A Lily in the Light(27)
“Just go.” Madeline was not asking. She opened the passenger door and led Esme to it. The seat belt was rough against her neck, sharp. Andre’s cab smelled like other people—it always did, a jumble of lingering perfumes and food, crumbs on the floor. Andre sighed and took his place behind the wheel. Nick and Madeline watched them pull away, two small shapes in the side view mirror. Maybe they weren’t just worried. Maybe they wanted to go somewhere too. Andre turned right at the stop sign, and they were gone. It was too late now. She didn’t want them to come anyway. Without them, she could pretend to be normal again. Her shoulders throbbed where Nick had grabbed her, hard enough to leave a mark. As the road spread the distance between them, she couldn’t shake the look on Nick’s face, that fading bruise. Esme slumped in her seat, hugging her dance bag like a pillow.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and Andre nodded.
“Have some water.” He pointed to a bottle in the cup holder. “Your throat must hurt.”
The water burned. She was embarrassed now, thinking of the neighbors who’d probably heard and run to their windows, shaking their heads behind vertical blinds and curtains, but her father didn’t ask for an explanation. What had it looked like to other people? As the Long Island Expressway rolled past, her anxiety about home was replaced with worry about walking into the studio. She wouldn’t know the new stuff. She hadn’t practiced, didn’t have pointe shoes; her muscles were soft instead of sore. Amelia would think she was lazy, unprepared.
She didn’t know if the right things were in her dance bag. Oh God, she thought. Lily had sorted the things in this bag. She hugged it closer. She couldn’t unpack it now.
“Just turn around,” she mumbled, regretting the tone in her voice, addressing him like a passenger with a no-name driver. “What’s the point?”
Andre kept driving. He flipped the signal to change lanes and slid to the right. As the car rounded the exit, Esme wasn’t sure she could dance even if she wanted to. Her body felt like she’d been buried in sand.
“If you don’t want to go in, we’ll just watch through the window,” he said. He didn’t want to go home either. That made her feel better. At least she wasn’t the only one.
Andre pulled into the parking lot. There were so many things she hadn’t noticed before: the speed bump by the entrance, the hole in the sign above Sal’s Pizza, how the line of cars waiting for spots looked like a vein. She hadn’t noticed when the geraniums in the flower boxes had changed to purple and green cabbages. Just behind the studio was a tall tree with red leaves. It was no one’s tree, forgotten when concrete had been poured to build this busy place. The leaves moved in the breeze. It was pretty but too tall for a tree house. What good was a red tree without a tree house? Esme pushed the thought away. It was a nice story, Nick had said. Maybe that was all it was.
“There it is,” Andre said of the studio, as if he was showing her a favorite toy she’d played with when she was a baby and forgotten about. Minivans idled at the curb, blocking the glass windows. The curtains were probably shut anyway. The whole idea of Amelia hiding her studio in a shopping center was ridiculous. What kind of former NYCB star had a studio between a pizza place and a nail salon instead of near Lincoln Center? It felt like a fat, elaborate lie that meant minivans could drop kids off every day, and it didn’t matter how good anyone was because they’d be minivan-driving people eventually, towing kids around and telling them how good they were. This was stupid. Coming here was stupid. Worrying about the right kind of tights was stupid. Not being allowed to dance because her bun wasn’t in the right place was stupid. Spending so much time in a studio staring at herself in a mirror with a tennis ball between her ankles was stupid. It was another make-believe story, and she was stupid for believing it.
Andre parked and shut off the engine. If she was looking down from a cloud, she would have seen one bumblebee-yellow car and the strange looks people gave the unlit taxi. Andre was quiet for a long time, watching from his own cloud.
“Go ahead,” he said quietly. If this had been any other time, he would have been mad for driving all this way if she’d refused to move. Wind swayed the car slightly. “I’ll be right here when you’re done.”
Her hand closed around the door handle. The door opened. Cold air rushed at her face and stung her eyes. It swirled through the car and pushed her toward the studio, toward the red tree. Her bag weighed her right shoulder down. Little quartz pieces in the concrete sparkled in the sun. People chattered around her. We need eggs. I did Tiffany Blue last time; I want something darker this time. I don’t understand him. Ask your mother. The dog’s in the car. No garlic knots before dinner. It twisted together into a weird kind of poem. At least people here were alive and moving and full of things to do that seemed important but weren’t. They were happy because they didn’t know how dumb it was. Hey! she wanted to scream. Everything’s fine until something important is snipped away from your life like a magazine cutout, and then everything you ever did will feel like air, and you can just blow it all away. She wanted to pretend she was dumb and happy for a little while, so she pushed the studio door open and stepped inside.
The kissing-booth sign was gone. Had that ever happened? Her mother with the sewing basket was a ghost, something she’d imagined. The inside door to the studio was closed. The younger girls were in there.