He hooked an arm around her waist and rolled down to his back, pulling her along. Her hair got caught under his shoulder. A cry of annoyance as she tugged it free. David laughed.
“You’re such an asshole,” she said, spitting hair out of her face and tossing it back from her shoulders.
And then she saw Erik standing in the doorway.
“WHY DON’T YOU START from the beginning?”
Daisy stared at the woman sitting across from her. “Because I like starting in the middle.”
She felt foolish as soon as the words left her mouth. She was twenty-four years old. Snotting back like a sullen teenager served no purpose.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m so tired. And I don’t have much of a filter lately.”
The woman tilted her chin, her smile was understanding. She had a head of salt-and-pepper curls, parted on the extreme side and anchored behind her ears. Her glasses looked expensive and trendy but the rest of her looked secondhand thrift. Despite it being January, her feet were bare in worn, scuffed Birkenstocks. The orange toenail polish was chipped.
Her name was Rita Temple. She was Daisy’s third therapist in five weeks.
“What happened with the previous two?”
“I couldn’t connect,” Daisy said. “The first one… He was at the hospital. Maybe it was because he was a man. I don’t know. But I walked into his office the first time and it felt horrible. The air in the room was so oppressive. And it had such a clinical smell. It was an office, like this, but it reeked of alcohol and disinfectant. I felt like I was in a gown on the exam table, waiting to get a shot.” She shrugged, embarrassment uncomfortably warm along her cheekbones. “I had an instinctive reaction to both the space and him. I gave it a second chance but the same thing happened.”
“People have instincts for a reason,” Rita said.
“The second therapist, Dr. Reilly, she was nice. I saw her a few times.”
“This was also at the hospital?”
“Yeah, but she came to my room. Not that my room was all that great a space, but at least I had some of my things around me. I still felt like I couldn’t connect. She was so quiet. And I know…” She held up her hand to stop any verbal traffic. “I know I’m supposed to talk and you’re supposed to listen. I think I’m looking for a therapist with a streak of big sister. Someone a little tough.”
“Why tough?”
Daisy looked down at her take-out coffee cup. “I don’t know.” But a little entity within her turned from its prim wooden chair facing the corner, lifted its woebegone face and whispered, I’ve been such a bad girl.
“Sounds like you want to be told off,” Rita said. “Or punished.”
Daisy rolled her lips in and blinked back the threat of tears. “I fucked up,” she said. “I’ve fucked up my life so bad.”
She sniffed hard, scraped her fingernail against a stain on her pant leg then looked around the room. The walls were painted a soft grey, silvery and warm, like sable. She had a weird impulse to run her hand along the surface, sure it would have a nap.
The knick-knacks adorning the end table looked personal and significant. A bowl of sea glass and several small, corked bottles containing sand and labeled with names of beaches. Books lined the shelves like multi-colored bricks, most battered and creased, obviously read and consulted many times.
“See anything you like?” Rita said.
“A lot of children’s books stuffed between the professional ones.” Daisy pointed. “The Betsy-Tacy series. And what looks like every Maurice Sendak book ever written.”
“I’m a huge fan.”
“And something smells like lemon, and lavender.”
“The bowl on the table has both. Does it remind you of something?”
“Home.”
“Where is home?”
“My parents’ house in Pennsylvania. They have a little farm and orchard. My mother grows herbs. In summer she’ll have bunches of lavender hanging all over to dry, lemon verbena and mint. Her family was all perfumers. Except her, she was a dancer. Like me.”
“Where do you dance?”
“With the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. I’ve been on leave since December. When I went into the hospital…”
The silence pulled tight. Daisy reached to the bowl, crushed lavender buds between her fingers and wished for a cigarette.
“While I was out, one of the tenors died,” she said. “Richard Versalle. Right onstage in The Makropulos Case. He was climbing a ladder, singing the opening aria… Had a heart attack and fell twenty feet to the stage. Dead.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what any of that has to do with my little breakdown.”
“Here’s a tip, and this will apply to any therapist you may choose to work with: don’t worry about relevance. The first few months of therapy are about spilling your guts. Good, bad, ugly and incoherent. Because you won’t know what’s relevant or isn’t until it’s all in front of you.”
“More is more,” Daisy murmured, not sure how she felt about months.
“Exactly. The plan is you spill and I sort. If you decide to stay, that is.”
Mulling over the plan, Daisy thought about taking her shoes off and pulling her feet under her. No sooner did she think it when Rita kicked off one of her own sandals and drew that foot up beneath her knee.
“Try to find a beginning,” Rita said. “Or just start somewhere. We can go backward or forward, it doesn’t matter.” She had a marble composition notebook in her lap. She opened it now, clicked the end of her pen.
“I love that sound,” Daisy said. “When the spine of a new book cracks.”
Rita smiled. “So do I.”
“So,” Daisy said. “It could start six weeks ago when I started cutting myself.”
She paused for a reaction, but Rita only kept writing.
“Or,” Daisy said, puzzled, “I could start two weeks prior when a broken window triggered some kind of flashback.”
“A flashback to?”
“To when I got shot.”
Now she waited for Rita to show a startled expression. To gasp or say “Oh my goodness.”
Silence except for the scratch of pen on paper.
“Or maybe I should start the day of the shooting,” Daisy said, now throwing whatever she could think of in a careless volley. “Or when I cheated on my boyfriend and destroyed my life. Or when I started doing drugs, because I was high when I cheated on him. But the drugs started after the shooting so it really goes back to then. I guess it has to start with the shooting. But really it starts with Erik.”
“Erik was your boyfriend?”
Daisy nodded. “He was my life. My life started with him. And I fucked up and he left and I deserved it. But I can’t leave. I can’t leave it and it won’t leave me and I don’t know what to do anymore.”
She exhaled and took a sip of coffee. Then sat up choking as hot liquid dribbled over her chin.
“Dammit.”
Through the monologue Rita had been taking notes. Her eyebrows went up and down. She gave short, brief nods, sometimes with a twist of her bottom lip. A terse sound of agreement in her throat, or a more lyrical “Hmmm.” Now she looked up, pen still poised over the pages.
“This is good,” she said.
Daisy’s own eyebrows rose. A first. She’d expected more non-verbal invitations, not praise for the mess she had made of her life.
“Glad you like it,” she said, smiling as she ran her singed tongue along the roof of her mouth.
“Basically, you’ve given me a story in reverse,” Rita said. Her smile was broad as she turned her notebook upside-down and squinted at it. “Now how about we turn it around?”
Tears sprang to Daisy’s eyes. She could feel her heart press against the inside wall of her chest in a terrible longing to be free. The little penitent gazed hopefully from its chair in the corner.
Please turn it around.
The unexpected simplicity of it stole her breath. The cup trembled in her hands. “I wan
t to turn it around,” she said. “I hurt so much and I can’t… I’ve tried everything.”
Rita put the end of her pen between her teeth. Behind her glasses, her eyes were kind. But something was mischievous in her expression. “You haven’t tried me.”
Daisy pressed the back of her hand into one damp eye, then the other. Something in her reached across the expanse of carpet and plugged into Rita Temple’s socket. A small current began to thrum in her chest.
“When did you graduate college?” Rita asked.
“Nineteen ninety-three.” Nearly three years ago. It felt like two decades.
“From?”
“It was a fine arts school outside Philadelphia.” Why was she being coy? Was this the final test to decide if she’d come back again?
Rita intertwined her fingers and set them down on her notebook. “Were you at Lancaster?”
Daisy put her cup down, heeled off her shoes and pulled both feet up. She drew one of the throw pillows into her lap, hugging the chocolate-brown chenille to her stomach.
“Yes,” she said.
PROFESSOR MARIE DEL’AMICI HEADED the ballet department at Lancaster University. Although 1989 marked her fifteenth year in America, she still spoke a mix of broken English and technical French, overlaid with a thick Italian accent that teetered on the verge of unintelligible. She had little memory for names, lumping most of the student body under “darling” or “caro.” If fond of you, she would recall your name but either butcher it or convert it to the nearest Italian equivalent.
“Margarita, darling,” she said now, snapping her fingers and beckoning to Marguerite Bianco, one of the freshmen students. “Vieni qui. I want to see you dance with Wheel. Wheel, caro, come.”
Wheel was Will Kaeger, a Canadian sophomore. Marguerite hadn’t any personal interaction with him yet. Only observed his astonishing skills in class and heard him speaking fluent French around the student lounge. She also overheard him claiming Native American blood on his mother’s side. He looked like a warrior: six feet two inches tall, straight-spined and proud, with tattooed arms and dark hair falling past his broad shoulders.
Shoulders back and stomach in, Marguerite walked closer to him on the hard blocks of her pointe shoes. A lifetime of ballet training made acting confident second nature. Still, her stomach did a slow, wary somersault. Will Kaeger was gorgeous, with a magnificent and uncompromising presence. A pressing-essence, she thought, as they shook hands. It leaned against her in a way that made her feet feel too big.
“Daisy,” Will said, around a rubber band held tight in his teeth. His hands scraped his hair back into a thick tail. “Right? I hear your friends call you that.”
“Yes.”
“Daisy, short for Marguerite,” he said. “I get it. Is your family French?”
“My parents. I was born here.”
“Tu parles français?”
“Oui.” Hands on her hips, she went up on her pointes. Shifting her weight from foot to foot, she stretched first one arm, then the other across her body.
“Bon.” Will’s hair was secure now and he reached a hand to her. “Viens danser.”
Come dance.
Keeping up a patter of conversational French, he engaged her in a few simple movements and she followed where he led. Taking and releasing each other’s weight, getting a feel for one another’s balance and center. And although neither knew it yet, laying a foundation of trust, the bedrock of their partnership for the next three years.
Most of Daisy’s previous experience with partner work involved uncertain boys holding her too hard or not hard enough. A lot of grabbing, falling, fumbling and misunderstanding. A lot of hard work, the end result never satisfying, never looking how she expected a pas de deux to look.
But within a minute of dancing with Will, Daisy knew he was different. Although he dwarfed her in height, their bodies were proportioned the same. When he proffered his palm, it was exactly where she needed it to be. Excitement began to pulse along her veins. He was not only confident, but competent. His hands were strong but they didn’t grab. They felt like an extra pair of her own hands.
She went into arabesque—on one leg with the other straight behind—and he took her waist, moved her back and forth over her supporting leg, experimenting with her center of gravity.
“Here?” he said, squinting in the mirror. “No. More here, this is your axis.”
“Right there,” she said, perfectly balanced, pulling up out of her waist and letting her arms float free. Not knowing where she stopped and he began was a thrilling sensation. Their reflection made the pretty picture she’d always imagined. She smiled, feeling all the years of training coalesce and click. This was ballet.
She brought her pointes together, feet crossed tight. Will moved her like a metronome from side to side, catching her lightly in one elbow then the other. Letting her fall further with each pendulum swing, holding off on catching her until the last second. She closed her eyes, trusting him.
“You’re easy,” he said.
“Don’t tell my father.”
He laughed and let her fall low, arching back in his arms this time, her head nearly to the floor. The blood rushed to her face. His hand, spread wide between her shoulder blades, was strong. He brought her upright and her arm slid across his broad shoulders. She felt power without bulk. Everything about him was long and lean. The strength of his muscles lay vertically.
“I think we’re going to be friends,” Will said to the mirror as they practice supported pirouettes.
“Bet you say that to all the freshmen,” she said. The color was high up in her face. Exertion made a film of sweat creep up from the neckline of her leotard and bloom in two splotches on her rib cage.
“I do and they all believe me. Especially the boys.”
Daisy kept her eyes on her reflection but her antennae perked up. Will was a rare bird: a straight man in the ranks of male ballet dancers. According to conservatory gossip, he was straight with a slight bend. Daisy found this fascinating. Growing up in the world of dance, she had no shortage of gay friends. Someone openly bisexual, however, was a novelty.
“Sorry, I’ve never partnered a left turner,” he said, catching her as she teetered off balance. “That was my fault. Try again.”
It took several tries to work out the mechanics. His instinct was to support her with his left hand, which only got in her way as she turned counter-clockwise. She kept smashing into him.
Marie came over. “Wheel, what are you doing to the little flower? You’re going to break her.” She grabbed his left wrist and held it captive in the small of his back. “I’m surprised at you. I thought you partner both sides.”
Will’s head whipped back over his shoulder and Daisy burst into laughter. The professor blinked innocent eyes and patted Will’s cheek. “Keep practicing, caro.”
“Damn,” Will said, watching her walk away. “You see what she did there?”
Hands braced on knees, Daisy nodded.
“Come on,” he said, holding out a hand. “I need to fix this or my reputation won’t precede me.”
In a few more tries, his right hand had the knack of providing discreet support for the double spin Daisy could accomplish on her own. The left came in at the last minute and coaxed the momentum into a third turn.
“Definitely friends,” he said.
“On both sides.”
They would be extraordinary partners and close friends within a month. And turning counter-clockwise would work to their advantage in another three years, when a boy called James Dow shot the fingers off Will’s left hand and set the name Lancaster forever into memory.
IT WENT FROM A GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION to an event. A singular proper noun loaded with context and definition. Like Verdun. Omaha Beach. Dealey Plaza. Kent State.
Lancaster once carried the same cachet as Juilliard or Tisch. Now it was a battlefield.
“I was at Lancaster that day,” Daisy said to Rita Temple.
April
19, 1992 was a Sunday afternoon. In the theater of Mallory Hall, Lancaster’s performing arts complex, the first tech rehearsal for the spring dance concert was in full swing. Daisy was onstage when James Dow came out of the wings with a gun. He’d already shot and killed five students backstage.
James was a ruthless killer and a crack shot in the wings. But stepping into the spotlights and setting the Glock pistol’s sights on his former lover, Will, turned him inept.
“Or he wasn’t shooting to kill,” Rita said.
“What do you mean?”
“From what you’ve told me so far, Will seems to have been the primary target. He and James had a relationship but Will broke it off.”
“Yes.”
“It was a crime of passion.”
“That’s the consensus. Will was the target.”
“But when James went to fire, you were in the way. In the wrong place at the wrong time. My gut reaction—and I wasn’t there—but when you described how he fired, my immediate thought was James was trying to shoot Will without shooting you.”
Daisy stared at her feet.
“Or do you think you were a target as well?”
“He killed all those kids backstage,” Daisy said. “He shot both Will and I. Then he jumped off the stage to keep shooting. I guess you can look at it a hundred different ways but nobody will ever know his plan or intentions. He’s dead. My friends and my teacher are dead. And the rest of us… We died in different ways.”
Will took one bullet straight through his left side. Another blew his left hand to a pulp. The impact of the shots made him buck and rear, throwing Daisy off his shoulder where she had been perched. James’s third shot hit her while she was still up in the air. Through the left thigh, nearly severing a branch of her femoral artery.
“Do you remember it?” Rita asked.
“No,” Daisy said. Invisible fingers had reached into her mind that day, found the flame of memory and pinched it out. What she told of April 19 was what she had been told.
“You were awake,” people said. “The EMTs asked you things and you answered. I heard you talk. Oh yeah, you were moaning in pain. You screamed at one point. I remember.”
It was strange to be told of an event she participated in, even played a starring role. Surreal to hear what happened after she was shot and before the police and the EMTs got into the theater and to remember none of it.
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