House of Dance (9 page)

“E
VERY DAY’S FOR
living in.” That was what Granddad had said. Walking home now, after dance, I felt like rubber that had been left out in the sun, globby and dizzy and so not pretty, but happy too because I really was learning to dance. I really was going to give my granddad all that I could give of color.

I was through the tunnel now and back around to the street on which I lived, and all of a sudden I was thinking about Nick and that one sweet time that we had gone off in
search of something big, taken what we wanted, gotten all caught up with time, had ourselves a verifiable adventure. We were thirteen. We’d escaped, when no one was looking, the Tuesday of our Easter break. We had run off to the station and boarded a train, telling no one, not even Leisha, where we were headed. An exhibition of old model planes had come to the city’s science institute. Nick had seen the ad in the paper. I was his accomplice.

The train had been crowded, the morning rush. It was April, but I was wearing a skirt and sandals anyway, hoping Nick would notice, and Nick had his khakis on, out of respect, he had said, for airplanes. We were tight together in the commuter train, and his legs were long, his shoulders wide. He was looking straight ahead, not saying much, because he hardly did, and because he was excited, maybe, and then, when he turned to look at me, it seemed his eyes were made of
sky. Every day’s for living in, and that day, sure as the sun came up, was altogether Nick’s.

There was a girl and a mother in the seat ahead of us, and the girl—maybe she was three—was wild. She’d be standing up, then kicking her legs out straight, like an acrobat in free fall. Every time she plopped down, the seat went squish, and she would let out a hiccup and laugh. When she grew tired of jumping, she banged at her mother for attention, who did precisely not one thing. Plain didn’t move. I looked at Nick. Nick looked at me. The sky still in his eyes.

“Some mother,” I said.

“Asleep,” he said. “I guess.”

“Who could sleep through that much racket?”

Nick shrugged. He looked at me, then past me at the world that was rushing by: garbage cans in backyards, dogs behind trees, little backyard sheds with metal roofs, inflatable
swimming pool, crushed flat. “Can’t believe we’re doing this,” he said.

“I can,” I said. “Why wouldn’t we?” Because we never had, that was the answer, but Nick didn’t say it.

The girl in the seat ahead was bored, slapping at her mother’s arm and getting nothing. Kicking at the back of the seat before her, until a shined apple of a head from across the aisle asked her to pipe down, please. It was when she turned around to see behind her that she fell at once for Nick. “Hello,” she said, and Nick looked up, and then she saw his eyes.

“Wanna hear me sing?” the girl asked.

“Sing?” Nick repeated.

“Okay,” she said, standing straighter, and Nick, looking at her as if he’d for the first time seen her, got this funny expression on his face. “I’m a real good singer,” the girl said, and she was standing all the way up now, facing backward, facing Nick, planting both feet
on the seat and starting in on some song. It was no song I’d ever heard, but it had rhythm and she held the tune, and now the girl was clapping to keep up with herself and smiling white through seashell teeth. All the little braids that spiraled out from her head closed up tight in kitten-shaped plastic clips, and she had some kind of jumper on and a shirt with a tiny collar. You couldn’t not see how she was saying “Dance with me,” and somebody from across the aisle saw it too, joined in with a little nodding rhythm, and now the girl, having found herself a bigger audience, grew even taller in her seat and sang a little louder with her frothy voice. All this while her mother slept, her head slammed against the window of the train, her breath hawing heavily.

The world outside the train kept rushing by. In the seat my thigh was pushing up against Nick’s thigh; and if at first, while the girl was starting her song, Nick didn’t move
one inch, just stared, now I saw the big boots on his big feet slide, a sort of shuffle to the right, a shuffle to the left, in time to the little girl’s song. Nick dancing. Nick taking the rhythm in, putting the rhythm out, and all the years I’d known Nick, had lived next door to Nick, lain flat on a roof beside Nick, chased his homemade planes, I hadn’t known that Nick had dance in the bottoms of his boots.

The girl reached the end of her song, blew the last word out of her little-girl cheeks, jumped up, then came down in her seat, popped back up, and said, “Don’t worry, I got another.” Now she was off again into some new tune, and there were more on the train helping her keep up her beat: commuters with briefcases, mothers with kids, other people like Nick and me, but not shiny apple head. Nick’s boots were going left-right-left-right-left-right, and my right sandal foot was going with his left black boot, because we
were sitting thigh to thigh, because this was Nick’s day, and Nick had decided to dance.

“I got something,” the little girl said, now that she had us all in the palm of her tiny hand, and Nick said, “What’s that?” and the girl said, “I got these,” and Nick said, “What these is it that you got?”

“These,” the little girl said—said to Nick because he was the one she liked the most, because she wanted to give her special something to him. Before we could guess what she meant, she was yanking at the plastic clips in her hair, the kitten barrettes, yellow and red, that piled up quickly in her hands. She pulled at her hair, but her braids stayed put.

“She shouldn’t do that,” I said.

But Nick said nothing.

“Her mother’s going to freak.”

“Her mother’s sleeping.”

“I got these for you,” the girl said. “For you, for you, for you,” she said, jumping herself silly. She tossed her fistful of barrettes
over the seat back, at Nick. They went up like fireworks and down like rain, landing in his lap. She screamed, it was so funny.

“I got more,” the girl said, putting her hands back up to her braided hair, snatching another kitten free. But now her mother finally woke herself up from whatever dream had made her dead, and I could see, but barely, her face through the crack between the seats: her sleep-mussed hair, her anger.

“Honey, I told you,” the mother said, shifting in her seat, changing the fractions of the face that I could see. “I told you, you take those barrettes out, you’re not getting any more, you listen? I told you to leave your hair alone!”

“That’s my friend,” the girl said, pointing to Nick.

“Nobody here’s your friend,” said the mother, not turning. “Now you sit down and say you’re sorry. You sit down. Be good.”

“It’s all right,” Nick said, leaning forward.
“She’s a performer.”

“She’s a diva is what she is,” the mother answered. “A circus clown. Can’t sit, this child. Can’t sit. I told her.” Then to the girl: “No more.” The girl was disappearing. Her face bobbing down and then up, then bobbing down. I could hear only her whimper, her crying.

Through the windows of the train the landscape was turning to industrial waste, small scraps of trees, birds on a wire. The empty plastic trash bags that got caught in the wind looked like green and white ghosts, floating. There was a dog on a hill. There was the start of the city. A building built of blue-green glass like a ship berthed in the sun. The conductor was announcing Philadelphia. People were shuffling, collecting things, and the girl and her song were all forgotten, but still there was that shower of barrettes, and when I looked back at Nick, I saw how he was stringing them together—red to yellow
to yellow to red, a bracelet of hair-clip kittens.

“Nice,” I said, but Nick said nothing, and by the time the train stopped in Philadelphia, Nick stood to let me slip on past. “See you around,” I heard him say behind me, and when I turned, I saw him reach to give the girl her barrettes back. She was fast asleep, curled up against her mother, who was herself asleep again. There were people behind Nick and me, pressing to get out. There was the morning rush.

“Liked your songs,” Nick told the girl, laying the barrette bracelet down on her lap.

“Me too,” I said, now walking forward, ahead of the crushing crowd. I could feel Nick close behind me, in the aisle. I could feel him behind me as we stepped out. It wasn’t far to the institute after that. Down the escalator, through the station, across an old bridge over a brown river past a black tower, through a wind blast. We turned a corner,
walking side by side. We took the institute’s wide white steps. We paid with birthday money, each of us. We lived that day, like Granddad said.

T
HE NEXT DAY AT
Granddad’s Teresa met me at the door. “He’s had a little setback,” she said. “I’ve got him sleeping.”

I felt my heart jitter up inside the narrow knob of my throat, my hands go clammy. “I’m coming in,” I said. And then, when she didn’t move: “Aren’t I?”

She looked at me so carefully that I wondered what she saw: my tangled hair all scrunchied back, my T-shirt loose, my long shorts baggy. “He needs his rest,” she said. She was wearing a buttercup-colored T-shirt and
a gauzy skirt, brown sandals without much of a heel. I crossed my arms in a most outright duplication of hers.

“I’m good at quiet,” I said.

“I know you are, but Rosie—”
Rosie.
My name, with the Spanish curlicue
R
, my name spoken as a warning.

“I’m family,” I told her.
“Family.”
One of the biggest words in any language.

She looked at me for a long time before she finally unknotted her arms. I was past her in a second, around the corner of the kitchen and right there, quiet, next to him, in his prison bed, beside the tangle of wires of a machine—it hadn’t been there before—that was needling something into his veins.

“What is this?” I demanded of Teresa, who’d followed me and was now right there beside me.

“I was trying to tell you.”

“You didn’t tell me
this
,” I said, thrusting my chin toward the IV.

“He needs it. For the pain. For fluids, Rosie.”

“Yeah. Well. He hasn’t said anything to
me
about pain.” My heart was a live frog in my throat. The heat of the day was getting stuck behind my eyes. I was mad again, but mad wasn’t right. And Teresa wasn’t wrong. I was.

“We should talk, Rosie,” she said, “the two of us.”

“I’m not,” I said, “going to.” Two words only in each long breath.

“Today we’re managing the pain, yes? We’re managing the pain and the fluids. Today.” Every one of her words playing like music, even the serious ones.

“It sucks,” I said, not taking my eyes for one second off Granddad. “Totally.”

“Yes, sucks,” she said. “I know it sucks. But he’ll want you here where you are when he wakes up. And he won’t want you mad.”

“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” I told her, flopping down so hard in the mean-
looking wheelchair that I probably bruised my butt.

“Me also,” she said, taking the remaining La-Z-Boy chair, scaring Riot out of a doze. “Nowhere.”

“It’s me
either
,” I said, “in my language.” I sat looking at Granddad. She sat looking at me. The room was dull brown and white sheets, bed bars and wheelchair metal. I said, “If you want to tell someone about it, tell Riot.”

It was like Mom had said: Multiple myeloma is apocalypse business. Too much calcium swimming around in the blood, bungling the kidneys. Too many plasma cells in the marrow messing with the immune system. Things getting stuck, things drying up, things dying. Hypercalcemia. Pneumonia. Infections. It’s the end-of-the-line stuff for multiple myeloma, the way people die when they’re that sick. Granddad was doing pretty well,
considering. But still, Teresa said. Still. Things were changing. He was changing. I had to be prepared. While Teresa talked, Riot walked all around. She jumped from the floor to my knee to the floor. She jumped to the windowsill. She stared at the people walking by outside, the people who couldn’t see us where we were, in a cave of sickness, running out of time.

“Where does he hurt right now?” I asked, for Riot’s sake.

“Everywhere he’s aching,” Teresa told the cat, who swiped just then at something with her monster-sized pipe-cleaner tail, then bent around on herself and nibbled at a hind leg. When Granddad sighed in his sleep, when he shifted just a little in his sheets, Riot’s ears went out like two antennae, a direct tilt toward his bed. She was better than a guard dog. She knew Granddad the best.

“Why does he hardly eat anymore?” For the sake of that cat I asked.

“Too much to ask of the kidneys. And the food—it doesn’t taste so good; it’s more like work.”

“What are you doing for my granddad? What
can
you do?”
My
granddad, I’d said.
Mine.
Because so what if he belonged to Riot? He also belonged to me.

“Make him comfortable. Bring him what he wants.” She was turning a strand of hair around one finger. When she stopped, a curl was there. I watched her. I wondered what would make her care so much about an old man she’d only just met, how much sickness she had seen, and how much dying.

“He wants me to put things In Trust, is what he really wants,” I said. “I know that for a fact.”

“No doubting, Rosie.” She chose another ribbon of hair and twined it around.

“And all I’ve gotten to so far is the books and the things in between the books and the songs. And that’s not much.”

“A lot already.”

“Not enough.”

I felt the heat of the day packing back in behind my eyes. I watched Riot leap from the windowsill, like water falling down. “You don’t know how hard it is,” I told her. “Deciding. What to keep and what to throw away.” I didn’t want to cry. I hadn’t meant to. But all of a sudden I was drying my cheeks with my hands; my hands were wet. Riot had left the floor where she’d landed and leaped right back up to my lap. She was padding my knees, softening them for a nap. I put one of my wet hands on the silk of her head until she finally quieted down.

“A hard job, deciding,” Teresa said.

“And it’s not like my mother has come around to help.” I felt another warm leak down my face. I didn’t dry it.

“Everything in its own time, Rosie.”

“Why are you here?” I asked Teresa, after I’d settled myself.

She thought for a moment. “To make a difference.” She had two long curls hanging beside her face. She was working on a third.

“No, here. In the United States. Why are you here and not wherever you’re from, doing this?”

“Ah,” she said. “Andalucía, you mean.”

“White horses. Red flowers. Black bulls.” Lifted straight from my grandmother’s travel-ogues, which I’d tucked safely away In Trust.

“Well. That is a story.”

“Granddad’s asleep,” I said, knocking away the last of the tears. “And so is Riot.” The Maine coon was purring like a revving car.

“I guess we have time then to tell.”

I scrunched around in the thin-seated wheelchair. I looked at the room, dull brown and sheet white except where the hospital metal caught little pricks of sun. I wasn’t leaving until Granddad woke, and I didn’t want to sit with my thoughts.