The Splendour Falls
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Authors: Unknown,Rosemary Clement-Moore
ROSEMARY CLEMENT-MOORE
splendour
falls
CORGI BOOKS
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409096245
THE SPLENDOUR FALLS
A CORGI BOOK 978 0 552 56135 8
First published in the United States in 2009 by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York., as
The Splendor Falls
Published in Great Britain by Corgi Books,
an imprint of Random House Children's Books
A Random House Group Company
This edition published 2010
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Rosemary Clement-Moore, 2009
The right of Rosemary Clement-Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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To Mom.
For a thousand and one reasons.
Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.
â
DAME MARGOT FONTEYN, PRIMA BALLERINA
F
or months, I relived the pas de deux in my dreams, in that multisensory Technicolor of a memory I'd much rather forget. Nothing ever changed: the backstage perfume of sweat and hair spray. The heat and glare of the lights. The delicious coil and spring of my muscles as I moved through the choreography as if it were a spontaneous outburst of the joy I felt when I danced. The glorious triumph over gravity as Pasha lifted me over his head, and I was untethered, not just from the stage, but from the earth.
If I could have forced myself to wake up then, it would have been better. Like dying happy. But the dance played out in measured beats, as unchanging as a reel of film.
Pasha set me down, soft as moonlight; the orchestra covered the hollow tap of my pointe shoe on the stage. I balanced on one leg, the other stretched up behind me, prolonging the illusion of flight.
I could never say what went wrong in the next eight bars. The stage was clean, my pointe was solid. It wasn't even a particularly difficult combination. Come down to fourth position, port de bras and
changement
to second position and a quick series of
chaîné
turns.
Right foot, left foot, right . . then a strange crunching sound that seemed to come from inside my head. Without knowing how I got there, I was facedown on the stage, and the murmurs of the audience were escalating with worry. In my dream â my memory â I tried to get up, but Pasha held me down, lapsing into panicked Russian. I didn't have to understand the language to know that something had gone very wrong.
It's funny how so much can hinge on one missed step.
Not funny ha-ha. Funny that the moment that should have been the pinnacle of my seventeen years on this planet ends up making me famous for the en-tirely wrong reason.
So I really don't mean funny so much as âtragically ironic'.
Dancers get injured doing the flashy things, jetés and
échappés.
I mean, who the hell breaks their leg on a turn they teach in the tiny-tots class?
Me, I guess. The month before, I'd gotten a fullpage write-up in
Ballet Magazine.
The month after, I was a tragic item in a sidebar to an article on insuring your legs, Betty Grable style, against career-ending injuries.
Sylvie Davis, the youngest-ever principal dancer for American Ballet, suffered a compound tibia and fibula fracture in front of hundreds of horrified audience members during her stunning debut at Lincoln Center.
At least I knew how to make an exit.
I
wanted to hate Alabama, and nothing about my arrival disappointed me.
To be fair, there aren't many places that are easy to fall in love with in ninety-degree heat and eighty-five per cent humidity. The bumpy flight from my connection in Atlanta, on a minuscule plane with doll-sized seats, hadn't helped. And that was before some snafu at the gate forced us to deplane on the tarmac and ride a bus to the terminal.
I'd been out of my walking cast for two weeks.My leg
throbbed like a sadistic metronome as I limped down the concourse, and the toes of my right foot were swollen like fat pink cocktail weenies. Gigi's carrier bag hung from my shoulder, my fingers white-knuckled on the strap. It's bad enough to dread something; it's even worse when the pain of moving forward is more than metaphorical.
I could rest a minute, sit down between the barbecue restaurant and the souvenir shop with the Confederate flag coffee mugs. For that matter, I was inside the security checkpoint. No one could come in and get me without buying a plane ticket. I could just live here until my mother and her new husband got back from their honeymoon and reported me missing.
Granted, that wouldn't really help convince them I no longer needed to see a psychiatrist.
Settling for a brief rather than indefinite delay, I ducked into the bathroom. It was empty, so I put Gigi's bag on the counter while I splashed water on my face and reapplied some lip gloss. Makeup has never been a priority with me â at least not offstage, which means all the time now. But whenever my mother was losing a fight, she always took a moment to freshen her lipstick. Eventually I figured out this was how she bought time to think up an irrefutable argument.
I was merely stalling the rest of my life.
Gigi gave a soft yip of discontent. I unzipped the top of her carrier so that she could stick her head out, then filled her travel bowl from the half-empty Evian bottle in my purse. The dog took a few indifferent laps, then blinked at me. Her subtext seemed pretty clear: What the hell is your problem?
Was it wrong to have a problem with being shipped off like an unwanted parcel to stay with a relative I'd met only once? I vaguely remembered Cousin Paula from Dad's funeral, pressing my mother's hand in gentle sympathy, even though Mother and Dad had been divorced for three years. But as she'd said on the phone, in her Scarlett O'Hara accent, âKin is kin,' and she was happy to have me visit.
Maybe I shouldn't be dreading this. These were my father's family. This was my chance to learn where he came from, because Dad had never spoken much about his background. Which raised the possibility that he might have left Alabama to get away from these people.
A thin blonde wheeled her carry-on into the restroom. Gigi pricked her ears forward adorably, but the woman just shot the dog carrier a dirty look before disappearing with a sniff into the handicapped stall. It was as though thinking about my mother had invoked her eviler twin.
I should correct that. My mother is not evil. She's merely self-absorbed. I can be, too.
For sixteen years, our self-interests coincided more often than not. I lived to dance, and she loved having a ballet prodigy for a daughter. So her lack of maternal instinct didn't really affect me until The Accident (it was hard not to think of it in capital letters) ended my skyrocketing career right as it left the atmosphere.
The Accident had also turned me into a child again. I'd been a professional dancer. I'd travelled to Europe and Asia with the company. Nine months of surgery, casts and titanium rods later, I was a seventeen-year-old
âunaccompanied minor' â thanks a lot, Delta Air Linesâ pawned off on distant relatives to be babysat.
The infuriating thing was, Mother knew very well how self-sufficient I was, because she'd taken full advantage of it while dating her new husband. I think if it had been up to her, she would have left me on my own while she went off on her two-week honeymoon.
But âDr Steve' hadn't considered it an option. I was emotionally fragile, at a crossroads, major cognitive realignment, blah blah blah. God, I hated shrinks.
He wasn't even
my
shrink, just my new stepfather.
So, I couldn't be left alone for two weeks in our Upper West Side apartment with only Gigi, the security staff, the doorman and all the take-out food in Manhattan for company. It would do me good, he said, to get away from the City, the reminders of my old life, and have a change of scenery.
The unspoken thread in this pronounced sentence was that the godforsaken wilderness of the Deep South was the perfect place for me to dry out. A drastic measure, just because I drank myself unconscious at their wedding. Imagine what he would have suggested if he knew about the hallucinations.
