Previously – Chapter 17: The Cost
They did not speak for two days.
Not properly. There were four texts about the minibus and one about whether the risers were coming back on Tuesday, and Mia answered all of them within a minute, and so did he, and that was itself a kind of message.
On the second evening Patricia put a plate down in front of her and sat and said, “Are you going to tell me, or am I going to keep pretending I didn’t hear it through a floor?”
“You heard it through a floor.”
“I heard about eleven words of it through a floor, and one of them was Heather, and I’ve been very good for two days.” Patricia unfolded her napkin. “So.”
Mia told her. Most of it. The part about the four seconds she got out on the second attempt.
Her mother listened the way she always had, without any expression whatsoever, and when it was finished she said, “And what did you want him to say?”
“That he wouldn’t take it.”
“Would you believe him?”
Mia stopped with her fork halfway.
“That’s not.”
“It’s the only question in it, so let’s have it.” Patricia put salt on her potatoes. “If that man had said no, of course not, I wouldn’t take it, quick as anything, no hesitating, would you have believed him? Or would you have sat there at the other end of my sofa thinking, he answered that very fast for a man who was married for thirteen years.”
Mia put the fork down.
“You want me to say he’s a coward,” Patricia said, “and I’m not going to, because I’ve been on the other side of that table.”
“Mom.”
“You were eighteen. You stood in my kitchen and told me you’d got the place in Detroit and you’d be going in September and there was a look on your face like you’d already gone, and I said that’s wonderful, darling.” Patricia was eating steadily. “It took me about nine seconds to say it. I’ve thought about those nine seconds for a very long time. I loved you the whole way through them. I was also doing a sum about what my life was going to be like without you in it, and I could not do the sum and say the sentence at the same time, and so there were nine seconds where you stood in my kitchen and watched me not answer.”
The kitchen clock. The fridge coming on.
“Did I ruin it?” Mia said.
“You went to Detroit,” Patricia said. “It was the right thing. I’d have been furious if you hadn’t.” She reached over and took a piece of bread. “But you’ve never once in sixteen years told me anything before it was already decided, and I’ve always thought that started in that kitchen. Nine seconds. That’s all it takes.”
Mia sat with that for a while.
“So what do I do?”
“I don’t know,” her mother said. “I’ve been sitting here for two days making up things to tell you and they were all no good, and I’m not going to say them now just because you’ve finally asked.” She got up and took the plates, and stood with them for a moment. “You asked a man a question at ten o’clock at night that he had never once been asked in his life, including by himself. That’s all I’ve actually got.”
She ran the tap and stood at the sink with her back to the room.
“Go and do your work,” she said. “He’ll come and find you when he’s got the answer, and if the answer’s bad you’ll survive it, and if it’s good it’ll be worth having waited for. And you have nine minutes of dance to make and eleven days to make it in, and I do know something about getting through two bad weeks, so at least that part isn’t me guessing.”
She turned the tap off.
“Also, eat something at lunchtime. You’re going to fall over.”
* * *
She went into the studio at six the next morning and did not come out until two.
She did it again the day after that, and the day after that.
Nobody was in the building until ten. Mrs. Fletcher had a key and came at nine-thirty and had learned by the second morning to put a coffee on the barre and leave without saying anything, which was, Mia thought, an underrated form of love. On the third morning there was a banana next to the coffee. On the fourth there was a banana and a note that said EAT THE BANANA.
Her set-up was: the stool, the phone on a tripod Lucy had found in a drawer, a Bluetooth speaker, a legal pad, and the ten-second countdown she gave herself before standing up, because standing up was now a thing that had a budget.
She had the music. Derek had sent three options in November and she’d known within four bars which one it was: a piece for strings and a low synthesiser, nine minutes eleven seconds, that opened with a long unresolved held note and did not go anywhere for the first ninety seconds. Everybody who heard it said the opening was too slow. It was not too slow. It was waiting.
What she did not have was the shape.
She had forty-one dancers, both studios together, ranging from six years old to Derek Raines. She had eight hundred people who did not know either studio. She had a stage with a dead patch downstage right that somebody had now hit with a hammer and pronounced fine. And she had the problem she’d stated at the reception desk three weeks earlier and had no answer to: both studios on the stage at once, without it looking like two studios on a stage at once.
For four days she built things that didn’t work.
Day one: the two groups start apart and merge. It was a school assembly. It was, worse, a parable, and she could see the line in the local paper about two communities coming together and wanted to lie down.
Day two: mixed from the first bar. Mush. You could not tell the technical level apart and so nothing was gained by having both, and the Crestwood dancers would spend nine minutes doing eighty percent of what they were capable of, and Danielle would be perfectly polite about it and would never work with her again.
Day three: a central duet with the ensemble around it. This one was fine. She built four minutes of it and it was competent and shapely and would go down extremely well, and at half past twelve on the third day she stood in the middle of the floor and said, out loud, “It’s a gala piece,” and deleted the videos off her phone one at a time so she couldn’t be tempted.
Day four she got nothing at all. Not one usable count in six hours. She went home at two and slept until seven in the evening and woke up furious.
On the fifth morning she came in at six and sat on the stool in the dark and did not turn the music on.
Everything resolves, she thought.
It had been in her for three weeks: Derek dancing a solo made entirely of completed sentences, every fall caught, nothing in it interrupted.
She turned the music on.
She let the long unresolved note run, and she marked with her hands, and about forty seconds in she stopped and said, out loud, in an empty room, “Oh.”
What if it doesn’t.
She got the legal pad.
The phrase came out in about fourteen minutes, the fastest she had ever made anything, and it was four counts long and it was the fall out of the turn from the October piece, and it was wrong on purpose.
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 then you did not get there.
The dancer stops. Not falls: stops, mid-transfer, weight suspended over nothing, arm still going the way the arm was going, and holds it for two counts that are far too long, and the music does not resolve either, because the music never resolves, that is what the composer was doing for ninety seconds at the top and everybody had thought it was too slow.
And then someone behind them takes the shape and finishes it.
Not catches them. Does not touch them at all. Simply arrives, downstage, in the position the first dancer was traveling toward, and completes the line the first body did not complete, and goes on with the phrase.
Mia sat on the stool with the pad on her knee and her hand over her mouth.
She ran it in her head with forty-one bodies. It scaled. God, it scaled: you could do it in ones, then in pairs, then in fours, until by minute seven the entire stage was doing it, interrupted phrase after interrupted phrase, forty-one people starting things and finishing things that were not theirs, and the technical gap between the two studios stopped being a problem and became the material, because the ones who could hold a suspension for two counts held it, and the ones who could not were the ones arriving, and there was no hierarchy in it that an audience could see.
And in the last twenty seconds everybody completes their own, all at once, and the music resolves for the first time in nine minutes, and eight hundred people who have no idea why will feel something go through the room like weather.
She marked it for two hours.
At half past eight she found that she had been standing for most of it and that her hip was screaming and that she had not noticed, and that this was the first time in eight months she had not noticed anything.
She sat down and wrote at the top of the page, because Derek would ask what it was called:
FROST AND FANTASIA. 9’11”.
And underneath, in smaller letters, for herself:
nothing in it is finished by the person who starts it.
* * *
She called the Lockwood ten in that afternoon, and it was a disaster for fifty minutes.
“You’re catching.”
“We’re not catching.”
“You are all catching, every single one of you, I can see ten people catching.” Mia rolled the stool forward. “Nobody in this room believes me that it’s allowed. You’ve been told since you were six that falling over is the worst thing that can happen and now I’m asking you to do it on purpose in front of eight hundred people and your bodies are refusing on your behalf.”
“It feels wrong,” said Connor.
“It is wrong. That’s what it’s for.”
They did it eleven more times and it was still wrong.
At forty-five minutes, Mia said, “Stop. Everybody sit down.”
Ten teenagers sat down on the floor.
“Right. Connor, stand up.” The tallest boy stood up. “Now. Fall forwards.”
“What?”
“Fall forwards. Don’t put your foot out. I’ll count you in.”
“I’ll fall over.”
“Yes.”
“Like, over.”
“Connor, there are ten people here and one of them is a lifeguard, you’ll survive it.” Mia held up a hand. “Five, six, seven, eight.”
Connor fell over. He fell over extremely badly, with a shout, and the whole room screamed, and he lay on the floor laughing with his arms out.
“Again,” Mia said.
He did it four times. By the fourth he had stopped putting his hands out and it was, for about a count and a half, the most beautiful thing anybody in that room had done all morning, because it was the only honest movement in it.
“That’s the shape,” Mia said. “That’s the count and a half I want. You’ve all been doing a dance about falling over. I want the actual thing, and then I want you to stop, in the air, at the point where you’ve committed and it’s too late.”
They got it at fifty-eight minutes. Not all of them; four of them, and then seven, and then Connor, who got it last and got it best, because Connor had spent seventeen years committing to things too late.
At the end of the class Bethany said, “Ms. Chambers, what’s it about?”
Mia had been waiting four days for somebody to ask her that and had not decided what she was going to say.
“It’s about the fact that you’re not going to finish everything you start,” she said, “and that it’s all right, because somebody behind you will.”
Ten teenagers looked at her.
“That’s quite sad,” said Bethany.
“Is it?”
Bethany thought about it, sitting on the floor of a studio in Pine Falls with her shoes in her hand.
“No,” she said. “Actually, no.”
* * *
She sent the phrase to Derek that night, forty seconds of phone video of ten teenagers on a bad floor, and he called her at twenty past eleven.
“Play it again.”
“Derek, it’s nearly midnight.”
“I’ve watched it fourteen times and I need you to talk over the top of it, play it again.”
She played it again and talked over the top of it, and he was completely silent for the whole forty seconds, which she was fairly sure had never happened before in his life.
“Right,” he said. “Two things. One, that’s the best idea I’ve been anywhere near in about six years and I’d like it on the record that I said so before the reviews.”
“It’s a regional gala, there aren’t reviews.”
“Two,” Derek said, ignoring this, “you know what you’ve done, don’t you.”
“I’ve made a nine-minute finale.”
“You’ve made a piece about your hip.”
Mia sat down on the arm of her mother’s sofa.
“That’s not what it’s about.”
“Fine. Sure.” She could hear him moving about a hotel room somewhere. “But I’ve had a dozen people make a piece about a thing that happened to them and every single time you could see it from the back of the house, and this is the first one I’ve watched where you can’t. It’s not about you. It just wouldn’t exist without you.” A pause. “That’s the difference between the good ones and the other ones and nobody ever tells you what it is, and now you know, so.”
“Derek.”
“Nine minutes,” he said. “You were right. Don’t tell Danielle I said that, she’ll have it framed.”
* * *
Tori came on Monday.
Mia was at the barre with the tripod when she heard the front door scrape, and turned, and there she was in the doorway in the Crestwood warm-up jacket, black with the small silver serif, holding her bag in both hands in front of her like a shield.
“I’m not stopping,” Tori said.
“Okay.”
“I’ve got the bus at three thirty.”
“Okay.”
Tori stood there.
“I saw the video,” she said. “Miss King put the finale skeleton up on the group thing. The four-count. With the stopping.”
“And?”
“Everyone’s freaking out.” Tori’s chin came up. “Jaden says it looks like a mistake. Celeste says it’s the best thing she’s seen in ten years and she said it in front of Jaden.”
Mia waited.
“I want to do it,” Tori said, in a rush. “I want to do the first one. The very first one, at ninety seconds, where nobody in the audience knows it’s going to happen and it just.” Her hands did something in the air. “Stops.”
“You’re at Crestwood.”
“I know.”
“You’d be dancing in the Lockwood half of a Crestwood show having left Lockwood two weeks ago, and every single person in that theater will know it, including your dad.”
“I know.”
“Then say why,” Mia said. “Properly. Because if you’re doing it out of guilt I’m not having you, and I mean that, I’d rather give it to one of the Crestwood girls.”
Tori’s face did something furious.
“It’s not guilt.” She dropped the bag. “It’s the best thing I’ll ever get to do. I’m sixteen and I’ve seen the four-count and I know, I actually know, that nobody is going to hand me anything that good again for maybe ten years and maybe never.” She was crying and talking at the same time and paying no attention to it. “I’m not coming back for you. I’m sorry. I’m coming back because it’s the piece.”
Mia had to look at the floor for a moment.
“That’s the right answer,” she said.
“Is it?”
“It’s the only right answer. Get your shoes on, you’ve got forty minutes before your bus.”
* * *
She got it wrong on Tuesday, and it was Adam who caught it.
She had built the finale for forty-one and had, over three days, quietly cut it to thirty-two. The nine she took out were Lockwood’s youngest: the six- and seven-year-olds, who could not hold a suspension for two counts, and who could not be trusted to stop on a person rather than a number, and whose presence in a nine-minute piece about interruption was, as far as Mia could see, a sentimental risk she was not going to take in front of eight hundred people.
She told him at the desk, professionally, as a decision already made.
Adam put his pen down.
“No,” he said.
“Adam.”
“No. Say the reason again.”
“They can’t hold it. It’s two counts of suspension over nothing and it’s the hardest thing in the piece and Priya can barely do it, and Priya is fourteen and has been trained since she was six.”
“Right.” He turned his chair. “So don’t make them hold it.”
Mia opened her mouth.
“They’re not the ones stopping,” Adam said. “They’re the ones arriving. That’s the other half of your phrase and you’ve given all of it to the teenagers. Somebody stops, and somebody comes and finishes it. A six-year-old cannot stop. A six-year-old can absolutely walk to a mark and put an arm up, because that is the entire content of what I teach on a Tuesday, and they will do it on the count, every time, because they have no idea it’s difficult.”
Mia sat very still.
“Put them in the arriving wave,” he said. “All nine. Put them at the front where you put them last month. Every time one of my teenagers stops, one of my babies finishes it, and you will not have to teach them anything at all except where the window is.”
There was a long pause.
“That’s better than what I had,” Mia said.
“Yes.”
“That’s considerably better than what I had.”
“I know.” Adam picked the pen back up. “I’ve been doing this for six years. I’m not good at very much of it. I’m good at that.”
She rebuilt it that night and it took four hours and it was the version that went on the stage in December, and for the rest of her life, whenever anybody asked her about Frost and Fantasia, Mia Chambers said that the finale had been co-choreographed and did not only mean Derek Raines.
* * *
The first joint rehearsal was that Wednesday at Crestwood, forty-one dancers in a room built for it, and for two hours it did not work at all.
Mia ran it from a chair at the front with Derek relaying her, an arrangement they had arrived at without discussing it.
“They’re all stopping at the same time.”
“They’re stopping on the count you gave them.”
“I know. Take the count away.” Mia leaned forward. “Derek, the ones in the second wave, tell them to stop when the person in front of them stops. Not on a number. On a person.”
“That’ll drift.”
“It’s supposed to drift. If it’s clean it’s a formation, and if it drifts it’s forty people watching each other.”
He looked at her for a second, and then he turned and told the room to stop watching the music and start watching each other, and the thing came alive in about ninety seconds.
Danielle had come in at some point and was standing at the back with her coat on.
At the run at ten past twelve, they got the whole of minute seven for the first time: forty-one dancers starting and stopping and finishing each other’s lines across the full width of a proper floor, the drift moving through the room like wind on a field, and the music going nowhere underneath it.
Somebody’s mother, watching through the glass, put her hand on the window.
When it stopped nobody said anything for a moment, and then Priya said “oh my God” quite loudly, and the teenagers made a noise that Mia had heard perhaps five times in her life from inside a company and never once from the outside.
Danielle walked the length of the room and stopped by the chair.
“That’s not a gala piece,” she said.
“No.”
“That’s a piece.” She was looking at the floor where it had happened, not at Mia. “I’ve been putting on shows in this county for nineteen years, and that is the first time I’ve stood in a room and thought, somebody ought to be filming this properly.” She got her phone out. “I’m going to get somebody to film it properly.”
“Danielle.”
“Two cameras, and a man who knows what he’s doing, and I’ll pay for it, and the recording’s joint, per clause nine point one. I’m told your Mr. Lockwood caught that and I did not.” A small pause. “Tell him I said that.”
Mia told him. He put it in the drawer with the spreadsheet.
* * *
Sasha said no on the phone and then said no again in an email, which was Sasha’s way of creating a record.
To be explicit, since you’ll quote me later: the surgeon told you no demonstrating. A cameo in a performance is demonstrating with lights on. I am putting this in writing because I know you.
Derek said, “Absolutely, obviously, are you joking, of course you’re in it.”
“Derek.”
“I’ve got you entering at seven-forty from stage left with the second wave, four steps, arms only, and you hold the suspension and Tori finishes it. Four steps, Mia. Four. My grandmother could do four steps and she’s dead.” A pause. “That’s a joke. She is dead, though.”
“There’s a rotation in it.”
“Then we take the rotation out.”
“You can’t take the rotation out, the whole thing is the rotation.”
“Then,” said Derek, in a completely different voice, “you should decide whether you want to do it, and stop asking people to decide for you, because I’ve been in this business twenty years and I know that phone call when I hear it.”
Lucy said, “No,” and then, four hours later, “Are you going to do it anyway,” and then, when Mia didn’t answer, “Right. What time do you need to be there.”
She told Adam on Thursday, at the studio, in the fifteen minutes between the four o’clock and the five-fifteen, because those were the only minutes there were.
They had been speaking again since the previous evening. Carefully. About minibuses and risers and whether the Crestwood costume invoice had come through.
“I’m dancing the second wave,” she said. “In the finale. Four steps and the suspension, and Tori finishes it.”
Adam had a stack of rosters in his hands. He put them down.
“What did Sasha say?”
“No. In writing.”
“And the surgeon?”
“He said no demonstrating. Not once. Not four counts.” She kept her voice level. “So, no.”
He looked at her for a while.
She had been braced for the argument. She had a version of it prepared, and a second version underneath in case the first one failed, and there was a part of her that wanted the fight because a fight was contact and they had not had any of that since Sunday.
“Okay,” Adam said.
“That’s it?”
“What am I going to do, Mia?” He said it without any heat at all. “Forbid you? I’m not your father and I’m not your physical therapist and I’m about eleventh in the line of people you’re not listening to.” He picked the rosters back up. “For the record: don’t. I think it’s a bad idea and I think you know it’s a bad idea and I think you’re doing it anyway for reasons you haven’t said out loud, possibly not to yourself.”
“That’s not.”
“And I’m not going to stand in your way, because the last time I fought to keep somebody where I wanted them, you told me exactly what it costs, and you were right, and I’ve had a week and a half to think about it.” He tucked the rosters under his arm. “So. Four steps. I’ll be in the wings on the left.”
He went to teach the five-fifteen.
Mia stood in the empty lobby with her hand on the reception desk.
She had wanted, very badly, for somebody to stop her. Every one of them had handed it back.
Then you should decide whether you want to do it.
She did want to do it. That was the whole of it, in the end, and there was nothing noble in it anywhere.
She wanted to stand on a stage one more time, in front of people, under a light, and she wanted it to be a thing she chose and walked onto and did on purpose, because the last time had been a Sunday matinee in Chicago in March and she had not known it was the last time, and nobody had told her, and she had come off in the wings and put her bag over her shoulder and gone home. She had bought a sandwich at the station. She had been annoyed about a train.
Eight months. She had thought about it every day for eight months and had never once been able to say what it was she actually wanted, and it turned out to be this:
I would like to know which one is the last one.
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