She's Not There (21 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The walls felt like they were closing in on her. It was this place, she knew. She felt the same crushing claustrophobia she had felt as a child back in Morning Sun, caged in by the cornfields. That is why she had loved going to The Bird’s lake house every August. Standing at the shore, looking out at the moving blur where the blue of the lake met the blue of the sky, she could imagine it was a curtain through which she could slip and escape.

Amelia let the drape fall and turned away from the window.

For two days now, she had been locked inside the motel room, paralyzed by fear that Clay Buchanan would find her again. He had followed her to Georgia. He had traced her to Iowa. He had even known she was at Arnolds Park that night.

Now he knew she was driving the Impala. He had the license plate.

She was trapped. Nowhere to hide. And no one to go to for help. Yet why did she
feel
there was someone out there?
He
was out there somewhere.

Her iPad was there on the bed where she had left it, but she couldn’t bring herself to pick it up again. She was tired of trying to unlock the password to her e-mail.

She couldn’t stand it. She had to get out.

Her sweater coat did nothing to keep out the wind as she walked across the crusty snow to the back of the motel where she had hidden the Impala. As she headed out on US 71, she glimpsed a smear of pale pink low in the western sky and guessed it was maybe four p.m.

There was a sign saying that Sioux Rapids was only three miles away, so she headed south. She needed hot food. She needed to be around people.

Sioux Rapids turned out to be a clone of Morning Sun, with old red brick storefronts, many of them vacant, lining a deserted Main Street. The only cars were parked in front of Max & Erma’s Bar. She didn’t linger after she finished her hamburger and a glass of red wine, intending to head down to the Walmart Mick had told her about to buy some warmer clothes and a prepaid cell phone.

As Amelia steered the Impala back out on US 71 into the dark night, her eyes kept flicking to the rearview mirror to make sure she wasn’t being followed. About three miles out of town, headlights flashed in her rearview mirror. A car was coming up behind her, and as Amelia slowed the Impala, her heart started to race. The car was right on her tail now, but she couldn’t see a house or even a light where she could turn in for help.

Then, suddenly, the other car accelerated and sped past her. She let out a hard breath of relief as she watched its tail lights grow fainter, then disappear as the car turned off the road.

She noticed the soft glow of lights ahead and realized the car that had been following her had pulled off into a parking lot. As she neared, she saw what looked like a factory set down in the middle of the dark fallow fields. A sign appeared in her high beams—
S
IOUX
C
ENTRAL
H
IGH
S
CHOOL
. And below that, all lit up,
T
HE
N
UTCRACKER
B
ALLET
7
PM
T
ONIGHT!

She hit the brakes and stared at the sign. With a look at the dark empty highway ahead, she swung left into the parking lot.

A sweet-faced old woman with hair the color of a Brillo pad was sitting at a card table in front of the trophy case. She took Amelia’s five dollars and handed her a program. Amelia followed the murmur of voices to the gymnasium. A stage had been erected under a basketball hoop, forming a makeshift proscenium flanked with purple velvet drapes. Amelia sat in one of the folding chairs next to a big ruddy-faced man holding a video camera.

The front of the program showed a drawing of a ballerina and the words “Magda Purdy’s School of Dance and Aerobics Presents The Nutcracker Ballet Starring Special Guest Star Jennifer Collins from Ballet Des Moines.”

The gym lights dimmed. There were murmurs and giggles coming from behind the purple velvet.

The music began. It was a recording, of course, but as the first sweet notes of the overture echoed in the big gym, Amelia felt an expansion in her chest, as if breathing had suddenly become easier. When the drapes parted, little white lights went on all around her, the glow of iPhones held up by moms and dads.

It was a threadbare little production, with a gaudy painted backdrop of a Christmas tree and a few pieces of furniture that Amelia suspected had come from attics and basements. The dancers—all so very young!—wore costumes she was sure had been sewn on home Singers and makeup culled from some mother’s cosmetics bag.

The steps were simplified and the dancers were awkward, but no one cared. As Tchaikovsky’s music swirled through the drafty cold gymnasium, magic was being made.

Amelia sat motionless, hand to her mouth, tears in her eyes. All the Internet searches of herself had yielded nothing about her dancing, but now, here in the dark, things were rushing back to her, things about her dancing that she had thought were lost to her forever.

Sunlight streaming through the big windows of the ballet studio in Burlington, her teacher Dotty’s voice urging her on, and how clear her mind was and how good her body felt when she danced.

The Bird was with her there in the dark.

You look like you’re floating on air up there, baby.

That’s what it feels like, Grandma, flying.

The memories were coming fast now. Falling asleep against The Bird’s shoulder on a Trailways bus. Where were they going? Then she remembered—to the big audition in Indianapolis. A month later, the letter came that said she had a full scholarship to the School of American Ballet in New York City. Another long bus ride to a city so big and so bright that it reminded her of the Emerald City in the movie
The Wizard of Oz
.

Sixteen, Amelia thought as she watched the stage; she had been just sixteen, only a few years older than these girls. How had she done it? Where had she found the courage? But she knew. The Bird had been there with her. She had stayed with her that first month in New York and, after returning to Iowa, had called her every day.

It’s hard, Grandma. All the other girls are so good.

So are you. Don’t you quit.

I wish you were here with me.

I’m always with you, Mellie, even when I’m not there.

The second act was starting, the one set in the Kingdom of Sweets. There was a scraping sound as parents sat forward in their metal folding chairs. The tinkling music for the Sugar Plum Fairy’s solo brought back another blizzard of memories. Getting accepted into the New York City Ballet, exhausting days and nights, living on coffee and wonton soup from Wok City near Lincoln Center, bloodied feet, and endlessly sewing ribbons on pointe shoes. And then, after two years in the corps, getting called into the office and told her contract was not going to be renewed, that she was too tall and her way of dancing too idiosyncratic.

That was the exact word they had used. She had to go look it up. It meant “personal, peculiar, distinctive, quirky, unique” and the last one . . . “all your own.”

Wasn’t that what dancing was supposed to be?

Familiar music brought her eyes back to the stage. It was the Arabian solo, the one that was called Coffee in the Miami City Ballet version.

Miami City Ballet . . . where she went after leaving New York. Where there was a man tall enough to partner her when she rose to almost six feet in her pointe shoes. Where no one thought her way of dancing was strange. Where she had bloomed in the spotlight.

The girls on stage were turning into blurs, and Amelia realized she was tearing up again. But they were tears of anger. Why couldn’t she find this part of herself anywhere? What happened to her? Why did she stop? Why did she quit and marry Alex?

The urge to bolt from the gymnasium was powerful, but she stayed in her seat, not wanting to bother the others around her. It was almost over, just the grand pas de deux left.

The Sugar Plum Fairy came back on stage, the young woman named Jennifer who had come from Des Moines to this gym in the middle of nowhere.

Unable to watch any longer, Amelia looked down at the program in her lap. When she finally looked up, she focused for a moment on the young woman and then her attention went to the Cavalier. He was tall and licorice-stick thin, with wavy dark hair. His expression was earnest as he partnered the young woman.

Amelia stared at the boy, but she was remembering a man.

There was an odd fluttering in her chest, like her heart suddenly wasn’t beating right, and her vision was narrowing, tunneling down, the edges darkening, and everything was disappearing and all she could see was . . .

“Jimmy,” she whispered.

He was the one who had been her partner in Miami. He was the one who had been her friend. He was the one who . . .

Her cheeks were burning, and the dancers on the stage were just ghost-blurs moving in the dark. It was flooding back now, Jimmy’s deep bellow of a laugh, his wide easy smile that creased up his face like one of those drama masks, his hands tight around her waist as he lifted her, his hands soft on her breasts as he made love to her.

Kiss a lover, dance a measure . . .

He was the one, the person who had been there in the thick fog of her forgetfulness, the one she had
felt
was still there, the one who had loved her. The one who still loved her?

How had she forgotten him? How could she forget someone that important in her life? And where was he now?

The sound of applause brought her back. The dancers were lined up, taking their bows. Then the curtains closed, the gymnasium lights came on, and everyone started filing out. Amelia sat frozen in the metal chair, staring at the purple velvet curtains.

She shut her eyes tight, desperate to remember, trying to bring all her senses into play. Jimmy had left Miami, she was sure, because she had a sense of a tearful good-bye at an airport. But not Fort Lauderdale . . . at Miami International. Because she could see the strange airline signs for Transaero, Alitalia, Qantas. She could smell the strong Cuban coffee Jimmy drank in the café while they waited for his flight. And she could hear the babble of Spanish and the sound of the intercom announcing departures.

Last call for American Airlines flight sixty-five to San Francisco.

That’s me, love, I have to go.

Amelia opened her eyes.

She remembered it all now. How Jimmy had been forced to stop dancing after his second tendon surgery, and how he tried to smile when he told her that there weren’t many options for a thirty-one-year-old dancing king with bad knees. The offer to be ballet master and teach at the San Francisco Ballet came five months after his final performance in Miami.

They had been lovers. She was sure of that now. But had it been while she was married to Alex? And why had Jimmy ended it? Because something deep inside her was whispering that
he
had left her.

The hard slap of metal chairs being folded made Amelia look around. Two teenage boys were stacking the chairs against the bleachers. Two other boys were dismantling the makeshift stage. Amelia sat watching them as they stuffed the purple velvet curtains into Hefty bags.

Kiss a lover, dance a measure . . .

Jimmy’s words, something to remember him by.

Then, suddenly, she could see it. Those same words, on a computer screen, but not a tiny screen like on a phone, but something bigger, like her iPad. A pink Kindle,
her
Kindle, stuffed full of books she told no one she read and e-mails she told no one she wrote.

I feel like I’m dying but I’m afraid to leave here, to leave him. —A.

Remember this? Kiss a lover, dance a measure, find your name and buried treasure.
See you soon. —J.

It was a fragment from a book by Neil Gaiman that Jimmy had given her right before he left. She had hidden the book away somewhere. Maybe in her closet? The book was about a child called Nobody who was raised by ghosts in a graveyard and had to figure out how to find his way out to a real life.

The night she wrote that e-mail . . . she remembered that night now. That night she had been on her way to see Jimmy. Either he had come back or she had been planning to go to California. But what had happened that night to stop her?

Amelia stood up, gathered her sweater coat around her and left the gym. The lobby was filled with laughing girls, their hair still in ballerina buns, faces still painted. They were zipping their slender bodies into nylon-and-down chrysalises as parents ushered them out the doors.

Amelia spotted a pay phone near the trophy case. She dropped in some quarters and called directory assistance for the number of the San Francisco Ballet offices.

She dialed the number, her heart hammering as the phone rang and then went to a recording, saying the offices were closed for the night. She hung up.

No matter. Tomorrow morning she would try again.