Maeve watches as her mother leans into her iPad, and then the call is over. She stays there a moment, staring at the now-blank screen. Then she takes a deep breath and sticks her tongue out.
Childish? Sure. But it feels good.
She leaves the laptop and goes back to the window, tries to take in the whole view. Allows herself, momentarily, to put aside all the baggage she brought with her: a divorce that left her with nothing, a body that feels like a traitor. She can see the outline of her face, a shadow reflection in the glass. Maeve Martin, principal dancer. Who she used to be.
Her last true chance at a career is the grant that paid for this retreat—a transition grant for professional dancers making the leap to directing a company, with a cutoff age of thirty-five.
Maeve is thirty-four.
Put it in a box, she tells herself. Stick a pin in it. Focus instead on the world stretched before you.
But even the heavy glass feels like a barrier. Maeve wrestles with the latch, then throws the window open, pops the screen, and leans right out. Her face and shoulders meet the cold air, the snow still falling, steady and gentle, and she has to stop herself from pitching too far; her feet almost leave the safety of the floor. Four stories up, a bird’s-eye view. A queen in her castle.
Below, the new snow sweeps off, endless, into the trees. Like a bolt of white cloth spooling out at her feet. Like a blank page set down just for Maeve. She flexes a little higher, up on her toes.
All that white. A new future, just waiting for her to write it.
The director’s office is tucked in a corner of the center’s wide lobby, giving its occupant a sweeping view of backcountry slope, the tree line ceding to snowcap only a little higher up. The director herself—Karolina Rhys—is struggling with the window blind when Maeve arrives. She knocks on the door frame so as not to surprise her, but it turns out Karolina is not the kind to startle easily.
“You’re here!” she says, calling over her shoulder. She’s got the look and demeanor of a younger woman, her silver-blond hair cut blunt below her shoulders, jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots. She’s in her late forties—Maeve has looked her up—the kind of enviable woman who is equally at home on an Oklahoma ranch or at an Oxford riding club. A Czech-born Saskatchewan farm girl; a painter who was once married to a famous playwright.
She gives the blind one more adjustment and turns. “You must be Maeve. My dancing queen!” A quick glance down at the paperwork on her desk. “Maeve Martin Dance Project?” She springs forward, arms outstretched. The greeting is warm and professional: she doesn’t shake but closes both hands over Maeve’s and looks her right in the eye.
“I’m Karolina. Karo, that’s mainly what people call me.” Then she’s across the office again, rummaging through a cabinet. “Let me just dig up your keys and we’ll be off on the grand tour.” She pauses, looking over her shoulder again. “You met Sadie already, didn’t you?”
Maeve turns, startled to find they’re not alone—the clerk from the night before is seated on the couch. Of course. She’s the director’s assistant. Who else would be asked to stay up half the night waiting for a late arrival?
The girl rises to her feet, but her bearing has changed. Last night’s gushing nervousness is gone; Maeve is surprised at how openly the girl seems to assess her, looking her up and down with the distrustful eye of a seamstress or a rival pageant contestant. A rejoinder, she realizes, for the cold shoulder Maeve gave her on arriving.
Karo keeps on. “She’s my doctoral student—I found her in Venice, at the Biennale, and coaxed her to come work as my assistant for a year before returning to her dissertation. She tells me you had a rather inauspicious beginning to your time with us.”
The girl steps forward and diplomatically extends a hand. “Sadie Kwon,” she says. To Karo: “We were . . . too tired last night for social graces.” A practiced smile.
She’s neat-looking, and well groomed, but there’s not much joy to her. The doctorate makes sense. In the light of day she looks more like a bank teller, Maeve thinks, than a dancer. She takes Sadie’s hand and gives it a squeeze, trying to emulate Karo’s warmth. Embarrassed now at her frigid reaction the night before. “Yes, I guess I arrived as the weather was turning,” she says. “You must love it, being here in the mountains full-time. What a treat—”
But Sadie just nods and breaks her grip. “Every new opportunity sounds exciting in Venice. It’s all artists and parties. You know, you’re networking all the time.” She steps efficiently to the desk and begins sorting through mail on a tray.
“I’m so sorry,” Karo says, still searching through her cabinet. “I always fumble the studio keys somehow. Sadie”—her tone sharpens almost imperceptibly—“Sadie, did you not make up Maeve’s welcome package?”
Maeve looks around, hoping to extricate herself from the discussion. There’s the couch to one side with an aerial-view photo mounted on the wall over it. Black-and-white, a vintage shot, its title in that squared-off 1960s typeface: HIGH WATER CENTER FOR THE ARTS. She swipes a brochure from an end table, turns to sit down, spreads the site map out flat against her lap. Orienting herself.
There are two main doors off the lobby, one leading to the front gate, where she came in the night before, and the other out to the back acreage and the expanse of trees and trails she can see from her own window upstairs. The studios are all cabins set some way off on the north side of the property; the high ridge has been marked on the map with a staggered line, and there’s what looks like a ski lift out at the eastern border—the SkyLift. There are two roads in, but only one that’s accessible in winter.
The center was constructed in 1922, Maeve reads, during the heyday of art deco design, and this influence is notable in everything from the vintage light fixtures to the geometric lines and sunburst motif in the lower-level spa area, where visiting artists can enjoy bathing in the natural hot springs for which High Water was named.
The building has six stories; permanent staff suites are on the second floor and all the artists’ rooms staggered on the floors above.
“You’ll learn the place quickly enough,” Sadie says, crossing the room. She passes a folder to Karo wordlessly, then turns to Maeve. “It’s beautiful here, and quiet. I’m sure you’ll like it.” That same fixed smile. “It’s very quiet,” she says again.
“You seem so young to be into a doctorate already—” Maeve means it as a compliment. In dance, everyone is young.
“I am.”
Maeve waits for her to finish, but Sadie has no more to say.
“Aha! Here we are.” Karo pulls a key from the folder, her voice brightening. “Unless there’s something else you’d rather do first? Have you eaten?”
But Maeve shakes her head as she rises. She’s still got her coat on, ready to go. “I really just want to get to work.”
Sadie steps forward as if to go along with them. Standing next to her, Maeve gets that same doppelgänger feeling, a sort of shadow. Something about the girl’s posture. It’s not a stretch to wonder if Sadie grew up in dance and then switched to academics. Competition is competition, after all.
“It’s not far to the cabins,” the girl says. She’s stepping into her tourguide role now. “Maybe a ten-minute walk? In the summer, you can sometimes grab a ride on an off-road—” Here she seems to catch herself, speaking more hurriedly. “But not now, not with the weather so unpredictable. Better to stick to the path. We don’t want any accidents—”
Karo looks at her sharply, and the girl suddenly hesitates, holding the door for Maeve.
“I’ll take Maeve over on my own,” Karo says. She tucks the key away again, then slides into a wool wrap and draws up the hood. She turns to Sadie, her voice clipped and quiet: “You have that request to finish up, yes?”
As sophisticated as Karo seems, Maeve sees that she can’t be easy to work for. The idea makes her soften, and she tries to brush Sadie’s hand, a kind of Thank you, as she follows Karo out, but she can’t quite ca
tch the girl’s eye, and the door shuts behind them.
They cut quickly across the lobby and out the door, then follow the line of the building toward the woods, their reflections rippling in the center’s wide windows. About fifty yards out, the shoveled path ends abruptly and they move off through snow that’s already almost knee-deep. Ahead of them, a trail marker gleams fluorescent at the border of the trees, and the vestige of a path picks up again, less recently cleared.
The air is crisp and clean. Maeve inhales, and breathes out the obvious tension between Karo and her assistant. Glad to be outside and free of it.
“We had snow early last year too,” Karo says. “Almost as bad.” She squints up at the sky, as though testing her theory, then corrects herself: “Not this bad.”
“When I arrived last night it was raining,” Maeve tells her, at a loss for something to say. Her experience of alpine weather is exactly nil. She follows Karo through the trees into a little fairyland of cabins, each set a few hundred feet apart from the others. Somewhere nearby, she can hear a dull echo, the rhythmic thunk of a hammer.
“I wondered about bears—” Maeve says. “There was a warning sign on the road—but maybe they’re already holing up for the winter?”
“In November? No, I wouldn’t say so. Anything’s possible, of course: they may be adjusting to the new weather patterns faster than us. But they generally stay higher up in the mountains. This time of year, it’s really the elk you have to worry about. Rutting season.” Karo thrusts her shoulders back like a girl trying to get some attention at a club. “Mating. It’s not their fault.” She breaks into a bold smile, pleased with herself. “They’re not rational.”
The path curves and the rhythmic sound grows louder. Maeve slows, peering into the trees. The forest here is almost all evergreens, tall and spindly lodgepole pines and dense firs; it’s hard to see. But there’s definitely something there, moving.
She pulls back a little. It’s a man.
He’s wearing some kind of camouflage gear, a parka in mottled grays and browns, but his hat is orange. The kind hunters use so they don’t get shot. He cuts a fine figure among the trees: tall and somehow commanding, even all alone like that. The sound she heard wasn’t a hammer. It’s an ax. He’s chopping wood, setting up logs to split on a wide stump.
“That’s Dan,” Karo says from a step or two farther up the path. “He’s our facilities manager. So you’ll see him out and about on the grounds—working.”
She pauses. When Dan glances over, Maeve raises a hand in greeting and he stops and regards her a moment before executing a gallant, good-natured salute. Then he hefts the ax and keeps on. Karo steps in closer to Maeve, a proud, almost motherly smile on her face.
“He came to us from the army, so—”
Off in the bush, Dan sets up the next log to be split. The ax falls. Thunk. Maeve flinches.
Karo gives a satisfied nod. “He takes his job very seriously.” She turns away again, tugging at Maeve’s sleeve. A moment later, she’s pointing merrily into a clearing ahead: a windowless structure, a round house, just beyond the break in the trees. “Look, here we are.”
The key is in a little brown envelope. Karo unlocks the door but allows Maeve to push it open—it’s her studio they’ve come to. They kick off their boots in the doorway. Maeve takes a glide across the floor. It is pristine, immaculate. The cabin itself looks wheel-shaped from the exterior, but inside, she can see it’s more of an octagon. The walls are lined with mirrors; light pours in from pie-shaped skylights cut into the ceiling above.
“That’s why this one was built in the clearing,” Karo says. “You get both worlds: privacy and gorgeous light. No windows at eye level.” She raises an eyebrow. “You can dance naked if you want.”
Maeve laughs. “I might, if I ever get warm enough.”
Karo paces the area efficiently, flipping on lights, opening cupboards hidden in the wall.
“It’s meant to be a full-service space: heat and electricity, obviously; refrigerator, kitchenette, a powder room in the back corner.” She swings a tall pantry door open, revealing neatly packed shelves. “We keep the kitchen stocked with dry goods, so you won’t have to run back and forth. There’s enough food here to sustain you for days—” She pops open the next cupboard door. “And you have everything else you’d need, utensils and plates and bowls. There’s a cast-iron soup pot in here big enough to use as a firepit,” she says, reaching in and rifling through the pots and pans. “Ah, here it is.” She knocks on the pot and it rings like a bell—then she waggles a finger. “I’m joking! No fires indoors, okay?”
Maeve smiles, but she’s only half listening. It’s all so much to take in. She circles the space, a finger trailing the mirrored walls. Her heartbeat starting to come up quicker. She looks so unprepared, somehow. Hair falling loose, jeans cropped at the ankle by hand.
Two weeks out here by herself? She wonders if she still has the stamina.
“The only thing we ask is that you don’t sleep out here but return to your suite at night. The insurance company is quite adamant about that. Liability: we can’t guarantee your security on the perimeter like this, and cell service, I’m sure you’ve already noticed, can be sketchy—especially in the trees and especially with this snow. So we prefer that you come home at night.”
Maeve nods, distracted by the many versions of herself in reflection, Maeve upon Maeve in the mirrors. She walks into the center of the room, wanting to somehow take ownership, feel in control of the space, and pushes off on one foot, a controlled spin.
As she turns, Karo’s voice sounds smaller, as though she’s speaking from somewhere far away.
“It was really designed as a rehearsal space for dance companies. Small troupes, you know, and that’s often what we get here—”
Maeve breaks out of her turn.
“I am a dance company.” This comes out louder and more suddenly than she’d expected, the acoustics of the empty room changing her voice, expanding it outward. She looks up only to see her own face staring down, distorted in the curved glass of the skylight above. “Or,” she says, “or I will be. It just doesn’t look like it yet.”
When Karolina doesn’t respond, Maeve finds herself doing that thing—filling the silence with details.
“That’s why I’m here,” she says. “To build something new. Not to perform myself anymore, but to direct, to build a company.” Standing in the center of the room makes her feel like she’s onstage. She steps forward, leaning into it.
“I used to be a principal with Dance Theater Nouvelle Vague. And before that, with the National—”
Karolina nods, suddenly interested.
“I know exactly who you are.” She looks at Maeve and there’s something new in her eyes, some bit of fire. “I actually know Nouvelle Vague very well. Or I did, years ago. My husband was Gianpietro Conti, the playwright. He did some work with them when Jules Bourassa was the director.”
For a moment, Maeve can’t breathe. This piece of history is news to her. How much does Karolina really know?
“Before my time,” Maeve says quietly.
“Ah.” Karolina gives a little shrug. “Well. I hope this new endeavor will make you happy.” She seems tauter now, more intense. “I saw you dance once, when you were touring. At the Opera House in Bonn. But then you quit.”
“No.” Maeve takes a few steps toward her. “No, I never wanted to quit.”
“All right—you left.”
Karo closes the last cabinet, the latch clicking softly into place.
Neither of them speaks. Maeve, a hand against her thin T-shirt, fingers absently running over the ridged line of the scar across her belly underneath. C-section, her career-section, ha-ha; this is Maeve’s great joke, but she doesn’t say it aloud now. There are no more principal roles for Maeve. Not at her age, and not with this body history. The only realistic goal is the one she’s set: start her own company, take the lead in a new way. And to do that, she has to stay focused. No
matter what.
Overhead, the light changes. A new wave of snow clouds moving in.
“Quiet out here, isn’t it?” Maeve moves back to where Karolina is standing, near the door. She’s eager to put the moment behind them.
“Well, you’re here at a bit of a strange time—I’m sure I mentioned that in my e-mails.” Karolina leans against the door frame and begins to pull her boots back on, her mood easily reset. “We ended a term program last month, so there’s only a few of us here. We’re quite the little club already! Don’t worry, you’ll fit right in. I’m here year-round. Our journalism director too. He’s a lovely kid, pure fun—Justin Doyle. But as far as artists are concerned, it’s really just you out here in the cabins. There’s a filmmaker, Anna Barthelmy, from New Orleans; she’s a sort of activist, her family is practically Creole royalty. She’s working up in the main building. Her second time at High Water in a year! If you like it here, you love it.” Karolina switches feet, tugs on her bootstrap. “And Sim Nielssen, have you seen his work before?”
Maeve shakes her head.
“He travels a lot,” Karo says. “Shows overseas, mostly—Europe and Asia. He’s in residence for the year. Been here since September, working on a great, giant installation. In the gallery, just off the lobby. It’s going to be fantastic, you can’t imagine how good.”
She stamps her foot into the boot, punctuating the very goodness, the greatness of this installation.
Maeve has a shiver suddenly, something on the back of her neck, cold enough to make her flinch. She reaches for it, but it’s only water—a bit of snowmelt from her hair. As she moves, she catches herself in the mirror again. For a second, her face hollows out; her lips are black, her eyes only sockets. A trick of the light from above.
She takes a breath. She hasn’t begun to put her own boots back on.
“I might stay behind here for a few moments.”
The absurdity of this strikes her as she says it. She’s dressed in jeans and a leather coat, and she’s brought nothing with her, no change of clothes, not even an elastic to tie back her hair. What does she plan to do here, alone in the middle of the woods?
The Retreat Page 2