A Lily in the Light(56)
She is moving, puffing, breathing, counting steps, not thinking about what she has to do and letting her muscles remember. She is too focused to think about Lily now, concentrating too hard to look forward to dancing with Adam. For a quick moment, she fears when it will end and she’ll have to think again, but there’s still time. She glances at the floor occasionally to make sure she’s reached her marks, checking tape lines that only she can see through a blur of fabric, lights, and limbs. Hundreds of miles away, the police question a missing someone, sorting through years of files and evidence, facts as small as fingerprints or strands of hair, looking for answers, searching for stars. All she has to do is dance.
The orchestra is too fast. She glares at the conductor quickly. What is he doing? His arms are waving, and the instruments are playing. He’s not watching her, so she speeds up to keep pace with the music. She’s convinced conductors do this when they don’t like someone. Shit, she thinks. Someone probably told him to. I’m sorry, she silently apologizes to Adam. I’m doing the best I can.
She falls on cue, gets up, goes down again, struggling to control her heaving chest once she’s stopped moving. It wouldn’t be convincing without real pain, so she thinks of her mother, half-asleep, telling Lily to go back to sleep, but her mother didn’t realize or forgot briefly that Lily was already gone and it was Esme. Her mother didn’t see her or wanted to see Lily instead. Esme falls until the pain of being forgotten and unseen is real. Adam is led away with covered eyes while one outstretched hand searches the air in front of him. She can’t see this but knows it’s happening behind her. Tchaikovsky’s strings tell her so. She’s covered in Adam’s shadow.
The piece is almost done now. Her hipbone juts against the floor. Her shoulder aches. This must be what it’s like to sleep on the floor, she thinks of the girl in the basement, how painful it would be to do that night after night knowing she’d had a real bed once with pillows and blankets and stuffed animals.
She undoes her hair and lets it stream over her shoulders. Her back strains. They have her by the ankles, behind her knees, and lift her. Now that she’s not dancing, her chest strains to breathe. Her costume pulls against her skin, keeping her lungs and pounding heart inside. She’s carried away without a floor beneath her feet. She looks up and sees only stage lights and scaffolding. The girl in the basement would see a hanging light bulb, a ceiling with black mold. No, she closes her eyes and leans back, arms above her head. She imagines a swirling galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars, prisms, and rainbows. That’s what the girl would see, memories from her home before. That’s what she would pray for, what would keep her breathing, hoping.
The curtain falls. They lower her to the floor. The audience is applauding. She waits in the wings for the curtain to rise again and the corps to bow and holds back real tears. She hasn’t thought about that night with her mother in years and can’t shake the shivery feeling it’s caused or how fragile it makes her feel. She is ready with an excuse about the orchestra, but when she sees the smile on Adam’s face, she knows she doesn’t need it.
“Esme!” Adam rushed toward her, arms outstretched. He wrapped them around her and lifted her from the floor. His heart beat against hers. “You were amazing! Everyone’s talking about it. What happened tonight? That was incredible.”
Hadn’t he said those same words after Sleeping Beauty, just before he’d blurted out his offer to NYCB and she’d blurted hers to SFB, the realization slowly dawning that a curtain had fallen between them?
“I don’t know,” she lied. “But I woke up with a fever this morning. Did I tell you?”
Adam blinked, laughing. “Shut up.”
“Nope,” she said. “It’s too late to be mad at me.”
The corps stepped backward. It was their turn. Adam lifted her hand and walked her to center stage, his hand chalk dry under hers. The lights were strong enough to make her see stars. They walked forward together, four long steps, Adam a step behind, and curtsied. He held his right hand to his heart, stepped forward to escort her back. Someone threw flowers. She pulled one long white stem from the bouquet and handed it to Adam. She was doing everything she was supposed to do, smiling in all the right places, but the whole thing felt wrong. Imaginary Lily was behind her, stomping her foot into the stage. You used me, Imaginary Lily hissed. Why do you only think about my sad stuff for stupid dance? The curtain came down one last time. Her head was spinning as the adrenaline eased away. It bothered her that she hadn’t known she’d done well until she’d seen Adam’s face. When would she ever know for herself? She smiled past everyone congratulating her to gather her things, ready for a shower and maybe a glass of wine before bed to muffle anything else Imaginary Lily had to say.
She’d done well. Soon people would whisper loud enough for her to hear, and reviews would pick her apart. She walked home past empty shops, turning in the opposite direction of her hotel just to pass Notre Dame. It was late, but she sat on the bridge and looked at the church, built of light and shadows. Streetlights sparkled on love locks along the Seine. Late-night dinner boats passed on the river, full of candlelit tables and shadow shapes. Esme felt like she was floating somewhere between real life and all the things in her head.
A street seller passed with headbands of jasmine flowers. A wreath of little white flowers would look pretty in Lily’s hair. She wondered if Lily’s hair still had red-gold streaks in the sun, if she still sneezed when the sun got in her eyes. Esme bought a string of flowers. The girl in the basement might not be Lily but could be. That was enough for now. It was nice, Esme realized, to think of Lily as a person again and not just something that had happened to her family.