The Looking Glass

by Janet McNally

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yep,” she said. I wanted to believe her, but I knew she wasn’t telling the truth. I didn’t know what was happening to her yet and she didn’t either. She still thought she was safe after her first surgery. Already, though, I understood that ballet was supposed to hurt, and that we were supposed to pretend it didn’t.

  Grace faced the mirror and rose up on her toes, balancing for a moment like she was hoping to lift off and hover straight over the ground. Then she smiled and turned toward me.

  “This will be you someday,” she said.

  Julia pulled me up to stand next to her in front of the glass, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. We looked at each other in the mirror, my face bare and hers with its sweeping, shimmering makeup. She touched my cheekbone gently with her pointer finger, still looking at my reflection instead of my real face.

  “If you want it to be,” she said.

  Back then, I couldn’t imagine wanting anything else. I don’t know when that changed.

  Now I can hear Grace pulling mugs out of the cabinets. Pavlova lets out a grumbly sound from the couch, turning over onto her back. I rest my hand on her belly.

  Grace comes back and sets two steaming cups on the coffee table. She curls up on the couch and tucks her legs below her.

  “All right,” she says. “Spill it, Syl. What’s up?”

  I’m ready. I look her right in the eyes.“Where’s Julia?”

  Grace frowns. “I don’t know.” She looks back at me for a few seconds, and then down at her mug. I sit silently, watching her. What would Sadie do? She’d go big or go home.

  “I don’t believe you,” I say.

  “What? Why?” Grace’s brow is furrowed. “Sylvie, she’s supposed to be here. She’s not. I don’t know where she is.” She takes one hand off the mug to gesture in the air, staccato movements meant to punctuate her words. Meant to make me believe.

  “Then why is your name in here?” I pull the book out of my bag and open it to the last page. I hand it to Grace. She takes it with her free hand and looks at the page.

  “Probably because she came here that first night, after she left your parents’ place. She left the next day, though.” Grace sighs. “This wasn’t her apartment then anyway. She’d already been gone for months.”

  “So where did she go after that?”

  “I don’t know. She left when I was at the studio,” Grace says. “I came back home and she and her bag were both gone.”

  I press my thumb into my opposite palm, hard. “You haven’t heard from her at all?”

  Grace looks at me for a second, considering. Then she nods. “Once. She sent me an email.” She blows on her mug, and I lean forward in my seat, waiting.

  “What did she say?”

  Grace takes a sip of her tea, swallows. She looks up. “She said she was all right, and that I shouldn’t worry.”

  “She didn’t say where she went?”

  “No.” She sets her cup down. “And I didn’t ask. I figure she’ll tell me when she wants to. If she ever wants to.”

  There’s a sheen of bitterness at the edge of Grace’s voice, and it makes my stomach ache. I don’t know what I thought—that Grace would be able to tell me exactly where Julia was, that she’s sober, that she’s coming home soon. That the first person I went to see would give me all the answers and I wouldn’t have to look any further. Wouldn’t even have to leave town.

  Of course it couldn’t be that easy.

  I pick up my mug and wrap my hands around it. It’s too hot still, but I don’t mind the mild burn of the porcelain. The tea is golden brown and steaming. I keep my eyes on it.

  Grace takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Jules stole from me, you know.”

  I snap my gaze up to look at her. “What?”

  “Yeah.” Grace presses her lips together. “It was after her surgery. When she ran out of pills.” She looks off toward the kitchen while she tells me the story, as if she’s watching it happen in her memory. “We used to keep cash in the silverware drawer for takeout or whatever. I kept doing it after she left. She stayed here one night after she was cleared to go back to dancing, because she was planning on moving back in.” Grace looks at me. “There was maybe a hundred dollars in the drawer. She left ten.”

  “Grace.” I exhale her name like a breath. I don’t know what I mean by it, why I’m just saying her name. I don’t know what else to say.

  “I asked her about it, but she denied it.” Grace’s voice is even, steady. “I thought maybe I made a mistake, that I’d spent it somehow, but when she got hurt again and we found out about the pills, I knew.” She bites her lip. I want to lean forward and touch her shoulder or her hand, but I don’t.

  “It wasn’t just you,” I say. Julia had stolen from my parents too, money from my father’s wallet and my mother’s purse. They didn’t notice at first, but I heard them whispering about it later, after everything came out. Still, it feels different, somehow, that she’d steal from Grace.

  “Yeah, I figured,” Grace says. “She was buying pills for maybe three months, right? That had to get expensive.” Her voice sounds hard. “They told her when they prescribed the meds in the first place, you know? How careful she had to be, dancing while taking them. Because she might not feel the pain anymore, and the pain is the thing that tells you to stop.” Grace’s voice wavers. “She didn’t want to stop.”

  Tears well up in my eyes so fast the world goes blurry. I try to blink gently in that way you do when you’re trying not to let someone see you cry, but it’s a flawed method because it’s not like the tears are going to absorb back into your eyes.

  “Syl.” Grace’s voice is soft.

  I try to look at her. She might as well be underwater. I squeeze my eyes shut and tears spill down my cheeks. I wipe them with the back of my hand.

  “It’s fine,” I say. I look up. “It’s okay if you’re mad at her.”

  Grace sinks back a little further into the cushions. “Sure, I’m mad. We were supposed to do this together. We’ve been dancing together since we were four years old.” Her voice sounds tired. “And let’s be serious. She had it easier than I did in plenty of ways. She worked so hard, I know. But I had to work harder. I didn’t think I resented her for that but”—Grace tosses up her hands—“turns out I do.”

  Grace picks up her tea again and looks into the cup. I don’t know what to say. I know it’s true, what she’s saying, both about Julia and about it being harder for Grace. The Academy and the company are both more diverse than they’ve ever been, but it isn’t enough. The leads still often go to white dancers.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. And I am, but saying it still feels useless.

  Grace shrugs. “Look,” she says, “Julia had a shot and she threw it away in the end. I’m mad about that. But I also understand why she was desperate to keep dancing. She had a chance to be one of the greatest. She was willing to do anything to keep it.” She leans forward and looks at me then, right in the eyes. “Sometimes the people we love disappoint us. Sometimes they absolutely break our hearts.”

  I look away and Grace leans back on the sofa. Pavlova puts her hard little paw on my knee and I swear for a moment she knows what I’m feeling.

  “I don’t want to be mad at her anymore. It’s exhausting.” Grace is staring at me again; I can tell even though I’m looking at the dog. “I’m sorry too, by the way.”

  “For what?”

  “For not being there for you this last year. I had a really hard time with everything.” She reaches out and touches my ankle, her fingertips light on my skin. “I didn’t know how to help anyone else.”

  I look up, finally. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not, really.” Grace smiles in her mouth and not her eyes. “But I can’t change it now. I can’t change any of it. I can’t even get your brother to talk about it with me.”

  “Everett?” I ask, stupidly, as if I have another brother. Grace nods.

 
“He sent me that drawing about a month ago,” she says. She points to a black frame on the bookshelf next to the photograph of her with Jules. “But when I sent him a text to thank him he didn’t respond.”

  I pick up the frame. It’s a quick sketch of Grace onstage, colored in the kind of cheap pastels Everett likes to use sometimes. He has everything right: the shape of her eyes, the way she positions her hands, the way her thin shoulders look strong enough to hold up a whole building.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say. I don’t know what this means, the fact that Everett would send Grace a drawing he’d done of her. I never really considered that they’d be more than friends, but suddenly that seems stupid. Everett is two years younger than Jules and Grace, but Grace was always around as they were growing up. She’s beautiful and talented and kind. It’s not hard to believe that my brother would fall for her.

  “You know,” Grace says, “you lose one person and it starts to feel like you’re going to lose every person. One by one.”

  We sit without saying anything for a minute. I can hear her neighbor’s television murmur through the wall, and the soft sound of Pavlova’s snores. I watch the vines to my right, but nothing happens. They don’t move, not even in the slight breeze coming in the window.

  “What are you going to do?” Grace’s voice is quiet.

  I look at her. “I’m going to go talk to Rose.”

  “Why can’t you just call her?”

  “Because I already texted her and she told me she doesn’t know where Jules is. But I don’t think she’s telling me the truth.”

  “So you’re going there.” It’s not a question.

  Pavlova rolls over again, exposing her belly. I put my hand on her rib cage. I can feel her heart beating.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Okay.” Grace nods. “Promise you’ll call me if you get into trouble?”

  For some reason, this makes me wonder what would have happened if Jules had just told someone what was going on. If she had called someone when she got into trouble. I wouldn’t be searching; Everett wouldn’t have packed up and moved to Nashville; Grace wouldn’t have turned into the Princess of the Plants. We could have helped Julia. At least I think so.

  I turn to Grace. “Yeah, I’ll call you,” I say. But I doubt I will. And anyway, I’ve read enough fairy tales to know how it works. Whether you’re looking for trouble or not, it knows how to find you.

  Sleeping Lessons

  WHEN I LEAVE GRACE’S BUILDING, the streets are quieter. The heat has eased since earlier, and sunlight shines golden on the sidewalk.

  There’s a little café across the street from Grace’s building. If Julia still lived with Grace, this is where she would stop for coffee and toast in the morning. In some other universe, one where things never got so bad with my sister, that’s what she’s doing. She’s sitting in one of these vinyl booths, spreading strawberry jam on bread. She’s living her normal old life.

  Pavlova sniffs the lamppost in front of me and I let her. I’m not in a hurry to go anywhere. There’s really nowhere to go but home. This—my standing still—is why I hear the music, I think. My brain is empty and the song enters it like it’s entering a room.

  It’s too quiet to hear well at first, but then it gets louder, falls like rain out of some apartment window above me. I recognize it: it’s a Shins song on a record Everett listened to constantly after Julia’s accident. I heard it mostly through his closed door, but sometimes he’d let me do my homework at his desk while he did his own on his bed—and he’d pull the needle back to start the album again and again.

  I stand here and I listen to the music swell around me in the street. It fills all the space from asphalt to sky, and I let it. I don’t move.

  This is when I see the next girl.

  This one is wearing a gauzy lavender dress, her hair hanging in black curls over her shoulders. She’s almost shimmering in the gold light of early evening, but when she turns for a moment to face me, I can see the dark circles under her eyes. She looks exhausted, like she’s one step from sleepwalking. I can barely bring myself to look away from her, but I drag my gaze up to the sign on the building she just left. Sarita Patel, it says. Sleep Therapist.

  It’s still possible that none of this is real, and my brain’s just falling apart, but Julia was Sleeping Beauty onstage—before she got hurt. I stand still for one beat, two, and watch this girl glide down the sidewalk. Away from me. And then I take off after her.

  Sadie has made me watch about a hundred detective films from the forties, and I would like to take this chance to call bullshit on the whole genre. Those movies make it seem as if all you have to do is leisurely follow your subject in a nice trench coat, your deerstalker cap pulled down low over your forehead. Maybe duck behind a lamppost once in a while. It turns out it would be better to be a track star than a gumshoe because this girl is fast. She’s maybe fifty feet from the corner and moving so quickly I’m practically running to keep up, and Pavlova is full-out sprinting. The girl turns the corner and I follow ten seconds later.

  Then she’s in the street, hand up, hailing a taxi. In a way that proves she must be magic, a yellow cab turns off the side street and slides to a stop in front of her. No one gets a taxi that quickly in New York City. I stop when I see it; I watch her open the door, slide in, and pull the door shut. The taxi drives away and I’m left standing there.

  The real magic waits to happen until I turn around. Above me is a wide metal sign. Butterfly and Bee, it says, letters spelled out in winding, burnished steel. There’s a fat bumblebee at one end and a butterfly at the other, wings outstretched and glimmering in the evening sun.

  I’ve been here before.

  And I have the unshakable feeling that I’ve been led here now.

  The Tale of the Tattoo

  ONCE UPON A TIME, JULIA brought me to a tattoo shop called Butterfly and Bee. She practically dragged me there from the subway, her arm linked through mine. The streets were lined with slush, the sky pearl gray over the tops of buildings. She was walking the way she always did. She never looked like she was in a hurry but somehow she’d get there fast anyway. Julia stopped in front of Butterfly and Bee and I stood under that sign for the first time. Then she opened the door and swept me inside. The guy at the front desk smiled when he saw her. He was handsome, with dark square glasses and full-sleeve tattoos on both of his arms.

  “Hey, ballerina,” he said.

  Jules smiled her megawatt stage smile. “Hi, Toby.” She walked farther into the room, head held as high as it would have been if she were stepping out on a stage floor. Her long scarf fluttered behind her.

  “Today’s the day,” she said.

  “I’ve been waiting,” he answered.

  I liked Toby right away, both his easy smile and the way he squinted when he concentrated on something. He told me his sister danced with Julia in the corps. They had met at a party, he and Jules, and she must have told him she was thinking of getting a tattoo. He knew it wasn’t something most ballerinas did, at least not in places where the tattoo would be visible in a leotard or a costume. I was afraid she’d get in trouble. There was talk of letting her dance a principal part for a couple of performances each week, which was a huge deal for someone in her position. When I told Julia that, she shook her head.

  “Don’t be so worried, little sister,” she said. “Concealer exists for a reason.”

  I sat on a stool next to her and held a book of designs open in my lap. Not that I needed them; I just wanted something to do with my hands. Julia sat perfectly still, her lake-blue eyes looking right at me.

  “Are you going to pick out a tramp stamp?” she said to me, smiling her crooked smile. “Mom would love that.” Her shoulders were straight, her posture ballerina-perfect, even in that chair. I watched as Toby positioned the stencil on her smooth, clean skin. His own arms were etched with blossoms and bumblebees, and when he lowered the needle, I could almost believe the buzz came from them. I looked at Julia�
��s arm on the table, palm facing up, drops of blood rising in constellations. I tried not to faint. There was nothing I wanted more than for Julia to think I was brave and worthy of being taken on an adventure like this one.

  I leaned toward her.

  “Does it hurt?” I whispered.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said. Her eyes were closed by then.

  “So what does twenty-six bones mean, anyway?” Toby asked. He didn’t take his gaze off the needle as he spoke.

  My sister opened her eyes, but she didn’t answer. She smiled a Mona Lisa smile.

  “All right,” Toby said. “I’ll guess. You’re a secret pirate and this is the name of your ship.”

  “No,” said Julia.

  “You’re writing a mystery novel and this is the title.”

  She laughed softly, staying totally still.

  “Then what?” He pulled the needle away from her skin for a moment.

  Julia lifted her right hand and stretched it across her body to touch his cheek. “It’s a just a good-luck charm, Toby.”

  She looked at me then, half a smile playing on her lips. She knew I wasn’t going to tell. Julia knew if she had a secret, I was going to keep it. Even if it ended up hurting us both.

  Good-Luck Charm

  I STARE AT THE GHOST of my own reflection in the window: dark hair pinned up in a neat bun, blue sundress. Silver sandals.

  Just past Ghost Me, I can make out the fiberglass curve of the bench in the waiting area, the reception desk off to one side. Above it, a string of fairy lights glowing like a tidy line of stars. I squint and lean closer to the glass, but the actual tattooing happens farther back, too far to see from here. Right now, I bet there’s a girl back there gritting her teeth against the whir of the needle, getting her lover’s name inked on her hip. She hopes she’ll stay with him forever, or maybe she already knows that she’ll leave him next week. Either way, that tattoo is going to become part of her. Like a sealed-over crack in a broken bone or a scar zigzagging over the skin of her knee, it’ll settle in and stay.