Dance with Me

by Luanne Rice

  “Nice,” he said, glancing up at the dolphin banner.

  “Got to keep the sharks away,” Chloe said.

  “Dolphins really do that?” Mona asked. “Chase sharks?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “That’s so weird,” Mona said. “Considering sharks have teeth and are killing machines and dolphins just swim around looking cute.”

  “They ram the sharks in the belly with their snouts,” Zeke said.

  “Nice introduction,” Mona said, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh,” Chloe said. “Zeke, this is Mona. Mona, this is Zeke.”

  “Hi,” they both said. But even though Zeke was saying “hi” to Mona, Chloe felt him staring at her. She felt herself glowing and tingling, as if he had just taken hold of her hand.

  “Have you ever seen them do it?” Mona asked, and Chloe knew she meant the dolphins.

  “Yes,” he said. “Last summer. Surfing, just out past the break at First Beach. Suddenly we saw fins.”

  “Fins?” Chloe asked.

  “Sharks,” he said.

  “Oh, shit,” Mona said.

  Just then a car came along, and it slowed down, but it didn’t stop. Chloe had to admit she was glad, at that very moment.

  “Yeah,” Zeke said. “Nothing too big, but still . . .”

  “Great whites?” Mona asked, then did the music from Jaws: “Dunh-duh.”

  “No. They’re rare in Rhode Island. Blue sharks. They’re not man-eaters, but they could do some serious damage to a board. Or a leg.”

  “So what happened?” Mona asked. Chloe was glad she was there to ask the questions; all Chloe could do was gaze into Zeke’s green eyes the way he seemed to be staring into hers.

  “Dolphin to the rescue. She’d been playing in the surf. We’d seen her; she’d been hanging around all week. But all of a sudden, she burst out of the water, one big leap. Then she sounded—”

  “Went down,” Mona supplied, as if Chloe hadn’t just read Moby Dick for the same English class.

  “. . . and she came up, nose-first into the biggest shark. Flipped him right out of the water. All we could see was his white belly.”

  “Did she chase him away?” Chloe asked.

  Zeke nodded. “Him and all his friends.”

  “My, you lead a dangerous life,” Mona said sternly. “Bike accidents, shark attacks.”

  “He has dolphins protecting him,” Chloe said.

  “Yeah,” Zeke said. He was standing so close to Chloe, she could smell the orange and coconuts from his tropical sunscreen. She could see the salt crystals on his eyebrows and the blond hair on his arms. The word “bereft” no longer applied. She felt him take her hand. Her fingers interlaced with his, and she knew it was his way of telling her that she was his dolphin.

  And suddenly she had the feeling that he was hers.

  CHAPTER 14

  Where did you say you’re going?” Margaret asked, staring at Jane.

  “She didn’t say,” Sylvie said. “She’s being very mysterious.”

  “Inscrutable,” Jane said, smiling.

  Margaret smiled back. Jane looked very pretty tonight. She was dressed in a long black skirt and very sheer teal blue shirt that set off her eyes, made them sparkle like sapphires. Her black hair glistened; she wore it tucked behind her ear with a jeweled hair clip. Sylvie, on the other hand, sat in the rocking chair beside the bed wearing black sweat pants and a faded yellow T-shirt. She bent over her needlework, concentrating fiercely.

  “You’ll ruin your eyes in that light,” Margaret said.

  “I can see.”

  “You girls never took care of your eyes. Don’t think I didn’t used to know what was going on. I’d kiss you good night, and I’d barely be out the door before you’d have your books and flashlights out.”

  Jane raised her eyebrows, but Sylvie didn’t look up.

  “You’re mad, aren’t you?” Margaret asked.

  “No. Why would I be mad?” Sylvie asked.

  “Because it’s Friday night, and you lost the coin toss. Your sister gets to go out, and you have to stay home with me. Why don’t you just put me in a home, let others worry about me?”

  Now Sylvie looked up. She looked upset, even panicked. Margaret felt a twinge of guilt, for being manipulative, but she had wanted to get Sylvie’s attention. Jane looked frozen, like a deer in the headlights. Margaret felt her chin wobbling. Although she was trying for effect, the emotions were real.

  “You should be going out with John tonight,” she said. “He’s such a nice man, a good teacher . . . and instead you’re stuck home with me.”

  “No, Mom,” Sylvie said. “John’s coming over in a little while. I’m going to take a bath and get ready soon. Please don’t say I’m stuck with you—”

  “But you are. You’re throwing the best years of your life away, taking care of me.”

  “Mom, you took care of us.”

  “I know,” Margaret whispered. She could feel her own heart beating in her chest. Reaching for her doll, she hugged it tight. She wanted the girls to see. It was a subliminal reminder to everyone. Margaret had raised two children alone. She had taught thousands of children; the town had thought enough of her to name her principal. She had always had the welfare of other people foremost in her mind. And right now she was bedridden. She could no longer take care of others—or even herself. She lived in constant fear that her daughters would decide to send her away.

  Sylvie saw her tears. She handed her a tissue.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” she asked.

  “I . . .” Margaret began, her throat closing as tears flowed from her eyes.

  She felt the girls waiting. They both looked so worried. Margaret wanted to tell them: I love you. I love my house. This is the home I made for all of us. This is where you both had the chicken pox. It’s where I rocked you to sleep when you had bad dreams. It’s where I got over your father. It reflects my love of bare wood floors and hooked rugs and the color blue. It holds all the pictures I ever took of you, and as long as I live here or anywhere I’ll never stop wishing I’d taken more. It’s where I studied for my master’s. It’s where I learned to inject myself with insulin.

  But the thoughts swirled so intensely, like a huge storm in a little inland bay, that they piled up on each other and knocked each other around and churned up the sandy bottom. All the words just flew apart, but Margaret was left with the same emotions as before and no clear way to express them. She held on to her doll, rocking, rocking as the tears flowed harder.

  “I,” she said. “I, I, I, I . . .”

  Downstairs, Sylvie felt drained. Seeing their mother like that upset her so much. Such a sharp, brilliant woman, unable to finish what she was trying to say. Sylvie had a lump in her throat, and she thought Jane did, too. Jane stood at the foot of the stairs, staring up.

  “Is she okay?” Jane asked.

  “Yes,” Sylvie said. “She just got upset about something.”

  “She got upset about the idea of us sending her to a home.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “It’s not that I want to do it, Sylvie. It’s just that I know we have to start to look into it.”

  “Like she said: She took care of us.”

  “But we didn’t have diabetes and circulation problems and a tendency to fall . . . and we didn’t have—”

  “Don’t say it,” Sylvie said.

  “Say what?” Jane asked.

  “Alzheimer’s.”

  “Don’t say it because you’re afraid it’s true?” Jane asked.

  Sylvie shook her head. She felt a wave of panic rising. Every Christmas she held a writing contest in the school library, and then she’d take the students with the winning entries to Marsh Glen Care Center, to read the poems and essays to the residents there. She pictured all the elderly people. Some were so elegant—well-dressed, coiffed, alert, and excited.

  But others were strapped into wheelchairs, their heads nod
ding, chins resting on their chests, some moaning or snapping their fingers, talking to ghosts or people no one else could see. Seeing them always tore Sylvie’s heart out. Who had they been before they got old? She was so afraid her mother was becoming like them.

  “Syl,” Jane said, grabbing Sylvie and giving her a hug. “We love her no matter what.”

  Sylvie gulped some air. She felt dizzy, as if she might pass out. Pushing her sister away, she sat down on the stairs. She blinked, looking up into Jane’s blue eyes. Her sister looked beautiful, decked out for the night. John was coming over in an hour, to have pizza. The expression in Jane’s eyes was pure sisterly love, and Sylvie couldn’t bear it.

  “You live in New York,” Sylvie said. “You’re home just to get things straightened out, and then you’ll leave again.”

  “It’s not like that,” Jane said.

  “You have a business to run! I know that. Are you just going to let it fall apart while you stay here indefinitely?”

  “This is the first time off I’ve taken in fifteen years. People won’t forget me. And I won’t forget how to bake.”

  “No, of course you won’t. The last few days you’ve been making pies, and I suppose you’ve found somewhere to sell them in Rhode Island . . .” she trailed off, leaving Jane a chance to supply the place. But she didn’t, and Sylvie reddened, knowing why.

  “Sylvie . . .”

  “Don’t think I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “They’re apple pies. The whole house smells like apples.”

  “Come on—”

  “Apple peels in the garbage,” Sylvie said.

  “You checked the garbage?” Jane asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “I think it’s wrong,” Sylvie said. “Whatever you’re doing.”

  “I don’t think it is,” Jane said.

  “It has something to do with Chadwick Orchards, doesn’t it? You’re making apple pies to bond with her. She lives in the midst of apple trees, so you’re baking your heart out to give her apple pies. If she lived on the beach, I just know you’d be baking with dulse . . .”

  “You went through the garbage?” Jane repeated, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe it. Which was funny, coming from Jane. When they were young, she was a total detective when it came to their father’s whereabouts. She would go through his drawers and pockets, read his datebook, rifle his glove compartment. Sylvie’s stomach flipped at the memory. “That’s disgusting,” Jane said.

  “No,” Sylvie said. “What’s disgusting is you bothering the Chadwicks like this. I’ll bet they have no idea of who you are, do they?”

  “They know who I am. I told them my name.”

  “Well, you’d better hope they don’t mention you to Virginia. She’s got an eagle eye out for her family. You know the conditions of the adoption! No one was to know your identity except her—but she knows, Jane . . .” Sylvie trailed off, knowing that Virginia was like their mother, forgetting a little more every day. She shifted gears. “You gave that baby up, Jane,” she said.

  “I know. Mom saw to that.”

  “Don’t you dare blame Mom! You were too young, you were in college, he refused to marry you . . .”

  Sylvie swallowed. She saw two bright spots of red on her sister’s cheeks and knew she had gone too far.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Sylvie said, wishing she could take it back. She watched Jane look down and away. Sylvie’s heart twisted in her chest. She remembered how much Jane had loved the boy. When they were very young, they would look through magazines and find pictures of brides and imagine their own faces there, and they had promised they would ask each other to be maids of honor, but neither of them had ever married.

  “That turned out,” Jane said quietly, “to be the least important part.” She looked up. “That summer, that whole year without him—I wasn’t sure I could go on breathing. But I did.”

  “I know,” Sylvie said.

  “It was because I loved him,” Jane said. “And that’s what love does. It takes hold of you so hard . . . takes hold of your breath. Your heart, your pulse, your thoughts, everything.”

  Sylvie closed her eyes, thinking of John. Did she feel that way for him?

  “Everything,” Jane repeated. “And it doesn’t let you go. You know how I realized I didn’t really love Jeffrey, Sylvie?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because it let me go,” Jane said. “Love let me go.”

  “I’m glad,” Sylvie said, thinking that Jane was making love sound pretty terrible, like a trap or a disease.

  “But it didn’t let me go with Chloe,” Jane said steadily. “It’s held on this whole time. I can hardly believe ten minutes have passed, never mind fifteen years. I can still feel her—right here—” She raised her arms in front of her, as if tenderly rocking a baby; but her eyes, staring at Sylvie, were ferocious.

  “Then you have to let it go,” Sylvie said, scared by the intensity.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Jane said. “Love doesn’t give you control—it takes control of you. Haven’t you figured that out?”

  Sylvie stood still. She thought of John. Comfortable, kind, nonchallenging John. She felt something building between them, the very first sticks or straws of a nest, something solid and real. He had held her hand—twice. Both times, she had felt a shiver on the back of her neck. The feeling of his knees touching hers under the card table made her shiver. She had bought some lavender bath salts to prepare for tonight, when she hoped he might kiss her . . . But the way Jane was talking . . . no, Sylvie had never felt that way.

  “You make it sound mad,” Sylvie said. “As if it drives you crazy.”

  “It does, in a way,” Jane said. “When I think about all the years . . . her first steps, her baby teeth, her first day of school, the music she likes . . . when I think about those things . . .” She closed her eyes.

  Sylvie wanted to hug Jane and, at the same time, wanted to run away. She remembered a time when she feared for her sister’s sanity—and safety. Those days after the baby’s birth had been terrible. Jane had slept all the time. If Sylvie passed by her bed at three in the afternoon, there would be a big, long lump completely hidden by covers, and Sylvie would know it was Jane.

  And then, almost two weeks after she’d given the baby up, the keening began. Sylvie had started at Brown, but she was homesick and worried and spent a lot of weekends at home. She could still hear the sounds: high-pitched, inhuman, like a loon on the lake at night. Like an animal. Jane had held them inside for so long, all those months at St. Joseph’s and the days at the hospital, and now they were forcing themselves out . . . almost as if the cries were alive, the last vestiges of the life that had grown inside her. Sylvie had cried alongside her sister, but in secret—in her own room, holding her own pillow.

  “But, Jane—can’t you just accept that you did the right thing? For her, for everyone?”

  “I feel as if I did the wrong thing,” Jane said.

  Sylvie watched her eyes. They were so un-calm. They darted around the room, as if nothing there gave her ease or comfort. They couldn’t look at Sylvie. Sylvie had a pit in her stomach. Had Jane felt that way this whole time? Back when it had all happened, Sylvie remembered feeling really angry at her: Sylvie had chosen Brown partly so she could be at college with her sister. Then Jane had gotten pregnant and ruined everything. Later, reading Fitzgerald in freshman English, having witnessed Jane’s depression, Sylvie worried that her sister would wind up like Zelda—driven crazy by her own heart.

  “Please, Jane, you’re worrying me. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “You?”

  “You’re my sister,” Sylvie said. “I love you. I can’t stand seeing you be so destructive—not just to yourself, I’m taking a risk to say this, but to her. Don’t you think it’s weird, that some older woman would suddenly appear out of the blue, with fresh-baked apple pies? Don’t you think she wonders? You’ll be lucky if her mother doesn’t call the police on you.”

&n
bsp; “It’s not like that,” Jane said. “It’s not like that at all.”

  “Only because they haven’t figured it out yet. But when they do—”

  “Stop, please?”

  Sylvie shrugged. It was Friday night. At least Jane was going out with someone, getting her mind off the whole Chloe craziness. Neither she nor Jane was good with dating—their father and Jane’s experience had ruined them both for easygoing Friday nights. Sylvie felt like she was seeing a child off for her first date. She critically appraised Jane’s appearance: subtle makeup, silver hoop earrings, gorgeous shining hair, sexy blue top. She took a deep breath, smiling at her sister.

  “Truce, okay?”

  “Okay,” Jane said. “We always seem to be saying that.”

  Sylvie ignored the barb. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  Jane didn’t reply. She smiled slightly, more inscrutable than ever. Suddenly tires crunched in the driveway. Sylvie started. What if it was John? She wasn’t ready. She had to soak in the bath, and give herself a minifacial, and change into something pretty. But then Jane, looking out the window, kissed Sylvie’s cheek and said a really fast good-bye, and ran outside to meet her date before Sylvie could say she wanted to meet him.

  Sylvie, feeling momentary relief that it was Jane’s date, not John, and a thrill that she actually felt so upset about not being ready, almost as if maybe love was taking control in a way Sylvie had never felt before, went over to the window. She stayed behind the sheer white curtain, trying to sneak a peek at who it was.

  She saw a truck. It seemed to have a small tree in the bed. Sylvie’s mouth turned to cotton. She watched the driver, visible only from behind, open the door for her sister. She saw Jane climb up the step and get inside. The driver slammed the door behind her.

  He was tall. He was trim, with broad shoulders. He had brown hair and a beard, and he wore black jeans and a blue oxford cloth shirt. His limp seemed more pronounced than it had the last time Sylvie had seen him: when he’d driven his mother to the potluck dinner.

  It was Dylan Chadwick.