Faithful Unto Death (20 page)

But when I first saw her, I thought it was Jo. I really, really did. My head knew my daughter was back in her room, that short of transporting, she could not have gotten to this spot before me. But for a fraction of a second, I saw the girl and thought,
Jo
.

And I’ve known Jo for all her life. And I was seeing this girl standing on a rise, bathed in the streetlight, not in the dark hollow of the cart tunnel. And I was not a lovesick adolescent seeing my dad with someone other than my mother.

A starburst of relief went off in my chest. That’s when I knew that, for all my self-assurances, I’d been very much afraid Alex truly had seen my Jo with his father. But it wasn’t Jo he’d seen. It really wasn’t.

The name “Jessica Min” floated up and I started to move forward, and that’s when the girl turned and looked over her shoulder and I saw her face.

A fresh startle. A new relief.

Thank you, God.

Because the tear-soaked face I was looking upon was not a girl’s, not a teenager’s, not, I thought, even a young woman’s. This was a mature woman. A trim, slim, adult Asian woman. I couldn’t be sure at this distance, but I would guess she was over forty.

If this woman was who Alex had seen late Sunday night—and I had been fooled myself for a second—then Graham Garcia was not a pedophile, and his son was not going to have to carry that dark secret in his heart for the rest of his life.

I’m not saying that cheating on your wife is ever okay, but whoa, it is surely better to cheat on her with a woman than a child. If this was the woman with Graham that night. If.

She looked up at me so I dropped my hands to my knees in the “winded but recovering” pose. By the time I’d straightened, she was crossing the golf course, not making any attempt to stay on the path, a golf course no-no. I started jogging slowly forward, keeping my eyes on her back. I marked the spot where she went through a cast-iron gate that opened onto the golf course. I heard the soft “clash” as the gate swung closed behind her. I counted the houses. The sixth house from the corner. She hadn’t taken the sidewalk around to a parked car. She had gone through a backyard gate without any hesitation.

She had gone home.

Twenty-five

From:
Merrie Wells

To:
Walker Wells

Subject:
Re:
Jo

Dad, I did. Yes. You need to talk to Jo. No, you need to let Jo talk to you. And try to chill.

Twenty-six

F
riday morning I woke so buoyant I needed a tether to keep my feet on the ground. Annie Laurie was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and so, wonder of wonders, was Jo. Sitting, that is. No coffee for Jo. She sat with her feet on the rung of the chair, her fingers laced through the mane on Baby Bear’s scruff. Annie and Jo and Baby Bear, expectant looks on all faces, smooth and furry, were angled away from the table so they could watch my entrance and I knew something was up. Yeah, nearly psychic.

“You having breakfast, Jo?” There wasn’t anything consumable in front of her. Jo never ate breakfast.

Jo had her hair tied back and wore her every-day-but-Sunday uniform of too-tight jeans, too-tight tee, and heavy black Doc Martens.

Annie Laurie gave Jo’s arm a push.

Jo said, “Remember last night I said I needed to talk to you?”

“No,” I said. “Mainly I remember that you didn’t want to talk to me last night. There was lots of not talking last night.” I walked over to the coffeemaker and sniffed to see how fresh it was.

Jo looked at her mom.

Annie said, “Get some coffee, Bear. There’s something Jo wants to tell you.”

Just like that, my heart went from helium to lead and sank down to somewhere in my left heel.

I’m thinking,
Oh God, pleeease don’t let her be pregnant, pleeease
.

I got my coffee in my bathtub-sized mug that nobody else is supposed to use even though I still sometimes see it on the floor, half-filled with Rice Krispies or Frosted Flakes for Baby Bear.

“Aren’t you due at school in, what? Ten minutes?” I said.
I did not want to have this conversation. Two percent milk, three sugars, a teaspoon for stirring, skip the toast,
please, please don’t let my little girl be pregnant
. I sat down at the table, not looking anyone in the eye, and stirred my coffee overvigorously.

Jo’s eyes were glistening with tears. She rubbed at Baby Bear’s neck until he shook her hands off. Her hands were trembling. She had to be pregnant.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart . . .

“Daddy . . .”

Oh, I was dead. I was so dead. Jo never ever calls me “Daddy.” She hasn’t since she turned ten.

“Last Saturday Alex took me downtown—”

Oh, pleeease God, not an abortion. Oh, please, oh please . . .

“—to the Ben Stevenson— ”

I’m going to kill the doctor who . . .

“—Academy, to audition for the American School of Ballet for—”

Half my coffee sloshed onto the table. I stood. Coffee stains khaki. Annie Laurie leaned over and grabbed a stack of paper napkins to catch the spill before it rolled off onto the floor.

Annie said, “Bear?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said and now my own hands were shaking. I sat down and Baby Bear laid his head on my shoe. Tethering me.

“—their summer program, and Tuesday I got a call, and Daddy, I’m in!”

So what were the serious faces for? It still wasn’t clear what was so great about yet another ballet class, but no pregnancy, no abortion, no Graham Garcia. Jubilation! Thank you, God.

I got out of my chair and gave Jo a hug. Her shoulders felt like bird bones.

“That’s great, Jo, that’s terrific.” I gave her another big hug and put her back on her feet. My heart was sick with relief. All this adrenaline up and downing couldn’t be good for my system.

Annie didn’t seem to be joining in the celebratory mood.

She dropped the sodden napkins in the trash in an emphatic sort of way and stood next to my chair.

“Bear, what do you know about the American School of Ballet?” Annie asked. She put her hand on my shoulder. That meant something. I don’t know what it meant, but something.

I said, “It’s downtown? Ben Stevenson runs it?”

Jo said, “Dad!”

“It is downtown, Bear,” Annie said, giving my shoulder a final squeeze. She sat down again and looked like she had a headache. “In downtown Manhattan.”

Jo said, “Daddy! It’s only the very best in the world, Daddy, and
I
got in, and almost nobody gets in and they have dorms and everything and it’s chaperoned and all and there will be girls from Russia there, Dad, girls from all the world over because this is the best in the world, and
I
got in and—”

“And it’s six thousand dollars for five weeks. If you include the airfare.” Annie said this with her face in her coffee mug.

I drank some of the coffee still left in my cup.

Jo was up, Doc Martens planted, ready to do battle. She said, “Grandmother says she’ll pay half, and Nana says she and Poppy will pay for the airline ticket, so it would only cost, maybe, twenty-six hundred, and I have almost three hundred in my bank account.”

“Wait a minute, you told Nana and Poppy before you told me? You told Grandmother?” I turned on Annie Laurie. “When did you find out?”

“Half an hour ago.”

I sat there. Now I understood why Jo’s hands were trembling. I was grateful that she wasn’t pregnant, but six thousand dollars for summer camp?

“Jo, before we go any further,” I said, “Nana and Poppy aren’t paying for any plane ticket. And we are not going to allow Grandmother and Grandpa to shell out three thousand dollars, either. And if I ever find out that you’ve asked your grandparents for money again, you’re looking at serious trouble.”

That was a rebuke. Jo took it like a benediction.

“Oh, Daddy! Then you’ll pay for it?”

Great.

I said, “Jo, this isn’t a two-minute decision. When do you have to let them know?”

“Today! I have to let them know by four o’clock today!”

“Jo, why did you wait so late to tell us?”

“I tried to tell you Tuesday night after youth group, but you got all over me about why I left the house, and then I tried to tell you Wednesday night, but you got all over me about seeing Alex, and then last night over noodles, I brought my progress report so you could see how good I’m doing and then I was going to tell you and all you could say was”—and here she did her “Bear” imitation, hands on her hips, her head thrown back, her voice a cartoon villain’s—“‘Josephine, why can’t you be just like Merrie? Josephine, why don’t you take calculus so no one will think you’re retarded?’”

Annie looked up at me.

“I did not call her retarded. And I don’t sound like that,” I said. “The thing is, Jo, six thousand dollars! Baby, that’s a lot of money . . .”

She came back like a whippet.

“How much did you spend on Merrie this year?”

“Merrie’s in college; that money comes out of her college fund. You have a college fund, too, and—”

“Then take the six thousand dollars out of my college fund!” She threw her hands up. Funny how I could be so simpleminded when the solution was perfectly clear. All she wanted me to do was rob her college fund for a fancy-pants dance camp.

“A little help?” I looked at Annie Laurie, but she decided that now was the time to get more coffee.

I tried to get things a little calmer.

“Jo, I can’t take the money out of your college fund. If I do, it won’t be there for college.”

Her hands went to her hair and she gripped it at the roots.

“Oh, Daddy, I’m not going to college! I am not going to college! I’m going to the American School of Ballet Summer Program, and they’re going to see how good I am, and at the end of the five weeks they’re going to invite me to stay on for their winter term. The website says a ‘select few’ will be invited to stay on for the winter term. And almost every single dancer in the New York City Ballet is drawn from the American School of Ballet! So that’s what I’ll be doing instead of college!”

My poor baby girl.

I said, as gently as I could, “And what if you aren’t among the ‘select few’ who are invited to stay for the winter term?”

“I will be! Oh, Daddy, please, please, Daddy, it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted and this is my only chance ever.”

And she was in my arms, crying her heart into shreds, her tears dripping down the back of my shirt. I smoothed her hair out of her face and rocked her in my lap.

There was no way this was a good investment. The way to be successful was to study hard and work hard and get as much education as you could, at least up to a point. Jo was nowhere near that point, and I didn’t have six thousand dollars to throw after a dream that didn’t have a chance and probably wasn’t worth pursuing.

I looked down at my child’s raven hair, the nape of her white neck showing through the dark.

“Jo, Jo, we’ll work it out, Jo. I promise.”

The face Jo lifted to mine was worth the six thousand dollars.

This is what we decided. I would send my fourteen-year-old daughter to the American School of Ballet this summer. In New York. City. Four thousand dollars of the expense would come from her college fund. I would pay two thousand—that’s how much we’d paid to send Merrie on that Summer-in-Europe program she’d done at nearly the same age as Jo.

If Jo didn’t get invited to stay on for the winter term, she would buckle down to her academics and plan on going to college. Because her college fund would be reduced, she might be looking at a year or two of junior college.

Does this sound harsh? Let me tell you something. Do you know how many ballet dancers can support themselves on what they make dancing? Four. Okay, not four, but not many. I looked it up.

If you go all the way through the American School of Ballet, that’s a twenty-thousand-dollars-a-year proposition if you need the room and board program. Then, if you are accepted into the New York City Ballet Corps de Ballet (those are what I would call the “chorus”—the background dancers), then maybe, only maybe, you can afford to live in a tiny walk-up studio, about the size of my bedroom and bathroom put together, if you waitress on the side, too. You’d probably have to get a roommate.

And you can do that maybe,
maybe
ten years. If. If you’re incredibly lucky and you don’t come down on your ankle wrong and sustain a career-ending injury. If your tendons don’t wear out. If you don’t need to eat on a fairly regular basis.

Being a professional ballet dancer is not a career; it’s a vocation. You’re going to spend your heart, soul, and body down to the last penny, and have nothing to show for it except memories and bad feet. It’s like deciding to be a nun, only the retirement program isn’t as good and the clothes don’t keep you as warm.

That’s not the life I want for one of my girls.

Annie Laurie and I agreed that she would call her parents and I would call mine to undo the financial tangle. There is never a good time to call my mother, so as soon as I got into the office, I decided to go ahead and eat the frog and get it over with.

It went like this:

“Hey, Mom, it’s Bear.”

“Yes, I know it is. What’s the problem?”

Once a week I call my mother, and there is almost never a problem. Maybe three times ever, and two of those times I was in high school, and one of those times it wasn’t me driving and I’d only had one, maybe two, beers. But every time I call her, it’s “What’s the problem?”

“Uh, there’s no problem, Mom, only I understand Jo asked you for some money and I—”

There was a tongue-clicking sound that means disapproval even in Namibia.

“She did not ask me for money,” Mom said.

“Yeah? Well, Jo said—” I didn’t get to finish my sentence.

“When I heard she had this incredible opportunity to hone her God-given talents, I offered her the money. I consider it an investment.”

“Mom, it’s only an investment if you get a return on your money; you don’t get a return on a ballet dancer because they don’t make any money.”

“Bear,
you
invest for money.
I
invest for the future.”

What that means I don’t have any clue. What I do know is that my mom was staking her claim to a higher moral ground than she thought I had my marker on.

“Right. Well, in any case, please don’t do it again. It encouraged Jo to call her grandmother Gaither and ask her for money, too, and—” She cut me off again.

“She most certainly did not. Naturally, when I heard that Jo had been accepted into the most prestigious ballet program in the country, in the
world
, I knew Gaither would want to help her out—”