Dancing on the Edge (2 page)

“I love this song,” she said, mashing her cigarette into the brickwork and then flicking the dead butt into the fireplace. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall in a way that made her narrow hips poke out of her spandex pants like big old cow bones. Her face wore a peaceful, happy expression for a change, and her hair was crammed beneath a scarf with fat pink sponge curlers poking out every which way. I looked at her and then at my Barbie doll with its plastic face, narrow waist, and large bust. They looked alike. I tossed the doll over my shoulder. Uncle Toole had just come into the room and the doll landed at his feet.

“See, sugar, I told you women just threw themselves at me.”

“You see me laughing, Toole Dawsey?” Aunt Casey pushed off the wall and set her hands on her hip bones. The two of them were always either fighting or acting all lovey-dovey with each other, and being around them either way just gave me the hives. I jumped to my feet, thinking I'd go find Dane, but then Uncle Toole stretched his hairy arms out to me and scooped me up, tossing me onto his shoulder. I don't know why but he always had to pick me up and turn me upside down when he saw me. It hurt because he did it so fast and handled me like one of the crates he lifted and loaded all day. Even if it didn't hurt, I wouldn't have liked it because he scared me. He was big-muscled and square all over, with a snarly, growly sounding voice and a scar on his forehead that looked as if the long jagged edge of a piece of glass had cut into him.

“Miracle, you're getting so heavy I might drop you,” he said, loosening his grip around my ankles some. “Oops! Oops! Watch out,” He lowered me to the ground on my head, let go, and I did a somersault and scooted out of his way.

Gigi rattled in with the tray of iced tea and glasses. “Is everybody ready?” she asked.

Aunt Casey turned off my tape player and took her seat at the table. The rest of us joined her, and then wouldn't you know it, Toole had to point me out.

“Whoa, what's going on here? Why ain't the baby toddling on off to bed? Are we having us a see-ance or a romper room here?” He gave us all his squinted-up, suspicious look, the one he always gave people whenever he felt they knew something he didn't know and they weren't saying what.

I looked to Gigi and she squinched her nose up at me. I smiled back.

“Dane is working,” Gigi said, “and we need a fourth, and anyway, it's high time we introduced Miracle to some of her ancestors.”

“I want to talk to Mama,” I said, so excited I was ready to pee in my pants.

Uncle Toole arched back in his chair and puffed out his chest. “Shoot,” he said, shaking his square head and giving me a nasty look.

Aunt Casey pulled the two cigarettes she had just lit out of her mouth and handed one to Uncle Toole. “Don't be rude to the child,” she said, blowing her smoke over my head.

Uncle Toole looked at the pink lipstick around the tip of the cigarette. Pink, the color symbol for all things female, as Gigi would say. He took a drag and blew the smoke out at me with a long low burp.

“Toole!” Gigi and Aunt Casey said at the same time.

“Shoot, let's just do it, okay?” he said, pulling forward in his seat and resting his wide, hairy hands on the edge of the Ouija board.

Gigi lit three of the candles that hung from a chandelier over the table and turned out the lights.

We all sat with our hands placed before us on the table and waited for a signal from Gigi. She had closed her eyes and was taking deep breaths through her nose and letting them out through the O she made with her lips. The candles flickered above us, casting dancing shadows in the room and on our faces. I looked at the three people sitting with me and they didn't look like themselves at all. Gigi's long nose looked longer and waxy, like Silly Putty, her loose-skinned face all lumpy, and the fat bun on the top of her head looked like a big old mud pie. Aunt Casey's head with the curlers made her look like a space creature, and the long strokes of eyeliner extending beyond the outer corners of her own eyes made her look evil, her green cat eyes squinting and blinking like sinister signals. And Uncle Toole's scar had gone a dark, deep red, as if his blood were pulsating through all that dead tissue, bringing it to life.

Gigi whispered, “I want you all to see Sissy. Close your eyes and concentrate. See her. See her.”

I heard Aunt Casey whisper, “Yes.”

“See her. Feel her near,” Gigi said.

I closed my eyes and thought of the picture of Mama Dane had on top of his writing desk. She was swinging on a giant iron gate and smiling for the camera, but to me she looked sad, the smile on her lips not reaching her eyes. I wondered if she knew then she was going to die young. I wondered if people knew deep down when they were going to die.

Gigi began to hum, and we all placed our fingertips on the planchette.

We sat listening to the low tone of her hum for a few minutes, and then I saw Gigi's body jerk sideways. “Who's there?” she asked.

The planchette moved. I felt goose bumps rise up on my arms, and my bottom began to itch. The planchette moved again, and it felt as if the guide piece were simply floating beneath my fingertips. I knew I wasn't making it move. I looked at Uncle Toole. His eyes were closed. So were Aunt Casey's and Gigi's. The planchette stopped moving and they opened their eyes. The nail was pointing at the letter
R
.

“Rasmus, is that you?” Gigi asked.

We started moving again, faster. The nail pointed to the word
yes
.

“We want to talk to Sissy. Is she there?”

The planchette moved away from the
yes
and then slid back.

I started chewing on my lip. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to talk to Mama.

“Sissy, your baby's here. Your little girl. Your Miracle.”

I inched forward in my seat and both Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole shushed me.

The planchette started moving again, quickly, smoothly, almost floating over the surface of the board. It slid to the
T
, then the
R
, then
O-U-B-L-E
.

“What kind of trouble?” Gigi asked.

Again the planchette was moving, and I could feel my fingers trembling. I had chewed a sore into my lip, and I worked at it and watched the planchette float over to the
D
, then to
A-N-E
.

Trouble for Dane
, I thought. I began to relax. People were always saying that. “What's the trouble with Dane?” they'd ask. “Where's his next book?” they'd wonder. “Wasn't that novel he wrote nine years ago supposed to be part of a trilogy?” Dane had been having trouble with his writing ever since Mama died and I was born.

“What trouble, Sissy?” Gigi asked.

I looked at Gigi. I wanted to talk. When was she going to let me talk?

Again the planchette spelled out Dane but then continued to the
G
and then to
O
and then it paused and, just when I thought the message was over, it moved again to the
N
and then to
E
.

“Gone?” Gigi asked. “Dane gone?”

The planchette moved slowly to the
yes
.

“Dane gone?” Aunt Casey whispered. “When?” She looked up at Gigi. “Ask Sissy when.”

The planchette moved one more time and spelled out
N-O-W
.

W
E SCRAMBLED OVER
each other trying to be the first one down the steps to Dane's room in the basement. We were in such a hurry that no one thought to turn on any lights, and I heard Uncle Toole bumping down the steps on his bottom. He was shouting
Whoa! Whoa!
on his way down, but his cowboy boots must have been digging into nothing because he didn't stop till he hit bottom. Then in the hallway, we stumbled all over each other again, feeling our way along the stone walls to Dane's door. I got there first and flung open the door shouting, “Dane! Dane, we're here!”

Uncle Toole grabbed me and held me back.

“Holy sh—,” he said.

We all stood together in a breathless clump, bedazzled by the lights of Dane's candle bottles. They were everywhere—on his shelves, on his desk, lining the edges of the window casements, and covering the floor like a flaming blanket.

“What is this?” Aunt Casey asked, twisting to see Gigi.

I answered her, whispering with pride. “Dane's candle bottles. He likes to plug all his empty wine bottles with candles and then we light them, in ceremony.”

“In ceremony of what?” Aunt Casey's voice was harsh.

“Casey, leave it,” Gigi said.

“But where's Dane?” I asked, stepping into the room. Uncle Toole caught me by the shoulders and pulled me back.

“He ain't in here, that's for sure,” he said.

Then Gigi brushed past us, her purple séance robe swinging into the bottles, making us all gasp.

Aunt Casey said, “Lord, Gigi, you want to go up in flames? Watch that robe.”

Gigi didn't hear her. She glided around the bottles, moving toward Dane's writing desk. Then she stopped and held up both her arms the way she did when calling on the dead spirits. We knew she had come upon something.

“Would you look?” she said. “What in the world?”

We all crept into the room, looking for what Gigi saw.

“His clothes!” She pointed to a heap on the floor. “If that isn't the strangest thing. Look at the way they're setting, like he was just in them a second ago.”

It
was
strange. We all agreed on that. Dane's uniform: his sweats, his bathrobe, his underwear, his slippers with the backs mashed down, lay on the floor in the midst of the candles, looking as if his body had just melted clear out of them and all that was left was the heap of clothes.

Then Gigi cried out, “He's melted,” and I heard this and knew it was so.

“Woman, you're out of your head,” Uncle Toole said. “People don't melt.”

“The witch in the
Wizard of Oz
did,” I said, imagining Dane calling out for help and nobody hearing him. My legs began to shake.

Gigi leaned forward and picked up two of the bottles and held them over her head and cried out again. “Dane! Dane!”

I cried out, too, but Uncle Toole grabbed my shoulders again and tried to lead me back out of the room. “This ain't nothing for a ten-year-old to see.”

“But I want to. What's wrong? What's happened? Why did he melt?” I twisted away from him, my shoulders aching from the strong pressure of his squeezing fingers.

“He didn't melt,” Uncle Toole said. “See what you started, Gigi?”

Gigi didn't answer. She was on her knees, surrounded by the candle bottles, swaying in circles and moaning.

I darted around the bottles and joined Gigi on the floor, and Uncle Toole stood behind us cussing while Aunt Casey yelled at him to shut up.

Gigi and I stayed on our knees swaying for a long time. I don't know when Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole left because I had to concentrate on being just like Gigi. I kept waiting for Dane to reappear, because it seemed to me that's why we stayed down there on the floor with our arms crossed over our chests moaning to the spirits. I thought Gigi was trying to conjure him up, but he never came back. The candies burned down, and I grew tired. I climbed up on Dane's bed and fell asleep, my face buried in my daddy's bathrobe.

 

P
EOPLE IN OUR TOWN
didn't like hearing about how Dane melted. It was as if it were some kind of threat to them, as if they could melt any minute themselves—from the sun, a heated room, a candlelit dinner. Gigi said it wasn't worth trying to explain to them that not just anyone could melt like that.

“Our specialness scares them, baby, that's why we've got to move,” she said to me one day when I came home from school and found her and Aunt Casey packing up the living room.

And it was true what she said about us scaring people. Even the police and the newspaper reporters who swarmed around the house and the yard were timid around us. They suspected Gigi of foul play, that's what the newspapers said at first: M
OTHER OF
P
RODIGY
S
USPECTED OF
F
OUL
P
LAY
. Then when they realized that everything he owned and wore was still in the house, that wherever he was, he was naked, they suspected both murder and suicide and had the pond in back of our house dredged.

About a week after the disappearance, as they were calling it, the papers got ahold of our theory about him melting and wrote a long article about Gigi and her practicing the black arts. The night after that came out, Gigi came creeping into my room in the middle of the night, her slingshot in one hand and her sack of marbles in the other.

I sat up in bed. “What's going on?” I asked.

“Go back to sleep, baby. I just got to deal with some adults who ought to know better.”

“What?” I rose on my knees and looked out my window. I could see something moving out there, dark shadowlike figures.

“Your window's the best chance I've got of getting a good shot.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “What's that they're doing?”

“Shh, I've got to get out on your roof without them noticing me. Here, you can hand me my sack once I'm out.”

Gigi handed me the marbles and silently lifted my window. Someone outside lit a torch and I ducked, thinking they could see us, but Gigi kept on moving through the window and out onto the roof, as easily as a black cat in satin slippers. She had always been light on her feet even though she was heavy, her movements graceful, careful.

I could see the figures real well now. Two of them held torches while three others sprinkled something along the edge of our lawn.

“Are they spooks?” I whispered through the window, remembering how some of the kids at school had said our house was full of them.