A Lily in the Light(21)
“And it’s not a ‘bunch of crows,’ dumbass. It’s a murder,” Madeline yelled through the bedroom door. Esme watched until the birds took off as suddenly as they’d arrived. She heard them faintly in the distance but couldn’t see them. After dawn, it was as if they’d never been there. Not even a feather was left on the street. It meant something, like all the plagues God sent in the Bible. It had to.
Esme sighed and gathered herself in her blanket. She could check the message. The machine in her parents’ room was quiet. No blinking lights. No new messages. Her parents’ unmade bed didn’t have the warm sleeping smell they usually left behind, a smell that made her want to crawl in between her parents on Sunday mornings like a little kid, like Lily still could. Lily’s bed was made up in the corner, stuffed animals lining the place where the bed met the wall. They were just matted fur and floppy heads without Lily’s puppet work, hand-me-down castoffs from Esme and Madeline. They were supposed to get bunk beds soon—then Lily’s little bed and all her things would move into the big-girl bedroom. Maybe they could set it up before she came home. Look, they’d welcome her back, you’re one of us now.
If she came back. Annette hadn’t seen that, hadn’t promised them she’d be back in a week—or at all. Esme pushed the thought away and flipped through messages until she found the one for her.
“Esme, it’s Amelia. I heard about what happened and just wanted to say how very sorry I am.”
Amelia’s voice in her parents’ bedroom was startling. She straightened her slouching spine, pushed wisps of hair away from her forehead. What you do when you’re not here counts as much, if not more, as what you do when you’re here. That was one of Amelia’s favorite sayings. Esme’d been poked with a stick, reprimanded from far away, and it didn’t seem fair, not with how things were.
Esme’s finger hovered over the delete button. She did not want Amelia’s pity. There was a pause. If you need anything, you know where to find me, she imagined Amelia would rush on, the same way everyone else shrugged off other people’s problems to move on with their own day.
“Pointe shoes are tomorrow if you can make it,” she said instead. “If not, do last week’s barre, as much as you can remember. Stay focused.”
Esme hit rewind. Yes, she’d said everything Esme thought she’d heard. Stay focused. The audition was in January, the one that would take her to San Francisco for the summer (hopefully!), where she’d live in a dorm at the top of a huge hill for the first time with a stranger instead of Madeline, and her roommate would be a friend and competitor at the same time, Camargo to her Sallé. And maybe she’d have a cute pas de deux partner and sneak her first kiss in the studio after everyone else had left. She’d ride cable cars to the studio every day like on TV. That dream felt like someone else’s plan now. Stay focused. Esme laughed, and the sound didn’t make sense next to the big bed where her parents slept or the little bed where Lily slept or the dresser cluttered with piles of clothes and a mirrored tray full of dusty jewelry and a bottle of Tabu.
She laughed again, joyless, but the vibration jolted her dream awake. She did want to see the Golden Gate Bridge, to walk under swaying red and gold lanterns in Chinatown. She wanted to sneak down to the dorm lobby in her pajamas, where she’d sit with other dancers and talk about how scandalous it was when Sallé let her hair down or Camargo took the heels off her shoes and Taglioni figured out how to dance on her toes or, ew, how Degas’s beautiful dancers were really prostitutes, a word she couldn’t say at home, not in front of her parents, but could in a dorm after hours of dancing and sore feet and a scalp rubbed raw from bobby pins keeping her bun in place.
The rest of the message played through. “Stay focused. If you can dance through this, Esme, you can dance through anything.”
Esme’s stomach sank. Was this the worst thing that could happen ever? Was there nothing worse? Through anything. This wasn’t like her bike slipping out from under her because she’d ridden over wet leaves, knowing forever after that she should slow down and steer around them. She didn’t want this to be something that made her stronger or smarter. It wasn’t fair to Lily, who was a person, somewhere, and not a pile of leaves she could outsmart.
Outside, keys jingled in the lock. The door opened and closed. Esme hit delete, but the message stayed with her. “Does fog taste like cotton candy?” Lily’d asked once, standing on tiptoes to see Esme’s picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. “Because it looks like cotton candy. Or marshmallows?”
There were heavy feet in the living room. Nick and Andre. Esme crept toward the door and watched them pull off boots and coats and leave them in a heap on the floor. They were windblown and early-winter raw, but the most striking thing was Nick’s eye. It was black and blue, shiny and swollen. It watered and ran down his face. If she were invisible, she could creep closer and look at the shades of blue and purple, poke that spongy skin because she’d never seen a real black eye before, but mostly, she wanted to know how he’d gotten it. A reason that made sense would make everything feel less like her looking glass world.
“Where’s your mother?”
Esme jumped. She wasn’t invisible after all. The open door rattled the plastic over the hole in the wall. Andre was looking right at her.
“Church.” The word squeaked out. She opened the bedroom door wider. Andre turned toward Nick.