Dancing on the Edge

by Han Nolan

  “Well, I’ll check on you in the morning. Think you need a doctor or anything?”

  “No,” I mumbled from beneath the blankets. I felt so cold.

  I know I slept some. I remembered dreaming about a warm yellow light. I could see it on the other side of a giant spider web. The web was blocking my way. I stood in the cold dark just inches from the warmth, too afraid to walk through the web.

  When I woke up I was still shivering. Aunt Casey brought me some tea and some more moldy toast and sat on the edge of my bed. She watched me drink my tea. She stared at my face, studied it the same way she studied for her psychology exams, with the same intense expression. It was as if she were trying to read me, understand me. She opened her mouth a few times and I thought she would say something; I could tell there was something she felt she needed to say. And watching her, seeing her trying to find the right words, I felt I could almost will those words out of her mouth for her, I could almost guess at what they would be, and then I couldn’t do it. Fear gripped my hands and shook the tea onto my lap. I dropped the mug onto the tray, and Aunt Casey jumped up and brushed at her own lap as if I had spilled some on her. Then she removed the tray and dabbed at my lap with the napkin she’d brought me. The mood had been broken. She said different words than the ones she had planned to say, safer words. She said she would come home early and if I didn’t feel better she’d take me to see her doctor.

  “Of course, it could just be psychosomatic. Know what that is? When it’s all in your mind. Most illnesses are all in the mind, did you know that? Disease is just dis-ease. Without ease. Cool, huh?”

  I shivered all day long. I couldn’t get warm. I stayed facing the wall. The wig heads were behind me. Aunt Casey had let me keep them turned away. She said it was easier to get at the wigs that way anyway, but I still felt afraid of them. I was afraid if I turned one of them back around again, any one of them, they’d have someone’s live face on them. Maybe Mrs. Beane’s, the woman who came for her fitting and died two months later. Maybe the head her wig sat on would have her face. That’s what I feared. They all had the faces of the person whose wigs they wore.

  I tried not to think about them, or anyone. I counted to ten thousand over and over, but sometimes a thought would slip in if I let my mind relax too much. I’d get a glimpse of Gigi in her home in Tennessee. Home since Christmas, yet I hadn’t seen her since the tornado. I hadn’t seen Grandaddy Opal, either. I wouldn’t think about that—six thousand and eighty-two—Miss Emmaline always answering the phone now—six thousand, four hundred, and thirty-one—Juleen Presque, the brain—eight thousand twenty-six—Dane melted—eight thousand forty-two—Gigi—don’t think—I’m so cold—nine thousand and thirteen.

  The doorbell rang. I lifted my head. Was it Aunt Casey? It rang again. Uncle Toole? I climbed out of the bed and hurried to the door, dragging the top blanket with me.

  I opened the door and found Juleen Presque standing on the stoop in front of me.

  I sucked in my breath and choked on the quick draw of air. “I’m sick, go away,” I said, coughing, pressing against the door.

  Juleen pushed it back and stepped inside. “I brought your homework.” She held up a stack of books. “You’re shivering. Why don’t you get back in bed. I can talk to you there.”

  “No. No, I’m fine.” I didn’t want her seeing the wig heads or the sawed-off sofa I slept in. “Thanks for the books.” I cleared my throat and clutched the blanket around my shoulders. “How did you get my homework? You’re not in any of my classes.”

  “But I was in your English class last year,” she said, peering into the empty living room.

  “You were? I don’t remember.”

  “That took guts coming in new the last month of school and messing with Mr. Pertnoy’s head.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

  “Erasing your name, reading that crazy story with the pirouettes.”

  “Oh! Oh yeah. He gave me an incomplete.” I wrapped my blanket around me tighter. I wished she’d leave the books and go away. “So thanks for the books then. I’ll probably be back in school tomorrow.”

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said, walking toward the kitchen.

  I followed her. “I know.”

  She turned around to face me. “You’re very interesting.”

  “Thanks.” I looked away at the empty counters—no cannons or Confederate mugs, no ashtrays or old newspapers. I was so cold.

  Juleen stepped closer to me. “You’re a clever one.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “You’re smart. You had the whole school believing in you, in your spells and dances and that story about descending from a long line of mediums and clairvoyants.”

  “But it’s true. My grandmother’s a medium.”

  “And now it’s all backfired. Now everybody knows,” Juleen said, ignoring me.

  “Backfired? What’s backfired? What does everybody know?” Why didn’t she leave? I was freezing. Couldn’t she see I was freezing?

  “Melanie Brubaker came in today with her purple hair.”

  “Melanie?”

  “You told her to dye her hair purple and do that stupid dance in front of Bob Eliott, remember?”

  “Yes. Didn’t it work? She must not have . . .”

  “Her hair fell out! All day long, in patches all over her head. Bob Eliott told her she was a joke and should join the circus. Everyone was laughing at her because of you.”

  “She must have done something . . .”

  Juleen stuck her face right up to mine. I could feel her heat, but it wasn’t enough to warm me.

  “You’re a phony. Everyone knows it now. A fake! I knew it. I could have told them, but I let you set yourself up. Everyone gets caught eventually—every fake.”

  “Stop!” I backed away. “I’m not a fake. I’m real. I’m real!”

  “My aunt Juleen used to contact the dead.” Juleen stared down at the books in her hands. “I was named after her, after a fake. She was caught red-handed. I was there when it happened. I used to think she was wonderful.” She paused, then looked up at me. “Now you got caught, everybody knows, and your grandmother will get caught, too.”

  I took another step back and found myself up against the kitchen wall. “No. She won’t. She’s real.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She is. Stop it! I’ve seen her. I was her assistant. People have even seen their dead husbands and wives appear right in front of them.”

  Juleen nodded. “People see what they want to see.”

  “What does that mean? What do you want? Why are you here?”

  “It’s all illusions, magic tricks. People see what they want to see and don’t see what they don’t want to see. The whole school knows now. They know what you really are. They know you’re a fake.”

  “Stop saying that!” I didn’t want her pushing me, making me look at what I didn’t want to see. “I’m sick. You’d better go now.”

  “It’s dangerous what you’re doing. People could get hurt worse than Melanie. Don’t mess with magic.”

  “You need to go now.” I let go of my blanket and took my schoolbooks from her.

  “I brought you a book. See there on top. It’s a book of poetry. Do you read poetry?”

  “What?” This girl was crazy. I had to get rid of her.

  “I read poetry. I write it, too. It helps.”

  I pushed Juleen toward the door. “Thanks for the book. Honest, I don’t feel well. You have to go.”

  Juleen opened the door and paused, turning back to look at me. “You read the poems. They’re true. They’re the truest, realest thing I know. You need that, I think. You’re like me. You need the truth.”

  Chapter 17

  I WAS STILL SHIVERING, but I didn’t put the covers back over me. My hands felt stiff, frozen. It was hard turning the pages in my miracle notebook where I had glued a miracle story to almost every page—a story from the newspaper, a true sto
ry. Newspapers had to print the truth. Miracles happen. I was a miracle. Gigi said so. A miracle! I’m real. Juleen doesn’t know anything. Nobody does. Gigi knows. She knows about things like that. She’s a medium. She’s the world’s greatest medium! I’ve seen her. I’ve seen her working. She didn’t have to pretend because it was real. She made her clients happy. They got to speak with their loved ones. Some said they actually saw them—People see what they want to see. No! It was real. I believe it. I’m real.

  She used incense and wore robes and saw auras. She could go into a trance—People see what they want to see and don’t see what they don’t want to see. No! She could contact the dead. She had Rasmus, her spirit guide—How do you know?—It’s all illusions, magic tricks. No! I slammed my miracle notebook shut. I remembered the day in Grandaddy Opal’s room. He showed me a book, a science book, a book of facts. It said there were black holes and wormholes and that space and time could bend in on themselves in a black hole. It said it. It is the truth. It was all true. It had to be true. I climbed on my bed and faced the shelf of wig heads. “It’s true. It’s all true,” I said to the heads. “You can contact the dead. Gigi can. Gigi does. She contacted Mama that night. Mama told us Dane melted. No—Mama told us Dane was gone, and—and Gigi said he melted. But I saw it. He was gone. He did melt. See? See, it’s true. It’s all real. And I created love potions. They were real. They worked. It was real. I’m real!”

  The wig heads just stayed there lined up on the shelves, the backs of their heads to me. They didn’t believe me. I knew they didn’t. I jumped off the bed. “I’ll prove it. I’ll show you—stupid wig heads!”

  I ran barefoot out to the garage. I had to make several trips to get all the candle bottles. I pulled them out of the bags and set them up all over the room, leaving a space in the center for me. I lit the candles and stood among them in Dane’s bathrobe and waited to melt.

  “Come on, melt!”

  I waited. I didn’t even feel warm. How was I going to melt if I didn’t get warm? I moved the candle bottles in closer together, closer to me. The wig heads were waiting. Everyone was. The kids at school, Gigi, Grandaddy Opal, Aunt Casey. They were waiting for me to prove myself, prove I was real.

  I bent my knees so that the bottom of Dane’s bathrobe hovered just above the flames of the bottles surrounding me. I waited. Yes, I was getting warmer. I closed my eyes and bent my knees just a little bit further.

  Part II

  “The Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.”

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Chapter 18

  I DON’T REMEMBER much about my stay in the hospital, not those early days, at least. I don’t remember how I got there. All I remember is sitting in a silver tub of water with my legs floating up at me like a couple of dead fish. I felt like a fish. I remember that, thinking I was a slice of haddock or cod. Gigi used to cook a lot of fish, white slabs of it on a platter with their shiny pink and silver backs. She would dredge each slab through her special egg and flour mixtures and fry them up crisp the way Dane liked it. My legs were frying. That’s what it felt like. As if every day someone were dropping them into the deep fat and frying them up crisp. The doctor said I had second- and third-degree burns. I remember nodding when he said it. I remember sitting in that silver tub, staring down at my legs and thinking, Yes, my legs are all burned up, but I couldn’t remember how they got that way, what had happened.

  The nurses didn’t like me to see the burns. They said I was already too traumatized and it was affecting the rate of healing. They wanted me to scream out in pain, but I didn’t scream.

  I learned that bits of rayon material had burned into some of the deeper wounds. The doctors rolled me into surgery to remove those bits and apply skin grafts. Then they put goop and dressings on my legs, and bulky pressure bandages on the grafts, and strung my legs up in the air so they would heal.

  Gigi came to see me after my skin-grafting surgery. I pretended to be asleep. She took charge. She told the nurses what to do, ordering more fluids and painkillers even while I slept. She asked the doctors when I’d be able to leave and told them I could leave sooner. She had a place she could take me for healing. I’d heal faster with her, she said.

  Aunt Casey came a lot, three times a day. I’d never seen her so often. She’d stare down at me with her red and swollen eyes, searching my eyes, my face, for some kind of answer. She’d talk to me, her voice tight, constricted. She asked how I was doing, if I needed anything. She told me I could scream if the pain got to be too much. It would be all right to scream, she said, just like the nurses, but I didn’t scream. I didn’t speak. I don’t know why. I just lost the desire. I didn’t speak to anyone.

  They had a TV in my room. I had to share it with the patient in the bed next to me, a girl who had been thrown through the windshield of her car. She didn’t watch TV. She always had too many people around her bed, talking with her, laughing.

  The nurses didn’t know that I had never seen a whole television show. They warned me that most of the shows were already in reruns for the season, but it was all new to me.

  Miss Emmaline came once when Aunt Casey was in the room and said in a voice the whole floor could hear that Grandaddy Opal couldn’t come because he was feeling a little under the weather himself. She said for me not to worry, that he would be better real soon and he couldn’t wait to see his girl. Then she and Aunt Casey went out into the hallway to whisper, but Miss Emmaline wasn’t good at whispering.

  I heard her say that Grandaddy Opal was back in the hospital—third time in four months. She said they thought the bypass surgery had gone well but he wasn’t recovering the way he should have. Then Aunt Casey spoke and I didn’t hear what she said, but I understood anyway. Needing people too much just drove them away. Loving someone did something to their hearts. My need for Grandaddy Opal was too much and it gave him a heart attack. I was killing him. I drifted off to sleep and Miss Emmaline was gone when I woke up. I remembered what she had said about Grandaddy Opal, and I decided I wouldn’t need him anymore. I couldn’t think about him anymore.

  I remember Uncle Toole coming to see me and he didn’t know what to do besides stand there and change the channels on the television.

  I started getting better. The nurses removed the pressure bandages. The oozing had stopped and they changed my dressings on the milder burns less frequently. I was down to taking painkillers only twice a day. I thought I’d be leaving soon.

  Then a man came to see me. He was tall. He had to duck to walk through the door. His legs were so long they didn’t look as if they had been attached to his body correctly; his feet turned in slightly when he walked and his joints looked loose, as if he could stick his foot behind his head if he wanted to. He had on jeans with a shirt and tie and wore running shoes. He loped over to my bed and took my hand and shook it.

  “Hi, Miracle, I’m Dr. DeAngelis. Mind if I sit down?”

  He leaned forward over, me, waiting for an answer. I stared at his hands. They were large and wide and hairy. He wore a wedding band.

  “Yes, I heard you’re not speaking. I don’t know if you mind if I sit down or not, so since I want to stay, I’ll have a seat.”

  He pulled up a chair, sat down, and propped his long feet up on the end of my bed.

  “I know your aunt Casey. I lectured at the university last month. She was there. Very intelligent. Very nice.”

  He paused and studied me a few seconds. He was watching my hands. I tucked them under the covers.

  “I saw pictures of your legs. They’re healing quite nicely, but there’s a lot of scarring, isn’t there? Maybe down the road a little you can have a plastic surgeon help you with those scars.” He took his feet off the bed and leaned forward so his head was near my shoulder. “I’m a doctor of scars, too, Miracle, only they’re the kind of scars you can’t see. They’re inside you. I’m going to help you, if you’ll let me. You see those wounds you have inside, they haven’t healed quite as nicely as
your legs.” He sat back in his seat, and I stared at the cup of water on the tray beside my bed.

  “In a couple of days you’re going to be transferred to another building called The Cedars, although I don’t know why, there are no cedar trees. But I think you’ll like it lots better. You don’t have to stay in bed all day. You’ll have things to do. You’ll take classes and catch up on your schoolwork, and there’ll be group therapy sessions where you’ll be with other teens with similar problems . . .”

  I looked up.

  “Oh, you don’t think anyone else has problems like yours. Well, that’s what’s so nice about group. You discover you’re not alone. There are people out there who have the same feelings you do. You’ll get to share your feelings. Maybe what you have to share will help somebody else. Maybe you’ll hear things that will help you and those scars will start to melt away.”

  He paused again, letting his information sink in. His voice was soft for a man. Not like a woman’s, just soft, as if he didn’t want to disturb anyone. And he had an accent. He was from New York or New Jersey. My dance teacher, Susan, was from New York.

  He touched my shoulder, cupped it in his big hand. “You’ll visit with me several times a week as well. I’m looking forward to getting to know you better, Miracle. We’ll talk, maybe play some games, draw some pictures, that sort of thing. And I’ll have some sessions with your aunt and perhaps some of your other family members.”

  I started to shiver.

  Dr. DeAngelis squeezed my shoulder. “It’ll be all right, Miracle. No surprises. I’m here today so you’ll know what’s going to happen. It may be scary, even painful at times, tearing through all that old scar tissue, I won’t kid you, but I and the staff, we’re all there for you. We’re there to help you.”