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"Promise to show you later.”

“All right.” After gathering the cards reluctantly, she shuffled them one last time. She had just learned how to tent the deck Ian had brought especially for her. She trooped off with the nanny with the cards in her pocket. Jane and Ian were left behind. They looked at each other across the table. 

"We’re so serious.” Ian wanted so much to lift the weight that hung over them.

“Yep.”

“It’s as if our whole future’s on the line.” 

“Yeah, like that.”

“Sucks, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You know what I wish?”

“What?”

“I wish I hadn't done it.”

She fought an irresistible urge to yawn. She didn’t want to have this conversation. It would be nicer to go upstairs and take a nap. 

Swimming through great waves of ocean-like resistance, she spoke. “I’ve thought a great deal about what happened. Everything about it. It wasn’t an accident. I needed Tor to point that out to me. You can imagine how wonderful that felt. You did something drastic and it showed up the cracks in our marriage. Somewhere there was a lie. Your sins were of commission. Mine were of omission. I
didn’t
. You
did
.” Her jaw locked against the next burgeoning yawn. It shuddered within her ribcage and subsided. “It makes it hard for me to trust you.” She yawned enormously. “Sorry.” She covered her mouth. 

His chin was tucked close in to his chest. “What is it you think are your sins of omission?”

She rubbed her shoulder, one of the places it felt like Tor had grabbed her, though he had never touched her. “I hid at home. I let a little neurosis take hold and grow, isolating me, even from you. The idea of home seemed important. I don’t think I understood it’s not necessarily a place. It’s a person. Or people. A family. I think now about my childhood. I never knew where I’d be. I wanted continuity. I let you go in my mind, because you seemed inconstant, unreliable. I let the distance between us grow, so I wouldn’t feel the pain of separation. You were always leaving. Just like my mother.” She slid her eyes over him. “You’re like her, you know. Exciting. Gorgeous. I married someone just like the person I wanted to escape.” Another deep, all-consuming yawn shook her body. It felt good. 

He ran both hands back through his hair and pushed his elbows onto the table. “I’m not her, you know. I may be like her in some ways, but I’m not her.”

“I’ve gone back to relive some of my childhood, this trip. Gone back down some of the old roads. They weren’t all bad ways. I sloughed it all off, long ago. I went a little too deep. I’m trying to find those parts of me I should have kept.” 

Those hours she’d spent alone, wandering about London while Tam was with Marie-Renée—that first time she’d been pulled down a mews into the past by the sounds and sights of her childhood: the rattlesnake shake of the tambourine, hand-beaten drums. The women dancing: shoulders shimmying, hips gyrating in the rhythm and sway of the belly dance. It was the music she grew up with, that had called her out of herself, had called her to work, to the stage. 

When she had featured, dancing her own routine for the first time, she was fourteen. As she had danced ever since she was old enough to stand, imitating her mother and the other women, it was natural for her to participate in the group dances that the women did to attract customers to the shops and shows. Her mother had wanted her to be mature, in her mother’s mind an adult, before she danced solo, and that had been fourteen. She herself had danced younger, she seemed to imply, without directly saying so. Whether that were true, Jane still didn’t know. She had choreographed it herself, to music she chose, and had enjoyed dancing her routine immensely. The belly dance had a certain adult nuance that Jane did not appreciate until she was older; to her it was a pleasurable way to move, a way of being in which she could lose herself and create a trance-like state of rapture.

It was several years after this, when her family moved back to the Ozarks for the last time and she entered high school as a senior, no longer home-schooled, that she began to feel ashamed of her mother and their unconventional past. No one else had a tarot-card reading, glittery, gold-hoop earringed, voluptuous mother who went barefoot. Outsiders looked at her mother like she was in costume, that she was playing a character rather than being herself. Her mother hadn't attended high school. She had lived with her own mother, a Rom who had left her family after falling for a
gadjo
, outsider. She had made of herself an outsider, when she chose to leave. He hadn't stuck around when she got pregnant. Magdalena followed in her mother's footsteps, down to the pregnancy and the man who walked away. 

Magda clung to the things of her childhood and used them for her family to survive. On the road, at events, her mother was special and appreciated, paid for being who she was, part of a large interconnected circle of musicians and performers who were like a big family. At home, with children in a public school, it was different. To the other parents at the school she was regarded as something of a joke, which she didn't seem to realize. If she did, she didn't care. Jane felt every agony of this distinction a hundred times more for the both of them. 

Although Jane loved her mother and secretly thought her beautiful, now she wished for one who would help her fit in. She asked to be called by her middle name rather than her first, and so became Jane, the name her real father contributed. The idea of any of her classmates finding out, now, that she had danced for customers who had put money into a hat was about the most embarrassing thing she could imagine in the world. 

She had stopped dancing. Except for occasional secret moments by herself, when a certain type of song came on the radio and she was alone in her room, she might be compelled to leap off her bed and twine herself across her floor because of the provocative heavy bass or percussive line. They were private moments that had nothing to do with the past and all
that
, she thought. She would never dance for those people again. It had become ridiculous and mortifying in her mind, and for anyone outside the family to know would be the worst breach of privacy. The festivals would henceforward have to do without her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

N
OW
,
SO
MANY
years later, a switch had flipped in her brain and she was drawn to the world of her childhood again. Her body of late had become so foreign. When she heard the familiar music that day, as she walked in the street, she had to follow it. After so many years of burying the persona of her youth, she longed to dance. The irresistible lure of the drum pulled her in.

The sound led her down a small, dusty alleyway. The front door was propped open and the music inside spilled out. Inside was a whirl of color as women spun and stood and danced throughout the room, wearing everything from full, elaborate costumes--intensely colored red, pale peach, turquoise blue, and rose--to workout wear, but all were involved. Dancing, or trying to. And before she knew what she was doing, Jane dropped her purse in the corner and joined them in the center. She rolled her neck, stretched her arms out to the fingertips and felt the luxuriousness of moving her body in circular motion. Closing her eyes, she let her body memories consume her like flame. Slowly she unwound herself and let the underlying beat take her where it would. Since that first time, she had returned when she could, two hours stolen here and there. She had gone so far as to purchase a veil, pantaloons, and halter. She couldn’t very well dance in jeans. 

At the same time her visit to the dance school brought a renewed sense of her physical self, it also unearthed something else. Jane felt anger coming up at her mother, now she thought about her past. When she looked at her little daughter she thought about her performing childhood. She didn’t pause long to consider she had more than enough free-floating anger to go around at the moment. The phone call with Magdalena turned angry without much trying.

"Why did I have to be on display at fourteen for all those people? It wasn’t right.”

“I danced when I was that age. It didn’t do me a bit of harm. Why do you bring this up? It never bothered you.”

“How can you say it didn’t do anything to you? Look at your relationships.” She took half a breath and felt herself daring to go further, beyond where she’d ever gone before. “Like with my dad.”

She heard her mother’s sharp exhalation. “Your father? You bring him up? He was never there, never cared, never gave anything but money for you, and not much of that.”

“He did what he could.”

“Did what he could?” Magdalena sounded stung. “The only thing he gave was DNA.”

Jane recoiled as if Magdalena had struck her. Her mother had never spoken of him like this. She had described her absent father in good terms when Jane had asked about him, telling the story of their brief relationship in such a way that it was her favorite bedtime story for years. In an instant, everything that stood out about her mother, those qualities she had noticed and admired about her when she was a child, the ones that embarrassed her as a teen, seemed hateful: her strident voice, her loquacity, her voluptuous physicality that drew attention from everyone, men and women; her differentness. If only she had the chance to be raised by her father, Jane thought, who had a normal life, a normal house and family. If her mother hadn’t hung on to her so hard. 

She heard the words coming out of her mouth, unstoppable: “If you weren’t so selfish maybe he would have had a chance to see me.”

“If he wanted to see you he could have.”

“He knew he wasn’t welcome.” She was finally saying the thoughts she had kept tucked away for years. Her father was a cardiologist. She had a picture of his home and family from a Christmas card he’d sent her one year with a check in it. It was a beautiful house. A beautiful family. 

“Jana, Jana.” Her mother's voice took on a different tone, one Jane resented. As if there were something she didn’t know or understand. “He could have seen you. I didn’t stop him. He didn’t want to. His life was how he wanted it and he was too busy to think about a girl he didn’t know. He didn’t know you. So he couldn’t miss you.”

“He told me at graduation you wouldn’t let him see me.” 

The best day of her life. A mother and a father, on the day she’d be free from school forever. She had a picture of them all together. It was the only picture of her parents together she had. And the secret information, the consolation from her father, that he’d wanted to see her all along. That one piece of knowledge, the puzzle piece that made her whole life make sense. 

“Then he lied.”

“You’re jealous. And I don’t even know him.” She felt a slippery sinking feeling, as if she were struggling to run on an ice-slicked hill, sliding down and down. She didn’t want to know what was at the bottom. 

“Maybe once right after you were born, when I knew he wasn’t going to do anything or be there for any of it, I said he couldn’t see you. But later he knew he could. He chose not to. That’s the truth.”

“He sent me money. He cared. I don’t care what you say.” Jane paced the bedroom, striding until the stretched length of the phone cord pulled her back. Being bound by an old school cord made her feel all the more trapped. 

“Caring enough to send a check a couple times a year is a little different than being there every day of your life.”

“Ma.” She bleated the word in pain. 

“Would you want your own daughter to have a father like that?”

“She has a fine father.”

“Not from what I hear lately.”

“Don’t start.”

“Get your business in order. She deserves it, right? Better than you had. You’d have liked two parents in the house.”

“There was Paulo.”

“Yes, we did have Paulo, most of the time.” Magdalena sighed.

“He was okay.” That was unjust. Paulo was better than okay. Still, not as good as my father would have been, Jane thought. Not brilliant, not a successful, providing, normal Dad. Paulo was another one in the cast of characters of her unusual background, someone to be explained. Long-haired, Kerouac-loving, mellow, free-wheeling Paulo. 

“That was the stars; it was inevitable our paths should cross.”

“How is he?”

There was a pause. “He’s off on the trail of a Celtic songstress from Flint. He’ll be back around.”

Jane halted her peregrinations. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

“I’m keeping my heart open.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Only when I think there is a limited amount of love in the universe. When I let myself bathe in the infinite light of the Spirit, accepting the divine blessing and circular nature of Love, I find peace. Of course, I’m human, so that works about fifty-fifty. I hope Paulo comes back when I’m bathing in the divine Light, so I don’t want to slam the door on his returning Spirit.”

“Oh, Ma.”

After her conversation with her mother, Jane felt broken. As if she were a mussel shell once shut tight, now pried open, her two sides vulnerable to the treacherous world. What if Ian saw the sides of her she’d hidden—her past self—the girl who’d danced for money, the woman who loved to dance? What would he think? She’d kept it a secret for so long. They even had a long-running joke about her clumsiness, her awkwardness. She had distanced herself from that girl. He didn’t know. 

The studio had free dance on certain evenings. The night she told Ian where to come, where to be and what time, he didn’t know what it was for. He was to meet her there. He barely knew her mother. She had kept that part away, though he liked Magdalena very much the few times they’d met. She had never revealed the part of herself that had been like Magdalena. Ian knew, mostly, how her mother had earned the family’s living, the singing part. Her mother had been long schooled not to discuss Jane’s pre-Jane years with her post-Jane friends.

The woman who loved to dance was hidden behind a curtain, prepared. The man who came to see her was there, at one of the café tables in the smokey little den.