Pretending to Dance (10 page)

I straightened a few books that had been piled on one corner of the desk and picked up the two pens and one pencil lying loose near the computer. I hunted on the desk for the stained-glass pencil case Amalia had made for my father a few years ago. The case, with its crazy quilt pattern of blue-and-white iridescent glass, would be hard to miss, but it was nowhere to be found, and I set the pens and pencil next to the pile of books.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Daddy said, as Russell pushed him into the room.

“No problem,” I said.

“Need anything before I take off?” Russell asked.

“Could you adjust the head support?” Daddy asked him.

“This thing's still irking you, isn't it,” Russell said as he fiddled with the knob on the side of the head support. Daddy'd had the old head support replaced and he couldn't seem to get comfortable with the new one. It reminded me of a baseball mitt, the way it cradled his head. “You want me to switch this out for the old one later today?” Russell asked. “I still have it.”

“Good idea,” Daddy said. “This one doesn't let me move my head the way I want. I'd like to be able to move the one body part I still have some control over.” He smiled at me but his voice gave away his irritation.

“I can't find your pencil case,” I said to him. “Do you know where it is?”

Daddy looked at the spot on the desk where the case usually sat. “
Hm
,” he said. “Not a clue. Do you know, Russell?”

Russell shook his head. “I'll keep my eye open for it,” he said. “Do you need anything else before I go?”

“I think we're good,” Daddy said, and Russell left us alone in the room.

I wiggled my fingers as though warming them up, then I rested them on the keyboard.

“Where were we?” Daddy asked. “Read me the last couple of paragraphs we worked on.” I knew he was anxious to get going. He wanted to finish the book by the end of the summer.

I found the last page of the document and read the paragraphs to him. Then he began dictating and I began typing, and we were off. I made more mistakes than usual, though, because my mind was on the questions I planned to ask him once we were finished working. I wasn't sure how I was going to dive into the topic of Amalia, but he made it easy for me.

“Where's your mind today, Molly?” he asked after we'd been working for half an hour and I'd had to stop his dictating so I could correct yet another typing mistake. “It's definitely not here in this room,” he said. “What's up?”

It was often a mixed blessing that he could read me so easily. Today, though, I was glad.

I dropped my hands from the keyboard to my lap and swiveled the chair to face him. “There
is
something that's bugging me,” I said.

“Talk to me,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “Were you married to Amalia before Mom?” I asked. “Or were you married to Mom and you cheated on her with Amalia? Or … I don't know.” I screwed up my face, uncomfortable with my own questions. “What really happened back then?”

He looked at me, eyebrows raised, as though he didn't quite understand what I was asking. “Well,” he said finally, “I wondered when you'd ask. I'd hoped it would be later. Or perhaps never.” He chuckled, then gave me one of his totally attentive looks. If he could have leaned forward, he would have. He had to make his face do all the work someone else could do with his body. “Nobody cheated on anyone, darling,” he said. “Would you like to hear the story of how you came to be?”

“Yes,”
I said. “Absolutely.”

He looked out the window toward the forest, as if gathering his thoughts. “It might not be the happiest story ever told,” he said, returning his gaze to me, “but it's one for which I'll be forever grateful, because it brought you into the world.”

I smiled, relaxing a bit as I folded my hands in my lap, ready to listen.

“So,” he said with a nod of his head, “I was twenty-eight when I received my doctorate from UNC and came home to Morrison Ridge. I moved back into the brick house with my parents and Claudia, who was still living there at the time. Trevor was already married to Toni and they'd built their house and had Samantha and Cal. So anyway, I got a job as a psychologist at a facility called Highland Hospital in Asheville. It doesn't exist any longer, but it was a bit of an unorthodox place.”

“What does that mean?”

“They had a unique approach to treating patients,” he said. “They often used art or music or nature to try to heal troubled people instead of relying exclusively on medication or shock treatment or psychotherapy. I found that outside-the-box approach appealing, as you can probably imagine.” He gave me a conspiratorial smile. “At any rate, here's something you don't know about me, Molly,” he continued with a bit of a sigh. “I used to love to dance, just like you.”

“Really?” I could barely remember him walking, much less dancing.

“Trevor and Toni and Claudia and I would go dancing every weekend,” he said. “Then we started going to the coast. Wrightsville Beach or sometimes Myrtle. Everyone there was playing beach music and doing the Carolina shag and we really got into it. We brought the dance back here to the mountains and helped start a shag group.”

“Is that the group Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim go to in Asheville?”

“Yes, Claudia actually met Jim there, and the group's still in existence, although obviously I'm no longer a part of it. And Trevor and Toni lost interest somewhere along the way.”

“Is that where you met Mom?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nor is it where I met Amalia.” He shifted his head on the headrest and I could tell it was bothering him. “Amalia was hired by Highland Hospital to teach dance to the patients,” he said. “Well, not ‘hired' exactly.” He looked off into space, kind of talking to himself. “Well, let's just call it ‘hired,'” he said. “Easier that way. The hospital gave her room and board. She was only twenty years old and she was a wonderful dancer, as you know,” he said. “There was an easygoing element to her dancing that allowed her to connect to many different types of patients. She was so uninhibited.” He was someplace else in his mind, and I waited as patiently as I could. I was anxious for him to get to the part about me. “She had a very difficult childhood,” he said. “Her parents weren't together and her mother was not a very good or caring mother. But that's Amalia's story to tell, not mine.” He gave his head a small shake. “Anyway, I told her about the dance group and she started going there with me. It was a friendship at first but gradually turned into … something more. I fell in love with her, although we were very different. I was nine years older, to begin with. She had a high school education and I had a PhD. We came from very different family and economic backgrounds. My parents and Trevor and Claudia discouraged the relationship from the start. But … well, you know her.” He smiled at me. “You know she has a sort of … magnetic personality.”

I nodded. This was so weird, hearing him talk about a romance with someone other than my mother. My stomach felt knotted up and I pressed my hands together in my lap, but I'd asked for the story, and I didn't want him to sanitize it for me even if it made me squirm.

“I'd never known anyone like her,” Daddy said. “My family seemed so rigid … so uptight by comparison. It was as though I'd found someone I could finally relax around.”

I knew what he meant. It seemed impossible to do anything that would shake Amalia up. She rolled with whatever came her way.

“So, anyway, we had fun together and I decided our differences didn't matter. But then I began having trouble with my legs. Sometimes when I danced—or even walked—my legs felt leaden and it took extra effort to make them move. At first I thought it was my imagination. I had no idea what was wrong with me. I saw a doctor—well, several—and had too many tests to count, and eventually got the diagnosis of MS. I didn't handle that diagnosis particularly well.” He smiled again, and I had the feeling he was understating what had happened.

“Were you a basket case?” I asked.

He laughed. “You could say that. And at first, Amalia was very supportive, but then she—quite suddenly—seemed to withdraw. And one day, she simply disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

He nodded. “One night, she packed up all her things in her room at Highland Hospital and left without a word to anyone. I was…” He looked at the ceiling. “Well, I guess the word is
devastated,
” he said, his eyes back on me. “I searched for her, but she had vanished, and I assumed the MS had scared her away. She couldn't deal with it and couldn't tell me to my face, so she simply left. It was too much for her.”

I couldn't imagine the Amalia I knew behaving so cowardly. “That was cruel.” I frowned.

“It did feel cruel at that moment,” he agreed. “But anyway, a couple of months after she left, I met Nora,” he said. “She'd been hired by the hospital as a pharmacist and we struck up a friendship. She wasn't the least bit put off by the MS. As a matter of fact, she invented ways I could deal with my ever-increasing limitations and accompanied me to doctors' appointments and came up with work-arounds so that I could still do things I wanted or needed to do.”

“That is so Mom.” I smiled.

“She was amazing. She was definitely a person you could count on, and I needed that. I fell in love with her, and of course my family adored her. She fit in much better with them, plus they were so relieved Amalia was gone.”

“I still can't believe Amalia deserted … Oh!” I suddenly got it. “Was she
pregnant
?”

“You are one smart cookie,” Daddy said. “She certainly was. Of course, I had no clue. You can draw your own conclusions as to why she thought she needed to leave. Maybe she didn't want to tie me down to someone my family disliked, or she was just plain scared. So your mom and I were married and then one day Amalia appeared on our doorstep with a baby—you. She was overwhelmed trying to care for you as a single parent. Your mom—Nora—was unable to have children.… I think you knew that?”

I nodded.

“And while I was disappointed about it, I thought maybe it was just as well, given the progression of the MS.” He looked out the window toward the trees again, then back at me with a smile. “But then
you
showed up,” he said, “and your appearance seemed like a miracle. It made sense for us to make you ours, and Amalia was—although she loved you very much—relieved, and she entrusted you to us. But the three of us wanted you to be able to have a relationship with her, so that's why she lives at Morrison Ridge. We thought it would be best for her to be close to you, and of course that's what she wanted, so—”

“But no one really wants her here, do they?” I couldn't forget a conversation I once overheard between my two uncles about the appropriateness of Amalia living in the slave quarters, since she was their housekeeper. “Cinderella,” they'd called her. “They don't like her.”

“Oh, they've come to like her well enough,” Daddy said. “Your grandmother has never approved of her being here, but she'll get over it one of these days.”

“It's been fourteen years,” I pointed out. “If she's not over it by now, I don't think she ever will be.”

“Doesn't really matter, does it? You have Amalia close by and that's what counts.”

“Right.” I thought of my mother—Nora—and tried to imagine how I would feel, having my husband's old girlfriend living so close by. “Has it been weird for Mom?” I asked. “Having Amalia here?”

Daddy sighed. “Well, I'd be lying if I said her relationship with Amalia hasn't had its share of tension,” he said. “I'm sure you've picked up on some of it from time to time. But you're the most important thing in the world to Nora, so she and Amalia tolerate each other for your sake.”

I looked down at my hands. I thought about how many sentences he'd used to tell me about falling in love with Amalia. How few sentences he'd allotted to my mother.

“What's running through your head, Moll?” he asked.

I looked up at him. “Are you still … are you in love with her?” I asked. “Amalia?”

He smiled. “I love her and always will, but ‘in love'?” He shook his head. “No. ‘In love' belongs to your mother, who's pretty extraordinary, wouldn't you say?”

“Yes.” I wished I felt totally relieved by his answer, but I still couldn't get the image of Amalia's head on his shoulder out of my mind. “Daddy,” I said, my eyes locked onto his, “I saw you and Amalia on the bench last night. You were both asleep. She was holding your hand.”

He lost his smile. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Was that upsetting?”

“Confusing.”

“Are you wondering if Mom knows Amalia was there with me?”

I nodded.

“She knows. We have no secrets.”

“Doesn't she get jealous?”

“I guess you'd have to ask her how she feels, darling. I can't speak for her.”

I gave a small nod. I could never talk to my mother like this. She was an awesome mother in about a million ways, but she was not the sort of person you could easily bare your soul to.

“Now,” he said, “there's one more thing we have to talk about, and that's a family meeting coming up Wednesday night.”

I frowned. “Family meeting?” I vaguely remembered a family meeting from about three years ago. It had to do with our trash pickup and mail delivery. I distinctly remembered falling asleep with my head on Daddy's lap.

“You don't have to be there,” he said, as if reading my mind. “Nanny's not coming, either, so she suggested you go over to her house and the two of you can watch a movie. How's that sound?”