The Love That Split the World

  “We’ve had a revelation,” Alice says, clapping her hands. “Three days after Natalie completed the EMDR process, she quit dancing. Prior to that time, she encountered Grandmother several times a year, and she’d been dancing since shortly before her first visitation, her Opening. There could be a link between your decreased level of physical activity and your losing track of Grandmother.”

  “Doesn’t that seem like a coincidence?” I say.

  Her head wobbles. “No,” she says firmly.

  “And that’s because a light string told you so?” I ask.

  “Light strand, but yes. This is important. I feel it. Besides, think about it: It’s a physical activity, a ritual of sorts, but there’s also a sort of meditative or artistic quality to it. That’s the point of ritual: When you’re comfortable enough with an action, your mind is able to disengage from the actual, physical motions and focus elsewhere. When we dream or hallucinate, multiple separate parts of the brain are active. It’s possible that dance, which marries physical and mental actions, enables you to access Grandmother’s world better than simple stress or emotional fatigue would on its own.”

  Beau looks at me. “Like with the piano,” he says.

  “What’s that?” Alice says.

  Beau shifts his weight to his other leg. “I can move between the worlds when I play.”

  Alice taps her fingertips together. “Perfect. An accompanist.”

  “But I’ve never seen Grandmother while I’ve been dancing,” I pipe up.

  “Maybe not,” Alice says. “But there are so many reasons this could have an effect. For one, it’s possible that dancing regularly affected your sleep. After all, this phenomenon starts as a dream state. Completing the EMDR might’ve cleared out some of your stored, unprocessed trauma, making those heightened dream states unnecessary. But you’re still having a recurring nightmare. You’re still able to move between your world and a world that exists as a dream state for most of us. I still think pinpointing your trauma is the key here, but deepening your sleep might help too. We don’t want to use any drugs that could augment your dream patterns or keep you from waking up when Grandmother appears, but we can naturally exhaust you as much as possible. We’ll send you to the studio late at night, and when you get home you can take some melatonin to help you sleep.”

  “Studio?” Beau says.

  “The NKU dance studio,” Alice replies. She rifles feverishly through the papers on her desk. “Where the hell did I put my phone? The dance studios have pianos in them already. It’s perfect, strangely so even. Two people from two different versions of the same town, with the same gift, accessed by complementary activities. It means something.”

  “Light strand,” I say, and she points one finger at me vehemently.

  “Light strand! Light web, really. Which you two will untangle as soon as possible. We’ll start tonight. I’ll get you a key.”

  “And what, you’ll just sit in the corner and channel Degas?”

  “I wish,” she says. “But people rarely experience these kinds of visitations with spectators around. The point of this is for you two to combine your abilities, not for me to become the Berlin Wall of hypnopompic hallucinations.”

  I turn to give Beau an apologetic look, but he’s already staring at me, concern evident along his brow. “All right. Tonight, Cleary.”

  Beau picks me up in the middle of the night again, parking his truck up the street like he did before. There’s that same electric feeling that there always is between us when I get in the car, the same lag when he looks down at my spandex dance shorts and bare legs. During the day, the tension between us shrinks to a manageable intensity, but at night it’s practically unbearable to be close to him but not touching.

  The highway’s deserted, and when we reach NKU, the parking lot is too, except for a green-and-tan Subaru covered in bumper stickers bearing political slogans and Rorschach inkblots that all basically resemble a person giving the peace sign. I see Alice’s silhouette by the building’s front doors, and she lifts her arms over her head, waving at us. Beau parks, and when we get out into the intensely hot night, I feel some relief from his magnetism.

  “Hello, hello,” Alice says vaguely, fumbling in her pocket. She pulls out a key ring, jiggles one key in the lock, then pulls the door open. She hands me the keys. “Now, the gold key unlocks the studios. It should work on any of them, so just choose your favorite. Be out by six A.M., and make sure you lock up.”

  “That’s it?” I ask as she starts across the parking lot.

  She holds her arms out to her sides. “That’s it. Make me proud.”

  The building is frigid and dark, the air conditioning set so high the vents blow my hair and give me goose bumps as we make our way down the hall.

  We let ourselves into the first studio we come to. The lights stutter on, illuminating gray vinyl floors, two mirrored walls, and a scraped-up wooden piano beside a rack of sound equipment. Beau walks across the room and sits down at the piano, tapping out “Happy Birthday” with one finger.

  “Beautiful,” I say. “A true work of art.”

  He smiles down at the keys and adds his other hand, picking up a slow, quivering song that deepens the chills along my neck. He drops his hands into his lap and looks up at me. “You gonna dance?”

  I walk to the middle of the floor and sit down to stretch. “It’s cold,” I say.

  “Want me to warm you up, Cleary?”

  “Somehow I think that won’t end with me dancing.”

  “No, probably not.”

  I stand up and meet Beau’s gaze in the mirror. “This is incredibly awkward.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m dancing for an audience of one. Who does that?”

  “Strippers?”

  “Okay, I’ll just pretend I’m a stripper. That’ll make this so much easier.”

  He nods. “Or you can picture me in my underwear.”

  I cover my face and laugh-groan. “I think you’re going to have to close your eyes.”

  “Shyest stripper I ever met,” he says.

  “And how many strippers have you met, Beau Wilkes?”

  “Not too many,” he says. “A few dozen.”

  I groan again, walk over to stand behind him, and cover his face with my palms. I feel his mouth shift into a smile under my hands. “That better?” he asks, starting to play blind.

  “I’m going to turn the light off too,” I say.

  “Fine.”

  “Fahn.”

  “Fahn.”

  “Please keep your eyes closed,” I beg.

  He grips my wrists lightly and pulls them down in front of him, against his stomach. I lean around his shoulder to look into his face and see his eyes scrunched closed. “Thanks,” I say. He presses one of my palms to his mouth, and my whole body warms as I unwind myself from him and go to the light switch. “Keep them closed.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  When he starts to play, I close my eyes and listen, trying to let all my nerves and discomfort seep out. It’s easier than I would’ve expected—he plays so beautifully it’s like the song is a piece of him that’s reached outside his body to meet me, and it’s drawing me out of myself too, leaving no walls standing between us. The way he plays piano makes me wish I could see him play football too. I bet he’s graceful like Matt, but less subdued. I imagine he plays untamed, unfettered, un-self-conscious, the same way he plays the piano. With simultaneous tenderness and abandon, making mistakes that only serve to make those periods of perfection seem more beautiful and real, overflowing with life and possibility. He plays the piano like he’s falling and, at any second, his fingers could completely miss the keys. Seeing people do the things they love has always fascinated and inspired me. Seeing Beau doing the thing he loves now actually makes me want to dance, to live so big my life swallows
the entire world.

  I start to move. It’s nothing like doing jazz or pom routines with the Ryle dance team. It’s like that first ballet class I took. I’m a tree growing; I’m sun warming the earth. An avalanche and a wave glancing off rock, and oil sliding through the palms of ancient hands, and in all that time, I’m also me and nothing else. I’m not my mother’s straight-backed walk or my sister’s beating hummingbird wings, and it’s fine.

  It is good. The people I love are in me, little flecks like mica in a creek bed. There are strangers in me too, with my face and hands and feet, a voice that spoke to me while I was nothing but a peanut-sized inkling in her belly; a hand that held mine as we walked down the street. This hurts, but it’s good to move and be all the things I am but can’t explain. It’s good to let my body bear the tension instead of my mind. I try to become the music, to absorb a piece of Beau into my limbs, and soon I’m lost in the darkness of the room, the swirl of the piano keys, the sweat wetting my hairline, my neck, my armpits, my legs as I leap and roll and hinge and turn. I am muscle and sinew, crunch and push, gather and swell. I am roundness, fullness. I am smallness, a tiny important thing tearing through the Earth.

  My mind wanders. I fall deeper and deeper into the song, into the dance, into my own memory. The song fades away, and still I keep moving until the last burst of energy thrusts out of me and I feel myself fade and settle like once-disrupted sand falling back asleep on the ocean floor. When all of me has finally stilled, except my overworking lungs, I look up into the mirror and see Beau behind me, standing beside the bench. He’s leaning against the piano, eyes visibly soft even in the darkness. “Why’d you stop?” he says quietly.

  I run a hand over my neck. It feels like it’s been hours since I last spoke, and my heart is still racing. “You stopped playing.”

  “No, I mean, why’d you quit?”

  I cross the room to the far wall, whose top half is composed of windows overlooking the campus, and lean against the barre. Beau follows, splays his hands out on the wooden post. He waits and watches. “It’s hard to explain,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t push for more, and maybe that’s why, after a minute, I offer it to him. “My mom was a dancer. Not my biological mother—my mom,” I say. “And my little sister, Coco. She’s talented, wants to be in musical theater.” Beau looks at me patiently and waits for me to go on. “My dad was into sports, and my brother, Jack, is on the football team. They look like our parents too. I mean, the portrait on our mantel could be an ad for the nuclear family, and then there’s me standing off to the side, ten shades darker. Mom used to always tell me: It doesn’t matter how things look—we’re family. And we are. I know that. But I guess after Grandmother left, I admitted to myself that it wasn’t only the way we looked that was different.”

  “So?” Beau says.

  I sigh and try to regain traction on my thoughts, which all swam out of me while I was dancing. I feel emotionally stretched out, loose and relaxed, unable to track down my usual knots.

  “So as a kid, I felt different from everyone, and the way I combatted that was to make sure no one else noticed, and that meant doing a lot of things I didn’t really want to do. But after Grandmother left, everything I’d done to fit in just made me feel sick. I didn’t want to be around anyone, other than Megan, because I was so self-conscious that I was pretending, and I didn’t know how to stop.

  “And then one night, my whole family went to one of Coco’s recitals. She and this kid Michael Banks were doing a rendition of the duet from La Sylphide. It was beautiful. She was beautiful, completely in control and elegant. I’ve never danced like that in my life. Dad and Jack were practically asleep, but then I looked over at my mom and she was crying, and the way I felt right then, it was stupid, but I was jealous and hurt and I hated it. And then that night, I went home, and I started Googling Indian reservations in Alabama. I’d thought about doing it a million times before that, but I always felt guilty, like I was betraying my parents. That night I just didn’t care. There was a word, something my birth mother called herself the one time she visited me, ishki. So I started with that. It means mother, in Chickasaw and Choctaw, so I had a pretty good idea she came from one of those nations.”

  “Did you find her?” Beau asks.

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. “I only really looked at one reservation before I kind of freaked out. There were pictures of people from the tribe, and I guess I didn’t expect that.”

  “Because one of them might’ve been your birth mom?”

  I nod. “But on their home page there was this interview with a girl from the tribe who’d just gotten a teaching job at Brown, after finishing a grad program there. I clicked on it mostly just to get away from the photos, but she was talking about how Brown was such a great place to learn and meet different kinds of people, and how before she went to college she didn’t really appreciate her home or her heritage, but that getting some space helped her see it differently, and now she knew she wanted to come back eventually but first she wanted to inspire young people to care about their histories and their traditions. And I want all that—to study something I love and meet people who are like me and not like me and graduate with a plan for how I’m going to make the world better. And I want to stop competing with my siblings and doing things just so people see me a certain way. And maybe someday I’ll like board games and window-shopping and movies about sports teams and dance team kick-lines, but right now I just want to start over, somewhere far away where no one expects anything from me and I can just be myself. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes sense,” he says, “but I think you’re wrong. Maybe not about all of it, but about dancing. Maybe you don’t dance like your sister or your mom, but anything with eyes could tell that it’s a part of you, Natalie. I’ve never seen you look more like yourself.”

  “More like myself, huh?”

  A small smile pulls at his mouth. “Don’t make fun of me. I’m tryin’ to be serious.” His lips settle into a straight line again. “You shouldn’t give dancing up just ’cause you think it belongs to someone else.”

  I sigh. “What about you and football?”

  His head tilts back in a silent laugh. “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “Wasn’t my choice.”

  “Beau, be honest with me. Were you scouted?”

  He runs a hand down the back of his hair. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “Natalie, I only graduated high school because teachers made up my grades so I could play. You think I’m gonna go off and get a college degree?”

  “I think you could. I also think college athletic departments are every bit as corrupt as high schools’, and they’d probably make up your grades there too.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “And in the meantime, Mason would be here, losing the house, and I’d be sitting through class, going crazy.”

  “Couldn’t Mason work more or get a roommate or something? It’s four years, Beau, and it could change your life.”

  “Maybe I don’t wanna change my life,” he snaps, and when I recoil from him, he settles against the barre again and runs a hand over his mouth then fixes his eyes on me. “I don’t want all that. That’s not what matters to me.”

  “Okay,” I relent. “What do you want, Beau?” He stares at me for a long moment, and I start to feel shaky and full. “Beau, what is it you want?”

  “A porch,” he says softly. He says it like it’s my name, and right then, I think, what both of us want more than anything is something we can never have. “All I really want is to build a house with a nice, big porch that gets used every day.”

  24

  On Thursday morning, after a particularly unsuccessful appointment with Alice, I head over to the school to get Jack. I pull around behind the field house as practice is winding down, roll down the windows, and close my
eyes while I wait. Now that the Jeep is back in working order, I’m back to dropping off and picking up Jack, and now that I’m spending the middle of the night at the dance studio with Beau, the mornings are insufferable.

  Life feels too fast and bright right now, but my brain feels foggy and slow. During the day everything hurts less—I don’t have the energy to worry about Grandmother, or even Matt, whose mom texts me a steady stream of Bible verses alongside pictures of Get Well Soon balloons, with very little actual information. But when I’m with Beau each night, the world snaps into clearer focus and I’m terrified again. Terrified and awake and a little bit on fire. I spend the whole time we’re together worrying he’s going to kiss me again and then, when he doesn’t, feeling devastatingly disappointed.

  The clash of shouts on the field draws me back to now. I open my eyes and scan the field until I see the two boys—Jack and someone else—pummeling each other on the ground while the rest of the team tries to pry them apart. I jump out of the car and sprint straight for the gate, but by the time I get there, Stephen Lehman has already pulled Jack clear of the other guy and Coach is shouting at them both, pointing off the field. “What happened?” I ask, voice tinny, as Jack stomps right past me and gets in the Jeep, slamming the door. I fling the door back open. “What the hell was that, Jack?”

  His chin is smeared with mud and grass stains, but he has no visible injuries. Even so, his face is all screwed up in anger, and he doesn’t look like my little brother. “Nothing,” he spits, slamming the door again.

  I stalk around the car and get in. “What’s going on?” I say more softly. I reach over to him, but he swats my hand away, and turns toward the window.

  “Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  “Fine, then talk to me.”

  “If you tell them, I’ll tell them about that guy who picks you up in the middle of the night.”

  “Jack, that’s not . . .” I shake my head but don’t go on. My phone’s buzzing in my pocket, and when I slide it out I see MOM on the screen. Jack swears and drops his forehead against the window. “Your coach must’ve called them.” Jack doesn’t reply, and I answer the call.