Off Balance (Ballet Theatre Chronicles Book 1) (33 page)

“Luke! Sweetie, hi. Is everything all right?” She balled up the wrapper, threw it away, and left the dancers’ lounge to talk in a more quiet spot.

“Yeah. I just wanted to talk to someone and remembered you told me I could call you. Except that you have your class where you can’t talk, so I waited. That was right, huh, Lana?”

“It was. What a big boy you are to call! Is Mom there?”

“No, she’s gone.”

“Is Annabel there with you?”

“No. I’m all alone.” His voice quivered with a mix of pride and unease.

“Goodness, you
are
a big boy.” She tried to sound casual, not alarmed. “Does Mommy do this often, leave you alone?”

“Only when she really has to. It’s okay. I know I’m never supposed to answer the door or the phone. But sometimes I get lonely. So I’m glad you were there.”

“I’m glad I was here for you too.”

He chattered nonstop for the next few minutes before the conversation turned to Christmas, even though it was still only September, and how he already knew what he was going to ask Santa for.

“Ooh, what is it? Can you tell me?”

“Well, I shouldn’t,” he said gravely. “Because I might jinx it.”

He was dying to tell her, she could tell. After much hedging, she got it out of him.

“I’m going to ask for you to come home.” He sounded proud, convinced he’d solved a tricky issue once and for all.

Lana squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh, sweetie, you can’t do that.”

“Sure I can.”

“Luke? Santa doesn’t do stuff like that. He brings presents.”

“Oh, he does
everything.
He’s Santa. And besides. A grown-up told me I could.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mom.”

Indignation rose up in her. “Luke, I can only talk for another minute, because I have a rehearsal. But the minute Mom comes home, tell her to call me, okay? So I know you’re safe and someone’s in charge of you again.”

He agreed and hung up on her without another word, phone etiquette having yet to work its way into his six-year-old mind.

Lana glanced at her watch. Time to head over to the theater. The first cast of
Autumn Souvenir
had stage time for a rehearsal in ten minutes, a run-through for some final checks on lighting. As she was organizing the contents of her dance bag, her phone trilled again. She grabbed at it hastily.

“Mom?”

“Lana. Hi, honey. How are things?”

“Mom, why was Luke alone?”

“Oh, now don’t you start on me. It was only for thirty minutes and he’s a responsible kid.”

“Mom, he’s six years old.”

“And I’ve been raising kids for twenty-four years, Miss Know-it-all. Is that why you had me call you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“No, the thing is, Luke seems to be under the impression he can ask Santa for me to come home.”

Mom chuckled, her defensiveness gone. “I know. Isn’t that sweet? He sure misses you.”

“But what’s going to happen on Christmas Day when I’m not there?”

“Well, you’ll just have to make sure you’re here.”

“That’s not so easily done. I’m a little far to just ‘drop by.’”

“Oh, I know, you’re far and you have your show going on and such. But this is Christmas Day we’re talking about, Lana. You’ve never missed a Christmas here. No one has. Not ever. And we all agreed that this was the kind of thing that made our family special. So, I realize you can’t come much earlier, and will have to leave right after, but we’ll just make do.”

“Mom, I can’t. We perform the day before Christmas and the day after. There’s no way I can work around that.”

“You tell them you can do one day’s show and not the other. You take the red-eye flights both directions. You make it happen, honey.”

“Look, I’m new in the company.
Nutcracker
is huge—I can’t just call in sick and pop back in two days later. I have to be here at all times, except for Christmas Day. And one day is just not enough time to get to Kansas City and back.”

There was an ominous silence from the other end.

“Mom? I can’t do anything here if you don’t speak up.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing you tell me, Lana. That you’re not going to even try and come home to be with your family on Christmas.”

“Maybe I can make it for New Year’s Eve. How about that? I’ll be done with
Nutcracker
and it will be so much less complicated.”

“And would you just like me to change the date of our Lord’s birth? Just change it around to accommodate your selfish whims?”

“This isn’t about me! This is about my job. Ballet isn’t some hobby to try and work around my ‘real’ life, like when I was a kid. Why can’t you get that? Why aren’t you letting me devote myself to it the way I need to?”

“Because sometimes life just doesn’t work out that way!” Mom burst out. “Not everyone gets to carry out their dreams, their perfect worlds. Some don’t get to at all. Some don’t make it past their first day of life. And that creates a big, terrible hole for the rest of us. The rest of us who care about family, that is. The things that matter. Things the family has lost, that will never, never come back.”

Mom began to cry, sobs that started off small and grew in intensity.

Lana had done it again.

She glanced at her watch in a panic. She was going to be late for rehearsal, this last one for
Souvenir.
Tonight was opening night. The timing here couldn’t have been worse.

“Mom, I’m sorry. Please don’t cry. Please. Don’t do this. I’m begging you.”

Mom managed to speak through her sobs. “Then tell me you’ll come home.” A noisy gulp for air. “To us. On Christmas Day.”

Something in Lana snapped.

“Stop doing this to me,” she cried. “Stop backing me into a corner, scaring me, so that you can…
manipulate
me.”

Alice’s words. Alice’s scenario.

Alice had been right.

“I’m not going to come home on Christmas Day,” she told Mom. “And that’s how it’s going to be. You’re just going to have to live with that.”

The sobs had stopped. In their place was a cold voice, seething with anger, terrible in its indictment.

“Fine. You made your decision, Lana Marie Kessler. You’ll deal with the consequences.”

The rehearsal, run by Ben, was only intended to be an onstage mark-through, for lighting to work on cues with the dancers in place. Lana, however, chose to dance full out. There was no other way she could deal with the sick anxiety brewing inside her.

She knew she was distraught, and that distraught equaled distracted. She knew she was putting herself at risk. So when she fell, coming out of a turn, she wasn’t shocked as much as resigned. There was even a sense of rightness, of satisfaction, that consequence should so neatly follow poorly thought-out action.

She hit the floor hard with a bone-jolting
bam
. She lay there, too stunned to scramble up and continue, thoughts swirling through her head at a millisecond’s pace.

I’m hurt
.

It’s Alice all over again.

Maybe Luke will get his wish after all.

She heard the “God, is she all right?” whispers amid a dawning realization that while the fall had hurt—she’d banged her head, producing stars, like in the cartoons, little spirals and asterisks of blue and pink—it hadn’t broken or torn anything.

This wasn’t Alice, after all.

“Lana?” Ben called out. “Are you all right?”

She managed to sit up. The other dancers and Ben were frozen in place, waiting for her reply.

Was she all right?

No. Nothing in her life was all right. Tears rose and spilled out, which she wiped away angrily, trying to pretend like they were just sweat, but more kept coming out.

Tears had bonded her to her fellow dancers in the past. She herself had been quick to comfort and sympathize with others who’d wept out their frustration, their pain. But that was not going to be what happened here. Because once she called out in a high, unsteady voice that she was fine, after a collective exhale of relief, one of the male corps dancers began to laugh. Courtney joined him, and another, and even Javier.

They were laughing at her.

These people who’d judged her, made her feel out of place, from the day of her arrival.

Not everyone was laughing, however. Delores hurried over to Lana, face creased in concern, bent and laid a hand on Lana’s shoulder. She glared at the others. “This isn’t funny. Lana could have been seriously hurt.”

“Yes, but she wasn’t,” Javier said, walking over to her. “And that makes all the difference.” He offered her his hand. She took it and he lifted her to her feet. When she’d risen, he stepped closer, wrapping his arms around her. “That was a beautiful, impressive, and, yes, hilarious fall. Do you forgive us for laughing?” he asked, and reluctantly she nodded.

Ben, after confirming Lana was fine, stepped away to speak with the lighting director. The other dancers used the break to recount their own big-fall stories. Javier repositioned himself behind Lana and began to massage her shoulders. “Are you really all right?” he murmured into her ear.

She melted into the soothing pressure of his hands as they kneaded her tense muscles. “I am. Thanks.”

“Good.” He continued to massage her shoulders, her arms, as the others spoke.

“My most embarrassing fall was during
Nutcracker
last year,” Courtney was saying. She turned to Delores. “Remember, during ‘Land of Snow’?”

Delores nodded. “It was those snowflakes. They’d gotten so dusty and slippery by the twentieth performance. I remember, it was like a minefield onstage during the final few shows.”

“Alice told me all about her fall,” Lana said to Delores, who nodded solemnly and shared the story with the younger members who hadn’t heard the details.

“I remember the night,” Delores said. “Poor Alice. But the crazy thing is that she and Ben improvised so well, you would have thought it was the actual choreography if you didn’t know the ballet.”

“Katrina and I had a night like that two years ago,” Javier said. “
Ay,
I wouldn’t want to do
that
again. She was out for the next six months.”

“All right,” Ben called out. “One more time from the top.” He paused to scrutinize Lana. “You don’t look good. Sit. We’ll run it with your understudy.”

Her throat seized up. “I can do it,” she croaked out.

Ben shook his head. “It’s not worth the risk. You hit your head; what you need is rest.”

“Please, Ben, I’ll be fine.”

“Lana,” he said. “This is just a run-through for lighting. We’re not taking your role away tonight. Just sit and rest up.”

He turned to Lana’s understudy who was yanking off her leg warmers, her sweatshirt, and told her in a lower voice, “But you’re on alert for tonight.”

Lana numbly made her way her way to one of the folding chairs at the front of the stage. She sat and watched her understudy dance her part and wondered if her life could get any worse.

Bad question.

When the rehearsal ended, the dancers disbanded for lunch, followed by another rehearsal for most of them. Ben told Lana to go home, rest up, a direct order from Anders. Lana stopped in her dressing room to try and call home.
Please, Mom
, she prayed as the phone rang.
Please be home and talk to me.
The answering machine picked up; all she could do was leave a message.

She left the building, stopping a few blocks away for a bowl of soup, away from the café, away from the chance of seeing Gil, because if she did she’d melt into him, despite his firing Alice, and never let go. She didn’t need Alice to tell her that would be a mistake. No Gil. Not right now.

After lunch, she tried calling home again.

No answer.

She walked slowly the rest of the way to Alice’s. Inside the house, to her surprise, Alice was right there, holding the phone out to her.

“Perfect timing,” Alice said. “It’s your father.” She looked worried.

Lana went cold.

She knew it was bad by the way Dad kept assuring her it was good news.

“She’s fine, honey,” he babbled. “Mom’s absolutely fine. She had a little fender bender on the way to picking up Marty from school, but there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. She and Luke are fine, not a scratch. Both a little shook up, that’s all. But I just now heard your messages on the answering machine. You sounded worried—boy, you sure do know your mom.” A nervous chuckle here. “You must be telepathic. But it’s all over, everyone’s home and safe. Nothing to worry about.”

Her mouth had gone dry, her lips papery. “Where did it happen?”

“You know that curvy stretch in the road that if you take it too fast it gets tricky? Well, it got tricky on her. She said she must have been distracted.”

“Dad. That’s the opposite direction of the school. What was she doing there?”

“Well, honey, I don’t know,” he said in a bright, bland voice, a “we aren’t going to talk about this because we’re all fine now” tone. Dad was good at that tone. He’d had sixteen years to work on it.

He droned on in this manner for another few minutes, words that flowed through Lana’s ears and out before her overworked mind could process them.

Your mother had an accident. With Luke in the back seat.

Lana had caused it.

She alone was to blame.

She hung up after extracting a promise from Dad to call her the next day, tell her how everyone was doing. Then she went numb and checked out.

She slid down the wall until she found the floor. The ringing in her ears muffled the outside world, like having cotton wadded in her ears. It felt good, soothing. But Alice didn’t like it. Lana could tell; she could register Alice trying to engage her, but she felt too heavy, too sleepy to care. Even turning her head to talk to Alice felt like too much of a burden.

Alice wouldn’t go away. She kept posing question after question until finally Lana had to answer. She was a guest in Alice’s house, after all.

“Yes, I can hear you,” she told her.

“Good. So. It sounds like your mom’s all right.”

“My dad says so.”

“Lana. Then why aren’t
you
all right?” She squatted down to Lana’s level and took Lana’s limp hands.