The Last Dance – Epilogue

Previously – Chapter 19: The Handover

They opened unit 114 on January eleventh, in the rain, and it took four hours.

Most of it went to the thrift store in Everett, in two loads, because Sylvia came with them and Sylvia was ruthless in the way that only a mother can be about her own daughter’s belongings, saying no, no, she never wore that, she bought it and hated it over box after box until Adam started laughing and then could not stop and had to go and stand outside by the fence for a while.

Three things came back to Pine Falls: the records, now at the studio and played badly and too loud by the teenagers; a photograph; and the green notebook marked SPRING, which had never been in the unit at all. Adam had found it down the side of a box in the supply closet after the flood, and had driven it to Everett and back in November rather than open it. Mia read it once, all the way through, sitting in the open doorway of the unit with the rain coming off the roller door behind her, and then gave it to Adam and never asked for it again.

Heather Lockwood had been a much better choreographer than anybody in Pine Falls had known, including her husband. She had also never once finished a piece. There were nineteen beginnings in that notebook and not one ending anywhere in it, and Mia had made a decision, sitting on that concrete floor, not to say so out loud for at least a year.

The green coat went to Sylvia.

They did Mia’s in March, and it took two days, because Chicago is a long way and because there was more in it than she had admitted to.

Most of it was furniture and she sold it over the phone to a man who came with a van. The rest came back in the truck: books, a chest of drawers her grandmother had owned, and fifteen years of programs from four companies in three countries, which she kept, all of them, and about which she declined to be reasonable.

The four pairs of pointe shoes came out of the shopping bag in Patricia’s garage on a Sunday in April, and she sat on the garage floor with them for a while, and it was not the event she had spent seven months dreading.

She threw two pairs away. They were dead and had been dead since 2024 and she had known it the whole time.

One pair went to Bethany Coyle, who had grown half a size and whose mother had been quietly not mentioning the cost of shoes since January, and who received them without any ceremony at all because Mia handed them over in a Walmart bag in a lobby and said “these are the good brand, don’t tell anybody.”

The last pair is in the office at Lockwood, on the shelf above the desk, not framed and not displayed, in among the roster files and a box of hairpins and a stapler. Visitors assume they are somebody’s spares. Twice a year somebody’s mother asks whether they can be borrowed, and Mia says no, and does not explain, and everybody assumes it is a hygiene thing.

They are not a shrine. They are just where they live now, which is the whole of what she had been unable to work out in a car in September.

* * *

The spring show was on June thirteenth and it was at the high school, because the arts center cost two thousand dollars and Lockwood did not have two thousand dollars.

That was the honest position, six months on. Enrollment was a hundred and thirty-one, up from forty-four. There were two new part-time staff and one of them was Erin Vasquez, three hours a week, doing the books properly for the first time in the studio’s existence and being paid what she was worth. Jensen had gone again in April, six percent this time, and they had covered it. Adam had put the annex application in on the twenty-ninth of January, at ten dollars an hour, eight days ahead of the policy, and had Tuesday evenings from June for a summer workshop, and Marilyn Boyce had not mentioned it to anybody. There was no surplus. There was no sprung floor. There was, in the office, a spreadsheet that showed Lockwood Dance Academy solvent for the first time in three years, barely, and a second line under it that had not existed in any previous year. It read ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, PT, and there was a number beside it, and Adam had printed it out and put it in the drawer where the photograph used to be.

The poster in the lobby window said:

LOCKWOOD DANCE ACADEMY

Spring Show

Saturday, June 13, 2pm and 6pm

Pine Falls High School

And, at the bottom, in smaller type, in a line that Lucy had set up in her template in February and had never once made a joke about:

Choreography and Artistic Direction: Mia Chambers

* * *

She had a stool at the front of every class and a rule about the stool that Sasha enforced by text message.

She had not demonstrated since December. Not once. Not four counts.

What she had instead was a phone on a tripod and eight advanced students who had learned, over five months, to be her body. She had not expected that, and it turned out to be better teaching than demonstrating had ever been. She would describe a phrase; a fifteen-year-old would attempt it; Mia would say no, the weight goes back before the arm does, do it again; and the fifteen-year-old would find it, in her own body, without ever having seen it in Mia’s. They understood things now that Tori’s year group had never understood, because they had been made to build the movement instead of copying it.

The hip was the hip. It hurt on stairs and in cold weather. She had a cane and would always have a cane and had bought a second, better one in March, in Seattle, an ugly expensive one made of carbon fiber that weighed almost nothing, and she had cried in the store, briefly and furiously, and then bought it anyway.

There would be a replacement eventually. The surgeon in Bellingham thought late forties, and had said in January, without being asked, that December twentieth had probably not cost her more than a season of it, and that he was telling her because she would otherwise assume the worst and be insufferable about it for a decade. Mia had stopped asking after that.

The money, for the record, came from four places and none of them was enough on its own. Two and a half days a week from Lockwood: the first salary the studio had ever paid anybody who was not part-time on the desk. A consulting fee from Crestwood for eight days a year, proposed by Danielle King and negotiated upward by forty percent while Danielle looked at the ceiling. The Portland license. And the Pine Crest Arts Fund, which came through in February. Adam had applied for it himself, in his own handwriting, without being told to.

It came to rather less than sixty-two thousand dollars. It came with health insurance from March first. Erin Vasquez set it up in an afternoon, and Mia was unexpectedly and privately emotional about it in a parking lot.

* * *

Connor Reyes finished school in June and did not go to a company and did not go to college.

What he did was take a full-time job at the building-supply yard out by the highway, on the trade counter, on a wage that meant his mother stopped doing nights, and turn up at Lockwood on Tuesdays and Saturdays and dance better than he had ever danced in his life.

Mia had a version of the conversation with him in February and lost it comprehensively.

“You could audition.”

“I know.”

“Connor, you could audition now. I’d make four phone calls tonight and three of them would be answered.”

“I know,” said Connor Reyes, who was eighteen by then and about an inch taller again. “And there’s four of us in the house and my dad’s still out and Marisol’s eleven. So not this year.”

“And next year?”

“Ask me next year,” he said.

It was, Mia recognized with some irritation, exactly what she had said to Tori in October and had thought was rather good at the time.

He teaches the Thursday beginners now, badly, and they adore him. Adam pays him properly for it, on a written agreement, with a review date. Erin Vasquez drew it up and Adam signed it without arguing about it once.

Tori sent a video in May from a studio in San Francisco with a floor you could see was good even through a phone, forty-one seconds of a variation, and a message underneath that said: 4th call back. also they asked who made the interrupted thing and I told them and the woman knew your name.

Mia watched it five times and then went and sat in the office for a bit.

The recording of Frost and Fantasia, filmed with two cameras by a man who knew what he was doing and paid for by Danielle King, went up in February. By June it had been watched a little over nine thousand times. That was nothing. Those nine thousand views also included somebody at a company in Portland, who wrote in April to ask whether the piece was available and on what terms.

Mia had read that email four times before she understood that somebody wanted to buy a dance she had made on a stool at half past six in the morning.

She had said yes. It was not very much money. Lucy had put it through the books as choreography license and had been unbearable about it for two weeks.

Danielle King called once a month, and there was a thing planned for the following December that neither of them was calling a tradition yet. Danielle had never once apologized for the scholarship and Mia had never once asked her to, and the working relationship they had built out of that was better than a friendship and considerably more useful.

Derek Raines came through in February for two days, taught a masterclass at Lockwood for free, told everybody the story of the December show at least six times, and improved it each time until by the end Mia had been carried off in the arms of a sixteen-year-old.

* * *

The six o’clock on June thirteenth ran twelve minutes long, because they always did.

Mia watched it from the back of the high-school auditorium, standing, with her shoulder against the wall by the door. It was the same place she had watched Derek dance from in a different building in November, and she had come to think of it as her seat.

Adam was in the wings, running it. Lucy was on the door with a cash box and a float and a list. Sylvia and Don were four rows from the front, and Sylvia was wearing a dark green coat, and Don had cried during the beginners, which he did every time and denied every time.

The closing number was Mia’s. It was six minutes long and it had every single child in the building in it, and it was the hardest thing she had ever made because there was almost nothing any of them could actually do.

At the end of it, the little ones finished their section downstage, and did not leave.

The older ones came on around them and through them, stepping wide, and the children sat down where they were, cross-legged, at the front, and stayed there, facing out at their own parents, while the piece happened over their heads. And at the very end the whole school was on the stage at once in a wide shallow arc, and the children were still sitting at the front, and one of them, a boy of about six who had gone the wrong way twice, waved at his mother.

Mia stood at the back with her hand on the door frame and did not think about being on the stage, and noticed, some time afterwards, that she hadn’t.

Adam found her in the emptying hall about forty minutes later, with a roll of gaffer tape in one hand and glitter on his sleeve.

“Twelve minutes long,” he said.

“It’s always twelve minutes long.”

“One day we’re going to cut something.”

“We’re never going to cut anything.”

“No,” he agreed. He put his arm around her, and she leaned on him instead of the cane. She was allowed to do that and did not do it often. “Kelly Nowak asked if there’s a summer thing.”

“Tell her there’s a summer thing.”

“There isn’t a summer thing.”

“There is now,” Mia said.

Out in the corridor more than a hundred children were being collected by their families, and somebody’s little brother was crying, and Lucy was shouting about the float, and the glitter would be on that floor in April.

Mia looked at the stage, which was empty, and lit, and nothing to do with her.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

The End