Dancing on the Edge (3 page)

Gigi turned her head to me and put her finger up to her mouth. “Shh. They're just people up to no good.” She signaled for me to hand her the marbles.

I passed the sack through the window and held my breath. So far no one had noticed her. Gigi selected her marble, placed it in the sling, and aimed. I knew it would hit its marie as soon as she drew back the sling. Dane always said Gigi had a dead-straight aim. She let go of the sling and in a flash one of the bodies out there, a woman's, let out a scream, and dropped to her knees.

“I've been shot! Lord, Ray, I've been shot, right between the eyes,” she howled. “I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die!”

The others stopped what they were doing and stood over the woman on the ground.

Gigi took aim again and shot another marble through the air.

“Dang!” came a man's voice. He grabbed his head and fell on his knees. “They're shooting at us! I've been shot in the back of the head.”

Another voice said, “I didn't hear anything.”

“It's that voodoo stuff,” the man hit with the second marble said. “Now, let's get out of here. The bullet's probably lodged in my brain, set to explode any minute.” He trotted beside the others, keeping low, as they lugged the fainted woman out to the truck.

Gigi didn't say anything until they drove out of sight. Then she stood up on the roof and let out a wolf howl.

I stood next to the window clapping, proud to be granddaughter to such a fine person as my Gigi.

The next day, I came home to find Gigi and Aunt Casey packing and saying we had to leave Alabama.

“But didn't we win?” I asked. “Didn't they run off?”

I looked at both of them. Aunt Casey's eyes were red. I wondered why she had been crying.

“It wasn't about winning, sugar pie,” Gigi said, her back to me. She leaned over her table of glass figurines and wrapped one of them for packing. “I just didn't want them trespassing on my property. But it's time we move on now, with Dane melted and people around here so excited.”

“But what if Dane comes back? We wouldn't be here. He could come looking for us and we wouldn't be here!”

Gigi shook her head and turned around, but she still didn't look at me. She looked at Aunt Casey, who held her head down, staring at her red-painted toenails, red, the color of rage.

“I can't raise you up around this. You need an accepting environment. You're special, aren't you, sugar pie?” She looked at me then and said, “Weren't you born from the body of a dead woman?”

I shook my head. “I'd better go pack,” I said, rushing for the stairs and keeping my head turned away so they couldn't see my face.

“Casey will bring you some boxes,” Gigi called after me.

I ran to my room and closed the door. I didn't want to hear their voices. I didn't want to hear the story about Mama and my miracle birth. Ever since Dane melted I'd become afraid of that story, as if my being born from a dead woman had something to do with his melting. They were the same kind of thing to me. Thinking of either one of them made my stomach squeeze up tight. They made me feel all wrong inside, and there was something more to it—my birth and his melting—something I couldn't quite put my finger on. All I knew was that it had to do with me.

The way the kids avoided me at school told me they knew, and the teachers who stood together and whispered about me knew, too. There was some big, wrong thing about me, and everybody knew what it was, except me. I wanted to run up to Gigi and ask, “What is it? Why don't you see me anymore? Why are you always in your room now, or out? Why aren't you home when I come home from school? What did I do?” But I knew I couldn't ask those kinds of questions. I knew it would upset the karmic balance. Instead, I took to wearing Dane's bathrobe, a soft coat of armor protecting me, wrapping me in its warm smells of cigarettes, wine, and musty old books—Dane's smell.

I heard Aunt Casey on the stairs, banging the wall with the moving boxes. She kicked at my door, and I let her in.

“Here you go, Miracle,” she said, all out of breath. She dropped the boxes on the floor and leaned against the door frame.

I picked up a box. “Thanks.”

“No sweat. How about I help you with some of this stuff?” She hip-swayed over to my chest of drawers and picked up my Barbie doll. “It shouldn't take long, you don't have half of nothing. Just hooks.” She ran her hand along the top row of my bookshelf, looking like some lone wanderer dragging a stick along a picket fence. She tossed my Barbie into the box I was holding. “Shoot, you don't even have a Ken doll. What's a Barbie without a Ken? Huh? What's a Barbie all by herself?”

I brought my box over to the bookshelf. “I don't like Ken. He doesn't have real hair. It's plastic painted hair.”

Aunt Casey laughed, and I saw bits of red lipstick stuck on her teeth. “Now look at these books. Dane must have picked these out, all this Shakespeare—
Hamlet
and
Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Hasn't he ever heard of Nancy Drew?”

“Who?” I asked.

Aunt Casey dragged her own box over to the shelves and started pulling out my books and stacking them in the boxes.

“I bet you don't get along too well at that school of yours, reading Shakespeare and listening to old-timey Bob Dylan.”

“Dane loves Bob Dylan,” I said.

“He sounds constipated,” said Aunt Casey.

We each filled our boxes without saying anything more, and then when Aunt Casey handed me my purple spiritual clothes from out of my closet, the ones Gigi had picked out for me, for when the color of my aura needed changing, I said, “No one likes me at this school. I'm glad we're moving.”

Aunt Casey stopped handing me the clothes and squatted in front of me. “You're special, that's all. You're different. I'm sorry what I said before about Nancy Drew.” She patted my shoulder, something Aunt Casey had never done before. “Shoot, they're just jealous, I bet.”

I shook my head. “They call me names and throw stuff at me. They say bad things about Dane and me.”

Aunt Casey looked into my face, the rims of her round eyes still red. “What kinds of stuff, sugar?”

“Mean stuff about how he always looks so creepy when he drives into town, like he's drunk. They say he's crazy. He talks to himself all the time and never answers anyone's questions. And they say that sometimes he just walks into a store, picks out what he wants, and right in front of everyone, walks back out again without paying. They say he belongs in jail.”

“Jail! Nonsense! You know, honey, that's just Dane. He forgets to shave, to wash, to brush his teeth. He's always been like that.”

“They're saying now we're all crazy, and we got spooks living with us.”

“Spooks? Who ever heard of such nonsense? Really!”

“They're even calling
me
a spook.” I said, telling her the worst of it, the part that troubled me the most, because I was starting to believe it, starting to feel like a spook.

Aunt Casey stood back up. “Well, never you mind them. I'm glad you're moving. I am. I just wish I were coming with you.”

“You and Uncle Toole aren't coming?” I hitched up my shoulder and turned away from her. Even if I didn't like them much, I knew it couldn't be a good thing losing them so soon after losing Dane.

“Hah!” Aunt Casey said, coming around to face me. “Your uncle Toole can stay right here, but maybe I'll come. That would serve Mr. Hot Pants right.”

“You and Uncle Toole have another fight? Is that why you've been crying?” I studied her face, so thin and pinched, and I noticed even with her pain, she looked pretty. Her skin was smooth and her green eyes seemed greener, bigger.

“I shouldn't have been crying. Not over him, that . . . that roving eyeball! Trotting after that Delphinnia woman. She's got nothing special, besides her name. But I fixed Toole good—shaved off his eyebrows and cut his eyelashes. He was too drunk and passed out to notice. Went to work today wearing ladies' sunglasses.” Aunt Casey laughed, but there were tears coming out of her eyes and the tip of her nose had turned red.

She wiped her eyes and shook her head. “Of course, I've got my business. I guess I couldn't exactly leave my beauty business, all my clients.”

She went over to my chest of drawers and stared at herself in the mirror, patting her hair and fluffing it up at the top. She had dyed it black. Last time I saw her, it was red. She changed hair color as often as most people changed their socks, and it made her hair appear brittle and stiff and oversprayed.

“No, I can't leave my clients,” she said. “At least they need me.” She turned around. “But hey, how about I give you a new do before you go, huh? No charge. Wouldn't you like a haircut, to celebrate the new you in a new town?”

I shrugged. “Okay, I guess so.”

Aunt Casey ran to the door. “I'll only be a minute. I've got a kit in my purse. This will perk us up, won't it? Now you be thinking how you want it, I'll be right back.”

She left the room and I stared at the door, thinking about Aunt Casey and her beauty salon. She owned it and managed it, and even had a wig-fitting business in her home where she fitted wigs for cancer patients. It was the only nice thing I'd ever known her to do until that day when she offered to cut my hair for me.

I wandered over to my chest of drawers and stared down at the red fingernail polish I'd painted on my nails. I had painted them the day of the séance so Mama wouldn't see the dirt underneath, but already the polish had chipped down to little flecks in the center of each nail. I made fists with my hands so I couldn't see the nails and took a deep breath. I wanted to look at myself in the mirror, but lately, every time I tried, a queer, queasy-hot feeling came over me. I couldn't look.

It used to be, before Dane melted, that whenever I saw myself, it was a surprise, a shock. I had spent so many hours studying Mama's face in the picture Dane had on his writing desk that I expected to see her looking back at me in the mirror. I expected her freckles and brown, almond-shaped eyes, but my eyes were round and blue, and my face long and Elmer's-Glue white, not one freckle. Mine was the pale, blank stare of a stranger. But now when I looked in the mirror, there was a new surprise, a new expectation, and it scared me more than anything. Because now, I didn't expect to see my reflection at all.

A
UNT
C
ASEY
cut my hair in the bathroom.

“You sit right there on the toilet,” she said. “You're getting so tall I can't have you standing anymore. Anyway, I do some of my best work on the toilet.”

“You sound like Uncle Toole,” I said, sitting on the seat with my back to her.

“That just shows you, don't many a man unless you like the way he talks. Now, how are we going to cut your hair? How about bangs? You like bangs?”

“I want Dane's haircut,” I said.

Aunt Casey leaned way over to get a look at my face. “That's a man's haircut, sugar.”

“I know.” I hung my head forward, staring into my lap. Dane wore his hair short, almost buzzed. He said it drove him crazy to feel hair on his neck or creeping down over his ears or on his forehead. Lately, mine had been driving me crazy, too. I was always feeling it on my shoulders or tickling my cheek. I found myself pulling at it in school when I was working or thinking or trying to fall off to sleep at night. I didn't want to feel it anymore. I didn't want to know it was there.

“Please could I have Dane's haircut, anyway?” I said, twisting my neck to see her.

Aunt Casey sighed and straightened back up. She sprayed my hair wet, combed it out, and started cutting.

“Look at you, wearing that ratty old bathrobe of his,” she said, straightening my head. “Gigi says you've been wearing it every day. Ever since he melted. Said you're even wearing it to school. You must miss Dane awful, huh?”

I shrugged and played with the tie on the bathrobe. “He's my daddy,” I said, hoping Aunt Casey couldn't tell, standing behind me, how much I really missed him. I didn't need her making fun of me.

Before Dane melted, I used to spend every day after school with him, down in his room. He called his room “The Cave,” and it was long and narrow with walls made of stone. He used the candle bottles to light the room, and they flickered and cast shadows on the walls so that even in our own silence and stillness we had movement, we had something going on.

Most of the time Dane sat at his writing desk and either stared at his computer, occasionally tapping out words on his keyboard, or he read. I sat on his bed with my homework in my lap, taking my time with each subject so that I'd have a reason to stay down there with him.

Sometimes he'd say, “Listen to this,” and he'd stand up and pace and read me a part of the story he was writing, the candle lights leaning and straining on the breath of his movement as he passed. I never understood what he read to me, and sometimes he didn't seem to be reading words at all, just sounds. Still, I listened and watched him pace from one end of the room to the other, six steps each direction, six, the number for creation, and I felt full and happy and complete.

Now, whenever I went down to the cave, I felt lost—sitting alone on his bed, listening for him, waiting, asking the floor, the walls, the candle bottles to let him come back. I didn't know how to bring him back. I didn't even know how to think about his melting. Should I cry? Gigi didn't cry. He didn't die, so we didn't have a funeral. We couldn't go looking for him, either. Where do you look for a melted person?

I thought about the candle bottles and how when his work was going really well, or he'd just sent his manuscript off to his editor, he would invite me into his cave for the candle bottle lighting ceremony. We'd set up all the bottles in different patterns on the floor of his room. Then we'd light the candles and sit together on his bed and watch them, and Dane would describe to me the really big celebration we'd have when he sold his new book. And I could see it all. Through the flames of the candle bottles, I could see the magic that shimmered in the room and spiced the air, the kind of magic that gets you believing in miracles.