Dancing on the Edge (21 page)

“Sissy loved recitals. She loved performing. She danced all year long, even in the summer. There was this summer program at the beach one year, at the arts academy there. Sissy wanted to go so badly, but Mama and Daddy had died in a plane crash. Daddy loved to fly. He had his own plane at Eldrich Field. He was taking Mama up for a birthday ride, showing her some new things he'd learned, and this storm just came out of nowhere. After that, it was just the two of us. Sissy wasn't sure she should leave me, but I knew she needed to go. We used some of Daddy's insurance money to pay her way.”

I sat with my mouth dropped open. I didn't know this. I didn't know any of it. Why didn't I know about Mama? Why didn't anyone ever tell me anything about her life? I glanced at Dr. DeAngelis. He was tapping his pen against his notepad. I looked at Aunt Casey. Was it safe to go on? Were they going to start lying again like last time?

“Miracle, it's your turn,” Dr. DeAngelis said.

“When—when I danced—sometimes it felt like flying. I used to think maybe I could be a dancer and Gigi would take me to a beach house and make me tuna and tomato sandwiches while I danced and danced and danced.”

“Sissy met your father at the beach that summer. He saw one of her performances. They used to have to sneak out at night to meet each other because the academy had strict rules about curfew and Gigi, well, Gigi expected Dane to be chained to his chair day and night, writing.”

“No!” I pushed back in my chair. “Game's over.”

“Do you remember something, Miracle?” Dr. DeAngelis asked in his soft voice. “Something about Dane, your father. Do you remember Dane?”

“No! No Dane! You're cheating. I don't know anything. I don't want to know about him.”

“It's all right. You're safe here. It's safe to remember him here.”

“No, it's dangerous. It's dark. You're pushing me off. You're pushing me. Don't say his name again.”

“Miracle, slow down. Let's slow down.”

I reached for a poem—a line, any line. I needed to feel that light inside. “They make us walk backwards, so we can see where we have been.”

“Miracle?”

“Amazing grace how sweet the sound.” I stood up and ran to the window.

“Miracle. You're safe. Nothing's happening. Look at the floor. It's still there. The chairs are where they've always been. Look outside. Another sunny day. There's that pine tree, same old tree. There's the blue unit across the quadrangle. It's all there. You're safe, and you know what I know about the dark? Miracle. There's always light after the dark. You have to go through that dark place to get to it, but it's there, waiting for you. It's like riding on a train through a dark tunnel. If you get so scared you jump off in the middle of the ride, then you're there, in the tunnel, stuck in the dark. You have to ride the train all the way to the end of the ride.
There's the light. It's waiting for you, Miracle. Don't jump off in the middle.”

“No, I already have the light.” I pressed my face to the window. His window didn't have a cage.

I heard Dr. DeAngelis stand up. He took a few steps toward me. “You're very upset. Can you tell me about it? Miracle? Were you surprised to find out your mother was a dancer?”

I turned from the window.

“You didn't know that, did you?”

“Nobody told me. Why didn't I know? How come no one ever told me about Mama?”

“Come sit down and let your aunt tell you about it.”

“I—I had to keep my dancing a secret. Every time I walked home from class I had to race over the sidewalk because that big eraser was coming up behind me, erasing the lesson. I'd just make it, leaping over the cracks in the sidewalk with that eraser erasing the very square I'd just leaped from.”

“You must have been very frightened.” Dr. DeAngelis backed up and sat in his chair. He gestured for me to go to mine. I took the one in the corner with the silver legs.

“When Gigi found out about my lessons, she was so angry.” I lifted my head up and asked Aunt Casey, “Why was she so mad? Why didn't she want me to take lessons?”

“Miracle”—Aunt Casey scratched her nose—“your mama loved dance so much, like you. She had such big dreams. She wanted to go to New York after that summer. She was sixteen, it was time, but she met—she got pregnant. She didn't even know at first. She was so skinny even when she was eight months pregnant she looked the same, just this basketball where her belly used to be. She was four months pregnant before she even realized something was different. I was the one who noticed it.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall. This was just a story. Aunt Casey was just telling me a fairy story.

“She was back at home. I was taking care of her. See that was the thing. Sixteen years old, she was still a baby herself. She lived at the dance studio. She didn't know anything about life, taking care of a baby. She still slept with all her stuffties—Pooh Bear and Ernie and Fluff Fluff—she had about twenty of them. When I'd go to her bed to wake her up in the morning, I could hardly find her she was so buried under all those animals.”

Aunt Casey stopped speaking. I opened my eyes. Was it over? Was that the end of the story?

Aunt Casey reached for another tissue from the box on the desk. Her hand was trembling. She wiped her forehead and the tissue fluttered like a nervous moth in her hands. She spoke again.

“It was getting hard waking her up in the mornings. That was the first thing I noticed. She was always such a cheerful morning person, never needed coffee to get her going. Then, of course, her belly was swollen. She said she had so much gas, she couldn't get rid of it. Over-the-counter pills didn't work so I took her to the doctor. She told us Sissy was pregnant.”

Aunt Casey looked at me with this pleading expression on her face, asking me to understand, but I didn't. It was just a story. It had nothing to do with me.

“See, Miracle, she couldn't give up her dream. I tried to make her see that she had a baby to think of now. I found out who the father was, found his number, and called him. I got Gigi. Then Gigi just took over. She arranged for them to live with her. They rented a house near my house with some of Da—of the father's writing money, and Sissy moved in with them.

“It was pure torture for Sissy. She and—and the father, well, they didn't get along at all. They were two selfish egos living in the same house. Both of them were spoiled babies. Both of them needed someone to take care of them. Gigi did. She smothered them with her care, made Sissy take naps, wouldn't let her dance, made her eat special macrobiotic foods. It was killing Sissy. She felt trapped. She used to call me on the telephone every day, crying about how she just wanted to dance. That's all, just dance. She would die if she couldn't dance. Then one day she called me and she was all agitated—nervous. She said she had come to a decision. She was going to have the baby, leave it with Gigi and the uh, father, and then take off for New York. She was going to be a dancer. She didn't know how to take care of a baby. She didn't want it—she didn't know the baby then, see. It was just something weighing her down. She didn't think of it as a human being or anything. She was just thinking about herself. That's all she ever had to think of—herself, her dance.”

Aunt Casey tossed her wad of tissues toward the garbage can on the other side of Dr. DeAngelis's desk. She missed. I stared at the wad and let Aunt Casey's words float over me.

“I tried to talk some sense into her. I told her how Mama and Daddy had sacrificed for her, for her dancing, it cost so much, lessons of every kind, costumes, new ballet shoes and slippers every week. It was time she learned to make some sacrifices, too. And I remember she said, ‘But don't you see, all Mama and Daddy's sacrifices would have been for nothing if I don't dance. It's not like other careers. This is my prime. If I don't dance now, I don't get another chance a few years down the road.'”

Aunt Casey lowered her head and hunched forward over her lap. I waited for her to go on. She didn't say anything for the longest time. I looked to Dr. DeAngelis to do something, say something, but he just sat back in his chair looking as if he were waiting for a bus and had all the time in the world. When Aunt Casey lifted her head again she had tears on her face. She grabbed some more of Dr. DeAngelis's tissues.

“I made her feel so guilty. I told her it was her own fault she was pregnant. I said she had to start taking some responsibility for her own actions for a change. I said everything wrong—I guess.” She glanced at Dr. DeAngelis. “I just didn't want the baby to grow up without a mother, without the love we had had. And then what happened?” Aunt Casey looked at me over the tissues she had pinched to her nose. “That baby grew up without her mother, without love.”

I looked at the two of them. They were both staring at me as if it were my turn to say something. What did they want me to say? Why were they looking at me? What did that baby have to do with me?

“What?” I said. “What do you want?”

Dr. DeAngelis spoke. “You know the rest of the story, Miracle. Why don't you tell us what happened next?”

“M
IRACLE?
The ride's not over. Don't hop off now, we're still in the tunnel.” Dr. DeAngelis rolled his chair toward me. I hated feeling cornered. I stood up and went back to the plastic chair.

“Stop looking at me,” I said, adjusting my legs so the goop wouldn't stick to the seat.

“You know what happened to Sissy next.”

“No, I told you I don't know it. I don't.”

Dr. DeAngelis wheeled his chair to my new seat and sat in front of me, waiting. He didn't say anything. I glanced at Aunt Casey. She was bent over her tissues, staring at them, sniffing.

The room was quiet. I hated the silence. All kinds of thoughts could pop up in that silence. Silence was like the dark, anything could be hiding in it.

“I don't know,” I began. “Maybe—maybe Sissy didn't run off to New York.” I looked up. Still that silence. “Maybe—” I stopped. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. I could see a picture—a scene in my mind's eye, a familiar scene. It was the same one that flashed in my mind every time Gigi told me the story of my birth. Yes, I hated when she told me that story. Something was always wrong with it. She always told it the same way. Mama hurrying across the street. Mama too big to move fast enough, to get out of the way. Mama getting hit by the ambulance. The doctors pulling me out of Mama's dead body, a miracle, full of omens and portents. She said it the same way every time, and every time a scene of how it was flashed across my mind, and the picture, that scene, was never the same as her words. They never matched. Until then, I had never noticed that. I saw Mama sad, the way she was in the picture of her on the iron gate. I saw her standing on the side of the street looking down the road to check for traffic. I saw her watching the ambulance, waiting for it to pass, its siren screaming, blocking out her own thoughts, her ability to reason, there wasn't time. There was just the screaming siren, the speeding truck, there was no time to think, she just did it, she stepped out in front of the ambulance. She let it hit her. I saw it. I knew how it was. I had always known. I had always known!

I opened my eyes and looked at Aunt Casey.

“I knew,” I said, reaching down along my legs, feeling for my scars.

“What?”

Tears filled my eyes. I blinked, and they ran down my face. “I knew about Mama! I always knew. I don't know how but . . .”

“Your family told you, Miracle,” Dr. DeAngelis said, rolling in closer, leaning forward.

Aunt Casey stood up and came over to where we were. “No, we never did. We didn't want her to ever feel she wasn't wanted.”

Dr. DeAngelis nodded. “Yes, the family secret, one you had to guard so closely that you couldn't be near Miracle, couldn't get too close to her or she might find out, and she could never find out.”

Aunt Casey squatted down next to me. “Yes. Yes, I see that.” She placed her hand on my arm. “Miracle.”

I let her keep it there.

“But then how did she know?” Aunt Casey turned her face to Dr. DeAngelis. “If we didn't tell her, how did she know?”

“But you did, all of you did.” Dr. DeAngelis flipped through his notes as if the words he was saying were in them somewhere. “She could read the truth in your actions, your gestures, your words, even the words that were left out. Her mind simply filled in the blanks.”

Dr. DeAngelis let me go. He wanted to give me time to think, to remember. He said the two of us would work together for a while, work through the memories, fill in the rest of the gaps. He had patted my shoulder, said I'd done an excellent job. He was proud of me. I had gone through the first tunnel. Before I left the room he handed me a notebook. The pages were blank. He said I was going to write my life's story in it. He said he had more if I needed it. He wanted me to write down everything I could remember, everything important to me. He said he'd help me work through some of the issues my writings brought out. Then he said I could go. I needed time to think.

I left Dr. DeAngelis's room, and Aunt Casey came with me. We walked down the hall together and then, before we reached the end where it opened out into the dayroom, she grabbed my arm. “Wait, Miracle,” she said. “I need to tell you—I want to tell you how it was for me.” She glanced toward the dayroom, then turned back to me. “See, Gigi was right. That day when we were fighting over you in the wheelchair, she said I didn't care about you. She said I was just feeling guilty, that it was all my fault. I was—I do feel guilty. Sissy was my responsibility. I gave her no other choice but to do what she did. When she died I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't accept what had happened, that it had anything to do with me. I used to come over to your house for'séances, remember?”