Pretending to Dance

  “Come on, man!” Daddy shouted to him. “Show her what you’ve got!”

  To my absolute shock, Russell turned into a dancing machine, rocking his hips, punching the air with his arms, bopping his head. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard my father laugh so hard, while I gaped openmouthed at this new side of Russell.

  “Woo-hoo!” Stacy cheered, fists in the air.

  “Oh, good heavens,” Nanny said, turning away from them as though the very sight of Amalia and Russell dancing together offended her, which I supposed it did.

  “Mother.” Daddy was still laughing. “Get a grip.”

  Amalia finished the dance with Russell and curtsied to him as he left the dance floor. He was grinning when he walked back to us, and Amalia moved away from our side of the pavilion, most likely looking for her next partner.

  “High five!” Daddy said to Russell, who lifted my father’s arm so he could high-five him. Russell laughed as he took his seat next to me again, beads of sweat on his forehead.

  “That was awesome!” Stacy leaned past me to say to him, and he smiled at her. I had the feeling that, with those three words, she might have changed Russell’s negative feelings about her. I hoped so, anyway.

  * * *

  After a while, Nanny disappeared into the crowd of people and Russell and Daddy went to check out Uncle Jim’s beer tasting. I looked at Stacy. “Finally!” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We quickly left the pavilion, keeping the giant lights and speaker between us and the crowd as we jumped to the ground and made our way quickly to the woods. The music grew muffled behind us as we slipped between the trees. I led the way, grateful for the nearly full moon.

  “This is far enough, isn’t it?” Stacy asked after we’d gone a short distance. I remembered how nervous she’d been when we’d had to walk through the woods near the springhouse that night we slept out there.

  “A little farther,” I said. She would probably not be happy to discover where I was taking us.

  Soon, the woods opened up to a small rectangular clearing.

  “We’re here,” I said. “This is perfect.”

  “Where are we?” she asked. Then she seemed to catch on as the moonlight cast boxy shadows on the ground. “Oh no!” She took a step backward. “Is this the graveyard?”

  I laughed. “It’s a good place to sit,” I said, climbing over the low iron fence, which was nearly invisible in the darkness. I sat down on the ground, leaning against one of the three big double headstones. I wasn’t sure whose it was and didn’t really want to know. My grandpa Arnette was buried beneath one of them. His name was on one half of the headstone, while the other half remained blank, waiting for Nanny. That was a little creepy, and I hoped I wasn’t resting against their stone. I was acting much braver than I felt.

  Stacy reluctantly climbed over the fence and sat down next to me. “You know,” she said, “I really like your house and even your springhouse and your family and Russell and everything, but there’s still something spooky about Morrison Ridge.”

  “Well, let’s smoke your joint and then we won’t care,” I said.

  She reached into the side of her tank top and brought out the joint and the matches. She lit the joint and we both took a hit from it. I leaned my head back against the cool headstone and closed my eyes, waiting to feel something. I could hear the music from the party. I loved how it sounded from this distance, dampened by the woods. I loved how the rise and fall of the music played against the steady hum of voices and the occasional peal of laughter that bounced off the trees around us.

  Stacy suddenly let out a yelp and I opened my eyes to see her jump to her feet. Two figures had risen up from one of the other double headstones and were moving toward us. I tried to jump to my own feet, but I was so shocked I couldn’t move. Then I saw the white Mohawk catch the moonlight and let out my breath. Dani and her friend.

  “It’s only my cousin,” I said to Stacy, tugging the hem of her skirt as Dani’s pale face came into view.

  “Boo!” her weird friend said as they walked closer to us. In the darkness, they seemed to float.

  “You two going to share that joint with us?” Dani asked.

  “You scared the shit out of me!” Stacy said. She sat down next to me again and I felt the tremor in her body. I was shaking myself. I didn’t know if Dani would narc on us, but the fact that she wanted to share the joint seemed like a good sign.

  I took the joint from Stacy’s hand and held it out to my cousin. Dani took it from me, and then she and the boy with the Mohawk sat down across from us, their backs against another of the headstones.

  Dani took a long hit on the joint. “This is my cousin Molly and her friend,” she said to the boy, her voice straining as she tried to hold in the smoke. She looked at Stacy. “I don’t remember your name,” she said.

  “Stacy,” Stacy said.

  “And this is Ralph.” Dani nodded to the boy, who now had possession of the joint.

  Ralph? The name of Michael’s penis in Forever? I didn’t dare look at Stacy. I was sure we were both cracking up inside.

  “Hi,” I managed to say. Ralph said nothing, but he leaned forward to hand the joint to me and I took another hit and passed it to Stacy. I was beginning to feel it now. My arm seemed to belong to someone else when Stacy took the joint from me.

  “You two shouldn’t be doing this.” Dani motioned to the joint. “You’re only what? Twelve now?”

  “Fourteen,” I said. She knew perfectly well how old I was. She was just trying to put me down in front of her boyfriend or whatever he was. She acted like your personal bodyguard, Chris had said about Dani. Why was she such a bitch to me, then? She was probably still angry with me for hitting her. I thought I could still see the shadow of a bruise on her cheek, but it may have been the way the moonlight fell on her face.

  “Do you go to Owen High?” Stacy asked Ralph.

  His slit-eyed nod was barely perceptible and I had the feeling our joint was not the first he’d smoked that night.

  “Do you know Bryan Watkins?” Stacy asked.

  Ralph nodded. “Asshole,” he said, and Stacy wrinkled her nose at him.

  “Like you would have a clue,” she said.

  “He probably has more of a clue than you ever will,” Dani said snottily.

  I wanted to put an end to this stupid conversation, afraid it was about to escalate, but before I could think of something to say, the steady hum of sound coming from the party suddenly ceased as though someone had flipped a switch. We all turned our heads in the direction of the pavilion. We couldn’t hear a thing.

  “What’s going on?” Stacy asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe someone’s going to make a speech or something?”

  We heard a sudden shout. I couldn’t tell if it had come from a man or a woman, but I was certain there was alarm in the sound.

  “Something weird is happening,” I said, getting to my feet. I stepped over the fence and headed through the woods in the direction of the pavilion. I could hear a couple of male voices now, loud and angry. I picked up my speed and heard Stacy close behind me, probably not wanting to lose sight of me in the dark woods. I thought Dani was behind me as well, though I didn’t turn to see.

  When I broke free of the woods, I saw the pavilion illuminated by the four floodlights, the partygoers frozen in a sea of color. There was no music. No dancing. Just those angry voices. Most of the people stood clotted together on one side of the platform and soon I was close enough to see what they were looking at: my father and Uncle Trevor in the middle of an argument at one side of the platform.

  “… sick of talking about this!” my father shouted when I reached the corner of the pavilion. “Leave it alone, will you? No one’s selling any land to you, and if you—”

  “So now you speak for everybody?” Uncle Trevor towered over my father. His face was bright red, and in the overhead lights I saw spit fly from his mouth when he shouted. “No one else
gets an opinion? You always have to have your own fucking way!”

  I stood there frozen. One of the big speakers and the base of a floodlight were between my father and me, but I could see him perfectly. He sat immobilized while Uncle Trevor bobbed and weaved around him like a boxer, moving in and out of my vision. My heart ached at how skinny and frail Daddy looked in his chair.

  “You think I give a shit about the goddamned ‘family land’?” Uncle Trevor made quote marks with his fingers around the words. “This so-called family’s dwindling to nothing, anyhow. There’s nobody left to carry on with the Ridge, anyway.”

  I hoped Nanny wasn’t close enough to hear him talk about Morrison Ridge that way. I searched the people circled around Uncle Trevor and Daddy, but didn’t see her.

  Aunt Toni suddenly shot out of the crowd, trying to grab Uncle Trevor’s shoulder. She said something I couldn’t hear, and I gasped when he pushed her roughly away, nearly knocking her over. She let out a yelp and someone yanked her back into the press of people.

  “Damn it, Trevor!” my father was shouting. It was his furious voice, the voice I so rarely heard, and yet it was no match for Uncle Trevor’s threatening physical presence. I gripped the corner of the pavilion, frightened. “Go home and sober up!” Daddy shouted.

  Stacy was suddenly next to me, her hands circling my arm so hard they hurt. “He’s totally drunk,” she said, and I felt her shudder. “God,” she added, “he reminds me of my fa—”

  “I’m developing my land no matter what the rest of you assholes choose to do!” Trevor barked at my father.

  “Only if you’re a selfish son of a bitch,” Daddy shouted. “Don’t you care that you’ll break your mother’s—”

  “You call me selfish?” Trevor took a step toward him and I could swear I felt the whole pavilion tremble beneath my fingers where they rested on the wood. “I’ve never known anyone as selfish as—”

  “Shut up!” Daddy yelled. “Just cool it, will you? You’re too drunk to talk rationally. And you’re wrecking the—”

  “And you’re always the rational one, right?” Spit flew out of Uncle Trevor’s mouth. “The fucking golden boy. Off to college while I bust my back helping Daddy and you get your string of degrees. You were so special, weren’t you?”

  Daddy went quiet, but only for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was very calm. “There’s still a hurt little kid inside you, Trev,” he said.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Uncle Trevor took another menacing step toward my father and my whole body tensed. The older man Amalia had been dancing with—the doctor?—suddenly grabbed my uncle’s arm, holding him back. “I don’t need you psychoanalyzing me!” Uncle Trevor shouted at Daddy.

  “You’re forty-six years old,” my father said. “It’s time you let go of your adolescent grudges and grew up.”

  Uncle Trevor seemed to run out of words. He pulled out of the man’s grasp, his eyes wide with fury, and I could tell he was about to explode.

  “Uncle Trevor!” I called, hoping to get his attention on me and off my father, but I didn’t think he even heard me. He grabbed the armrests of Daddy’s wheelchair and gave it a forceful shove, all of his weight and bulk behind it. In the darkness, maybe he couldn’t tell how close the chair was to the edge of the pavilion, but from my vantage point, I saw the catastrophe about to unfold in front of me.

  “Stop!” I shouted, waving my arms helplessly in the air. “No!”

  “Uncle Graham!” Dani screamed as she ran past me, reaching her arms out in front of her as though she could somehow prevent the chair from tumbling off the pavilion, but Uncle Trevor had pushed it with so much force that the chair shot off the platform like a bullet. It seemed to be suspended in midair for a split second before tipping backward and landing on the ground with a terrible thud.

  I screamed, standing there in horror, unable to make my legs move until Stacy grabbed my arm and propelled me forward.

  Dani reached my father first. “Uncle Graham!” she cried, dropping to the ground next to him. “Oh my God!”

  I reached the chair and saw that Daddy had spilled out of it and lay a couple of feet away on the ground. Horrified, I knelt down on the opposite side of him from Dani.

  It was too dark to clearly see his face, but I thought he was looking up at me. “I think I’m all right,” he said, his voice a whisper. Hearing him speak reassured me. Someone on the pavilion yelled to call an ambulance and I looked up to see Uncle Trevor backing away from the edge of the platform, hands over his face, as if afraid to see any damage he’d caused. “I’m sorry!” he shouted. “Fuck. I’m sorry!”

  Aunt Toni suddenly appeared in front of him and she smacked him across the face like she was trying to snap him back to reality. “Go home, you big bully!” she shouted, but he stood there crying into his hands like an overgrown little boy. I turned away from him, my attention back on my father—and on Dani, who had gently lifted his head to her lap. Someone had turned one of the floodlights so it illuminated Daddy and the rest of us on the ground. I saw Stacy sitting with her back against the pavilion, her hands at the sides of her head as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. And I saw that Dani’s thick black eyeliner and mascara was smeared, the skin wet around her eyes. Ralph had disappeared, but Dani didn’t seem to care. This is my real cousin, I thought. Beneath the hard edges, beneath the bitchiness, she’s a good person.

  I was aware of the hushed crowd above us on the pavilion, but not who was in it. All I knew was that there were women with hands to their mouths and men unsure what to do to help. My mother pushed through the clot of people and jumped to the ground next to me, dropping quickly to her knees at my father’s side. His head still rested in Dani’s lap.

  “Oh, Graham,” my mother said, almost in a whisper. She smoothed a hand over his hair and leaned over to press her lips to his forehead. “Where are you hurt?” I knew she had to see what I was seeing: tears welling up in Daddy’s eyes. I’d never seen him cry.

  “I don’t want that ambulance,” Daddy said quietly to her. “Just get me up.”

  “All right.” She turned to look above us at the crowd. “Where’s Russell?” she called to no one in particular.

  “I’ll look for him!” Stacy got to her feet and climbed onto the pavilion, disappearing into the crowd.

  “I can help get him up,” Dani said.

  “Me, too,” I said, though I knew how hard it was to move my father’s body even an inch, much less back into his chair.

  Amalia suddenly appeared next to me, as if she’d materialized out of thin air. She bent down to touch Daddy’s shoulder, her hair brushing my cheek as it fell forward, and my mother suddenly snapped at her.

  “I’ve got him, Amalia!” she said.

  Amalia’s eyes widened in surprise, but then she nodded. “I’ll help find Russell,” she said, backing away, and I watched her disappear into the darkness as quickly as she’d appeared.

  Peter walked around the corner of the pavilion. “How can I help?” he asked my mother.

  She looked behind me, and I knew she was searching for Russell. “We can’t do it without—”

  “I’m here!” Russell appeared on the pavilion above us.

  “Thank God,” Mom said under her breath.

  In a moment, Russell was on the ground with us. He knelt next to Dani, attempting to check the back of Daddy’s head with a small flashlight. “Good thing we changed out that head support on your chair,” he said quietly to my father. “The old one could have snapped your neck.”

  No one said anything and I guessed we were all thinking the same thing: Daddy was already essentially paralyzed from the neck down. How could it have been any worse?

  “Any pain, Graham?” Russell asked him.

  “I’m fine,” Daddy insisted. “Just get me up, Russ, all right?”

  Russell looked at my mother. “I’ll move him back into the chair,” he said. “Then I’ll need some help to lift the chair upright.”

/>   “No ambulance.” Daddy said again. “The last thing I want is a damn hospital.”

  Russell looked at someone above us on the pavilion—I couldn’t see who. “Stop the ambulance!” he shouted.

  “Are you sure?” my mother asked Daddy, worry in her voice.

  “Yes, I’m sure.” He sounded impatient and I knew he wanted this whole ordeal over with.

  We all drew back a little, letting Russell and Peter move Daddy’s legs and arms and body into the toppled chair, while Dani still cradled his head carefully—almost expertly, as though she worked every day with disabled people.

  “Molly and Nora,” Russell said, “stand up and stay right in front of him so he doesn’t fall out of the chair when Peter and I set it upright.”

  I stood up and was instantly hit by that spacey feeling from the marijuana. I wished I hadn’t smoked it now. I braced myself, my feet wide apart, hands forward, ready to help. I watched Russell and Peter lift the chair and my father into an upright position. They seemed to be moving in slow motion. Mom leaned forward to hold on to Daddy’s shoulders, and I placed my hands against his chest in case he slid forward. His ribs felt like twigs beneath my palms. His head was close to mine and only then did I realize I was sobbing.

  “I’m fine, Moll,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “Utterly humiliated, but that’s the worst of it.”

  I couldn’t speak. I wished I could hug him right then. What must it have felt like to fall backward off the pavilion? My stomach lurched thinking about it. I could imagine the fear. I thought of how I’d been trying to make him happy these past few weeks. I’d tried to make his life fun and worth living. I felt as though all that effort had been snuffed out in one single second.

  Russell bent over to speak in my father’s ear. “Carry you home?” he asked.

  “And miss the fireworks?” Daddy asked. “No way.”