by Kim Wright
“You’re not going to leave me,” a voice says. “I won’t let you go.”
IT IS NOT UNTIL much later that I will understand exactly what happened. That Pamela’s husband had been as upset as she by the meeting with their lawyer. That after she ran out, he ran out too and had spent the last twenty-four hours searching for her, driving in one wide furious loop between their lake house, their mountain house, their beach house, and their Charlotte house, ripping open each door and finding each room empty. How his fury and panic had risen with each passing mile. How he’d gotten speeding tickets in three different counties within hours of each other and some computer had finally triggered in Raleigh. Telling the authorities that there’s a dangerous person out there, a man driving wildly from one end of the state to another, a man who’d been doing ninety in a sixty outside of Asheville at eleven in the morning and was stopped again just four hours later, almost to Wilmington, for failure to yield. Despite the fact that they had put out an APB on his license plate, he’d somehow made it back to Charlotte undetected and to this studio. Did he really think she’d be here? He’d sat outside watching the door for some time, a witness would later confirm, and then at some point he had grabbed the gun and gone in. A pistol, not one of his rifles, a smaller gun that he kept hidden in his bedside table, a gun he claimed to have bought for his wife’s protection. He’d seen a red dress through the window and the slender shape of a blond woman and in that split second he’d made the same mistake as Nik. The woman was getting ready to dance. She lifted her right hand as if she were waiting for a man to come and claim her and that had been too much. He’d grabbed the gun with no idea of how he was going to use it. That’s the strangest part of all. That during all that driving, all those hours alone in the car, he had not formulated a plan.
Of course I didn’t know any of this when I was standing there with the pistol pressed against the side of my face. I didn’t know that a few seconds earlier Bob had brought the butt of this same gun down on Anatoly’s head as he came through the door or that Anatoly had been so intent on his computer screen that he had never seen it coming. But Nik had looked up from the stereo at the sound of the first thud and had known what was happening at once. He must have started for the back door, and it’s hard to say with all the noise, with all the confusion, with the music so damn loud, what happened next or in what exact order the other people in the room became aware of the gunman’s presence. I was standing there like a ninny, blindfolded with my right arm up, probably looking like Justice without her scales, and when the gunman grabbed me I had even tried to dance. At what point did he realize he had the wrong woman? When I asked him if he was trying to trick me, did he know at once that was not Pamela’s voice? Or was it not until his arm went around my waist? Maybe I moved differently, smelled differently, or maybe there was something in the shape of my shoulders or my hips that told him his wife had eluded him yet again. That he was holding a gun to the head of a stranger. That he was as much a hostage to the situation as I was.
“I’m not your wife,” I say, but by now I’m only telling him what he already knows. The barrel pulls away from my cheek and there’s the sound of a shot, impossibly loud, so much so that the room echoes with it, reverberating, turning it into a thousand shots at once. I roll away from him, using all my strength, and he releases me so abruptly that I lose my balance. I feel myself tumbling through the blackness, hitting the wooden floor hard enough that one of my earrings flies off, and when I pull the blindfold away I’m lying on my side, half under Quinn’s desk. From this angle the ballroom looks strange, as if the whole world has tilted and slid. Anatoly is stirring in the chair above me, mumbling like someone coming out of a deep sleep. He tries to stand and falls back, saying one word in Russian. Izvinite.
From my vantage point beneath the table, I can see it all. See the women moving as one to engulf Nik. Surrounding him, shielding him, pulling him toward the back door. They move as if they’ve choreographed it, as if this were all some sort of dance they’d been secretly rehearsing for months. Isabel has a cell phone pressed to her face as she walks. Calling the police probably, and her expression shows more irritation than fear. She yells back toward the gunman, “You can’t come in here,” as if he were nothing more than a badly trained dog, and then she holds the door open for the other women. Nik’s eyes are searching the room for something, but it’s like he’s being carried away on a great wave. He understands that the gun meant for him has been turned on me. The man who is so proud that he refuses to let anyone buy him a Sprite knows full well that he has run up tremendous charges and is leaving a woman to pay his bill.
Later the story will improve, become nearly epic in the retelling, and will require them to use words like “overpowering” and “wresting,” but the truth is that by the time Steve and Harry are across the floor, Pamela’s husband has already dropped his hand to his side. The mirror behind him is shattered, a spiderweb of broken glass with a dark hole in the center, and he stands helplessly, turning in a slow circle, his face as thoughtless as a child’s. Steve got the gun from him easily, and it took only the slightest nudge from Harry before he toppled to the floor, a gunman no more. Just a jilted husband, a man who panicked and shot at his own reflection, a man named Bob. The music has stopped and his sobs are the loudest thing in the room. Steve kneels and puts one hand on my shoulder, saying, “Are you all right?” When I say yes, he stands and turns to Anatoly, pressing something against his head. He has taken my blindfold, I realize. Pamela’s scarf. The Hermès is now covered with blood, and it takes me another second to remember that, beneath all the jokes, Steve really is a doctor. He’s speaking calmly to Anatoly and saying, “You’ll be fine. Just sit back.”
The police come thundering through the back door. When Isabel had called, they were already on their way. The witness in the parking lot, who we would later learn was a busboy from Esmerelda’s, had reported a man leaping from a parked car with a gun. He read them the car’s license plate number and they’ve come with their full SWAT team, only to be met by a group of women, running across the parking lot toward them in sequined dresses, shrieking words like “hostage,” “gunshot,” and “blood.” But in the ballroom all they find are four men and a woman. One of the men is on his knees, sobbing. Another man is holding a gun on him while the third is pressing a cloth to the head of the fourth man, who appears to be wounded. The woman is crawling out from beneath a desk and swatting at the long strings of cobwebs clinging to her red dress.
Bob is taken away. They handcuff him and put him in a car and then they insist on escorting me and Anatoly out to the ambulance. When I step into the parking lot—as surprised by the bright sunlight as if I were exiting a movie theater—it sets off a fresh spasm of weeping among the women and the sight of Anatoly behind me on a stretcher only makes it worse. Now that it is over, we’re collapsing. Of course we are. Jane’s knees buckle and the medics look her over too. I can’t stop shaking, so they wrap me in heated blankets and have me lie down in the back of the ambulance. They check Anatoly’s head, thinking perhaps he has a concussion. Through the ambulance door I can see the men making gestures in the air and the women all on their cell phones calling God knows whom.
Quinn and one of the cops are also standing at the door of the ambulance and she tells him the name of everyone who was in the studio when the gunman entered. She enunciates the names slowly and methodically, helping with the Russian spellings, talking loudly enough that I can hear her. There is one name she leaves out. I raise my head, dizzy and trapped by the heat of the blankets, and our eyes meet. I nod, to let her know I understand.
Nik was never there. That’s our story and we have all silently agreed to it, with negotiations composed of raised eyebrows, meaningful glances, and texts sent to the person standing right beside you. I remember Isabella’s words back in the food court and if “some sort of trouble” can get a man permanently deported then it is simpler, cleaner, smarter, t
o pretend that Nik was nowhere near this particular trouble. Anatoly is telling the medic that he doesn’t want to go to the hospital and he tries to prove that he’s fine by counting backward from one hundred. “You must let me stay,” he says to the doctors as they bandage his head. “This is my studio. I am responsible for these people.”
The cops take statements from everyone, including me, although since I was blindfolded for most of the crisis, I am not exactly the world’s best witness. The blindfolding seems to confound the young officer interviewing me. I have trouble making him understand that it was not the gunman who blindfolded me, that it was already on when he came through the door. Struggling to explain, I almost slip. I almost mention Nik’s name but then I tell the young officer that we often dance blindfolded at the studio, that this is a way for ballroom dancers to check their balance. He seems to believe me. He looks around, then expels a big long sigh. We look crazy to them, I realize, standing in the bright sunlight in our false eyelashes and Swarovski crystals.
The police had known they were dealing with a domestic incident the minute they confirmed Bob’s license plate and I gradually see, with growing relief, that they are inclined to leave it at that. Divorce makes people unhinged—this is the general consensus of the crowd in the parking lot. The man just snapped. They’ve been looking for Pamela too, ever since Bob got the second speeding ticket and had just found her minutes before the busboy’s call, at a friend’s house, drinking chocolate martinis. A domestic incident, says the police captain. That’s about all they deal with these days, now that the world’s gone crazy, and nobody keeps their business to themselves. It’s just a shame all of us had to get caught up in it.
“Can you remember anything else?” the young officer asks me.
I shake my head and realize I’m only wearing one earring. Quinn has come up beside me. The ambulance and the cops have gradually begun to leave. Quinn smiles at this young man, who’s trying so hard to be thorough, and asks if he can continue with me at another time. She says, “It’s almost six. We should be leaving soon.”
And that’s how I learn that apparently they all still intend to dance. Amid the confusion of the past hour, Quinn has been quietly going around, finding new combinations of partners to accommodate Nik’s absence. They’d had a vote. They are in agreement. If Anatoly can do it, if he can get on his feet and cover his routines, they want to go to the hotel as planned and compete.
Anatoly seems as confused as I am. “We can’t compete,” he says. “Not without . . .” He looks around at the scene and exasperation flits across his face. This probably isn’t the first time he’s lost someone in a squeal of tires, and it’s no wonder he thinks Americans are naive. We’re always so shocked when bad things dare to happen. So angry when we can’t fix them. I suspect he sees us all as golden retrievers—big, dumb, and strong, bounding across open fields, drooling from our permanent smiles, blissfully unaware of the wider world around us. We stick our snouts down the hole and are surprised by the snake every time.
“Come on,” Quinn says firmly. “The limo’s back. We’ve missed the banquet but if we hurry, we can be there for the first heat.”
What does she mean, the limo’s back? Where had it gone? I scan the parking lot. When I’d first arrived at the studio, it had been over by the grocery loading dock, and now it’s pulled facing the opposite direction, ready to go. The women must have thrown Nik into the limo, I realize dully. He’s at the airport now, or perhaps he has already taken flight. Quinn is pushing a legal pad into Anatoly’s hands, explaining to him that he can cover most of the extra heats. By extra heats, I guess she means the heats Nik would have danced, but she doesn’t say this. And for the heats where there is a conflict—by this I gather she means heats where Nik would have been dancing at the same time as Anatoly—the civilian boys have agreed to step up. We can just do the routines we learned in group class. It will be fine. Steve was dressed to dance anyway and they’ll come up with something for Harry. And she has called Lucas. He saw the whole thing on the news and was already putting on his best preacher suit when the phone rang. He’s going to meet us at the hotel.
“We can work out the details in the limo,” she says. “That is, if the two of you are up to it.”
“Why bother?” Anatoly says. “Group routines and half of us dancing with the wrong partner? We won’t place.”
“Oh, honey,” Quinn says, laughing. “That’s small potatoes considering what we’ve just been through. We need to do this. Every damn one of us. Even you.”
“Well,” Anatoly says, looking skeptically at the list Quinn has made on the legal pad. “I see that I am supposed to tango with you, Kelly. Are you able?” Kind Quinn. I’m beginning to think of her as superhuman Quinn, the way she has orchestrated all this, and she’s even remembered that the tango is my favorite dance, the only one I have a prayer of placing in, and that’s the dance in which she’s paired me with Anatoly.
“I just need to get my earring,” I say. “I lost it in the studio.”
“Don’t go back in there,” says Quinn. “Tell me where you think it is and I’ll get it.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “It won’t take me but a minute.”
Anatoly pushes himself slowly to his feet and starts toward the others. Valentina is holding his tux on a hanger. She motions for him to hurry. Quinn starts to say something, then stops. I start to ask her something, and then stop. We stand for a second, looking at each other.
“Things are okay,” she says. “As okay as they can be.”
“How do we know?”
“We’ll hear from him eventually, I’m sure of it.” And then she adds, “The good news is, your hair’s still perfect.”
I WALK INTO THE studio. I don’t know what I was expecting—crime scene tape? A CSI team taking pictures? But everyone has gone, writing this off to just another marriage gone sour, just another rich man who’ll buy his way into a psych ward instead of a prison. I find my earring, taking care not to step in the shards of glass. The crumpled scarf is still lying where Steve left it after he had pressed it to Anatoly’s head to stop the bleeding.
I walk to Nik’s desk and pull open the top drawer. It’s empty.
IN THE LIMO, THE mood has changed to a spirit of euphoria. There are no cops and ambulances now, just high fives and loud declarations of how it would take more than this to bring us down. We’re so crowded that we’re piled half on top of each other. Harry, who had not been expecting to dance, is struggling into Nik’s slim tuxedo, which Quinn found hanging on the back of the bathroom door. He strips down to his underwear, doing a little shimmy on the limo floor, and all the women take turns slapping his butt. Isabel is acting as a sort of emcee, calling out the new order of who will be dancing with whom. Quinn is on the phone explaining to the organizers that there will be some changes in our lineup, that we are running late but on our way. Steve opens the champagne and for once Anatoly does not protest that we should wait until after the competition to drink. Steve pours it, warm and bubbly, into small paper cups. No more than an inch for anyone, no more wine than you would get at communion.
At some point someone notices that Steve has blood on his shirt. His tux doesn’t have a vest, but Harry’s does. Harry makes a great show of sacrificing it for the greater good, and the vest covers most of the stain. It takes me a surprisingly long time to realize that the blood on Steve is Anatoly’s, that Steve must have gotten smeared when he’d bent over him to examine the cut on his head. Quinn pulls a little marker of Tide to Go out of her purse, dabs at the stain, and then leans back and announces, “You can hardly see it.”
Of course you can see it. It all but glows in the dark. I can’t seem to look at anything else.
Anatoly clumsily moves over beside me. We review which steps I know in tango and he tells me what sequence he’ll try to work them in. He reminds me that when we get out on the floor with other dancers all aroun
d us, I shouldn’t be surprised if he mixes it up a bit. There isn’t always enough room to move along the clear line of dance. People step in front of you, sometimes by accident, but there are even dancers who will deliberately try to cut you off. I have to trust him, he says. He knows how to find the open floor.
“But even if you do not always know where you are going,” he says, “you must take big steps.”
I nod, staring straight ahead and holding the champagne in my hand. Don’t worry, I tell Anatoly. Nik has explained all this to me many times.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
BY THE TIME the limo arrives at the hotel, we are celebrities. Aerial shots of the studio have apparently run all over the six o’clock news with the banner HOSTAGE BALLROOM. I have twenty-two calls on my iPhone and I send quick e-mails to my mother and Elyse, asking them to get the word out that I’m okay.
Perhaps because the story has beaten us to the competition, Quinn has no trouble getting our heats switched up. She comes back to the table with three tags reading 384—this was the flight that took Nik out of Moscow, years ago. He’d always considered it his lucky number and requested it for comps, and now Quinn pins the tags on Harry, Lucas, and Steve. An organizer brings us plates of leftover food from the buffet and says, “Bless your hearts.” Jane takes the heat sheets and gets us lined up and from there it all becomes a blur. I’m having so much trouble following events in a linear fashion that I wonder if I hit the floor harder than I realized and if maybe I’m the one who’s concussed.
I suspect we’re quite bad in the early dances. The routines from group class weren’t designed to show well in competition. One of the other studio owners stops by our table and says “Bad break, man,” but Anatoly barely responds. Which bad break is the man referring to—the crack across his head, the loss of Nik, our dismal showing in the early rounds? Or perhaps the fact that Anatoly is the proprietor of a studio that, thanks to the news stories, the citizens of Charlotte will ever after refer to as Hostage Ballroom?