Dance with Me

by Luanne Rice

  Dylan dug holes two feet deep, twice the diameter of the new trees’ root systems. He threw some loose soil back into the hole, loosened the layers of dirt on the sides, to make it easier for the roots to penetrate. With each tree, he took care to untangle the roots, spread them on the loose soil, make sure they weren’t crowded or twisted.

  As he replaced soil around the roots, he firmed it with his hand, making sure there weren’t any air pockets. He checked to make sure the graft union was a good two inches above the soil line. Patting down the earth, he had the sense of burying something he loved. He thought of Isabel. He remembered the day they had lowered her into the ground.

  The rain began. The drops were big, and splashed on the dry ground. They fell hard and fast, and within a short time had turned the earth to mud. They pelted the white petals, and they dripped off the branches and new leaves. Dylan kept working. His hands were blistered from the shovel’s rough handle, and they began to bleed. The rain turned his blood into water and washed it into the soil.

  “Hello!”

  He heard the voice and looked up. A blue station wagon was parked in the road, and a woman was coming through the field. It was Jane. She wore a thin white shirt and faded jeans, sneakers on her feet, dark hair in her eyes.

  “I’ve got the pies!” she called, gesturing behind her. “They’re in the car!”

  Dylan leaned on his shovel. He was almost finished, and didn’t want to stop. Something about planting trees made him forget his life for a little while; he got lost in the roots and the soil and the falling rain, and it took him a minute to come back. He stared at Jane, drenched wet as she ran toward him, and thought of an earthbound angel.

  “Where should I leave them?” she asked.

  “You didn’t have to come through the orchard,” he said.

  “I called you from the road, but you didn’t hear,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said. He had been wearing a flannel shirt, taken it off when he’d started sweating. It was balled up on higher ground, on a rock under an old, established tree, still fairly dry; he shook it out, and tried to cover her head with it. A little shower of dirt rained into her eyes. She tossed her head, laughing. Now she had a streak of mud on her cheek.

  “The pies?” she asked, a smile wavering on her lips.

  “How about dropping them at my house?” he said. “Turn into that driveway just past the fence—I’ll walk over and meet you there.”

  She nodded, already running for her car.

  Jane followed his directions: she followed the split-rail fence, turned onto the dirt driveway. Her hands were shaking. Dylan had tried to cover her head with his shirt. He had actually brushed her cheek with his beard. He had smiled with friendliness, and she couldn’t quite smile back. She was delivering pies, but she was on a stealth mission.

  He lived in a big, white farmhouse. The word would be “rambling.” It had porches and chimneys. The shutters were dark green and peeling. An old wishing well tilted in the front yard. A bright red truck was parked in front of an old weathered silvery red barn. As she watched, Dylan strode out of the orchard, up the front steps, and gestured for her to come inside.

  She grabbed the basket of pies and ran, hunched over to shield it from the rain. Dylan had the door open; she flew through. The front hall was dark. They shook their wet heads like shaggy dogs. Dylan led her into the kitchen, but passing through the living room, she noticed cats sleeping on all the chairs.

  “Cats love rainy days,” she said.

  “Well, we’ve got cats, all right,” he said.

  “Cozy,” she said.

  “They make the house smell like one big furball,” he said. “But they provide pest control.”

  “Pest control?”

  He nodded. They were in the kitchen, which was a retro fantasy of old cream-colored appliances, enameled table and spindle-legged wooden chairs, and faded gingham curtains. Jane had the clear thought that nothing in this room had changed since 1955.

  “The cats eat the rats,” he said. “And mice and snakes.”

  “Good cats,” she said.

  “We store apples in the barn, and by October, the word gets out, and critters appear from all over. My brother suggested poison, to keep the mice down . . . the family practically broke up over it.”

  “Why?” Jane asked.

  “Chloe,” he said, and the name, as much as she had known she would hear it today, sent an electric shiver down her spine.

  “What about Chloe?”

  “She had a fit. Poison mice?” He shook his head. “She’d rather poison herself. Eli tried telling her there’s a special poison that just puts the mice to sleep, a nice gentle shove into dreamland, and she threatened to run away from home if we used it.”

  “She loves animals,” Jane said, holding the new information, precious as a pearl, in her mind.

  Dylan nodded. He leaned against the Formica counter, arms folded across his chest. He was tall, and his body was strong and broad, but his face didn’t seem like that of a farmer. Jane thought his eyes were too fine. His gaze was too deep. He looked like a man who knew his way around Shakespeare. She thought, uncomfortably, of Jeffrey, then looked down. As she did, a drop of blood fell onto his boot.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  “Yep,” he said, looking at the palm of his hand. He reached for a paper towel. “Toughen up,” he said to his hand.

  “What happened?”

  “Spent too many years at a desk,” he said.

  She tilted her head, waiting. He pressed the paper towel harder, wadded it up, threw it away. Almost instantly, another blood drop hit his boot top.

  “Give me your hand,” she ordered, crossing the kitchen.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  She nodded gravely. “Yes.” She held his hand in hers. His skin was tan and rough. His fingernails were black with dirt. Blisters had formed across the palms of both hands, and the ones on the right were broken and bleeding. She stepped to the deep enameled sink and turned the faucets—heavy chrome with white enamel “hot” and “cold” discs in the middle.

  “You have a nice old-fashioned kitchen,” she said, still holding his hand as she waited for the water to warm up.

  He nodded. “I grew up here.”

  “Does it remind you of your childhood?”

  “It did when I first moved back here. But now it’s just where I live. Are you really a doctor?”

  “Yes,” she said gravely.

  “A psychiatrist?” He smiled.

  “Oh, because I asked about your childhood? Very perceptive. But no. I’m a brain surgeon.” She tested the water with the inside of her right wrist. “This might sting.”

  “I’m tough.”

  “Here goes,” she said, sliding his hand under the stream of warm water. She watched it wash away blood and dirt. His palm was raw, and she knew the water hurt. “You’re being very brave.”

  “Thank you. I thought you said you were a baker.”

  “Well, I am,” she said. “But I’ve cut my hand plenty of times, so I do know first aid . . . so that qualifies me to do this. Do you have any antiseptic?”

  He opened the door under the sink, and she saw a small plastic kit with a red cross on the front.

  She smiled. “I’m not really a doctor.”

  He smiled back. “Somehow I knew that. In a former life, I was paid to know when someone was telling the whole truth. I’m cutting you some slack, because I think you just wanted to set my mind at ease.”

  “You’re very perceptive. Hold still,” she said, as she dabbed at his palm with a paper towel, opened the case, and took out a tube of ointment. She spread it on, then wrapped his hand in a length of gauze. “There.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Good as new.”

  She nodded. He motioned toward the kitchen table, pulling out a chair for her. Jane sat down. The enamel table was cream-colored, chipped at the edges, with pink roses in the corners. Dylan’s kitchen was like a time c
apsule. She felt as if she had traveled back to her youth, into the domicile of another time.

  “Don’t ever redo your kitchen,” she said. “People in New York would pay a fortune to have this.”

  “Ah, New York,” he said.

  She glanced around, then smiled at him. “Do you miss it?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Should we exchange stories about where we lived and what our favorite restaurants are?”

  “And figure out that we bought our newspapers at the same stand?”

  “No, I had mine delivered.”

  “Me, too,” he said, grinning.

  “So, forget having a newsstand in common. There must be something else.”

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “Growing up here in Rhode Island, I couldn’t wait to get away. When I’m in the city, I think of myself as a New Yorker. It’s such an intense place to live. It always makes me feel very on edge and alive—but in a good way. Then I come back to Twin Rivers, and I feel I never left . . .”

  “How could ‘on edge’ be good?” he asked, skipping her last statement. The humor had left his eyes; he leaned back against the counter, watching her.

  “Well,” she said. “I think I know what you’re getting at. The not-so-great intense things . . .” She thought. “Like, walking down the street at night, you’re always aware of who’s around, who’s behind you . . . and crossing streets, you know never to trust the red light, because some yellow cab might come careening along and jump the light and you’d be history . . . or a flower pot might fall from someone’s terrace twenty stories up and brain you . . . or some cop will be shooting some robber, and there’s always that messy off-chance you’ll get caught in the cross fire . . .”

  Dylan stood, expressionless, listening.

  “But there’s a wonderful ‘on edge,’ too,” she said. “There’s walking down Charles Street on an April morning, and seeing the Callery pear trees in bloom—makes you want to write poetry. And there’s opening the paper on Friday morning, seeing that the Eliot Feld Ballet is at the Joyce Theater that night, and calling for tickets. There’s waking up hot in the middle of a July night, and missing Narragansett Bay, and going down to Battery Park to feel the harbor breezes and take a ride on the Staten Island ferry.”

  “Sounds as if you love the city,” he said.

  “Love, hate. But mostly love.” She smiled and shrugged. “It’s New York.”

  He nodded.

  Jane glanced around the kitchen. Her heart kicked over, speeding up, as she saw the photo: Chloe and another girl, surrounded by flowers, kneeling with their arms around each other, when they were about five or six. Very slowly, as if by accident, Jane began to migrate over to the wall where it was hanging.

  “How did you end up back here?” she asked him.

  “I love the land,” he said simply.

  The quiet answer distracted her, momentarily, from Chloe’s picture. “You mean the orchard?”

  He nodded. “It’s been in my family for a long time. I remember riding on my grandfather’s lap on the tractor. He got me started learning about trees, learning one from another by their bark, their leaves . . . My father wanted Eli—that’s my brother—”

  Jane held still, not reacting to the name of the man who had adopted her daughter.

  “. . . and me to go to college, have the chance to do something else with our lives. We did . . . but I never gave up the idea of coming back.”

  “Living in New York, you pined for apple trees?” She smiled.

  He nodded. “In a way, yes. I had a great life. I went away to college, lived in D.C., traveled everywhere, wound up living in New York. Whenever the city would start seeming too big, or squeezing in—”

  “Which it always does,” Jane said.

  “I’d think of being here. It’s crazy . . .”

  She waited, encouragingly.

  “I’d picture myself standing right in the middle,” he said. “Trees on either side of me, spreading as far as I could see. All that space and air, and all that green . . .”

  “You could breathe again.”

  He nodded.

  “My father and grandfather taught me how to plant,” he said. “When I was young, I had my own vegetable garden. Just a few tomato plants on a little square of earth. But I made things grow. That felt good.”

  Jane turned toward the picture again. Chloe and the other girl were kneeling among flowers. Jane stared at Chloe’s beautiful big eyes, filled with love as she gazed at the other girl. “Looks like you have another gardener in the family,” Jane said, her heart racing.

  Dylan didn’t respond.

  “How old is Chloe there?” she asked.

  “She’s five. They both are.”

  “Who’s the other girl?” Jane asked.

  “My daughter,” Dylan said.

  “She’s the same age as Chloe?” Jane asked. The question came out so fast, and she felt just the quickest, sharpest prick of awareness: There was so much she didn’t know about her daughter. She hadn’t even realized she had a cousin.

  “Born the same year,” Dylan said.

  “In 1988,” Jane said, the date slipping out before she could stop it. But Dylan didn’t seem to notice.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Chloe was born . . .”

  “In February. Our little miracle girl,” he said.

  Jane clenched her jaw and couldn’t look at him. His words packed a punch. How how could he say that, how could they have taken her miracle and made it their own? “Miracle girl?” she made herself ask.

  “Yes. All they ever wanted was a child to love. My brother and sister-in-law. Great people, couldn’t have kids of their own. It seemed so unfair. But then one day they decided to adopt . . .”

  “One day they decided to adopt,” Jane said, the words echoing in her head. “Chloe?”

  Dylan nodded. “I never think of her that way. Don’t know what made me say it just now . . . guess it’s just remembering what a miracle she seemed. Man, she changed everything around here. Brought a lot of joy.”

  Jane stared at the picture. “I can see why,” she said. “Two little girls the same age.”

  “Chloe was born in February, Isabel in June.”

  “Four months apart,” Jane said. Her heart constricted. She could hardly bear to think of the entire life that had unfolded without her. “They must be close . . .”

  “They were.”

  Jane nodded, awash in her own sadness. But then she looked at Dylan and saw his eyes. They were empty, lost, hopeless. The rich golden green-brown had drained out of them; they were pale, the color of tea, as if he had just become a ghost. Her heart turned over. “‘Were’?” she asked.

  “My daughter . . .” he began.

  The next words seemed caught in his throat. He opened his mouth to complete the sentence, but he couldn’t. She saw him clamp down on the words and the thoughts. He stood there, silent. She didn’t know his story, but she knew what he was feeling. His daughter was gone. Jane felt it in her cells. How often had she stood in front of her mirror, trying to see a hint of the woman Chloe would become? Gazing into her own eyes, at her own smile, for a sign of the daughter she didn’t know? She was haunted by her own version of “My daughter . . .”

  “What happened?” she said. Caught by the pull of Chloe’s picture—like the moon held by the earth’s gravity—she tried to take a step closer to Dylan, but couldn’t move.

  “Before,” he said, “when you were talking about New York . . .”

  She nodded.

  “And you talked about the things that can happen . . .”

  “The intense things . . .”

  Dylan was staring at his bandaged hand; when he looked up, his eyes were on fire. They were no longer empty or lost, but burning with hate.

  “Cross fire,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Real cross fire,” he said. “Just like y
ou said: good guys and bad guys shooting at each other. Isabel and her mother got caught in it. I was an officer, a marshal. I was working on a case, trying to get them away from it. But I didn’t—”

  Jane, held by the power of the picture, turned to stare at Chloe and Isabel. As much as she saw herself in Chloe, she saw Dylan in Isabel. His daughter was a bright, vibrant, chestnut-haired sprite, caught in Chloe’s embrace.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jane said.

  Dylan nodded and shrugged both at the same time. His frown was deep, the lines between his eyes sharply scored. His beard was dark, and his eyes were still pale, the color of stones underwater, washed by the river. He couldn’t look at her.

  I know what it feels like, she wanted to say, to lose a daughter.

  She stared back at Chloe’s picture. She thought of the years that had passed without her. She thought of the dreams—no, the nightmares—she had had of Chloe being taken from her arms. She thought of the nights she had held her pillow as if it were an infant, crying until the cotton and down were soaking wet.

  She looked at Dylan Chadwick and thought of her own heartbreak and knew it wasn’t the same at all. Not at all. Glancing down at her own hand, she saw the ghostly patch of blue. The blue paint, from where she had brushed against the apple stand.

  That splintery, rickety wooden stand, just painted bright blue, robin’s egg blue, by Chloe.

  Chloe was alive. She hadn’t been cut down by cross fire. She was growing up, living life. The life Jane had given her. Breathing deeply, she found herself able to take one step away from Chloe’s picture. Then another. The distance increased—one foot, two feet—until she had crossed the kitchen and found herself standing in front of Dylan Chadwick.

  She reached for his hand.

  Her hand took hold of his bandaged one. Her heart pounded. She felt his pain pass through their skin. It felt familiar. She understood all the nights he had felt alone in the dark, knowing he had lost his daughter. She understood that very, very well.