Enright Family Collection (121 page)

“That’s different, Laura. It’s our family home.” His voice softened, and in it she could hear the unspoken plea.

Ah, so that was it.

“Oh, Matt ...” Laura shook her head. How could she help him to understand that embracing her new family did not mean that she was turning her back on her old one?

“Look, I have to go,” he said abruptly. “I promised Doc Espey I’d stop in and see him tonight. I’ll be talking to you.”

He hung up the phone as soon as he realized that he was sweating. He was afraid, pure and simple, for her, and for himself.

Didn’t she understand that the closer she allowed these people—this new family—the more it would hurt later, if and when the time came that they all drifted back to their own lives and decided not to take her with them?

And lately, the thought had crossed his mind that if he lost Laura to them—if she was an
Enright,
would she cease to be a
Bishop?
—he would lose his last connection to the family they had made with Tom and Charity, and then who would he be? Would he not become, once again, the boy who had no one?

The thought of it brought back memories drenched in shadow, shadows that had held uncertainty and fear of the places where he’d been deserted for hours—sometimes days—on end. The child who had lived in those shadows had never forgotten, had never gotten over the fear that someday, someone might realize that perhaps
that
was where he really belonged, and would send him back, alone, and those same shadows would claim him again.

Matt fought back the shadows and dropped the phone onto its base, his palms sweating, wishing he could have found the words to tell Laura, but his voice had frozen, refusing to let the words out. After all, if he spoke his fears aloud, might they then have life? Might they have power?

Matt cleared his throat and whistled for Artie. In
spite of his still throbbing ankle, he would walk to Doc Espey’s. The afternoon had clouded up and a brisk wind had started to blow from the east, bringing with it the promise of a hard-driving, cleansing rain. With any luck, it would help clear his head.

Georgia locked the back door to the farmhouse and turned on the back porch light. She walked through the rest of the downstairs, turning on the lights in the front hall and the one over the front door, then one in the little sitting room. It was just starting to get dark, and she was feeling uneasy, wondering if the vandals would be returning again tonight. She shook the fear off, telling herself that there was not much left in the garden to destroy.

It had been nice having the dog there, though. A big, ferocious dog who could be mean if he wanted to.

Much like his owner,
she thought dryly as she turned back to the stove, where she was heating up some vegetable soup she’d found in the freezer.

Matthew Bishop was a real piece of work, all right.

If he hadn’t been quite so obnoxious,
she mused as she stirred the soup,
I might have liked him.

She unwrapped the foil where she’d stored the leftover biscuits and took out two, noting there were still several left. Mrs. Colson must have made more than one batch.

All right, I did like him. At least, I did at first.

She next searched the cupboard for a suitably sized soup bowl, trying to ignore the thought that she had more than liked Matthew Bishop.

Okay, fine, I was starting to like him a lot.

Seeing his smiling face in the photographs lining the windowsill didn’t make it any easier.

“Okay, so you’re a hunk of the first order. Maybe the sexiest, handsomest, hunkiest man ever to cross my path. That doesn’t make you any less of a jerk,” she said aloud to the photo as she slid into the chair he had sat on earlier. “The only nice thing about you is your dog, mister. And your sister. It’s hard to believe that you and Laura are sister and brother....”

It was then that Georgia recalled that only by having been adopted by the same parents had Laura and Matt become siblings. She buttered a biscuit, trying to call up the details of Matt’s adoption as Laura had once mentioned. Something about his having been abandoned by his mother and being brought into the Bishop home as a four-year-old who had not yet learned to speak....

Well, he sure had had plenty to say
that
afternoon.

Georgia’s eyes fell upon the photo of Matt with a laughing Ally on his back, and she felt an unsolicited stab of envy.

The truth was that she’d been really attracted to him. That he’d activated all those bells and whistles she’d always read about but had never believed in. It had started the minute she had looked up to see him coming across the farmyard—and ended with the dark look that had crossed his face as soon as she had introduced herself to him.

No, it didn’t end there,
a tiny voice inside her protested.
If it had, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now thinking about him.

Well, it hardly matters, she reminded herself, since he’s a crazy man.

A crazy man who wishes my entire family and I would disappear and never come back.

With any luck, he’ll stay away and I won’t have to deal with him.

Georgia turned his picture facedown on the sill and, determined to not waste another thought on Matthew Bishop, resumed eating her dinner.

chapter ten

There was never any question but that Georgia would totally ignore Matt’s demand that she pack up and leave.

She ignored him early the next morning, when she awoke to her second day at Pumpkin Hill, determined to finish cleaning up the mess in the garden, and she ignored him as she sat that night in his favorite chair and read his aunt’s books on fortune-telling.

She ignored him again on Tuesday when she sat on the back step, Aunt Hope’s book on fortune-telling in one hand and her teacup in the other, trying to decipher the little blobs of tea leaves left behind in the bottom of her cup. And she ignored him later that day when she pushed aside the furniture in the living room in the hopes of carving out a space big enough for dancing and was disappointed that there was only sufficient room for some very limited exercise.

She was still ignoring him on Wednesday when, determined to find a place large enough in which she could
really
dance, she dragged first the broom, then
the vacuum cleaner up to the second floor of the barn to clear away the cobwebs and the many years of ancient dust from the floor. It had taken her all morning, but by one o’clock in the afternoon, the old hardwood floor had been thoroughly cleaned as it had never been cleaned before. She had even brought up a wet mop, making countless trips back to the first floor for clean water. When she had finished and the floor had dried, she walked the length and width of it, searching for splinters and other such hazards. Mentally noting those spots best avoided, she lugged the bucket back down the steps for the last time, and went off in search of her portable tape player and her box of music tapes.

Later, dressed in pale pink tights and leotard, dark green leg warmers, and pink leather ballet shoes, her equipment tucked into Mrs. Colson’s picnic basket for easy toting and her pointe shoes slung over one shoulder, she had marched defiantly across the farmyard to the barn.

Just let him try to run me off.

In her head the music she had selected was already playing as she all but ran up the steps to the second floor. She went to the outlet she’d located earlier and plugged in the tape deck, but did not turn it on. There was one more thing to be tended to.

She stood in the middle of the floor, contemplating the fact that there was no barre. Well, then, she’d use a chair. Off she went to the house where she grabbed one from the kitchen and carried it over her head up to the second floor of the barn. After setting the chair on the floor near the window, where the light was best, she turned on the tape, straightened her shoulders,
and, holding on to the back of the chair, began her warm-up exercises at the makeshift barre. Starting with
plies
—leg bends—to stretch all of the leg muscles, she ran through what had been for years her normal routine. First
demi-pliés
—the knees bent halfway; then
grand plies
—the knees completely bent; through each of the five classic ballet positions, first on one side, then turning the other side to her “barre” to repeat all of the exercises. Then on to the second set of exercises, those intended to limber the hip joints, improve turn-out, and stretch the calf muscles. Finally, on to the last of the barre exercises, ending with a
grand écart
—a split so complete that the entire length of both legs touched the floor.

Pausing only long enough to change the tape, Georgia brushed the beads of perspiration from her brow and moved to the center of the room, where she began the progression of floor exercises—from
port de bras en fondu
through
saut de chats
and
pirouettes
—pausing only long enough to change the tape. When the floor exercises were completed, she sat on the chair and peeled off the flat pink leather shoes and replaced them with worn satin pointe shoes, which she tied around her ankles with satin ribbons that had begun to fray.

Returning to the chair, she worked without music, then turned back to the room to complete her round of exercises, the stiffness of the toes of the shoes welcomed against the calluses she had long ago formed. She worked her way across the floor in a series of movements intended to move a dancer across a stage. When she had gone as far as the outside wall, she turned around and went back across
the floor again, repeating the movements over and over. When her calf muscles had begun to plead
no more,
she grinned and granted herself a ten minute break. She lifted the lid of the picnic basket and brought out a bottle of water, from which she drank slowly.

It felt so good to work. Even if no one ever saw her dance again, it felt so good to go through the steps, to work her body the way it had been trained to work. She straddled the chair and sipped at the water, her muscles, unused as of late, springing back to life to complain loudly. She would ache tomorrow, she knew, but she shrugged it off. It was her own fault for not having kept up with her exercises. Well, she would get back into shape and she would stay in shape.

Every day,
she promised herself.
I will do this every day.

As if to test her resolve, she pulled the chair to one side of the room and set the bottle on it. Turning to the basket, she rummaged for the tape she wanted, then slipped it into the player and turned up the volume.

If she was going to dance, she would dance only to her favorite music. She would dance all of those roles she would never get to dance on stage, and it would not matter that no one but she would know that she had mastered every step. She would dance to please herself, for the sheer joy of it, and there would be no one to say that she was not good enough; no one to judge her. She could be Giselle, she could be Columbine, she could be Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. She
knew all of the classic ballets by heart, though she had never had an opportunity to dance the leads. Now she would.

Today, however, called for impromptu dance. She would dance from her heart. The tape she had selected was a mixed collection of Chopin’s works that she had recorded herself from several longer tapes. Georgia had always felt the composer’s piano pieces—much of it written during his affair with a popular romance novelist of the day, George Sand—reflected both the romance and the heartbreak of his life, the perfect thing for impromptu dance. The lively strains of the
Mazurka in B Major
was a good warm-up number, and she followed it with the
Waltz in C Sharp Minor,
swirling and leaping and gliding across the old pine floor of the barn. She had just finished a labored routine to her favorite
Ballade in
G
Minor,
when unexpected applause from the top of the steps startled her.

“Wonderful! Oh, Georgia, that was so wonderful!” Laura cried. “I knew you were a professional dancer, but I had no idea of how ... well, incredibly talented a dancer you are!”

“Aunt Georgia, you are a real ballerina!” An awestruck Ally pointed to Georgia’s feet, which were still poised on their toes. “Can you teach me to do that?” Ally spun around awkwardly, demonstrating a jump. “I want to dance like that, too!”

“I had no idea I had an audience.” Georgia blushed, disturbed to find that she had not been alone after all.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. We didn’t mean to intrude or to
spy on you. We just followed the music....” Laura realized, too late, that for Georgia, the afternoon’s dance had been something more than mere exercise.

“It’s okay. I was just finishing up.”

“Oh, I wish I had known you were going to dance,” Ally pouted. “I could have danced, too.”

“Next time, bring your ballet slippers, and we will dance together,” Georgia told her.

“Can I come tomorrow?”

“Don’t you have school tomorrow?” Georgia laughed.

Ally’s face fell.

“Then how ’bout Saturday?” She brightened again. “I don’t have school on Saturday.”

“I think you should ask your mom if she’d be willing to drive you out here again on Saturday.” Georgia suggested.

“I don’t mind the drive at all, but, Georgia, are you sure you want to?” Laura asked.

“I’d be delighted to teach her. It will be fun for both of us.”

“Can I bring Samantha, too?” Ally asked.

“Who is Samantha?” Georgia sat on the floor and began to untie her shoes.

“She’s my friend. She used to take dancing lessons with me until our teacher stopped.”

“Sure.” Georgia shrugged. “The more the merrier.”

“Yippee! This will be fun! Wait till I tell everyone that I get to take dance lessons again!” Ally jumped up and down.

Georgia laughed. “Well, keep in mind that this is a pretty makeshift arrangement here, kiddo.”