Loud Awake and Lost (18 page)

“And so what if you do? Revisit the dance, step by step. That's what a dance teacher would say. You were going somewhere upstate, right?”

I nodded. “I was on my way to see my aunt. I guess it must have been a kind of thrown-together plan. I'd called her a few days before. And I'd been up there a few times in the fall, a couple of times before that in the summer. So I knew the route. But it was a really bad storm that night. And…I wasn't alone.” I exhaled a shaky breath.

“Right, I know. You want my advice?” Lissa paused. “Drive it.”

“What? Drive to the bridge?”

She nodded. “That's the real burning building. I'd go with you, if you want.”

Drive it. “I'm not sure.” I shivered.

Coney Island was one thing. The prospect of this drive was terrifying. And yet, if I were going to do it, I'd have to do it alone. No Kai, no Mom, no Smarty, no Holden or even Lissa. This would have to be my journey.

Reflexively, I checked my texts just to see if Kai had left me anything. No. But it wouldn't stop me from checking again, in the next half hour.

“Maybe you'd find the flow of what happened,” said Lissa. “Or maybe you'll find the flow of all of these other moments that you're missing. But jeez, you look white as a ghost, Ember.”

“It scares me,” I admitted. “Terrifies me.”

“Look, I don't think you should do any of this before you're ready. Go see Birdie first, maybe? Touch in with what you know before you head out into something you don't. Just to make sure you're strong enough, physically and mentally. You've got to be careful with yourself.”

“You're right. I get it.” I nodded. “Actually, you kinda sound like my mom,” I told her. “In a good way, I mean.”

“It's been my experience that moms usually mean it in a good way,” Lissa answered.

I sent Birdie a note late that same night, once I got back from Lissa's—after hanging out a while longer in her apartment, we'd located the closest IHOP uptown, where we ordered silver dollars with whipped butter and strawberry syrup.

“You'll come watch me in the pageant? And then in the spring, I get to dance as a witch
and
a bridesmaid! Who could ask for more, right?” Lissa seemed homesick as she hugged me good-bye.

“You're incredible, Lissa. Of course I'll come clap for you.”

She pulled away, her face unguarded pleasure. “Seriously? I'm not too far away?”

“What are you talking about? You're eight stops on the L.”

Independence was a process, it seemed, and it struck me that Holden was just the same as Lissa in that way. Sometimes he'd seem incredibly independent, and then other times he'd reach out for me as if he were stuck out alone in a field and needed that quick reassurance of cover. “
Nutcracker
's opening night is December fifth,” Lissa said softly, “and then it's March twelfth for
La
Sylphide.
”

“Promise, promise to both. I'd love to come see you.”

On the Lincoln Center subway platform, I'd absently checked again for messages from Kai—none. But I knew it was knee-jerk, that I'd only looked as a way of making myself feel better. The rhythm and tempo of Kai had been established. He happened when he happened, he answered to no rule, and I was coming to an understanding that no matter what I did, I couldn't control him.

As the train pulled into the station, I saw the letter spray-painted on the column on the opposite side of the platform. The casual sideways
A,
in gunmetal silver. My heart leapt—what did it mean? It was like a silent wave, or a smile, the signal of his presence. How many of them were here in the city?

The thought troubled me all the way home, where for once—probably due to my scrupulous texting—my parents were pretending that they'd been tucked up peacefully in bed. Dad reading, Mom knitting.

“How's Lissa?” asked Mom.

“Fun.… Committed,” I said. “She's really in it.”

“Well, I don't envy her. Dancing is such a hard life.”

“Not if it's the only one you'd ever understand.”

Dad, who slept closest to the door in old-fashioned protector style, now reached out his hand to cover mine. “Was it difficult for you? To see her? To be there, around all those kids?” If Mom was right that Dad's voice was the window to his soul, I could tell from the way he asked that a small, quiet part of his soul had been crushed I'd given up dance.

“Not as bad as I thought. Good night,” I answered softly, leaning down to kiss him quickly on the forehead before I turned and left the room.

Birdie's reply to my question was immediate, pinging my in-box by the time I'd come back from brushing my teeth in the bathroom.

Hi, Ember—

Hooray! I was so happy to get your email message. I've really been hoping that you would come on over to the Fine Arts building and say hello. It's not the same—and for sure quieter—with you and Lissa both gone.

Also, Ember, I have something to show you that I think you will want to see. Drop by tomorrow after rehearsal—but not too late.

I would love to reconnect. Sooner the better. xx B.

I clicked and reclicked the message like a lighter all the next morning, during and in between classes.

Then I let my fingers send a quick
ok see you then!
at lunch.

Walking out of the cafeteria, Rachel and I made a plan to hang out this weekend, which was a step in the right direction—but things between us still didn't feel exactly perfect, so I nixed asking her to come with me for support, for my very first visit back to the dance studio. Dance wasn't Smarty's cup of tea, anyway. What we needed most was some real time together out of school. No Jake and no Holden; in fact, nobody else at all running interference. We'd make our way back to the right rhythm, because we always did.

I also called Jenn to reschedule my physical therapy. My afternoon was now clear, and with the school day over, I killed the next ninety minutes in the library. Schoolwork was not the same this year—I could feel teachers giving me leniency on papers and quizzes. I'd never been a spectacular scholar, or even a scholar at all, but now I struggled for my B-minuses and C-pluses. It was trickier, since the accident, to lower myself deep enough to reach those hard, fixed places of concentration.

Paris. My conversation with Lissa kept nudging at me. I'd wanted to take off even before last February. The land of shiny copper pots, of soufflés and flambés, and recipes that needed careful, close instruction. I'd have been in a country where I didn't know the language and didn't have any friends, and far from my parents. Was that what I'd been dreaming about, when I'd confided to Lissa?

At half past four, I gathered my books and left the main building, then headed down the block to the converted church that Lafayette used as its Fine Arts Center. The place of my old dreams.

It was the first time all year that I'd walked up the worn steps and through the arched front door. The entrance was the only place where you could smell the building's previous holy days. That dry-papery, ancient-wood, furniture-polish churchy smell. On the way through, I pressed my hand to the scar ridged beneath my bangs. It gave me courage—I was older, I was different, I was returning to the studio not in failure but with resolution that my past was my past.

I'd heard a rumor that some new hit TV show about ballet dancers had caused a major uptick in Lafayette freshmen taking dance as an elective, and the front hall of locker banks did seem extra crowded with girls in wraps and leg warmers, packing up and heading out. But from the deep cream walls and the lost-and-found basket at the front desk to the corkboards crammed with local auditions, everything looked the same as it always did. It was both exhilarating and strange to be here again.

Stranger still was that I was all but unrecognized by the freshmen and sophomores.

In H studio, I peeped in on a couple of mirrored dancers lingering at the bar. The floor was dusted in cornstarch, and Birdie's favorite Café Europa radio station was playing Charlotte Gainsbourg in a remix. Laughter drifted from the more casual “green room” next door. And even though there was no reason for it, the sound left me feeling unsure of myself, as if I'd been deliberately left out of the joke.

I walked down to J studio, where most of the one-on-one choreography happened. The protocol of J studio was silence, no music, and it was usually more intense, too, a controlled randomness of small groups and individuals working piecemeal through routines. Some of the dancers were beating out their eight-count combinations, while others performed in pairs. In back was a nest of freshmen stretching through their end-of-practice cooldowns.

With no Birdie in sight, I sat in a spare folding chair by the door.

“Ouch!” The seat was too hard; I winced as pain jolted up my spine. It was like a reminder that the place where I really belonged was in my physical therapy class—not here.

“Ember! You okay?” Marianne Polzone, skimming past, paused to check me over.

“Hey, Marianne. Fine, I'm fine.”

She nodded and resumed the complicated steps of a floor routine. Marianne was a senior, and she'd always been somewhat robotic in her style, but she'd really changed this past year. As I watched her, I had to respect how far she'd come from “Marianne Plod Zone,” Lissa's smirking name for her.

After a minute or so, Marianne even dared a small, pleased glance at me, as if hoping that I'd noticed how much she'd improved. I smiled back. Yes.

Wade Adams, working on some difficult choreography on the other side of the room, was just as rubber-bandy and intuitively brilliant as always. His older brother, Chester, was a principal with the ABT, which is where Wade himself very likely would end up. Wade and Chester both looked like young, tall, redheaded Woody Allens. Not exactly leading-man types, but you forgave them their shortcomings in the looks department when they started to move.

I relaxed deeper into my seat, as Hannah Thwaite bounced into the studio. Hannah! I'd hardly seen her at school—she probably lived in the Arts building. Hannah was one of the best dancers at Lafayette, a natural despite her round, blow-up-doll figure that she liked to emphasize. Today she'd been highlighting her assets with a plunge-neck leotard, and as she sprang to the corner of the room to retrieve her shrug, she noticed me.

“Eeek! Ember! A little Birdie told me you might drop by today. But you're so late, you missed practice. You look amaaaazing with your hair like that—I saw you the other day in the hall and totally meant to tell you.” Did Hannah speak like that on purpose? Or did her fake sweetness sound okay in her own ears? “You've been such a stranger here! We were all starting to feel offended! But I guess you keep away because you miss it so much. It's incredibly brave of you to come by and show some support.”

I gave Hannah's boobs a quick smile. “I always think of you as having plenty of support.”

Hannah pulled her shrug across her chest and raised her eyebrows. I wasn't usually bitchy, and I was annoyed that I'd sunk to her level, but of course now Hannah had her claws out. “Well, if it's any consolation, it's been hugely competitive this year. So it would have been really hard to make the cut.”

“Then I guess it was pretty smart of me to stage that debilitating car accident.”

Hannah looked only slightly embarrassed. “Oh, Emb, I'm obviously not trying to be—I mean, I feel incredibly sorry for you. For what happened, I mean. We all feel bad.” Her smile was awkward—she wasn't being fake now, but her sincerity didn't come easy, either. “You used to put in so much time here. Jeez, I feel like after one thousand or so hours, we should each get to tag the J studio wall, you know?” As she pretended to shake a can of paint and spray. “Like, ‘Hannah was here!' ” She snorted. “ ‘Ember was here!' ”

“Right…”

Just then Birdie swept through the door. Her eyes lit brightly on me. “Ember, oh good. I thought I saw you come in!” When she hugged me, the buttons on her long-underwear thermal shirt met the buttons of my long-underwear thermal shirt in a compatible click. “Wow.” She smiled as she pulled away. “As I live and breathe. Okay, come on upstairs with me.”

“See ya, Emb.” As Hannah shot off, I stood to follow Birdie out of the studio and then up a flight of stairs to her cramped dormer office, the site of many late afternoons for some of us, after dance practice.

It still seemed that the room hadn't received the spring cleaning Birdie had been threatening to give it since I'd made my very first visit. It could never be termed a hangout office, but I'd spent a few afternoons here with Birdie and other kids, sardine-packed on Birdie's shabby brown velvet sofa, where we'd all gossip and watch
Dirty
Dancing
or
Footloose
on her ancient TV while eating burnt microwave popcorn.

Ember
was
here.
Hannah's thought, now planted, was never going to uproot.

“You had something to show me?”

“Behind here. Come closer.” Birdie's computer screen was glowing. She dragged a straight-back chair—thinly cushioned, thank God—over for me. As I sat, she flopped in her own swivel chair next to mine and then gathered herself up in it, propping her chin on her knees. “Can you guess what this is?”

“Nope.” I had no idea.

“It's your audition for
Chicago.
”

My whole body prickled. “Oh.”

“We taped everyone, so that the dance and drama departments could watch together, later. I think it might help you set the record straight. All year, I'm sure, you've had people feeling bad for you. Assuming that this accident had derailed your dreams. And I imagine it's been a difficult adjustment. But…” Her hand hovered above the cursor arrow, as if waiting for permission. “This is from December.”

“Yes. I'd like to see.” Although I wasn't sure, exactly, if I was ready. But I nodded, swallowed, braced.

She pressed play, and there I was. Full screen.

Was it only a year ago? But I was so much younger! Unformed and soft in a way that I knew I wasn't anymore. In that thin pink terrycloth sweatshirt that I'd just donated last week to Grace Church. My legs looked too thin for my baby-blue leggings.

“Do you remember this?” Birdie murmured at my side.

“I'm…not sure.”

My audition was standard, an
All
That
Jazz
dance sequence. I was prepared for anything, but mostly for failure.

Except I was good. I was great, really. Campy, sparkly, I was selling it, but I owned it, too. My voice was trained and suited the role, but my dancing was a cut above. Each move I made was clean and punctuated, and as I watched, I could feel my muscles remembering it—the swivel, the jump and land. I knew this routine. I'd been in such amazing shape. So limber and confident, and almost naive in my innocence. I thought I'd be in control of that body forever.

I watched that girl, the girl I had been. I watched her hit every line, every mark.

And then she/I stopped. A second later, the music stopped, too, in an abrupt and discordant break.

Off camera, Birdie asked me what was wrong. If I wanted to start again. There was an echoing moment. The cameraperson sensed that a drama was unfolding before her, and the lens-angle view jumped over to Martha Cutts, who was Lafayette's pinch-hit piano player and Mr. Cutts's wife. She was watching me, clearly puzzled, and then with eyebrows firmly raised, she began the piece again.

The camera jiggled back to me. Thirty-two beats, and when I stopped for the second time, Birdie leapt on camera. I watched her, compact yet sleek, as she picked up the routine, performing as if we were in it together, a duet.