As she was locking the car, she realized she’d momentarily forgotten about Rene. About Angie. About Jake. Just the anticipation of dancing had filled her mind with movement and music and left no room for pain.
Three weeks now, she thought, still smiling but feeling a nervous knot forming in her stomach.
Three weeks until Ohio.
She was sure she was ready. She repeated to herself that she was sure.
Rene, as he’d told her, didn’t call her during those three weeks. Mary thought of him every day, and doubt crept into her mind and spread like a malignancy. Would he ever call? Did any man ever really carry through on the important promises?
As the time of the competition drew nearer, she thought less about Rene and more about Ohio, battling her nerves. She began waking up in the early morning hours and not falling back asleep until almost dawn, her mind spinning to music. Other nights she’d lie awake thinking about Rene, until she slept and saw herself or women she resembled, their throats slit and grinning and their pale bodies locked in sexual embrace with a man whose features were blurred. Her nervous state began to show on her face, the strain dragging at her eyelids and the corners of her lips.
After Ohio things might be different. She would have passed through the fire, emerging annealed, and free.
One day the hospital called and informed her that Angie had been placed in intensive care. It wasn’t unusual during chemotherapy, Dr. Brainton told Mary. Something about the white corpuscle count and anemia. Angie could have visitors, but they must only view her through a window, couldn’t even send flowers; the intensive care unit had to be kept sterile.
Mary dutifully went to Saint Sebastian every day and stood for a while outside Angie’s room. She’d waved to her through the window the first few times. Then Angie became too weak or disinterested to wave back. Sometimes she didn’t seem to know anyone was there, and simply lay with her eyes closed or staring up at the ceiling. She was thinner and seemed much older now, and her eyebrows and most of her hair had fallen out. Yet ancient as she’d come to appear, there was something infantile about her, as if she’d aged full circle and returned to the newborn stage of her life cycle. The lack of hair and eyebrows, maybe. Mary had become the strong one and the caretaker. Daughter had become mother, and mother daughter. Time and death having their joke.
Dr. Brainton assured Mary that while Angie’s condition was delicate, she was in no immediate mortal danger. But he didn’t sound sure. Whatever his reputation, a doctor who looked like a bond salesman two years out of college didn’t inspire confidence.
Mary suspected Angie might die soon. Suspected yet didn’t admit it. To accept the impending death of a parent, you had to bend your mind around your own mortality. There was an undeniable progression there, the dark plainly visible at the end of the tunnel. She kept such thoughts to herself and placed them in an isolated part of her mind where she could almost ignore them.
A few days before Ohio, she answered her phone and a man’s voice said, “I just called to wish you luck.”
Not Rene or Jake. When she didn’t reply, the caller said, “This is Jim, Mary.”
At first she didn’t know which Jim, and stood silently shuffling through her memory.
He laughed. “The Jim that danced with you at Casa Loma.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry. My mind’s been whirling lately.”
“I’m not surprised, with the big competition coming up. That’s why I called. I remembered you telling me you were gonna compete in Ohio, and I ran into somebody from Romance who told me you’d really meant it. I figured I’d wish you the best up there.”
“I appreciate it, Jim, honestly.”
“Anybody else from Romance gonna compete?”
She told him the other dancers’ names, and they talked about dancing and nothing else for another ten minutes.
“Call me when you get back,” he said, “let me know how you did. I’m interested, because I’m interested in everything about you.”
She didn’t want to encourage him along those lines; she’d never thought of him in any romantic way. “I’ll call,” she said. “I promise.” Being kind, but not too responsive.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he said, and hung up.
Mary wondered about the conversation, about how much Jim expected from her. She’d tried to be diplomatic, but what had he assumed from what she’d said?
She gave up trying to get inside his mind. It was impossible to know how some men thought.
She’d had no trouble getting off work for an extended weekend for the competition. Even Mr. Summers stopped by her desk and wished her luck. She felt rather like a celebrity as she drove home from work the evening before she was to fly with Mel and the other Romance Studio contestants on a TWA flight to Columbus.
As she was carefully packing the black Latin dress in a garment bag, her apartment door slammed. Then a familiar footfall.
She knew it was him even before he spoke. Shouldn’t be, couldn’t be, but it was.
“Mary? Where the fuck are you?”
He sounded drunk, at seven o’clock in the evening.
Not good.
She swallowed a lump of fear and tried to zip up the garment bag. But the zipper stuck and she snagged a fingernail on it. She ignored the pain.
She recalled the way Rene had talked about pressure building and building in violent people. Then the inevitable happened.
“Mary?” His footsteps sounded in the hall, heavy and ominous, from a land of giants in a child’s nightmare.
She’d feared something like this. Though they were no longer together, he’d never be able to let her leave without at least trying to destroy the beauty and possibility in her life. She was about to fly, and he had to crush the wings he so resented. Everyone struggled to grow wings, or had given up. It annoyed him that she wouldn’t make that capitulation. It was, somehow, a threat to him.
Then he loomed in the doorway, his face a mask of rage. The liquor on his breath tainted the air. The way Duke had smelled when she was a little girl.
“How did you get in, Jake?”
He smiled. “Had an extra key made a long time ago.” He was drunk, all right. It was in his voice, his eyes. He was probably here straight from Skittles, boozing it up with his warehouse buddies.
“Get out, Jake. Now!”
She might as well not have spoken. “Guess what that fuckin’ supervisor at the warehouse did?” he asked, so furious his spittle tattooed Mary’s arm.
She shrank away from him. She knew it didn’t matter what anyone had done.
Whatever or whoever had wounded Jake, the price was hers to pay.
37
“Jesus!” Mel said at the airport, “what happened to you?”
Mary didn’t think the results of last night were that obvious, with her oversize dark glasses on. Mel must have noticed the bruise on the bridge of her nose, a small, blood-plum stain underlined by a moon-shaped cut where Jake’s thumbnail had gouged her when he’d swung and only grazed his target. No way to hide that one.
A dozen dancers and instructors were lounging around the waiting area of Gate 43, carry-ons and garment bags bunched like obedience-trained pets at their feet, waiting to board the flight to Columbus.
Mel moved around in front of Mary and turned her body slightly, toward the wide windows overlooking the runway, so none of her fellow passengers could see her face. He gently removed her glasses and stared at her. Then his handsome young face got ugly. “Oh, fuck, Mary! How you gonna compete with bruises like that?”
She’d never seen him this upset. “They should be better by tomorrow, and I can cover them with makeup.
