Pretending to Dance (3 page)

Now he sent away to a New Age shop for palm stones—sometimes he called them “worry stones”—to give the kids he worked with in his private practice.

“The palm stone is there,” I said.

“Why up there?” he asked. “You used to carry it around with you.”

“Not in years, Daddy,” I said. “I don't need it anymore. I still love it, though,” I assured him, and I did. “But seriously. What am I afraid of?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “You're a pretty brave kid.”

“At least I don't have any booze in the secret rock, like you and Uncle Trevor used to hide in there.”

He laughed. “I'm glad to hear it,” he said. “What time is your friend … Stacy Bateman is it? What time is she arriving?”

“Five,” I said. He'd given me an idea with his talk of sleepovers. “Could Stacy and I sleep out here tonight?” It would be so cool to stay in the springhouse, away from my parents and Russell.

“Hmm, I don't know,” he said. “Awfully far from the house. From
any
of the houses.”

“Yeah, but you just said that you and Uncle—”

“We were older. Besides, now that I remember the sort of things we did out here, I don't think I want you sleeping out here unsupervised.” He laughed.

“Like what?” I asked. “What did you do?”

“None of your business.” He winked at me.

“Well, we won't do anything terrible,” I promised. “Just listen to music and talk.”

“You know how spooky it gets out here at night,” he said.

“Oh, please let us!”

He looked thoughtful, then nodded. “We'll check with Mom, but she'll probably say it will be all right. Can you help me with a bit of writing before Stacy arrives?”

“Sure,” I said, eager to please him now that he'd given me permission to spend the night in the springhouse. And besides, I loved typing and not just because he paid me and I would soon have enough money for the purple Doc Martens I was dying to buy. It was because I felt proud of him when I typed for him. Sometimes I typed his case notes, and I liked seeing the progress his patients made. Daddy would label the notes by number instead of name in case I knew one of his patients, since he sometimes saw kids who went to my school. But most of all, I loved typing his books for him. They were about Pretend Therapy. He had a more technical name for the approach he used with his patients, but that's what he called it when talking to laypeople. “In a nutshell,” he would say when anyone asked him about it, “if you pretend you're the sort of person you want to be, you will gradually become that person.” I saw the approach work with his patients as I typed his notes week to week. So far, he'd written two books about Pretend Therapy, one for other therapists and one for kids. Now he was almost finished with one for adults and I knew he was anxious to be done with it. Soon he'd be going on a book tour set up by a publicist he hired to promote the book for kids, and I'd be going with him, since, he said, I'd been his guinea pig as he developed the techniques he used with children and teens. And of course Russell would go with us. Daddy couldn't go anywhere without his aide, but that was okay. In the three years Russell had lived with us, I'd grown to appreciate him. Maybe even love him like part of the family. He made my father's life bearable.

I stood up and turned off the cassette player. “We should go now if I'm going to type,” I said. I only had a couple of hours before Stacy was due to arrive.

“All right,” he said. “My walkie-talkie's on my belt. Give Russell a shout.”

“I can push you home,” I said, reaching for the push handles of his chair and turning him around.

“You think you can manage the Hill from Hell?”

“You scared?” I teased him. The main road through Morrison Ridge was a two-mile-long loop. The side of the loop farthest from the springhouse was made up of a series of hairpin turns that eased the descent a bit. But the segment of the road closest to us was a long, mostly gentle slope until it abruptly seemed to drop off the face of the earth. It was the greatest sledding hill ever, but that was about all it was good for. I took the Hill from Hell too fast on my bike one time and ended up with a broken arm.

“Yes, I'm scared,” Daddy admitted. “I don't need any broken bones on top of everything else.”

“Pretend you're not afraid, Daddy,” I teased him again.

“You can be a real twit sometimes, you know that?” he said, but he was laughing quietly. I felt the vibrations in the handles of his chair.

I pushed him down the path that ran from the springhouse to the loop road. The path was nearly hidden, littered with leaves and other debris, but I knew exactly where it ran between the trees. I had to stop a few times to pull vines from the spokes of the wheels, but soon we reached the loop road and I turned left onto it. The dirt road, cradled in a canopy of green, was just wide enough for two cars to carefully pass one another. That was a rare occurrence—two cars passing one another. Only eleven people lived on Morrison Ridge's hundred acres these days, since my two older cousins, Samantha and her brother Cal, had moved to Colorado the year before, much to my grandmother's distress. Nanny thought that anyone born on Morrison Ridge should also die on Morrison Ridge. I tended to agree with her. I couldn't imagine living anyplace else.

Our five homes were well spread out, invisible to one another. The zigzagging roads connected us all. Love did, too, for the most part anyway, because all of us were related in one way or another. But there was also anger. I couldn't deny it. As I walked Daddy past the turnoff to Uncle Trevor and Aunt Toni's house, I felt some of that anger bubble up inside me.

Daddy looked down the lane in the direction of their house, which was well hidden behind the trees. I thought he was thinking about his latest argument with Uncle Trevor, who was toying with the idea of developing part of his twenty-five acres of Morrison Ridge. He was trying to talk my father and Aunt Claudia into selling him part of their twenty-five-acre parcels so he could go into the development business in a bigger way.

But that wasn't what Daddy was thinking about at all.

“There's Amalia,” he said, and I saw Amalia walk around the bend in the lane from Uncle Trevor's house.

I would have recognized Amalia from a mile away. She had the lithe body of a dancer and I envied the graceful way she moved. Even dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, as she was now, she seemed to float more than walk. I set the locks on the wheelchair and ran to meet her on the lane. She was carrying her basket of cleaning supplies and she set it down to wrap me in a hug. Her long wavy brown hair brushed over my bare arms. Her hair always smelled like honeysuckle to me.

“When's my next dance lesson?” I asked as we started walking up the lane toward my father. He was smiling at us. I knew he loved seeing us together. Amalia held the basket in one hand, her other arm warm around my shoulders.

“Wednesday?” she suggested.

“Afternoon?”

“Perfect,” she said.

Spending more time with Amalia was one of the highlights of the summer. I felt so free with her. No rules. No chores. She didn't even have certain steps I was supposed to follow during our dance lessons. Amalia was all about total freedom.

We reached my father. “Where's Russell?” Amalia asked.

“Molly's pushing me home,” Daddy said.

“Don't lose him on the hill,” Amalia warned me, but I knew she wasn't serious. She was not a worrier. At least, she'd never let me see her worry. “Maybe I should help going down the hill?” she suggested.

Daddy shook his head. “Then you'd have an uphill climb all the way home,” he said. Amalia lived in the old slave quarters near my grandmother's house at the very peak of Morrison Ridge. The slave quarters had been expanded and modernized, the two tiny buildings connected into one large open expanse of wood and glass. Amalia had turned the remodeled cabin into something pretty and inviting, but there were those at Morrison Ridge who believed the slave quarters was a fitting place for her to live. My father wasn't one of them, however.

“Well, if you're sure you're okay,” Amalia said, and I wasn't certain which of us she was talking to.

“We're fine,” Daddy said. “It sounds like Molly's enjoying her dance lessons this summer.”

“She's a natural.” Amalia touched my arm. “Focused and unafraid.”

It seemed like such an odd word for her to use to describe my dancing:
unafraid
. But I loved it. I thought I knew what she meant. When we started moving around her house, I felt like I was a million miles away from everyone and everything.

“Molly has a friend coming to visit tonight,” Daddy said. “They're going to stay in the springhouse.”

“As long as Mom says it's okay,” I added. He seemed to have forgotten that hurdle.

“Yes,” he said. “As long as Nora says it's okay.”

“An adventure!” Amalia's green eyes lit up and I nodded, but she wasn't looking at me. Her gaze was on my father and I had the disoriented feeling I sometimes got around them. Was it my imagination or could the two of them communicate without words?

Amalia picked up her basket again and put it over her forearm. I spotted a bottle of white vinegar poking out from beneath a dust cloth. Dani told me that after Amalia cleaned their house, it stank of vinegar for days. Amalia cleaned every house on Morrison Ridge. Except ours.

“We'd better get going,” Daddy said. “I'd like to get the hill behind us.”

“Bye, Amalia,” I said.

“See you Wednesday, baby.” She waved her free hand in my direction and I unlocked Daddy's chair and began pushing him down the road.

“So what will you and Stacy do in the springhouse tonight?” he asked.

We were passing one of the wooden benches my grandfather had built at the side of the road. I guessed there'd been a view of the mountains from that bench long ago, but now the trees blocked everything. “Listen to music,” I said. “Talk.”

“And giggle,” Daddy said. “I like hearing you giggle with your friends.”

“I don't giggle,” I said, irked. He still talked to me like I was ten years old sometimes.

“No?” he said. “Could have fooled me.”

“Here's the hill,” I said. I turned around so we'd be going down backward and tightened my grip on the handles. I'd seen Russell take him down the hill a dozen times. He made it look simple. “Are you ready?”

“As I'll ever be,” he said.

If he'd been capable of bracing himself—tightening his muscles, girding for the ride—I was sure he would have done it, but he could do little except hope for the best.

I started walking backward, holding tight, digging my tennis shoes into the dirt road. My father and the chair were frighteningly heavy, far heavier than I'd anticipated, and the muscles in my arms trembled. This had been a mistake, I knew as we picked up speed. My heartbeat raced in my ears. When we reached the bottom of the hill, I was close to tears and glad he was facing away from me so he couldn't see my face.

“Ta-da!” I said, as if it had been nothing.

“Brava!” he said, then added with a chuckle, “Let's not ever do that again.”

“All right,” I agreed. Impulsively I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around him. For a moment, I simply held him tight. I didn't ever want to lose him.

 

3

 

Russell's eyes nearly popped out of his head when I wheeled Daddy into the house.

“You carried him down the hill?” he asked as I pushed Daddy through the front door into the living room. I knew he didn't mean that I literally carried him. Russell had a few turns of phrase that were all his own.

“Of course,” I said, like it had been nothing.

“Next time, we'll call you,” Daddy said to Russell.

“Damn straight you will.” Russell gave me a scolding look, or at least he tried to, but he had these big cocker spaniel eyes the same chocolate brown as his skin, and I'd never seen him able to pull off a convincing angry expression. Anyway, I knew he wasn't mad. Just worried. He loved my father. He did everything for him. Lifted him out of bed in the morning, bathed him, emptied his urine bag, changed his catheter, dressed him, brushed his teeth. I guessed when someone depended on you as much as my father depended on Russell, you either started loving that person or you ended up hating him. I didn't see how there could be an in-between.

“Let's say hi to Mom,” Daddy said. “Then we can type.”

“You got him?” Russell asked me, and I nodded. Russell headed down the hall toward his room, which was right next to my parents' room. He was always close by in case Daddy needed him.

I pushed Daddy past the broad living room windows that overlooked the mountains in the distance. Uncle Trevor helped my grandfather build our house when my parents got engaged. In my opinion, it was the nicest of the Morrison Ridge houses, with its sky-blue exterior and dozens of windows that overlooked the tree-covered peaks and valleys that stretched on and on forever. It was hypnotizing, that view. When I was younger, I'd sometimes sit on the window seat in the dining room and imagine what it would be like to be an eagle soaring from our house to those mountains. That was before the New Kids on the Block and Johnny Depp entered the scene and my fantasies switched to something a bit more provocative.

Mom was in the kitchen, chopping onions on a wooden chopping board. She still had on her white pharmacy coat with the embroidered
Nora Arnette, PharmD.
above the pocket. She was also wearing her harried look. That “I've been on my feet all day and now I have to make dinner for my family and a guest and I don't even have time to take my white coat off” look. My mother always had too much on her mind. If there weren't a zillion things to do, she would make up stuff that needed doing. It was impossible for her to relax. She was very pretty, but her prettiness had a fragile quality to it, especially when she was tired or rushing to get something done, the way she seemed to be now. She had the sort of blond hair that was so fair, no one would notice when it eventually turned gray. It was shoulder length and she almost always wore it in a small ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were the palest blue; her skin a nearly translucent white, but she had full lips that were so deeply colored she never bothered with lipstick. I knew this because I'd pawed through her makeup bag more than once, trying out the eyeliner and mascara and blush, disappointed that there was nothing to spice up my own pale lips.