuki, thirty now, a Japanese American boat builder with his grandfather's shoulders, kneeling by the boat in jeans and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled, one hand flat on the cracked wood. Two years she had dated him, from twenty-five to twenty-seven. Six months since he'd ended it in a parking lot with a sentence she still couldn't repeat without her chest going tight. Six months since she'd stopped trusting her own skin, because the reason he gave had everything to do with her sleeves and her past and nothing to do with her at all.

"Lyssa?" Alan said.

"We dated," she said. "Two years. He broke it off in June."

Alan's mouth opened and closed. "Nobody tells me anything in this town."

Yuki looked up then. Maybe he heard her voice, or maybe it was luck, or bad luck, which on a rainy Thursday in a coastal theater felt like the same thing. He saw her in the half-laced gown on the main floor and his hand came off the boat and he just stopped, the way she had stopped, a full mirror of it.

"Okay," Zach said, clapping once, loud, the sound bouncing off the empty seats. "Okay. So that's a thing that's happening. Alan, is there any possible way we could get literally any other boat?"

"The boat is load bearing for the scene," Alan said helplessly.

"Then can the boat builder possibly come back tomorrow?"

"He came two hours out of his way tonight," Petro said. "He's got the tide schedule and everything."

Lyssa pulled the laces tighter herself, mostly to have something to do with her hands, and looked at the wall of keys through the stage door glass. So much for don't embarrass me tonight.

"Fine," she said. "He fixes the boat. I stand on it. We're adults. We can be in the same room for forty minutes."

Yuki, from the stage, in that low careful voice that never got loud, said, "I can be in a room for as long as the work needs."

Nobody said anything for a second. Zach looked at Alan. Alan looked at Lyssa.

"Great," Alan said. "Wonderful energy. Places in twenty."

The room didn't exactly go quiet, because theaters don't work that way. There were still rustles and a dropped wrench and Petro mumbling to himself about shims. But the middle of the room went quiet, the part with the two of them in it, and Zach and Alan both felt it and both shut up at the same time, which was probably a first.

Yuki stood up off the stage floor. He had sawdust on one knee and his shirt was stuck to his back from the walk over in the rain. He looked at Lyssa across the whole empty house, over the rows of folded seats and the cable runs and the sawhorse holding paint cans, and he didn't say anything for a while.

"Hi," he said finally.

"Hey."

"You look..."

"Don't," she said, and crossed her arms.

The gown presented a problem she had not considered when she agreed to wear it. It cut low in front and off both shoulders, and both her sleeves were out, all of it, the full arm from wrist to shoulder. Koi and water and a band of storm clouds at the top that she had started at twenty-six and never quite finished. The arm Yuki had once looked at in her kitchen and called too crowded for a future, whatever that was supposed to mean. She made herself hold still and let him see it. If he was going to look at her like that, then he could look at all of it, the same as always.

He did look. She watched him look and hated how much she wanted to know what he was thinking.

"Okay," Alan said, too loud. "Okay, so, we're going to do a first run-through. Lyssa, you're on the boat, Zach comes up the gangplank, you say the line, he kisses you, you say the other line. Yuki, just... do your thing over there and ignore us."

"Ignore us," Zach repeated. "Great plan. Love it."

The first run-through was a disaster, but not the way anyone expected. Zach got up the gangplank fine. Lyssa walked down the dory's deck fine, said her line fine, "You came back across the water," or whatever it was, she'd only had the script for twenty minutes. Then Zach took her in his arms to kiss her and she was fine, actually fine, doing the thing where you tilt your head and keep your jaw loose and think about grocery lists.

The problem was that the plank under Zach's left foot wobbled. It didn't break or even really move much, just a little give, a little creak, and Yuki was up the steps from the house and onto the stage before anyone could say anything.

"Wait, that's not..."

"Just hold still," Yuki said. He was crouching at the edge of the gangplank, pressing down on the board with one hand, and his other hand had come out to steady himself against the boat frame, right at Lyssa's waist, through the fabric of the gown, warm through the corset lacing. He wasn't even looking at her. He was looking at the plank, at the screw that had backed out half a turn.

Lyssa flubbed the line. She flubbed it bad. Her mouth was open and nothing came out of it, and Zach was still holding her, and she could feel her own breath going wrong in the corset, shallow and fast, because six months was apparently nothing, was apparently no time at all.

"You okay?" Zach asked, quiet, just for her.

"I forgot the line."

"Take your time."

"I don't have a line to take. It's gone. It's just, it's gone."

Yuki took his hand off her waist. She felt it go, and hated that she felt it go. He tightened the screw with a little driver from his back pocket, tested the plank twice with his whole weight, and stood up.

"That'll hold," he said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to, I just saw it move."

"From the house?" Petro said. "You saw a screw back out from the house?"

"It's my boat."

"It's the theater's boat," Alan said.

"It's my boat that I built for your theater."

"Okay, okay." Alan made little settling motions with both hands, like a man putting out small fires. "Let's just, from the top of the kiss. Zach, kiss her again, Lyssa, your line is 'then the sea can have me.' And Yuki, maybe..."

"I'll be over here," Yuki said, and went and sat on the edge of the stage with his back to them, which was somehow worse, because now she could see his shoulders and the back of his rolled sleeves and the whole shape of him doing the deliberate not-looking thing he'd always done when he was upset, the thing she used to read as easily as a weather report.

They ran the kiss twice more. It was fine. She said the line. Zach was a professional and a good kisser in the strictly technical, choreography sense, and Lyssa thought about grocery lists, and about bacon lattes, and about how she was going to have to explain tonight to Dee Saturday at two while shading a rose on her shoulder, and got through it.

"Ten minutes," Alan announced. "Then we run the whole act. There's coffee in the green room, it's terrible."

Lyssa didn't go to the green room. She went the other way, off stage right into the wings, where the overhang was and the stage door, and the wall.

The wall of keys. Hundreds of them, nailed up over decades, brass and iron and cheap modern aluminum, some polished and some rusted to lace, each one put there by somebody in a show who wanted to leave a piece of themselves in Harrow Bay. Hers was three rows up and a little right of center, a small dull brass thing she'd pulled out of a junk drawer at the parlor, and she and Yuki had nailed it up together two years ago, the night before her first (and only, until tonight) show here. His