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  When she asks about the girl, the nurse makes a pucker face and says, “It was her heart. No one expected it.” She knows this, then: she will never forget watching the jester kiss Christopher like he was smothering a bird. That this is a world in which a girl can be almost dead, almost crippled, and yet not. A world in which trust is the hardest thing. A world in which she is never safe except when she is leaping with her eyes closed. She thinks of Maurice, of the girl with her flaming tutu. The flowers, now a day old, smell of their watery stems, plant matter, algae.

  She closes her eyes.

  The nurse catches herself and frowns. “I don’t think I was supposed to tell you.”

  When her parents come that morning to pick her up, they come in together, their faces flushed from the cold and talking about the snow that is coming. It is supposed to come tonight or tomorrow. Two feet of snow, they say. They each carry bags of bottled juice, more than she can drink. Mira starts to tell them about the girl who was wheeled in, talked her to sleep, then coughed and would not stop coughing and was wheeled away and never brought back, but she does not finish, she cannot finish.

  CHAPTER 18

  PRESENT

  The day before I leave for New York, I finally drive over to Sioban’s house. It’s been almost a week since I fled from her room. I park across the street in my professor’s car and, in broad daylight, climb the same rickety wooden stairs I climbed that night. It’s been warmer, though, and the steps are swollen and covered with dark stains where the ice has melted. When I get to the top, I don’t even pause. I knock boldly on the door—the sound reverberates in the crisp afternoon air. A student with a backpack walking on the other side of the street turns to look at me. Before I can worry about what will happen if Sioban is not there, the curtain behind the panes moves and Sioban’s long, articulated face peers out. The curtain is replaced, and then the door bursts open. The hot air blast of her smell—sweat and essential oils (rose? patchouli?) surrounds me. I think of Bernie saying “Make it right.” I smile. “Hello,” I say.

  Sioban lets me in and then turns away, without saying a thing. She walks back to her desk. I hadn’t even noticed this desk before. It’s tucked in the corner. On it is a large, heavy textbook of graphs and charts, and an open laptop.

  “Physics?” I say.

  “Actually, neurobiology,” she says, folding herself into the desk chair with her back to me. She crosses her legs underneath her. There is nowhere else for me to sit except on the bed, so I stand.

  I realize with dismay that I’m still attracted to her. I take my coat off and fold it over my arm, covering my bandaged hand. “You haven’t been back to class,” I say. “You didn’t do the midterm.”

  “You noticed?” she says.

  “Sioban,” I say. “We must talk.”

  She crosses her arms and turns to look at me. She looks different. Just this morning I was able to get my contacts back in, and it’s strange to have things delineated so sharply. Is it just that I can see again? How complicated it is to really look at a person. The particularities are overwhelming. Her lips look thinner, her skin more uniform. The acne scars on her cheek are small pale puckers, barely noticeable. She wears leggings and a striped boatneck shirt. She’s also wearing glasses, which I have never seen her in before. They are metal and round, the opposite of stylish. Her dark curly hair is actually the only thing that looks the same about her—it’s pulled back into the high ponytail I’m used to. No scarves or jewelry, nothing extraneous. The only exception is a complicated timepiece on her wrist, which looks like a scuba diving watch. The expression neat as a pin comes to mind. A clean, efficient girl, not an artist of any type. Her scientist side?

  “Sioban,” I say again, trying to get my bearings. She has gone back to reading. “It’s too late to drop my class. If you don’t complete it, I will have to give you a grade commensurate with that. You don’t want that. Your sponsors don’t want that.”

  She is skimming the textbook, highlighting everything she reads.

  “I see you are upset,” I say. Even in this clarified, reduced state, how much space in a room she can take up shocks me. I’m starting to sweat now.

  She slams down the highlighter. “Upset? Yes, I am upset.” She gives me a ferocious stare. “In your class, with you, I felt like something mattered, for my ideas—my mind. You were so important for me.” She flings her head down on her book. “You just left—you just left. How could you?” I’m shocked to realize she’s crying. “You just left me—alone.” She pauses and wails. “Naked.”

  What had I expected? Not this level of anger and self-righteousness. I say, “Sioban, what we did was wrong. I take full responsibility. But it can never happen again.”

  She scoffs in the midst of her great, heavy gulps. “Love is never wrong.”

  Oh dear god, I think.

  When I don’t respond quickly enough—my brain is whirring too fast to speak—she says “Don’t you love me?” There is nothing good I can say here. I look down at her beige carpet, where there are no longer any errant socks.

  Love? That had—truly—never occurred to me. What does this say about me? This is a professional situation, I think. Make it right.

  I go to her and reach out my hand. My hand hovers over her head. “I care about you, Sioban,” I say. I see the pain I’ve caused the girl. I can see her. Not just because of my contacts. Her face, overwhelmed, but unafraid. My early performing made me into a weathervane for others—I don’t want that for her.

  “You are too gifted, too young to lose your way,” I say. I want to touch her face. “You have your life ahead of you. And I mean it. I don’t want to get in your way. Dance. Be a scientist. Show the world what can be done. I’ve made rules for myself that I maybe didn’t have to. But it’s too late for me to fix that.” I laugh and my laughter sounds strange to me. “But maybe I can fix some of it. We’ll see.”

  She stands, turns into me, and then my arms are around her and it is a hug but it is a strange hug. There is nothing sexual in it. Her thin body seems thinner. It’s like hugging myself, her bones and muscles are my own. I feel incredible tenderness. I am amazed that I have managed more kindness toward her than I have toward myself. I feel relief and something else, maybe something like hope.

  “Listen, I am going to take a trip—” I say. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

  She clings to me. She grabs my arm, the one with my injured hand. Though it’s wrapped in my jacket, a pain shoots up my arm. Then I notice that Sioban’s science textbook is propped up by another book, a thick one. I can just catch the brown cover and the ornate font, a generic title treatment in those days. It’s Bronislava’s memoirs. She’s been using it to prop up her textbook. She catches me staring at the book. I pull away and bury my face in my bag as I search for one of my cards. I pull one out. It’s actually from my previous college, but that doesn’t stop me. I scrawl my cell number on the back of it and tack it to her wall with one of the push pins sticking there. “I’m going to New York,” I say. “Call if you need to.”

  “Fuck you,” she says, but her voice is lighter. Something has shifted again. She is letting me go. She has reclaimed something. She knows it. My heart is racing and my stomach sinks. This will be harder than I thought. It’s almost impossible to maintain my boundaries with this girl. The tidal pull toward her is too strong.

  She turns back to her desk like a snail into its shell, to her graphs and charts, to her highlighter, to her young rage and pain, and as much as I want her, I want that, even that, with a burning heart, I want all of that.

  CHAPTER 19

  DECEMBER 1977

  Maurice is right. The dark does come.

  A few days after she’s out of the hospital, Mira is back at home, sitting on her scratchy blue flowered comforter in her unpainted room. She’s listening to Don Giovanni. She wears her terry cloth robe and dangles her feet in her puffy bunny slippers over the side of the bed. She finished her homework early and then alphabetized h
er bookshelf, which is filled with old books, many of which originally belonged to her mother. She fiddles with her beige adhesive wrist guard. Underneath this device, which she must wear for another week (but thank God it will be off in time for the SAB auditions), her skin itches as the tiny fracture heals. The itch has settled under the flesh-colored fabric. It is always there, rummaging about in the kitchen, doing its homework. Sometimes it jumps up, startled, and yells, and that brings tears to her eyes. She never knew an itch could poke you with the hot end of a poker. She never knew an itch could make you cry. She wants to tear off the wrist guard and rip the itch off, but she can’t. She is not allowed. If she plays the opera loud enough, the itch is quiet and she can’t hear her mother or Gary laughing or doing whatever they do downstairs.

  Her eyes run over the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, with their cracking cardboard covers and gingery smell, and her four old records, The Osmonds Greatest Hits, Free to Be You and Me, Burl Ives, and one called English Songs of Old, stacked on the lower shelf, dusty now. In her closet, her shirts and dresses hang neatly, a sight that gives her pleasure even now that she is almost twelve. On the desk against the wall, her cat mug with pens and pencils in it sits on an old leather blotter that had belonged to her father. The two posters on her walls half-scraped of their wallpaper: one black-and-white of Baryshnikov as Albrecht in Giselle leaping like a pouncing cat, and one of Makarova—she had wanted Kirkland but the message to her mother had gotten garbled—in a penché in front of a dusky sunset studio backdrop.

  She is listening to one of the records she recently found in the corner of her parents’ closet. Her father’s opera records that he didn’t take with him—Die Fledermaus and Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni’s opening aria begins. She braces herself against the thundering orchestra and the trills and vibrato of exalted, expelled emotion. Something cracks inside her, and then flows like liquid. She doesn’t know the story—doesn’t care to—but she understands it is a drama of impending doom and revenge. The itch pokes its head up. She rubs at the outside of the hideous wrist guard. She imagines Giselle with a meat cleaver, thundering in among the Wilis, hefting it toward Albrecht’s head, his head rolling off his neck, blood on the Wilis’ white tutus.

  There is a knock on her door. Louder now. She can’t ignore it. She opens the door wide as the aria blares behind her. Gary stands before her in his ripped T-shirt and black engineer boots. She glowers at him.

  “Can I read you a poem?” he says. “I just wrote it.” He comes into her room and sits on her bed. He holds a piece of paper. He reads to her:

  Killer black house flam flap flapper eyes cold flat palm greenbacks

  mother, daughter flypaper hooters stuck down pinned beneath the viaduct

  I live in darkness shout out I can hear only—hold me.

  “What do you think?”

  “I hate it,” she says.

  He smiles. “I thought you would,” he says. He reaches out and touches her wrist.

  “Does it hurt?”

  She shakes her head.

  He doesn’t take his hand away. “I can’t believe that guy didn’t catch you. What an asshole. Your mother thinks ballet is reductive claptrap, but you know, I thought you were great. You were really pretty. Beautiful.” He is close enough that she can smell the coffee on his breath. She can see pores on his nose like little holes in cheese. She doesn’t pull her hand away.

  “She says, ‘Who defines what is beautiful? Whose definition is it?’ She can’t stand that you are getting sucked into some old dead guy’s idea of beauty, I guess.” He laughs. “Maybe I’m just an old guy.” He smiles and she notices his eyes are gray. They look sad. For a second, she doesn’t hate him. “Or maybe,” he says, pulling her closer, “she’s just jealous.”

  A hand brushes against her wrist and grabs. She holds this hand, dry and calloused, but firm. On the other side of her she can feel a bony shoulder against hers. He pulls her to him. It is a bony chest full of need, a scratchy feeling on her neck, his scratchy lips eating her skin, and to her surprise she does not cry out. The mouth finds its way to her chin and wrestles upward, fighting for her mouth, finds it, and rests there. It recoils at first in surprise, then presses harder against her. She closes her eyes. She imagines it is Maurice. She kisses the mouth back. It is her first real kiss. Mira thinks: This is real. This is real. She does not know what this means, but it comes to her in a swift fall of words, like a curtain descending.

  Just then, with a sputtering flicker and a snap, the lights go out. Her record player whirs to a stop. Gary pulls away from her. She hears him walking into the hallway. “What’s happened, Rachel?” The first thing Mira thinks is: the world is ending. Mira feels her way out to the dark hallway. She hears her mother in the hallway below. “What now?” says her mother with a burst of glee in her voice. She loves it, thinks Mira. The world is ending and she loves it.

  “Is everyone okay? Is it just us?” says her mother, reaching the third-floor landing.

  They open the door of the junk room, and the streetlights are blaring inside the windows like a set of binoculars—two eyes burning down on them. Far to the right, if she squints her eyes she can just make out the digital clock on top of the Watchtower building blinking the time on and off: 7:15.

  “It’s not the neighborhood,” says Gary. “It is just us.”

  Then her mother is downstairs on the phone for a long time, yelling and cursing. “Process difficult to reverse,” she says, repeating something being said to her. Finally, she hangs up. “They say the electricity bill hasn’t been paid,” she says. She blames it on Mira’s dad, who she says was supposed to take care of it.

  “It’s your fault,” says Mira, knowing that it is; everything is, will always be, her mother’s fault.

  For the next two days, the house remains cold. The curtains billow with the air that leaks in through the splintered windowpanes. Mira walks around with blankets draped over her, as does Gary. Her mother won’t resort to blankets, but she wears a terry cloth robe over her kimono. All the parts of Mira’s body outside of the blanket grow purplish with cold. In the early morning, when she gets up, she can see her breath come out of her body. Sitting at her desk at school, her teeth chatter and her feet are numb for the first few hours of each day. She rubs them against the metal prongs of her chair to get the feeling to return to them. Everything hardens in the cold: her mattress grows into a slab of stone, the old oranges in the fruit bowl become bowling balls, her sheets crackling slivers of ice. Her pointe shoes are especially brittle. She, her mother, and Gary use candles and gas lanterns that her mother buys at a hardware store on Court Street. She places candles all around the parlor. Mira sits on the floor of the living room, the TV dark beside her, doing homework by candlelight. They carry the camping lanterns when they go up or down the stairs. With mincing steps, wrapped in a blanket, Mira bourrées her way over to her dresser. She draws lines under her eyes. In the oily light of the lamp, she gazes at her pale face. Gary’s eyes brush over her as she walks by in her long white nightgown, carrying a lantern. She lowers the light so that dark envelops her. Her mother comes into the room and says, “Oh! Our house is haunted!” Then she laughs her slipped-on-a-banana-peel kind of a laugh. . . . “Our house has ghosts! Whoo hooo . . .” She rushes at her daughter the way she sometimes did at her studio when her work was going well and would grab Mira and spin her around. Mira smells her sharp flowery smell. Her mother stops and picks up a cold-withered orange from the buffet table next to her. Holding it, she walks through the flickering of the parlor to the window. “A generator. That’s what we need. A generator. We don’t need those Con Ed fuckers,” she says.

  Mira dreams of Maurice. He is driving her in his car down the snake of the highway—it’s the East River at night, over the bridge. He parks on a side street. He takes her through the streets, looking for something. He takes her hand. There is a delinquent hush over these Brooklyn streets. He stops at a dented steel door in the alley behind a lar
ge building. She stands beside him, wearing her winter coats and mittens. He fiddles with the handle on the door and then pushes against it hard, then harder, against the dented metal. They go through the door into a cinder block hallway, which winds around until it leads to a big subterranean room. This room looks like it belongs at the bottom of an ocean. There’s a weird bluish light. In the middle of the floor is a cone of light, and in the middle of the light is a table and three chairs. In the room, there are at least a dozen kids from her age and up. A blond boy and two girls sit playing cards. The boy has very red eyes, reddish skin, and, when he smiles, red teeth. Maurice takes her hand and walks to the edge of the pool.

  “Children, this was once the largest swimming pool in all of New York. They filled it with salt water. All the ladies came to bathe. My dear mother came. She said it was marvelous. That is why I decided to buy it.”

  Yes, Mira now sees it is not just a hole in the ground but something built with an intention. All things at one time had a purpose, however difficult it might be to understand later.

  Just then a girl with brown hair in tight braids that stick out from her head approaches them. She wears a smock and has the largest eyes Mira has ever seen. She wears no shoes.

  She looks down and hands Maurice a bunch of wilted yellow flowers. “I saved them for you. We didn’t know if you would ever come back.” He laughs his bell-like laugh. She turns and runs back to a shadowed corner, from which Mira hears some whispers and shuffling.

  Something inside Mira relaxes. She knows that girl somehow.