Previously – Chapter 15: The Junior Partner
She came on Friday instead, which was not what he had asked for, and neither of them mentioned it.
He had bought a fish. He had bought it that afternoon in Everett on the way back from an hour at the arts center with a man and a hammer, from a man behind a counter, having asked two questions about it and understood neither answer, and he had been quietly frightened of it since about four o’clock.
“You bought a fish.”
“I was told not to buy a chicken.”
“Adam, you’ve never cooked a fish in your life.”
“No,” he said, “and I would like you to notice that I did not tell you that on the phone, because you’d have offered to bring something, and then it would have been a thing you’d done.”
It was, in the event, extremely good, which annoyed him.
They ate at the table with the radio on low and the rail by the front step going white with the first frost of the year, and they talked about nothing for two hours again, and she found that she had been looking forward to it since she left his kitchen on Wednesday, in a way she had not looked forward to anything since March.
At about ten she said, “I’m going to stay.”
Adam put his fork down.
“You don’t have to make a speech about it,” she said. “I’d just like it noted that I’ve thought about it and I’m saying it out loud, because I have a track record of deciding things by myself and announcing them afterward, and Danielle King told me so in a café and so did my mother and so, in his way, did you.”
“Right.”
“That’s all. That’s the whole announcement.”
“Mia.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not going to say anything,” Adam said. “I’m working out how to stand up without it looking like a decision.”
* * *
There were things about her hip that had to be said out loud, and she said them, in the hall, with her coat still half off, in the flat voice of a woman giving somebody a floor plan.
Not the right side. Not weight through the right leg, not at any point, for any reason. Not lifted, not carried, not turned over. Nothing that put the joint at end range, meaning nothing that involved her knee coming up past a right angle. It ruled out a surprising amount and would have ruled out more of it fifteen years ago.
“Is there a version of this that isn’t a briefing?” she said.
“I’d rather have the briefing.”
“Most people would rather not have the briefing.”
“Most people,” Adam said, “have not spent two years watching somebody guess,” and that was the moment, in a hallway, with a coat, that Mia stopped being frightened of it.
It was slow, and it was funny about four times. She had not expected that, and it turned out to be the whole of what she needed. There was a negotiation about the stairs which he lost. There was a pillow that had to go somewhere specific and he took direction about it with the grave attention of a man being shown how to wire a plug. At one point she said “not that,” quite sharply, and he said “understood” and moved, and did not apologize, and did not go careful afterward, which was the thing she had been most afraid of in the car on the way over.
She had thought her body would be an argument. It had been an argument since March: a thing to be managed and negotiated with and counted, forty feet and two curbs and a step up into the store.
It was not an argument. That was the part she had not been able to imagine and could not, afterward, describe to anybody, including Lucy, who asked.
Afterward he lay with his arm across her and his hand very deliberately nowhere near her right side, and said, into the dark, “I have been thinking about how to do that for six weeks and every single version I had was wrong.”
“They were all going to be wrong.”
“Yes, I know that now.”
“You were going to ask if I was all right about eleven times.”
“I had planned to ask about eleven times.”
“I know,” Mia said. “I could feel you not doing it. It was the loudest thing in the room.”
Adam laughed, and she felt it happen through his ribs against her shoulder blade, and outside the window the first frost of the year went on quietly ruining somebody’s garden.
At some point in the night she woke up, because she always did, and ran a hand down the front of the right hip and took a reading, as she had every night since March.
Three. Maybe a three.
She lay in the dark in a house six minutes from the studio with a man asleep on the other side of the bed, and thought, with the clarity you only get at four in the morning: that is the best day I have had since the sixteenth of March, and I would like about nine hundred more of them.
She had, at that point, six hours.
* * *
He made her coffee at half past six in the morning and got it wrong, and she drank it, and he drove her to her mother’s so she could change, and waited in the truck at the end of the lane like a seventeen-year-old.
Patricia, at the kitchen window, said nothing whatsoever, at volume, for about four minutes.
“Say it.”
“I’m making toast.”
“Mom.”
“I am making toast,” said Patricia, and made toast, and put it in front of her, and only at the door, with Mia’s coat already on, said: “There’s a rail by his front step.”
“There is.”
“Did you ask him for it?”
“No.”
“No,” her mother said, and let her go.
Mia sat in the truck with a piece of her mother’s toast and her hair still wet and looked at Main Street coming, and thought that she had not been this pleased about a Saturday since she was about nineteen.
* * *
They arrived in a minibus at nine forty for a ten o’clock, Celeste’s doing, and they came in through the front door in a line.
Twenty-two of them. Black leotards, every one the same black, with CRESTWOOD across the chest in a small silver serif, and warm-up jackets over the top in a matching black, and their hair already done. Not done in the car. Done at home, properly, by somebody who knew how, and then traveled in.
Lockwood’s eleven were in the lobby waiting for them.
Mia watched it from the office doorway and made herself keep watching. Tori had her hair in a bun that was slightly too low and she was pushing a pin back into it for the fourth time. Connor was in a T-shirt with a hole at the collar and gray sweats and he had shoes on that Mia knew for a fact were his older brother’s. Two of the younger girls had gone very quiet. The rest had arranged themselves, without appearing to, into a group with their backs to the reception desk.
“Morning,” Celeste said, to the room in general. “We’ll get changed if there’s somewhere.”
“There’s a changing room,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “It’s through there. It’s small.”
“We’ll manage.”
It was as they went past that Mia heard it. Not from Celeste. From a boy near the back called Jaden, to the boy next to him, in the voice of somebody who genuinely believed he was being quiet.
“This place is tiny. How do they even function?”
Mia was eight feet away. Connor was four.
She saw his shoulders go and she got across the lobby faster than she should have, and she put her hand flat on his upper arm and left it there, and said, “Water bottles in the corner, not on the barre,” in a voice for the whole room, and he stood there under her hand with his jaw working and did not move.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
“Connor.”
“I said okay.”
Derek arrived at four minutes to ten with two boxes of doughnuts and no coat, in November, and put the doughnuts on the reception desk and said, “Nobody eat these until after, they’re a reward and I will be checking,” and eleven Lockwood teenagers who had been braced for a humiliation discovered that the famous one was going to be an idiot, and the temperature in the lobby went up about six degrees.
* * *
The class was good. She had not expected it to be good.
Derek took the warm-up. He put them in mixed lines on purpose, alternating, so that no Crestwood dancer had a Crestwood dancer on either side, and he did it without announcing it, and half of them didn’t notice until they were already in place.
“Right. Hello. I’m Derek, I’m forty-one, I’m going to lie about that later so please don’t correct me.” A ripple. “Rules. One: if I say something and you don’t understand it, that’s my fault and you put your hand up. Two: nobody apologizes. If you fall over you get up and you carry on and you do not say sorry, because I’m going to fall over at least once this morning and I refuse to apologize to any of you.” He clapped once. “Three: at the end there are doughnuts, and there are eleven of one and eleven of the other, and you will note that there are thirty-three of you, so.”
“That’s not enough,” said somebody.
“No,” Derek agreed. “It isn’t. That’s the fourth rule, and the fourth rule is about life.”
Mia worked the room from a stool.
That was the arrangement she’d made with herself at six that morning: a stool at the front corner, her cane against the mirror, and she would not spend more than a total of fifteen minutes on her feet. She had it written on the back of her hand.
She was good from the stool. She had learned to be.
“Sixteen, the arm’s early. You’re arriving before the music does.”
“Front line, you’re all watching Derek’s feet. His feet are the least interesting thing about him.”
“Thank you.”
“And whoever is doing four pirouettes when I asked for two: I can see you, it is not more impressive, and you are landing in a shape nobody would pay for.”
“Thank you,” Derek said.
“Watch his back. The whole phrase happens in his back.”
She had thirty-three of them and she knew nine names, and by the twenty-minute mark she knew twenty-two, because she had asked, and because asking was ninety percent of it.
A Crestwood girl with a very high extension came off the diagonal badly three times in a row and Mia had her come over and put two fingers on her ribs and said, “Breathe out here, not up here, you’re lifting your whole chest to get the leg and it’s costing you the landing,” and the girl did it and got it and looked at Mia with the particular startled expression of a fourteen-year-old who has been given information rather than encouragement.
“What’s your name?”
“Priya.”
“Priya, you’ve got a beautiful line and you’ve been taught to show it to people, and the showing is what’s breaking it. Stop selling. Just do it and let them look.”
Priya went back to her place and did the whole rest of the class about fifteen percent better, and Celeste, over by the mirror, wrote something down.
Derek set a phrase that had a lift in it, an assisted turn, one partner supporting the other’s waist. He put them in pairs and did not choose the pairs, and there was a horrible eight seconds of teenagers standing very still while a room reorganized itself, and then Connor, who had said nothing all morning and whose shoes were his brother’s, walked straight across the floor to the girl standing on her own at the far end, who was a Crestwood girl about a foot shorter than him, and put his hand out and said, “You’re all right, I’ll do it, I’m strong.”
And she said, “You’d better be,” and they were fine.
Mia caught Celeste’s eye across the room and Celeste raised an eyebrow, and neither of them said anything, and it was the first thing that had passed between the two studios that morning that was not a negotiation.
At twenty-nine minutes Derek said, “Right. Stop. Everybody find somebody from the other studio, and I mean that, I will be checking, and I want you to teach them eight counts of something you’re good at.”
Thirty-three teenagers stared at him.
“Anything. Eight counts. Not your hardest thing, your favorite thing.” He clapped. “Four minutes. Go.”
It was appalling for ninety seconds and then it was extraordinary.
Mia watched from the stool as a Crestwood boy with a beautiful clean double tour taught it, badly and with enormous patience, to Bethany, who had never been taught anything by anybody her own age in her life. She watched Connor teach a Crestwood girl a hip-hop transition he had learned off the internet, not in any of Lockwood’s syllabus, clearly practiced in his bedroom for four years, and excellent. She watched two fifteen-year-olds discover that they both did the same odd thing with their hands and become, in the space of about a minute, friends.
At the end of it Derek made everybody perform their eight counts, in pairs, in front of everybody, and the room shouted itself hoarse, and the loudest cheer of the morning went to a fourteen-year-old Crestwood girl who had taught her partner nothing at all because they had spent four minutes arguing about whether it counted as dance if you did it sitting down.
“What did you learn?” Derek asked her.
“Nothing. We had a discussion.”
“Excellent. That’s also the job.”
Mia caught Celeste’s eye again and Celeste, who had not smiled once since the minibus, was smiling.
At the thirty-minute mark Mia looked up and Tori was laughing.
Not politely. Doubled over, hand on a stranger’s shoulder, laughing at something Priya had said, in a way Mia had not seen in three months. Sixteen years old, in a room with fourteen people who were as good as her or better, for the first time in her life.
Look at that, Mia thought. That’s what she’s never had.
Then Danielle came in.
She stood at the back by the fire door with her coat over her arm and did not sit down. Mia registered her and went back to work.
* * *
At thirty-eight minutes, Derek said, “Right. The Lockwood piece, the one from the showcase. Danielle’s got the video and I’ve watched it seven times and there’s a thing in it I want to steal, so we’re all going to learn it.”
Mia’s stomach did something.
“It’s four counts,” Derek said. “It’s the fall out of the turn. Tori, come here, you’re demonstrating, you’re the only one who can do it.”
Tori went the color of a beetroot and did it.
Twice, then a third time slower, and the room made a noise the third time because slower made it worse rather than better, the way the good ones always do.
“So,” Derek said. “That. Everybody. In fours.”
It fell apart, obviously. Thirty-three teenagers went into a phrase that had taken one of them five weeks and it came out as a lot of falling over, and the room got loud and happy, and two Crestwood boys went down simultaneously and lay there, and Derek shouted “NOBODY APOLOGIZE” over the music, and somebody’s water bottle went across the floor.
Mia went around it from the stool. Later. Later. You’re all catching too early, the whole thing is the lateness. It’s not a fall, it’s a decision not to catch yourself for one count longer than is comfortable.
“That’s mad,” said a Crestwood boy.
“That’s the job.”
“How do you even practice that?”
“You practice it badly about four hundred times where nobody can see you,” Mia said, “and then one day it’s yours,” and Tori, from the other side of the room, said “That’s literally what happened,” and the room laughed.
And a girl said: “Can you show me?”
She was one of the Crestwood ones. Fourteen. Straight ponytail, no malice in her anywhere, and she had asked it the way you ask anything of the person at the front of the room.
Mia said, “Tori can show you.”
“She did, though.” The girl was not being difficult. She was being fourteen and precise. “She does it fast. Everyone does it fast. I want to see where the weight goes.”
Where the weight goes.
It was the right question. It was the exact right question, the only question about that phrase, and it was the thing Mia had spent five weeks failing to say to Tori in words.
The room had gone quiet in the way rooms do when they notice something before they understand it. Derek, over by the stereo, said, “I can walk it through,” in a light voice, and started to move, and Mia lifted a hand and he stopped.
She knew exactly what she was doing. She had been in a room for thirty-eight minutes being better at her job than she had been at anything since March, and a child had asked her a question that could only be answered in one language, and she wanted to answer it.
“Hold this,” she said, and gave her cane to the girl.
* * *
She marked the entry, walking. Four steps. That was fine.
She took the turn at half speed and it was fine, because the turn was on the left.
The fall came off the right.
That was the whole design of it. You spun left, you let the momentum carry through the right hip, you fell out of it sideways with your weight over a leg that was not underneath you yet, and for a count and a half there was nothing holding you up but the belief that you would get there. Then you got there. That was the phrase.
Mia went into it and the room was silent and she felt, for about half of one second, absolutely magnificent.
Then her right hip took the load.
There was no sound. She would remember that. It did not tear or pop or do any of the things people describe. It simply stopped being a joint and became a hinge with nothing in it, and her leg went out from under her sideways and she came down on her right side on the floor of her own studio with her arm underneath her.
She lay there.
Thirty-three teenagers did not make a sound.
And in the half-second before anyone reached her, while she was still going down, before the pain arrived, Mia knew.
It was not a thought and it did not have words in it. It was the same information her body had given her in Chicago on March sixteenth, in the wings, four seconds after the lift, before anybody had said the word labrum to her: a piece of knowledge delivered directly into the bone, complete, requiring no interpretation and admitting no argument.
That’s it. That’s the end of it.
Then the floor, and the pain, and Derek’s hands.
He got there first. He was very fast and very calm and he did not try to lift her, he put one hand flat between her shoulder blades and said, “Don’t move, don’t move, I’ve got you, don’t move,” and to the room, in a completely different voice, “Celeste. Take them out.”
“Everybody up. Out to the lobby.” Celeste’s voice came down flat across the room. “Now, please. Bags. Go.”
They went. Somebody was crying. Priya was still holding the cane and did not know what to do with it and Celeste took it off her on the way past.
Mia lay on her side on the floor with her cheek on the boards, and from that angle she could see the drift of glitter along the base of the mirror, still there, and still going to be there in April.
“Mia.” Derek had crouched right down so his face was level with hers. “Talk to me.”
“I know.”
“What?”
“I said I know,” Mia said.
* * *
She would not be carried and she would not have an ambulance, and it took twenty minutes and three people to get her into the office chair, and Lucy came with ice and the reading of a woman who has been told on the phone and driven too fast.
“Right,” Lucy said. “Bellingham. Now.”
“Sasha first.”
“Sasha will say Bellingham.”
“Then Sasha can say it and I’ll believe her.”
At some point in there Danielle King left. Mia did not see her go. Mrs. Fletcher said afterwards that she had stopped at the desk, and asked whether anyone had called anyone, and been told that Lucy was on it, and said “Right,” and gone out to her car and sat in it for a minute before she drove away.
The Crestwood kids waited in the lobby for the minibus in total silence. Nobody touched the doughnuts.
It was in that silence, at about ten past eleven, that Jaden said the thing.
Mia did not hear it. Nobody would tell her exactly what it was afterwards, and the four accounts she eventually assembled did not agree, and the closest she got was Tori’s, three days later, in a parking lot:
He didn’t even say it mean. That’s the thing. He said it like he was working it out. He said “is she even a dancer any more,” like it was a real question.
Connor put him into the wall by the bulletin board.
Not a punch. Two hands, flat, in the chest, and Jaden went back into the drywall hard enough to bring the fire-drill notice down, and then eight people were shouting and Celeste was between them with her arm out like a railroad crossing.
They brought Connor into the office because there was nowhere else.
He stood by the filing cabinet with his hands jammed into his armpits and his chin down, seventeen years old, shaking.
Mia was in the chair with a bag of ice on her hip and her leg out straight and her right hand still not working properly, and she said, “What did you do.”
“He said something.”
“I asked what you did.”
“I pushed him.” Connor’s voice cracked in the middle of it. “He said something about you and I pushed him.”
Celeste was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, and Adam was not there yet, and Mia could feel the ice going wet through her leggings, and what she should have said, and knew she should say, and thought about saying, was thank you, and never do that again.
What she said was: “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done.”
Connor’s head came up.
“We’re four weeks out. There is a contract. There are eight hundred seats and a lighting rig and Crestwood’s insurers on a speakerphone, and you have just put a sixteen-year-old boy into a wall in front of twenty-two witnesses and one of them is their head of faculty.” Her voice was not loud. It was worse than loud. “You could have taken this whole thing down. Over a sentence.”
“He said you weren’t a dancer.”
“I’m not,” Mia said.
The room went very quiet.
“Get your things,” she said. “Go home. I’ll call your mother.”
He went. He did not slam the door, and later she thought that if he had slammed it she might have felt better.
Celeste unfolded her arms.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “mine started it, and I’ll be saying so. To Danielle and to the boy’s parents and to anybody else who asks.”
“Thank you.”
“He’ll be on the bus and I’ll deal with him.” Celeste paused in the doorway. “That was a good class, until it wasn’t. Best forty minutes those twenty-two have had in a year, and I’ve been teaching nineteen of them since they were nine.” She looked at the ice pack and away again. “That girl of yours with the low bun is the real thing. And the boy who crossed the floor for Priya, whatever he’s done since.”
“Connor.”
“Connor.” Celeste nodded once. “I’m sorry about your hip.”
* * *
When the minibus had gone, Lucy came into the office with a fresh bag of ice and shut the door and did not put the light on.
“Right,” she said. “What do you need.”
“Nothing.”
“Wrong answer, try again.”
“Lucy.”
“I’ve known you since we were nine,” Lucy said, sitting down on the corner of the desk, “and there has never once been a bad thing in your life where you didn’t say nothing and then do something insane about four days later. So. What do you need.”
Mia took her time about it.
“I need somebody to tell the parents,” she said. “Before it’s a rumor. Kelly Nowak will have it by four o’clock and by tomorrow it’ll be that I broke my back.”
“Done.”
“And I need Tori to hear it from me and not from a group chat.”
“Also done, she’s in the lobby, she wouldn’t get on the bus.”
Mia closed her eyes.
“And I need somebody to eat one of those doughnuts,” she said, “because there are twenty-two of them out there and nobody touched them and it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Lucy went out and came back with the box and put it on the desk and they ate one each, in the dark, in silence.
“They’re not even very good,” Lucy said.
“They’re terrible.”
“They’re from a garage.”
“They’re absolutely from a garage,” Mia said, and something in her chest let go slightly, and then Tori came in, and Mia told her herself, in eleven words, and Tori did not cry until she was outside.
* * *
Adam got the call at twenty-five past eleven and was there by twenty to twelve, and by the time he arrived it was over. That was the part he could not get past afterwards. The minibus was gone. The lobby was empty. Mrs. Fletcher had already swept up the drywall and put the fire-drill notice back on the wall with a new pin.
There were two boxes of doughnuts on the reception desk that nobody had opened.
He found her in the parking lot.
She was standing at the passenger door of Lucy’s car with one hand on the roof, not getting in. Lucy was in the driver’s seat with the engine running and the sense to stay there.
“Mia.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not standing on that.”
“I’m not standing on it, I’m leaning on a car.”
She was gray. That was the word for it; there was no color in her face at all, and her hair had come out of its clip on one side, and she was holding the roof of a Corolla in a parking lot in November with her weight entirely on her left leg and her cane hooked over her wrist where somebody had put it.
Adam had come at forty over the limit for six miles working out what to say. He had about nine versions.
He stopped six feet away and did not use any of them.
Because he had seen this before.
Not the injury. He had never seen anybody go down. What he had seen was a woman standing in a parking lot at Everett Providence on February nineteenth holding the roof of a car, after a conversation with an oncologist, not crying, entirely composed, refusing to be helped into the passenger seat of her own vehicle. Heather had stood exactly like that. One hand flat on the metal. Her weight on one side. Looking at the middle distance with an expression he had spent two years failing to describe to anybody, because it was not despair and it was not fear.
It was arithmetic. It was a person doing a sum they had already done and getting the same answer.
So he did not say it might not be as bad as you think. He did not say we’ll get a second opinion. He did not say I’m so sorry.
He walked around to the driver’s side, and said, “Lucy, I’ve got her,” and Lucy looked at his face and got out without a word and handed him the keys.
He opened the passenger door and held it, and stood back far enough that she could get herself in.
It took her a long time. He let it take a long time.
Then he shut the door, and went around, and drove her home, and did not say one single word the whole way, and Mia looked out of the window the whole way and let him.
At the turning for her mother’s road she said, “There were doughnuts.”
“There were.”
“Nobody ate them.”
“No,” Adam said.
And that, for reasons neither of them could have defended, was the thing that made her cry.
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