Bittersweet (9 page)

It used to be that Edy found solace in ballet. When the piano notes or violin rushed in and her feet began to move, a crash of comfort found her, draped her, cloaked her, and flushed out the world’s indignities.

She was such a simpleton then.

When Edy returned to ballet classes, Madam Rousseau welcomed her in a brisk, fortifying way: a hand on either of Edy’s shoulders, eye to eye, and a quiet question of whether she had what she needed. Rousseau expected simple answers, so Edy replied with a ‘yes.’ Satisfied, the older woman tilted Edy’s chin up. “Then it is on to dance,” she announced.

Rousseau drove them hard that day, sweat from the chin hard, and gasped at the bounding nature of Edy’s leaps, the fluidity of her turns. Rousseau made no allowances for the extended absence, and likely pushed harder because of it, knowing that Edy, above all others could handle the strain.

Edy welcomed it. She welcomed the chance to shove away worries about the fate of the house on the Cape, about what Rani might or might not say, about her oddly popular status at school, and about a relationship time bomb that ticked. Midway through class, however, Rousseau stopped, grabbed her cell, and put in a discreet phone call. Fifteen minutes later, a thin, olive-skinned woman, and a pale, willowy man with shades planted in his dark hair, took a seat in the back of the room. Seeing them seated reminded Edy of Wyatt and how he’d been so devoted, so passionate about watching her practice.

“Again, from the top, my dancers.” And though Madame Rousseau said “my dancers,” this time, she looked only at Edy.

Edy nodded once, curt. Her stomach twisted. The man at the back of the room turned his mouth down in what had to be well practiced disapproval. He was there to see Edy? They were there to see Edy.

Only with supreme effort did she drag her gaze away, inhale sharp, and measure out a shaky exhale. She could almost place her spectators. They looked familiar. They were familiar. They were people she should know.

Begin.

~~~

All of life’s beginnings should come with one thunderous leap. That was the only thought Edy could manage as she half walked, half ran the whole way home: everything good she begin with one magnificent jump, before a tiny man in a velvet voice says, “I want her.”

She should’ve had some memory of gunning home on battered feet, or of trying to blow down the Pradhan door after her own house stood empty despite the presence of her father’s car. Yeah. Her father’s car. He’d come back with absolutely no forewarning after staying away for weeks and communicating through a few measly emails. So whatever. Edy had rushed home with a whirlwind in her lungs and a pump pump in her heart, thinking that she needed somebody, anybody to hear her incredible news. She threw open the Pradhan door and collided with Rani.

Okay, maybe she didn’t need anybody.  

“What’s happened? Is someone after you?” Rani stuck her head out and looked down the street, gaze sweeping, concerned.

“No. I have news. I—”

Rani held up a hand. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to tell it to the boys. I’m cooking and on the phone with my mother. I really can’t spare the time.”

Edy shoved aside the needling voice reminding her that such a conversation would have never taken place in the before. Hassan’s mom offered a contrite smile before disappearing into the kitchen. Edy gaze followed her with a thought: The boys?

She found them huddled around the coffee table as if examining some delicate specimen, Hassan, Ali, and Edy’s dad. Not one flinched on her arrival.

“Well, it’s early yet,” Edy’s dad said. “But this tremendous PR wise. Sure the record speaks for itself, but the praise—”

“What’s going on?” Edy said.

Their heads snapped up.

“Hassan got a write up in ESPN Magazine,” Ali announced.

Hassan rolled his eyes. “The Elite program got a write up in ESPN Magazine. They mentioned me.”

“My son is modest,” Ali explained. It sounded like an apology.

“Well, no one’s ever said that before,” Hassan said.

“Seven lines and the write up is not about him!” Ali waved a hand in dismissal.

Edy’s eyes popped. “They talked about you for seven lines? In ESPN Magazine?” She rounded the coffee table and dropped down on a knee. “Let me see.”

She had to scan at an awkward angle because of Ali’s reluctance to part with it. Only when Hassan clawed his fingers back was Edy treated to a private viewing.

A paragraph about the camp itself, who sponsored it, and why. A second paragraph highlighting two seniors, Leahy, and Lawrence, noting the last for being the son of former Raider Steve Dyson. Then, in an ode to glory, the last paragraph belonged all to Hassan. Yeah, it rattled off stunning statistics, but it painted a trajectory, too; of a boy growing into a man of unprecedented feats.

Or at least a guy destined for a top college program. 

“You okay?” Hassan said quietly as she read.

 The ballet studio stood small, distant, dwarfed just then.

“I’m fine,” Edy said and cleared her throat to try again. She tried on her happiest smile because this was her boy and always had been. This was their dream. It all felt impossibly large just then.

She cleared her throat. “I have huge news, too.”

“Oh?” Her father said, looking up.

She nodded. “At ballet practice today, the artistic director, Elliot Neil Shore, sat in on practice for, like, five seconds before he put me in the company production of Westside Story.”

Her father smiled indulgently. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. Congratulations.”

She looked at Ali. “Good work, my princess. Good work.”

She looked to Hassan, who grinned like a maniac, smile clownish and overcompensating. He sensed her disappointment in their responses and figure he’d make up for it all by himself. “Look at you, girl! Beating everyone out. That’s great news! And Westside, huh? We, uh, talk about that in school.”

Hassan’s cell shrilled and he fumbled it out of his pocket. “Lawrence? Yeah, no, I know! ESPN, right?” Hassan strolled off to one corner, treating them to a broad portrait of his back. Already, Edy’s father and Ali had turned back to the magazine.

Belatedly, Edy realized, they’d rather go over those same three paragraphs again and again, then discuss her good fortune even once.

Her grandmother would have known who Elliot Neil Shore was. She would have known the honor of training and performing with one of the most prestigious companies in the nation. But then again, her grandmother was insane.

She found Rani in the kitchen, a glossy magazine spread centerfold on the table with a sepia shot of a ballerina mid-leap for the shoot. Edy dropped down at the table and begun to read about Vivian Kent, whose mother and father had also been ballet dancers. Vivian had become a prima ballerina after years as a dancer and muse for one of the most prestigious choreographers on the planet. For awhile, Edy’s complaints hung suspended, forgotten in the majesty of photography.

“Vi’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Rani said.

Edy looked up, startled to find Hassan’s mother speaking to her voluntarily. “Vi?” Edy said.

“She’s an old friend of mine.”

Edy rose to stir a bubbling over pot with the wooden spoon that sat counter side. As she did so, she shared her news with Rani.

“You told them?” Hassan’s mother said. “The men?”

Edy nodded and Rani seemed to disappear in quiet contemplation. “It’s been that way always, hasn’t it? As if football’s superior to dance? They pretend there is no future in dance, you know. As if there is no future for you.” Rani hesitated, eyes downcast. Finally, she shut off the stove. “You and I will celebrate your news. It’s meant to be celebrated.”

Edy didn’t want to listen. She didn’t want to listen or believe that Rani would welcome her so warmly, because she knew the opposite of that warmth. She knew the sharpness of her rejection cut brutal and deep and she’d been working in her own small way toward accepting that. To believe in her, to believe in her capacity for forgiveness now, only to have it stolen later, well, it had to be a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Nonetheless, unable to help herself, Edy went into Rani’s open arms even as a small voice warned against it.

Curtains fluttered, discrete. Doors creaked by the crack. Only two stood and watched Wyatt’s arrival to Dunberry Street. Did they notice the absence of his mother? Edy would. Or all the weight he hadn’t meant to lose? As his father wheeled him up their plowed path, straining and huffing beer breath, the short steps came into clear focus and the question of how to handle them with it. How. Wyatt scoffed out a grunt of frustration and paid for it in pain.

“Let me help you,” said a voice. Except Wyatt wanted no help from that voice. He wanted nothing from anything attached to Hassan Pradhan, because it all, no matter the dressing, brought pain in the end.

“Don’t—” Wyatt attempted to twist and ignited with the shift. That pain was an atrocity, blinding and paralyzing, contorting like a form of demonic possession, sweeping out all rationale thought with it.

“Listen,” Wyatt’s dad said. “I couldn’t trouble you to help me get him to his room, could I? I’d planned on keeping him downstairs, but I know he’d rather be around his own things.”

He said ‘sure.’ Sure! As if they weren’t embattled enemies. As if the whole world wasn’t their battlefield and they weren’t locked in the midst of a death match that second.

On three they lifted the chair and bumped it with every nook and cranny from stairs to door. At the door, a new problem emerged.

“It’s too narrow,” his dad said. “These old houses, they aren’t really handicap compliant.”

Hassan paused. “Well, we can fold the chair, right? I’ll bring it in and you can carry him.”

Wyatt’s dad coughed out a laugh. “Not me. Unless you want to go back in time fifteen years.”

A beat of silence followed. Realization dawned and Wyatt went limp with dread.

“No,” he said.

“Let’s get this over with,” Hassan said. “Hold the door for me, Mr. Green.”

“No!” Wyatt cried.

Two massive arms came down and ripped him from his chair. They stepped into the house like newlyweds, the world’s ugliest bride and groom.

Wyatt blinked at his living room. A clean living room. There was his dad’s old recliner from Building #19 in the corner and the flat screen he loved. There was even his dad, staring down at him as if he were some puzzle.

“Hold on to me,” Hassan said. “Or not. Whatever.”

‘Or not’ was the correct answer, because there was no way Wyatt would be made to wrap his arms around Hassan’s neck.

“Take him up to his room,” Wyatt’s dad said.

Wyatt’s brain vaulted to catch up. His room? As in Hassan visiting, occupying, eyeballing his private place? The place where he kept an endless assortment of Edy sketches, some—no, many on the wall?

“Dad, I—”

“Let’s go,” Hassan said and started for the stairs.

How had this happened, that Wyatt had become a passenger, a mere bystander watching his own life? He had no say; he had no choice; only love, get shot, be humiliated.

The jerk didn’t even pause or breathe heavy while carrying Wyatt upstairs. How far off the main road had Wyatt veered if he wanted Hassan to drop him, just to prove he had weaknesses? He even figured out how to dodge bullets. That was the joke Wyatt like to tell himself. One day, he promised, it would even make him laugh.  

Once at the top of the stairs, they found the light blown. Wyatt’s dad squeezed ahead of them, found the room, and waved them in. Hassan carried him as delicately as wet crepe paper and set him on the bed.

At least he didn’t fluff the pillows.

In life before getting shot, Edy littered Wyatt’s wall in a kaleidoscope of sketches, some hurried, most painstakingly created. Stark walls stared back in unnatural gaps where Wyatt’s father had made a belated attempt to protect him. Corners of paper still stood mounted to the walls, while whole middles had been ripped away, trashed, destroyed. A variation of Edy gone forever.

Wyatt knew his dad. He drowned facts in Budweiser and faced nothing. How long before he’d come in this room and saw Edy everywhere? How long before the wheels churned and he thought of Chaterdee? How long before the old man got to shredding evidence to shield his boy one more time? One last time? And here Wyatt was about to drown in humiliation. He was to die at the thought of Hassan seeing a million smiling Edys, there in his most private of places. They were his Edys, in his room, and he really couldn’t—

One. He’d missed one. Over by Wyatt’s desk was a drawing done up in blushing anime style, with Edy’s hair flowing over in pigtails and her eyes wide with innocence. She sat in a garden of butterflies, only the top button on her shirt fastened, with cleavage from the top and bottom jutting out.

He had forgotten how beautiful she was—even in caricature. He had forgotten the sudden way she hit his heart—like a blow to the chest. And Wyatt was the man to talk blows to the chest. How had he ever forgotten her beauty? Or the peace he felt when alone with her?

He hated her though.

“Is that Edy?” Hassan squinted, went wide eyed. He marched over and snatched the paper; it shook in his grip.

“Listen,” Wyatt’s dad said, careful and easy. “We’ve all been through a lot. Let’s stay calm and remember it’s only a drawing.”

Hassan folded the sketch and shoved it in his back pocket; his orbs flecked with flames. A second passed where Wyatt thought he’d leap on him, beat him flat, something like that. Then Hassan started for the door.

“It’s her,” Wyatt said quietly. “Feel free to burn the picture, though. I really am over the both of you.”

Hassan left without a word.