Dance with Me

by Luanne Rice

  “You know, you remind me of something,” he said. “Not because you’re anything like her, but because you’re so different—”

  “Who?”

  “My wife,” he said. He knew he shouldn’t tell the story; he wanted to stay loyal to Amanda’s memory. But he had been so alone for so long, and right now he felt such heat and emotion shining out of Jane, that he felt the physical need to unburden himself.

  “We were at dinner at her parents’ house, and her father asked me to make the toast. I can still see the crowd gathered: tanned, gowned and jeweled, black-tied. I stood, started to raise my glass . . . I was very unhappy. We both were, Amanda and I. As it turned out, she asked me for a divorce later that month. But that night, I was just swamped with feelings of regret . . . longing for something we didn’t have . . .”

  “But you had to make a big toast and sound the part,” Jane said.

  Dylan nodded. “So I raised up my glass, and . . . nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No. I started to say something incredibly profound, but no sound came out. I got all choked up. Got emotional,” he said. “In front of all those people . . . my in-laws watching with horror, and all their sunburned friends looking as if they wanted to disappear. And Amanda . . .”

  Jane’s eyes still looked a little sad, but playful and full of affection. Dylan stood still, forcing himself to breathe. He stepped out of the moment, observed it from a distance. He felt so comfortable with this woman. She was giving him a teasing, knowing look, as if she’d known him her whole life.

  Strange thing was, he felt that way, too. There was an old-shoe feeling, in the best possible way, about Jane Porter. He felt he wanted to walk around with her forever. What was that about?

  He’d been on a sort of fast track in life, which had neglected love. Brown, the Marshal Service, Washington, D.C. Amanda was beautiful, her father was politically connected, she came from Rhode Island: She was his first serious girlfriend, and she became his wife. But staring at Jane, at her sad eyes and hesitant smile, he realized he’d missed something.

  He’d missed whatever was going on in his heart right now. His mouth was dry. He wanted to walk over and hold her. On the other hand, he felt shy about trying anything. He loved the way she seemed to care about Chloe. And about Isabel.

  Even now, her gaze darted back to the picture. She seemed totally at ease, leaning against the counter.

  Could he imagine standing around in a kitchen with Amanda? Nope. There would be drinks on a silver tray, carried out to a terrace. There would be Vivaldi on a stereo. Classical music was key. For some reason, their house always resounded with some orchestra or other.

  Dylan liked fiddles and guitars. He liked Steve Earle and the BoDeans. Emmylou. He liked his pickup truck, which he called “the rig.” When he dug holes to plant his root stock, he felt a connection with reality. Something about soil made him think of life—how could it not? Roots and dirt and life and love. And Jane. He chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “My mind just went through a gyration that made perfect sense to me, but I have the feeling might set you off.”

  “Yeah? Try me.”

  “Roots, dirt, and thou,” he said.

  “You left out apples,” she said. Then she stood on tiptoes, tipped her head back, and kissed him. Thunderbolts were all over the place today. He felt them flying out of Jane, right into his body. The charge shook him from head to toe. He held her tighter. He thought he’d die if he ever had to let her go. He was forty-eight years old, but he had never felt this way before.

  “Jane,” he said, when he felt her lower down from her toes.

  “I couldn’t help myself,” she said, looking up.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m really glad about that.”

  She seemed to take half a step back. “What you don’t understand,” he said, keeping her locked in his arms, “is that I can’t let go of you.”

  She laughed, leaning into him. “Good,” she said, “because I don’t know what I’d do if you did.”

  He bent down to kiss her again, and her lips felt so hot and sexy, so flat-out physically exciting, that he almost forget, almost, the wide-open feeling in his heart that told him his feelings were bigger than this kiss, bigger than one moment of passion.

  Suddenly her cell phone began ringing again. The tone was muffled but insistent. She ignored it till it stopped ringing, but then it started again. Laughing, she broke away, and reached into her bag.

  “Hello?” she said.

  Dylan was already thinking about what he’d say to talk her out of wherever she had to go. He was smiling, ready to ask her to come into the orchard with him and then stay for dinner. But the look in her eyes wiped the smile from his face.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “That was my sister,” she said, just holding the phone as if she had forgotten how to click it shut. “Sylvie’s been trying to call me . . . our mother’s been taken to the hospital.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Mom fell,” Sylvie said when Jane walked off the elevator.

  “Is she okay?” Jane asked, hugging her sister.

  “She broke her hip, and she’s in surgery now.”

  Jane leaned back, trying to read Sylvie’s eyes. They were clouded by a kind of despair. She had a hunched-shoulder aspect that made Jane realize that there was more going on than Sylvie was saying.

  “What happened?”

  “She got out of bed by herself,” Sylvie said. “She tried to walk downstairs and lost her footing. When I got to her, she told me she had something she wanted to say to me. Only, she thought I was you . . .”

  Sylvie couldn’t even look Jane in the eyes. “I wasn’t there,” Sylvie said, all in a rush. Only then did Jane really notice that she was dressed up: blue dress, blue high heels, a lovely curl to her hair. “John asked me to come to school and address his class on ways to best utilize the school library, and little-known facts about the Dewey Decimal System. I had planned to ask you to stay with Mom, but you disappeared before I had the chance. . . .”

  “I was delivering pies,” Jane said, shivering as she remembered being held by Dylan and what he had said about Chloe grieving for her real mother.

  His touch was on her skin. She held herself, to keep it there.

  There was confusion. This was a tense situation, yes. Her mother was in the hospital. And Jane was the Mata Hari of Chadwick Orchards. Using Dylan to get close to Chloe, she had somehow missed this possibility: She was falling in love with the man. The way he loved the orchard, the way he loved Chloe, understood her grief. She had felt, for a few moments that afternoon, that she held his heart in her hands.

  She incurred a dirty look from Sylvie, but it was nothing to the turmoil in her own being.

  “Anyway, it was only going to be for one period. I told Mom what I was planning to do. She thought it was a wonderful idea, and she promised—promised—not to get out of bed. I fixed her a little tray, made sure she used the toilet before I left . . . She seemed very content. I left her there, reading Chaucer.”

  Jane tried to smile. Their mother: She read Chaucer the way some people read thrillers. Hungrily, turning the pages, not to know what happened next—she had read the works a hundred times before—but for the love of the language.

  “But somewhere along the way, she got it into her head that she had to talk to you. So she got out of bed, made it to the stairs, and tumbled down.” Sylvie looked down at her shoes with remorse. “I don’t know how long she’d been lying there when I got home. I stayed a little longer than I’d said . . . John and I went into the teacher’s lounge for coffee after class . . . and all my old friends were there, and we were catching up, while . . . Mom just lay on the floor with a broken hip.”

  “Sylvie, it’s not your fault,” Jane said.

  “I feel like it’s both of our faults,” Sylvie said.

  “Wait a minute—I’m not going to take that on,” J
ane said.

  “I could have sworn you told me you didn’t have plans today.”

  “I said I hadn’t made plans,” Jane said. “But that didn’t mean that something wouldn’t come up.”

  “You didn’t even tell me you were leaving!”

  Jane knew that. She had waited until Sylvie was in the shower, till she could hear the hiss of the hot water, before loading the pies into the station wagon and driving away. She hadn’t wanted to hear what Sylvie would say about going to the Chadwicks’.

  “You took the car, and I had to call John to come pick me up between periods,” Sylvie said reproachfully. “That’s bad enough. But our mother was alone, and she fell. She lay there for God knows how long in horrible pain. You should have seen her—heard her! She was practically delirious. Grabbing my hand, calling your name . . . saying over and over that she had something to tell you—”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jane said, closing her eyes against the picture.

  “And all because you’re living a lie!”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You were evasive with me about your plans, and you’re fooling the Chadwicks. Whatever you’re telling them about the pies, or your baking, that’s not the real story. It’s wrong, Jane.”

  Jane opened her mouth, to tell Sylvie she didn’t understand. But suddenly she knew her sister was right. Her insides seemed to drain out of her, and the stark white hospital lights and the insipid blue walls seemed to close in on her. Dylan’s words about Chloe’s grief rang in her ears. She felt like a fraud, completely exposed in the bright light.

  What was she going to do about it?

  “How did she get here?” Jane asked. “Mom, I mean.”

  “I called nine-one-one. The same ambulance that picked her up before came again. The EMTs remembered her.”

  “Was she alert?”

  Sylvie half laughed, half sobbed. “Alert enough to point out a fly buzzing around in back. And to ask the woman taking her blood pressure what her favorite class in school had been.”

  “High school principal to the core. What did the woman say?” Jane asked, smiling at the thought.

  “Phys Ed,” Sylvie said.

  “Mom didn’t like that answer,” Jane said, and she and Sylvie both laughed softly. “Remember, she never really considered gym a class? She used to give us notes to excuse us all the time, so we could stay in the library and read?”

  “I do remember,” Sylvie said. “‘Please excuse my daughter from gym, as she has a sore toe.’ What she wanted to write was, ‘. . . as she has a superior mind and can’t be squandering precious reading time kicking a ball.’ ”

  “‘. . . Or baking a cake,’ ” Jane said.

  “Oh, Jane,” Sylvie said, her gaze full of sadness.

  “I know I disappointed her,” Jane said.

  “She wanted the best for you,” Sylvie said. “She thought that when you gave up the baby, you’d go back to Brown.”

  “I know she thought that,” Jane said. “But I wasn’t the same person anymore. She must have forgotten that part—that having a baby changes you forever. Whether you raise her or not.”

  “You were so young,” Sylvie said.

  “I was old enough to be a mother.”

  “Let’s not fight, okay?” Sylvie asked. “Not while Mom is lying there, in surgery . . .”

  “I don’t think we’re fighting,” Jane said. But her body felt stiff and tense, as if she was an out-of-shape prizefighter. Her family would never understand how she felt. Sylvie couldn’t imagine what it felt like, to be twenty years old with huge aching breasts full of milk and no baby to drink it. She would never believe that even now, sixteen years later, once or twice a month, Jane dreamed of giving birth. It had happened in a hospital not very far from here. This surgical floor reminded her of where she had spent her labor and had Chloe.

  Just then, a doctor in green scrubs came through the ER doors. He held a clipboard, checked it, and called out, “Sylvie Porter?”

  “That’s me,” Sylvie said.

  The doctor walked over. He was about thirty-five, compactly built, with earnest brown eyes and a receding hairline.

  “And I’m Jane Porter,” Jane said. “We’re Margaret’s daughters.”

  “I’m Dr. Becker,” he said. “And I did your mother’s surgery.” He glanced around the room. There were two yellow vinyl seats available in a corner, and he gestured toward them. They all drifted over in that direction, but when they got there, no one sat down.

  “How is she?” Jane asked.

  “She was in a lot of pain when we brought her in,” Sylvie said.

  “We’ve been trying to make some decisions about her care,” Jane said, and Sylvie shot her a sharp look.

  “The surgery went well,” the doctor said, “but there were some complications.”

  “Complications?” Jane and Sylvie asked at the same time, and Jane’s blood turned to ice.

  “We found some enlarged lymph nodes,” he said. “In her pelvic region.”

  “Oh,” Jane said, shocked not so much by his words, but by the gravity of his tone.

  “She has diabetes,” Sylvie explained, smiling weakly. “And she develops infection really easily. Isn’t that what causes swollen glands? Remember, Jane, we used to always get them when we had sore throats? I can just feel Mom checking my . . . she’d run her fingers along under my chin—”

  “These nodes have a different appearance than swollen glands,” Dr. Becker said.

  “Could it be a bad infection?” Sylvie asked.

  “I removed several,” the doctor said. “To be biopsied.”

  “Biopsied?” Sylvie asked.

  Jane didn’t reply. She heard the rush of her own blood in her ears. Now Sylvie sat down in one of the empty yellow chairs. Jane couldn’t move. The doctor was talking about slides, freezing tissue, examination by a pathologist, knowing more in a few days. He said the word “lymphoma.”

  “You’re saying that’s what she has?” Jane asked as Sylvie let out a moan.

  “No,” the doctor said. “I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that it’s a possibility.”

  Jane looked down at the top of Sylvie’s head. It looked so blond and pretty in the harsh hospital light. Sylvie was sitting in the yellow chair, making herself into the smallest shape possible. She was hugging herself, as if she was half frozen to death. Jane sat beside her and took her hand. Glancing up, she thanked Dr. Becker, who went on to explain that the hip fracture had been fairly simple, requiring only one pin. He said that she was in intensive care, and that they could see her soon. He then told them he’d be in touch about the biopsy.

  “It can’t be, it can’t be,” Sylvie was saying.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” Jane said.

  “I might be correct,” Sylvie said, “and she might just have a bad infection—right?”

  “Maybe,” Jane said.

  The two sisters sat silently. Jane closed her eyes. She thought about all the life-changing moments of her time on earth. Was this one of them? Would everything left in life, all the events yet to come, be filtered through the memory of this moment—the exact moment Dr. Becker had said the word “lymphoma” about their mother?

  Jane shivered, because she knew all about life-changing moments. She had had, perhaps, more than her share so far. Some were so certain: Bang! Everything transformed in an instant. Several flooded her mind, all at once: when her parents brought Sylvie home from the hospital, when their father walked out on them.

  More recently: the dance at Carrie Tower. And just today, hours earlier: the kiss in Dylan’s kitchen. Both had the weight of life-shifting events. Jane felt different, transformed, as the result of dancing with Dylan Chadwick. All the cells in her body felt lighter, and her thoughts seemed inclined in his direction; she found herself touching her cheek, where his beard had rubbed, and she would startle herself in the midst of a daydream of him and the orchard, to realize that she smelled apples where
there were none.

  But Jane’s biggest life-changing moments had to do with Chloe: the night she was conceived, the day Jane got the pregnancy test results, the night Chloe was born.

  The elevator door opened, and John Dufour stepped out. He came straight across the shiny tiled floor to Sylvie. Catching sight of him, she stood up and opened her arms. They embraced, and Jane heard her sister softly weeping.

  “She might have lymphoma,” Sylvie cried. “They’re doing tests . . .”

  “I’ll be right there with you,” John said, holding her. “The whole time.”

  Jane watched. He wore a camel-colored sweater vest over a blue-and-white-checked shirt. He had a bald spot. His potbelly made it hard to hold Sylvie as close as he obviously wanted to. His arms and shoulders strained with tension and passion. The sight of her sister, frail and blond, her eyes squeezed tightly shut as tears ran down her cheeks, embraced so rapturously by her fellow teacher, gave Jane a swooning sense of aloneness.

  Her mother was in intensive care, possibly fighting for her life. Her sister was giving every appearance of being in a true and loving relationship with someone who obviously adored her. And Jane, as Sylvie had said, was living a lie.

  She was falling in love with someone who had no idea of who she really was and what she really wanted. And the focus of her entire existence was a young girl who grieved for her real mother, who had spent her whole life with adoptive parents who loved her.

  “Hi, Jane,” John said while Sylvie fished a tissue out of her bag.

  “Hi, John. Thanks for coming.”

  “I want to be here for Sylvie.” He smiled. “And you.”

  Jane smiled back. He was acting like a family member. It felt nice. Jane was happy for Sylvie. She remembered that Dylan had asked her to call him, but there was a sign saying “No cell phones” hanging on the wall.

  Leaving her sister and John to keep vigil, Jane decided to go downstairs and find a pay phone.