No, she thought, it was more than a peace offering. It was a choice: a choice to avoid resembling the cold and vengeful maidens of Giselle. At the break, Giselle walked purposefully to speak with Marcus.
“Hey, so … I know I haven’t been … friendly,” she said. “And I want to apologize. And to thank you for covering for me back there.”
He gave her half a smile, perhaps uncertain whether he ought to trust this kinder, softer version of the Giselle who’d spent the last eleven days scorning him.
“Listen, I know I’ve been a jerk to you,” said Giselle. She swallowed and spoke the words. “I’m sorry.”
His smile filled out. “No worries,” he said. “I think I get it.”
Giselle felt her face flushing.
“You lost a role you deserved because I’m too short to dance with you,” said Marcus.
Giselle swallowed. It was time to admit Marcus was no more a “part stealer” than Katya was. He was just … the right height and skill level for the job. She looked off to one side, willing herself not to tear up.
“Heidi’s okay as Giselle,” said Marcus. “I mean, her technique is flawless. But you’re the better dancer.”
Giselle could think of nothing appropriate to say in reply and for once held her tongue.
Marcus continued. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone travel emotion out through the ends of their fingers the way you do. Or, um, the way you did?” He spoke it like a question. “I take it ballet is something you’re … putting on hold for now?”
Giselle swallowed just as Mr. Kinsler called the class to order, apparently for the second time.
“And I’m not asking again,” Mr. Kinsler said.
Giselle was relieved to have an excuse not to answer Marcus’s question. Marcus meant well; she could feel the kindness behind the question, but his question made the ballet-shaped wound at her core pulse and throb.
After the break, rehearsal dragged on with missed entrances and early exits as the three lovers who knew the blocking tried to adjust to the understudy Lysander who didn’t know the blocking. Finally Mr. Kinsler suggested the lover’s group call it an early night.
Giselle left without speaking to anyone. Outside, the air was less cold than it had been the past nights, but a miserable rain drizzled down, causing drops to congregate on the short ends of Giselle’s hair and then tickle in wet trails down her neck and back.
She entered her house silently. Katya, Mom and Babushka were home, back in the kitchen complaining about Kevin’s inability to achieve anything like a proper leap in his dance to the death with the willis. Katya remarked at that rate, everyone in the audience would clap in relief to see him hurled to his death.
It was, Giselle thought, as though she had never been a part of her own family, grousing about the latest disasters from rehearsal. They all spoke as though last night’s siren attack had never happened, as though the sirens and their handiwork were of less consequence than the comings and goings of ants in the back garden. As though, after all, ballet was the only thing that mattered.
Giselle swallowed against the tightness closing her throat.
She left her jacket on the coat rack and entered the kitchen.
As she approached the table, the three broke off their conversation. The scent of their tea, bright with raspberry jam, made Giselle want to hold them all tightly and never let them go. And then it made her want to cry. Her place was here. Here, sitting around the samovar and groaning over the disappointments of Kevin’s Hilarion. What was she doing acting?
Anger clawed at her throat and she opened the refrigerator door to hide her face. Everything was wrong, wrong, wrong, but if she spoke the words out loud, what would change? She grabbed a carton of orange juice and drained it as if she were swallowing her needs, her despair, her desire.
“I’m not eating,” she announced.
“It’s potato pancakes,” Katya said, hopefully.
“I’m not hungry,” snapped Giselle. She turned on her heel and stormed up the stairs.
She was tired and she was afraid; she was hungry and she was empty, but food would not sate the hollow space in her belly.
25
DREAMT OF IN YOUR PHILOSOPHY
Giselle sat in Math, her eyes on her work, her thoughts far away from the story problems in front of her.
In the halls between every class, whispers abounded regarding James and his worsening condition. She tried not to listen. Tried not to remember her dream: his cracked lips, the pleading look, his collapse so like Hilarion’s fatal collapse in Giselle.
From outside, rain pelted the streaked windows lining one side of the room, a noisy tattoo in an otherwise silent class. She had too much opportunity to think, to dwell, to ruminate, and her mind drew ceaseless parallels between James and Hilarion, James and Prince Albrecht, James and the drowned man from Scappoose.
Mathematics, of all subjects, ought to have offered respite from such thoughts. Instead, it offered opportunity to structure her questions in a formulaic manner.
Were the sirens (a) indiscriminately predatory or did they (b) specifically target lying, cheating men? She bit her lip. The second would require a supernatural knowledge of the hearts of men, like that of the willis. Surely it was ridiculous to assign any such abilities to the creatures. They killed for sport or pleasure or food, no one knew which, but not for revenge.
Shaking her head at herself, Giselle tried to concentrate on the next math problem. She chewed on the eraser end of her pencil until the taste, faintly bitter, made her stop. Had sirens ever attacked women or girls, she wondered? She couldn’t recall any such attacks, but it wasn’t as if she’d completed an exhaustive study on the topic. The creature who had spoken to her when she was small had left her with an impression of kindness and fellow-feeling. But it was probably safest to assume the creatures attacked both men and women. It was only in her dreams that the sirens had claimed to target faithless men. And her dreams were just dreams, the natural product of a lifetime where the ballet Giselle had never been too far from mind.
But then she thought about how James’s feet had seemed to freeze at the queen’s command as if by an enchantment. How the sirens danced with him at the river’s edge. That much, she had witnessed. And now she felt less certain. Was it (a) or (b)?
This was an equation she could not solve. Was she losing her mind?
Once again, she turned to her math, pushing her pencil along, manipulating variables. As she moved the groups of numbers and letters from one side of the equal sign to the other and then back again, it became for her a sort of choreography: you here, you there, and here and there, and there and here. And one, two, three, four—one, two, three, four. A quiet melody began to play in her head. It was the violin refrain from Giselle, and no amount of telling herself to concentrate on math could turn her focus from the simple refrain. She missed the music of ballet almost as much as the dancing itself.
Giselle gave up on her math and closed her eyes. She drifted back to the time she had been taken to watch Giselle performed with a full orchestra. It had been at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. They’d sat in the front row and Giselle had watched the swaying motion of the orchestra performers nearly as much as she watched the swaying rows of willis. She’d been small—so small she’d been given an extra cushion, and even then the high stage had meant she couldn’t see the dancers’ feet so that the willis seemed to float: white, ethereal creatures from another world.
Holy Mother of Nimble Feet, she missed dance.
Balancé, balancé, chassé, pas de bourrée. Simple steps across the floor: a series she taught to the youngest of dancers. No. Simple steps she had taught to the youngest of dancers.
She blinked and reprimanded herself sternly. This was math. She would not cry. A single tear formed, clung for a moment to her lower lid, and then spilled.
This was math and she could not stop the tears.
Discreetly, her teacher slipped her a tissue and a
tiny printed flyer. Siren Attack Support Group, it read, along with a classroom number and time. Giselle swallowed a bitter laugh. This wasn’t the group she needed. She needed a group for the support of those whose dreams had been stolen, whose hearts had been plucked out and discarded, whose souls were no longer knit to their bodies.
The bell, strident and accusing, rang at last. Giselle walked to her next class, English. This time as she paced through the halls, she allowed her feet to angle into a slight turnout. It felt like heaven. Well, a painful, sword-thrust-to-the-gut sort of heaven. The vacant quad called to her, and she felt her muscles begging for a series of piqué turns across the empty space.
Her English classroom was warm and darkened to view Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, which caused most students to droop over their desks, but Giselle gave herself the small gift of sitting with her spine in ballet-perfect alignment, as if an invisible plumb line ran up and through the crown of her head.
Her immersion in Shakespeare’s language made the movie easy to understand, and almost at once she found herself caught in Hamlet’s wretchedness, providing distraction from her own woes. But when Hamlet spoke the lines, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, the spell was broken.
Giselle was back in her own world: there are more things in heaven and earth. There were white girls, combing their hair by moonlight, invading Giselle’s slumber, showing truths hidden by day. She found herself nodding: it was all true; her dreams—like Hamlet’s ghost—were sent to her from another world. How could she have believed otherwise?
During Ophelia’s “mad” scene, the bell rang, interrupting Giselle’s dark musings that she, too, was drifting toward crazy. The harsh fluorescents flickered back on and with that, real life seemed to resume. She was being ridiculous. She was letting her imagination run away with her. She needed to talk to sensible, rational Katya.
In the halls, students murmured about James.
“I hear he’s worse.”
“I hear they’re going to helicopter him to the Health Sciences University Hospital.”
“The doctors can’t figure out what’s killing him.”
“He’s dying?”
“That’s what I heard.”
In P.E., Giselle’s class did a two mile run. For her, the run was easy, but for at least half of the students, it was all they could manage, and Giselle saw face after face with the same fading expression she’d seen on James’s face in her dreams.
They were just dreams, she told herself. Just dreams. And dreams were nothing more than the product of subconscious thought. Right? Of course, right.
Except when they were an alternate reality into which vengeful undead creatures had drawn your soul while you slumbered, revealing to you truths you would not otherwise have been party to.
There are more things on heaven and earth …
In this mood, Giselle joined her fellow actors for rehearsal. Mr. Kinsler began the class with another minute’s silence for James, who had been transported by ambulance and not helicopter to the more sophisticated hospital in Portland. During the minute of silence, Caitlyn’s small sniffling noises grew louder, and furrows of tears streaked down her mascara-smudged cheeks. Giselle pitied her. Whatever she herself had felt for James, it hadn’t been that.
When the minute ended, Mr. Kinsler chose Ophelia as the presenter for the day, and Ophelia stood to enlighten the class as to the prevalent beliefs of Elizabethans regarding the existence of a fairy kingdom and the extent to which such creatures might visit mortals in dreams.
Giselle rolled her eyes to the ceiling. Holy Mother of Visitations. This was what she needed today? This?
Ophelia discussed changelings and church bells, while Giselle tried to ground herself in reality by working on memorizing the quadratic equation. Did it end in /2a or was the 2a in the square root? She was lost in variables and coefficients when Mr. Kinsler posed a question.
“So, what can you tell us, Giselle?”
She felt like a salmon she’d once observed caught by an eagle’s talons.
She swallowed. “Can you ask the question, er, a different way?” It was a trick Katya had taught her; she’d just never had to put it into play before.
“Sure,” said Mr. Kinsler. “I just wanted to get a feel for the level of similarity between the fairies in Giselle and those in Shakespeare.”
“Oh,” replied Giselle. “I see.” She swallowed and tried to formulate an answer.
Before she could speak, Mr. Kinsler added, “I’m sure several of you will be eager to attend the Studio Bolshoi production of Giselle to write your mandatory performance review for the semester.”
There were a few sighs and one groan.
Giselle cleared her throat. “There are some similarities. In both cases, they are supernatural beings. But I’d have to say the willis are much crueler than our fairies.”
Her tongue nearly tripped over the way she’d called Shakespeare’s creatures “our fairies,” as though she was an actor like the rest of them.
She continued. “The willis in Giselle have this overriding sense of having been wronged, and all they care about is wreaking revenge.” She paused, licking her lips. “There used to be this saying, ‘That gives me the willies.’ Well, the saying comes from the willis in the ballet. They are evil spirits meant to be terrifying. I mean, you might not catch that if all you saw was a bunch of girls dancing in white romantic-era tutus. We’re working on making them more frightening.”
Suddenly, Giselle couldn’t bear the thought of the drama students snickering at the supposedly perilous willis in traditional costume. She made a mental note to speak to her grandmother about distressing the elegant costumes and continued.
“And really, if you take into account that the willis’ goal every night is … is to …” She broke off as an image of James, falling among the white-clad sirens, flashed through her mind. She pushed the thought away. “They try to lure young men so they can drown them after dancing with them until the young men fall down from exhaustion. So,” she paused, “I think you can see why they might, you know, give you ‘the willies’.”
Mr. Kinsler frowned. “Are the, er, willis from Russian folklore?”
“The ballet originated in France, but it’s set in Germany. However, it’s likely the willis are based on Russian water goblins called rusalki who also like to lure and drown young men out of vengeance. Pretty much nothing good comes from supernatural creatures in Slavic folklore.”
“Seriously,” said one of the girls in the “fairies” group. “Ever heard of Transylvania?”
A few of the mechanicals made wolf-howling noises.
“Werewolves howl,” said Ophelia, “Not vampires.”
“Let’s stay focused, people,” said Mr. Kinsler. “Giselle, these willis—are they afraid of church bells?”
It seemed an odd question. Oddly … perceptive. She wondered if Mr. Kinsler was familiar with the score of the ballet, which included church bells.
But before Giselle could answer, Jordan called out, “Did you say ‘church bells’ as in … church bells?”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Kinsler. “You’ll recall from your careful reading of our play that Oberon claims neither he nor his court fear church bells.”
Ophelia chimed in. “It’s Oberon’s way of saying his fairies aren’t demonic fairies who would need to be afraid of holy things.”
“Giselle?” asked Mr. Kinsler. “Is there a connection between church bells and the willis?”
She nodded. “At the end of the ballet, it looks as if the willis are going to kill the hero, like they already did to another guy, but then you hear a church bell striking morning—it’s in the musical score—and then the willis all return to their graves, because they can only rise and do harm at night. Daybreak sends them scurrying. Oh, and they’re afraid of crosses, too.”
“Like vampires,” said the girl who had mentioned Transylvania.
“Like our siren
s,” said Ophelia, her head tilted thoughtfully to one side.
“The Foulweather sirens are afraid of crosses?” asked Nathan.
“Google it,” replied Ophelia. “That’s how they got rid of the sirens in the Puget Sound in the 19th century. They dumped crosses into the water.”
“The crosses were made of iron,” said another student, who was Googling it. “At least, that’s what Wikipedia says.”
“And fairies don’t like iron….” said Ophelia.
“This was in 1869,” added the Googling student.
“And sirens were first sighted in Foulweather in 1870,” said Mr. Kinsler. “Interesting. However, that’s all we have time for today, I’m afraid. Warm ups!”
Rehearsal ran more smoothly than it had for the past two days, and class ended with Mr. Kinsler thanking Marcus for running lines with James’s understudy, something Marcus hadn’t told any of them he’d done.
Marcus shrugged. “It was nothing,” he said. “Considering the circumstances, it was the least I could do.”
This might have been true, but Giselle certainly hadn’t thought to do as much, she mused as she exited the classroom.
She was halfway through the school parking lot when she heard someone calling for her. Heard Marcus calling for her.
Out of habit, her mouth pinched into a narrow line. She sighed at herself. What was wrong with her? Hadn’t she already “made up” with Marcus? Forgiven him for the way he’d unintentionally hurt her?
Maybe, she thought, forgiveness wasn’t a single act but rather many tiny acts, again and again until you knew you meant it.
“Hey,” said Marcus, catching up. “Mind if I join you? I just wanted to say I hope you’re doing all right,” he said, falling into step with her.
Giselle’s chest felt suddenly tight. Doing all right? No. She was not … doing all right, but she didn’t want to talk about it.
“You and James were … close, right?” Marcus asked softly.
Oh. That. She didn’t respond. There were too many things to say about that, and most of them were completely mortifying.
“Or not,” said Marcus. “I just thought …”
Siren Spell Page 17
