Chapter 2 - Dust on the White Tablecloth
I still had Harlan's sleeve bunched in my fist when the light started to move.
Not flicker. Move. The whole chandelier swung a foot to the left over the main table, and the candles threw long arcs across the ceiling. Crystal threw sparks across the wood floor. Someone at Table One laughed, then stopped. That silence was worse than the creak coming down through the chain.
"Come on," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "Please."
Harlan didn't come on. He planted his feet right on his mark beside the white tablecloth, his bow tie crooked from where I'd grabbed him, and stared up like he could glare the thing steady. Around us chairs started scraping back. Glasses rattled. The floral centerpiece — white lilies and eucalyptus in a low bowl — shivered with each swing.
Above us, on the balcony, I heard shoes hit the railing hard. I didn't look. I couldn't look away from the chain.
The sway got wider. The chandelier pulled toward the balcony side, hung for half a breath, then came back toward us. Dust sifted down from the ceiling mount in a thin gray cone through the light. A woman two seats down gasped and pushed back so fast her chair tipped and cracked against the floor.
That broke it. Everybody moved at once.
Men shouted and grabbed elbows. A server dropped a tray and wine splashed red across the white cloth. Somebody's chair caught my ankle as they dragged it clear. The room filled with scraping wood and breathing and the high singing rattle of crystal hitting crystal.
I yanked Harlan again, harder. He stumbled half a step, caught himself on the edge of the table. Water glasses jumped. One tipped and rolled and fell off and shattered.
"Harlan, move," I said, and shoved at his shoulder with the heel of my hand. "Now."
He turned on me then, face red under the lights, mouth already forming whatever he was going to say about a girl in a button shirt putting hands on a donor. Behind his head the chandelier swung out and came back faster, chain groaning, candles guttering sideways. Hot wax spat down and hissed on the tablecloth.
The last thing I remember clearly before it went is the centerpiece. The lilies nodding with each pass of air, patient, stupidly pretty, while this massive lit thing hunted above them.
Then the mount gave.
It didn't drop straight. It sheared and swung down in an arc, and for a second the light swept the whole ballroom — faces white and open-mouthed, hands up, my own arm still out toward Harlan — and then it hit the end of the table.
The sound wasn't a crash at first. It was a deep iron cough, then glass. So much glass.
The chandelier drove through the white cloth, through wood and plates and stems. The lilies vanished under crystal. Glasses burst upward in glitter. Candle flames flattened and went out in puffs of black smoke. A wave of dust and plaster rolled out across the floor and up into our faces, chalky and hot, and the bright overhead light died with it. Only the warm wall sconces were left, dim and yellow through the haze.
Something heavy hit my shoe — a link, a piece of arm, I don't know — and I stumbled back coughing, eyes burning, ears ringing with the aftershock of crystal settling, ticking, breaking.
People were coughing. Someone was crying. Chairs lay on their sides. The long table sagged in the middle where the frame had folded, cloth torn and blackened, flowers crushed to green pulp under a mound of twisted arms and dripping wax and broken prisms.
Harlan was on the floor beside me. On the floor, breathing. Alive.
He pushed himself up on one elbow, tuxedo jacket dusted gray, bow tie hanging loose. He looked at the wreckage, then at my hand still locked around his sleeve. His eyes focused on that, not the table that would have taken him.
He jerked his arm free.
"Take them hands off them."
His voice cut through the ringing. Angry, raw from dust. A couple guests turned to stare at us — at him sitting in plaster dust, at me kneeling with my reddish hair falling out of its band into my eyes, my white shirt smeared.
I let go. My fingers wouldn't open right. They stayed curled in the air where his sleeve had been.
May you like
I couldn't answer. The dust was in my throat, but that wasn't why. In front of me the chandelier lay heaped where eight people had been sitting a minute before. A candle still burned sideways under a crystal arm, flame blue and small. Wax pooled across a shattered plate.
I stared at it and breathed. In. Out. The air scraped. Nobody moved to touch the pile. The room held that way, half-standing, half-crouched around the ruin, while the dust settled slow over everything white.
