Previously – Chapter 6: The Flood
At two o’clock everybody went away for two hours, the way they do, and the building was empty for the first time since half past four that morning.
Mia had planned this.
She had been planning it since September, and she had planned it with the specific unadmitted care of a person planning something they know they are not going to tell anybody about. Everyone would leave at two. The room would be warm by then, because the fans had been off since noon. Adam had a thing at his house and would not be back until three-thirty.
She had told herself it was for Tori.
That was even, in a limited sense, true. Tori had built the phrase out of description, like a person assembling furniture from a diagram, and it was ninety percent right and was never going to be more than that until somebody put the shape in front of her.
One time, Mia had thought, at various points over a month, and never once as a question. At half speed. Marked, mostly. Just so I know what I’m asking her for.
She sat in the considered chair in an empty studio at four minutes past two with the low autumn sun coming through the west windows onto a floor that had been under water nine hours earlier, and she put her hands on the arms of the chair and stood up.
The hip took it.
She walked four steps out to the middle of the room and stood there and put her arms into first. First does not require a hip at all. She had done it perhaps eleven million times.
Then she put her weight over the right leg.
Not a turn. Not a fall. She simply shifted her weight from two feet to one, which is a thing you do about four hundred times an hour without noticing, and stood on it.
It went about three seconds.
Then the leg reported in, late, the same lag as the supply closet, and something in the front of the joint gave a bright vertical warning that was not exactly pain and that Mia’s body understood before Mia did, because she found she had already put her left foot down and both hands out.
She stood in the middle of an empty studio with the sun on her.
She tried again, because of course she did. She got about the same. She tried a third time, more carefully, and the third one was worse than the second, and that is the piece of information that ends the argument, because bodies are not stubborn and do not need persuading twice.
Mia went and sat down.
She did not cry. She sat in a chair in a warm empty room for thirty minutes with her hands in her lap and looked at the floor, and what she felt was not grief exactly but something with a colder shape to it: the understanding that she had spent an autumn telling herself a story about being sensible, and that the sensible version of her had been quietly saving up this one afternoon since September, and that a chest of drawers in a supply closet had spent it for her without asking.
You’ve had it, she thought. That was it. That was the last afternoon where you didn’t know.
At twenty past two she got the phone out and typed a message to Sasha, and looked at it, and deleted it.
At half past she went and found the coffee pot.
* * *
The doors opened at four into a building that smelled powerfully of damp plaster, and nobody cared at all.
They came in eleven at a time. There were a hundred and five tickets sold and a hundred and forty-one people, because the grandparents came out of the county like weather, because eleven more paid at the door, and because Ray Blackburn had brought four people and a camera.
Mrs. Fletcher’s chair diagram had been correct in every particular and she was unbearable about it for two weeks.
Kyle Brennan’s fairy lights, on the new circuit, worked.
Mia sat at the end of the second row on the aisle with the running order on her knee, because there was nowhere else for her to be, and because standing in the wings for two hours had stopped being a thing available to her at about four minutes past two.
At six minutes past four, Adam walked into the middle of the floor with a microphone and said:
“Right. Hello. Thank you for coming. I want to say two things and then we’ll start, because I’ve been told by the woman on the end of row two that if I talk for more than ninety seconds she’ll have me taken outside.”
Laughter.
“First thing. There was three hundred gallons of water on this floor at five o’clock this morning.” He let that sit for a second. “Nineteen people came into this building before eight, and not one of them was asked, and there are eleven fans in the supply closet belonging to four different families and the Pine Diner. So. Some of you already know that. I wanted the rest of you to know it.”
Somebody at the back started clapping and the whole room went with it, and it took a while.
“Second thing.” He looked at the floor for a moment. “Heather ran this room for four years and this is the first thing we’ve done like this since she died, and she’d have hated the flyer.”
A ripple.
“She’d have said the name was terrible. It is a terrible name.” Adam put his hand in his pocket. “Right. That’s it. That’s ninety seconds. Here’s the beginners.”
* * *
The beginners were four and a half minutes long and were, technically speaking, a shambles.
Eleven children in blue came on in something approximating a line. Two of them found their parents in the second row within the first eight counts and did not stop waving. A boy called Theo performed the entire number one full bar behind everybody else with the tremendous unhurried dignity of a man who knows he is right. Rosalie, who had spent twenty minutes under a piano bench in September, came out front and center and did all of it perfectly and finished with her chin up, looking at the back wall as though she had been expected.
A hundred and forty-one people made a noise that Mia had last heard in a nine-hundred-seat house in Seattle.
She sat in the second row with a running order on her knee and thought, with something close to professional outrage: that’s not fair. That took them three weeks.
And then, immediately after: no. It took them three weeks and six years.
The seven-to-nines were clean. The ten-to-twelves were better than clean, and their transition, the four-second one Mia had rebuilt eight times, went past without a single person in the room noticing that anything had been solved, which is the entire nature of the work.
Backstage, meaning the corridor with a bucket in it, the following things happened in the space of forty minutes.
A seven-year-old was sick, twice, from nerves, and went on anyway and was excellent. Two of the ten-to-twelves had a complete rupture of a friendship over a hair clip and reconciled during the interval with the intensity of nations. A boy could not find his shoe and it was located on top of the water heater, where he had put it, for reasons he was unable to supply.
Mrs. Fletcher ran the corridor with a clipboard and a system of colored stickers she had invented that morning.
And at some point in the second half, Kyle Brennan, who had been awake since half past five and who had spent the morning on his knees in three inches of water, fell asleep sitting bolt upright in the fourth row with his arms folded, and his wife let him, and six people photographed him.
The adult beginners came on eighth.
There were six of them: the nurse practitioner, a retired police sergeant, the man from the hardware store, and three women from the church. They wore black and they were forty-one to sixty-eight years old and Mia had spent two weeks taking out of their number every single thing that required any two of them to do the same thing at the same time.
What was left was a piece in which six adults did six slightly different things and looked delighted about it.
It brought the house down. Not politely. The sergeant got a whoop. The man from the hardware store, who had a genuinely good sense of rhythm and had told nobody in forty years, got an actual cheer, and at the end he did a small unscripted bow that had not been in any version of anything, and the room went up.
Diane Coyle, two rows back, laughed so hard she had to be handed a tissue.
Tori’s group went on second to last.
It was four minutes long and it was the only thing on the program that would have survived in a real theater, and Mia had built it in September out of a phrase she had described with words because she could not show it.
The room went quiet in a different way. You could hear it happen. A hundred and forty-one people who had spent ninety minutes watching their own children being adorable adjusted, within about eight bars, to watching something else.
Bethany Coyle had her eight counts in the middle and did them so well that her mother made a small noise.
Connor jumped, and left the floor on the and, and landed.
And at two minutes forty, Tori came off the diagonal and fell out of the turn and caught it.
She caught it about a beat early, and her back foot skidded, and the whole thing was ninety percent of what Mia had asked for.
It did not matter in the slightest. A hundred and forty-one people who had never seen anything like it in their lives made a sound that started before she had finished, and Mia Chambers sat in the second row on the aisle with her hands over her mouth and understood exactly what it would have been if the girl had had the shape.
That’s the ten percent, she thought. That’s the ten percent I was going to give her this afternoon.
* * *
There was, before the last number, a thing that had not been rehearsed.
Adam came out with the microphone to introduce it and said, “Right, the last one’s everybody, so give us four minutes to get ninety-one children into a room that holds forty,” and while the corridor was doing that, a hundred and forty-one people sat in folding chairs with nothing to look at.
And Ray Blackburn stood up.
Mia’s entire body went cold, because she had seen this at benefits in three cities and it never once ended well.
“Since we’re waiting,” said Ray Blackburn, at conversational volume, to a hundred and forty-one people, “I’d like to say that this building had three hundred gallons of water in it at five o’clock this morning and that my raffle raised a hundred and fifteen dollars.”
Applause.
“And that the tire has been won by Marion Deakin, who does not drive.”
A very large laugh.
“And,” said Ray Blackburn, “that I’ve been asking Mia Chambers to do a benefit for this town since the day she got back, and she keeps saying maybe, and I’ve worked out this afternoon that she’s been doing one since September and just hasn’t been charging me.”
Mia sat in the second row and looked very hard at the running order on her knee.
The room turned around in its chairs, the way a room can do to a person, and applauded for a moment, and Mia lifted a hand about four inches without looking up, and Ray Blackburn sat down enormously pleased with himself.
“Right,” said Adam, into the microphone, into a room that had gone rather warm. “Everybody.”
The last number was everybody.
Ninety-one children on a floor that had held eleven that morning, in four waves Mia had timed to the second on a legal pad three weeks earlier. The babies came on last and the babies came off first and there was a moment at the end where the whole studio was full of children of every size from five to seventeen and the six adults at the back, and the parents in the folding chairs had entirely stopped pretending to be dignified.
Mia watched from the second row.
She was aware of about four things at once: that the transition at bar sixty was two counts late and always had been; that the room was over capacity and that if there had been a fire it would have been a catastrophe; that a hundred and forty-one people were standing up.
And underneath, quietly, in a voice she did not recognize as her own: I made about a third of that.
* * *
It took two hours to empty the building.
That was the part Mia had forgotten about entirely, because in a company somebody else does it: the long strange hour after a show where nobody leaves and everybody has to tell everybody, and children run in circles with their costumes half off, and adults stand in coats holding paper cups saying the same four sentences to different people.
She sat at the end of the second row and could not have moved if she had wanted to, and so the whole thing came to her.
Ray Blackburn asked about the benefit again and she said maybe, and he said that was the spirit. The man from the hardware store wanted to know, with total sincerity, whether he had a future in it, and Mia said, “You’ve got a very good sense of rhythm and you’re sixty-one, so I’d say your future is Thursdays,” and he laughed for a while and told nine people.
Rosalie’s mother arrived at the chair, opened her mouth, and produced no words at all.
“She was tremendous,” Mia said.
“She was under a bench in September.”
“She was under a bench in September and today she was front and center and she looked at the back wall the entire time. That’s what you’re supposed to do and nobody taught her it.” Mia meant every word. “She worked out that the back wall doesn’t move. That’s a real thing. Tell her I said the thing about the back wall.”
Rosalie’s mother went away and cried by the corkboard.
Connor Reyes came past with a stack of chairs and stopped.
“You said go on the and.”
“I did.”
“I went on the and.” He shifted the chairs. “It’s like there’s a whole extra bit of time in there that nobody tells you about.”
“There is.”
“That’s mad,” said Connor Reyes, and carried the chairs out, and Mia sat in the second row and thought that she would probably remember that for the rest of her life and that he would have forgotten it by Tuesday.
Tori did not come and say anything at all. Mia understood that perfectly: at sixteen, the ones who have done something they are not sure about go and stand near the food.
Danielle King was not there. Mia noticed, and thought about it for some time.
Four separate parents asked about the spring term. Diane Coyle cried at her twice. Lucy did the money in the office with the door shut and came out at seven thirty and stood in the doorway and said, “Nine hundred and eleven dollars,” in the voice of a woman announcing a birth.
“That’s the door?”
“That’s the door and the bucket and Ray’s forty and the diner’s tips jar. Diane emptied that into it without telling anybody.” Lucy was pink. “Adam. That’s four hundred dollars more than the studio made in September. In one afternoon. In a room with a hole in the ceiling.”
Adam sat down on the floor.
By half past eight everybody had gone.
* * *
The chairs were stacked and the fans were back on and the room was cold again, and Mia was in the considered chair because she had been in it for four and a half hours and getting out of it was going to be a project.
Adam came in with two mugs and gave her one and sat down on the floor with his back against the mirror, at her feet, which was where he sat.
Neither of them said anything for about a minute.
“I’m going to tell you something,” Mia said, “and then we’re not discussing it.”
“All right.”
“At two o’clock this afternoon I stood up in the middle of that floor and put my weight on my right leg and it didn’t hold.” She looked at the mug. “Three times. It’s worse than it was on Thursday. It’s the chest of drawers.”
Adam did not move.
“I’d been planning it since September,” she said. “Not that. The other thing. The finding out. Everybody does it, apparently, at about month five, on their own, at night, and I’d told myself it was so I could show Tori a phrase properly, and it wasn’t.” She drank some of the tea. “That was mine. That afternoon was the one I’d been keeping. And I spent it on a box of blue nylon.”
“Mia.”
“I said I don’t want to discuss it.”
“I’m not discussing it.” He had his head back against the mirror. “One thing, and then we’ll sit here.”
“Go on.”
“When they told me about Heather, the second time, the bad appointment that February.” He was looking at the ceiling. “I drove her home and I stopped at a Chevron on the way and I bought her a bag of those toffees she liked, and she looked at them, and she said, Adam, we’re going to have to stop pretending that anything I do is going to help.“
Mia sat very still.
“And I’ve thought about that sentence about twenty thousand times,” Adam said, “and it took me two years to understand that she wasn’t being brave. She was being accurate. And it was the kindest thing anybody’s ever said to me, because it meant I could stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Working out how to fix it.” He turned his head and looked at her. “You’re allowed to have lost the afternoon. You don’t have to also make it into a lesson about what you learned.”
Mia put the mug down on the floor because her hand was not entirely steady.
“That’s a terrible thing to say to somebody,” she said, “on a day when they can’t get out of a chair.”
“Do you want a hand?”
“No.”
“All right.”
“Yes,” Mia said.
He got up. He came and stood in front of the chair, and put both hands out, and she took them, and he took her weight and brought her up out of it, and when she was standing they were about a foot apart with their hands still joined.
Neither of them let go.
The fans were going at the far end. Somewhere on Main Street a car door shut.
“This is a bad idea,” Adam said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve been in this town six weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be gone in the spring.”
“That is not a question,” Mia said, “and I notice you’re not asking it,” and she watched him hear that, and watched him decide.
He let go of one of her hands and put his to the side of her face, carefully, as if he were not certain he was allowed to, and Mia said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and pulled him down and kissed him.
Adam Lockwood made a small sound and put both arms around her, and had the presence of mind, about two seconds in, to move his hand off her right hip. She noticed. She would still be thinking about it in December.
They came apart a few inches and stayed there.
“Right,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That’s.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got a hole in my ceiling,” Adam said.
“You have.”
“And a plasterer coming Monday, and an insurance claim, and ninety-one children, and about five thousand dollars of building work I can’t pay for.”
“All true.”
“And I have not done this in thirteen years.”
“I know,” Mia said. “It was very obvious.”
Adam laughed, properly, from somewhere under his ribs, and put his forehead down against hers, and they stood in the middle of a cold studio at nine o’clock at night with eleven fans blowing across a floor that had nearly died that morning.
“Don’t say anything sensible,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to say that we should probably talk about it,” Adam said, “and I’m aware that’s the same thing.”
“Then don’t.”
“Mia.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Talk about it tomorrow.”
And he didn’t say anything else, and neither did she, and that was the last hour of October eighteenth, and it was the best day either of them had had in two years.
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