by Celeste, B.
I was on a roll and couldn’t be stopped. Turning to him, I tightened my hands into fists and glared past the tears that welled in my eyes. It made it difficult to see but didn’t stop me from making sure he knew how I felt. “Whoever this guy is, or these people, they can’t possibly taint my family any more than what’s already been done. If they want to ruin me, destroy me, they can save their energy. Because this—you—did it for them.”
The pain that sliced open his features should have made me feel guilty, but the rage, the sadness, the mixture of every feeling I never wanted to feel again was consuming me as each second passed until I was shaking. Shaking and clawing my way out of my own skin because I didn’t want to be stuck in it right now. Not ever.
As I turned to the door, I grabbed ahold of the handle only for a hand to come down on the wood to prevent me from exiting. “Della, please sit down. You’re not in the mindset to go anywhere right now. You look sick.”
I did what I’d never done before. I shoved him. I put all my strength into the push and sent him stumbling backward because he was unprepared for it, leaving me able to throw the door open and storm out into the rain. Fitting. Clouds grayed the sky, thunder rumbled in the distance, and I thought about all those stories my mother used to tell me about Greek Gods.
“Do you really think they exist?” I’d asked her after she’d told me the story about Zeus. He’d sounded so powerful, so fearful, that I wouldn’t ever want to be on his bad side. But my mother had told me every story had some lies mixed in with the truth. That maybe Zeus wasn’t so bad, just misunderstood because people with power usually were masked by it.
It made me think of my father and his friends, the men who seemed so sure of themselves out in public. When my father was indoors, he was a different man. Kind, gentle, and loving. Nowhere near the person people seemed to look up to and be intimidated by all at the same time. I’d kept hold of that when things got bad because I needed reassurance that he wasn’t a bad man, just masked by his bad decisions.
“Adele!” Theo yelled after me. The rain was coming down harder, faster, but I didn’t care. I let it soak me, prayed it would wash away everything I felt since the shower hadn’t done it. I didn’t want emotions weighing me down anymore.
I needed out.
I needed air.
A black car came into view and Dallas got out with a concerned look on his face. Why he hadn’t left when he was told was beyond me. He’d always known when I needed him. It took him mere seconds before he was ushering me in the back and closing the door, gesturing toward Theo, and saying who knew what. I didn’t care.
I should have but I didn’t.
Because all I cared about was how I felt the loss of my father for a second time. Except, now it felt ten times worse. Before, I’d stared. I was shocked. Silent. Sophie yelled. Lydia cried. But me? I couldn’t. I couldn’t do any of that because I didn’t know how to accept what we were being told. I’d chosen to believe it was all a sadistic prank, like he’d pop out of the bushes and laugh like it was a cruel joke. I’d known better. My father wasn’t like that, but I needed to hold onto anything other than the reality that I’d never see him again.
“I’m broken,” I whispered as soon as Dallas got into the driver seat. So, so broken.
He looked over his shoulder. “I know a lot of broken people, Della. A lot who suffered through unimaginable loss like you. You’re not broken. You’re human.”
I closed my eyes and let the storm be the only sound I heard on the drive home. I didn’t want to be human. I didn’t want to be…
I didn’t want to be.
“Can you show me the routine again?” I asked, walking into Tiffany’s house the following day. She stopped what she was doing in the kitchen, making a pink shake, to stare at me.
“Hello to you too.” Amusement only lasted a few seconds when she saw my face. Her brows drew up. “Uh, like right now?”
I nodded.
She glanced at her shake. “Did you want something to eat first? Maybe we could—”
“I already ate.” The lie slipped off my tongue easily, and she only hesitated a moment before nodding slowly. It didn’t look like she believed me, but she also didn’t call me out on it.
“Okay.” She finished making her shake before throwing some of the dirty dishes into the sink and turning toward the back doors that led to the studio. She was already in her usual attire.
She sipped her drink as I set my things down off to the side and began stretching. I knew she was watching but I paid her no attention. Bending in half, I reached for my foot to stretch my calf and took deep breaths.
“I didn’t think we were training today,” she said after dropping down beside me and stretching too. “I was about to go through some things Judith gave us to practice.”
I straightened and rocked my arms to the side to warm up my obliques. I only felt a little bad I’d bombarded her last minute. “I almost have the dance down. I need a little more help to get in sync with the music. I’m always a beat or two behind.”
“You’re doing fine. We haven’t been at this very long. Hell, it took me longer to get my first dance down.”
Her compliment didn’t ease the tightness in my chest that needed to be expelled before I blew. Since getting back from Theo’s yesterday, I’d kept my phone turned off and my head wrapped around anything other than what he’d told me. It still nagged me, taunting, like a demon sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear. I painted angry black lines and red splatters and white slashes, but nothing helped in my spare room when sleep evaded me. TV didn’t keep my attention. Running could only last so long in the gym located on the first floor of my building, since running outside was something I liked avoiding if I could. What I needed was to exhaust myself until I had no choice but to collapse in bed and fall victim to the abyss of unconsciousness.
We started out doing the routine fully so she could see where I was going offbeat, then twice more together before she told me exactly how to fix my mistakes. It was easy enough, but I’d messed up again. And again. And again. Twenty minutes turned into thirty. Then forty-five. By an hour, Tiffany’s shake was gone and so was her shirt because it was drenched in sweat. She toweled off and paused the music, watching me still move. My back was to the mirrors, my eyes were closed, and I was busy trying to lose myself in each move even without the music.
“Della.”
I didn’t stop.
“Della!”
I cracked an eye open when a hand shot out and grabbed my arm during my last turn. “I was almost finished!” I snapped.
“What is with you?” She dropped her arm and shook her head. “You’ve been a real bitch lately, I’m not going to lie.”
No answer came.
She sighed. “Whatever it is, it’s got you working ten times harder than I’ve seen you work…ever. And that says something because you always worked your ass off in ballet. Probably more than any of us.”
I shrugged, picking up my water and downing half of it in one go. “I want to be able to say I finished a routine and nailed it.”
“Then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What then? What comes after?”
There was a pause where she eyed me suspiciously while I shifted on my feet, water bottle in my hand with a white-knuckle grip around the plastic. “Then I learn a new one.”
I got back into position and waited for her to turn the music on. Instead, she said, “You know, Judith asked about you the other day. She heard you were dancing again.”
My stomach hurt. “So?”
“So…I confirmed you were.”
I dropped my arms. “Why would you do that? She’s going to think I’m coming back. It’s bad enough Sophie made everybody else think that. I was hounded for weeks.”
“I wasn’t going to lie, Della.”
Again, I chose not to say anything.
Tiffany studied me with intense eyes that I avoided as I closed mine a
nd evened my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. My heart rate came down naturally, just in time for me to raise it again if she turned the damn music on instead of interrogating a pointless matter.
“One day you’re going to tell me what’s bothering you,” I heard her say.
Another lie slipped past my parted lips before I could stop it. “Yeah. One day.”
There was a light tap on the door that told me it wasn’t the man who usually showed up despite my wishes. He hadn’t tried to reach out to me because he knew better. Hadn’t shown up. Hadn’t texted. So, it was only a matter of time before he sent somebody else.
Wiping off my hands on the overalls covering my body, I noted the way they fit even looser around the waist but ignored it. Padding over to the front door, I looked through little hole to see light hair with natural highlights similar to mine in the sunlight. The blonde tones made me blink, my hand hesitating to undo the locks before opening to find my aunt behind it.
“Lydia?”
She smiled at me, timid and small, her height an inch or two taller than me, but her features always tentative. “Hello, Della. May I come in?”
Stepping aside, I gestured for her to walk past me, closing the door behind her before turning in curiosity. “Not that I mind, but what are you doing here? You never visit.”
Her lips twitched. “I know I haven’t. That’s something I think about quite often. But that’s why I wanted to see you.”
“You mean, Theo asked you to come?” I walked over to the kitchen and grabbed a glass of water. “Would you like anything to drink?”
“I’m fine.”
I nodded and watched her look around. Her smile grew when she saw a picture of Theo and me from my high school graduation. I was in my cap and gown with my hair curled and a face full of makeup, and Theo was in his typical dress pants and button down shirt with an arm wound around my waist, tucking me into his side. I loved that day. It meant freedom.
In hindsight, that freedom was restricted even when I thought it’d be limitless. And most of that was because of me. I’d been afraid of a lot of things, but mostly of disappointing the ghosts of my past. My mother. Even my father before I’d known the truth. Hell, even after. I was always pressuring myself to be the best, to just be…better. Not of other people. Better than myself. And I knew I was failing at it right now.
“Actually,” Lydia said, “he didn’t. Theo mentioned that you needed some space, but Sophie told him he was being ridiculous. Something about girls your age needing discipline not distance.”
Sounded like Sophie. It made me want to roll my eyes, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat down on the couch while Lydia walked to the TV and studied the frames on the entertainment center the flat screen rested on. Pictures of my parents, of the three of us as a family, one of just Theo. He looked like he always did—not quite smiling, but not scowling either. Not at me, who’d taken that picture when I told him I wanted to go to Central Park.
“Theo knows you better than anybody, so that was why I told Sophie I’d come instead of her. We both know she’d take the wrong approach and come on too strong. I figured I was the lesser of two evils.”
I winced. The last time Sophie had come here she remarked on every piece of furniture she didn’t like, telling me she could buy me better things. Of course she could. Her husband let her buy whatever she wanted to get her off his back. Her taste was the opposite of mine and she knew it. The second I agreed to let her buy me new stuff, I’d lose. Sophie was family and I loved her, but I didn’t want her to think she had any influence or control over me.
“I appreciate it,” I told her honestly.
“You’re painting,” she commented, her attention going toward my overalls. “I still have one of the pictures you drew me when you were little. Do you remember? It was of me and your father. You said you wanted me to have something of us together since we didn’t have many photographs of just the two of us.”
I did remember that. I didn’t understand why the photo album Sophie had given me didn’t have many pictures of them together. Lydia might have come into their lives later, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be part of family photos.
I nodded, a gentle smile forming on my face when she turned to me. “I do. You still have it? I figured all that stuff I drew would be long gone by now. They were awful.”
To my surprise, she laughed. Loudly. Lydia usually only had two volumes—soft and softer. That sound was abnormal. “Oh, Della. I’m not the only one who kept them. There’s a man we both know who’s kept everything you gave him. Art or not.”
Or not? What else had I given Theo that he could have kept? I hadn’t even known he had anything I’d gifted him from back then. The drawings didn’t even seem like anything worth keeping considering some of them were lines and squiggles that made no sense.
“I didn’t give him anything else, Aunt Lydia. But the fact he kept those…” It made my heart thump a little faster than I wanted to admit.
Her smirk was tiny, her eyes dancing as she shook her head. “We’ll agree to disagree, yes? Can I see what you were working on?”
I only paused for a moment before nodding slowly, setting my water down on the coffee table and standing. She followed close behind me as I led her to the room I’d left my latest painting, something I woke up in the middle of the night to create after a dream that was too vivid not to do something about. The sweat that’d been collecting on my brow had stayed there as I’d gotten out of bed and stormed into my spare room in nothing but a pair of panties and the oversized tee I liked sleeping in. I stayed there for four hours, until exhaustion swept over me at six in the morning and I crawled back in bed.
It took me another two hours to get it where it was now. My palms were stained a dark pink from the color I’d mixed up—a dusty rose tone that matched the tint of my cheeks when Lydia’s lips parted after seeing it on the easel.
“Della,” she whispered, grazing her fingertips along the edge of the canvas.
Resting in a black background with various shades of pink, peach, and purple was a lonesome girl who looked too frail, too brittle to be wearing the tutu that graced her narrow waist. The ballerina lacked the leotard that normally clung to her body, her back bare and painted in cream with the darker shadows emphasizing a sickly spine everybody would point at and whisper about because they knew it wasn’t right the way her skin clung to her bones. She was bent over, as if to bow, her face hidden, her stance somber, yet screaming so many things.
Help me.
Save me.
Do something to end this.
That was what the girl in the dream did.
She begged.
I swallowed as Lydia peeled her eyes from my creation and up to me. “It’s stunning. Is it…?” She dipped her chin. I knew what she was asking but all I could do was shake my head.
Another lie. So many lies. “It’s just a girl, Aunt Lydia.”
Despite my aunt not knowing me well, it was clear she didn’t believe me. With good reason. She didn’t call me out and I didn’t offer any further information.
Maybe if I weren’t scared, I could be honest with her. I would tell her that I’d dreamt about me, the girl I was. I’d tell her that I saw my father being hauled off in handcuffs while being read his rights. I’d admit that I saw my mother on her deathbed, holding my father’s hand and telling him to be strong.
“Be better, Anthony. For Della.”
Those words plagued me. I never used to think about them as more than a plea to stop working so much and spend more time with me. We were all each other had without her. It meant we needed to be there for each other when it mattered. Now, I didn’t think that was what she meant at all.
Be better.
Maybe that was why I’d repeated it to myself so often. It was like my mother had meant it for both of us even though she’d directed it at my father…at what he was doing. As morbid as it was, maybe it was better she didn’t witness his demise. She’
d be disappointed that he didn’t listen to her last wish.
Tears stung my eyes as I inhaled a long, deep breath. It eased the pain my lungs had succumbed to at the thought that always influenced my subconscious as I slept.
The dreams were awful. If I didn’t wake up right away from them, I silently pleaded to, so I didn’t have to relive the torture. When I did wake up, it was always the same. I would realize it may have been a dream, but it was so very real.
My parents were dead.
The ballet dancer in me was dead.
And my mother’s last wishes were ignored, leading to my father’s demise.
It made me wonder how much my father really loved my mother. I knew, at one time, he loved her so much it almost felt like what he felt for me wasn’t enough—like I was somehow second best to their love story. Maybe I’d gotten it wrong though. If my father’s feelings were as strong as I thought they were, he would have listened. He would have tried.
Be better.
“Della?” My aunt’s worried voice clouded the train of thoughts that left me spiraling. Sucking in a deep breath, I gave her a fake smile and stared back at the painting, trying not to give away the truth in my eyes. Our family was said to give everything away because of them. One look was all it took before the world knew…everything.
Lydia stepped away from the canvas and toward me, reaching out and taking my hand. The squeeze was what had me looking down at our joined palms, her fingers interweaving with mine. Our skin tone was almost identical, but hers was slightly darker. I remembered her tan in the summertime too. Just like my father, it didn’t take long for them to get color when they went outside.
“Lydia…” I hesitated—my voice barely audible between us. “Do you think that my father was a bad person? That my parents should have been better than who they were?”
Her hold on my hand tightened. “I’m not sure it matters what I think.”