The woman is looking at my phone with interest, though she looks a little worried too.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I really can’t help you beyond taking your name.” She hands me back my phone and exchanges a glance with someone behind me. I turn around and see half a dozen dancers leaning out of the closest studio.
“You can help me,” I say, my voice breaking. “You just don’t want to.” I square my shoulders. “Well, I’m not leaving.”
The woman picks up the phone. She must not be any good at telepathy. “I need some assistance at the desk,” she says, to who-knows-who.
“I need some assistance too,” I say. “And honestly, if I call for it, it’ll probably end up being a talking cat or, like, a horse with wings, so watch out.”
Arguably, this is not the best thing to say, because it just makes me sound unhinged. And even though the guy walking fast down the hallway doesn’t hear, he sees the look on the receptionist’s face. It’s not a good one.
“You have to leave,” he says. He puts his hands on my shoulders and starts to guide me toward the door. I try to plant my feet—to be a stone, a tree with roots deep in the ground—but he’s already got momentum, and I’m moving.
Then someone saves me, with only her voice.
“Wait!” she says, we hear from behind us. “I know her. It’s okay.”
I turn around. The man’s hands are still on my shoulders, but he loosens his grip a little. The dancer standing in front of us is tiny, maybe five feet tall, really beautiful, with long black hair piled on her head and thick, smudgy eyeliner around her dark brown eyes. She looks amazed.
“Shit, Sylvie,” she says. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Pain and Power
WE SIT OUT ON THE front lawn, under the spread-out branches of a maple tree. Daniela splays her legs out into a V shape, pressing her head toward one knee. Seeing it makes me want to do it too. It’s so familiar, that type of movement, even though she’s in a leotard and I’m in cutoff shorts. She sits up straight then, and I lean forward, waiting for her to tell me a story. To tell me where Julia is.
“You came all the way here?” she asks. “From New York?”
I nod. “I went to Princeton first, and Philadelphia. Saw my cousin and Julia’s ex-boyfriend.”
“How, though? I mean, how did you get here?”
“My friend drove me.” Daniela is watching my face as I say this and I’m sure she can tell there’s more to it than that, but I don’t feel like explaining it right now. I don’t even know how to explain it to myself.
“All right.” She rolls her shoulders, then tips her head to stretch her neck. “Julia stayed with me for two weeks. Then she got her own place.”
“Where? Here in DC?”
Daniela nods. “She could have stayed longer, but I think she wanted to try to forget about ballet. Which is hard when you’re living with a dancer.” Daniela smiles, and I feel the muscles in my shoulders relax a little. She wouldn’t be smiling if my sister were still taking pills. Though maybe she doesn’t know.
“Is she okay?”
“I think so,” Daniela says. “I haven’t talked to her in a while.” She pulls up a handful of grass, lets it drop. “I feel bad about that, but I think it’s what she wanted.”
“It’s what she does,” I say. “She leaves.”
Daniela looks at me for a long moment. “Yeah, I think people would have said that about me a few years ago.”
Something clicks in my head, like a key turning a lock. “You were . . .” I can’t say it.
“An addict,” Daniela says. “Yeah. Diana sent Julia to me so I could be her role model.” She laughs a hard laugh. “To prove she could get clean too.”
My next words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “What’s it like?”
Daniela doesn’t seem surprised or bothered by my asking, but she thinks about it for a second before she answers.
“I think being a dancer prepares you for it, somehow. You’re used to pain, and you’re used to power.” She looks at me. “Right?”
I nod.
“And you’re used to giving up everything else in pursuit of your goal.” She lets out a small laugh. “You’re used to being an asshole. Anyway, I screwed my life up for a while, but somehow my body made it through mostly okay. Unlike Julia.”
I shut my eyes tight and see in a flash: my sister on the studio floor, sobbing. Her leotard soaked with sweat, her leg at an angle that wasn’t quite right.
I open my eyes.
“So why did you stop?”
“My mom,” Daniela says, nodding a little. “I did it for her. Plus, she pulled me right out of here and took me back to New Jersey. To rehab. I didn’t have a choice.” She looks down at her hands in her lap. “I could have run away, but I figured . . . I don’t know. I figured I was already there. I could give it a shot.”
A dark gray squirrel runs down the other side of the maple tree and halfway across the lawn. I watch it. I know Daniela is looking at me.
“You have to be prepared, Sylvie. She might not be ready to see you.”
“Ready to see me?” I say this too loudly. “I’m her sister. It’s been a whole year. How long does it take to get ready?” I mean this as a rhetorical question, but Daniela answers it.
“It’s different for everyone.”
“She sent me a book with a list of names in it,” I say. “Mine. Yours. My cousin’s. Her ex.” I lean forward. “She wants me to find her.”
Daniela resettles herself on the grass, folding her legs in front of her. “Okay,” she says. “But why wouldn’t she have told you where she is?”
“Maybe . . . maybe she can’t,” I say. “Maybe it’s like a fairy tale: I need to prove myself, show what I’m willing to sacrifice. Show that I’ll do whatever it takes to get to her.”
Daniela shakes her head, her piled-up hair swaying a little on her head. “Kid,” she says, “that kind of thinking will get you into trouble.”
“Exactly,” I say.
Daniela looks down at her hands. The squirrel comes back toward the tree, but just runs straight up the trunk.
“Listen, I worked really hard to find you,” I say. “You can see that, right?”
She nods. “I can see that.”
“All right, then, you can imagine how hard I’ll work to find her. Even if I have to wander around this city for days on end, I’ll do it.” I make a wandering motion with the first two fingers on my right hand. “I’ll sleep out on the National Mall. Can you do that? Or will the Secret Service come and cart you away?”
She smiles. “I don’t think it would be the Secret Service,” she says. “Probably the National Park Service.”
“Whatever,” I say. “I know she needs me.”
“Sylvie,” she says, and the first thing I think is: I’ve got her.
“Yeah?”
Daniela pulls her phone out of her bag and looks at it. Then she looks up at me.
“She was going to meetings every afternoon when she got here at a place a few blocks away.” She gives me the address. “You might be able to make it,” she says, “if you run.”
So I do.
Migration
THERE’S ONLY ONE WOMAN LEFT in the room by the time I get there, gathering the folding chairs into a pile in the back. She’s white, tall, and thin, with frizzy platinum-blond hair falling over her shoulders. There are deep lines in her tanned skin. She might be the villain of the fairy tale or a heroine who never got to the Happily Ever After. I’m not sure yet.
“Hi,” I say. I take a step through the doorway. “I’m wondering if you can help me. I’m looking for my sister, Julia.”
She looks at me for a long moment, sizing me up. “The ballerina?” she says.
I feel relieved when she says it, because it means she knows Julia, but I feel a twinge right in my heart, as if a shard of glass has found its way in there.
She used to be, I want to say, but instead I just nod.
“Are you the leader?”
She laughs in a way that isn’t exactly nice.
“I’m just part of the group,” she says. “And I’m on my way out.” She goes, then, just walks out the door, but I follow her outside. The sky is even bluer than when I came in, if that’s possible. A cartoonish blue sky from a Disney movie.
“Please,” I say. “I’ve been trying to find her for days. This is my last lead. You’re my last lead.”
She lights a cigarette with a silver lighter, takes a drag. “They call this anonymous for a reason,” she says.
“I know that. But I already know she’s here, and honestly, I think she needs my help. If you could tell me something, anything, I’d be so grateful.”
The woman stops moving away from the door and faces me. She looks at my face and then down at the rest of me: tank top, cutoff shorts, silver tennis shoes on my feet.
“You think she’s different from the rest of us.”
The way she says it, it isn’t a question, and I’m not sure what to say. She’s right, I guess. But how could Julia not be different from the rest of the people at her meeting? She was different, is different, from anyone else I’ve ever met.
“What you need to understand,” the woman says, “is that the things that make you different are the things that get obliterated when you’re an addict. Okay?”
She looks at me expectantly, and I nod.
“She isn’t different anymore.” The woman says this and then takes a step back from me. She doesn’t look angry. She looks sad. “She’s just an ordinary junkie.”
My tattoo twinges then, and I press the fingers of my other hand onto it. This is when I hear a sound above me, a flutter of wings—and then a small crash, something hitting glass. I look up and see the window: a reflection of the building across from it. Whatever the thing was, it falls in a flash of blue like a piece of the sky.
A chill spreads from the sidewalk into my body, up, up, up to my heart. I walk over to the small blue thing on the pavement.
It’s a bluebird. Its wings are half-spread and its head tilts to the side, beak pointing toward the sky. I can see in its crumpled shape the bluebird on the High Line from days ago.
“Shit,” the woman says. She walks over too and stands next to me, so close that her sleeve touches my arm. I don’t think I’m breathing.
“I read about this,” she says. “They’re migrating, and they get disoriented by the lights and the glass. Stupid humans.”
She’s a bird expert or something. A freaking birdologist. My eyes fill with tears.
“It’s just a bird,” she says. Her voice is much softer now, something close to kind.
It’s not just a bird, though. Or at least I don’t think it is. It’s a sign, a warning. I can feel the tears spill out on my cheeks now, and I don’t try to stop them. “I know this bird,” I say.
She lets out a small laugh. “Well, I’m sorry for your loss.”
My tattoo is burning, and I encircle my left wrist with my right hand. I know Julia’s not imprisoned in a castle somewhere—at least I think I do—but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t need me. “Please,” I say. “I mean, I know why Julia comes here. She’s not anonymous to me. I’ll just find out when the next meeting is and wait for her.”
I’m watching her face. Out here in the bright sunlight, it doesn’t seem as wrinkled. She was pretty once, I can tell. Life and years did this to her. And drugs, I guess.
“Fine,” the woman says. She drops her cigarette on the sidewalk and crushes it with her heel. “She works at a diner in Capitol Hill. It’s called the First Lady.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“But you didn’t hear it from me.”
I try to smile. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Exactly.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know who I’m helping here. Maybe neither of you.”
“Maybe both of us,” I say.
Maybe.
Stakeout
AN HOUR LATER I’M STANDING on C Street in front of the First Lady, enveloped in the hazy blue light of its neon sign. The air is so humid I might as well be in the rain forest, and my tank top is stuck to my back with sweat. I turned my phone on long enough to find this place, and I see that Jack has sent me three text messages, and Sadie’s sent me five. He must have told her. I don’t know what, but something. I turn off my phone again without reading them.
When I open the door the bell above me rings, old-fashioned and metallic. Chilled air raises goose bumps on my skin. The seats at the booths are dark blue vinyl and the tables are Formica. Portraits of the ladies line the walls, many of them photographs—Eleanor Roosevelt with her kind-eyed smile, Jackie O. with her dark bob and slim sheath dress—but a few prints of paintings too. I recognize Martha Washington by her powdered wig, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the brunette across the way is Mary Todd Lincoln. My favorite, Michelle Obama, smiles in a deep green dress just across from the door.
I don’t see my sister anywhere, but a cheerful blond in a navy-blue shirtdress walks toward me from the back of the restaurant.
“Hi,” she says. “Table for one?”
I take a deep breath. I’m just a customer.
“Sure,” I say. She seats me in a booth and places a menu in front of me. I flip through it for a second and see Eleanor Roosevelt’s scrambled eggs, Abigail Adams’s raspberry waffles, Dolley Madison’s blueberry French toast. If I had an appetite at this point, I could really get into this famous-lady breakfast food. I could order one of everything and have a first-lady feast. Maybe after I find my sister. Maybe then I’ll have first-lady-feast seconds. I imagine what that would be like, sitting across the table with her at last, having pancakes. I can’t quite picture it.
I look up from my menu and this is when I see her. She’s facing away from me, standing in front of the window, awash in a sunbeam. She’s wearing the same navy-blue dress as the hostess, and her hair is cut into a long, wavy bob. She’s chatting with an elderly couple at the table, regular customers, maybe, putting their ice waters down and pulling straws from her apron. She’s any old waitress.
She’s the bright star that has guided me all this way.
She’s my sister.
Julia turns then and walks right by my table, but she doesn’t see me. Or she doesn’t see that it’s me, sitting here. I’m just some teenage girl in a vinyl booth.
I’m so hopeful in this moment. Everything that has happened has brought me here.
“Jules,” I say. I slide out of the seat and stand up. She stops for a beat, then turns toward me. Her eyes are wide. She drops the empty tray she’s holding, and it bounces across the tiled floor.
Then she says my name.
“Sylvie.”
It’s followed by the last word I want to hear.
“No.”
Okay
“SYLVIE,” SHE SAYS. “WHAT ARE you doing here?”
“Finding you,” I say, and then I say it again, as if I have to. “I found you.” She stands there, her brow furrowed, looking at me. I keep talking. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” I say. “You sent me the book.”
“I didn’t know what else to do with it,” she says. “I found it. In a bookshop.” She crosses her arms in front of her chest, and I swear she shivers. “I don’t—I don’t understand how it was there. But it was.”
“Magic,” I say.
She shakes her head. “There is no magic.”
“Oh, but there is!” I say. “You don’t know.” I’m about to tell her, but she says, “Shhhhh.” She goes to sit in the booth and pulls me along. I slide into the seat across from her.
I reach down on the booth’s seat and pull the fairy tale book out of my bag as if I need evidence. I hold it out to her.
She looks down at it, and then back up at me.
“What?” she says.
I push the book closer to her. “You drew me a map.”
“I drew a flower, Sylvie.” Her voice is louder than it
should be, and I can see the couple she’d just been serving across the aisle turn to look at us. Julia doesn’t notice, but she lowers her voice anyway. “I didn’t mean you should follow me here. I just wanted you to know where I went. That I was safe.”
“Maybe you should have just written, ‘I’m okay,’ then. Instead of this.” I’m fighting off tears now, and the last thing I want to do is cry in front of my sister. I want her to think I’m strong.
“Maybe,” she says. But she doesn’t sound convinced of her own words. “Listen, I’m sorry. I had to take care of myself. I couldn’t worry about you or Everett. Or Mom or Dad. I had to start over.”
“I see you’ve done well at that,” I say. “You have a job. You have friends, I’m sure. So, what? You don’t need us anymore?”
Julia rakes her hand through her hair. I see her tattoo in a flash on her wrist.
“Of course I need you,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s that here, I’m not a screw-up. Here, I’m not someone who let everyone down.” She’s speaking so quietly I can barely hear her over the clatter of dishes coming from the kitchen.
“I want to go to school,” she says. “I have to figure out what I can be, since I can’t be what I thought I was meant for.” She looks down, clasping her hands together hard.
My memory flashes on a girl dancing, reflected in a mirror, but it’s not Julia. It’s me.
“I’m dancing the same solo in Chrysanthemum that you danced,” I say. “For the donor dinner.”
One little twinge of pain crosses her face meteor-quick, then disappears.
“Chrysanthemum,” she says. “You must be doing really well.”
“I’m trying,” I say.
Julia catches sight of my wrist then. Her eyes widen, and she grabs my arm.
The Looking Glass Page 20
