The Love That Split the World (22 page)

We let ourselves into the first studio we come to. The lights stutter on, illuminating gray vinyl floors, two mirrored walls, and a scraped-up wooden piano beside a rack of sound equipment. Beau walks across the room and sits down at the piano, tapping out “Happy Birthday” with one finger.

“Beautiful,” I say. “A true work of art.”

He smiles down at the keys and adds his other hand, picking up a slow, quivering song that deepens the chills along my neck. He drops his hands into his lap and looks up at me. “You gonna dance?”

I walk to the middle of the floor and sit down to stretch. “It’s cold,” I say.

“Want me to warm you up, Cleary?”

“Somehow I think that won’t end with me dancing.”

“No, probably not.”

I stand up and meet Beau’s gaze in the mirror. “This is incredibly awkward.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m dancing for an audience of one. Who does that?”

“Strippers?”

“Okay, I’ll just pretend I’m a stripper. That’ll make this so much easier.”

He nods. “Or you can picture me in my underwear.”

I cover my face and laugh-groan. “I think you’re going to have to close your eyes.”

“Shyest stripper I ever met,” he says.

“And how many strippers have you met, Beau Wilkes?”

“Not too many,” he says. “A few dozen.”

I groan again, walk over to stand behind him, and cover his face with my palms. I feel his mouth shift into a smile under my hands. “That better?” he asks, starting to play blind.

“I’m going to turn the light off too,” I say.

“Fine.”

“Fahn.”

“Fahn.”

“Please keep your eyes closed,” I beg.

He grips my wrists lightly and pulls them down in front of him, against his stomach. I lean around his shoulder to look into his face and see his eyes scrunched closed. “Thanks,” I say. He presses one of my palms to his mouth, and my whole body warms as I unwind myself from him and go to the light switch. “Keep them closed.”

“You’re the boss.”

When he starts to play, I close my eyes and listen, trying to let all my nerves and discomfort seep out. It’s easier than I would’ve expected—he plays so beautifully it’s like the song is a piece of him that’s reached outside his body to meet me, and it’s drawing me out of myself too, leaving no walls standing between us. The way he plays piano makes me wish I could see him play football too. I bet he’s graceful like Matt, but less subdued. I imagine he plays untamed, unfettered, un-self-conscious, the same way he plays the piano. With simultaneous tenderness and abandon, making mistakes that only serve to make those periods of perfection seem more beautiful and real, overflowing with life and possibility. He plays the piano like he’s falling and, at any second, his fingers could completely miss the keys. Seeing people do the things they love has always fascinated and inspired me. Seeing Beau doing the thing he loves now actually makes me
want
to dance, to live so big my life swallows the entire world.

I start to move. It’s nothing like doing jazz or pom routines with the Ryle dance team. It’s like that first ballet class I took. I’m a tree growing; I’m sun warming the earth. An avalanche and a wave glancing off rock, and oil sliding through the palms of ancient hands, and in all that time, I’m also me and nothing else. I’m not my mother’s straight-backed walk or my sister’s beating hummingbird wings, and it’s fine.

It is good. The people I love are in me, little flecks like mica in a creek bed. There are strangers in me too, with my face and hands and feet, a voice that spoke to me while I was nothing but a peanut-sized inkling in her belly; a hand that held mine as we walked down the street. This hurts, but it’s good
to move and be all the things I am but can’t explain. It’s good to let my body bear the tension instead of my mind. I try to become the music, to absorb a piece of Beau into my limbs, and soon I’m lost in the darkness of the room, the swirl of the piano keys, the sweat wetting my hairline, my neck, my armpits, my legs as I leap and roll and hinge and turn. I am muscle and sinew, crunch and push, gather and swell. I am roundness, fullness. I am smallness, a tiny important thing tearing through the Earth.

My mind wanders. I fall deeper and deeper into the song, into the dance, into my own memory. The song fades away, and still I keep moving until the last burst of energy thrusts out of me and I feel myself fade and settle like once-disrupted sand falling back asleep on the ocean floor. When all of me has finally stilled, except my overworking lungs, I look up into the mirror and see Beau behind me, standing beside the bench. He’s leaning against the piano, eyes visibly soft even in the darkness. “Why’d you stop?” he says quietly.

I run a hand over my neck. It feels like it’s been hours since I last spoke, and my heart is still racing. “You stopped playing.”

“No, I mean, why’d you quit?”

I cross the room to the far wall, whose top half is composed of windows overlooking the campus, and lean against the barre. Beau follows, splays his hands out on the wooden post. He waits and watches. “It’s hard to explain,” I tell him.

He doesn’t push for more, and maybe that’s why, after a minute, I offer it to him. “My mom was a dancer. Not my biological mother—my
mom
,” I say. “And my little sister, Coco. She’s talented, wants to be in musical theater.” Beau looks at me
patiently and waits for me to go on. “My dad was into sports, and my brother, Jack, is on the football team. They look like our parents too. I mean, the portrait on our mantel could be an ad for the nuclear family, and then there’s me standing off to the side, ten shades darker. Mom used to always tell me: It doesn’t matter how things look—we’re family. And we are. I know that. But I guess after Grandmother left, I admitted to myself that it wasn’t
only
the way we looked that was different.”

“So?” Beau says.

I sigh and try to regain traction on my thoughts, which all swam out of me while I was dancing. I feel emotionally stretched out, loose and relaxed, unable to track down my usual knots.

“So as a kid, I felt different from everyone, and the way I combatted that was to make sure no one else noticed, and that meant doing a lot of things I didn’t really want to do. But after Grandmother left, everything I’d done to fit in just made me feel sick. I didn’t want to be around anyone, other than Megan, because I was so self-conscious that I was pretending, and I didn’t know how to stop.

“And then one night, my whole family went to one of Coco’s recitals. She and this kid Michael Banks were doing a rendition of the duet from
La Sylphide
. It was beautiful. She was beautiful, completely in control and elegant. I’ve never danced like that in my life. Dad and Jack were practically asleep, but then I looked over at my mom and she was crying, and the way I felt right then, it was stupid, but I was jealous and hurt and I hated it. And then that night, I went home, and I started Googling Indian reservations in Alabama. I’d thought about
doing it a million times before that, but I always felt guilty, like I was betraying my parents. That night I just didn’t care. There was a word, something my birth mother called herself the one time she visited me,
ishki
. So I started with that. It means
mother
, in Chickasaw and Choctaw, so I had a pretty good idea she came from one of those nations.”

“Did you find her?” Beau asks.

“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I only really looked at one reservation before I kind of freaked out. There were pictures of people from the tribe, and I guess I didn’t expect that.”

“Because one of them might’ve been your birth mom?”

I nod. “But on their home page there was this interview with a girl from the tribe who’d just gotten a teaching job at Brown, after finishing a grad program there. I clicked on it mostly just to get away from the photos, but she was talking about how Brown was such a great place to learn and meet different kinds of people, and how before she went to college she didn’t really appreciate her home or her heritage, but that getting some space helped her see it differently, and now she knew she wanted to come back eventually but first she wanted to inspire young people to care about their histories and their traditions. And I want all that—to study something I love and meet people who are like me and not like me and graduate with a plan for how I’m going to make the world better. And I want to stop competing with my siblings and doing things just so people see me a certain way. And maybe someday I’ll like board games and window-shopping and movies about sports teams and dance team kick-lines, but right now I just want to start over, somewhere far away where no one expects anything from
me and I can just be myself. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense,” he says, “but I think you’re wrong. Maybe not about all of it, but about dancing. Maybe you don’t dance like your sister or your mom, but anything with eyes could tell that it’s a part of you, Natalie. I’ve never seen you look more like yourself.”

“More like myself, huh?”

A small smile pulls at his mouth. “Don’t make fun of me. I’m tryin’ to be serious.” His lips settle into a straight line again. “You shouldn’t give dancing up just ’cause you think it belongs to someone else.”

I sigh. “What about you and football?”

His head tilts back in a silent laugh. “That’s different.”

“How?”

“Wasn’t my choice.”

“Beau, be honest with me. Were you scouted?”

He runs a hand down the back of his hair. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Natalie, I only graduated high school because teachers made up my grades so I could play. You think I’m gonna go off and get a college degree?”

“I think you
could
. I also think college athletic departments are every bit as corrupt as high schools’, and they’d probably make up your grades there too.”

“Maybe,” he says. “And in the meantime, Mason would be here, losing the house, and I’d be sitting through class, going crazy.”

“Couldn’t Mason work more or get a roommate or something? It’s four years, Beau, and it could change your life.”

“Maybe I don’t wanna change my life,” he snaps, and when I recoil from him, he settles against the barre again and runs a hand over his mouth then fixes his eyes on me. “I don’t want all that. That’s not what matters to me.”

“Okay,” I relent. “What
do
you want, Beau?” He stares at me for a long moment, and I start to feel shaky and full. “Beau, what is it you want?”

“A porch,” he says softly. He says it like it’s my name, and right then, I think, what both of us want more than anything is something we can never have. “All I really want is to build a house with a nice, big porch that gets used every day.”

24

On Thursday morning, after a particularly unsuccessful appointment with Alice, I head over to the school to get Jack. I pull around behind the field house as practice is winding down, roll down the windows, and close my eyes while I wait. Now that the Jeep is back in working order, I’m back to dropping off and picking up Jack, and now that I’m spending the middle of the night at the dance studio with Beau, the mornings are insufferable.

Life feels too fast and bright right now, but my brain feels foggy and slow. During the day everything hurts less—I don’t have the energy to worry about Grandmother, or even Matt, whose mom texts me a steady stream of Bible verses alongside pictures of
Get Well Soon
balloons, with very little actual information. But when I’m with Beau each night, the world snaps into clearer focus and I’m terrified again. Terrified and awake
and a little bit on fire. I spend the whole time we’re together worrying he’s going to kiss me again and then, when he doesn’t, feeling devastatingly disappointed.

The clash of shouts on the field draws me back to now. I open my eyes and scan the field until I see the two boys—Jack and someone else—pummeling each other on the ground while the rest of the team tries to pry them apart. I jump out of the car and sprint straight for the gate, but by the time I get there, Stephen Lehman has already pulled Jack clear of the other guy and Coach is shouting at them both, pointing off the field. “What happened?” I ask, voice tinny, as Jack stomps right past me and gets in the Jeep, slamming the door. I fling the door back open. “What the hell was that, Jack?”

His chin is smeared with mud and grass stains, but he has no visible injuries. Even so, his face is all screwed up in anger,
and he doesn’t look like my little brother. “Nothing,” he spits, slamming the door again.

I stalk around the car and get in. “What’s going on?” I say more softly. I reach over to him, but he swats my hand away, and turns toward the window.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

“Fine, then talk to me.”

“If you tell them, I’ll tell them about that guy who picks you up in the middle of the night.”

“Jack, that’s not . . .” I shake my head but don’t go on. My phone’s buzzing in my pocket, and when I slide it out I see M
OM
on the screen. Jack swears and drops his forehead against the window. “Your coach must’ve called them.” Jack doesn’t reply, and I answer the call.

“Is he okay?” Mom says.

I glance sidelong at Jack, face impassive and eyes unfocused. “Physically,” I offer. “Yeah, he’s fine.”

Mom sighs, a mix of relief and blossoming concern. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, well, I can’t leave work right now, but Dad’s going to take off early. He’ll be right home.” Jack’s eyes flick to mine when he hears her words through the speaker, then away again miserably.

When I hang up, I stumble over an apology. “I’m sure they’ll understand if you tell them what happened.”

Jack says nothing, doesn’t look at me. As soon as we get home, he storms inside, and I follow him up to his room, but the door’s already shut, his and Coco’s whispers spilling through the cracks around it. I stand with an ear pressed to the door until I hear the soft squeak that escapes when you hold tears in. Jack, definitely. There’s nothing scarier than hearing someone you love cry, and the smaller the sound, the deeper it can burrow into you.

“. . . . just don’t want this sometimes,” Jack’s saying.

“Don’t want what?” Coco murmurs gently.

“Don’t want to
be
.”

I step back from the door and lean against the wall, mind spinning and dark splotches floating across my vision.

Three months to save him
.

There’s nothing scarier than hearing someone you love cry, except imagining a world where that sound stops. Suddenly I can’t breathe. Can’t be here. There’s nothing scarier than loving someone.

Beau and I sneak out to the studio every night until my next appointment with Alice, and every night’s the same. We’re jittery and tense on the car ride over, every inch between us thick with our heartbeats. We talk and flirt while I stretch in the center of the studio floor. Then we turn off the lights, Beau closes his eyes, and I dance. Every song is beautiful, but none is mine. I wonder if I’ll ever hear that song again, or if telling Beau not to wait for me means he’ll never finish writing it. Toward the end of our time in the studio he always ends up watching me while playing, but by then I also feel comfortable and relaxed. Then, once we get into the truck, the tension falls again with a renewed fervor.

Every glance across the dark cab, every moment of eye contact, of almost touching, is overwhelming. Every early morning when he drops me off and we whisper goodbye, I run back to my house, push Gus off my pillows, and collapse into bed feeling wired.

But when I sleep it’s deep and dark and warm and dreamless. I only have a week and a half until we leave for our trip, and while our nights at the studio don’t seem to bring me any closer to Grandmother, I covet them. Every moment with Beau drowns my fear out, but when I wake up from my late-afternoon nap, and the buzz of spending the previous night with him has faded, dread fills me to the brim.

Someone is going to die.

Someone is going to die, and here I am worrying whether Beau and Rachel are back to Whatever They Were since I told him not to wait for me and we don’t see each other outside of the studio.

My Tuesday appointment with Alice goes horribly. I can’t
think clearly, and Alice is irritated by my long pauses and short answers. When she asks me to talk about my relationship with Mom, and I respond after thirty seconds with “She’s nice,” Alice slams her notebook shut though we still have half an hour together.

“I can’t work with this, Natalie.”

“Work with what?” I say, at least as annoyed as she is.

“Every session, your emotions cyclone around you like tornadoes, and all you’ll give me is
she’s nice.
You have to really cut yourself open for counseling to work, and you won’t. You’re trying to kill your feelings to make life easier. You’ve given up. And don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all the new insight you’ve lent to this. But if you’re really so convinced Grandmother is a prophet, or deity, then you know someone’s going to die soon if we don’t crack this. This may be about science for me, but a girl with your already fragile psyche is going to fall to pieces when she lets someone she loves
die
.”

“I do
not
have a fragile psyche.”

Alice stands up and opens her office door for me. “You’re shutting me out. You’re too afraid.”

I don’t budge. “Afraid of what?”

“You want a counselor, Natalie? Is that what you need? Fine. I should’ve cut my schooling in half if all I was going to do was psychoanalyze teenagers, but if that’s what you need, I’ll be your child psychologist for sixty seconds. Here’s my diagnosis: You are suffering a typical, run-of-the-mill, naval-gazing,
who-am-I
existential crisis. You were separated from your biological family at a young age, and you’ve had abandonment issues ever since. Though your adoptive parents are incredibly supportive
and loving, and yes, as you said,
nice
, you didn’t see yourself reflected in either of them as a small child. Thus you learned to look into yourself, overthink and imagine and fantasize, about your identity. Most likely you would have this natural disposition and these feelings of isolation regardless of whether you were raised by your birth parents or adoptive parents, but your obsession with self-knowledge is compacted by the assumption that your biological parents gave you up for the same reason that you don’t recognize yourself in your adoptive parents: because you are missing something. So while most children form their identities out of their likes and dislikes, their interests and relationships, you spent all your time trying to develop an identity from scratch. And what foundation do you build it on? Emotions. Now the problem for highly emotional people is that feelings are unstable and unreliable. They come and go. They change swiftly. Sometimes, in certain seasons of life, they seem to be absent entirely. Not much to build on, is it? Shall I go on?”

“Alice, I—”

“The more negative interactions with others you had as a child, the more you reinforced the belief that you were missing something, and thus the more isolated and alone you felt. The more you
convinced
yourself you weren’t like your peers. And in one essential way, you’re not like them. Most of your classmates never worried about who they were when they were ten years old. Don’t get me wrong, eventually they will—probably in six months when they’re on their own for the first time. But right now most of them are just living their lives. So why aren’t you? Because you have conditioned yourself to spend the vast majority of your time trying to
know
yourself. You are incapable of
letting any feeling go unnamed. Your quest for self-awareness has resulted in crippling self-consciousness. You aren’t able to describe your mother to me in any word other than
nice
because you are at once desperate to be seen and afraid of being seen. You are afraid of unveiling any piece of yourself you don’t like or you find shameful. I can tell you, even if I
had
cut my schooling in half, I’d still be confident enough to bet money that
that
piece is made up of resentment and jealousy. You disdain yourself for feelings you believe to be unique to you, which only further encourages the thought pattern that whispers in your brain at night:
I am not good enough. I am not good
,
period
. Maybe even,
I’m bad. There is something in me that cannot be fixed
.”

Something’s searing though me, and it’s hard to breathe or even see straight. I want to tell Alice to stop, but my throat feels closed and my chest too heavy to get in the breath I need to make words. She goes on.

“No matter how many times your mother and father encourage you to feel comfortable asking questions about your origins, you still feel guilty for wanting to know, and thus refuse to search anywhere but within yourself. You seek out relationships with people you hope will reflect yourself back to you and validate the person you
think
you are, the person you don’t believe your parents accurately see. When you realize that no one can fully see your soul, you become disillusioned. You become hopeless and despairing and you retreat further into yourself, believing you cannot go on living until you have a firm picture of who you are.

“It doesn’t help that, for years, you had Grandmother, an entity that seemed to know everything about you, only to have
her abandon you when you most needed confidence in your identity. And the worst part, for me personally, as I watch this incredibly slow-moving train wreck, is that I—a scientist—am more aware of the quintessential and unnamable thing that makes Natalie Cleary Natalie Cleary than you are. What’s tragic is you’re self-destructing purely by inaction even though you are a smart, strong, emotionally resilient, competent, and capable young woman who should be out conquering the world and falling wildly in love and saying
yes
to every opportunity while, might I add, helping me dismantle the patriarchy controlling the world of scholarly scientific journals by uncovering the truth about Grandmother.”

I’m dizzy now and shaking, my eyes damp, but the pressure on my chest has lightened. I feel empty, like a flimsy outline. “I’m trying.”

“Listen to me.” Alice crosses the room and roughly takes my hand in hers. “I’m older than you and, no offense, way smarter. You’re not missing something. You’re not broken. Your grand identity will not be revealed to you like a bolt of lightning. It’s okay to be scared. Your big feelings are powerful. But it’s not okay to hide, especially when what you want more than anything is to be known. Don’t shut down. Stick this out. Woman up, tell your parents what you’re doing, and stay until we finish this.”

I drop my face into my hands. It’s hard to look at her right now. I feel transparent, horrifyingly naked and not in the comfortable way I do when I’m with Beau. It’s more like I’m in a room made of mirrors and stark light. “What if I can’t, Alice?” My voice comes out quivering, and I realize how afraid I really
am. “What if I do everything I can and it’s still not enough, and I lose Matt or Beau or Dad or Jack? What then?”

I look up at Alice. Her face has softened; she almost looks like a different person. “I don’t know, kid,” she says. “But the only promise you ever get is this very second, and if you leave Union now, you may never see Grandmother again. You may never again see the parallel-universe-traversing boy who’s in love with you, and you may never again see whoever’s about to die. And even if you’re the one calling that shot, it’s going to hurt like hell.”