When Stars Collide by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The small suitcase that held her toiletries lay on its side. Two more suitcases didn’t seem to be where she’d left them. There were other small things. The bedroom door had been closed when she’d left, and now it was open. She hadn’t used the master bathroom this morning, but the drawer next to the sink was ajar.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Chill lost his cool, erupting with an astonishing string of locker room obscenities that concluded with his insistence that they immediately go to the police. This would be her third visit inside a police station in a little over two weeks—a record she’d never counted on achieving.

All she wanted to do was curl up in her pajamas with a glass of wine and some good jazz. But she knew he was right.

His “friend” in the Chicago Police Department turned out to be a leggy brunette about her age, and, if her suspicions were correct, a former girlfriend. Olivia confirmed the details he’d already given Lieutenant Barbie in a telephone conversation they’d apparently had earlier in the day. And calling her “Lieutenant Barbie” was totally unfair. Lieutenant Brittany Cooke was efficient, competent, sympathetic, and Olivia was a jealous disgrace to the sisterhood.

“I’ve talked to the police in New Orleans and Las Vegas,” the lieutenant told her. “And I’m making some inquiries about your ex-fiancé’s sisters and one of your superfans.”

Olivia glared at Thad. “Rupert is not part of this!”

“Just following protocol,” the lieutenant said with a soothing smile. “For now, be smart about what you do and where you go.”

Thad looked as if he had something to say about that but kept his mouth shut.

*  *  *

Thad’s condo was exactly what she would have expected a multimillionaire bachelor with excellent taste to own. Modern and spacious with sweeping windows showcasing both city and lake views. The decor was contemporary, mostly tones of gray, steel, and blue with unexpected hits of color here and there. But with the exception of a full bookcase and a great vinyl collection, Thad himself was missing. No personal photos sat on display. Nothing that reflected the people he’d met over the years, the places he’d traveled. And not one object that testified to his many accomplishments on the field.

“I’m putting your things in the guest room,” he said, “but I’m requesting that not include your actual body.”

She tugged on her necklace. “We need to talk.” But Thad had already disappeared with the two suitcases she’d brought along, and he either couldn’t hear her or chose not to.

She took in an abstract painting she recognized as a work by the famous American street artist Ian Hamilton North—a vast, multicolored kaleidoscope that took up most of a wall.

She had to find a new place quickly. Definitely by the time the show opened. She’d talked to her real estate agent twice already today, and he’d assured her it shouldn’t take long to locate a more secure apartment. Definitely by the time the show opened. Maybe she could find a temporary rental. Or maybe . . .

Maybe this was a sign from the universe that she was allowed to relax her vigilance for a few more days—a week. Maybe a little more.

They ate turkey sandwiches and potato chips for dinner. She learned Thad had planned to use part of the next two weeks until the Aida gala to visit his parents in Kentucky. “You should definitely go,” she told him.

“Maybe.” He reached into the potato chip bag. “I have a couple of business deals I want to look into.”

Meaning he wasn’t budging from Chicago, and she doubted it had anything to do with business deals. His sense of responsibility toward her was a weight he shouldn’t have to bear. “As you’ve pointed out ad nauseam,” she said, “your building is secure. I’ll be in rehearsal most of the day, and when I’m not, I’ll babysit this hovel for you, so there’s no need to change your plans.” She set down the remains of her turkey sandwich. “Just to get any awkwardness out of the way, I’m sleeping in the guest bedroom tonight.”

“Fine with me.” He couldn’t have looked less interested.

*  *  *

She was sleeping in the damned guest room! What kind of crap was that? As much as he wanted to argue with her, she was tired and on edge, so he let it go. For now.

Her vocalizing awakened him the next morning. It was her real voice, not the tape-recorded version, and she sounded amazing. But he knew her well enough by now not to compliment her because she’d only say her voice was too fat or too skinny or coming from her elbow instead of her butt or some crap like that.

She walked in on him as he was shaving. She’d dressed casually for rehearsal. Slip-on sneakers, a pair of perfectly fitted black joggers, and a long, black knit sweater. A purple woven scarf looped her neck to protect her from the drafts that were the archenemy of serious singers. Her makeup was flawless—bold eyeliner, dark brows, and crimson lips. She looked as formidable as The Diva she was. But he knew she didn’t feel that way.

“Sitzprobe is next Monday,” she said. “Counting today, I have five more rehearsal days until then.”

“Siltz probe?” Thad lifted his head to shave under his chin.

“Sitzprobe.It’s the first time the singers and orchestra really come together. There are no costumes, no props. Everything gets stripped away except the music. You sit and you sing.” She gazed at a spot above the mirror, no longer seeing him, lost in her thoughts. “Sitzprobe is pure. The instruments, the voices. There are these magical moments when the music becomes transcendent.”

He thought of those moments when he no longer heard the roar of the crowd. It was just him and the field and the ball.

“It’s my favorite rehearsal.” She gazed down at her hands. “You can’t fake it in sitzprobe. There’s no marking. You either have it or you don’t.” She gazed at his reflection. “I lied,” she said.

He waited.

“I lied to the maestro. I told him I had a cold.” She turned away and disappeared into the hallway. “I’m driving myself to rehearsal.”

*  *  *

Olivia had loaded up her tote with everything she’d need for the day: an extra sweater, her reusable water bottle, a pencil, a highlighted copy of the score so she could note any new blocking. She’d packed Throat Coat tea, cough drops, saline spray, a couple of packs of almonds, an apple, hand sanitizer, makeup, tissues, her wallet and phone, her Carmex lip balm. Now all she needed was a big box of nerve. Sitzprobe. A week from yesterday.

She’d left her own car in one of Thad’s two parking slots. He’d surprised her by not putting up an argument about her driving herself until she looked in her rearview mirror and saw a sleek, snow-white Corvette following her to the Muni. And parking right behind her.

He got out of his car and came toward her, the lenses of his sunglasses flashing in the cold morning sunshine. Even as she felt a stab of trepidation, she thought how much she loved this man. What if—?

No what-ifs. She grabbed her tote and got out of the car. Drawing herself to her full height, she offered up her haughtiest, “Yes?” as if he were her vassal instead of the man she so desperately loved.

He slammed her car door shut, grabbed her arm, and marched her around the side of the building with her tote banging against her leg. In warmer weather, the singers gathered in the small, enclosed green space for fresh air. Now, the wooden benches were unoccupied, the big flower urns waiting for spring planting.

She found herself wedged between him and the side of the building. She lifted her chin and gazed down the length of her nose at him. “What?”

He knew her tricks, and he wasn’t intimidated. “You said you had a cold.”

Her distorted reflection looked back at her from the lenses of his sunglasses. “I told you that.”

His perfect mouth set in a deadly line. “You lied.”

“I told you that, too.” She wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

He whipped off his sunglasses and drilled her with those ridiculous green eyes, which now seemed exactly the same color as a particularly virulent patch of poison ivy. “Guess what, babe? You’ve had a miraculous recovery.”

“You don’t understand.” She tried to get away from him, but he shifted his weight to block her.

“Oh, I do understand.” He shoved his sunglasses in his jacket pocket. “You’re Olivia fucking Shore. The greatest mezzo in the world!”

“I’m not the greatest—”

“You’re at the top of your game. In the starting lineup! A fucking tornado, not some twenty-year-old pretender afraid to open her mouth!”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not—”

“Stop being such a pussy.” He gripped her by the shoulders. “I heard you loud and clear this morning. Sitzprobe. It means everything to you, and you only have five rehearsals to get ready for it. You’ve worked too damned hard to give in to this crap. Your voice is exactly where you need it to be.”

“You have no idea—”

“You’re going in there right now, and you’re going to sing your ass off.” He actually shook her! “Do it one-legged, standing on your head, or with your eyes crossed. I don’t care. You pull yourself the hell together and show them exactly who they’re dealing with. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Louder!”

“Yes!”

“Good.”

He stalked away.

*  *  *

She straightened the collar of her trench coat and glared at his back—the ignorant jock. She marched from the abandoned garden. It was easy for him to say. He didn’t understand. He knew nothing about the kind of pressure she faced. Nothing about the critics who were waiting to gnaw on her bones, the fans who would desert her, the reputation that would turn to dust. He never had to face—

But he did. He knew exactly how she felt. He’d played hurt. He’d played with the crowd booing him. He’d played in blistering heat waves, frigid snowstorms, and with the clock ticking down to its final ten seconds. He’d played under every kind of pressure, and he understood what she felt as well as she did.

She marched directly to the maestro’s office and rapped on the door.

“Avanti.”

She stormed in. “Maestro.” She dropped her tote by the door. “I know I’m early, but . . . I’m ready to sing.”

It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t horrendous. She didn’t have the breath support she needed to make her vibrato dependable or keep from falling off some of the notes, but she didn’t once go flat.

Sergio still believed she was suffering from the aftereffects of a cold, and he wasn’t overly concerned by what he heard. “Most important now is for you to take care of your voice.”

Back in her dressing room, she made a phone call. The voice that answered sounded distinctly displeased. “Olivia Shore? I do not recognize this name.”

Olivia ignored that. “Can I come in today? I have a long break at one o’clock.”

“I suppose. Bring me plums. The purple ones.” The connection went dead.

*  *  *

The old woman met Olivia at the door of her musty Randolph Street apartment. She wore her customary black serge dress and pink bedroom slippers run down at the heels. Her coarse, gray-streaked black hair was knotted on top of her head, with wiry strands escaping around her wrinkled face, which bore her customary scarlet lipstick.

She greeted Olivia with a gruff, “You may enter.”

Olivia replied with the gracious nod of her head she knew Batista expected.

Batista Neri was one of Olivia’s longtime vocal coaches, and someone Olivia had been deliberately ignoring since she’d lost her voice. Batista had once been an accomplished soprano. Now she was one of the best opera coaches in the country. She was maddeningly condescending, but also highly effective.

Olivia set the bag of plums on an ornate mahogany side table near the door. “My voice . . . ,” she said. “It’s gone.”

“Ah, well.” Scorn dripped from Batista’s every word. “Now you will find a husband to take care of you, and you will make him gnocchi every night for supper.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Enough of this bullshit. Let me hear you.”

*  *  *

When Olivia reached the rehearsal stage later that afternoon, she found Lena Hodiak moving through Amneris’s blocking for the Judgment scene in act 4. Olivia watched as Lena mouthed the lyrics, “Ohime! Morir mi sento . . .”Alas! I shall die! Oh, who will save him?

Lena waved as she spotted Olivia and quickly moved into the audience to give Olivia the stage.

It felt like midnight instead of late afternoon. Olivia had sung badly for the maestro and only a little better for Batista. At least Batista had abandoned her crotchety prima donna routine and gotten serious when she heard the state of Olivia’s voice.

“Lift your palate, Olivia. Lift it.” At the end of the lesson, Batista had prescribed bee propolis throat spray and more abdominal exercises and ordered Olivia to come back the next day.

Arthur Baker, the aging but still handsome tenor playing Radamès, came in, along with Gary, the director. A few hours later it was time to rehearse the second scene of act 1, where Amneris tricks her servant Aida into revealing her true feelings for Radamès with the lie that Radamès is dead. Sarah was meticulously prepared, as always, but the chemistry they’d once shared onstage was gone.

Olivia had never been happier for a day to be over. At five o’clock, as she opened her dressing room door, she saw Thad sprawled on her chaise waiting for her. “How did you get in?” she demanded.

“I’m a famous football player. I can go wherever I want.”

Witnessing her lover playing the part of the arrogant asshole lifted her spirits. “I should have known,” she said, closing the door behind her.

“Bad news.” He idly crossed his ankles. “Someone stole your car.”

She regarded him suspiciously. “Any idea who that might have been?”

“Probably Garrett. He’s a punk.”

“I see.” She remembered the spare set of car keys she’d unwisely left on the dresser in his guest bedroom. “And under whose order might he have performed this particular act of felony?”

“I’m fairly sure he thought it up all by himself.”

“And I’m fairly sure he didn’t.”

He tilted his head toward her private bathroom. “Want to get it on in there?”

Her answer was as surprising to him as it was to her. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

They locked themselves in the small bathroom, pulling at their clothes and groping each other, exactly what she needed to wipe out her day. They ended up partially naked in the cramped shower, water not running, Olivia against the wall with her pants pooled around one ankle, Thad’s jeans at his knees, both of them awkward and frantic—out of their minds. It wasn’t the third night. It was the fifth day, and this wasn’t supposed to happen because she couldn’t keep loving a man who wasn’t part of her world, but at that moment, she didn’t care.

Afterward, she did. “What’s wrong with me? This only makes everything tougher,” she said, as she reassembled herself.

“Only if you want it to be.” He closed the lid of the toilet and sat on top, watching as she finished pulling herself back together. “Not to criticize, Liv, but you’re way too uptight.”

“Taking care of my career is not being uptight,” she retorted, sounding uptight. She grabbed a hairbrush. “What did you do today? Other than arrange for my car to disappear?”

“I bought a couple of new stocks and nosed around in your portfolio again. You need to dump Calistoga Mutual Fund. It’s been underperforming for years.” His leg brushed the back of hers as he crossed an ankle over his knee. “I also spent some time with Coop and his wife, Piper. That’s Cooper Graham, the Stars’ last great quarterback.”

“Until the idiot came along.”

“The idiot’s not in that category yet.”

“But he could be.”

“I guess,” he said begrudgingly.

“It’s good you have something to do.” She picked up a makeup brush, stalling for time. “I sang for Sergio Tinari this morning,” she told him.

“Did you now?”

She turned on the bathroom faucet. “And I went to see my old voice teacher.”

He ignored the broader significance of that. “How’d you get there?”

“I walked.”

“Not smart.”

“It’s hard to get abducted in the Loop at midday. And I need my car back. I have to look at apartments.”

“I’ll do it for you.”

“You don’t have to—”

“You’re working. I’m not. It’s only fair.”

The offer was enticing. The last thing she wanted to do after a full day of rehearsals was go apartment hunting. On the other hand, the sooner she found her own place, the better it would be for her, especially after what had just happened.

*  *  *

That night, he went to her room, testing the new boundaries she’d set. “I think I’ll sleep in here,” he said. “But no touching, okay?”

She gave him a soft smile and held out her arms. “No touching.”

He laughed, got in next to her, and pulled her body to his. As he kissed her, he thought how much he loved being with this woman. Not love-love. But pure-enjoyment-love. What meant the most, however, was how well someone who wasn’t part of his world understood him. If The Diva had been a guy and athletically gifted, she’d have made a hell of a teammate.

He rubbed her earlobes with his thumbs. Kissed her. It wasn’t long before she was making those beautiful, throaty sounds. They traveled together, climbing, reaching, falling . . . The world splintered into a million pieces.

Afterward, God help him, she wanted to talk. He snuffled into his pillow and pretended to be asleep, which didn’t do anything to discourage her.

“This is only temporary, Thad. Temporary insanity on my part. It all ends on opening night. I’m serious.”

He muttered something deliberately unintelligible. Mercifully, she said no more.

He didn’t get it. Career or not, even prima donnas needed a private life, and he wasn’t high-maintenance like her. Sure, he attracted a lot of attention when he went out, but she wasn’t exactly invisible. And yes, now that the tour was over, he had a lot of catching up to do—putting in extra hours with his trainer, digging deeper into his sideline work. There were people he needed to see, meetings he had to take, rookies who wanted to talk to him about managing their money. And maybe he hid more of himself than she did, but all that didn’t add up to him being high-maintenance, right?

In the end, she fell asleep long before he did.

*  *  *

Wednesday. Thursday. The rehearsals ticked away. Olivia worked with Batista every day and started feeling a little more like herself. But it was never good enough. Next Monday’s sitzprobe hung over her head like a guillotine blade. She could mark through Tuesday and Wednesday’s technical rehearsal, but not sitzprobe and not Thursday’s final dress rehearsal, where there would be a selected audience. Friday was a rest day, and then opening night on Saturday.

She sensed members of the company talking about her behind her back. Their highly trained ears noticed the muting of the dark, tonal luster in her low range. They detected the occasional wobble, the awkward phrase. But everyone believed she was recovering from a cold, and only Sergio had begun to look concerned.

Lena, in the meantime, had become Olivia’s shadow, watching everything Olivia did during rehearsals, asking the occasional question, but also never being intrusive. Despite her youth, Lena was the consummate professional, yet Olivia had begun to hate the sight of her. She’d never felt this way about any of her other covers, but then she’d never felt so threatened by one. She was ashamed. Lena wasn’t a vulture standing on the sidelines waiting to fly off with Olivia’s bones. She was hardworking and respectful, doing exactly what she’d been hired to do, and once this was over, Olivia would make up for her unjust thoughts by buying her a great piece of jewelry or treating her to a spa weekend or . . . What if she fixed her up with Clint Garrett?

The last idea seemed genius until she saw Lena kissing a long-haired young man she later identified as her husband. Jewelry, then.

*  *  *

Thad picked her up at the Muni after his first day of apartment hunting. As it turned out, he’d found fault with every place he’d seen. One was too noisy, another too dark, the third had no place for her piano, the fourth had a Jacuzzi, but no decent shower. And the fifth . . .

“Smelled like dead rabbit,” he said. “Don’t ask me how I know this.”

“I won’t.”

On Friday morning, she had three hours of free time while the company rehearsed Aida’s famous Triumphal March—a complex piece of staging that involved over a hundred performers, twenty-six dancers, and two horses, but fortunately, no elephants, not for this production. She used the time to schedule a meeting with her real estate agent and wasn’t surprised when Thad decided to tag along.

Refusing to meet Thad’s disapproving gaze, her Realtor showed her three of the apartments Thad had rejected. One, as he’d reported, lacked enough natural light. The second was almost perfect, but would be crowded with her piano. As for the third . . . It had a doorman, video camera surveillance, and plenty of room. The location was great, she could move in right away, and it smelled nothing like rabbit.

“I’ll take it,” she told her Realtor.

“You’ll regret it come Easter,” Thad said.