Astonish Me (24 page)

“He does. Harry, you do. But he’s working on it. You have to help. It’s meant to
look
effortless, not
be
effortless.”

For her fifteenth birthday, Harry gave her a book on famous ballerinas, including Emma Livry, who died in 1863 at the age of twenty after her tutu caught fire from a gas lamp onstage at the Paris Opéra, and now Chloe has nightmares about dancing while engulfed in flames. This morning, after plunging into a bottomless orchestra pit, trailing sparks through the blackness as she fell,
unable to scream, burning and flailing in silence, waiting to splash into the water Joan said was under the Opéra but never getting that relief, she woke with scratches on her torso and blood under her fingernails, the sheets tangled around her ankles. If she quits, maybe the dreams will stop.

When her father comes downstairs in his bathrobe, Chloe tells him she was finishing homework and that she has eaten breakfast. There are no dishes in the sink and her clothes are soaked with sweat, but her father pours himself a bowl of Lucky Charms and says nothing. He has stopped going to church. He has been working in a store that sells mailing supplies. He doesn’t care that her mother has started bartending and is gone most nights. As Chloe passes by his chair, he reaches out and grabs her, pulling her into a sideways hug. He so rarely embraces her that her first impulse is to pull away, but he holds fast, his shoulder digging into her ribs. Not knowing what else to do, she pats him on his head and gently pries his arms off her. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s just breakfast,” she says.

She showers and walks to school. Halfway there, Bryce pulls up next to her in his truck and rolls down the window. “Hey,” he calls.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing?”

“Knitting a sweater. What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” His truck crawls along in the bike lane. He says again, “Hey.”

“Hey what?”

“Maybe I’ll see you after school.”

“No. I have dance.”

“Maybe I’ll see you at lunch.”

“Maybe.”

At lunch she goes out to the parking lot, to the far corner where Bryce has parked his truck under a pepper tree. Small green leaves and hard pink peppercorns sprinkle the hood and flatbed. The cab is cool in the shade, and she finds herself almost dozing off even while
Bryce kisses her and grasps her wrist to press her hand against the front of his jeans. “You’re so hot,” he whispers. “You’re like crazy hot.” Other students pass by, talking and laughing, but their voices seem as irrelevant as birdcalls and only add to Chloe’s lull.

When the bell rings, she says, “Is it okay if I stay here and take a nap?”

“Don’t you have class?”

She has biology. “Free period.”

He doesn’t like the idea, but she has let him feel around inside her underwear and knows he will want to keep her happy. She is already folding her sweatshirt into a pillow. “Just don’t get me in trouble,” he says.

When she wakes sometime later, the parking lot is quiet and Harry is staring at her through the driver’s window.

“Hey,” she says. “How long have you been standing there, creeper?”

“They were calling you to come to the office. Mrs. Ferguson asked me to look for you.”

“Am I in trouble?”

His face is strange, reluctant. “I don’t think so.”

“But I ditched.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“I should probably get used to taking care of myself, since you’ll be so far away this summer. Off with the
good
dancers.”

He doesn’t say anything but doesn’t leave, either. She knows he feels bad about the intensive but not bad enough not to go. Taking her time, she sits up and straightens her clothes, pulls down the mirror and checks her makeup, wiping crumbs of mascara from the inside corners of her eyes, licking her index finger and smoothing her eyebrows. It bothers her how he doesn’t tell her to hurry up but just stands there waiting. Only eight boys were at the auditions in L.A. and almost a hundred girls. She had made it through several rounds, and then she had waited, breathless after a combination,
the number four pinned to the front of her leotard, while the people from the company conferred. A lady with a bun of white hair said, “Will numbers three, nine, seventy, fifty-two, and twenty-one please stay? The rest of you, thank you very much.”

True, Chloe had been skipping class in the weeks before audition to hang out with Dylan, who had been more of a real boyfriend than Bryce because he took her to the movies and they had gone all the way, and, true, she had fallen off pointe during an easy set of turns in the audition and been sluggish with her footwork, but the rejection had still come as a shock. Joan
knew
these people, had told them to look out for her. Maybe if she’d been Joan’s daughter they would have taken her along with Harry. Maybe Elaine didn’t like her and had told them not to take her. The next day she had told Joan the whole thing seemed really unfair, and Joan had been surprisingly bitchy and unsympathetic and said, “You can’t expect to slack off and still be good enough.
Ballet isn’t about you. Art isn’t about you, what you want.”

“I know that!”

“Maybe I pushed you too hard. Maybe I misunderstood—I thought you were serious.”

“I am.”

“You’re not, and if you don’t see that, I don’t know what the point is.”

“I
am
,” Chloe had protested, and for a few weeks, she was determined again. She started the morning exercises, trying to get stronger and sleeker, but her commitment is already dwindling.

“Don’t you have class?” she asks Harry.

“Yeah, but, like I said, Mrs. Ferguson asked me to find you.”

For the first time it occurs to her that something is wrong, and she slides out of Bryce’s truck and walks with Harry across the parking lot. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says.

She knows he is lying. When Joan started coaching them in pas
de deux, the promenade was the first thing they learned. Chloe stood on one pointe with her other leg back and bent in attitude, and she and Harry grasped hands, their index and middle fingers extended along the inside of each other’s wrists, their arms making an S shape, and he walked in a circle, turning her. The step looks simple but is difficult. She can feel his pulse in his wrist. He becomes a part of her balance; they are one system of weights and counterweights. They might as well be standing on a tightrope together.
He’s a glorified butler
, her mother likes to say.
No, he’s doing a lot
, she replies, even though, when they moved on to lifts, Joan had told him not to grab but to support.
You’re like a waiter lifting a tray
, she said.

As they come into the principal’s office, two things happen at once: she sees her mother sitting in a chair, and Harry puts one arm around her waist and grasps her under the elbow with the other hand, holding her up.

CAREFULLY, HARRY CLOSES HIS BEDROOM DOOR AND PADS DOWNSTAIRS
. He doesn’t think Chloe is asleep, not really, but he feels he should honor her charade. She is under the covers in his bed, curled on her side, breathing through her mouth, her eyes closed. Outside, the streetlights have come on, but the kid next door is still dribbling a basketball on his driveway. The sound, echoing around the neighborhood, is crisp and sharp. The kid is bad at putting the ball in the basket, but he’s good at dribbling and turning and faking and jumping, graceful and smooth. Harry has watched him before. Sometimes minutes pass without him even taking a shot at the basket while he and the orange ball orbit each other.

In the kitchen, Harry’s father sits at the round yellow breakfast table they brought from the old house. A plate of cold spaghetti and three empty beer bottles are in front of him. His mother is outside smoking. A glass of something sits at her place but no food. When she sees Harry, she steps on her cigarette and comes in.

Harry takes his usual chair. “She’s pretending to be asleep.”

His mother turns her face away, staring out into the backyard. “Poor thing,” she says for the thousandth time.

“I got hold of Sandy finally,” Harry’s father tells him in a man-to-man tone. “She knows Chloe’s going to spend the night here.”

“Is she mad?”

“It was her sister I actually talked to. They’re at a hotel. She said Sandy’s pretty sedated.”

“Oh. Like with drugs?”

“I assume.”

At school, when Mrs. Ferguson asked him to go find Chloe, she had told him her father had died and her mother had come to get her. He asked how Gary died, and Mrs. Ferguson hesitated before saying he’d killed himself.
How?
Harry asked, knowing the question was impolite but wanting to know.
It’s not very nice
, Mrs. Ferguson said after another hesitation,
but you’ll find out eventually. He used the exhaust from his car. He died in their garage
. Harry knows the Wheelocks’ garage well, its oil-spotted cement floor and naked lightbulbs, the big oily, dusty springs that groan when the door lifts open. Gary has a workbench with a Peg-Board full of tools, and there is an old red leather barber’s chair you can swivel around fast enough to make someone dizzy. Chloe’s whole body had flowed out of his grasp like water after Sandy said, “Daddy’s dead. He killed himself.” She sat on the rough office carpet, gasping for air, and when Sandy crouched down beside her, she lunged forward and knocked her over, clawing at her face, not making a sound except shallow gasps. It had taken Harry and the principal and Mrs. Ferguson to pull her off. Sandy had looked so amazed, so sad, lying there with three long scratches down her face, her skirt pushed up to show her plump knees.

“Sandy’s sister didn’t sound too happy with Chloe for reacting the way she did,” Harry’s father goes on. “I tried to tell her that Chloe doesn’t really blame Sandy. This is a coping mechanism. It’s cruel, but it might help her get through the next few days.”

“Days?” says his mother, still staring out the window.

“I don’t know.”

She turns back. “Why would she blame Sandy? Gary was so obviously depressed. He has been for years.”

Now they both look at Harry. Chloe, curled in his bed, had raged against her mother in an incantatory whisper, muttering and hissing that Sandy was
a crazy bitch who was never happy, and he knew she would never be happy, and so he was never happy, and it should have been
her
instead
. “I think she thinks Sandy was really hard on him,” Harry suggests.

His mother’s high forehead creases. “It’s odd what children think about their parents.”

“How so?”

“I mean, I think Gary was pretty hard on everyone. I think he felt like he’d gotten a bum deal in life. But I still don’t know how he could have done this to them. Harry, make sure
you
understand this wasn’t Sandy’s fault.”

Harry points to his mother’s glass. “What is that?”

“Vodka.”

“Just vodka?”

“Just vodka.”

“Can I taste it?”

“Okay.”

“Joan,” his father says, startled.

She pushes the glass toward Harry. “It doesn’t matter.” She watches as he sips the terrible liquid, and then she tells him, “She can stay in your room, but you get your sleeping bag and sleep on the floor.”

“What, you think I think this is my big chance?”

“If things get out of control,” his father says, “like if she seems like she’s getting too sad, you come wake us up.”

“What’s too sad?”

“Just if you feel out of your depth.”

After a while, Harry goes back upstairs. He pulls his sleeping bag from the hall closet and eases his bedroom door open. Chloe has
not moved. The sleeping bag is green and pilled from use, and when he spreads it on the carpet, it looks drab and uninviting. He stands uncertainly, feeling like an intruder in his own room. It’s much too early to sleep, but he doesn’t want to turn on a light. He has homework, but probably he won’t have to go to school tomorrow. He sits on the edge of the bed. “Chloe,” he says, “do you want something to eat?”

“No.”

“Can I do anything?”

“No.”

“Your mom’s in a hotel with your aunt.”

“I don’t care where she is.”

Carefully, slowly, not wanting to alarm her, he lifts the covers and slides in beside her, leaving space between their bodies but resting his hand on the saddle of her narrow side. He knows he should be ashamed, but he can’t help hoping that eventually she might turn and let him embrace her, her flat chest and belly against his, closer than they are when they dance, or at least closer in a different way—still and quiet, not always moving. He is sure he knows her body better than anyone else, much better than the boys who get to touch it everywhere, probably better than she knows it. When she walks toward him in the halls at school, he prepares, without thinking, to lift her. He knows the exact weight of her body, the limits of its strength, the smell of its sweat. His fingers have left bruises on her inner thighs, her hips, her arms.

He is in high school. He is supposed to love no one, everyone. He is supposed to ferret out willing girls and take what he can get. For everyone else, Chloe seems to be one of those girls. He has heard she rides around in cars with older kids playing a game where you shed an article of clothing if you were the last one to touch the ceiling after spotting an out-of-state license plate. She doesn’t even try. She just sits there and strips in silence until the boy driving the car kicks everyone else out. Other kids do these things—drink and party and hook up—for fun, but Chloe never seems to be having fun. Her rebellion
is considered, serious. Rumor was she’d gone all the way with that guy Dylan, who girls said looked like Kurt Cobain even though he was always so buried under baseball hats and hooded sweatshirts and tangled, bleached hair that he didn’t really look like anything.

“Did you read the book you gave me for my birthday?” she asks. “The ballet book?”

“No.”

“Do you know who Emma Livry is?”

“No.”

“She burned up.”

He rubs her back the way his mother rubs his when he is sick or sad, feeling the sharp edges of her shoulder blades through her tank top, the bumps of her spine, the flat wings of muscle. Her grief makes her distant despite the nearness of her body; her vertebrae slide under his fingers like worry beads. He wants to wipe away some of her sadness. “Chloe?” he whispers. “You know I love you.”