Dancing on the Edge (23 page)

I looked over at Gigi's right hand still held open for me. I wanted to reach out and take it, I wanted to believe in her, but as in the dream I had had two nights before, I couldn't, and I awoke now with a sudden flash of understanding, a knowing that part of me had stopped believing in her the day Juleen Presque had come to see me. Juleen Presque had called Gigi a phony. I remembered that. I remembered! And I remembered I was determined to prove Juleen wrong. I would show her, and the wig heads, and everyone else. Yes, I remembered. I remembered!

I had taken out the candle bottles and lit them and had stood among them waiting to melt. I wanted to prove to everyone that Gigi's world was real, that I was real. Then came that moment, the moment I had chosen to forget until then, riding in the van with Gigi as she held her world back out to me. It was the moment after the robe had caught fire and the flames seared my skin. I felt an instant of the cruelest pain, and in that instant, I saw the truth: Gigi was a phony, and Dane didn't melt. Dane didn't melt! He didn't melt!

I turned to Gigi that day in the van and said to her, “I believed you!”

Gigi's arm came down, her hand folded over the crystal dangling from the rope around her neck. “Believed me? Well of course you did, baby. What are we talking about here?”

“I believed what you said about omens and portents and miracles.”

“Miracles? Of course.
You're
a miracle, born from the body of a dead woman! Of course you believe . . .”

“I was born from the body of a dead woman? A dead woman, Gigi! What is that? That's not Mama! You never told me about Mama. She was just a dead woman who gave birth to me. She wasn't Sissy. She wasn't a person, a dancer. You didn't want me to know she was a dancer. She was just a dead woman, a nothing! I was born from nothing! You taught me that, Gigi. Why?”

Gigi's eyes were blinking as if they were trying to signal the answer. An angry flush grew from beneath the collar of her robe, rising up her neck and spreading out over her face. “Why are you shouting at me like this? I taught you good things. You were my apprentice, remember?”

“Yes, I was your apprentice, and I believed you. I believed everything you said. I believed in the incense, and the dances around the table to ward off evil, and magic and miracles. I believed in yellow for intellectual pursuits, and green for transcendent knowledge, and purple!” I tugged at my shirt. “I especially believed in purple. Purple was spiritual. Purple would make me just like you. Purple would bring Dane back to me and make me real. I just wanted to be real.”

“Dane!” Gigi put on her blinker and pulled off to the side of the road. She stopped the car. I could see tears slipping into the creases of her face. She opened the ashtray and pulled out some fresh sheets of toilet tissue to dab at her eyes.

“Have you been talking about Dane with that doctor?” she asked, twisting in her seat to face me. She glared at me, waiting for me to answer her, and I felt myself shrink, my body dissolve into its familiar nebulous state. I began to shake. I could hear Dr. DeAngelis speaking to me, asking me why it was safer to bury what I knew. Telling me to go forward, to stay on the train, look at the truth. When I was with Dr. DeAngelis, when he asked me about Dane, my mind reached out for Gigi. I had something I needed to say to her. I thought I wanted her to rescue me, take me with her to Tennessee, I thought that's what I needed to tell her, but then I realized that wasn't it at all. I wanted her to release me. I wanted her to say it was all right to stop believing. I wanted to break the unspoken pact we had kept between us for so many years.

I sat up and turned to face Gigi. Her face was still a rash of red blotches but the tears were gone. I looked in her eyes just the way Dr. DeAngelis would have wanted me to and asked, “Where's Dane?”

Gigi's mouth dropped open.

“Where's Dane? Where is he?”

Her eyes widened. She leaned back, away from me. “You know where he is.”

I shook my head. “No, the truth. Where is he? What happened that night of the séance?”

“You know what happened.” Gigi's hand clutched at her crystal. “He melted, remember? You saw for yourself. You saw the candle bottles. You saw his clothes.”

“No! I don't want to hear your lies. Where did he go? What happened to him? Why did he leave?”

Gigi shook her head. “I told you, Miracle, I told you he melted. That's all I know. He melted.”

“Gigi!” I slid closer to her and raised the leg of my purple pants, raised it up to expose the scars. “People don't melt, they burn. See? They just burn.”

G
IGI DIDN'T LOOK DOWN
at the burns on my leg, but I did. I looked down at them as if I were seeing them for the first time, my burns, my scars, vestiges of my last desperate attempt to feel something, to feel real, to feel the truth.

I lifted my head. I wanted to tell Gigi what I was feeling, make her understand why I needed the truth.

Gigi was staring out the windshield.

“But Dane melted,” she said, her voice quivering, her head tilted. She turned to me.

I looked in her eyes and I could see that she was pleading with me, asking me to believe. Begging me to keep our silent pact, to stay with her in her fantasy world. But I couldn't do it. I had realized it wasn't safe there anymore, if it had ever been. There was nothing there for me. I was nothing, felt nothing when I lived in that other world. I shook my head and started to turn away.

“He melted,” Gigi said again, grabbing me with her words.

I didn't want to look at her. I didn't want her to pull me in, but I couldn't help it. I tried staring at her hands locked together in a tight grip. She had put on weight. The bracelets on her wrists pressed into her flesh. I lifted my head and Gigi looked at me, pleading. Wrinkles ran down her face like a thousand frowns. I could read her pain as if I had struck her in the chest. I could read her fear, and I nodded. I understood that fear. Gigi still needed to believe. She wasn't lying to me. She believed what she told me. She believed Dane had melted. She had to. Knowing that Dane left her because he didn't want her anymore was more than she could bear. It was the loneliest, most desperate feeling in the world. That's what I knew. That's what I would tell Dr. DeAngelis when I saw him again. When he asked me where Dane was, I would tell him he left us. He ran away. And when he asked me how it made me feel, I would tell him . . . my thoughts stopped. No, it wasn't just the loneliest feeling. It wasn't just the emptiness, it was—it had been, a need. All those years I needed Dane, I needed him desperately to make me feel safe and real, but what I realized, staring again at my scars, was that I was real right there, right then. I didn't need those scars anymore, I didn't need Dane or Mama to make me feel real. How did it happen? When? I studied my hands, touched my face, I was real, and it wasn't Dane or Mama who made me so, it was knowing the truth—all of it. The truth made me real.

I wanted to sing out, to dance, to move the way I was feeling inside, wild and ecstatic, but Gigi held me back, bringing me down with her voice.

“Miracle?” Her voice pleaded once again.

I turned to face front, away from Gigi. I couldn't help her. I didn't know how. My own feelings were too new, too fresh. Thoughts and memories were slamming around inside my head, crashing into one another, exploding, breaking wide open. I needed time. I needed a chance to sort them all out. I needed someone to talk to who would understand and listen, really listen. I needed Dr. DeAngelis and Aunt Casey. I wanted to tell them everything, to share what I was discovering with them, and to let them know I needed them.

“Would you take me back to The Cedars, please?” I asked, staring straight ahead.

Gigi sat up and reached for another piece of toilet tissue. “But I'm taking you to Tennessee. I can heal you. I can send you the healing dreams.” She sniffed and wiped her nose. “You'll be my first cure—my miracle cure. We'll take pictures—before and after. You'll be written up in all the papers—Miracle McCloy and the Miracle Cure.”

I shook my head. “I don't want to be a miracle. I just want to be a girl. I just want to be normal.” I looked at her. “Please. Take me back to The Cedars.”

Gigi shook her head and the loose skin under her chin wobbled back and forth. “But I can't. They'll think I kidnapped you. That prying Dr. DeAngelis will get after me.”

“But I have to go back. I need them. I need that place.”

Gigi started up the car and turned on her blinker. Then she accelerated back onto the highway. I thought she would turn around at the first exit, but she didn't. She moved into the passing lane and kept going north, to Tennessee.

I sat leaning up against the door, watching the signs go by—
NASHVILLE
57
MILES, NASHVILLE
52
MILES
— and I remembered other trips in and out of the state of Alabama. I had never wanted to go. I hadn't wanted to leave our home and move in with Grandaddy Opal. Then, I hadn't wanted to leave Grandaddy Opal to move in with Uncle Toole and Aunt Casey, or to leave them to stay at The Cedars in the yellow unit with Dr. DeAngelis. No, I never wanted to go, they just took me. Without asking how I felt about it, they took me, and I went without saying anything, because I was a nobody. They had made me feel like a nobody.

I stared out the window, anger welling up in me. I had to go back to The Cedars. I couldn't let Gigi take me away again.

I turned to Gigi. “Gigi, I have to go back. You need to turn around, now!”

Gigi turned on her weight loss tape and accelerated to seventy-five miles an hour.

“This really is kidnapping,” I said.

“Nonsense, I'm your legal guardian.” She turned up the sound on her tape.

“But you're taking me against my will. Gigi?”

She stared out at the road, pretending I hadn't just spoken to her. If she weren't driving I knew she would go into a trance. That was her way. If she didn't like what she was hearing, if she didn't like what was happening, she just pretended it all away.

“Is this what you did to Dane?” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the tape. “Is this how it was?”

“Dane melted,” she said, still staring at the road.

“No, before—when he was thirteen and you took him away from Grandaddy Opal. This is how it was, wasn't it? He didn't want to go. He didn't want to just write all day. He wanted to be with Grandaddy Opal and ride bikes and build things, but you just took him. You took him away from Grandaddy Opal and brought him to that beach house. He didn't want to go, did he?”

“Miracle, hush!” Gigi slowed down and moved over to the traveling lane. She hummed along with the flute, but I could tell by the deep furrows in her brow and the way she tilted her head away from me that she was listening to me, listening to what she didn't want to hear.

“And he didn't want to marry Sissy, and maybe he didn't want me, but most of all he didn't want to live the life you chose for him, so he ran away. He ran off, didn't he?”

Gigi shook her head and pointed at me. “Stop telling your lies! It's that doctor brainwashing you. Don't say another word. I knew that place would damage you. Casey and her big ideas.” She glanced at me. “Look at you, your aura's black. The darkest black. That's what happens when you go to those nut houses. Everyone there walks around in a black cloud.”

“No! It's good there. I'm learning good things, and Aunt Casey's there with me. She holds my hand. She rides through the tunnels with me. And Dr. DeAngelis and Kyla and everybody, they talk to me and they listen and they touch me. They're giving me something I've never had before. When I'm with them, I'm somebody. When I'm with you, I'm nobody!”

“Nonsense.” Gigi shook her head as if she had a fly in her hair.

I reached over and turned off her tape. “It was the same way with Dane,” I said. “He had to leave. He had to run away or he'd always be a nobody, no matter how many books he wrote. Gigi, don't make me run away, too. Take me back. I need to go back.”

Gigi switched the tape back on and turned it up so loud I couldn't yell over it. She pulled some more toilet tissue out of the ashtray and blew her nose.

I sat back in my seat and faced the window, but instead of watching the other cars passing by, the people staring, trying to read our van, I watched myself in the reflection of the window. It had been a long time since I had dared to look at myself, searching for Sissy's freckles. This time I didn't look for Sissy or even Dane, I just looked at myself. It was my hair, growing out from its Dane-like cut. It was my face, long and thin, my eyes blinking back at me, my mouth, my chin—me. I stared at myself a long time and sometimes the sunlight would fall on the window and take my face away, but then there it would be again, just the same, me staring out at me. I kissed my finger and pressed it on the window where my mouth appeared. I held it there and tears spilled from my eyes. I took my finger away and watched myself cry.

Gigi turned on her blinker and shot off the highway onto the exit ramp. She shut off the music. The silence felt wonderful.

I sat up, wiping my face. “Are we in Tennessee?” I asked.

“There's a bus station here,” she said. “You can just go back to that place on your own.”

I turned to thank her but she held up her hand. “You've been ruined by that doctor. My healing dreams can't possibly work on you. It would be a waste of my time and energy.”

We rode into town in silence. Gigi found the bus station and checked the schedule. There was a bus leaving for Birmingham in less than an hour. She didn't wait with me, and she wouldn't look at me when she said good-bye. She looked past me, at the buses shifting gears behind me.

“You'll be all right,” she said.