Off Balance (Ballet Theatre Chronicles Book 1) (38 page)

The young server returned with an urn of coffee, offering refills. Andy nodded, sat back to let him pour, and the two of them exchanged comments about the day’s weather forecast.

Alice sat back as well, relaxing into her seat, her mind whirring with all the information she’d just been fed.

A new job. A new start.

That Andy Redgrave. A good one to have in her pocket.

Gil had reeled in a good one.

She not only survived opening night of
Autumn Souvenir
, she’d excelled. That was what people were saying. Relieved couldn’t begin to describe how the review of Friday night’s performance in the
San Francisco Chronicle
made Lana feel. The reviewer had described her dancing as “fresh, lyrical, nuanced” and had declared her “a powerhouse, a welcome addition to the West Coast Ballet Theatre’s roster of talented dancers.” Javier’s performance had garnered praise, too, as had two of the principals in the night’s earlier ballets. Two other soloists were mentioned, as well. And Dena Lindgren was noted as “someone to watch.”

Lana had read and reread the review, alternately thrilled and terrified. Would this be yet one more thing to alienate her from the other dancers? But in the end, Javier’s support and endorsement, of both her and their performance together, carried a lot of clout. And, further, the grumbling dancers had found another target for their antipathy: Dena, who’d replaced Gabrielle on the rehearsal sheet for
Arpeggio.
The two Lindgren sisters were now rehearsing it together, along with Lana. She saw Lexie’s nod of satisfaction during the rehearsal, once the three of them had completed a trio passage. He liked the fit.

Lucinda in public relations called her into the office on Thursday after company class.
Dance Magazine
wanted to schedule an interview, she told Lana, and an online periodical was asking for a photo shoot. Lana was now to be included in media-related events during the company’s tour stops in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Lucinda handed her leaflets, public relations memorandums, then proceeded to educate her on how to interview, how to answer questions and present herself, even how much makeup and what kind of outfits she should wear in public. When Lana squirmed over answering more personal questions, Lucinda told her to get used to it, that everyone else would want to know everything about her. She was hot, on the radar screen, and the WCBT planned to capitalize on that. Did Lana have a website, a social media platform? How did she feel about public speaking?

“Oh, and there will be an
Arpeggio
publicity photo shoot,” Lucinda said, reading off a memo. “You and the two Lindgren girls. When you three are back in town.”

“Um, a publicity photo shoot?” she repeated. “For, like, brochures? Promotional stuff?”

Lucinda peered at Lana over her reading glasses. “That’s what a photo shoot usually implies.”
You dimwit,
her expression seemed to add, but she remained silent.

Lana struggled to take in this last bit of news. Her, Dena and Rebecca, representing
Arpeggio
to the public, forever affixing their identities to the ballet. “But,” she stammered, “um, casting hasn’t been decided.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about Lexie and Anders making a mistake here. And this was a directive from them.” She glanced down at her notes. “Next. Let’s talk about your habit of saying ‘um’ a lot.”

“Um, pardon me?”

“Yes. Like that.”

Ten minutes later she stumbled out of Lucinda’s office, only to encounter Gil. The sight of him produced twin bolts of fire and unease, which shot through her and left her weak-kneed and hesitating over her words. Even Gil seemed unsure of himself. Their conversation sounded stilted, contrived, as if they were being recorded for public viewing later, a WCBT training video, on how to avoid romantic entanglements at work and how to deal with them once things got messy.

But her anger toward him had cooled since he’d un-fired Alice, since he’d delivered the tender message through her. In truth, she missed him terribly. Well. The non-dancer part of her did, the sensualist she’d become in his arms, his bed, ever craving his touch, the smell of his skin, the taste of it. The dancer understood that this was the price you paid to remain true to what mattered most.

They chatted. He accompanied her to the elevator and when the door opened, disgorging a few administrators, he reached over and touched the small of her back, his fingers grazing her hip as she moved away from him, into the elevator. It sent an electric shiver through her. She saw, from the glance they shared, just before the door closed, that it had similarly affected him.

He was honoring his end of the bargain, handing her the power to dictate the terms of their relationship. No gesture could have been more crucial, more appreciated. It assured her that from here on out, she had the ability to call the shots in her personal life.

Mom’s terrible hold on her wouldn’t have to ever repeat itself.

When she’d called the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services on Monday to report Mom’s behavior, she’d spoken calmly until the worker asked her relationship to the perpetrator. Her throat had closed up and she’d begun to cry.

The woman on the other end had been kind. “You’re proving how much you care for your mother by doing this, not the other way around,” she’d said through Lana’s sobbed out story. Lana answered the questions the woman posed about Mom, about Luke, about the family, despising herself for what she was doing to the Kessler family. Only the fact that she’d given them her phone number, name and address kept her from hanging up.

The woman told her a case worker would follow up some time over the next two to fourteen days. Lana explained how she was leaving town the following Monday, and it would help if they could make the initial contact before she left town. She knew Mom would call her afterward, ranting. She needed to be in a stable place when that happened.

Today was Thursday; she hadn’t heard from Mom yet.

She knew she would.

The call came midway through lunch break. The conversation lasted ten minutes. It was the worst thing Lana had ever had to endure. Mom was hyperventilating, spewing words of rage.

“My own child, accusing me of this! I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”

“Mom. You crashed a car with Luke in it.”

“I was distracted!” she shrieked, noisier and more plaintive than Lana had ever heard her. “And you told them,
you told them
that I’d left Luke alone that day.”

“You did!” she cried, her stomach churning.

“That was a family issue alone!”

“No. It’s a Kansas law.”

“You’re a self-centered, ungrateful child. A child, that’s all you are. You know nothing about parenting, about being a mother, taking care of a family. You waltz out of town, take up with fancy friends, and suddenly you’ve got the world figured out.”

“Please don’t be this way, Mom. Please.”

“Don’t you ‘please, Mom’ me. You little monster.”

She couldn’t believe her mother would call her that. All those years of being dutiful daughter, mother’s helper, taking it all without complaint, meant nothing.

“I told Annabel,” Mom was saying, “I told her California would taint you, turn you ugly, against your family, but I had no idea—”

“I did what I did for our family,” Lana interrupted.

Mom snorted in contempt. “Don’t make me laugh.”

Lana lost all patience.

“You were a threat to your child,” she said in a cold, hard voice. “I’m a grown one; I can fend for myself. But if you
ever
involve the little boys in one of your issues again, I’ll call SRS a second time. I’ll go against you, Mom. Don’t think I won’t.”

“You, you…”

Mom couldn’t even speak, she was so outraged. When the words finally came out, they were shrill, staccato.

“You have shamed this family beyond words, Lana Kessler. Don’t ever bother coming back here. You hear me?”

With that, she hung up on Lana.

She stood there, phone in hand, reeling, bent forward, as if Mom’s voice had reached right across the miles and punched her in the stomach. She made her way on wooden legs through the hallway, seeking out the quiet corner where Gabrielle hadn’t been trying to flirt with Gil last week, and where Lana had tried, instead, to break up with him. She hunkered down on the bench, trying to stifle her sobs, as the hysteria rose in her, threatening to spill over.

Don’t ever bother coming back here. You hear me?

She was huddled there, weeping, trying to be quiet about it, when, to her horror, someone approached, and all she could think was that it was Courtney and it would be shame on top of pain on top of having been deceived by a fake friendship. But it was Dena, who rushed over when she recognized Lana.

“Oh, God, something’s happened. Are you hurt? Is someone else hurt? Was there news from home?”

She couldn’t possibly explain, and even if she could, Dena wouldn’t be able to relate in the least. Lana had seen the Lindgren girls’ mother; she was lively, engaging, pretty, the kind of mother all girls dreamed of having. Mom was a freak next to the woman. Lana could only shake her head after each question, wave Dena away.

“Just go. You wouldn’t understand. Please,
go.”

Dena took a step back, turned halfway as if to leave, but hesitated.

“Lana. Gil’s right there in the café. I saw him less than a minute ago. I’m friends with him, and I know you are too.”

This made Lana look up.

Gil would get it. He’d had his own mother problems. Back that first day of meeting him, she’d been appalled by his mom story, wondering what terrible thing he’d done to produce such ire and rejection from her.

Gil might be the only person on earth to understand here.

“Should I get him?” Dena asked.

“Yes,” she told Dena, who sped away.

Dena was fast. Or Gil was. Or both. Moments later, two shadows appeared at the other end of the hall. Within seconds, Gil was seated on one side of the bench, Dena on the other, Lana sandwiched in between.

“Lana?” Gil took her hand. “What’s happened?”

“Do you remember,” she said to Gil in a voice too high to be calm, but it was the best she could do, “back when you told me that story, about your mom, freaking out over something you said, or did? And her telling you—” Here she ran out of voice, courage. She studied the floor, her slippered feet next to Gil’s shiny black dress shoes.

“Yes. Is this about your own mom?” Gil sounded more urgent. “Lana, what did she say?”

“I betrayed her in the worst of ways, Gil. She put Luke at risk and I turned her in for it. I broke the family vow of ‘unity above all’. I told the authorities what she’d done, and in turn, she told me never to come home again.”

The tears followed, a childlike wail that tore through her, and that was the end of explaining.

How odd, times like this, when the people you’ve known and trusted forever become so vicious, and it’s the others around you, maybe your closest friends, maybe not, who know exactly what to say, what to do, how to soothe, how to help you heal. Gil and Dena took turns offering words of consolation and advice, sharing their own stories.

“There is nothing that can break your bond of family, Lana,” Gil said. “Not if you want it. Your mom’s angry, but she can’t unmake you her daughter. She can’t make your home suddenly not be your home. She can’t un-love you. She might threaten it, but she can’t.”

Gil’s words, his indignation, began to soothe the raw, raging thing inside her.

“Alice said my mom’s resorting to all this because she’s scared she’s losing me.”

“Alice is right.”

A chuckle broke through her tears. “I’m going to tell Alice you said that.”

His serious expression relaxed into a grin.

“Okay, so I did. Only under dire circumstances, though.”

Dena snickered. Gil wagged a mock-reproving finger at her. “My admission doesn’t leave this room, Squirt.”

“It’s a hallway.”

“Fine. This hallway.”

With less tension in the air now, Dena and Gil began to banter back and forth. When he called her “Squirt” for the second time, Dena grimaced.

“You said you’d stop calling me that, once I became a full company member.”

“Oops. Sorry. Old habits die hard.”

“Sure, I understand. They say it’s an aging thing, when you can’t change your habits.”

“Touché, Squirt.”

More laughter, followed by an easy silence.

“You two know each other well,” Lana commented.

“That Chicago connection,” he said. “Isabelle, Squirt’s mother, took me under her wing when I first moved out here. Made me dinner and made me feel like a member of the family.”

“Which means,” Dena said, “that Rebecca and I didn’t stop arguing just because he was there at the table too.”

Lana looked at her in surprise. “You two argue, wow. I’d been thinking you were the model family. The perfect mother, the perfect sister.”

Dena found this hilarious. “I can’t wait to tell them you said that. You ask the two of them, and I’m demon spawn. Always disagreeing with them, looking for a fight, there to tax them.”

“No!” Lana exclaimed. “Not you.”

Dena leaned over to catch Gil’s eyes. “You’re my witness. You hear what Lana’s saying.”

“Oh, no one would call you demon spawn, Squirt. We’ll just say you’re the family firecracker. You keep the Lindgren family interesting.”

Dena nudged Lana’s shoulder with her own. “See the reputation I have, even outside the family? Tell me I’m not trouble waiting to happen.” She was smiling, though, seemingly pleased by the image.

Dena was a lot more interesting than Lana had realized. And compassionate, to boot.

Gil consulted his watch. “Whoops, I’m about to be late for a meeting.”

He rose. So did Lana. He turned to her and hesitated.

He hadn’t made any overtures a good friend wouldn’t have. Holding her hand, slinging a companionable arm over her shoulders, giving one a little squeeze when the three of them were laughing over a joke. Now his eyes were pleading. Begging.