A Lily in the Light(75)

He nodded slowly, uncapped the bottle, and took a sip. “Are you happy there?”

They’d never talked about happiness before, whether all the dreams they’d had as students had been what they’d expected, how happiness came in temporary waves.

“It’s what I worked for, right?” She shrugged, tossing a T-shirt into the open suitcase.

“Well, let me ask you this . . .” He stared out the window at rows of wrought iron windows and trellises on the limestone building across the street, carefully choosing words. The sweater she was folding rested in her lap.

“I got offered a place in Boston. I’d dance, but I’d also choreograph.”

“Boston?” She’d been only once, early on as a corps member. She didn’t remember much. The reality of Adam moving even farther away sat in her stomach like a pit, so heavy it grounded her to the floor. At least when he was in New York, she could picture him walking streets she knew from her childhood, her early life connecting to his present life, but that would end when he moved to Boston. The sweater she was holding felt slimy under her fingers. She pushed it away.

“They asked about you.” Adam’s eyes were nearly turquoise in the light through the window, an indescribable color she could only call Adam. He swirled the water in the bottle until a funnel spiraled on its own. “As a soloist with some principal roles.”

She was ready. The Waltz Girl had proved that. Boston was four hours from New York, closer than San Francisco, closer to Lily. It meant she’d be with Adam. They could leave shows together and find warm, yeasty pizzerias on cold nights or walk along the Charles. Was that really what he was offering?

“All the best colleges are there. You could even think about school.”

“I think—” Esme started and stopped, unsure if this moment and whatever answer she gave would unroll the next section of her life, if she’d regret it or look back and know she’d made the right choice, but there was Lily. “Can I think about it?”

“Of course,” he said. “I only promised I’d talk to you. I’ll give you his number if you’re interested.”

“Who runs it?”

“Paul Katzman.”

Esme laughed in shock. “Amelia’s Paul?”

It would be a kind of homecoming, a circle from where she’d started. It couldn’t be a coincidence that everything had happened this week.

“He has a soft spot for very stunning Waltz Girl performances.” Adam winked.

Construction drills started outside the window. Hammers banged. They were building a scaffold across the street and a web of nets to swallow a building. It sat there without protest, vines swaying from the trellises.

Adam sighed. “I botched this week, Esme. I know I did. I should’ve . . .” His voice trailed off. He shifted his weight and ran a finger over a folded shirt as if he were petting a kitten. Esme wished it were her hand instead.

“I just keep thinking about who I was in San Francisco, how hopeful I was, how focused. Maybe I was too focused, because we all were, but most of my memories have you in them. I just thought that maybe this summer I could reconnect with who I was, and I thought you being here would help, but I wasn’t thinking about how much changed since then. I don’t know . . .” Adam rubbed his forehead between his hands. “I’m not even making sense.” He laughed, a bitter sound, filled with regret. “I probably sound nuts.”

Esme crawled closer and rested her hand over his. “You don’t sound nuts.”

His hand relaxed under hers.

Esme sighed, releasing all the questions she had about her own life, what it meant. The weight of it huffed out in one long breath. “That summer, when we first met, I felt so free. Everything I did was important. I was allowed to be happy, but I didn’t have time to be—or really, I wouldn’t let myself because I thought I had to work harder. Every time I got a role or a nice compliment, I worked harder to keep deserving everything because there was a goal at the end, especially after . . . well, it was easy to leave everything behind and ignore whatever I felt about Lily or my family because I had something else instead.”

Esme paused to gather her thoughts. The ice machine in the hallway rattled as a nameless person filled a bucket and walked heavily along the carpet.

“After she went missing, one of the things I made myself believe was that she was in a children’s book somewhere, like Narnia or Where the Wild Things Are—you know, one of those books where kids slip between worlds. She was just on a journey, and I was on mine. Ballet let me believe it. It made it realer somehow.

“I did what I wanted to do,” she said finally. “I found my Narnia, but it never felt like enough. And truthfully, I was so afraid of ‘the end,’ when I’d have to stop and see the things I didn’t want to.” She thought back to her mother’s shadow behind the trailer curtain, of the mannequin under the sheet, long forgotten.

“And then to find out she was so close the whole time, Adam, just across the Hudson, and we couldn’t find her. I can’t imagine what her life’s been or how any of this could’ve happened.”

A tool dropped outside and bounced against metal. Surrounded by the floral wallpaper in her room, it sounded especially strange. The seashell sat on its bed of sand next to her bed, a battered piece of the ocean.