Dance with Me

by Luanne Rice

  It didn’t matter. He knew.

  “Jane,” he said. Was that a gasp? It was followed by silence. Then, “How are you?”

  “I saw her,” Jane said. “I met her and spent time with her.”

  More silence. Long silence.

  “Where?” he asked, finally.

  “In Rhode Island. She lives there. At the edge of an orchard in Crofton. She’s beautiful, Jeffrey. And smart, and funny . . . so unusual and eccentric and lovely . . . passionate . . . the brightest—”

  “Jane,” he said, stopping her.

  “I—” she began. Why had she called? She’d known when she’d first dialed. Her heart cracked like a walnut shell, and tears streamed down her face. She was mad, and she knew it. She licked the tears from the corners of her lips. The man at the other end of the line was Chloe’s father. They had made her together.

  “I’m married now,” he said. “I have three children.”

  “I know,” she said, containing herself. “I saw in the alumni magazine.”

  “Some things need to remain in the past,” he said.

  As if it were a tomb—with walls and a lead lining. Things can get in, but they can’t get out. Jane held the phone, shaking. It was so hot, she was filmed with sweat, and she was wearing nothing but her underwear. It was as if naked was the only way she could talk to him. Naked and insane with love—not for him, but for their daughter.

  “Don’t you think about her?” Jane whispered.

  “I try not to,” he said.

  “Then don’t you dream about her?”

  Another long silence. “I do,” he whispered. “Of you, too. That’s why I wrote the book.” His voice stopped, and the sound of someone young asking him a question filled the distance. Jane gulped, waiting for him to say something more, but he didn’t. He just hung up the phone.

  She had gone, that very night, to the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, to get the book. And she’d bought it and carried it home. And she’d tried to read it, looking for clues: Somehow Chloe was responsible for this big, weighty, well-reviewed book. Opening the back cover, she stared at Jeffrey’s photo. She wasn’t really looking at him, she realized, but was searching for signs of Chloe: the shape of his eyebrows, a tendency for his smile to lift more on the left . . .

  And Chloe was there.

  She had always been his daughter, so much a part of him. From the minute Jane had realized she was pregnant, she had thought of them as a family. Lightning had struck, fusing them together. How could they ever be apart?

  With his book in her hand, she remembered the day she told him. She had taken a train to New York City, met him at Penn Station. He was waiting for her under the sign board, with all the train times. Seeing him, she began to run. She dropped her bag and put her arms around him; he had felt her shaking.

  “You made it, this is so great,” he said. “The Long Island Railroad is downstairs, and we have about forty minutes before our train—my parents are really glad you’re coming, and they want us to have dinner there tonight, but tomorrow there’s a concert at Jones Beach and—”

  “Oh, Jeffrey—”

  Her face pressed into his chest, she formed the words before she said them out loud. They sounded so strange in her imagination: I’m pregnant.

  College girls didn’t say those words. Intelligent English majors didn’t say them. Girls from good Catholic families didn’t say them. Girls who had just traveled from Rhode Island to New York to meet their college boyfriends shouldn’t say them, first off. . . . Her face turned red. While her heart beat faster, faster, and her knees felt weak, a whole story went through Jane’s head: the words would shock Jeffrey, almost certainly, but his love and his goodness would help him to help her through whatever happened next.

  “What’s wrong?” she heard him asking . . . she was so rarely at a loss for words. They were English majors, in love with language and literature, and they loved to talk and argue and discuss and expound, and they’d been apart for the last three weeks. But right now, she was a shy girl with her face in his lapel and an inability to form words.

  “I . . .” she began. But then something changed the words in her head, and she said, “We . . .”

  “We?”

  “We’re going to have a baby,” she said.

  She had expected many things. Shock, silence—anything but what came next. He laughed. “Good one, Jay,” he said.

  “We are,” she said, drawing back, so he could see that she was serious.

  They locked eyes. He was smiling, surprisingly, because they weren’t really jokey people, they didn’t tease each other a lot. But as he realized that she wasn’t kidding, his gaze met hers in steadiness and gravity.

  “Jane,” he said, as if her name somehow reassured him. Then, “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. I went to Planned Parenthood . . .”

  He held her, rocked her. His lips brushed hers. The relief of telling him was so great, and he was holding her so tightly, she had the sudden, sure sense that everything was going to be fine. She was going to get through this: They were. They all were . . .

  “I feel as if it’s . . . she’s . . . a girl,” Jane said. “I know it’s crazy, how can I know, but I just feel—”

  “Don’t do that to yourself,” he said, still rocking her.

  “Do what?”

  “Girl, boy . . . Don’t think like that, Jane. Don’t get attached.”

  Jane laughed, looked up into his eyes. “But I’m more than attached. I’m her home! She’s—or he’s—in my body!”

  “Stop,” he said. And his eyes were harder than his voice.

  “Stop . . .”

  “We have to figure out what to do.”

  “To do?”

  “Jane! You know what I’m saying. Look. I’m going to call my parents and tell them we’re getting a later train. I’ll say . . . I don’t know—I’ll say your train is late, and we can’t make the connection. I don’t want to have us all sitting around the table making small talk while you and I—”

  She tried to breathe. While you and I plan the future. While you and I hold each other. While . . .

  “While you and I try to make some kind of sense about what the hell we’re going to do. There was a senior on my floor who got his girlfriend pregnant—”

  Jane opened her eyes wider.

  “Planned Parenthood—good going, there. I think that’s where they went. Or, rather, she did. He wouldn’t go with her. I’m not letting you go alone, though.”

  “Go where alone?”

  “For an abortion.”

  Jane blinked slowly. She believed every woman had that right. But she touched her belly. She said hello. The baby said hello back, right there in Penn Station. She shook her head.

  “No abortion,” she said.

  “Jane—”

  “Jeffrey.”

  “We have two years left at Brown! We have grad school, dissertations . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Tell me you’re not thinking we’re going to keep the baby!”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “I love you, Jane. I know we’re going to get married some day. But we can’t do this.”

  “We can’t? Or you can’t?”

  “Shhh. Jane.”

  “I’m not having an abortion. I think, I want, I want to keep the baby. Or maybe I can give her, or him, up for adoption. If we find the right family. I’m a realist! I know we’re young! I understand these things, Jeffrey,” she said, and her voice was rising because other travelers were looking at her. “I understand! I’m emotional! We conceived her at Campus Dance, we love each other, she came from us . . .”

  “Shhh, Jane . . .”

  “I know, I’m sorry. So I’ll miss next semester. I’ll live at home. I’ll do home study! We can get an apartment! Off campus . . .”

  He shook his head, and his lips got tight, and that’s when she knew: This was over. He wasn’t discussing th
is. He might listen and he might talk, but Jeffrey didn’t want the same thing she did. Jane knew, and in that moment, her heart died a little.

  “I’d be distracted,” he said. “Brown is the Ivy League. We can’t just coast through, having a baby one week—”

  “I can,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. If you have the baby, you can say good-bye to junior year. You’ll miss the whole year.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s our education,” he said.

  “But this is our life,” she said.

  Those words, “our life,” shimmered and rose in the air between them, seeming to fill all of Penn Station. All of the travelers and commuters, the people meeting trains, the redcaps, the ticket agents, the parents holding tight to their small children, the college kids on their way home or to visit friends, the younger children on their way to summer camp . . . all of them were living their lives. Incredible, diverse, specific lives: theirs alone.

  Jeffrey frowned, and his eyes looked angry. They filled with instant, hot tears, and Jane got to see him as he might have been as a young boy, disappointed with something.

  That was when Jane knew: “Our life” meant something very different to Jeffrey than it did to her.

  “Oh,” was all she could say.

  “You’re too smart for this,” he said.

  “Apparently I wasn’t,” she said, trying to smile. “It happened.”

  “No. I mean, for this. For whatever happens next. For what you decide . . .”

  You, she heard. Not we . . .

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not some hick.”

  Jane closed her eyes. What did he think hicks looked like? Did he think they couldn’t go to places like Brown? She knew his family was well-off. They lived in a nice suburb. His father was a radiologist. His mother volunteered at the hospital. Jane had been looking forward to seeing them, but feeling slightly nervous. She knew her family was from a different social league.

  “This isn’t a movie,” he said.

  “No kidding,” she said.

  “You’re acting as if this is romantic,” he said. “But start thinking literature, Jane, not cheap paperback.”

  Jane exclaimed—not a word, but just an awful sound. Her mother had taught her and Sylvie to love all books and stories, and she felt shocked and freshly offended. Her head was spinning. This was their story: not a movie, not Thackeray or Fielding, not any writer’s. He was the one thinking of it in those terms, not Jane. She thought of literature classes, she thought beginning-middle-end, and she suddenly realized that, for Jeffrey, this was the end.

  “This can’t happen to us, because it will wreck our lives,” he said.

  “You are not,” she said slowly, “who I thought you were.”

  “Jane . . .” He took a step toward her, but didn’t touch her.

  Tears filled her eyes. “I feel sorry for you, Jeffrey. I wish you could feel what I’m feeling—her—him—inside me. To know that she came from love . . . you’d never be able to say what you’re saying.”

  “I’m not allowed to want a future?” he asked. “Not just for me, Jane—for you, too!”

  “Our future is forever,” she said, tears rolling down her face now. “And it has a baby in it. Whether she lives with us or not, she is going to be here. We made her.”

  “I’m not in it,” he said, holding up his hands. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things. I’m telling you right now, Jane—I’m not in it. I don’t want this.”

  “Then I don’t want you,” she said.

  Their eyes met in a hot stare. Her body flooded with emotion, with love. And then it all turned cold, like a winter river, like the runoff of all the snows from the top of the northern mountains. She felt like ice, and she hated Jeffrey for abandoning the baby they had created by their love.

  And at that moment, Jane stepped away. She stared at him. Her eyes were clear and dry. She took another step backward. Then another. He got smaller. She didn’t kiss him, and she didn’t wave good-bye.

  He was making his choice, and she was making hers. Jane used the second half of her round-trip ticket to return to Rhode Island that night. She slept on the train the whole way. Being pregnant made her very tired.

  She wanted to cry. Jeffrey was her father, all over again. She had loved him, and he had let her down. She knew there was a chance he might change his mind, but she didn’t think so. Somehow, on that train trip, it began not to matter. She had her baby. Ever since the beginning, she had thought it was a girl.

  That night, she was sure. She rocked herself and the baby and the train rocked them both. In a dream, Chloe had told her things that only a mother and daughter could know. . . . Jane had spent that whole train ride with her baby.

  Jane thought of Jeffrey saying “education.” She felt sorry for him, and for most of that train ride she tried to hate him. Because she also thought of her mother. A woman who revered education more than almost everything, but not just for its own sake: for what it could teach a person.

  What it could teach a person about herself, about the world.

  About love.

  Jeffrey had a lot to learn about love, and no university in the world, not even Brown, could teach it to him.

  Jane stuck the book on the top shelf and left it there.

  August progressed. The days grew cooler, then hot again. Jane found herself typing other names into Google: her father, for example. Thomas J. Porter.

  She spent one whole night reading the entries, looking for likely candidates. His last known stop had been Glastonbury, Connecticut, but he was long gone from there. He could be anywhere. She remembered how she and Sylvie had loved to sing along to the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man.”

  They had sung it with anger and derision. What kind of loins had they sprung from, anyway? A man who would desert his family?

  Perhaps that was the worst part of this long, hot summer, Jane thought as the wedding cake baked; knowing that Chloe felt the same way about her. Seeing that shock and almost visceral aversion in Chloe’s eyes gave Jane a message: This is the kind of person you are, this is what she thinks of you.

  It was really too much, in a whole host of ways, to bear. So Jane baked wedding cakes for other people. She sweetened the celebrations of other families’ lives. In a couple of cases, when her assistant was delivering to other places, Jane went to the venues herself, to drop off her wares, and she’d see the party firsthand.

  She always cried at weddings. Birthday parties and bat mitzvahs, too. Any kind of ceremony or celebration. They were always so filled with hope and good wishes; they represented the lengths to which people would go to gather together. Sometimes the families came from Europe, Asia, Ohio, New Jersey, to be there. Aunts and uncles, husbands and wives, grandparents, nieces, nephews, cousins, second cousins, second-cousins-once-removed, brothers, sisters, mothers—all together in the hall, posing for pictures, telling old stories, creating new memories, eating Jane’s cake . . .

  They’d laugh at Jane for crying. But in a nice way, a fond way.

  “Oh, my God! You don’t even know us, and you’re crying at my daughter’s graduation party!”

  “I wish her all the best,” Jane said, eyes streaming. “You’re so blessed to all be together . . .”

  “Oh, we know it. Thank you.”

  Luckily, fall was fast approaching. If there was one thing Jane had learned from the last time she’d been separated from Chloe, fifteen years ago, it was that time did heal all wounds. Well, not completely. But after a fashion. Time put a big Band-Aid on them. So that life could go on.

  While recovering, Jane knew that she would have to participate in her own healing. She would have to avoid apples, for example. She would have to prohibit herself from shopping the fruit aisle, picking out the reddest Empires, the most golden Delicious. Cinnamon would have to be expunged from her cabinet. And there could be no piecrust formed in the shapes of apples
, barns, fruit trees of any sort. Getting through September without baking an apple pie would be hard—but critical.

  And she’d have to stay off the Internet. She had to avoid temptation to type names into Google. Chloe’s, for example. Or Dylan’s. As she had done just last night.

  Dylan Chadwick: nine thousand hits.

  Most of them had to do with Dylan Thomas or Rufus Chadwick, the composer. But a few were for Jane’s Dylan. She still thought of him that way in her weaker moments, i.e., most of the time.

  She read articles about his service in the U.S. Marshals. He sounded heroic and brave. He had brought down drug lords and gambling czars. He had protected sequestered juries in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He had tracked a kidnapper across the country, apprehended him in Wyoming. Because a lot of his work was very secret, most of it didn’t make it to the Internet.

  But the story of Amanda and Isabel did.

  Jane read the New York Times account. The headline read: “Mother, Daughter Killed in Midtown Shooting.” And it went on to describe the scene. Unmarked town car stopped on Seventh Avenue in front of Penn Station, Dylan Chadwick escorting his wife and daughter into the station, gunfire exchanged—Amanda Chadwick, 33, and Isabel Chadwick, 11, dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Hospital; Dylan Chadwick in critical condition.

  It went on to say that Chadwick, a marshal in the Southern District of New York, had been working a drug detail, a far-ranging case involving heroin, jury tampering, and execution-style murder. It was an organized-crime case, and Chadwick had been trying to get his family out of town.

  Reading the article, Jane found herself back in Dylan’s kitchen. She could hear the apple tree boughs rustling in the wind outside, she could see Isabel’s picture on his refrigerator. Two eleven-year-old cousins, heads together, smiling for the camera. Jane could see the way the corners of the photo curled, after years of humidity. And she curled a little herself, inside, thinking of how awful it was that Isabel’s picture lasted so much longer than she had. She knew Dylan felt the same way.

  And thinking of Dylan, she had to close her eyes.

  Sitting there at her table, eyes closed as the sweet fragrance of a wedding cake baking filled her senses, she almost didn’t hear the bell tinkle. It was very faint, almost as if a ghost had opened the door to her bakery, slipped in off the Chelsea streets.