The Unexpected Waltz (36 page)

The cops take statements from everyone, including me, although since I was blindfolded for most of the crisis, I am not exactly the world’s best witness. The blindfolding seems to confound the young officer interviewing me. I have trouble making him understand that it was not the gunman who blindfolded me, that it was already on when he came through the door. Struggling to explain, I almost slip. I almost mention Nik’s name but then I tell the young officer that we often dance blindfolded at the studio, that this is a way for ballroom dancers to check their balance. He seems to believe me. He looks around, then expels a big long sigh. We look crazy to them, I realize, standing in the bright sunlight in our false eyelashes and Swarovski crystals.

The police had known they were dealing with a domestic incident the minute they confirmed Bob’s license plate and I gradually see, with growing relief, that they are inclined to leave it at that. Divorce makes people unhinged—this is the general consensus of the crowd in the parking lot. The man just snapped. They’ve been looking for Pamela too, ever since Bob got the second speeding ticket and had just found her minutes before the busboy’s call, at a friend’s house, drinking chocolate martinis. A domestic incident, says the police captain. That’s about all they deal with these days, now that the world’s gone crazy, and nobody keeps their business to themselves. It’s just a shame all of us had to get caught up in it.

“Can you remember anything else?” the young officer asks me.

I shake my head and realize I’m only wearing one earring. Quinn has come up beside me. The ambulance and the cops have gradually begun to leave. Quinn smiles at this young man, who’s trying so hard to be thorough, and asks if he can continue with me at another time. She says, “It’s almost six. We should be leaving soon.”

And that’s how I learn that apparently they all still intend to dance. Amid the confusion of the past hour, Quinn has been quietly going around, finding new combinations of partners to accommodate Nik’s absence. They’d had a vote. They are in agreement. If Anatoly can do it, if he can get on his feet and cover his routines, they want to go to the hotel as planned and compete.

Anatoly seems as confused as I am. “We can’t compete,” he says. “Not without . . .” He looks around at the scene and exasperation flits across his face. This probably isn’t the first time he’s lost someone in a squeal of tires, and it’s no wonder he thinks Americans are naive. We’re always so shocked when bad things dare to happen. So angry when we can’t fix them. I suspect he sees us all as golden retrievers—big, dumb, and strong, bounding across open fields, drooling from our permanent smiles, blissfully unaware of the wider world around us. We stick our snouts down the hole and are surprised by the snake every time.

“Come on,” Quinn says firmly. “The limo’s back. We’ve missed the banquet but if we hurry, we can be there for the first heat.”

What does she mean, the limo’s back? Where had it gone? I scan the parking lot. When I’d first arrived at the studio, it had been over by the grocery loading dock, and now it’s pulled facing the opposite direction, ready to go. The women must have thrown Nik into the limo, I realize dully. He’s at the airport now, or perhaps he has already taken flight. Quinn is pushing a legal pad into Anatoly’s hands, explaining to him that he can cover most of the extra heats. By extra heats, I guess she means the heats Nik would have danced, but she doesn’t say this. And for the heats where there is a conflict—by this I gather she means heats where Nik would have been dancing at the same time as Anatoly—the civilian boys have agreed to step up. We can just do the routines we learned in group class. It will be fine. Steve was dressed to dance anyway and they’ll come up with something for Harry. And she has called Lucas. He saw the whole thing on the news and was already putting on his best preacher suit when the phone rang. He’s going to meet us at the hotel.

“We can work out the details in the limo,” she says. “That is, if the two of you are up to it.”

“Why bother?” Anatoly says. “Group routines and half of us dancing with the wrong partner? We won’t place.”

“Oh, honey,” Quinn says, laughing. “That’s small potatoes considering what we’ve just been through. We need to do this. Every damn one of us. Even you.”

“Well,” Anatoly says, looking skeptically at the list Quinn has made on the legal pad. “I see that I am supposed to tango with you, Kelly. Are you able?” Kind Quinn. I’m beginning to think of her as superhuman Quinn, the way she has orchestrated all this, and she’s even remembered that the tango is my favorite dance, the only one I have a prayer of placing in, and that’s the dance in which she’s paired me with Anatoly.

“I just need to get my earring,” I say. “I lost it in the studio.”

“Don’t go back in there,” says Quinn. “Tell me where you think it is and I’ll get it.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “It won’t take me but a minute.”

Anatoly pushes himself slowly to his feet and starts toward the others. Valentina is holding his tux on a hanger. She motions for him to hurry. Quinn starts to say something, then stops. I start to ask her something, and then stop. We stand for a second, looking at each other.

“Things are okay,” she says. “As okay as they can be.”

“How do we know?”

“We’ll hear from him eventually, I’m sure of it.” And then she adds, “The good news is, your hair’s still perfect.”

I WALK INTO THE
studio. I don’t know what I was expecting—crime scene tape? A CSI team taking pictures? But everyone has gone, writing this off to just another marriage gone sour, just another rich man who’ll buy his way into a psych ward instead of a prison. I find my earring, taking care not to step in the shards of glass. The crumpled scarf is still lying where Steve left it after he had pressed it to Anatoly’s head to stop the bleeding.

I walk to Nik’s desk and pull open the top drawer. It’s empty.

IN THE LIMO, THE
mood has changed to a spirit of euphoria. There are no cops and ambulances now, just high fives and loud declarations of how it would take more than this to bring us down. We’re so crowded that we’re piled half on top of each other. Harry, who had not been expecting to dance, is struggling into Nik’s slim tuxedo, which Quinn found hanging on the back of the bathroom door. He strips down to his underwear, doing a little shimmy on the limo floor, and all the women take turns slapping his butt. Isabel is acting as a sort of emcee, calling out the new order of who will be dancing with whom. Quinn is on the phone explaining to the organizers that there will be some changes in our lineup, that we are running late but on our way. Steve opens the champagne and for once Anatoly does not protest that we should wait until after the competition to drink. Steve pours it, warm and bubbly, into small paper cups. No more than an inch for anyone, no more wine than you would get at communion.

At some point someone notices that Steve has blood on his shirt. His tux doesn’t have a vest, but Harry’s does. Harry makes a great show of sacrificing it for the greater good, and the vest covers most of the stain. It takes me a surprisingly long time to realize that the blood on Steve is Anatoly’s, that Steve must have gotten smeared when he’d bent over him to examine the cut on his head. Quinn pulls a little marker of Tide to Go out of her purse, dabs at the stain, and then leans back and announces, “You can hardly see it.”

Of course you can see it. It all but glows in the dark. I can’t seem to look at anything else.

Anatoly clumsily moves over beside me. We review which steps I know in tango and he tells me what sequence he’ll try to work them in. He reminds me that when we get out on the floor with other dancers all around us, I shouldn’t be surprised if he mixes it up a bit. There isn’t always enough room to move along the clear line of dance. People step in front of you, sometimes by accident, but there are even dancers who will deliberately try to cut you off. I have to trust him, he says. He knows how to find the open floor.

“But even if you do not always know where you are going,” he says, “you must take big steps.”

I nod, staring straight ahead and holding the champagne in my hand. Don’t worry, I tell Anatoly. Nik has explained all this to me many times.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

B
Y THE TIME
the limo arrives at the hotel, we are celebrities. Aerial shots of the studio have apparently run all over the six o’clock news with the banner
HOSTAGE BALLROOM.
I have twenty-two calls on my iPhone and I send quick e-mails to my mother and Elyse, asking them to get the word out that I’m okay.

Perhaps because the story has beaten us to the competition, Quinn has no trouble getting our heats switched up. She comes back to the table with three tags reading 384—this was the flight that took Nik out of Moscow, years ago. He’d always considered it his lucky number and requested it for comps, and now Quinn pins the tags on Harry, Lucas, and Steve. An organizer brings us plates of leftover food from the buffet and says, “Bless your hearts.” Jane takes the heat sheets and gets us lined up and from there it all becomes a blur. I’m having so much trouble following events in a linear fashion that I wonder if I hit the floor harder than I realized and if maybe I’m the one who’s concussed.

I suspect we’re quite bad in the early dances. The routines from group class weren’t designed to show well in competition. One of the other studio owners stops by our table and says “Bad break, man,” but Anatoly barely responds. Which bad break is the man referring to—the crack across his head, the loss of Nik, our dismal showing in the early rounds? Or perhaps the fact that Anatoly is the proprietor of a studio that, thanks to the news stories, the citizens of Charlotte will ever after refer to as Hostage Ballroom?

“We should have had twenty firsts by now,” Anatoly says to Quinn, “and we would have, if only—”

She puts her hand to his lips. It’s a small competition, not even a regional, and we’ve been through a hell of a day by anyone’s standards. Yet all he can think about is that he looks foolish in front of the other studio owners? He should be ashamed, she says, so hush up.

He does loosen up a little through the night, after the first and the worst of the embarrassment is over. He is dancing almost every heat, and he begins to enter the same zone the rest of us are in, the zone of just coping, moving mindlessly through one song and then the next. Steve and I have danced well together lately and we might even have placed in our foxtrot heat if we’d remembered to keep our heads to the left. But for some reason as the music begins he looks me right in the eye and I look back. We do not break this gaze throughout the entire dance and when we finish, he kisses my hand. We place fifth out of six couples, beating only an eighty-two-year-old woman whose instructor had to drag her through her routine.

But overall Steve has a good night. He wins all the heats he dances with Quinn—although, of course, in many cases he’s the only person of his gender and age group entered, so the vast majority of his wins are uncontested. Valentina reminds me that there’s another small drama playing out tonight—that Steve’s ex-wife is here and this is the first time he has danced in her presence.

At the break they give out the second set of awards, and I sit back in my chair and listen to Steve’s name being called time after time. Quinn had wanted him to leave the dance floor with handfuls of ribbons, and so he shall. Some people might say that being the best dancer because you were the only dancer is a hollow victory; just a few weeks ago, I would have been one of those people. But now, upon reflection, I’ve decided it is not. Quinn has always known just what Steve needs, and she knows he needs her to walk with him across the dance floor after the break is over: to walk straight up to the table where his ex-wife is sitting with her own instructor and her own handfuls of medals and her dress, which looks even heavier than mine. Where he tells her, “You dance beautifully. And it is to my eternal discredit that I never told you this.”

So that’s it, I think. He’s done. You can blame or explain, or try to demand answers and hope all that will bring you what the shrinks call closure. Or you can just forgive and that’s the spiritual fast track. A road like one of those beltways that circle cities, which take you smoothly around all the snarls and tangles of memory, and onto the open road beyond.