“I’m so sorry.”
“You should have called,” Auguste says. “I’d have told you to stay home.”
“That’s very generous, I wish I’d—”
“Today, I mean. You need not be here.”
“But something happened.” Even Sophie is alarmed by the desperation in her voice. “I was…”
“Kidnapped?”
The other dancers giggle. Sophie’s blood simmers.
“Honestly. In a way.”
The entire room is silent.
“I mean, I can’t think of a better way to explain—”
“Stop it. Just stop. Whatever happened, it’s done. We’re moving on.”
Auguste turns back to Nathalie and twirls his fingers. The other dancers hop up and take their spots. Antoine kicks his feet, preparing for their dance.
“Fuck, would you just let me explain!”
Auguste spins on his heel.
“We’ll talk outside.”
The music starts. Sophie watches the other dancers in the mirrors, extending into the room forever. An infinite number of eyes, all on her. Endless exits and only one way out. Once in the atrium of the lobby, Auguste stands close to her and talks hushed.
“Obviously you do not talk to me like that in front of the other dancers.”
Sophie has never met someone who could use politeness to convey such anger. They stand alongside two large fronds, the wide leaves allowing them privacy. She doesn’t quite remember walking there.
“I like you, Sophie, you know I do. I think you could be truly great. This is why I like you. But behavior like this can stop a career.”
A glimmer of rage dances up Sophie’s back; it pirouettes around her spine, then lands in her stomach. Her body isn’t made to hold this much disappointment. The darkness waits, opening its arms to her, saying, I know, I understand. I can help. We can make them understand. We can make our pain theirs.
She barely has the energy to fight it anymore. Now there is a satisfaction in the pain. Now it feels like a piece of her, too. Sophie pushes her thumb into the tissue pressed under the arm of her leotard.
“Sophie? Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, of course. I’m listening.”
Sophie catches herself in the reflection behind Auguste. She sees her hair pinned with baby’s breath, flowers and leaves wrapping their way up her body. The regal gold starbursts around each arm. She imagines another universe where things are still going as planned.
You hear that, Sophie? Auguste had said. Are you ready to be remembered?
Her face, in focus, looks drawn. Sullen. Hardly her.
“No, clearly you’re not. You say you’re sorry, but you have no remorse. You’re dripping with disdain, and I don’t know whether it’s for me or for this company or—”
“I love this company, and you—I am so grateful…”
Sophie is weeping, overcome, and Auguste waves a hand in the air.
“I don’t know who’s gotten into your head,” he says. “Made you think the rules no longer apply. Maybe you weren’t ready. Maybe it’s my fault. Being at the top means you have to work harder, you have to be even better. Look at you. Your posture. Truly, it’s like you’ve forgotten your own body. Now, I have other dancers watching. Go home.”
“I can’t,” she says softly. “This show is everything to me.”
“It isn’t about you. I can’t set this précédent. Besides, the Sophie I cast wouldn’t be putting me in this situation. She was ready to perform like Marie Taglioni herself, dancing at the Paris Opéra.”
“Auguste?” his assistant calls from the studio.
“Anïa, j’arrive!” Then he turns to Sophie, pained. “Please, take care of yourself.”
Now the darkness isn’t something she’s pushing away but running toward. She blinks and Auguste’s throat is in her hands, his eyes wide. She can’t tell whether it’s the force of her grip or just his startled shock, but his eyes are enough to make her let go.
She takes three steps back and starts, “I’m—” without finishing, without even being able to articulate the sorry that she feels, not only to him but to herself swallowed whole, lost entirely, and finally without return.
Sophie glances into the rehearsal room and sees more faces staring back. Auguste’s mouth is moving, but she cannot process the words. Bless him, he actually looks concerned for her. Bless him, he is stepping toward her, not away. Bless him, she wants to slit his throat.
She blinks and he is closer. Once more, maybe twice, and he might be close enough to touch again. She squeezes her arm and imagines the blood as she runs to the parking lot.
* * *
Sophie’s hands tremble. She turns the key in the ignition. The same air runs hot, then cold, pointed directly at her face. Her eyes water. She is crying. Sobbing now. The radio plays yet another pop star covering a holiday song, and she slaps the button for silence. Moments ago she was in this same seat, but now everything is different.
She tries not to imagine Nathalie inside the studio, already lifted in Antoine’s arms; the inevitable excitement she must feel. Nathalie is a soloist. She had been training for Sophie’s role as an understudy. She would have hoped for this. Nathalie would now become a principal, too. Sophie’s brain tortures her. It shows her the unreliable loyalties of her fellow dancers; even Jacqueline would forget her. It shows her Nathalie, en pointe for the final pas de deux on opening night. All eyes on her. Auguste’s grateful praise.
Sophie pushes her fists into her eyes, anything to make it stop. To make this nightmare end. When she looks again, a few of the dancers are outside on a break and leaning against the front glass, laughing as they suck their e-cigs, stretching their legs back and forth. She considers driving her car through the studio walls.
She needs to get out of here, though there is nowhere to go. She can’t go home, not with those girls taunting the growing rage inside her. Then one of the dancers nudges another, and they all look in Sophie’s direction.
* * *
Sophie drives. The longing to hurt grows. She tries to focus on the road. The ink reminding her to LOOK UP still covers her knuckles, though she can hardly tell whether those are real traces of ink, or simply the memory of what once was.
Fast. Faster. Fastest. She isn’t sure where she’s going, but she has to get away from that studio, from all the people she wants to suffer. She looks in the rearview mirror and expects to see the stranger—shaved hair, tattoos across his pale forehead—the person responsible for this darkness now braided to her very being. Sophie keeps driving fast and north toward the hills. She needs to get someplace safe and open. Someplace she can breathe. Someplace she can think. When she finally hits Los Feliz Boulevard, no choice but to follow its curve, she chooses the first path up through Griffith Park, toward the Observatory.
Parked cars line the street all the way to where the wide lawn levels in front of the art deco building. Dozens of families have already staked out spots in the grass, with colorful blankets and picnics. Later they will set up their own telescopes. Sophie weaves through the patchwork picnic blankets, making her way toward the building that overlooks the park. When she first moved to Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory was her favorite place to come think, her North Star in a city that felt lonely and disorienting in every direction.
A little girl with pigtails and big brown eyes smiles up at Sophie as she passes. Her family sits nearby on a blanket, but she’s somersaulting through the grass toward a cluster of beach towels. She must be only three. She stops and grabs her feet with her hands as she rocks on her back, pushing her tiny legs into the air. Sophie thinks of herself at that age, mostly what she remembers through photos. An aspiring gymnast, before her first ballet lesson. For a moment, she forgets everything; why she’s here, what she’s fleeing, the loss she’s feeling. Then the little girl’s dress falls down toward the grass, her chubby legs still stretched overhead, pink underwear covering her bum. The stranger begins to stir. I
tching. A woman—the mother—smooths the girl’s dress down. Then she rubs her daughter’s back, steering her toward their blanket, keeping an eye firmly on Sophie.
The woman’s expression makes her stomach turn. Sophie holds up a hand and forces a smile as she hurries toward the Observatory. She wanted to hurt the child. The woman saw it, she knew. Sophie had wanted to take the little girl’s legs and twist them until they snapped.
When she finally reaches the Observatory, half its white exterior is in shadow; the iron dome of the roof reflects the sun, and the harsh corners of the curving walls create an abstract, surreal backdrop for the park views. In the distance, the city sprawls infinitely, ending only where the ocean extends to the horizon.
Sophie walks the balcony that juts out over hiking trails, where happy couples approach the end of the main trail with proud smiles. That they should be so lucky. That I would spill the beauty from them all. Sophie shakes her head. She runs her hands through her hair up to where her loose bun takes shape, then she makes a fist around it and squeezes. She realizes how she must look, a girl in ballet clothes, erratic. If they only knew. She slaps her face, and then looks down to see a young boy staring at her, holding a plastic camera, frozen. She lunges at him, and then runs from herself.
Sophie hurries farther around the perimeter of the balcony. From afar, it looks like a porcelain egg, pure white decorated with little arches and scalloped edges, but up close the building is scratched all over with initials and promises and threats. Remember me, they say. The scratches look frantic all piled on top of each other, and Sophie’s eyes revel in the frenzy, so many visitors scratching each other out just to make themselves known.
Around another corner, she comes upon more children—these terrible, tortured bodies, waiting to be spilled—sitting in a school group, drawing. Sophie looks all around, but there is no chaperone in sight. One prick was all it took for that blood-red beauty. She squats down next to a little girl, the smallest in the group, with mousy curls and a tiny upturned nose. Then all around the girl, Sophie sees blood pooling, seeping out from under her overalls—but no, no, she presses her palms against her eyes. The girl smiles up at her. Plain concrete shines white in the sun. It’s a deep, greasy red that these terrible tortured bodies keep hidden, waiting to be spilled.
Oh god, fuck.
Who would care? Waste of skin. Organs. Bone. Better to spare them what they’ll soon learn. They should be so lucky to see all that they hold. Sophie looks down to see the little girl’s hand in hers. No, it’s her hand around the girl’s wrist. The other behind her neck.
“Get away from her!”
Sophie pushes the tiny head away and backs up until she hits the balcony ledge. Sorry, sorry, she tries to say, but nothing comes out. Another woman calls back the children who’ve crowded, curious, around her. Sophie feels for the ledge and hoists herself onto its rough surface. She looks down at the initials here, too; so many lives wanting to be seen, to leave a legacy, when all Sophie wants is to disappear. To finally stop the thoughts, end the cycle. She thinks—remember this—as she turns to face the ravine below. The city appears as a beautiful blur through her wet eyes. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.
That I would spill the beauty from them all.
The darkness rises faster now, a figure rushing the distance inside her, and before it can catch her again—Sophie rises to relevé and takes one step, then another.
Chapter 23 TODAY
“Trauma doesn’t require truth,” Angelica says. “It is capable without proof, without reason. If you fear someone is going to harm you, are you any less terrified in that moment because you end up being right or wrong? You experience the panic, the terror all the same. Truth comes after. And truth speaks in outcomes, exists only in knowledge. Lived experience stays the same.”
Angelica looks out at the circle. Faces that have been there weeks and others only recently arrived. The newest, her daughter. It hurts her to see Remy in this place coupled so closely with addiction, but she saw an opportunity and took it. Only with distance does Angelica even see the choice. When Remy was lying in the hospital bed, there was no way to know if her memories would come back naturally, on their own. Moreover, Angelica had no idea how many of David’s pills she had taken or what the impact had been. The force of the car, then her head on the asphalt, had caused severe trauma to Remy’s brain. In that moment, it seemed a miracle that she would ever wake.
Running it back in her mind, there is no solution where they don’t end up here. Remy could have wasted months waiting, passively, for her memories to return. Angelica had no choice but to do everything she could. And now in just another week, her daughter will be home. And then, hopefully, she will leave. Happy. Again.
She turns the sound therapy up with the sleek metal remote. Another train rolls by. Angelica likes watching their faces light up differently with each cue. She likes to be the one who observes and dictates the change all at once.
Remy sits next to Lucien. He looks tired. Sophie is absent from the circle—a late night, one of the nurses said. To Lucien’s other side sits Jeffrey, who will never leave his wheelchair, who she wants to help by freeing him from those moments he will never have again. Jeffrey who loved to walk, who chased his son and taught him to dribble a basketball. Who tossed him up and down, watching the sun fade in and out behind his small silhouette, and told his wife that this was the most beautiful sight. Who lost her, too. Angelica could help him find peace, if only he would let her. If there is peace, anyway, in forgetting.
Lucien prefers to keep the pain, his own. At times his love for his mother still feels spiteful, like more evidence of Angelica’s inadequacies with Remy. Now the two of them sit side by side. Angelica has never been good at separating herself from the experiences of her patients; she measures herself, even as they share their pain. But this is another level.
She turns up the volume further. Another thunderstorm rolls in. Blue sky outside. Water smooth as the glass. Remy will be happier without David. She will be free.
“Close your eyes if you haven’t already,” Angelica says. “Let your mind wander.”
None of the nurses know. Keeping David out of Remy’s memory altogether was simply cleaner for everyone. The omission would leave serious holes, yes, but Angelica could act like this was the chance fault of her emergency procedure; like the accident had damaged too much for a complete retrieval. No one would know. She had been given an opportunity for something extraordinary. How could the accident, and its resulting amnesia, not feel like fate?
Remy would learn to rebuild. And maybe even find more space for Angelica in the gaps. The privacy she still afforded her daughter during the scan was selfish; in truth, Angelica was afraid to see what might be there. Even Lucien, who values his mother’s life more than himself at times, has thought things no mother would want to hear. Angelica has always felt inadequate. Seeing herself through Remy presented the possibility of simply being too much to bear.
Of course, removing David from Remy’s memory also meant Angelica would not have to face Remy’s use of his pills. They would not need to have that conversation, and Angelica would not need to confront her own great hypocrisy. The entire thing feels like a gift. Especially with her upcoming NPR interview; she couldn’t risk the story. The fact is, she understands Remy’s choice. Hadn’t Angelica done the same with Sahar? She still revisits her love only to feel its loss over and over again. Her daughter had merely repeated another of her mistakes.
She watches Remy sit with her eyes closed, wondering if there is a place for her behind them. Wondering where she will go when she leaves. Wondering what Angelica would see in those moments she kept, just in case, before they were removed from Remy’s world. Wondering if she has done something irreversible.
The thunder cracks and rumbles.
Chapter 24 BEFORE
Lucien never liked tuna melts. He always gave his friend a hard time for ordering tuna fish, even on bagels, whenever they a
te together around Stuyvesant, and in the years following when George came home from Williams and they met for lunch at Veselka. It always seemed to be tuna fish, even at Veselka. Lucien knows that can’t be right, not every time, but the memory insists, which says more about the strength of his distaste than anything. What other menu item dictates what your company tastes, too? What could be more controlling?
He wants to see his mother. He begrudges every one of Florence’s memories that is of something, or someone, else. How cruel, to wish someone’s life away even once inside it. But there are only so many opportunities, and fewer and fewer pills.
And yet here he sits. Tuna melt between his buttery fingers. Savoring every bite of the toasted bread with its mountain of salty tuna under an orange blanket of cheese. At least he’s alone at the counter. With empty red-patent stools on either side, Lucien can lose himself in his thoughts, and hers. He’s been craving everything differently with so much of Fleur influencing how he thinks and feels, her memories mixing with his own and shifting something inside him. Perhaps he feels better simply being someone else.
He hadn’t noticed at first, but he even finds his mannerisms changing; a hand ends up over his heart when he thinks; he tucks hair that isn’t there behind his ears; he moves through a room differently. When he enters, he senses the eyes on him now. He anticipates them. Lucien never considered himself looked at before, or thought much of it if he was, but now he feels it everywhere he goes—this new threat of being seen. Of being too direct, too serious. Of course, when he glances up, no one is ever looking back.
The 101 Coffee Shop is one of those retro diners that purposely serves things defiantly outdated to their young clientele, and then executes them in an over-the-top way. Their ice cream sodas tower. Their burger needs a steak knife stabbed handle-high just to keep it upright. He drove there on a hunch. A craving. He was right. Even the height of his tuna melt, arguably a modest sandwich, is comical. He debates using a knife and fork, but he wants to consume it too quickly for that. With each bite, something inside him settles. He takes a sip from the water bottle he brought, its cloudy iridescence hinting, he hopes, at some vitamin supplement or protein powder. This is Los Angeles. Call it Spirit Dust. No one will think twice; Liv sells a jar of that at Astral Bodies.
The Shimmering State Page 25