Previously – Chapter 4: The Window Side
The Harvest Fest was set for October eighteenth. That gave them three weeks and two days, and Mia had said in the first meeting that it was not enough time and had been overruled by a room containing Lucy Henshaw, Mrs. Fletcher and a photocopier.
The photocopier was in the pharmacy back office. Lucy produced four hundred flyers in an afternoon in a way that Mia was fairly certain constituted a firing offense.
“It’s fine, Ray thinks it’s community outreach.”
“Does Ray know?”
“Ray is going to know on Tuesday when I tell him he’s a sponsor,” Lucy said, “and he’ll be delighted, and it’ll cost him forty dollars, and he’ll get a line on the flyer, and he’ll talk about it until Easter.”
The flyers went into four hundred school bags on Wednesday. By the Friday, twenty people had asked Adam about it in the street and two had asked whether it was true that Mia Chambers was choreographing it.
“I’m not choreographing it,” Mia said.
“You are, though,” said Lucy.
“I’m arranging things that already exist.”
“Mia. You’ve been in that building for eleven hours this week and you’ve rewritten the ending of the babies’ number twice.”
“Once.”
“Twice. Mrs. Fletcher told me.”
* * *
The work was the thing she had not expected to love.
It was not dance. That had to be said plainly, and Mia said it to herself most mornings on the walk down: it was not dance, it was logistics with music, and it consisted almost entirely of solving problems that nobody in the audience would ever know had existed.
There were ninety-one children and one room. There were eleven distinct groups who all had to be on a floor, in some order, in an hour and forty minutes, and each one needed somewhere to be before and somewhere to be after, and there was exactly one corridor.
Mia built the running order on a Tuesday afternoon with a legal pad and a chair and it took her four hours and she did not notice any of them.
“You’ve done a spreadsheet,” said Lucy, appearing at the desk.
“It’s a list.”
“It’s got columns.”
“A list can have columns.”
“That’s a spreadsheet on paper, and I have never been prouder of anybody.” Lucy leaned over it. “Why are the little ones on twice?”
“Because they’re on at the start when they’re not tired, and they’re on at the end because eleven of them have got two parents and a grandmother each, and that’s about a third of the room, and if the little ones are in the last number nobody leaves early.”
Lucy looked at her.
“You’re quite ruthless,” she said.
“I’m box office,” Mia said.
She fixed the adult beginners’ piece by taking out every single thing in it that required anybody to be in unison, and turned it from an embarrassment into a joke that the six of them were in on. She gave Bethany Coyle eight counts on her own in the middle of the teen piece and did not tell her mother. She spent an entire Thursday on the transition between the seven-to-nines and the ten-to-twelves. It lasted four seconds and she rebuilt it eight times.
There were, over three weeks, four separate crises, none of which appeared in the program.
The first was a costume problem. It resolved itself when Mia established that nobody in the audience could tell the difference between eleven blue leotards and eleven leotards that were approximately blue, and that the correct number of leotards to buy was zero.
The second was Kyle Brennan’s fairy lights. They blew the strip by the mirror on the first attempt, and Kyle rewired them onto a different circuit with an expression of grim personal vendetta.
The third was the ten-to-twelves, who developed, in week two, a collective conviction that their number was embarrassing. Mia watched it happen over about four days and recognized it, because it is a specific illness of that age and it kills more dancers than injury does. She fixed it by taking the number apart in front of them and asking them what was wrong with it, and letting them be right about two things, and changing both.
The fourth was Connor Reyes, who missed the last Tuesday and the last Thursday and did not answer his phone.
“He does this,” Adam said.
“Since when?”
“Since about April.” He was looking at the roster. “His dad’s out of work. There’s four of them in the house and Connor’s the oldest and he picks up shifts at the place out by the highway, and when it gets bad he stops coming and then he’s embarrassed about stopping, so he stops harder.”
“What do you do?”
“I go and get him,” Adam said.
He drove out on Friday afternoon and came back with him at five, and Connor did the run-through in his brother’s shoes, and nobody said anything about it, and Mia noticed that Adam had not made him talk about it either, which was a competence she had not expected.
* * *
And on the second Saturday she found that she had, without any decision being taken, begun making things.
Not arranging. Making.
It happened in the middle of a Saturday class with eleven teenagers on the floor and Adam over by the stereo, and it consisted of Mia saying, “No, do it like this,” and then, because she could not stand up, describing a movement she could see with total clarity in her head and had never seen with her eyes.
“Off the diagonal, and then instead of finishing it, you stop.”
“Stop where?”
“In the middle. Halfway through the weight change, before you get to the other leg.”
“That’ll look like I’ve fallen over.”
“For about half a count. And then you’ll finish it, and the half a count is what people will remember.” Mia stopped. “Sorry. Do the normal one. That’s a stupid idea.”
Tori did the normal one.
It was, Mia thought afterwards, the first idea she had ever had.
* * *
Dr. Peterson’s office was in Everett, in the same building as Sasha’s, on the floor above, and he had the new scan up on a monitor before Mia had her coat off.
“Sit down. You’ve walked here from the parking lot.”
“That’s what a parking lot is.”
“That’s what a parking lot is if you’ve got two working hips.” He turned the monitor. “Right. Sasha’s sent me a note. She does that about ten times a year and it always means she’s worried and doesn’t want to be the one to say it.”
Mia’s stomach did something.
“The repair’s holding,” he said, right away, seeing her face. “I’m going to say that first because everybody stops listening after the first sentence. The labral repair is intact and it looks good.”
“And?”
“And there’s some change on the joint surface that I want to keep an eye on.” He put a pen on the screen. “That, and a bit of that. That’s cartilage. In somebody your age with your history it’s not surprising and it’s not, by itself, a catastrophe.”
“But.”
“But it doesn’t grow back,” Dr. Peterson said. “That’s the whole of the but. Labrum can be repaired. Muscle can be rebuilt. Cartilage is a thing you have a quantity of, and the quantity only goes one way, and how fast it goes depends almost entirely on what you do with the joint over the next year.”
Mia sat very still.
“How much have I got?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not going to be pushed into a number, because the number would be made up and you’d take it home and live in it.”
“Sasha said almost exactly that.”
“Sasha and I have been having the same argument with dancers for twenty years.” He sat back. “Here’s the practical bit, and it’s boring, and it’s the only part of this appointment that matters. Load management. Not rest, load management. You can walk. You can stand for a bit. You can teach. What you cannot do is put that joint under rotation with your body weight on it, because that is precisely the movement that takes the surface off, and you will be able to do it long before you should, and it will not hurt very much at the time.”
“Define rotation under load.”
“Turning on it,” he said. “Dancing on it, Mia.”
The room was quiet.
“For how long?”
“Six months, and then we look again. And I want to be extremely clear about something, because you’re going to leave here and start bargaining with it in the car.” He leaned forward. “There is no version of this where you get away with a bit. There’s no just a few counts. The joint doesn’t know it’s only a few counts.”
Mia looked at her hands.
“Can I ask you the question?”
“You can ask me the question and I’m going to give you the same answer Sasha gave you. I don’t know.” Dr. Peterson took his glasses off. “But I’ll give you the shape of it, because you’re an adult and you’ll get it out of somebody eventually and it may as well be somebody who’s looked at the pictures. If you do everything right for six months, there’s a version of next summer where you’re taking class again. That’s real. That’s a genuine possibility and I’m not saying it to be nice.”
“And if I don’t.”
“Then we’ll be having a different conversation a lot sooner,” he said, “and it’ll be a shorter one.”
* * *
She sat in the car in the parking lot at Everett for five minutes afterwards without starting the engine.
There is no version of this where you get away with a bit.
She had, she realized, come into that building carrying a specific unexamined plan: some time around the middle of October, when nobody was there, she would put music on in an empty studio and find out what was left. She had not admitted it to herself in words. It had been sitting behind her sternum since the second Saturday, warm and private, like money in a coat.
Sasha had described it, almost exactly, four weeks ago: month five, alone, at night.
Mia put her hands on the wheel.
She thought about being able to tell Sasha, at some point in November, that she had not done it, and thought about how much she wanted to be the person who could say that, and how little that was the same thing as not wanting to do it.
Then she drove home and taught nobody anything and iced her hip for forty minutes and did the exercises twice, including the evening set.
* * *
She met Danielle King on October ninth, outside the café on Main, entirely by accident, and it lasted a few minutes.
Mia had come out with a coffee and a flyer in her hand, on her way to pin it to the bulletin board in the diner, and there was a woman on the sidewalk in a very good wool coat looking up at the front of the building next door with an expression of professional assessment.
She turned.
“Oh,” she said. “Hello. You’re the one with the cane.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Forgive me, that’s appalling.” She put her hand out, entirely unembarrassed. “Danielle King. I’ve been in this town for about forty minutes and three separate people have told me there’s a former principal helping out at the little studio, and I’ve been trying to work out which of the twenty-five women on this street it was, and then you came out with a cane and it seemed rude to pretend I hadn’t noticed.”
Mia shook her hand.
“Mia Chambers.”
“I know. I looked you up in the car.” Danielle’s eyes had already gone to the flyer. “May I?”
She took it without waiting and read it, all of it, front and back, in about nine seconds.
“Eighteenth of October,” she said. “Five dollars. Ninety-one children.”
“That’s right.”
“Whose idea was the five dollars?”
“Mine.”
“It should be nothing,” Danielle said. “Charge nothing and put a bucket by the door with a sign on it saying what a term costs, and you’ll take four times as much and nobody will feel done.” She handed the flyer back. “That’s not a criticism, that’s a freebie. I’ve done about two hundred of these.”
“You’re opening in November.”
“The seventh, if the glaziers are honest. They are not.” Danielle looked back up at the building she had been assessing. “I’m here about that unit, since you’re wondering. I’m not going to take it, because the footfall on this street is about a hundred and fourteen people a day and forty of them are over seventy.”
“You looked.”
“I look at everything.” She said it pleasantly. “Miss Chambers, since you’re standing here. Do you know what I’d like?”
“No.”
“I’d like the Lockwood man to survive.” Danielle put her hands in her coat pockets. “I mean that completely sincerely and I’m aware of exactly how it sounds. I do not want his ninety-one children. I want the four hundred children in this county who currently do no dancing at all, because that is where the money is, and every single time a small studio closes in a town like this the number of children who dance in that town goes down and it never comes back up.”
“That’s a very generous position.”
“It’s an arithmetic position,” Danielle said. “It happens to be generous, which is convenient.” She looked at Mia properly for the first time. “It won’t feel like that in about eight months, and you won’t believe a word of this by Christmas, and I’d rather have said it now so that at least one of us can be accurate later.”
Then she nodded, and got into a car that was a great deal newer than anything else on Main Street, and drove out of Pine Falls, and did not come back to Pine Falls for two weeks.
Mia stood on the sidewalk with a flyer in her hand.
She’s got the whole county, she thought, and she came and looked at a unit on this street anyway.
* * *
Ray Blackburn became a sponsor on Tuesday, for forty dollars, and behaved for two weeks as though he had underwritten the Bolshoi.
He also, unprompted, put a poster in the pharmacy window; told everybody who came in for a prescription; and produced, on Thursday before the show, a raffle. Nobody had asked for a raffle. The raffle raised a hundred and fifteen dollars on prizes donated by four Main Street businesses. One was a haircut. One was, inexplicably, a tire.
“A tire,” said Lucy.
“It’s a good tire,” said Ray Blackburn.
Mia found, somewhat to her horror, that she liked him enormously.
* * *
The last week was the way last weeks are.
Two of the ten-to-twelves got chicken pox. The order of the second half changed four times. Kyle Brennan produced a staple gun and a van, and nobody ever formally appointed him to anything again. Mrs. Fletcher developed a system for the folding chairs that involved a diagram.
On Wednesday Mia stayed until nine at night and could not get up out of the considered chair, and Adam pretended to be looking for something in the office for four minutes until she could.
They ate, that night, at the desk, out of a bag from the diner, because the alternative was going home, and neither of them suggested going home.
“Can I ask you something,” Adam said, “that I’ve been not asking for about three weeks.”
“Depends.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Mia looked at a paper carton of fries.
“Because it’s interesting,” she said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a completely true answer and you’re not going to like it, because you want it to be about you or the children or the town.” She ate a chip. “It’s interesting. I have solved eleven problems in three weeks that nobody else in this county could have solved, and one of them was the four-second transition between the seven-to-nines and the ten-to-twelves, and I would like you to understand that I have thought about that transition more than I have thought about my own hip.”
Adam started laughing.
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are, that’s why it’s funny.”
“In Detroit,” Mia said, “and in Chicago, I did what I was told for fifteen years. I was extremely good at it and I was told what to do every single day by somebody else, and about four times a year I had an idea and there was nowhere to put it.” She wiped her hands. “Nobody’s told me what to do since March sixteenth. It turns out that’s the first thing I’ve ever actually enjoyed.”
Adam was quiet for a moment.
“That’s the most honest thing anybody’s said in this building in two years,” he said.
“Don’t get sentimental, it’s a Wednesday.”
“I’m not being sentimental, I’m being extremely relieved.” He balled up the bag. “I’ve been walking around for three weeks braced for you to tell me you were doing it out of pity.”
* * *
Two things happened in that last week that were not in the running order.
The first was that on Monday, Bethany Coyle’s grandmother died, and Bethany came to rehearsal on Tuesday anyway, and did the whole thing, and nobody knew until Diane called Adam on Wednesday to apologize for not having told him.
“She wanted to come,” Diane said. “She wanted to come and I couldn’t work out whether to let her.”
“You let her,” said Adam. “That was the right call and you’re going to spend two weeks wondering, so I’m telling you now: that was the right call.”
The second was that on Thursday, Connor Reyes came in and asked Mia, without any preamble, whether professional dancers got paid.
“Yes.”
“Like, properly?”
“It depends enormously. A corps contract in a mid-size American company is between about thirty and forty-five thousand dollars for a nine-month season, and you’ll be broke, and about a third of people do something else in the summer.” Mia watched him take that in. “Why?”
“No reason.”
“Connor.”
“My dad asked,” he said, and then, after about four seconds, “he asked because he was working out if it was a waste of time. Not being horrible. He does the numbers on stuff, that’s what he’s like.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said I’d find out,” said Connor, “so now I’ve found out,” and went to get changed, and Mia sat in the considered chair and thought about thirty thousand dollars and a boy in his brother’s shoes and did not entirely know what she had just done.
* * *
On Thursday, seventy-one tickets had gone.
On Friday, ninety-four, and Lucy said, “We’re going to have to stop selling,” and Mia said, “We’re absolutely not going to stop selling,” and they put out eleven more chairs.
The dress run was Friday evening. It was a shambles for ninety minutes.
The babies would not come off. The seven-to-nines came on eight bars early and had to be sent back, producing tears from two of them and hysterics from a third who had found the whole thing extremely funny. The adult beginners, who had been word-perfect on Wednesday, discovered the existence of an audience and went to pieces so comprehensively that the nurse practitioner had to sit down.
At six-forty Adam was in the middle of the floor with his hands on top of his head and said, to nobody, “This is going to be a disaster.”
“It isn’t.”
“Mia, they can’t get off the floor.”
“They’ll get off the floor tomorrow, because tomorrow there’ll be two hundred people watching and they’ll be terrified, and terror is the most reliable technical aid in this industry.” She was in the considered chair with the running order on her knee. “Every dress run in the history of the world has been like this. I have been in dress runs at nine hundred seats where the principal walked off in tears and the next night got a standing ovation. It’s not a rehearsal, it’s a fright, and they need it.”
“You’re very calm.”
“I’ve never been calm about anything in my life,” Mia said. “I’ve just been in this room before.”
Then, at about half past seven, the ten-to-twelves did their number correctly for the first time in three weeks and the whole room, full of parents who were not supposed to be there, made a noise.
Adam locked up at nine thirty and they stood on the sidewalk outside in the cold.
“One hundred and five,” he said. “Sold.”
“Plus the ones who’ll turn up.”
“Plus the ones who’ll turn up.” He looked at the crooked sign over the door. “I haven’t done anything like this since she died.”
“I know.”
“I don’t mean the show.” He had his keys in his hand. “I mean the thing where you’re frightened of a specific day in a good way. I’d forgotten it’s a thing that happens.”
Mia looked at him for slightly too long.
“Go home,” she said. “Sleep.”
“You too.”
“I’m going to.”
She did not go home. She went home at eleven, having stayed to do the running order one more time, and lay in her old room with her hip iced and her leg on two pillows, and slept badly, and at twenty past four in the morning her phone went.
She got it on the second ring because she had not really been under.
“Mia.” Adam’s voice was strange. There was a hard flat noise behind it. “Are you awake.”
“What’s happened?”
“There’s water coming through the ceiling in the corridor.” She heard him moving, fast, and a door, and then the noise got much louder. “It’s coming through the ceiling, Mia, the whole corridor’s, I can’t.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“I don’t know. The roof, or the pipe, I’ve turned the stopcock and it hasn’t.” Something clattered. “It’s in the studio. It’s on the floor. It’s about an inch at the west end and it’s not stopping.”
Mia was already sitting up, and the pain went straight through her, and she did not notice it at all.
“Adam.”
“The show’s in twelve hours,” he said.
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