The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

Ari stepped back and stumbled into the booth. “You blame me for what Markos did?”

  Diana took a shaky breath. “You’ll always be my best friend, Ari. But sometimes it you’re not very good at it.” Diana turned to Cal and pulled on his arm. “Come on. I’ll hail you a cab.” Cal allowed himself to be led out of the restaurant.

  I wished I could follow them. During the conversation the place had become drab and unromantic, with cheap tablecloths and tacky seafaring decoration. I should’ve picked someplace else to eat. Someplace less beachy, less summery. A bistro with white tablecloths and classical music playing. Maybe none of this would’ve happened if I’d chosen differently.

  Ari and I faced each other across the booth. “I tried to be a good friend,” I said. Ari snorted and I spoke faster to stop her from speaking over me. “I did. I love you guys. I’ve been trying to help you all summer.” My voice warbled, which I hated. I didn’t have to explain anything to her, but I did anyway. “I’ve been staying near. Even when you ignored me or made fun of me, I knew I had to stick around. And maybe—maybe one day everything would go back to normal. You’d appreciate me. We’d be real friends.”

  It was humiliating down to my bones, as if I’d burned off clothes and skin and muscle to get to the truth. Tears stung behind my eyes, more from anger than from sadness, and I held them back.

  Ari shook her head. “Diana’s mad but she and I will be fine. You’re delusional if you think it’ll be the same with you.”

  Ouch.

  Unhook it. Hang it away.

  I stood up. Mina stood, too, but I refused to look at her, and she let me leave the restaurant alone.

  I left Ari and Mina stewing in the restaurant, hating me. Cal and Diana, waiting for a cab on the street, hating me. Fine. I hated them, too.

  Only I didn’t really hate them.

  All the feelings I’d unhooked were still there. I could unhook them but that didn’t mean they were gone. Somewhere in me, I was ashamed. They’d seen the worst part of me, the truest part. I could pretend that it was good enough to order them around and get them to do what I wanted, the birthday dinner and sitting sullenly in my backyard, but what I really wanted them to realize was how much they missed me. And I couldn’t force that.

  Instead, I punished them. I was true to my word and didn’t call any of them for four days.

  Knowing what I did about the spell, I knew that what happened then was partly, if not fully, my fault.

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  It was so early the heat hadn’t sunk into the ground yet, and the papers were being delivered by a middle-aged man in a truck. There were no other cars on the road, and the quiet made the buzz of cicadas even louder. When I got to Diana’s house, her mother answered the door in her housecoat and broke into a huge grin, like I was delivering a sweepstakes win. Diana must not have told her what I’d done. I hated her for not screaming at me.

  Instead she called for Diana and tried to make small talk with me, but I turned my face into stone and stared past her, waiting for Diana to appear.

  She did, finally, wearing a tank top and pajama shorts, her hair up in a ponytail, her face—looking at me—after more than a week—a blank. Like I was no one. No anger. No lamp thrown at my head. Nothing.

  For a terrible second I thought she’d gotten a spell to erase her memory of me, but then she asked her mother “Can we have a second?” and when her mom left I caught a flash—barely there—of pain before the blank mask came down again.

  “What do you want, Markos?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I was an asshole—I can’t even believe how much of an asshole—and I need to tell you I’m sorry.”

  “You kissed Kay.”

  “It was a stupid mistake.”

  “You swore at me. You haven’t talked to me for almost two weeks.”

  She listed my crimes quietly, much more devastating than if she’d screamed at me. “I’m sorry, Diana.”

  She took a breath and straightened her spine. “Okay. I forgive you.”

  My mouth probably flopped open and closed a dozen times. “You . . . do?”

  “Yeah. Thanks for coming by. It’s good of you. Bye.”

  She started to close the door, but I put out a hand to stop it. She looked at the hand and looked at me and I felt like a slug, or maybe a slug that died and was decomposing on her front steps. “So—wait a second. We can be friends again?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you said you forgave me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Doesn’t seem like true forgiveness if you never want to see me again.”

  Her eyes went fiery. “Are you here to lecture me on how to properly forgive someone? That seems a strange topic for you of all people.”

  I didn’t have the brainpower to deduce what she meant by me of all people. “I’m not here to lecture you, no. I’m here so you can yell and scream at me for fucking up your life.”

  She appeared to grow five inches, her eyes level with mine. “Don’t flatter yourself, Markos. I’ll get over it.”

  “You’ve got to give me a second chance!”

  “Why?” she asked, sounding a lot like that Win-voice in my head.

  “Because, I—” I stopped, swallowed, and had one of those moments where you see yourself from up above and you look like such a pathetic loser, begging and pleading. And yet I’d gotten this far. I had to keep going. No bullshit. Honesty.

  Even though honesty sucked.

  “Because I miss you and I can’t stop thinking about you and I actually I sort of need you in order to keep living, like I’m scared of who I’m going to become without you around because that guy, the guy I was, was such a mess.” She opened her mouth as if to argue so I kept talking, not because I thought I’d convince her but because I wanted to hold back her inevitable no. “And actually if I’m being completely honest, which I am, or at least I’m trying to be, I really think I might sort of love you, but I don’t know because that’s not something I know anything about. And I’ve been trying to figure out what Win would say, which is a losing game, but he was a better guy than I am so I think he’d say that this is love and that I should tell you, so I am. I love you. I think.”

  I forced myself to make eye contact and had to stop talking because she was crying. It hit me like a baseball in the solar plexus: I made her cry. The look on her face was because of me.

  No way was this good. I may have had no prior experience confessing love, but I doubted gut-wrenching tears were the optimal response.

  “Please leave me alone, Markos,” she said. “I can’t be responsible for you being a good person. Why can’t you just be a good person?”

  I took a step back from the door, stumbling. I shuddered, suddenly cold. I tried to take a breath but a sharp pain in my chest made me wheeze.

  “I . . . I told you the truth,” I said.

  “Thank you for that.”

  She closed the door.

  I was kneeling on her front lawn.

  I had to get up or her mother would come out and find me.

  I had to get up so Diana wouldn’t look out her front window and see me kneeling.

  I had to get up to find a bottle of Maker’s Mark to start forgetting what happened here.

  I had to get up.

  I had to.

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  After what happened with Echo in my truck, I knew I had to get the money. I couldn’t keep things going the way they were. Pretty soon I’d make a mistake so big that I’d never be able to get back to where I wanted to be.

  In the end, it wasn’t hard to get at all. We were at Markos’s playing video games. I didn’t even pause the game.

  �
�If I needed money,” I said, “could you lend it to me?”

  “How much?”

  Neither of us looked away from the screen. Markos machine-gunned a couple pedestrians.

  “Five thousand.”

  He didn’t say anything right away, and I thought he might laugh, in which case I would have to laugh, and then I’d be paying off Echo in quarters I found underneath soda machines for the next thirty years.

  “Okay,” Markos said. “You really need it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay then.”

  Then on Monday he handed me the envelope in between fourth and fifth periods. I put it in my locker and felt it beating like a heart all day.

  But then what did I do? Did I go to Echo’s house and hand it over right away? Did I finally feel like I had permission to bite into the sandwich slowly growing stale in my sock drawer? Did I do anything at all?

  No.

  First I took it home, emptied the bills out of the envelope onto my bed, and stared at the pile—more money than I’d ever seen in my life, all in one place. It was so much more than I’d imagined it would be. A towering stack. Twenties, mostly, but also some wrinkly tens and fives and ones and a fake-looking hundred—fake-looking because a hundred-dollar bill was one of those things that only fictional rich people in movies ever had in their wallet.

  Five thousand dollars could buy Kara braces. It could get my mom a new (used) car, to replace the one that kept stalling out at intersections. If I put it in a savings account it could make more money just sitting there. Five thousand dollars would make my mother so happy, or at least relieve her of worry for a few days or weeks. I could help her—not be a burden for once.

  But I was planning on using it to make myself happy instead.

  So selfish. Such a waste.

  The same five thousand dollars could help Echo get out of town, find other hekamists, and convince them to save her mother’s life. Save her own life, too. Save mine.

  So how was I supposed to weigh it? My mother and Kara versus Echo and her mother—it didn’t seem fair to choose. Or should I have ignored all that and just chosen for me?

  I stuffed the money back into the envelope. I heard my mother at the front door, calling my name. I tucked the envelope into my waistband and pulled down my shirt.

  If she found the money on me or in my room, she’d want to know where I had gotten it. She would assume something terrible: drugs or thievery or worse. She’d blame herself for being a bad mom. She’d want to talk about it, and get me to tell her what it meant.

  And that, in the end, is what decided it. How would I explain to her where I’d gotten the sudden windfall? She’d be humiliated if she knew I took it from Markos. It would ruin the happy feeling of giving her something to help make her life easier.

  Later that night, I went to Ari’s. While she was talking to her aunt, I hid the envelope at the very back of her closet in a half-crumpled empty shoebox. I knew I could always retrieve it from the box if necessary and my mom wouldn’t accidentally find it and ask questions. Keeping it with Ari and out of my house made me feel less like a selfish dick, less like I’d chosen myself over my family. I could put the money almost out of my mind completely.

  Getting close to the end here. The final wrap-up. I had the money, the spell, I had Markos and Ari and Echo, everything’s seconds away from resolving perfectly—the pop-up fly to end the inning sailing straight for me.

  It’s the calm before it all falls apart.

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  PART IV

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  Three days after Kay’s birthday (three days after the day I was supposed to move to New York), I fell over while trying to fouetté in my bedroom. I hadn’t talked to Diana or Kay since that dinner, and I’d been avoiding Jess and her suddenly endless supply of well-meaning hugs since she made me go to Dr. Pitts. I hadn’t gone to Echo’s house, either, even though I knew she said she was ready to make me the spell—something about our last conversation had unsettled me, not knowing what she and Win were cooking up, not knowing how I was supposed to react. So in my little isolated bubble I had a lot of time to worry that every stubbed toe, missed stair, and paper cut was the work of a malicious spell.

  When I fell, I landed on my bed, pushing the mattress out of alignment with the box spring. A journal that had been stuck in between fell out onto the floor, an unfamiliar book hidden in an unfamiliar spot full of very familiar handwriting. I rubbed my hip where I’d landed and sat on the floor to read it.

  Looking at the journal, I could dredge up a memory of placing it under the bed, in that distant removed way I recalled a lot of the past year. I could not remember having written anything in the book, but it was full of my handwriting. I opened the notebook with the same curiosity that made me stare at the dance videos: maybe this would finally explain why I’d done what I’d done.

  But the journal didn’t explain. Not exactly.

  In the front of the book there was the jagged edge of a page ripped out—where I had written the note to myself the night I took my spell. Then, near the middle, a few pages were written in cramped letters.

  Skipped dance today to hang out with Win. Not even on purpose—forgot to go. Didn’t miss it until Rowena called the house. So tired of Rowena and buns and perfection. So tired.

  Win says it’s a gift to be good at something as good as I am at dance. And that I’d regret it if I didn’t go to New York. But Win is being Good Boyfriend Win and I know he’ll miss me. He’s been so strange. Sadder than usual. I’m worried. Won’t say what it is. And I have my own worries. Jess is so excited. Applying for jobs by the dozen. Talking about Greenwich Village and MOMA and concerts in Central Park. Going to New York is how I pay her back for the past nine years. Get her out of here. Can’t imagine six hours a day, so far from Win. I used to dream about it but now it seems such a waste.

  When I finished reading I realized I was sitting on the edge of the bed squeezing my wrist so tight my hand had started to turn red. The pain was a hammer banging rhythmically on a metal spike. Old Ari’s words hit so hard I got dizzy.

  She didn’t love to dance.

  I didn’t love to dance.

  I went cold all over, like being dunked.

  I had assumed that she and I had most things in common. She had Win and I didn’t, but we shared dance. Something so important couldn’t change so much. Right?

  Unless there was something about my relationship with Win that made me not want to dance. Or not need to dance. Because that’s how I’d always thought of it before, a need.

  Jess thought the spell had saved me—the one that took away the memory of the fire. But she was wrong. Dance had lifted me out of the pit of my parents’ death. Without it, I’d still be down there, wandering blindly, looking for escape.

  I checked the time. An advanced ballet class would be getting out soon. I got in the car and drove to the studio, then ducked my head under the wheel and hid until all the students left.

  Rowena was the last one out, locking the door behind her, heading to the only other car in the lot.

  I almost fell in my rush out of the car, unfolding clumsy limbs. She didn’t seem startled to see me, but then again she’s always been unflappable.

  “Ariadne. How lovely to see you.” Her eyes flicked to my legs, my arms—I clenched and didn’t move so that I wouldn’t give myself away. (I had a flash of memory of how it used to feel to dance, with every part of me in sync and under control, and with that flash a sudden sureness that I would never feel that way again, no matter what Echo’s spell might fix.) “You’re looking well.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “You heard—about my memory spell.”

  She nodded. “I spo
ke with Jess. And the girls—such gossips. But I understand, now, about your difficulty. Side effects, yes?”

  “Did I . . . Rowena, did I want to keep dancing? Before Win died?”

  Rowena leaned a little bit against her car door, tired but still precise, straight-backed, poised. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Because of Win?” I asked, bitterness twisting my mouth.

  “Not exactly. Mind you, you never spoke of this directly. But you changed.” She smiled. “I am quite used to my girls changing; it can be lovely to see someone discover the type of person they’re going to be.”

  “Even if that person wants to give up dance?”

  “Even if. There are many things a person could be that are as important—or more so—than a dancer. Goals shift. They change. You were as talented as always, and the Manhattan Ballet saw that at their Institute last summer, but over the course of the year your heart went out of it.”

  A wave of shame passed through me. “I gave up.”

  “A dancer’s world can be very narrow. Yours expanded.” She looked off into the thin scrub lining the parking lot, as if seeing great forests and mountains and rivers. “Then after Win passed away and you came back—I was happy to see you, of course, but not surprised that your body didn’t want to obey. I had the reasoning wrong, but it did make sense, at least to me.”

  I could tell Rowena considered this the end of her speech, but I couldn’t let her go while I was struggling to make sense of it all. “So . . . even if I think I want to dance right now . . . if I meet some guy, in six months I’ll probably change again?”

  “I don’t know,” Rowena said. “Perhaps there was an alchemy unique to you and Win. But I will say to fear change is the most hopeless fear one can harbor. Change will happen, Ariadne. Injuries. Loves. Deaths. There’s never a moment where you’re finished, that’s it, all changes over. Change is forever.”

  I knew I should’ve thanked her—for caring about me, for teaching me, for noticing me—but if I opened my mouth I would’ve cried, so I backed away to my car, nodding at her helplessly. She nodded back.