Previously – Chapter 18: Frost and Fantasia
It snowed on the twentieth, which nobody had asked for and everybody was pleased about, and by four in the afternoon the parking lot of the arts center was full and there were three inches on the roofs.
Backstage was a country with its own weather.
Mia had forgotten. Eight months, and she had genuinely forgotten what it was like at four hours to curtain: the tape on the floor in nine colors, the smell of hairspray and dust burning off a lamp somewhere in the grid, two stage crew arguing about a cable, and everywhere, in every corridor and doorway and stairwell, teenagers sitting on the floor with their legs up walls.
She had a chair in the wings, stage left, with her name on a piece of gaffer tape. Derek had done it as a joke and she had not taken it off.
The dressing rooms had been allocated by Celeste on a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet had been ignored within nine minutes, which Mia took as the best sign of the day. Crestwood’s advanced girls had colonized Dressing Room 2 and had been joined by four of Lockwood’s without any negotiation that anybody witnessed. Somebody had brought a speaker. Somebody’s mother had brought a slow cooker. It was not allowed. It was plugged in behind a rail of snow-sprite costumes with a dish towel over it, and by six o’clock it had fed about thirty people.
At half past four Mia strapped the brace on in the accessible restroom with the door locked, sitting on the closed lid, and got the velcro wrong twice.
At five, Danielle found her.
“Front of house says nine hundred and forty,” she said. “We’ve sold the standing at the back. Local news are here, and there’s a woman from the Herald who I have told not to bother you and who will bother you.”
“Right.”
“The dead patch downstage right is fixed. I had a man with a hammer, as instructed, and he was expensive, and I want Derek to know that.” Danielle consulted her phone. “Also your Mrs. Fletcher has taken over the merchandise table and is refusing to let my staff near it and I’ve decided not to have that fight.”
“That’s wise.”
“You’re on at seven-forty and you’re the only person in this building I can’t replace.” Danielle looked at the strapping, and then at Mia’s face, and then at the strapping again. “You’re really doing this.”
“I’m really doing it.”
“For what it’s worth I think it’s an appalling idea.” A pause. “For what it’s worth I’d do it.”
She went. Four steps away she turned around.
“Nine hundred and forty,” she said again. “In this county. In December. Neither of us could have done that.”
Adam came at five thirty with the minibus and eleven Lockwood dancers and a box of safety pins, and he was extremely calm and extremely efficient and he had a list, and it was only when he handed her a bottle of water without being asked that Mia understood he had been terrified since Thursday.
“Wings left,” he said. “The whole time. If you need me I’m there.”
“I know.”
“Four steps.”
“Four steps.”
He held her look for a second longer than he needed to and then went to find a nine-year-old who had lost a shoe.
Mark Dorsey was in the corridor outside Dressing Room 2, in a shirt, holding a coat he clearly did not know what to do with.
“Mr. Dorsey.”
“Mark.” He shook her hand about four times. “I took the day. I know I said. But I took the day.”
“I’m glad.”
“She’s in there with about nine of them and I’ve been told to go away.” He looked at the door. “She wouldn’t have gotten here without you. I want to say that in case it all goes mad afterwards and I don’t get the chance.”
“She’d have gotten here.”
“She’d have gotten somewhere,” Mark said. “She wouldn’t have gotten here.”
Tori was in the corner of the green room in the Lockwood costume, made for her in November before any of it happened and personally cleared by Celeste so that she would be allowed to wear it, and she was pushing at the pin in a bun that was slightly too low.
“Ms. Chambers.”
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re going to say something reassuring,” Mia said, “and I’ll cry, and I’ve got an hour and a half of being professional to do first.”
Tori grinned and went back to the pin.
Connor was outside the stage door in the snow with no coat on, and Mia found him because Lucy told her to.
“You’ll freeze.”
“I’m hot. It’s the.” He gestured at himself. “I’ve never been in a proper one before.”
“Nobody has, the first time.”
He wiped his hands on his thighs. “I want to say sorry about the wall.”
“You’ve said sorry about the wall.”
“Yeah, but you were still sitting down when I said it, so it didn’t.” He shrugged. “I got a letter. From Crestwood. It’s not a bad letter, it’s like, a formal thing, and Celeste wrote at the bottom that the other boy started it, in pen.”
“That was decent of her.”
“Yeah.” He looked at the snow coming down through the light over the door. “Is Tori all right?”
“Ask her yourself, she’s in there.”
“I will,” Connor said, and did not move, and Mia left him to it.
* * *
They opened the house at six thirty and the noise of nine hundred and forty people came through the wall, low and continuous, and did not stop.
Act One was children, and it was thirty-five minutes long, and it was the correct thing to do, and every single one of the nine hundred and forty people had a phone out for at least four minutes of it.
Crestwood’s beginners were neater. Lockwood’s beginners were funnier. Rosalie, who in November had spent twenty minutes under a reception desk, came on with fifteen other six-year-olds in silver and performed the entire piece approximately half a count ahead of everybody else with total conviction, and got her own round of applause on the way off, which she accepted.
The comic number was a toy shop and had six adults in it from Lockwood’s Thursday evening beginners, including a nurse practitioner, a retired sergeant of police and a man who ran the hardware store on Main, and it brought the house down so comprehensively that they had to hold the next entrance for nine seconds.
A boy of about seven went entirely the wrong way in the snowflake piece, realized, and went back, and nine hundred people made a sound of pure collective love.
Mia watched from her chair with the tape on it and did not manage to sit still.
At the interval the corridor was chaos. Somebody’s tights had gone. Two of Crestwood’s intermediate girls were crying for no reason anybody could establish and were fine ninety seconds later. Mrs. Fletcher had sold out of programs and was taking names for a reprint that did not exist.
Lucy appeared with a clipboard and a look.
“Front of house have had four people ask where they can sign up for classes.”
“For Crestwood?”
“For Lockwood.” Lucy’s eyes were enormous. “In the interval. They’re asking Barbara on the door, and Barbara has no information whatsoever, so I’ve written the website on a piece of paper and taped it to the merchandise table.”
“That’s not a marketing strategy.”
“It is tonight,” Lucy said, and went.
* * *
Act Two was the advanced work, and it was here that the thing Danielle had wanted from the beginning actually happened, and Mia watched it happen with something that was almost frightening in it.
Crestwood’s advanced piece was superb and cold, and the audience applauded it correctly, and Priya had a solo in it that made Mia sit forward.
Lockwood’s advanced piece, the October one, the black one, was danced by the five of them on a proper stage with a proper rig for the first time in any of their lives. Mia had rebuilt the ending in two weeks to cover the hole where Tori used to be, and Bethany, who had inherited the phrase and had never in her life had anything before, caught the fall a beat late and slightly badly and got a noise out of nine hundred people that Crestwood’s superb, cold piece had not gotten.
Connor was upstage left in that piece and Mia watched him land a jump he had been failing to land all autumn, and saw him decide, in the air, that he was going to land it.
Derek, beside her in the wings, said, “There it is.”
“There’s what?”
“That’s the thing she’s buying.” He was watching the stage with his arms folded. “You can teach the other thing. Twenty years, I’ve never once seen anybody teach that.”
Then his own piece, and he went out and did in nine minutes what he was worth four thousand dollars a night for, and Mia stood in the wings on her cane and watched a man dance the way she used to dance, and waited for it to hurt.
It did. It hurt exactly as much as she had expected, and it was survivable, and she was surprised by how little it interested her.
She was thinking about the transition at bar ninety-one.
* * *
Blackout. Set change. The snow rig had cost more than Lockwood’s annual insurance and the crew had been arguing about it for three days. It went on for its test and put four seconds of white drift across the floor and the audience made a noise before the piece had even started.
Mia stood up out of the chair with the tape on it.
Adam was there. He didn’t say anything. He put his hand flat between her shoulder blades for a second, the way Derek had on the studio floor in November, a thing she was fairly sure he did not know, and then took the cane out of her hand.
“Wings left,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’m right here.”
“I know, Adam.”
The music started.
Nine minutes and eleven seconds. The long unresolved note went out into a dark house and stayed there, going nowhere, for ninety seconds while the stage very slowly came up on forty-one people standing absolutely still, and Mia heard, from somewhere in the middle of the auditorium, a woman cough and then decide not to.
At ninety seconds Tori moved.
She came off the diagonal alone with the whole stage frozen behind her, and she spun left, and she let the momentum carry through the right hip, and she fell out of it sideways with her weight over a leg that was not underneath her yet.
And she stopped.
Weight suspended over nothing. Arm still going the way the arm was going. Two counts, which is a very long time, and the music not resolving because the music never resolves, and nine hundred and forty people not entirely sure whether they had just watched a mistake.
Then a boy from Crestwood arrived downstage in the position she had been traveling toward, and finished her line, and the phrase went on.
Yes, Mia thought. There.
It built. It did what she had known it would do on a stool at half past six in the morning: ones into pairs, pairs into fours, the whole stage by minute seven starting things and finishing things that were not theirs, forty-one bodies interrupting and completing and interrupting, and the technical gap between two studios turned into the actual material of the dance, and no audience anywhere could have told you which child came from which building.
At seven minutes forty, Mia walked on.
* * *
Four steps.
She had done four steps ten thousand times. She had done four steps in the studio every morning that week, on the tape, at tempo, with Derek counting, and she had never once had a problem with them.
The light was warmer than she expected. That was the only thing she registered on the way out: that the wash was warmer downstage than it had looked from the wings, and that the floor had more give in it than she had allowed for.
Four steps. Arms.
She got to the mark.
Then the rotation. The rotation was the whole thing, and she went into it and let the momentum carry through the right hip exactly the way she had built it, and she felt the joint accept the load, and she thought, with a lift that was almost joy, it’s holding.
She fell out of it sideways with her weight over a leg that was not underneath her yet.
And she stopped.
It was correct. That was the appalling part, and she understood it in the same instant that it happened. She was supposed to stop. She had written the stop. The suspension over nothing was the entire idea of the piece and she was doing it and it was, as far as nine hundred and forty people were concerned, exactly right.
Except that she was not holding a suspension.
There was nothing underneath her and there was not going to be. The hip had gone somewhere in the rotation, quietly, without any of the drama of November, and what was holding her up was the fact that her left leg had locked and her arm was out and she had thirty years of training in the business of not falling over.
Two counts.
She could see Tori, upstage right, in the second position, waiting, exactly where Mia had put her five days ago.
Tori came in on the count and finished the line.
Perfectly. Better than perfectly. She arrived downstage in the shape Mia’s body had been traveling toward and completed it with an epaulement that Mia had not choreographed and that was, in the tenth of a second Mia had to think about it, better than what she had choreographed, and the phrase went on, and forty other people picked it up behind her, and the piece continued.
And Mia was supposed to travel off upstage on the next four counts.
She could not move.
Not stiffly. Not painfully. She simply could not do it, the way you cannot open a door that is locked, and she stood center stage under a warm wash with forty dancers moving around her and nine hundred and forty people in front of her and eight counts went past and then eight more.
She thought, very clearly: I am going to have to be carried off in front of everyone I know.
Then Tori came back.
She came out of her own phrase to do it. She abandoned a solo line in a piece she had waited two weeks and left a studio for, and she did it in tempo, on the music, so that it looked like the choreography.
She arrived at Mia’s left side and put her hand out flat, palm up, at hip height, in the position of a girl offering a hand in a dance.
Mia took it.
Tori turned, unhurried, on the count, and walked her upstage on the diagonal in eight slow steps with the snow coming down and the ensemble folding in behind them, and at the top she peeled away and went back into the piece four bars late, and nobody in the auditorium ever knew.
Adam caught her in the wings. She had about a second and a half left in her and he had all of it.
“I’ve got you.”
“Don’t let me sit on the floor, they’ll see.”
“I’ve got you,” he said again, and took her whole weight, and got her onto the chair with the tape on it, and knelt down in front of her so that his back was to the stage and nobody could see her face.
The music resolved at nine minutes and eleven seconds.
Forty-one people completed their own phrases, all at once, for the first and only time in the piece, and the chord landed under them, and Mia sat in the wings with her hand over her mouth and heard nine hundred and forty people come up out of their seats like a wave hitting a wall.
* * *
The curtain call took fifteen minutes because Derek would not let it stop.
He brought them out in the wrong order on purpose: the beginners first, then the toy shop adults, who got the second biggest cheer of the night, and the nurse practitioner said afterwards that it was the single best thing that had ever happened to her. Then the advanced, both studios together in one line rather than two, an arrangement Celeste had insisted on at four that afternoon over Danielle’s objection and had won.
Then he went off, and came back on holding Tori’s hand, and put her downstage on her own, and stepped back out of the light.
Nine hundred and forty people, on their feet, for a sixteen-year-old from the far end of the valley who had learned to spot off a light switch in a bedroom the size of a bath mat.
Mia watched from the wings, sitting down, with Adam’s jacket over her shoulders, and thought about a girl walking two and a half miles from the highway to ask a question she already knew the answer to.
Mark Dorsey, four rows back, was standing on his seat. An usher had decided not to see it.
Then Derek came back on and looked into the wings and made a gesture that Mia pretended not to understand, and made it again, and Adam said, very quietly, “You’ll never hear the end of it if you don’t,” and so Mia Chambers walked out on a cane in front of nine hundred and forty people and stood next to Derek Raines and did not dance, and the noise the theater made was not the noise you make for a dancer.
It was, she realized, standing there with her hand up, the noise you make for the person who made the thing.
She had never heard it aimed at her before. Nobody had told her it was different.
* * *
They got out at half past eleven.
There had been photographs, and the woman from the Herald, and Sylvia and Don in the front row with their hands over their mouths.
Mark Dorsey had come backstage and had gotten about four words out before he had to go and stand by a fire door.
Connor and Jaden shook hands with the particular grimness of teenage boys who have been told to, and then, seven minutes later, were seen sharing a bag of chips.
Erin Vasquez hugged her and said, “You’re still the one who ended up doing something good,” and meant it, and this time it did not sting at all.
Danielle King said, “Nine hundred and forty in. Twenty percent up on my projection.” And then, after a pause, “I’ve never seen anybody do what that girl did. Coming back for you. I want you to know that I did not teach her that.”
“No,” Mia said. “You didn’t.”
“No.” Danielle looked at the empty stage for a moment. “Same time next year, Ms. Chambers?”
Derek held her by both shoulders and looked at her and said nothing at all for a moment and then kissed her on the forehead and went to get his coat.
Adam drove.
Not to Patricia’s. He came off the county road at the junction and turned left instead of right, and Mia looked at the side of his face and did not ask.
* * *
The studio at midnight was cold, and the streetlamp came through the front windows the way it always did, and there was still glitter along the base of the mirror.
Adam put the lights on the lowest setting, the single bank over the barre, and left the rest of it dark.
He got her a chair and she said, “I’ve been sitting for two hours,” and stayed standing, with one hand on the barre and the cane in the other, and he leaned against the mirror opposite her with his arms folded and did not start.
“You drove past my mother’s road,” she said.
“I know.”
“Adam.”
“I’m going to answer the question,” he said.
The building ticked. Somewhere at the back a pipe knocked twice and stopped.
“Yes,” he said.
Mia’s hand tightened on the barre.
“That’s the true first half and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t, because you asked for the unkind one.” He was looking at the floor between them. “If someone had put it on a table in front of me at ten o’clock at night in your mother’s front room, all of it back, exactly as it was, then yes. For about four seconds, yes. That’s what you saw. That’s what the four seconds were.”
“Okay,” Mia said. Her voice did something.
“No. Wait. That’s not the answer, that’s the first half of a sum, and the reason I couldn’t say it out loud is that I had never once done the second half, and I was doing it in front of you at ten o’clock at night with you looking at me, and I ran out of time.” He unfolded his arms. “I’ve had since then. Do you want the rest of it?”
She could not speak, so she nodded.
“Every twenty-eighth of November,” Adam said, “I drive to Everett and pay a year on a storage unit, in cash, at a window, and then I sit in the truck in front of the door for about an hour, and then I come home.”
Mia stared at him.
“Her things are in there. All of it. I packed it in the eleven days after the funeral and I have never opened the door.” He said it steadily. “Two years of rent on a locked room. That’s a year of Tori’s fees. I know, because I’ve done that sum too, at night, more than once.”
“Adam.”
“I’m not finished. This is the part that matters and I’ve been three weeks getting it into an order.” He put both hands in his pockets and took them out again. “That morning, the twenty-eighth, I got out of the truck. First time in two years. I had the padlock key in my hand and my palm flat on the door, and I stood there long enough to get cold, and I thought the thing I go up there to think. Everything I had is behind this.“
He stopped.
“And it wasn’t true any more. That was the whole of it. I was standing in front of a door with my wife’s life behind it and I could name what wasn’t in there.” He looked at the floor between them. “A woman on the far sidewalk with a cane, seen first in a reflection. Fifty minutes in a glass room at Crestwood, watching somebody be better in a room than I will ever be, and being proud of it and diminished by it at the same time, and finding out I could hold both. A person who would tell me the worst true thing about myself, out loud, in my own lobby, on a Friday, and who is the only one in this county who would.”
“That’s four months.”
“That’s four months,” Adam agreed. “Against thirteen years. I did the arithmetic standing there, because I do arithmetic, and it came out the wrong way around and I said no anyway.”
Mia had put her hand on the barre.
“So when you asked me,” he said, “I already knew. That’s the part I cannot make better. I’d worked it out a little over a week earlier, with my hand on a padlock, and then you asked me in your mother’s front room and I had all of it ready, and I still could not get the second half out fast enough for you to survive hearing the first.”
She did not answer for a while.
“You could have said the first half.”
“I know.”
“I’d have waited for the second one, Adam. That’s all it needed. Four seconds of me sitting there knowing you were coming back.”
“I know that now,” he said. “I have known it since about a minute after you left.”
He pushed off the mirror.
“And that’s the man who says yes in four seconds. That’s exactly who he is. He’s a man who’s been paying rent on a door he can’t open, and who kept a studio alive past the point of sense so there’d be somewhere for her opinions to live, and who let a sixteen-year-old girl’s future get to within about a week of being spent on it. You told me that in your mother’s front room and I shouted at you, and you were right, and it’s the second time.”
“I didn’t want to be right.”
“I know. That’s why I’m telling you the rest.” He stopped a couple of feet away. “The answer’s no, Mia. Not because I’ve stopped loving her. I haven’t and I’m not going to and you’d be a fool to want a man who could. The answer’s no because that trade takes back the last two years, and I would have to go back to being the person I was that November before you limped into my lobby, and I have thought about it every day for three weeks, and I will not. Not for her. Not for anybody.”
“You could be saying that because tonight went well.”
“Tonight didn’t go well,” Adam said. “Tonight you stood on a stage in front of nine hundred and forty people and couldn’t get off it, and I watched, and I couldn’t do anything, and a sixteen-year-old girl solved it in four counts because you taught her how. I’ve had the worst two minutes of my life tonight and I’d have them again.” He shook his head. “I worked this out on November twenty-eighth sitting in a truck. It’s got nothing to do with tonight.”
Mia found that she had put her hand over her mouth for the second time that night.
“I love you,” Adam said. “I’d like that as a separate item, not as part of the sum.”
“You are so bad at this.”
“I’m appallingly bad at this.”
“Then let me do one.” Mia kept her hand on the barre, because she was going to need it. “You asked me a question in your kitchen in November and I gave you a speech about deciding things by myself. It was true. It was also me getting out of it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m going to, because you did.” She made herself say it plainly. “If somebody put it on a table tonight, that hip back, all of it, twenty-two years old and everything in front of me, and the price was that I never came home. I’d have said yes in March. I’d have said yes in June. I would have said yes in September standing on that sidewalk looking at you through a window.”
“And now?”
“Now I would have to think about it,” Mia said, “and that is the most romantic sentence I have got, and I am not going to do better, so please take it.”
Adam laughed, badly, with his eyes wet.
“I’ll take it.”
“Good. Come here.”
He came there.
* * *
Later, and it was properly late, he said into her hair: “I’m giving it up. The unit. Not tonight, I’m not going to make a big thing of it at one in the morning, but in January. I’m going to go up there and open the door and do it properly.”
“Okay.”
“Will you come.”
“Yes,” Mia said.
“Sylvia should come too.”
“Sylvia should absolutely come too, and she’ll take over completely, and it’ll be much better.”
“She will,” Adam said. “God, she will.”
Mia looked past him, at the floor. The single bank of lights over the barre made a long pale shape on the boards and left the rest of the room dark, and the glitter along the base of the mirror caught it and gave it back in about nine colors.
“Count me in,” she said.
“What?”
“Eight bars. Count me in.”
“Mia.”
“Not dancing,” she said, before he could. “I’m not putting a pound through it and I’m not coming off the barre. Arms. Eight bars, marked, at the barre. I am allowed to do that and I have been doing it every morning since September with nobody watching.”
“Mia.”
“Adam, I have been on a stage tonight in front of nine hundred and forty people and I could not get off it, and a child had to come and fetch me. I would like eight bars in an empty room with the door locked and no audience. Marked. Two hands on the wood.” She hooked the cane over the barre. “So count me in.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he stepped back to give her the floor, and put his hands behind his back, and said, quietly, in the voice he used for the four o’clock:
“Five, six, seven, eight.”
She marked eight bars.
It was almost nothing to look at. She kept both hands on the barre and her weight over the left the whole way and her feet barely left the floor, and everything that mattered happened above the waist, and it was the shape of the phrase and not the phrase, the way it is at half past six on a Tuesday morning in every studio in the world.
And it was hers. She had made it on a stool in the dark in an empty building and it had been danced that night by forty-one people in front of nine hundred and forty, and now, at midnight, in the cold, holding a piece of wood, Mia Chambers went through her own eight bars and finished the phrase herself, all the way to the end of it, with nobody arriving to complete anything.
Then she stopped, and stood there breathing, and Adam said, “That’s eight,” and she said, “That’s eight,” and that was the last of it.
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