The Understudy

For eleven months, Marisol Vega had been the understudy for Clara, the lighthouse keeper's daughter in the musical Harbor Light, which meant that she had played the part every night, alone, in her head. She knew every line, every song, every step of the second-act staircase scene. What she had never done was play it on the stage of the Hartley Theatre, in front of fourteen hundred people, because the actress who actually played Clara, Celeste Moreau, had not missed a single performance since the show opened.

On the night it finally happened, Marisol was eating noodles out of a carton in the basement dressing room when the stage manager, Hank, appeared at the door. "Celeste's lost her voice," he said. "Completely. You're on in forty minutes." The noodles went into the trash. Afterwards, Marisol would not remember climbing the stairs; she would only remember thinking, over and over, if only she had run the staircase scene that week. She had meant to. She had been tired.

She had come to New York from San Antonio at nineteen with one suitcase and a list of open auditions, and for six years she had sung in the chorus of shows nobody remembered. Being Celeste's understudy was the best job she had ever had, and also, in its way, the loneliest. You learned everything and performed nothing. Every evening you arrived, warmed up, and then sat in the basement listening to the applause for someone else.

Outside, the storm that had been forecast all day was arriving early. Rain hammered on the roof, and in the wings the crew was talking in low voices about the power. Marisol's dresser, a calm woman named Dot who had worked on Broadway since the nineteen-eighties, pinned her into Celeste's costume and said, "It's time you stopped looking so frightened, honey. They paid to see Clara. They don't care who's wearing her."

The first act went better than she had dared to hope. Her voice held. Her feet found their marks. Somewhere in the second song she stopped thinking about Celeste and simply became Clara, a girl on a rocky island who would rather drown than leave it. When the curtain came down for the intermission, the applause was warm, and Hank gave her a thumbs-up from the wings.

Ten minutes into the second act, there was a crack of thunder so loud it seemed to come from inside the building, and half the stage went dark. The emergency lights flickered on, dim and yellow. In the audience, someone laughed nervously. Backstage, Marisol could hear Hank on his headset saying the words no actor wants to hear: "We may have to stop."

She was standing at the foot of the staircase, exactly where the scene she had not rehearsed was meant to begin, and she would rather have been anywhere else in New York. And yet, as she looked out into the half-dark, she realized something. In the play, this was the night of the great storm, the night the lighthouse lamp failed and Clara had to climb the tower with a lantern to save the ships. Had the lights not failed, she would have sung it in a bright, tidy spotlight, as Celeste always did. Now the theater itself was giving her the storm.

She picked up the prop lantern, which, by some small miracle, ran on batteries, and switched it on. Then, without waiting for Hank's decision, she began to sing. Slowly, the stagehands understood what she was doing. One by one, they switched on their flashlights and held them up in the wings, so that small lights appeared around the edges of the stage like ships far out at sea.

She climbed the staircase step by uncertain step, with the lantern swinging in her hand and the rain still drumming on the roof. Halfway up she missed a step, caught herself and kept going, and the audience, who thought it was part of the scene, gasped. When she reached the top and held the lantern out over the dark stage, there was a silence so complete that she could hear her own heartbeat.

The applause, when it came, went on for a long time. The power returned twenty minutes later, but by then nobody cared. In her dressing room afterwards, Marisol found a note in Celeste's handwriting, delivered by Dot: "I wish I had seen it. Everyone says I should have been there. Secretly, I'm glad I wasn't." Under it, Hank had added a line of his own: "Director wants to know if we can keep the flashlights."