“Let her be. She knows what she’s doing.” Karo enjoys seeing herself as the master among apprentices, Maeve thinks: the fearless leader, the sage. Now she reaches to fix Justin’s hat for him. “Happy hour down in the hot springs! Okay, yes—” She turns back to Maeve. “So I hope you’re not shy. The heat can make you dizzy. What’s better for balance than that?”
Maeve hits the floor, panting—then rolls away and pushes up, falls again. Pushes up. Pulls in to spin. And spin, and spin. Out of the turn, extending, her quads and calves burning, she’s in the air and then down again, landing too hard, Jesus, Maeve!, arch, lift, pull up straight, wide-turn-step, step-step, ball-change, reach and hold-hold-hold-hold—fall.
The wood floor always rising to meet her, the sound of her own hard breath ruthless over the music.
Where the impulse is to turn in, Maeve opens out. Where the impulse is for small, she wants to make it big, expansive. Powerful. Women’s work tends to explore emotional spaces—from a review she read in The New Yorker on the flight here. Not just women’s work—what’s designed for women, over and over again, by male choreographers.
Maeve intends only the opposite. Athletic, virtuosic. Bold shapes. Aggression.
Fight.
There’s sweat in her eyes. Her hair is tied up in a bun and the bun wrapped in a kerchief to keep strays from distracting her. She pulls up, a doll on a string, and for a moment she’s completely still, staring herself down in the mirror. It takes more strength to hang in the air like this, to appear suspended, than to nail the showy, high jumps. This is where the damage of the C-section lays itself bare: without a solid core, she has less control. Everything she does looks impulsive, skewed.
The light lifts, as though a new spot has been trained on her. She spins back and drops again, hitting the ground hard. Too loose, sloppy in her form. She can feel the shock wave in her hip. Why can’t she be more careful? When she lifts up again, it’s like punishment, hip throbbing, and she’s throwing herself through the room. Why. Can’t. You. Be. More. Careful.
And she comes down, purposely careless, angry, hurtful, her shoulder off the wall. Hard enough to make her cry out. If you hurt yourself, you have to stop.
This time she stops.
The shoulder stings and she’s almost afraid to touch it. If she injures herself now, then what? There are no more grants, no other retreats. She gives it a tiny roll, back and then forward again. A test.
Injury is self-sabotage, Maeve. What are you, stupid? It means you give up. You’re done. You have to go home with nothing. You left your children for nothing, you came here for nothing.
When she talks to herself like this—derisive, angry, mean—it’s Iain’s voice she hears. Her husband. Ex-husband, ex. Ex, for God’s sake.
Still—after all this time.
His voice that leaves her dizzy, leaves her nauseous, spinning. But drives her to get up again.
And again. An old habit she just can’t shake.
When she met Iain, he was the artistic director with a company in New York. Maeve was a visiting principal, a classical dancer from Canada—a national company—only there for a month-long intensive. Right away, there was a connection. He knew her so well. Without, it seemed, even trying.
A relief, at first: it’s not a life everyone understands. She’d had boyfriends in high school and even after that, nice men who used words like relax, who told Maeve that she didn’t have to keep getting up, she didn’t have to measure herself obsessively, she didn’t have to be perfect. But in Maeve’s world, none of that was true. They meant well, all of them, but they drove her rageful. They drove her to tears.
Iain wanted her driven and exhausted. He wanted her perfect, too. He loved her best when she was most unhappy, when she was a slave to it. No one else had ever known Maeve inside out. Not like that.
When she didn’t return from New York, her company director screamed breach of contract down the phone line. The LA Times referred to Iain as a strategist and Maeve as Nouvelle Vague’s latest acquisition; The New Yorker teasingly called him a poacher, Maeve his trophy. Her photograph in Rolling Stone. In Vogue.
And suddenly there they were, five years on.
Talia came along, an accident. A happy accident?
Yes, Maeve thinks now. She squats down on the studio floor and rounds her back, feeling the stretch between her shoulder blades, knees hugged into her chest.
Yes. She has thought it over a lot. Despite everything, she is glad to have them, Talia and Rudy both. Despite what they did to her body. Despite the way they tied her down. The way they tied her to Iain. They are a passion.
Such a passion, in fact, that she has to leave them to focus on anything else, and the leaving itself is so sharp and painful that just thinking about them makes it so Maeve can hardly breathe. Iain knew this about her, that love would be her weakness, long before Talia was born. I know you. He could sense it in her, he said, the same way he’d known everything else that made her tick.
I know you.
Iain knew, for instance, that what Maeve feared more than anything was an injury. So it was a good threat. Hold her down by the wrist, twisting. Just enough. His weight on those tiny bones. Enough to make her comply. Or her arm, caught up behind her, the pressure on her shoulder. He aimed for the joints.
A bruise, she could live with. Bruises: who cares? Just no sprains. Please. No muscle injury. For God’s sake, a bone, even a little one in her hand or foot, would mean she couldn’t dance for weeks. Something he leaned on when she proved she could take it without crying out, without waking Talia, toddler-sweet and sleeping in the next room and then, later, Rudy too.
He’d thought, briefly, that he could use her fear of waking the kids as a threat. But Maeve can be silent through just about anything.
She curls against the floor now, the way she used to curl up, protecting herself. The music—mostly drums, improvisation music—comes out of a speaker in the wall and it is relentless. She needs it to stop so that she can think. She needs to stop thinking and get up again.
In the end, the marriage left only two marks on her. One, the surgeon’s knife at her belly; and the other, a thin red scar that runs the length of her index finger down into her palm. The wound caused by a shard of a broken mirror.
The mirror from a studio just like this one.
Maeve pulls up and crawls to the corner, slaps the speaker’s power button until it finally cuts and there’s nothing, quiet, and she sits there on the floor and takes a breath.
Her head hurts, some combination of the new altitude and minimal sleep and acoustics. She’s glad of it. It’s a sharp pain, steady, something to focus on that’s not the pain in her hip, her shoulder. She closes her eyes and breathes out, then opens them again.
It’s impossible to avoid yourself in a studio. There’s Maeve, sitting against the wall, knees pulled into her chest, wrapping her arms around herself; there she is reflected in twenty different mirrors. Every angle of her. Every line. Whispering to herself through the silence, in the gentlest way. Lovingly.
He’s gone, he’s gone. He’s gone now.
A weird wave of relief washes over her, half euphoria, half endorphins. Like a rush. She opens her hand and traces the scar from fingertip to wrist. He’s gone.
Her voice growing cold: Iain is gone.
Maeve waits in the silence until her breathing is even. Then she turns on the music, and she gets up.
It’s snowing more heavily than ever when she finally pulls on her boots and wanders out of the studio, dazed from the work. For a moment she’s disoriented. You can see how hikers go missing. She remembers reading how pioneers used to tie one end of a rope to the house, the other to the barn, so they couldn’t get lost in a storm. Maeve doesn’t have a rope, but someone would come and find her if the weather was really bad, right?
As if on cue, the wind suddenly lets up—the path is dusted with fresh snow but plain to see. It’s obviously been cleared sometime during the day, but when
, and by whom? Maeve is the only one working out here. At the edge of the woods, she can see the chain of solar lanterns, still unlit at this hour, a trail of little black hats leading to the center.
She’s supposed to go to the spa. Karo is right; a hot soak will in fact be good for her muscles. But she suspects that’s not her reason for going, and she’s chastising herself a little. Sim Nielssen with his whalebone and his steady gaze. The curve of his lips.
His way of addressing her, one artist to another: Everything is in our service.
As if to prove something to herself, Maeve detours sharply across the clearing instead of heading straight back. There’s still enough light in the sky, and she traces the tree line to where the ridge crops out, bare white, going over the work in her head as she moves along, conjuring up the few, fleeting glimpses of herself from the mirror that satisfied her, pasting them together. She knows she hasn’t hit it yet, hasn’t found what she’s hoping for, but she twists and changes the shapes in her mind. Trying to imagine how it could look in the bodies of younger dancers, dancers with all their muscles intact, with more control and less exertion behind each gesture.
She stops at the boundary of the woods, against the steep edge of the gorge. Far below, there’s a shallow river, already frozen, and farther along, an arc of cable extends over the valley to a wide platform. She remembers the attraction she saw marked on the center map—the SkyLift.
A shadow sweeps in, and she turns to look, spooked—but it’s just the range, rising higher and higher to all sides, the weight of the shelf looming. A bowl. Maeve feels dizzy inside it.
She toes at a ridge of snow and it lifts up, layered and whole, then suddenly flips and somersaults down over the rock. Perfect fort-making snow. She can picture Rudy, his fleece hat cocked on his head, working to build a wall.
What is she doing here, hiking up a trail two thousand miles away?
From down in the valley, there’s a cry. The shadows shift; something else moving in the riverbed.
“Probably not a good idea to stand so close to the edge—”
Maeve spins to find Sadie there, picking her way down the path—on her way back to the center herself.
“There was an accident here a few months ago. A painter—” the girl says, and she stops a good yard away and stays there, as if to make a point. “Elisha Goldman, ever hear that name? Just stepped off the ledge, boom. Couldn’t see where the ground ended and the sky began.”
Maeve nods but also steps back from the edge and into the trees. “She died?”
Sadie shrugs. “Might as well have. Half paralyzed. I’m sure she has her regrets.”
Her tone is flat.
Maeve bites her lip. Every interaction with Sadie is awkward, starting with that first, admittedly lousy, impression Maeve made. It was late, she was exhausted; does she need to apologize now? How much could it really matter?
But there’s a softness to Sadie’s face in this light and Maeve thinks of the way Anna described her. She really does look like a kid—albeit a kid who’s trying too hard. That feels familiar to Maeve.
She takes a breath and tries again.
“I’m wondering if I should be here at all,” she says. “I didn’t expect this weather, not so early in the year. I have children. They’re little.” Snow swirls up in a quick gust, the soft, heavy flakes catching in Sadie’s hair. “How about you? Don’t you feel trapped out here? You’re practically a kid yourself—” The words catch in Maeve’s throat almost the second they’re out.
Too late. Sadie is already gluing on her forced smile.
Maeve holds up a hand, mea culpa–style. “That’s unfair. I was dancing professionally by the time I was eighteen years old and I fucking hated it when people talked down to me.”
But Sadie shrugs it off.
“It’s pretty common,” she says. “I’m twenty-three, though, not eighteen. I have a master’s degree in art history and an MBA in arts management. I graduated high school when I was fifteen. So I’m used to it.” There’s a beat, Sadie looking her up and down. Then: “I used to dance too, you know. I guess you could say a lot of girls do.”
“Oh, did you?” Maeve hesitates, unsure of what to say. “I’m sure you were very good. You’re built for it.”
Sadie offers a half smile and for a second Maeve is sure she said the right thing. So much of dance is measurements. Proportions. She steps closer. The girl’s hair is pulled back neatly in a satin band, her wool coat cinched at the waist. Her face never changes unless she wants it to. Everything seems purposeful, like she’s onstage. That, too, feels recognizable.
But Sadie’s smile suddenly sharpens. “Just another high-performance Korean girl, right?”
Maeve sharpens too; her eyes narrow. It feels like she’s supposed to apologize again, or maybe curtsy. She does neither. The snow is piling up on her sleeves and she brushes it off.
Sadie turns to head down the path.
“There’s some talk about all this new snow,” she says, calling back over her shoulder. “We’ve had a strange year. If it keeps up, they’ll orchestrate some explosions.” She holds up a hand to catch the snow as it falls. “To manage the snowpack, you know? But not right now—don’t worry. Probably not till after you’re gone.” This feels like Sadie the tour guide again, until she goes off script: “People who live in extreme places like to think they’re in control.”
The cry echoes in the valley again and Maeve leans out to look. Whatever is down there has come out of the trees. There’s an undulation to its movement and it takes her a second to realize it’s not one thing, but many. A herd.
Elk.
“We should go,” Sadie says, impatient. Maeve realizes this is what she’s been doing all along. Not forcing an awkward conversation or waiting for some kind of apology. Of course not. Just doing her job: corralling Maeve.
“Sorry,” Maeve says. “I didn’t realize—” She hurries along the path to where Sadie is waiting. This seems to please Sadie, a moment of deference.
“I don’t really care what you do, but—” Sadie pauses, and a slyness creeps into her tone: “Have you met Dan?”
Maeve looks at her. “You’re the second person who’s mentioned him to me.”
“Oh, who was it? Justin? Or, no—Anna!” She rolls her eyes. “He’s attractive, I guess. He’s got that cop thing going on, some women really go for that.” They skirt along the edge of the trees, where the walking is easier. Maeve nods at Sadie, encouraging her to continue—the girl finally seems to be warming up.
“He won’t like you wandering around by yourself. He’s—I don’t know.” Sadie shakes her head. “He reminds me of my father.” She leans down and plucks something out of the snow. A stick? No, a piece of antler. The way Sim Nielssen said: you find them lying around sometimes. Sadie’s voice lowers a notch: “Always needs to be top gun.”
Maeve expects her to tuck the antler away, save it for a collection, but instead she spins and pitches it hard into the trees.
There’s a clatter in the distance as it makes contact.
“What do you mean, you pulled them out of school?” Maeve has her mother on the line, her room phone pressed between ear and shoulder. “I wanted you to stay with them at my house. That’s what you said you’d do. That was the plan.”
“So what? They’re with me at the cabin instead of home.”
“You know how I feel about that cabin.”
The cabin Maeve has refused to return to since that first visit, the summer she was nine, choosing dance camp, intensives, even summer school if it meant never having to face that high fence where the deer died in the night.
“Just because you hate it doesn’t mean they will. They’re fine, they’re happy. And I thought you decided to be outdoorsy now, up in the mountains? No? It’s a failure?”
“That’s not the point.”
Maeve presses her lips together to stop herself from screaming. She arrived back in her room to find a voice mail from the school secretary:
Talia and Rudy hadn’t been in school that morning. Could Maeve please remember to call them in as absent? It’s school policy.
She knows the fucking school policy.
The principal called her that first year, just after she’d left Iain, and Maeve almost missed the call, her phone set to Do Not Disturb while she toured yet another rental house. She’d wanted to seem confident, professional, as she leaned on the kitchen counter to fill out the application, but when she saw Carter Street Public School flash silently on the phone’s screen, she set aside her pen to pick it up. Talia was only four years old.
The call was just a formality, the woman said. But there’s another parent here to get Talia for her dental appointment and—we weren’t aware this was a shared-custody situation?
Maeve threw herself into her car, the engine flooding twice as she rushed to start it up. A red light and a pedestrian ambling across the crosswalk and she leaned on the horn, burned through. At the school’s front entrance, the principal unlocked the door. Maeve fell to her knees on the classroom floor, her face in Talia’s hair, arms wrapped tight around Talia’s skinny little ribs.
That was the first school. After that, Maeve sat down with every new day-care team, every new teacher, and explained there was no shared custody, no matter what he said. She even tried—once—a restraining order. Not that anyone helped enforce it.
Now she catches herself in the vanity mirror, hair in a knot on top of her head, and reaches for a photo that she’s wedged into the frame: a photo-booth strip she brought from home, Maeve and Rudy and Talia at the mall, smiling and sticking out their tongues and making kiss-lips. She takes a breath and releases it again, the way those relaxation apps tell you to, a silent four-count in her head, stroking the photo with her thumb.
Rudy always just one step behind, kissy when he ought to be pulling a face.
“Kids like schedules, Mom. They like things to stay the same. And I can’t work if I don’t know for sure—for sure!—where they are.” Her voice is rising, but she can’t help herself. “You know what I went through! Do you have any idea how panicked I was when I got that voice mail? Why wouldn’t you at least tell me?”
The Retreat Page 4
