Dancing on the Edge

by Han Nolan

  Chapter 26

  I DIDN’T SEE Dr. DeAngelis that day. I went back to the surgery part of the hospital to have my legs examined by my doctor. He told me I was through with the dressings but to continue smearing silver sulfadiazine on them—the goop. I wore shorts for the first time since my stay in the hospital. Everyone crowded around me in group, wanting to see, asking me if my legs hurt. Leah called me lumpy-legs, and I told her to hush her mouth. Everybody except the counselors clapped. Leah was angry because they didn’t take away any points from me for speaking out of turn. She said they were playing favorites, and when group was over she whispered to me, “I’ll get you. Just don’t turn your back.”

  Aunt Casey was already in the room when Kyla brought me down the hall to see Dr. DeAngelis the next day. She had a wad of tissues in her hands and was sitting in the chair closest to Dr. DeAngelis’s desk.

  Dr. DeAngelis stood up when I entered his room and told me to take a seat. He was wearing the same thing he had worn the first time I saw him—shirt, tie, jeans, and running shoes. His sleeves were rolled up this time, though, and he’d already loosened his tie some. I guessed it had something to do with his conversation with Aunt Casey.

  I chose a different chair. I chose the plastic cushioned one, like the one in our dayroom only this one was black and looked new, no cracked plastic taking jabs at your sweaty legs.

  “Well, Miracle, I hear you’re doing better in group.” Dr. DeAngelis sat back in his chair and rolled himself out between Aunt Casey and me, making sure he wasn’t blocking our view of each other.

  I didn’t have anything to say to his comment so I studied his poster again: THE MIND SET FREE.

  Aunt Casey blew her nose and sniffed.

  Dr. DeAngelis reached back for a pen and his notepad and then smiled at me. He had big teeth. “I thought today, Miracle, we’d play the game ‘I Recall.’ It’s quite easy. What I want you to do is think back to a memory you have, any memory, tell us a little bit about it, and then your aunt will bring up a memory of her own, triggered by yours. You understand? Then it will be your turn again, and your response will be based on something your aunt has said.”

  He looked at the both of us, first me, then Aunt Casey, then me again. “Any questions?”

  “Can I pass?” I asked.

  Dr. DeAngelis laughed. “No, I’m afraid not.” He flipped in his notepad to a clean page and said, “Now, why don’t we start?”

  I tried to think of something that would stump Aunt Casey, block her so she wouldn’t bring up anything I didn’t want to hear.

  “Well—I remember being the love magician in school. I made up love potions and cast spells on the boys. All the girls wanted me to do a spell for them.”

  Aunt Casey cocked her head. “Miracle! When?”

  Dr. DeAngelis held up his hand. “No. No questions. Not now.”

  “Right.” Aunt Casey closed her eyes a second, then opened them and said, “I remember being in love with Toole Dawsey. We had this dream that I was going to be a beautician and get so popular and rich we’d move to Hollywood and I’d be the hairdresser to the stars. He wanted to be an actor, like Sylvester Stallone.” She looked at Dr. DeAngelis. “We were real young then.”

  He nodded and turned to me.

  “Uh—I remember Uncle Toole hanging me upside down by my ankles every time he came to see me. I didn’t like it. He scared me. He’s so—so bulky, and he’s got this scar.” I reached down and felt my own scars.

  Aunt Casey smiled. “Yeah, I remember that.” She caught Dr. DeAngelis’s eye. “Oh, my turn. I remember—I remember Toole lighting firecrackers in the back of our house. It wasn’t even the Fourth of July, but he loved explosives. Anything with noise. I remember one exploding and almost taking his head off. He’s got thirty-two stitches in his forehead.”

  They had this game planned. They were trying to lead me to my legs. Dr. DeAngelis wanted me to say what happened, only I didn’t know what happened. I tried to steer the game away from scars.

  “I remember getting banged up in dance. I love to dance. Dancing is real. When I dance, everything I feel comes out. I used to dance all day long at—at Grandaddy Opal’s. I’d dance on the furniture and his National Geographics. I used to imagine—I used to imagine that someday I’d be able to step out of all my purple and dance and everyone would see me, they’d understand. I thought if they could just watch me dance they’d know all my feelings. I wouldn’t have to say anything. If they could have just watched me. Nobody ever watched me.”

  Aunt Casey and Dr. DeAngelis exchanged a look. I didn’t know what it meant. Aunt Casey sat up in her chair and took a deep breath.

  I clutched the edge of my chair and wondered how she was going to bring what I said back to scars. If she did, I was going to call cheating.

  “I—I remember the first time Sissy, your mama, saw dance. A dance company came to the school, some ballet company. When she got home—she was maybe seven—she couldn’t stop talking about it. She said she was going to be a ballerina when she grew up. My parents thought she’d forget about it after a few days, but she didn’t. She started dancing all over the house—stupid stuff, you know, little kid stuff. Finally my parents signed her up for lessons and she did it, she became a ballerina.”

  I didn’t say anything at first. My hands were gripping the sides of my chair so hard they were starting to cramp. Then I spoke, cautiously, as though I were testing the temperature of the bathwater with my toe. “I remember—we had recitals every year when I took dance lessons, but—I was never in them because they were late at night and nobody was supposed to know about the lessons. Anyway—anyway, no one would have come so . . .”

  “Sissy loved recitals. She loved performing. She danced all year long, even in the summer. There was this summer program at the beach one year, at the arts academy there. Sissy wanted to go so badly, but Mama and Daddy had died in a plane crash. Daddy loved to fly. He had his own plane at Eldrich Field. He was taking Mama up for a birthday ride, showing her some new things he’d learned, and this storm just came out of nowhere. After that, it was just the two of us. Sissy wasn’t sure she should leave me, but I knew she needed to go. We used some of Daddy’s insurance money to pay her way.”

  I sat with my mouth dropped open. I didn’t know this. I didn’t know any of it. Why didn’t I know about Mama? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me anything about her life? I glanced at Dr. DeAngelis. He was tapping his pen against his notepad. I looked at Aunt Casey. Was it safe to go on? Were they going to start lying again like last time?

  “Miracle, it’s your turn,” Dr. DeAngelis said.

  “When—when I danced—sometimes it felt like flying. I used to think maybe I could be a dancer and Gigi would take me to a beach house and make me tuna and tomato sandwiches while I danced and danced and danced.”

  “Sissy met your father at the beach that summer. He saw one of her performances. They used to have to sneak out at night to meet each other because the academy had strict rules about curfew and Gigi, well, Gigi expected Dane to be chained to his chair day and night, writing.”

  “No!” I pushed back in my chair. “Game’s over.”

  “Do you remember something, Miracle?” Dr. DeAngelis asked in his soft voice. “Something about Dane, your father. Do you remember Dane?”

  “No! No Dane! You’re cheating. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know about him.”

  “It’s all right. You’re safe here. It’s safe to remember him here.”

  “No, it’s dangerous. It’s dark. You’re pushing me off. You’re pushing me. Don’t say his name again.”

  “Miracle, slow down. Let’s slow down.”

  I reached for a poem—a line, any line. I needed to feel that light inside. “They make us walk backwards, so we can see where we have been.”

  “Miracle?”

  “Amazing grace how sweet the sound.” I stood up and ran to the window.

  “Miracle. You’re safe. Nothing’s happenin
g. Look at the floor. It’s still there. The chairs are where they’ve always been. Look outside. Another sunny day. There’s that pine tree, same old tree. There’s the blue unit across the quadrangle. It’s all there. You’re safe, and you know what I know about the dark? Miracle. There’s always light after the dark. You have to go through that dark place to get to it, but it’s there, waiting for you. It’s like riding on a train through a dark tunnel. If you get so scared you jump off in the middle of the ride, then you’re there, in the tunnel, stuck in the dark. You have to ride the train all the way to the end of the ride. There’s the light. It’s waiting for you, Miracle. Don’t jump off in the middle.”

  “No, I already have the light.” I pressed my face to the window. His window didn’t have a cage.

  I heard Dr. DeAngelis stand up. He took a few steps toward me. “You’re very upset. Can you tell me about it? Miracle? Were you surprised to find out your mother was a dancer?”

  I turned from the window.

  “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “Nobody told me. Why didn’t I know? How come no one ever told me about Mama?”

  “Come sit down and let your aunt tell you about it.”

  “I—I had to keep my dancing a secret. Every time I walked home from class I had to race over the sidewalk because that big eraser was coming up behind me, erasing the lesson. I’d just make it, leaping over the cracks in the sidewalk with that eraser erasing the very square I’d just leaped from.”

  “You must have been very frightened.” Dr. DeAngelis backed up and sat in his chair. He gestured for me to go to mine. I took the one in the corner with the silver legs.

  “When Gigi found out about my lessons, she was so angry.” I lifted my head up and asked Aunt Casey, “Why was she so mad? Why didn’t she want me to take lessons?”

  “Miracle”—Aunt Casey scratched her nose—“your mama loved dance so much, like you. She had such big dreams. She wanted to go to New York after that summer. She was sixteen, it was time, but she met—she got pregnant. She didn’t even know at first. She was so skinny even when she was eight months pregnant she looked the same, just this basketball where her belly used to be. She was four months pregnant before she even realized something was different. I was the one who noticed it.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall. This was just a story. Aunt Casey was just telling me a fairy story.

  “She was back at home. I was taking care of her. See that was the thing. Sixteen years old, she was still a baby herself. She lived at the dance studio. She didn’t know anything about life, taking care of a baby. She still slept with all her stuffties—Pooh Bear and Ernie and Fluff Fluff—she had about twenty of them. When I’d go to her bed to wake her up in the morning, I could hardly find her she was so buried under all those animals.”

  Aunt Casey stopped speaking. I opened my eyes. Was it over? Was that the end of the story?

  Aunt Casey reached for another tissue from the box on the desk. Her hand was trembling. She wiped her forehead and the tissue fluttered like a nervous moth in her hands. She spoke again.

  “It was getting hard waking her up in the mornings. That was the first thing I noticed. She was always such a cheerful morning person, never needed coffee to get her going. Then, of course, her belly was swollen. She said she had so much gas, she couldn’t get rid of it. Over-the-counter pills didn’t work so I took her to the doctor. She told us Sissy was pregnant.”

  Aunt Casey looked at me with this pleading expression on her face, asking me to understand, but I didn’t. It was just a story. It had nothing to do with me.

  “See, Miracle, she couldn’t give up her dream. I tried to make her see that she had a baby to think of now. I found out who the father was, found his number, and called him. I got Gigi. Then Gigi just took over. She arranged for them to live with her. They rented a house near my house with some of Da—of the father’s writing money, and Sissy moved in with them.

  “It was pure torture for Sissy. She and—and the father, well, they didn’t get along at all. They were two selfish egos living in the same house. Both of them were spoiled babies. Both of them needed someone to take care of them. Gigi did. She smothered them with her care, made Sissy take naps, wouldn’t let her dance, made her eat special macrobiotic foods. It was killing Sissy. She felt trapped. She used to call me on the telephone every day, crying about how she just wanted to dance. That’s all, just dance. She would die if she couldn’t dance. Then one day she called me and she was all agitated—nervous. She said she had come to a decision. She was going to have the baby, leave it with Gigi and the uh, father, and then take off for New York. She was going to be a dancer. She didn’t know how to take care of a baby. She didn’t want it—she didn’t know the baby then, see. It was just something weighing her down. She didn’t think of it as a human being or anything. She was just thinking about herself. That’s all she ever had to think of—herself, her dance.”

  Aunt Casey tossed her wad of tissues toward the garbage can on the other side of Dr. DeAngelis’s desk. She missed. I stared at the wad and let Aunt Casey’s words float over me.

  “I tried to talk some sense into her. I told her how Mama and Daddy had sacrificed for her, for her dancing, it cost so much, lessons of every kind, costumes, new ballet shoes and slippers every week. It was time she learned to make some sacrifices, too. And I remember she said, ‘But don’t you see, all Mama and Daddy’s sacrifices would have been for nothing if I don’t dance. It’s not like other careers. This is my prime. If I don’t dance now, I don’t get another chance a few years down the road.’”

  Aunt Casey lowered her head and hunched forward over her lap. I waited for her to go on. She didn’t say anything for the longest time. I looked to Dr. DeAngelis to do something, say something, but he just sat back in his chair looking as if he were waiting for a bus and had all the time in the world. When Aunt Casey lifted her head again she had tears on her face. She grabbed some more of Dr. DeAngelis’s tissues.

  “I made her feel so guilty. I told her it was her own fault she was pregnant. I said she had to start taking some responsibility for her own actions for a change. I said everything wrong—I guess.” She glanced at Dr. DeAngelis. “I just didn’t want the baby to grow up without a mother, without the love we had had. And then what happened?” Aunt Casey looked at me over the tissues she had pinched to her nose. “That baby grew up without her mother, without love.”

  I looked at the two of them. They were both staring at me as if it were my turn to say something. What did they want me to say? Why were they looking at me? What did that baby have to do with me?

  “What?” I said. “What do you want?”

  Dr. DeAngelis spoke. “You know the rest of the story, Miracle. Why don’t you tell us what happened next?”

  Chapter 27

  “MIRACLE? The ride’s not over. Don’t hop off now, we’re still in the tunnel.” Dr. DeAngelis rolled his chair toward me. I hated feeling cornered. I stood up and went back to the plastic chair.

  “Stop looking at me,” I said, adjusting my legs so the goop wouldn’t stick to the seat.

  “You know what happened to Sissy next.”

  “No, I told you I don’t know it. I don’t.”

  Dr. DeAngelis wheeled his chair to my new seat and sat in front of me, waiting. He didn’t say anything. I glanced at Aunt Casey. She was bent over her tissues, staring at them, sniffing.

  The room was quiet. I hated the silence. All kinds of thoughts could pop up in that silence. Silence was like the dark, anything could be hiding in it.

  “I don’t know,” I began. “Maybe—maybe Sissy didn’t run off to New York.” I looked up. Still that silence. “Maybe—” I stopped. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. I could see a picture—a scene in my mind’s eye, a familiar scene. It was the same one that flashed in my mind every time Gigi told me the story of my birth. Yes, I hated when she told me that story. Something was always wrong with it. She always t
old it the same way. Mama hurrying across the street. Mama too big to move fast enough, to get out of the way. Mama getting hit by the ambulance. The doctors pulling me out of Mama’s dead body, a miracle, full of omens and portents. She said it the same way every time, and every time a scene of how it was flashed across my mind, and the picture, that scene, was never the same as her words. They never matched. Until then, I had never noticed that. I saw Mama sad, the way she was in the picture of her on the iron gate. I saw her standing on the side of the street looking down the road to check for traffic. I saw her watching the ambulance, waiting for it to pass, its siren screaming, blocking out her own thoughts, her ability to reason, there wasn’t time. There was just the screaming siren, the speeding truck, there was no time to think, she just did it, she stepped out in front of the ambulance. She let it hit her. I saw it. I knew how it was. I had always known. I had always known!

  I opened my eyes and looked at Aunt Casey.

  “I knew,” I said, reaching down along my legs, feeling for my scars.

  “What?”

  Tears filled my eyes. I blinked, and they ran down my face. “I knew about Mama! I always knew. I don’t know how but . . .”

  “Your family told you, Miracle,” Dr. DeAngelis said, rolling in closer, leaning forward.

  Aunt Casey stood up and came over to where we were. “No, we never did. We didn’t want her to ever feel she wasn’t wanted.”

  Dr. DeAngelis nodded. “Yes, the family secret, one you had to guard so closely that you couldn’t be near Miracle, couldn’t get too close to her or she might find out, and she could never find out.”