Finding Center (18 page)

Aly

People take for granted the predictability of their bodies. To wake up each morning and be roughly the same size they were the day before. I’ve relied on that for years, not just as a dancer who needed to know her body better than she understood anything else in the world. I relied on my body’s predictability as someone with anorexia nervosa. My body’s fluctuations in size challenged my ability to stay sane and balanced. My body’s reliability is crucial.

In case you’re not aware—as I wasn’t going into this—pregnancy means your body changes
every single day.
There’s no hiding the pregnancy now, not even in looser tops. Dr. Ham’s sure that people don’t stare at my ringless left hand and my stomach as often as I say they do. Dr. Ham’s also sure that I’m catastrophizing.

Catastrophizing is Ham’s favorite word these days. And I’m seeing him almost every day this week, and next, and probably until I give birth, a fact that both Zed and I are ignoring because it’s not cheap. When I first brought it up to Zed, the cost of it, he cut me off instantly.

“Does it help to see Ham?” Zed had asked me, opening the fridge where I have a meal plan taped up for the first time since before Zed and I reunited.

“Yes,” I had replied, my voice tiny.

Zed plopped a Greek yogurt cup and a spoon down in front of me on our little breakfast bar. “Then there is no price tag. See him as often as you need to see him.”

Your body grows, and your heart grows, and your love expands. You don’t know that it can, but it does. You start to believe that eventually, your chest will split open. Once, you thought this before, and you thought the rusted broken parts of you would fall out for everyone to see. Now, you think your heart will fill up your chest, squeeze your lungs and then crack your ribs. All your love will pour out of you in a river like a dam breaking open.

I tell this to Ham. He tells me to tell Zed. I tell Zed and his brow furrows.

“No,” he says finally. I blink at him and he sighs, turning over my hand. He traces the lines of my palm. “Love’s not a thing that leaves us, Aly. I don’t believe that. There’s not a finite amount of love in the world.”

Some days, it’s hard to believe. Everything feels finite right now. Finite and fragile.

We finally have
Rubies
right though, and that’s a relief in some ways. In others, it only throws into sharp contrast all the changes that have already happened and foreshadows everything yet to come. I feel like I’m being asked to juggle glass balls (Zed, ballet, baby, my father’s visit, my career, Madison, the company, my mental health, my changing body). It’s splitting me in half. As soon as we’re out in the lobby, our costumes off, I can’t hold it anymore. Zed blinks at me, and then his eyes narrow.

He slings an arm over my shoulder and kisses my temple. “You going to make it home?”

If I talk, I think I might break in half. There’s this dark sadness that lines my ribs all the time and sometimes it grips my breastbone, filling the space around my lungs. I can’t breathe. I shrug, and then shake my head against his hard side. My hand on his stomach can feel the changes. His abdomen’s defined again, rock hard and lined. In turn, I am turning soft. Soft and destructive. I am a hurricane with bloody feet.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Let’s go home, take a hot shower, curl up under a lot of blankets and hang in there until tomorrow. Right? That’s what we do on the bad days. We take a deep breath and hang in there.”

“I am tired,” I manage to say, “of bad days. I thought they were over. Things were supposed to get better.”

“I know, Kitten,” he whispers. “I wish I could take away all your bad days. But that’s how this goes. There are bad days and good days. I promise to be there for all of them.”

I wipe at my eyes as we get off the elevator and step into the sunshine. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he promises, and he keeps his arms around me, holding me together like I will actually fall apart all the way home.

When we’re home, I do exactly what he says. I take a hot shower. I put on pajamas, and I climb into bed, pulling our quilts over my head. He curls up on top of the quilts next to me after he showers and the wetness from our hair makes the room feel humid.

His hand skates over the curves of my body and I feel the heat from his palm even through the layers of blankets. “Do you know why you’re sad?”

The questions people who’ve never been sad like this ask. I clutch at my pillow. I can’t explain it, even if I know the catalyst. I can’t find the words for this—it’s come for me again and again and again as long as I can remember and maybe I’ll never be free of it but I know more than anything that I’ll never be able to explain it to someone who’s never experienced it.

Then I push the quilts down and roll over to face him. Zed shimmies under the blankets without needing to ask, my face enough of an invitation. He brushes the backs of his fingers over my cheeks and I close my eyes.

“What made you start to drink?” I ask him quietly.

His hand freezes against my cheek. “I don’t—I hit the bottom. I didn’t want to feel anything anymore. I couldn’t figure out how not to feel. Alcohol did that for me.”

“I can never decide,” I whisper, “whether depression is like feeling too much, like you overload all of your sensors until you’re numb from too much feeling, or it’s feeling nothing at all.”

“You’ve been here before,” Zed murmurs, his hand resuming its journey to push strands of wet hair behind my ear. “I’ve seen you here before and you come out the other side.”

“I know,” I whisper. “I wish that helped.”

“It’s a shame you have such an aversion to pillow forts and excessive amounts of ice cream because I feel like that cures a lot of things,” he says and I hear the smile in his voice. I can’t help but smile. For a long moment, we just lie there in the quiet and the dark. Then he rolls over and whispers in a voice rough around the edges, “I’m in love with you. I know I don’t always understand, but I think you’re brave, and beautiful, and wonderful. And all of the hardest days are still better than any day without you.”

My throat closes around the words
me too
and I curl my fingers into fists. Then I whisper, because secrets are safer in the dark with my eyes closed, “I wish you could kiss away this sadness.”

“Where are you sad?” The ache in his words makes me reach for him. He slides over top of me, holding himself up on his elbows. His weight crushes away the darkness so I can breathe again. I inhale, and then I exhale. The light catches his eyes. He repeats the question and so I answer the only honest way I know how.

“Everywhere.”

So he kisses me everywhere. He kisses me again, and again, and again, until the brush of his lips build a wall against the throbbing pain in my heart. His mouth moves lower and he kisses me until my blood turns to molten gold. He kisses me again, and I taste stardust on my tongue.

Zed

Instead of just the girls going to brunch on Sunday, I suggest we all go. Aly needs time away from her own head, and to be around friends without dance coming up at all. I hope. Fingers crossed dancers can talk about something other than dancing. Or maybe I can get them to talk about something that isn’t dance so she’s distracted. We set out for the brunch place by the White House Aly, Sofia and Yana like so much. Aly’s bright and brilliant in her red dress and gray sweater, but her eyes are quiet and solemn. She’s taking more in than she’s giving away, but that’s almost always been her style.

Just before I open the door, she takes a deep breath and says, “Today’s going to be a good day.”

I glance down at her, at the blond hair she curled this morning to frame her face, at her earrings that were a gift from her mother last Christmas, the necklace that was a gift from me years and years ago. She’s assembled herself this morning out of parts borrowed from other people. But the determined set of her mouth—that’s all Aly.

“Yes, it is,” I say and pull open the door for her. “Way to lay down the law.”

She ghosts a smile at me over her shoulder as we take a table by the windows. We’re the first to arrive but we’re still sitting down when Yevgeny and Yana show up, looking bright and wild and way too awake already. Yevgeny plops down in the chair next to Aly and Yana next to me.

Yevgeny nods to me and then slings an arm around Aly. “How is my beautiful little snowflake?”

“Snowflakes melt,” Aly says dryly.

“Ray of sunshine?” he teases her and then pokes her in the side. “This dress brings color to your cheeks.”

“Yevgeny,” Yana says with a snort. “Calm down, you’re like a puppy. You saw her yesterday. Hi, Zed, Alyona, how are you guys?”

I glance at Aly across the table and shrug. “Pretty good. You guys?”

My phone buzzes with a text and I glance at it under the table while Aly, Yevgeny and Yana discuss the menu.

Done. I sent you an email with the details! from another teacher at my school, Hank Watters.

I swallow hard, my heart pounding, and text him back.
Thank you.

Hank replies.
I’m glad it’s staying in the greater family, you know?

I do. I text him back and then turn my phone on Silent.

“Who is it?” Aly asks, nudging my foot under the table.

I say I hate lying to her, but I feel like all I’ve done this fall is lie to her. “Noelle.”

Aly’s face clears from curiosity to straight-up concern. “Is she okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, forcing myself to smile. “Just being Noelle.”

Sofia plops down next to Yevgeny and says, “I’ve been cleared, as of yesterday afternoon, to dance in
Alice in Wonderland
.”

I sigh to myself. Seven minutes. That’s all it took for them to cut straight to ballet. But it’s hard not to be happy when Aly squeals and launches out of her chair, wrapping her arms around Sofia. Yevgeny claps Sofia on the back hard enough to make the Cuban dancer wince and Yana lifts her coffee cup in a toast.

“To keeping the role of Alice out of the hands of Madison Dahl,” she crows. “Thank you, God, for healing Sofia’s back!”

“Cheers,” we all chorus together, lifting our cups—Aly’s tea and the rest of us have coffee—and clinking them together with grins.

“Excited to be dancing
Alice
?” I ask Sofia. Aly, obviously, wasn’t dancing in
Alice
now, and the question of who Jonathan would cast had bothered the group. I was invested in Madison not getting the part if only because it made Aly happy.

Sofia nods. “I haven’t danced the role before.”

Aly smiles. “I’ll come and help. I can’t be onstage but that doesn’t mean I can’t be at DBC.”

Yevgeny glances at me like I’m Aly’s keeper. I shrug and say, “As long as you’re prepared, Sofia. She’s ruthless. One day she’ll be a ballet mistress that everyone fears.”

Aly throws me a look while everyone else laughs. “I’m not
that
bad.”

“Oh, Kitten,” I grin at her. “You’re that bad. That’s how you’re so good.”

“Kitten,” Yevgeny says. “I hear a lot of nicknames between lovers here, but
Kitten
.”

The waiter arrives and we’re interrupted until we all place our orders. When he leaves, Aly points a finger at me. “No.”

I catch her finger in my hand and hold it. “Ever see her take a nap backstage during a rehearsal or on the night of a performance? She curls up literally anywhere, hands under her cheeks, and just falls asleep. Like a kitten. The nickname predates us dating.”

“By years,” Aly adds. “Zed likes nicknames.”

“When I followed Yevgeny over from Ukraine to Lyon School,” Yana says, drinking her coffee black. “I started to keep a list of all the ridiculous things I heard people call their significant others. Honeypants, loveworm and sugarbooger are ranked way higher than Kitten in terms of strange.”

“Loveworm,” repeats Aly slowly, and then turns to me. “If you ever call me loveworm, I promise you, this is the last kid you’ll ever create.”

I grin while Yevgeny howls with laughter. “Okay, but what about honeyworm. Can we combine these? Is it like a strange version of Mad Libs?”

“What is Mad Libs?” Yevgeny asks. Yana and Sofia also look confused. Aly brings out her phone and for the next fifteen minutes until our food arrives, we play Mad Libs using an internet form.

Aly hands her phone to Yevgeny to read with all of the blanks filled in as our food arrives. So over eggs and bagels and pancakes, we’re all breathless with laughter as Yevgeny announces that he enjoys “long, sad walks on the beach, getting loaded in the rain, and serendipitous encounters with towels.” It only gets worse, until I can’t breathe from laughter. Yana leans over and takes the phone away from him, handing it back to Aly who is as red in the face as I think I am.

I gasp and shake my head. “Those things never get old.”

Aly shakes her head. “I never knew what they were until Lyon School.”

“Seriously?” I gape at her. “You didn’t do them when you were a kid?”

She rolls her eyes. “Not in the schools I went to, no. That probably wasn’t considered a structured enough activity.”

“That’s how we learned nouns and adjectives and proper nouns and so on,” I say. “Best thing public school did for me.”

“We learned because we were told to learn,” Sofia says dryly, and Yana and Yevgeny nod with her. She gestures down the table to Aly. “Send that to me. I want to turn that into a lesson for my students though.”

“Students?” I ask.

“I teach English as a second language to new immigrants on Sunday afternoons,” Sofia says. “As a thank-you to those who taught me when I moved here.”

“That’s neat,” I tell her. “Let me know if I can ever help in any way. I only teach theater and music but—”

“No,” she cuts in, her eyes lighting up. “I teach a lot through movement. That would be fantastic. I’ll let you know.”

Across the table, Aly smiles at her plate. I watch her cut her eggs up into tiny pieces but eat them slowly and steadily, without distress. She said today’s going to be a good day. And I think we’re off to a good start. Slowly, but steadily, we’ll keep treading water.