A Lily in the Light(49)
“We don’t always choose our choices, but they’re ours. Am I happy?” He sighed. “Look around. This is a beautiful place, the most beautiful I’ve seen in a long time. I’m here with you, and I’m happy to be. We can’t be everything all the time. That just wouldn’t be life.”
Esme stopped walking and closed her eyes. If she didn’t get in, she might never come back here. The breeze blew past her ears, freeing stray wisps from her bun. The back of her leotard was still damp, and the breeze made her shiver. They were under a row of eucalyptus trees, and the whole place smelled like earth. A black-and-orange butterfly flicked by overhead. A swan cried on the pond. It was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen, even more so because of what they’d left behind. She wasn’t ready to let go of this version of her father for the one he was at home.
“Thank you,” her father said quietly.
“For what?”
“We’re here because of you.” He put his arm around her. Her father was right; she’d been calm during the audition, and as soon as the music had started, she’d moved with it. It was more than just muscle memory. Dancing let her soul breathe. It had always been that way and always would be. She wasn’t ready to leave yet. She wanted to touch the Pacific Ocean for the first time and follow a monarch butterfly along part of its migration. She wanted to ride on a cable car and lean out the window as it crept up a hill or hear fishermen shouting by the wharf. And worse, she felt like she was being plucked away from where she truly belonged. It was time to leave, but she would be back. She took one more deep breath to fill her lungs, collecting as much of this place as she could carry, wishing she could take it home with her.
Three weeks later, Esme took down the poster of the Golden Gate Bridge from above her bed because she didn’t need it anymore. She’d been accepted, officially, and they’d even given her a scholarship. Soon enough she would see that real bridge every day, learning and dancing like Anna Pavlova and Amelia and every other great dancer had done. She took down one piece of her room every time she went home so it would feel less and less like the room she remembered until it was essentially empty, proof that her life was not here anymore in the empty shell home had become without Lily, but it was waiting for her on the other side of the only world she’d ever known.
PART TWO
PARIS, 2005
Chapter Thirteen
Esme felt like a wet leaf plastered to her sheets. The summer air was icy cold outside her blanket. Her arms and legs and muscles were wet-sand heavy. She was dehydrated and jet lagged, but she would not miss the opening night of Serenade. Not in Paris. Not with Adam.
Advil and electrolyte tabs were in the nightstand, a bottle of cold water on the floor. She swallowed the pills as the tabs fizzled in the bottle. She rubbed her temples in slow circles, repeating the same words she’d woken up to for the past eight years. Today is a new day. I’m happy to be here, the only remaining tenet of a grief support group she’d gone to once in a church basement. A chill spread through her bones as her feet touched the cold floor. Today it was true.
Esme left the hotel an hour later, head floating in the early-morning haze. Dull achiness crouched behind her knees. A woman in a blue apron swept cigarette butts into the gutter while a man set out café tables along the sidewalk. In the next shop, a girl placed orange madeleines and macarons in the window. The smell of warm chocolate and baking bread crept silently through the street. Murmured conversations she didn’t understand made everything feel like a dream. She felt alive in a way she hadn’t for a long time—and safe. Most importantly, she felt safe.
In San Francisco, her cramped apartment tottered on a hill, swallowed in morning mist and shaken occasionally when the earth shifted. It had lost its thrill a long time ago. She dreaded the uphill walk at night, the constant Pacific chill. It still didn’t feel like home, not even after eight years, but then again, no place felt like home anymore. Neighbors shuffled across the street to warn her about a push-in robbery down the block or someone mugged at their car. “Please be careful, Esme,” they said. “A woman living alone. What a shame that would be.” She was not an exception. Anything could happen, and yet she missed the oasis San Francisco used to be before she’d realized, truly realized, how many bad things happened to regular people and wished San Francisco was still as innocent as a beautiful red bridge in the fog.
In Paris, everything was new again. Not understanding newspaper headlines was a relief. A scooter bounced past on the cobblestones. Her favorite building jutted into the street with a red door and a trellis of hanging flowers. Next was the theater with green double doors, carved flowers, falling leaves: a true fairy-tale door. But she didn’t have to knock three times or wait for a keeper to slide away a hatch because she belonged there. It felt magically old, like everything in Paris.
And Adam was here.
As students, they’d had a choreographer once, Dontel, who loved working with Esme and Adam. He’d pull them into the studio when class was over and run through new pieces for hours, using Esme and Adam to physically visualize what he saw inside and bring it to life. “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” Dontel would say when things were going well, or he’d shake his head, scattering his hair in a flyaway puff, when it wasn’t, and they’d start again.