“I’m sorry,” he said.
Her heart tore down the center as she went into his arms. She understood how he kept love at a distance all those years, understood the extent of the risk he took loving her after he lost Noelle. But the risk of having another child, the risk of losing that child and watching another wife go mad with grief? Ray’s soul would never make such a gamble again. He’d drawn this decision long ago in ink.
But… And I can’t erase my dreams to keep him safe.
“I want children,” she said. “I want a family with the man I marry.”
In the grey Canadian twilight, he looked old. A broken-legged wolf. His blue eyes swam with tears. “I can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she said through a throat of iron while the marrow in her bones felt all too much like glass.
They crept through the rest of the evening, speaking softly, touching each other as if they were burned and bruised. Ray pulled into the solitude of a book. Daisy sought distraction in work, sitting down at her desk with notes for a new ballet she and Will were working on. She played the music softly and sketched out an idea for the set design, using the beautiful colored pencils Ray bought for her.
“You have no idea,” he said, “what a thrill it is for me to see a woman chase down a dream like a hunter.”
He got up from the couch and came over to her. “You get an idea for a ballet and three months later, I sit in the theater and see it manifested. You want your bathroom a new color and the next day you’re putting down newspapers and opening cans of paint. You don’t wait for someone to come along and do it for you. You roll up your sleeves and get to work. I love that. I love you, Daisy.”
He crouched down by her chair and set his forehead against her side. She ran her hand through his hair.
“Ray, I do love you. And—”
His fingers touched her mouth. “Come to bed with me,” he said. “Please no more words tonight. Just come be with me.”
She followed him to bed where he made a hard and desperate love to her, like a hunter chasing down a dream. A last stand. No words or tears spilled between their grave, urgent bodies, and afterward Daisy surprised herself by falling into a sated and dreamless sleep.
In the thin grey of morning, Ray shook her awake.
“Daisy. Wake up, Daisy.”
She batted his hand away. “Stop.”
“Wake up, sweetheart.”
His face was drawn up and grim. He looked even older than the night before.
“What’s wrong?”
“Something’s happened.”
“What?”
He took her hand, led her into the foyer where he threw his wool overcoat around her shoulders.
It seemed a dream. “Ray, what is it?”
He led her out on the porch and gestured toward the small front yard of her apartment. She followed his pointing finger to a lump of black fur in the frosty grass. She squinted then looked back at Ray, noticing he had a towel in his hands.
She turned back to the yard and took a step down. “Sovereign?”
His hand checked her. “Don’t. I’ll get her.”
Her legs buckled and she sat on the steps.
“Sové,” she said, louder. “Come here, honey. Come here, Sovereign.”
Ray was wrapping the cat in the towel. He came back to her, the bundle cradled in his arms. A trickle of dried blood trailed from one black ear. The topaz eyes stared at nothing.
“Oh, honey, no,” she whispered, reaching. Carefully, Ray put Sovereign in her lap.
“She must have been hit,” he said, sitting down. He put his hand over the cat’s empty gaze. His other hand spread wide on Daisy’s head.
“I’m so sorry.”
She leaned on him, weeping, clutching her darling.
Ray held her tight and said nothing.
DAISY WRAPPED HERSELF in work after she and Ray broke up. Her job remained a constant source of joy. She could get up in the morning and look forward to the day. First position was always first position. She was a gifted choreographer, a sought-after teacher. She and Will were coaxing the flowers of New Brunswick Ballet Theater into bloom and great things were happening.
But she was lonely.
It intensified when the Kaegers’ second baby, Sara, was born. Daisy helped Will and Lucky by taking two-year-old Jack off their hands whenever she could. She fell hard for her honorary nephew, who seemed just as smitten with Aunt Daisy. He slept over every Sunday night, snuggled up close in her bed, thumb in his mouth and the other hand holding to a lock of her hair.
Watching him sleep, something in her heart contracted. A cold, fuzzy unease took shape in her stomach as she balanced on a contemplative edge.
I’m going to grow old. Alone. I’m going to live alone and die alone.
Anxiety, which had made itself scarce for many years, came calling. Mean wolves snarling in the wee hours, making her take flight from bed and go digging for Xanax. She paced her apartment, thoughts undulating like a murmur of birds, wheeling and turning. The ominous, prickling heat down her limbs even as she shivered. She breathed deep against the growing knot in her heart. She needed to find the hook, the platitude or mantra that became a shelf she could lay her mind down on. But the beasts kept laughing at her from the shadows.
I’m alone, this is my life. This is what it’s come to.
I gave up a man who loved me for a dream that might not ever come true now.
I’ll never be that woman standing on the porch, waving to her children.
“You all right, honey?” Will said when she dropped Jack off one Monday evening. He was lying on the couch in front of the fire, Sara asleep on his chest.
Daisy sat on the floor, tracing Sara’s pink earlobe with her fingertip.
“Wolves,” she said. “I don’t know why they’re showing up lately.”
Will’s hand rested on her crown a moment, then went back to Sara’s head. As Daisy watched him caress his sleeping daughter, her own fingertips cried out for soft, plump skin and milk-sweet breath. Her chest pounded fists and stamped feet, wanting the weight of an infant as she lounged on the couch in front of her own fireplace.
I’m alone.
Oh, Erik, what the hell happened to it all?
I wish I could talk to you.
“Talk to me,” Will said softly.
“All these years,” she said. “I date the nicest guys. But everything comes back around to Erik eventually. And it still hurts.”
“Phantom pain,” Will said, holding up his maimed hand. “They’re gone. But they hurt.”
Daisy reached to touch the scar tissue.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye to those fingers. Or grow unattached to them. They were here one minute, gone the next. I never saw them again. Same with Erik. He was blown off you the same way my fingers were blown off. Part of you still feels him. Part of you will always be in love with him. Because you never detached. You never fell out of love.”
“Sometimes I feel like a strand of Christmas lights with one bulb burnt out. I’m happy, Will. But not the way I was when I was with him. Will I ever be that happy again—completely, with all the lights on? Was it a dream, a once-in-a-lifetime feat that can’t ever be replicated? I don’t know.”
“I wonder if he ever replicated it,” Will said, his hand spreading wide across Sara’s back.
Daisy pushed the thought away. Always, she tried to impose some kind of discipline on her thoughts of Erik. Not to dwell on the scenario of him with another woman.
Was he married?
Probably. With kids. She had to accept the possibility.
“I think about him every day,” she said.
Will’s eyes closed. “So do I, Dais.”
Lucky’s voice came into the room. “You ever think of calling him?”
Will’s hand went up to stroke his wife as she passed by the couch, a towel-wrapped Jack on her hip. Daisy turned and stretched her legs out long, holding out her arms. Lucky dumped her damp son off and
plopped into the easy chair.
“I could,” Daisy said, drying Jack’s toes with a corner of the towel. “At the same time, I’ve worked so hard to get here, Luck. I couldn’t take it if he were cold or dismissive. Silence is preferable to either of those.”
I don’t know him anymore, I only know what he was.
“I love who he was,” she said. “Is he still that person?”
“And is it worth the risk of finding out,” Lucky said.
“Better to be here with the love I knew.”
“The man you loved,” Will said.
“I see what you did there.” Smiling, Daisy wrapped her arms around Jack, whose eyes were drooping. Thumb in mouth, he pushed his forehead against her sternum a moment, then put his cheek against her and sighed. She kissed his head.
“I don’t think you make bad choices in partners,” Lucky said. “You pick nice guys.”
“She picks princes,” Will said.
“But you also pick them safe. Trey went off to London. The zygote was too young. Ray was too old. You don’t pick anyone with promise. Because you’re still waiting for Erik.”
Her tone wasn’t accusatory, nor did Daisy take it that way. It was the truth only a friend could tell.
“Want to stay here tonight?” Will said.
She smiled into Jack’s hair. “No, I should go home,” she said. “Face the wolves.”
“Why wolves?” Lucky said. “What made you choose them as the enemy?”
Daisy looked right and left, thinking. “I don’t know,” she said. “I came up with that expression years ago. Four A.M. when the wolves come. Why?”
“It’s got me thinking about The Golden Compass. And daemons. And how wolves are vicious and brutal hunters, true. But they mate for life.”
Daisy stared at her friend, who smiled back.
“You always say you want a daemon,” Lucky said. “Maybe it’s not a pack of wolves coming for you in the night. Maybe it’s just one. And it’s not coming to kill you. It’s coming because it needs you.”
Come to me.
Come dance with me.
Let’s have a conversation.
Daisy closed her eyes as her chest unfolded in sudden understanding. Behind her lids she saw a wolf. Its fur wasn’t black but silver and sugar-white. It glistened as it circled three times and laid down beside her, nose on paws. A whine in the back of its throat as she put her hand on the soft fur and stroked with and against the nap. Slid her fingers into the juncture between arm and body, curled into the warmth and felt the great heartbeat under the fur. Beating as hard and fast as her own.
You’re not my enemy. You come here because you need me.
“I like that,” she said. Her fingers dug into ruff at the imaginary wolf’s neck. You’re with me. You are me. My soul manifested. A helpmate and confidant. And you will never sever yourself from me.
“I really like that,” she said.
From above, Will’s hand fell soft on the crown of her head.
“You’re not meant to be alone,” he said.
BARBEGAZI
Stevens Road
Saint John
October 24, 2005
Dear Rita,
Aren’t I subtle with the new address? Yes, I now officially have equity. I wasn’t looking to buy a house at all, but over the summer our rehearsal accompanist Edwina Meagher retired. And she and her husband asked if I’d like to buy their place on Grand Bay.
I’d been there a bunch of times—for tea, for knitting club, for no reason—and it’s a miniature La Tarasque. A sweet little farmhouse with a wraparound porch and pretty gardens. The clincher was its name: Barbegazi. They’re legendary winter gnomes in Swiss and French folklore, and Edwina had a dozen statues of them around the property. They’re hideous but darling. Most she took with her but she left me a few to keep watch through winter, she said. So I’m now perfectly at home in a pretty house guarded by an ugly French myth.
I have a live-in lover. Don’t get excited—it’s of the four-legged variety. Another instance of serendipity: I was having lunch in the Wharf Tavern one afternoon when the bartender Nick asked if I’d help him get a cat out of their dumpster. It was an unfortunately disgusting rescue, but we pulled out this pathetic scrap of a kitten. Skin and bones with one pierced ear—badly infected. Its eyes were powder blue and I recognized it as a Russian Blue which, by the way, cost a bloody fortune. Who buys a Russian Blue, pierces its ear and then throws it away? Honestly, sometimes I hate people.
We wrapped it in a bar towel and left it at a local shelter. But after going unclaimed for two weeks, I adopted it, or her as it was discovered. I call her Bastet, after the Egyptian cat goddess with earrings. Pardon me while I show off my liberal arts education.
Tons more to tell, where do I start? NBBT is busy getting ready for our first full-length Nutcracker. The stress is unbelievable but the excitement is addictive. We have a double cast of children for the party scene and (wait for it) a growing Christmas tree for the battle scene. A monumental and expensive feat of engineering, but also the kind of spectacle that sells tickets.
A reporter from Dance Magazine came to do a feature story on us. Let me say that again: Dance Magazine. I felt like Linda Richman when Barbra Streisand walked on the set. “I can die now. That’s all the time we have this week. I have to go die now.”
The most exciting news? About a month ago, I went home for a few days. We’re lounging around one night and the phone rings. And it’s my father’s son, Michel, calling out of the blue. Hi Dad.
My poor old man almost collapsed. He got so emotional, he handed the phone to ME. Like I’m helpful in this surreal situation. “Um…Hello. Nice to meet you…?”
I admire my mother so much. After five minutes of my shrill small talk, she, the freakin’ ambassador, takes the phone and starts chatting away like it’s her favorite nephew. “Come see us. Oh, absolutely, darling, we’d love to meet you in New York.”
Meanwhile, Pop is crying and I’m staring like an idiot.
Michel is a chef and has come to the States on a year-long work visa, bringing his wife Anya and a three-year-old daughter, Dominique (Kiki). The first meeting in New York was Michel and Pop alone. Which they needed to be. Then Michel brought Anya and Kiki to Philadelphia for a weekend and they met my parents for dinner. It’s going along cautiously but it feels really positive. Mamou invited them for Thanksgiving so I will get to meet him in a few weeks. I’m excited. And so happy for Pop that he’s gotten this chance to resolve and rebuild a relationship with his son.
I’m kind of jealous, actually.
And on that cry-for-help note, I am off to rehearsal.
Take care and talk to you soon,
Daisy
“THIS IS YOUR BROTHER,” Joe said, his voice gruff.
Daisy burst out laughing, as did Michel.
They had the same eyes.
“But you knew this,” Joe said.
“No,” Daisy said, as she and Michel pressed cheeks three times. “How would I know?”
“From his pictures in my study.”
“They’re in black and white. I honestly had no idea he had the eyes.”
“The eyes,” Michel said to his wife, Anya. “See? I’m not a changeling.”
Anya raised her eyebrows and made a zipping motion across her lips. Behind her leg lurked Kiki. Green eyes like celery and blonde hair in two stubby pigtails atop her head.
“Come into the kitchen, darlings,” Francine called. “Look at my present.”
Anya, whose family hailed from Switzerland, had gifted a cuckoo clock to the Biancos. Francine was beside herself, making everyone hush at each quarter hour to see the little bird emerge.
“I love it,” she said over and over. “It makes me so happy.”
They lived in the kitchen for the next three days. Francine was in her element and with Michel co-piloting, each meal outdid the next. Joe sat at the long farmhouse table, alternating between sous-chef chores and watching his s
on with thoughtful, misty eyes. Anya was exhausted from her post-doc work and spent a lot of time napping, which left Kiki for Daisy to eat up with a spoon. In childish French, they played with old toys and games Daisy brought down from the attic. Daisy gave her a bath in the evenings and read stories—including all the verses from Daisy, Daisy. They cut paper snowflakes, gathered eggs and baked cookies.
“You sure she’s not a bother?” Anya said, poking her head into Daisy’s bedroom to say goodnight.
Daisy looked up from her book, then down at the sleeping child next to her. “We’re good,” she said smiling.
“Fantastic,” Anya said. “I’m going to get laid.”
“I’ve been laid in the carriage house many times,” Daisy said. “You’ll love it.”
Francine never made turkey on Thanksgiving. Instead, dinner was a perfectly rare beef tenderloin with roasted vegetables and creamed spinach. Apple pie and homemade rum ice cream. They sat around and talked until the butter went soft and the candlewicks were fighting to stay alive in pools of liquid wax.
Michel and Daisy cleaned up the kitchen together while everyone else drifted off to their beds, talking easily as they crammed the dishwasher and packed up the leftovers.
She liked him. She was still feeling out their connection, deciding it was best, for the moment, to think of him as someone she’d like to know better. She imagined he was doing the same with Joe.
Michel told stories of his difficult stepfather and being forced to keep Joe at a secretive distance. Daisy rolled up the leg of her jeans and told him about Lancaster. Then, popping the lids onto Tupperware containers, she confided in him some of her worries about getting older. Not having anyone. Wishing she could give her mother a grandchild.
“So have a baby,” Michel said, drying the last copper saucepan. “You always have the option. Maybe it’s not conventional or exactly what you envisioned. But even the best dreams have something askew.” He reached and hooked the loop of the handle onto the pot rack. He looked at home.
“You’re right,” she said. The solution was simple, but only when someone pointed it out. She could. If it came to that.
“You’re only thirty-three, Dézi,” Michel said, smiling. “Christ was just getting his start at that age.”
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