Pretending to Dance

“It’s called Flowers in the Attic,” I said.

  “Ah, yes.” He smiled. “V. C. Andrews. The Dollanganger family, right?”

  My father always seemed to know something about everything. It could get annoying. “You’ve read it?” I asked.

  “No, but so many of the kids I work with have read it that I feel like I have,” he said. “The siblings are trapped in the attic, right? A metaphor for being trapped in adolescence?”

  “You really know how to ruin a good story,” I said.

  “It’s a gift.” He smiled modestly. “So, are you enjoying the book?”

  “I was. Not so sure now that I have to think about the metaphor and all that.”

  “Sorry, darling.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t call me “darling” in front of Stacy when she came over later that afternoon. I didn’t know Stacy very well, but she was the only one of my friends around for the summer, so when my mother suggested I invite someone to sleep over, I thought of her. She loved the New Kids on the Block and she promised to bring her Teen Beat and Sassy magazines, so we’d have plenty to talk about.

  As if reading my mind, Daddy nodded toward one of the three New Kids on the Block posters I’d taped to the fieldstone walls. I’d moved them from my bedroom to the springhouse for the summer. “Play me some of their music,” he said.

  I stood up and walked over to the cassette player, which was on the floor under the sink. There were not many places to put things in the small cramped springhouse. Step by Step was already loaded in the player. I hit the power switch and music filled the little building. The springhouse had electricity provided by a generator along with a microwave and running water diverted from the nearby spring. Daddy and Uncle Trevor had fixed the place up for me when I was six years old. Daddy must have still been able to walk a bit then, but I could barely remember him without the wheelchair. I’d gone through summers of tea parties in the tiny stone building and I’d spent the night out here a few times with one of my parents sleeping in the second twin bed. Then I spent a couple of recent summers fascinated with the insect and plant life that filled Morrison Ridge’s thick green woods. My microscope still sat on the ledge beneath one of the springhouse’s two windows, but I hadn’t touched it yet this summer and probably wouldn’t. Now I was into dancing and music and fantasizing about the boys who made it. Oh, and Johnny Depp. I’d lie awake at night, trying to come up with a way to meet him. In that fantasy I wore contacts instead of glasses and somehow miraculously had great hair instead of my shoulder-length flyaway brown frizz. And I had actual breasts. Right now, I barely filled out the AA cups on my bra. We would fall in love and get married and have a family. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make that happen, but it was my favorite thing to think about.

  “It’s warm in here, don’t you think?” Daddy said. He couldn’t stand being hot—it made him feel very weak—and he was right about the heat. Despite the fact that we lived in the mountains and the stone walls of the springhouse were twelve inches thick, it was toasty in here today. “Why don’t you open the windows?” he said.

  “They’re stuck.”

  He looked at the window closest to the sink as though he could open it with his eyes. “Shall I tell you how to unstick them?”

  “Okay.” I stood up and crossed the small space until I was in front of the window. I stood there bouncing a little in time with the music, waiting for him to tell me what to do. I was always dancing these days, even while I brushed my teeth.

  “Now, right where the lower pane meets the upper pane, pound your fist.” Daddy didn’t lift his hands to demonstrate the way someone else might. Two years ago he might have been able to lift them, at least a little. Now his hands rested uselessly on the arms of his wheelchair. His right hand curled up on itself in a way that I knew irritated him.

  “Here?” I pointed to a spot on the window frame.

  “That’s right. Give it a good whack on both sides.”

  It took a couple of tries, but the window finally gave way and I raised it. I could hear the rippling sound of the nearby spring, but as soon as I walked to the window on the other side of the springhouse, the sound was overwhelmed by the New Kids singing “Tonight.” I used the same technique to open the second window, and a forest-scented breeze slipped across the room.

  Daddy smiled as I sat down again. My mother said his smile was “infectious,” and she was right. I smiled back at him.

  “Much better,” he said. “Even when I was a kid, those windows would stick.”

  I held his lemonade glass close to his lips and he took a sip through the straw. “I love thinking about how the spring ran though this little house back then,” I said. I’d seen old pictures of the building. A gutter filled with springwater ran along one interior wall and, in the old days, my Morrison Ridge ancestors would keep their milk and cheese and other perishable food cool in the water.

  “Well, my father changed that early on when he added the windows. Your uncle Trevor and I helped him, or as much help as we could give him. We were really small. Once it dried out in here, we had sleepovers nearly every weekend in the summer.”

  “You and Uncle Trevor?”

  “And your aunt Claudia and our friends—with one of our parents, of course—until we got old enough that the boys didn’t want to hang out with the girls and vice versa. Later Trevor and I would stay out here alone. There were no beds in here then, but we’d sleep in our sleeping bags. We’d build a fire outside—we had no microwave, of course. No electricity, for that matter.” He looked into the distance, seeing something in his memory that I couldn’t see. “It was great fun,” he said. Then he glanced at the wall above one of the twin beds, to the left of the Johnny Depp posters. “So, what do you keep in the secret rock these days?” he asked. When they were boys, he and Uncle Trevor had chipped one of the stones from the wall to create a small hollow, covering it over with a lightweight plaster cast of a stone. You’d never know the hollow was there unless someone told you. I kept some shells and two small shark teeth in there from one of our trips to the beach, along with a pack of cigarettes my cousin Dani had left on our porch the year before. I didn’t know why I was holding on to them. They’d seemed like something exciting to hide at the time. Now they seemed stupid. I also had a blue glass bird my mother had given me for my fifth birthday in the secret rock, along with a corsage—all dried out, now—that Daddy’d given me before my cousin Samantha’s wedding. And I kept my amethyst palm stone up there. Daddy had given the stone to me when I was five and afraid to get on the school bus. He’d presented it to me in a velvet-lined jewelry box and I didn’t take it out of my pocket for a full year. He told me the story of the stone, how the amethyst had been found on Morrison Ridge land in 1850 when they broke ground for the main house where my grandmother now lived. How it had been carved and smoothed into the palm stone with a gentle indentation for the thumb, then passed down through the generations. How his own father had given it to him, and how it helped him when he was afraid as a child. He’d never believed that the amethyst had actually been found on our land, but he’d treasured the stone anyway and he seemed to believe in its calming powers.

  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 hi
s 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 forgott
en 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.