Previously – Chapter 16: The Master Class
On November twenty-eighth, the morning after a Thanksgiving he had spent at Don and Sylvia’s table saying almost nothing and eating a great deal to cover it, Adam told Lucy he had a thing in Everett and left at seven, and it was true, and he had told nobody what it was for two years.
The place was called Cascade Self Store and it sat behind a tire depot off the highway with a chain-link fence and a keypad and a man in the office who did the crossword. Unit 114. Five feet by ten. Fifty-eight dollars a month, and Adam paid it annually, in person, on the anniversary of the day he and Heather had signed the lease on the studio, because he had done it that way the first time by accident and had then been unable to do it any other way.
He had run the numbers on it more than once, in the ledger, late, with the calculator. Two years of that unit was a year of Tori’s fees, or the deposit on the arts center, or the breaker panel four times over.
The man in the office was called Wendell and had been there both previous times and gave no sign of remembering him, which Adam appreciated more than he could have said.
“Annual?”
“Annual.”
“Cash again.” Wendell counted it without looking at it, the way people do who handle cash all day, and wrote the receipt out by hand. “You want the auto-pay? Saves you the drive.”
“No, thanks.”
“Most people want the auto-pay.”
“I know,” Adam said.
Wendell looked at him for about a second and a half, and something in his face said that he had worked in a storage facility for a long time and had seen a number of men decline the auto-pay, and he said, “Cold out.”
“It is.”
“Supposed to come in off the water tonight.”
“That’s what they say.”
Then Adam drove around to the inside of the fence, past the row where somebody kept a boat under a tarpaulin that had been on it since at least last November, to the row where 114 was, and parked, and turned the engine off, and sat.
The doors were orange. That was the thing that had surprised him the first time, and still did: that a place designed for this should be so cheerful. Two long rows of bright orange roller doors under a gray sky with the sound of the highway behind them.
In it, in boxes he had packed in the eleven days after the funeral, with his mother-in-law handing him the tape: her clothes, four of which he had kept out and then put back in. A wooden crate of records. Two boxes of the studio’s first-year paperwork that he had never separated out because separating it would have meant reading it. Her whole childhood in a Rubbermaid tub with SYLVIA’S HOUSE ATTIC written on the lid in marker that was not his handwriting.
And the good coat. She had a good coat, dark green, that she had bought in Seattle for a wedding and worn perhaps nine times, and the reason he had never given it to the thrift store was that it still had the shape of her shoulders in it, and he did not want a woman in Everett to be walking around inside the shape of his wife’s shoulders.
He had never once opened the door.
Not once, in two years. He came, and he paid, and he sat in the truck in front of it for somewhere between forty minutes and an hour, and then he drove home.
He knew exactly how stupid it was. That was not the problem. The problem was that opening it was a thing you could only do once, and he had never yet had a day on which he was prepared to spend it.
He had worked out, in about the eighth month, that the sitting was the point. Not the visiting; the sitting. For one hour a year he was a man with a wife whose things were ten feet away behind a door, and he did not have to do anything about it, and nobody in Pine Falls was watching him be brave.
At ten past nine his phone went. Sasha moved me to Thursday. Surgeon’s in Bellingham. Mom’s driving. x
Adam looked at it for a while.
Do you want me there, he typed, and deleted it, because he was sitting outside a storage unit in Everett and could not be in Bellingham on Thursday and could not say why.
Text me after, he sent. Whenever you want. Or don’t. Either.
Either, she sent back. Good answer.
He put the phone face down on the passenger seat.
And then, for the first time in two years, Adam Lockwood got out of the truck.
He did not decide to. That was the part he went over afterwards and could never account for. He had the key to the padlock in the door pocket where it had lived since 2023, and he had it in his hand, and he was standing in front of a bright orange roller door in the cold with the highway going behind him, and his hand was flat on the metal about a foot above the lock.
The metal was freezing. That surprised him, absurdly; it was November and it was a sheet of steel.
He stood there for a long time, and what he did there he did not tell anybody about for three weeks, and by then it had cost him something.
Then he took his hand off the door.
He put the key back in the pocket, and got into the truck, and sat for another twenty minutes, and then he drove back to Pine Falls and taught the Friday class, and was extremely good at it.
* * *
Patricia drove to Bellingham with the radio off and did not ask a single question in eighty miles, which Mia had not known her mother was capable of.
At about the sixty-mile mark she said, “Do you want a sandwich? I made sandwiches,” and Mia said no, and Patricia said, “There’s sandwiches,” and that was the entirety of the conversation.
The surgeon was about fifty and had a photograph of a sailboat on the wall and was extremely straightforward. Mia had asked Sasha for that in advance, and it turned out to be much harder to be on the receiving end of than she had expected.
He put the new imaging up next to the March imaging and went straight at it.
“The repair’s failed,” he said. “You can see it here and here. There’s a re-tear at the anterosuperior margin, and there’s more chondral wear than I’d like at eight months. Some of that was always going to happen. Some of it is load.”
“Load.”
“You’ve been on it.” He said it without any judgment at all, which was worse. “Standing, teaching, and at least one significant loading event recently. I’d guess that’s why you’re in my office in December instead of next June.”
Sasha, beside her, said nothing at all, very loudly.
“Options.” He turned to face her. “One, we do nothing and you manage it, and you’ll have a stiff hip that hurts on stairs and in cold weather and you’ll be looking at a replacement in your fifties, possibly your late forties. Two, revision arthroscopy. That’s a six-month recovery and it buys you comfort, not function. Three, if the wear progresses the way I think it will, we’re talking about resurfacing or replacement sooner, and then you have a hip that works for walking and gardening and will not tolerate impact, rotation under load, or end-range flexion. Ever.”
Mia had a question and had come the whole eighty miles to ask it and found that she had to run at it twice.
“Can I dance.”
“Define dance.”
“Professionally. Company class, five days, full rehearsal load, performance.”
“No,” the surgeon said.
He did not soften it and he did not look away and he did not wait, all of which Mia would be grateful for later and was not grateful for then.
“Could I have,” she said. “If I hadn’t been on it.”
“Probably not.” He turned back to the screen. “The chondral wear was there in March. That’s the thing that ends careers, not the labrum. If you had done everything right, and I mean everything, you’d have had a fifteen or twenty percent chance of a limited return in a lower-demand company, and you’d have been managing pain to do it, and you’d likely be back in my office within three years anyway.” He tapped the March image. “I’d have told you that in March if anybody had asked me. Nobody asks in March. In March everybody wants a plan.”
Mia sat with her hands in her lap.
“Teaching,” she said. “From a stool. Corrections, hands on. Choreography.”
“All of that, yes, indefinitely, if you’re sensible, and you’re not going to be sensible, so let me be specific.” He held up one finger at a time. “No demonstrating. Not once. Not four counts. Not to show a child where the weight goes.”
Mia’s eyes went up.
“Sasha told me what you were doing when it went,” the surgeon said. “It was a reasonable guess about what kind of person you are.”
In the corridor afterwards Sasha said, “Not the thing you think.”
“Go on.”
“You are going to spend a year deciding this was a punishment for showing off in front of a fourteen-year-old.” Sasha had her bag on her shoulder and her keys in her hand and she was, Mia realized, quite angry. “It wasn’t. The cartilage was going in March. If it hadn’t been the master class it would have been a curb, or a staircase, or nothing at all. You’ve been given something to blame yourself for and you’re going to take it, because that’s easier than the alternative.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“That it was just bad luck,” Sasha said, “and that there’s nobody to be angry with.”
Patricia was in the waiting room with her purse on her knees and a magazine she was not reading.
She stood up when Mia came out and she took one look and she did not ask.
“Right,” Patricia said. “Do you want to go somewhere, or do you want to go home?”
“Home.”
“Home.” Patricia got her coat.
They stopped at a place off the highway forty minutes later because Patricia announced, without discussion, that she needed the restroom. This was untrue. They sat in a booth with two coffees and the sandwiches from the car and neither of them ate anything.
“One thing,” Patricia said.
Mia braced.
“I’m not glad.” Her mother was looking at the table. “I want you to know that I’m not glad. I’ve had sixteen years of people in this county telling me I must be secretly pleased that it didn’t work out, that I’ve got my daughter back, that everything happens for a reason. Beverly Ann Wicklow said that to me in the pharmacy in September and I have not spoken to her since.” She turned her cup around. “I was never once pleased. I’m not now. I watched you dance in Detroit when you were twenty-two and I have never in my life been so frightened of anybody.”
Mia had to put her hand over her eyes.
“Right,” Patricia said. “That’s it. Eat a sandwich, it’s a long way back.”
Mia ate a sandwich. It was turkey and swiss and had been made at six that morning, and it was, she thought afterwards, one of the four or five best things she had ever eaten.
* * *
Tori came on Saturday, to the house. She had walked from the highway again.
Patricia let her in and put her coat on the radiator without being asked and made her a sandwich she hadn’t asked for, and then went upstairs.
Tori stood in the front room and would not sit down.
“Crestwood offered me a full scholarship,” she said.
Mia was on the sofa with her leg up. She had known for four days that something was coming, because Danielle had not called since the master class, and Danielle called about everything.
“Say all of it,” she said.
“Full tuition. All classes, six days, and the summer intensive, and they pay for pointe shoes.” Tori’s voice was flat and fast, the way it went when she had rehearsed something. “There’s a minibus that runs from the Pine Falls end and it goes past our road. Miss King says Derek Raines does a masterclass block in February and again in June and I’d be in it. And there’s a thing in the summer where they take four of you to an audition tour, San Francisco and Houston and two others, and they pay for the flights.”
“Who told you.”
“Miss King called my dad.” Tori’s chin came up half an inch. “Which I know is a thing you’re going to be annoyed about, but she called my dad because I’m sixteen, so.”
“I’m not annoyed.”
“You are, though.”
Mia let that go, because it was true.
“What did your father say?”
“He said it’s my decision.” Tori’s mouth did something complicated. “Which isn’t true, because he was crying. He went in the garage. He thinks I don’t know that’s where he goes.”
The clock in Patricia’s hall did what it always did. Outside somebody’s dog was being called in.
“He said the thing about the day off, as well,” Tori said. “For December. He said now he won’t have to take the day off because Crestwood’s minibus’ll bring me. And I said Dad, the show’s the same show, I’m in the same show, and he said, oh. Right.”
She stopped.
“So I came to ask you,” she said.
And there it was.
Mia had been in this room in the other direction. She had stood in a front room at seventeen and asked a woman what she should do, and the woman had said the wrong thing, and Mia had done it anyway and had been right to, and it had taken sixteen years for them to be able to have a conversation about anything.
“Ask me properly,” she said.
“Should I go.”
“Yes,” Mia said.
Tori’s face came apart.
“Sit down,” Mia said. “Tori. Sit down.”
She sat on the edge of the armchair with her coat still buttoned and cried for about a minute and a half, hard, the way you do at sixteen, and Mia let her, because there was nothing else on offer.
“That’s not,” Tori said, eventually. “You’re supposed to.”
“I know what I’m supposed to say.”
“Everyone at Lockwood is going to think.”
“Everyone at Lockwood is going to be fine, and two of them will be horrible to you for about two weeks, and one of them will still be horrible in a year, and that is the actual price and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.” Mia shifted her leg down off the cushions. “Listen to me. You want me to tell you to stay, because if I tell you to stay then it’s my fault and not yours, and you can be loyal, and you can be the girl who stayed at Lockwood, and in four years you’ll be twenty and you’ll be teaching the Tuesday beginners and you will hate me so much you won’t be able to look at me. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen to people. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world.”
“That’s not.”
“You are the best raw instrument I have ever had my hands on.” Mia said it levelly, because if she did not say it levelly she was not going to get through it. “And I cannot give you six days a week, and I cannot give you a sprung floor, and I cannot give you a room with fourteen other people in it who are as good as you. That is the only thing that has ever made anybody better. You had thirty-eight minutes of that on Saturday morning. I watched you. You were laughing at something that girl said and I have never seen your face do that.”
Tori was crying openly now and doing nothing about it.
“I can give you me on a stool for two hours on a Tuesday and a Saturday,” Mia said. “That was worth something when you were twelve. It is not worth what you’d be turning down.”
“But you came back. You came here.”
“I came here because I broke,” Mia said. “Don’t take that as a route.”
They sat for a while. Upstairs, Patricia moved about with entirely unconvincing casualness.
“Will you still do my references?” Tori said, in a very small voice. “For, like. Later.”
“Tori.”
“Sorry.”
“I will write your references until I am eighty,” Mia said, “and you are going to get extremely sick of me.”
* * *
The advanced class was at four, and Mia went in for it, against advice, and told them herself.
Ten teenagers sitting on the floor in a room with a bad breaker panel, two weeks out from the biggest thing any of them had ever done.
“Tori’s taken a full scholarship at Crestwood. She starts in January. I found out this morning and I’m telling you before you see it anywhere else.”
There was a silence of about four seconds.
“So she’s not in the show,” said Bethany.
“She’s in the show. She’s contracted through December and she’s in the finale. She’s out of the Lockwood piece; that’s the one thing I’ve asked Danielle for.”
“She’s dancing our piece and going to them?”
“Yes.”
Connor said, from the back, “That’s a bit.”
“Say it.”
“Nothing.”
“Connor, say it.”
“It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth,” Connor said. “That’s all. I’m not being.”
“It is a kick in the teeth,” Mia said. “It’s completely a kick in the teeth and you’re allowed to feel it. And in about a year you’ll all understand that she’d have been mad not to go, and about half of you will have worked that out before then, and I want to say one thing about it and then we’re doing barre.”
She waited until they were all looking at her.
“Nobody in this room is to be horrible to her. Not at the theater, not in the changing room, and not on your phones, because that is where it actually happens.” She let that land. “I’m not asking you to be pleased. I’m asking you to be professional for two weeks. That is a completely different thing, and it is the only part of this job I can actually teach you.”
“Are you sad?” said one of the younger ones.
“Yes,” Mia said.
Then she made them do barre for fifty minutes, which was the correct thing to do with ten teenagers who had just been handed something they could not put down, and by the end of it two of them had asked her whether Tori’s phrase in the October piece was going to somebody, and Bethany had gone very quiet, and Mia had thought: there it is.
She gave the phrase to Bethany on Tuesday.
* * *
Adam found out on Sunday and came to the house at nine at night, and he had not phoned first. He never did.
Patricia let him in and then took herself upstairs with more speed than was strictly natural.
“She’s gone to Danielle,” he said. He was still in his coat. “Tori.”
“She’s taken the scholarship. Yes.”
“When.”
“She told me yesterday. She’d already decided.” Mia moved her leg down off the cushions. “Sit down, please, you’re looming.”
He did not sit down.
“I’ve been on the phone all afternoon,” he said. “Mark’s an idiot, he thinks it’s done, but it isn’t done, they haven’t signed anything until January. If we go to the Pine Crest fund and we go now, Carolyn Foster’s got a discretionary pot for exactly this, I’ve looked it up, and if we put together a package with the work-study and we cover the summer intensive somehow, then it’s not six days against two, it’s.”
“Adam.”
“It’s six days against two plus the person who actually taught her, and if Mark hears that from both of us, in a room.”
“Adam. Stop.”
“Why?”
“Because I told her to go,” Mia said.
He stopped.
He stood in Patricia Chambers’s front room with his coat on and his car keys in his hand and looked at her, and Mia watched him do the arithmetic and get the answer.
“You told her to go.”
“She asked me. She walked two and a half miles from the highway to ask me and I told her the truth.”
“Which was what, exactly?”
“That we can’t give her what she needs and Crestwood can.”
“That is not the truth, Mia, that’s a conclusion, and it’s a conclusion you reached on your own on a sofa without picking up the phone.” His voice had gone up now. “We’re two weeks out from the biggest thing this studio has ever done. We’re going to be on a stage in front of eight hundred people in a show with our name on it, and the one dancer we have who anybody would drive out in the snow to see, you have personally sent to the other studio, and you didn’t tell me until I heard it from her father.”
“And you told the advanced class.” His voice had gone flat. “Yesterday. At four o’clock, in my building. Ten of them. Bethany’s mother called me this morning to ask if the studio was closing.”
“They needed to hear it from a person.”
“So did I, Mia.”
That one went in properly, and she felt it go in, and there was nothing available to say.
“You would have fought,” she said.
“Yes! I would have fought!”
“With what?” Mia said.
The room was very quiet.
“With what, Adam. Say the number. You know all the numbers, you’re the one who knows the numbers. What were you going to offer her against a full six-day scholarship and a flight to San Francisco? The Pine Crest discretionary pot is nine hundred dollars, I’ve seen the letter, it’s on your desk. You were going to go into that man’s kitchen and offer his daughter nine hundred dollars and you.”
“That’s not.”
“And she’d have said yes.” Mia heard her own voice getting away and let it. “That’s what you’re not seeing. She would have said yes. She’d have sat in her father’s kitchen and looked at you and said yes, because she’s sixteen and she loves you and she has never once in four years been able to say no to you, and in six years she’d be twenty-two and finished and she’d never know why.”
“You don’t get to decide that for her.”
“Somebody had to, because you never would!”
“Because I don’t give up on people!” he shouted.
It landed in the middle of the room and sat there.
“Say it,” Mia said.
“I didn’t.”
“You did, actually. Say the rest of it.”
“Fine.” His hands had come out of his pockets. “You have been in this town three months and you have decided about your hip, and you have decided about the studio, and now you’ve decided about a sixteen-year-old girl, and every single time you decide the same thing. It can’t be done. And you say it like it’s courage. Like being the one who says the hard thing is the same as doing the hard thing.”
“And you keep everything alive past the point where it should have been let go,” Mia said, “because you couldn’t do it once.”
Adam went white.
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s completely fair. You do it constantly. You did it with Connor and the work-study you can’t afford, you did it with the Wilcoxes’ money, you’re doing it with this building.” She was up on her feet now, on the bad leg, and she did not care. “Heather has been dead for two years and you are running a business into the ground to keep her opinions in a room, and now it’s costing a sixteen-year-old her future, and you cannot see it, and I am the only person in this county who will tell you.”
“Get out of my.”
He stopped. There was nowhere to send her. It was her mother’s house.
He turned and looked at the window instead, at his own reflection in it and the room behind him.
“That’s the second time you’ve said that to me,” he said.
“I know.”
“You said it in the lobby and I came back and told you that you were right, and I meant it, and I have thought about almost nothing else for three weeks.” His voice had dropped right down. “And you’ve been saving it. You’ve had it in your hand this whole time and you’ve been waiting to hit me with it again.”
Mia opened her mouth and found nothing in it.
“That’s the bit that isn’t fair,” Adam said.
* * *
Neither of them left.
That was the part Mia thought about afterwards. It was ten past ten at night in her mother’s front room and there was nowhere for either of them to go, and so they sat down at opposite ends of the sofa like people at a bus stop, and the fight went out of the room and left the two of them in it.
After a long time Adam said, “She’d have gone anyway. Tori.”
“Yes.”
“I’d have made it worse.”
“Probably.”
“I’d have made it much worse,” he said. “I’d have gotten Mark in a room and I’d have talked, and he’d have said yes because he’s had a hard year and I’m relentless, and then the girl would have.”
He stopped. He put the heels of his hands against his eyes and held them there.
“I’m so tired,” he said.
“I know.”
“I don’t mean tonight.”
“I know,” Mia said.
She found, from the other end of the sofa, that all the arguing had gone out of her too, and that what was left underneath was the thing she had been carrying since a parking lot in November, and that she had had four days in which to decide not to ask it and had not managed.
“Adam.”
“Mm.”
“Can I ask you something, and will you tell me the truth, and not the kind one.”
He took his hands down.
“Yes.”
Her heart was going hard. She kept her voice steady because it was the only thing she had left to keep.
“If you could have her back,” Mia said. “Not as a wish. As an actual choice, on a table, tonight. Heather comes back, all of it, exactly as it was. And the price is that I never came home. I stay in Chicago, and I never limp into your studio in September, and you and I never happen at all.”
He did not move.
“Would you take it?”
The clock in the hall.
He looked at her. He looked at her for a length of time that she was, in the days afterwards, entirely unable to measure, and could not stop measuring, and which she would eventually decide had been about four seconds, and which was the longest four seconds of her life.
His mouth opened.
Nothing came out of it.
“Right,” Mia said.
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