He’s here, Daisy thought, although she knew it wasn’t Erik. The voice was wrong.
David broke from the group and loped up the aisle, into the arms of Neil Martinez. They swayed and rocked side to side, slapping and pummeling. The others moved up toward them. Neil reached past David to grab and touch the men, to kiss Daisy and Lucky.
“Holy beefcake, dude,” John said, punching Neil’s massive shoulders.
Neil laughed. He was always handsome in a Latin lover way, but now he was twice the size. Like a bodybuilder. Smooth, dark skin with twin dimples. A nearly hairless head and a trim, salt-and-pepper beard.
“You look like Hector Elizondo,” Lucky said, holding his face between her palms.
“I’m telling you, bald is hot,” David said. “You haven’t lived until you’ve felt a woman’s inner thighs on your naked pate. Right, Neil?”
Neil grinned, but within Lucky’s hands his eyes were brimming and they darted about the theater in a nervous volley.
The day of the shooting Neil had been sick. Dedicated, he’d dragged himself in late, slightly feverish and muffling a cough into a fist. He’d been behind the Manhattan skyline set with David when James walked in. Together they hit the floor and through a crack between two faux buildings they watched it all. And Neil had never been the same after. Like a bottle of soda left open, he’d gone flat.
Big as a pile of boulders, Neil hugged David again now. His hands still patting and thumping, but gradually they grew still. The fingers curled into fists, clutching David’s jacket. The brawny shoulders shivered. How his massive frame crumpled against David’s slight one tore at Daisy’s heart.
“It’s all right, man,” David said. He pulled up tall and seemed to expand. “We’re gonna get through this together. You and me. Okay?”
The others exchanged sympathetic glances and quietly stepped away. Daisy noticed a woman at the back of the theater, one hand on the handle of a stroller and the other clasping a little girl’s fingers. Daisy smiled at them as she walked up the aisle and introduced herself.
“Maribel,” the woman said, and pushed aside the proffered hand to hug instead. “I’m sorry,” she said, sniffing. “I’m hugging everyone this weekend.”
“Not a problem,” Daisy said. “That’s my strategy, too. This is Lucky. And Will. And John.”
Maribel hugged them all. The little girl had retreated behind her mother’s legs.
“This is our daughter, Rosie. And the baby is Carlito.”
Lucky crouched by the stroller, already intent on seduction by peek-a-boo.
“Are you all…” Maribel shook her head, searching for words as her hand crept around Daisy’s sleeve. “Were you there? Here, I mean. When it happened?”
“We were all here,” Will said, sliding an easy arm around Maribel, as if they’d been friends for years.
Lips turned in, Maribel kept shaking her head. Her gaze followed Neil and David who, arm-in-arm, had walked down the aisle to the apron of the stage.
“I didn’t know if he was going to come today,” she said. “He kept changing his mind. Yes. No. I can go. I can’t go. I have to go. Don’t make me.”
“I changed my mind a hundred times, too,” John said. “Including when I drove onto campus. I almost drove off again.”
“He talks about it,” Maribel said, looking around the group. “It’s like I was right there with him, he tells the story so vividly. But he…” She drew her breath in a ragged sigh. “He’s haunted. Even after all these years, it haunts him, especially when he gets sick. He was sick that day, you know.”
“We know,” Will said. “He almost didn’t come in.”
“Whenever he starts to get a cold or a flu, it’s like he comes down with a virus in his head. He’s equated the two things together.”
“We all have a trigger,” Daisy said. “It’s the sound of breaking glass for me.”
“For me it’s Gershwin,” John said. “Because all through the shooting and after, the music kept playing. Nobody turned it off. Do you remember? It was surreal. We’re down in the blood and the carnage, police and paramedics everywhere. And over our heads ‘I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise’ is coming out of the speakers.”
Will looked at him, eyebrows wrinkled. “It was? I don’t remember that at all.”
“Oh yeah,” John said, nodding as he stared out over the rows of seats. “Like the musicians playing while the Titanic was going down.”
“Who is Fish?” Maribel asked. “Neil always talks about this friend called Fish. Is he here?”
Daisy kept her eyes fixed on Neil and David, now on the stage, pointing up at the lanterns and catwalk as if strategizing a focus session.
“No,” Will said. “At least not yet.”
Daisy closed her eyes, wishing she could know.
“SANTA,” ROSIE MARTINEZ cried when Leo Graham entered the theater.
A whoop of laughter followed. Leo was indeed snowy-white now, both hair and beard like fine grizzled cotton around his round-rimmed glasses, his belly bulging like the earth under a Grateful Dead T-shirt.
He opened his arms and gathered David and Neil close, holding his prodigal sons in an enormous hug. Within minutes, they were his devoted slaves again. Neil was running, fetching and hauling as if he were a freshman. David was six inches from Leo’s shoulder, frantically scribbling notes on a clipboard.
Meanwhile Kees was assembling the dancers.
“Jesus, they’re infants,” Will muttered.
Daisy’s eyes were just as wide at the fresh faces. “Were we that young? We couldn’t be.”
Kees laid out the arc of the ceremony. He had choreographed a piece for his students. Will and Daisy would dance “The Man I Love” and John had his solo piece from his senior concert ready. To go with the live performances, the communications department had combed through the conservatory’s archived videos and spliced together a montage. All the footage they could find of Taylor, Manuel and Aisha over the years, interspersed with pictures of Trevor and Allison their families had unearthed and sent. Since the sound quality of the old tapes was so abominable, the student orchestra would play under the presentation.
“Please God, no Gershwin,” John said.
Through it all, the journalist from NPR was shadowing them. Interviewing and recording, or simply gathering the ambient sounds of the production coming together.
“Do you think you’ll talk about the cutting?” Lucky asked Daisy.
“I don’t know,” Daisy said, stretching on the floor by the piano. “I’m ready to talk about how hard it was but I don’t know how detailed I’ll get.”
She sat back against the piano’s leg and drank her water. If she glanced out the corner of her eye, she could imagine Erik sitting at the keys, picking through a Bach prelude for her. Telling her secrets. Holding her eyes.
Little fingers touched her pointe shoes. Daisy smiled at Rosie, who had also been shadowing her all day. Putting down her water bottle she opened her arms and the child sat in her lap.
“Is she bothering you?” Maribel called from the front row.
“Not at all,” Daisy said, inhaling baby shampoo and spring air from the little girl’s head.
“She loves her ballet lessons,” Maribel said.
“Point your toes like I’m doing. Let me see.” Daisy looked up at Maribel. “She’s got good feet.”
Camberley Jones, from NPR, beckoned Daisy over to where she and Will were sitting. Daisy set Rosie aside with a last little hug, then got up, wrapping her black shawl around her shoulders. Sliding into the seat next to Will, she took his hand. Their cold fingers slid together, lined up and pressed down.
“My memory is full of holes,” Will was saying. “Some parts are clear, others are blank. He came onstage at the part of the pas de deux where Daisy does this really difficult lift on my back…”
He went on telling what he remembered and Daisy turned within, assembling her thoughts. Did she want to talk about the broken glass? The cutt
ing? She didn’t know how to touch on it a little bit. It felt like an all-or-nothing topic and once she started, she might go on for hour after vulnerable hour. Already she felt skinless, bones and nerves exposed to the air, quivering and flinching at everything.
Will’s fingers squeezed. She realized silence was filling her ears. Her eyes flicked over to see both Camberley and Will looking at her.
“My last clear memory is walking down the aisle,” she said. “Right over there. I had been in the lighting booth with my boyfriend then I walked down the aisle to go to the stage and… It splinters apart after that. I don’t even remember starting the dance.”
“He didn’t come in until three-quarters of the way through,” Will said.
“I know,” Daisy said. “But I have no memory of it. Everything stops there in the aisle, when I turned around to wave at my boyfriend. And then it’s a black hole, until I woke up in the hospital and I still didn’t know what happened.”
She was talking to Erik. She had reached acceptance he wasn’t coming and she tried to imagine her voice surfing the radio waves into the future. Hoping that somehow, he would hear the piece when it aired. But her voice was big, loud and obvious in her ears. My boyfriend felt clumsy and passive-aggressive in her mouth. A fidgety, fretful desperation clutched her, certain this was her one last chance to fix things and she was botching it right out of the gate.
Don’t you fuck this up again…
John joined the group, sliding into the seat behind Daisy’s as Camberley began to nudge them toward the post-shooting spiral into the dark.
“I was a mess,” Daisy said.
“Her scars are crazy,” John said to Camberley.
“Being shot nearly destroyed me,” Daisy said, and she imagined Rita Temple nodding approval.
You were shot. Your life changed. It’s a fact, not a dramatic ploy for attention.
“This is all I’ve done, all I’ve been since I was five. And then I wake up in a hospital bed with my leg sliced open and I had no idea what happened. The randomness, the senselessness of it… I truly became two people afterward. I had the me who worked like hell, trained and fought and never looked back. And then this other me who was just…dark. Angry and depressed and constantly anxious. Things I had never been before. Feelings I had never entertained, let alone been consumed by. I didn’t know how to express them. A lot of times, I didn’t have words for what I was experiencing.”
“What got you through it?” Camberley asked.
Erik, Daisy thought. But steel bands wrapped tight around her throat and chest. All at once, she couldn’t get the syllables of his name to come up.
He wasn’t part of the getting through.
“Take your time,” John said. From the seat behind hers, his arms came around to hold her. “You all right?”
She nodded as both John and the truth wrapped her in an undeniable embrace and pressed her into stillness.
I didn’t get through it. Not then. I got through it years later. And Erik wasn’t there.
She drew her breath in. “John got me through,” she said. “John was the one who got me into therapy and got me on track to… Back to myself. I got through it but…” Her voice broke. Her conviction was absolute, still she felt like a traitor.
I love you. I will always love you. I will always be sorry. And when I finally faced it, you were gone.
John was holding her hands tight. His forehead touched the curve of her neck and shoulder.
“It’s all right,” he said.
Camberley Jones’s mouth mirrored the words. She nodded in encouragement, her eyes brimming.
“I got through it,” Daisy said, “but I don’t think I ever got over it. I can’t… I lost things I’ll never get back… Sorry, this is hard. It’s… In a lot of ways I’m still two people. Part of me has moved on and evolved, yet part of me is still haunted.”
Oh I love you, I will always love you, where are you? Erik, sweet boy, where are you…
“The shooting changed me,” she said. She didn’t know what she was saying. She stared at the aisle, at the last place she remembered feeling happy and complete, before everything changed forever. Warm wet spilled over down her face. Like a wild stallion, the remembered pain of the days spent in a crucible of self-hatred reared up.
You stupid bitch, you stupid, stupid, stupid…
Green glass cutting into her skin. The bracing, clean breath of release as her blood welled up. The terrible beauty that lay in scarring herself. Hurting and destroying her skin as she had so thoughtlessly hurt and destroyed the one thing she loved more than dancing.
I just want to ditch this place and go back to bed with you…
“It changed who I was,” she said. “And for a long time I didn’t like…her.” She put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Come on,” John said, standing up. “Let’s take a break. Get some water.”
He led her away to the side of the stage, held her tight in his arms. “You did great,” he said, rubbing her back.
Shaking to her bones, Daisy blew her breath out, pressing the backs of her hands into her eyes. Tiny hexagons of orange and yellow swirled behind her lids. “Jesus, I wasn’t expecting that.”
“It took guts. I’m proud of you. It wasn’t easy.”
“I couldn’t get it out. God, I sounded so stupid.”
“No,” he said. “It was your story and it was genuine. Not stupid. I promise.”
Boots scuffing toward the edge of the stage by her back. David’s voice soft on her head. “You all right, Marge?”
“She’s good,” John said.
Daisy took her hands away from her eyes. Golden blobs swam past as she smiled up at David’s face, sleek and lashless like a rabbit’s. “Small exorcism.”
“Dave, come here,” Leo called.
“I’m coming, you old fart,” David said, something he never would have ten years ago.
Maribel approached with a sleeping Carlito in her arms. “Here,” she said to Daisy. “Hold the baby. It’s calming.”
So Daisy sat with the baby snugged on her chest, her cheek nestled against the soft head. One finger closed up in a tiny fist and John’s arm around the back of her seat. When the stage manager called her and Will to rehearse, she was calm, but physically wrung-out, limp with emotion and catharsis. In such a state, she thought hearing “The Man I Love” would be the end of her. Instead, the music poured into the well of her aching heart and filled it with a thick joy. She let her legs and feet take over. Let the past flow through her. Turning in the circle of Will’s strong arms, she gazed up at him and made her fingers trail along his face before falling backward in his grasp.
“Jesus fuck,” Will murmured, bringing her up and into his chest. “I’m never going to get through this.”
“I’ll get you through,” she said. “Hold onto me.”
As they neared the section of the dance where they had been shot, Daisy saw the tension rise up in Will’s face. She was about to run and leap onto his shoulders. He would catch her physically but emotionally, he was falling into her arms.
Will’s eyes reached to her and she realized it must be just past three in the afternoon on April nineteenth. In her peripheral, she spotted John and Lucky in the wing where they had been that day, holding each other tight. David and Neil were together—standing now, not sprawled on the floor with their arms over their heads. Kees watched from the front row, not the back row. Their eyes were on her skin. Their thoughts were hers as they all pulled tight and remembered.
I lived here.
I danced here.
It happened. Here.
Brave and beautiful, she ran down the diagonal. Ran to Will. Caught his hand, threw her leg. Rolled over his back and caught him safe.
She came to a stop, poised in arabesque on his shoulder. Waited to hear a shot ring out.
Only applause.
WITH A FINE-TIPPED Sharpie Daisy signed the boxes of her pointe shoes and gave them to Rosie.
>
“They’re a little stinky,” she said, capping the pen.
“What do you say?” Neil said, nuzzling his nose against his daughter’s cheek.
“Thank you,” Rosie whispered, clutching her prize tight.
“Thank you,” Maribel said, hugging Daisy. “I didn’t think he would stay for the vigil tonight, but he says he’s going to.”
“Let him do what he can,” Daisy said. “Even this much is wonderful.”
“Dais, we’re going back to crash,” Will called. “You coming?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll meet you back here tonight.”
“I need a nap, too,” John said, shrugging on his jacket. “I just hit the wall.”
“I might walk around,” Daisy said.
“I’ll see you later.” He kissed her cheek and left.
Dressed and packed up, Daisy went slowly up the aisle, approaching the lighting booth. As she had done in so many dreams, she put her fingertips against the glass, picturing Erik inside, looking daggers at her. She stepped in carefully. Looking for some proof of their love she knew wasn’t there. No initials carved in wood or secret, scribbled graffiti.
“You talk to him?”
She looked back. David was in the doorway, a foot up on the step but going no further.
“No,” she said.
“At all?”
“No.”
He leaned a shoulder against the jamb. “I really ruined your life good, didn’t I?”
She turned full around and smiled at him. “It wasn’t your fault. And I’m all right.”
He nodded, arms crossed tight. “We’re all right.”
“What are you doing with yourself now?” she said. “I got so caught up in the moment, I didn’t even ask. Where are you living?”
“Virginia Beach.”
“Why there?”
A shy smile unfolded above his chin. “I followed a girl.”
“David,” she said, teasing. “What is this sappy look I see?”
His face grew pink and he dragged a toe through the dust of the floor, kicking at a cable. “It happens to the worst of us.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a nurse. Came in handy while I was sick. She…” He rolled his lips in and out, passed a brisk hand across his face. “What can I say? It’s your everyday love story. I gave her my heart and she gave me a kidney. What can you do but live happily ever after?”
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