Drenched in Light

by Lisa Wingate

  “Looks like someone needs to take up the slack for you.” He nodded toward my box of papers. “Better watch out, or filling the sub list will be dumped on your plate permanently. The first thing you have to learn around here is how to say no.”

  “I can handle it.”

  Verhaden smiled benevolently, winking at me. “They’ll drain you dry and spit out the shell,” he said, his expression adding, And you’ll end up forty, with no family, no life, and a bad comb-over. His face turned slowly grave. “Seriously, Julia, you can’t take over the office work, adopt every kid who’s dropped off too early, and tutor all the ones whose grades are below par. There are too many of them. These kids have to learn to sink or swim on their own.”

  I recoiled, as much at the Darwinian philosophy as at the fact that Verhaden was the one espousing it. I’d always thought he was one of the good guys. “I have to do what I can. If I don’t, why am I here?”

  “You’ll burn yourself out, Julia.” Meeting my eyes, he laid a hand on my shoulder. I had a sudden inkling that he knew why I was now a guidance counselor, rather than a dancer with the KC Metro.

  I chose to quickly change the subject. “If Dell Jordan doesn’t get some help, she’s not going to make it. She’s way behind academically.”

  I could tell I’d struck a nerve. Withdrawing his hand, he stepped back and crossed his arms. “While she’s spending time in tutoring, she’s not getting the extra practice she needs in instrumental or voice. She has an incredible talent, but she’s way behind all the other kids in formal training.”

  If I hadn’t been holding a box filled with my grant-writing blood, sweat, and tears, I would have thrown my hands into the air, and said, Excuse me? This is a school. reading, writing, ’rithmetic, remember? “If she doesn’t pick up her grades, she’s not going to be here long enough to develop her music. First things first.”

  “Exactly,” he countered, still annoyingly sure of his position. “She’s got spring concert with the symphonic coming up, and the Harrington Spring Fling. If the music’s good enough, and the long, sad story about the little prodigy from the sticks makes the newspapers, the board will approve her application for next year. She’ll be retained in the seventh grade, and that’ll give her extra time to develop before she moves on to high school.”

  “Oh!” I burst out, color flaming into my cheeks. “Oh!” I paced a few steps away, my heart hammering an angry tattoo in my throat. Why was everything always about the performance? Didn’t anybody realize there were kids, real people with needs and emotions, involved here? Didn’t anybody care?

  I pulled in a long breath, then blew out, thinking of Mrs. Mindia. Relax, breathe deeply, imagine clear water trickling softly along a riverbed… . If I didn’t settle down, I was going to have a stroke right here on the steps and be buried under mountains of grant paperwork.

  Settling one last breath in my lungs, I turned around, and Verhaden drew back, apparently surprised, by the heat in my face. I was on fire. “Have you ever looked at the statistics on retention? Ever? Have you?” He shook his head vaguely, and I rushed on. “I’m not saying that it doesn’t work in some cases, but the research is clear that much of the time, it is so detrimental socially that the kid just gives up and falls further behind. Do you know what the dropout rate is for retained students? And you’re talking about a kid who already doesn’t fit in well socially, who’s already one of the older students in her grade. She doesn’t feel that she has any right to be here. Have you ever thought about what it might do to her if she’s retained? It will only confirm what she already believes about herself—that she’s not good enough, that she’s destined for failure.”

  For once, Mr. Verhaden didn’t have an answer. Arms hanging slack, he coughed indignantly. “I don’t think …”

  The door opened, and Mr. Stafford stepped out, heading home with his briefcase. Pausing, he looked from me to Verhaden and back. “Everything all right?”

  “Yes,” we hissed in unison.

  Shrugging, the principal continued down the stairs. “All right, then. You get that substitute list filled yet, Costell?”

  “I’m trying,” I bit out.

  If he noticed the frustration in my voice, he didn’t respond. “Have a nice weekend,” he called back, then waved a little toodle-oo over his shoulder.

  Neither of us answered. We just stood there at an impasse. Hiking the box onto my hip, I braced it under one arm. “Look, Mr. Verhaden …” I was going to say, Give me a few weeks and let’s see what’s possible with Dell, but he held up a hand to stop me.

  “I stand corrected on the retention question, concerning Dell. It’s not an issue we deal with very much here,” he acquiesced. “But you have to understand that it’s a gamble. Dell’s here because of the music. She’s an experiment, not our normal sort of kid, and plenty of people find that a threat. If she doesn’t sparkle during the spring performances, it’s not going to matter what her grades are.”

  “Point taken,” I said, thinking that getting kicked out of Harrington might be the best thing that could happen to Dell. This place was like a cancer. On the other hand, failing here might be the straw that would finally break her. “Let’s hope she can do both.”

  Verhaden nodded, looking slightly pessimistic. “I’ll see what I can do about getting a table and chairs put in the storage room. I assume you’ll still be using my storage room?”

  I couldn’t help smiling at the fact that he knew. Not much at Harrington escaped Verhaden’s radar. “It’s quiet. She doesn’t want the other kids to see her in tutoring sessions… . And speaking of the storage room …” The next thing I knew, I’d blurted out the question about donating used instruments to the Jumpkids program. Talk about bad timing.

  Verhaden dropped his mouth open, as in, Wow, does this woman have nerve. What’s she going to ask for next—the shirt off my back? “I’ll have to give that some thought.” Scratching his head, he turned and started down the steps, glancing back over his shoulder, his bemused look adding, Who is that woman, and what has she done with mousy little Julia Costell?

  Waving with much more confidence than I felt, I started toward the parking lot, satisfied that in some small way I had finally gone against the crippling tide at Harrington. But as I got in my car and drove down the block, the reality of what I’d done set in. I’d signed Dell up for an unspoken gamble she couldn’t possibly understand. What if, because of everything else we were working on, her music did fall behind? What if Verhaden was right, and the music was all that mattered? I was meddling in her life, and neither she nor her foster parents knew anything about it.

  Guilt fell over me like the shadow of an approaching storm.

  To top it all off, when I arrived at Jumpkids, the first thing Dell did was give me an adoring smile, and her foster mother welcomed me with open arms.

  “Dell was hoping you would come down to our Jumpkids minicamp in Hindsville this weekend,” Karen said as we stood in the doorway of the gym, waiting for the kids to finish their snacks in the cafeteria.

  I had no idea how to respond to the invitation. My instant reaction was to say yes, but then I remembered the grant deadline and The Grapes of Wrath waiting in the trunk of my car. I needed to be home working all weekend. I should have been there right now.

  “I’ll have to see how the weekend progresses,” I hedged. “I’d really love to go, but I have a pile of work in my car.”

  Karen nodded sympathetically. “Well, if things change, we’d love to have you. Hindsville isn’t very far, and it’s a pretty drive. Feel free to come on down if you find some time.”

  “I’ll try,” I answered. Beside me, Dell let out a long sigh, already giving up on me for the weekend. Turning away, she walked across the room, sat down on the bleachers next to a portable keyboard, and tapped out the melody to one of the Jumpkids songs.

  “Play something for us,” Karen urged, and Dell took a breath, then arched her body over the instrument. Closing her eyes, she swayed s
lightly, as if the music were silently building inside her, until finally it spilled onto the keys and filled the room with a version of “The Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, worthy of the Sistine Chapel. I stood amazed, speechless, watching her lose herself in the melody and transform from a shy girl to an artist, captivated by a magic that was both startling and awe-inspiring. Even though I’d read about her musical ability in her profile and heard about it from other teachers, I’d never fully understood how talented she was until that moment. With nothing but an inexpensive keyboard, she took away the bleakness of the grade school gym, and transformed it into a concert hall, a place of reverence, a sanctuary. Music lifted her from the ordinary to a place that transcended explanation. To allow an ability like hers to go undeveloped because she had difficulty with The Grapes of Wrath would be criminal, a denial of an inborn, God-given gift that was meant to be celebrated.

  Whether she knew it or not, whether she believed it or not, she was extraordinary.

  Chapter 14

  Saturday morning, I woke up stiff and sore. The phone was ringing, and for some reason, nobody was answering it. Rolling over, I grabbed it clumsily and croaked, “Hello?”

  “Julia?”

  It took a minute for my mind to register the voice. My thoughts swam sluggishly through a murky mixture of past and present. “Jonathan?” I murmured, blinking sleep from my eyes, momentarily snuggling into the idea that the past eight months had never happened—that my breakup with Jonathan, rehab, the end of my dance career, moving home with Mom and Dad, the job at Harrington, the scene with Jonathan and his new wife at the Target gift registry were all part of a long, strange dream, and I was finally waking up.

  “Jonathan?” I said again.

  “Julia? Are you all right?”

  “I just woke up.”

  He chuckled. “Sleepyhead. It’s after eight.” Jonathan was always an early riser. He’d never understood those of us who weren’t. The tenderness in his voice made me laugh along with him.

  “It’s quiet here this morning.” The words ended in a sigh, and I closed my eyes again, my mind wandering back in time, convincing my body to travel along.

  “I just wanted to”—he arrested the sentence with an odd hesitation—“see how you were doing. I figured if I called early, your folks might still be out for their walk.” Every Saturday morning, my parents took a walk to the park and back. Jonathan, of course, knew the routine.

  “I’m sore from …” From what? I dragged my eyes open again. Why was I so sore? I was never sore after a performance …

  Slowly, the memory of dancing with the Jumpkids wound into my consciousness. I recalled lifting tiny dancers into the air as they practiced pas de chat and changement de pieds over, and over, and over. Yawning, I surveyed the grant paperwork strewn on the floor, where I’d worked last night after surviving Mrs. Mindia’s latest dance class, dinner with the Jumpkids, and countless exuberant hugs.

  My mind snapped back to the present like a rubber band with a spit wad of reality attached to it.

  Clearing my throat, I sat up, brushing strands of tangled hair out of my face. “Jonathan, why are you calling me?”

  “I just …” Another trailing sentence, punctuated by a gap, during which I tried to imagine what he was thinking. “I just … I’ve been … You’ve been on my mind this past week. I wanted to know that you’re all right.”

  “I’m all right,” I replied flatly, then felt a pang of guilt. His concern was genuine, his voice colored with shades of leftover feelings and latent regrets. It only made talking to him more painful.

  “I knew. I knew what you were doing, Julia, and I didn’t do anything about it. I just put more pressure on you. I didn’t understand how serious it was. I … I thought it was something you could control.” The words rushed out as if he’d stored them up, practiced them before dialing my number. “But seeing you the other day, and then hearing that news story last week about that girl who’s brain-dead because she went too far with diet pills and purging … God, Julia, I realized that could have been you. I’m so sorry. I should have done something about it.”

  A dozen possible responses raced through my mind. I felt myself shrinking and shrinking, and shrinking, until the room, the world, seemed too big. “Jonathan, it wasn’t your responsibility. It isn’t your responsibility. I was the only one who could do anything about it. I still am.”

  “I should have been there for you. Things could have been different. We could have—”

  “Jonathan.” I stopped him before he could go any further, before he could say something he would regret and I would torture myself with forever, thinking about what might have been. “Things aren’t different. We are where we are. I drove you away because I knew you were figuring me out. It’s part of the addiction—keeping everyone at arm’s length, maintaining secrets. It’s over, and now I have to move on. We have to move on. You have a wife; you’re going to have a baby. I have a new job I’m really into right now.” Maybe that was becoming true. It sounded convincing, anyway. “It’s OK. Things are OK.”

  He sighed, a long, slow, resigned passage of breath, as if he knew I was right. “Things should have been different.”

  Tears prickled in my eyes, and I pressed my fingers to my nose to keep from sniffling. “Jonathan, what is … is. There’s no point thinking in should-bes. It only causes misery.” A direct quote from Dell’s Grandma Rose. Now I understood how true it was. Both Jonathan and I had to accept the truth and move on. “You and Carrie seem really happy together. I wish you the best. I really do.”

  “Julia—”

  “I’d better go. Lots to do today.” Even as I said it, I was hobbling stiff-legged to the shower.

  “I’m always here if you need anything. I still care about you, even though it didn’t work out.” Behind the words, there was an unspoken uncertainty; Maybe I still love you.

  Or maybe he was just unsettled by the collapse of a long-term relationship, finding someone new, getting married, and now becoming a father, all in less than a year.

  “Be happy, Jonathan. You and Carrie seem great together. Really.” She’s much better for you than I ever could be. She’s normal.

  “Take care of yourself, Julia.” He hung up without saying good-bye, leaving the conversation feeling unfinished.

  I stood in the bathroom trying to decide what to do next. The prospect of hanging around the house all day was unbearable. I had to get out, do something, even if it was only perusing bridal registries or shopping for honeymoon lingerie with Bett.

  Showering and dressing quickly, I pulled my hair back into a damp ponytail and left the room, sidestepping the piles of grant papers and promising myself I would work on them this evening and all day tomorrow. Right now, I needed to go … somewhere.

  Things were quiet downstairs. Joujou was asleep on the sofa, making peaceful little pug-nosed snorts, her legs twitching in some dream. Outside the patio, Dad was trimming the holly bushes and the crape myrtles, getting them in shape for spring. On the kitchen table, there were scrambled eggs and toast on a plate and a note from Mom. Bett had a touch of food poisoning this morning, and Mom thought she’d better go over there. I pictured poor Bett, pregnant, sick, having both Mom and Jason fussing over her, when what she probably wanted was to sleep or camp out in the bathroom. I considered attempting to lure Mom away from Bett’s place with some wedding-related errand, but there wasn’t much chance it would work. When Mom took charge of a situation, she hung on with all ten claws.

  Standing in the kitchen, I tried to decide what to do next, then finally settled on heating a small portion of the leftover breakfast. Before I realized it, I was hiding the rest of the food under a newspaper in the trash. Old habits die hard. Staring at the contraband, I heard myself telling Jonathan, “I’m all right.” What a lie that was. Three months out of rehab, and I was still hiding food in the trash. When was I ever going to be all right?

  “Focus on the little battles, not the war
,” Dr. Leland had told me when I was at St. Francis. “One step at a time—two forward, sometimes one back, then forward again. That’s how recovery is done …”

  “Fall down nine times; get up ten,” Sister Margaret advised. Japanese proverb.

  Taking the plate from the microwave, I ate what was left. One step forward.

  While I was eating, I focused on the successes of the past week. I had shared more or less regular meals with Mom and Dad all week. I hadn’t stood at the mirror loathing my reflection and imagining that I could see every calorie clinging to my body—I hadn’t had time. At school, I hadn’t skipped lunch or picked through a cafeteria salad, carefully dipping each lettuce leaf in the dressing so I would consume less fat. I’d eaten lunch each day without even thinking about it while tutoring Dell in the storage room. Not once had I stopped to lament the calories or consider how much weight gain might be caused by a bag of Cheetos. I had arranged for the wedding dress to be restored, ordered some nice bouquets for Bett’s rehearsal, and given a little business to a sweet old lady who’d treated me to free flowers. Best of all, I had attended Jumpkids on Friday and danced without feeling as if I were tasting the forbidden fruit, that would surely bring about my downfall.

  Compared to all of those achievements, a few eggs in the trash can didn’t mean much. Overall, it had been a successful week. If Mom searched the wastebasket, which she probably would, and found the hidden food, I would tell the truth and move on. One piece at a time, I would put together a life for myself—one that could, perhaps, include dance even if dance could no longer be my life.

  All of a sudden, I knew where I wanted to spend my Saturday. I wanted to dance with various partners, none of whom was over four feet high. Finishing the last bites of breakfast, I put the plate in the dishwasher, left Mom and Dad a note, grabbed my purse, jacket, and briefcase, and headed for the Jumpkids minicamp in Hindsville.

  In the driveway, I called Karen’s cell phone, hoping she would answer. When she did, the reception was so scratchy I could barely hear her.