Finding Center (17 page)

Aly

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Talking to my father.”

“What specifically are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.”

“His disapproval, perhaps.”

“What about his disapproval upsets you?”

“I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Tell me more about that.”

“I can put a lot of things in boxes in my head, you know. Like, if I get a correction in class, I know what to do with it. I make the correction, and then I put the fault in a box.”

“What’s the label on that box?”

“Mistakes.”

“And when your father disapproves of you, why don’t you think you can put it in a box?”

“Because his disapproval is hard to contain. It’s about a lot of things. It’s about the fact that I couldn’t be that person for him and my mother, the one that kept them together. It’s about my being a dancer. It’s about me being sick. It’s about me with Zed.”

“He doesn’t like Zed?”

“He’s never specifically approved of Zed, and he doesn’t include Zed in his invitations.”

“Invitations that you turn down.”

“Yeah.”

“So you think he’ll disapprove of you and Zed having a child together?”

“Pregnancy. Out of wedlock.
Second
accidental, unplanned pregnancy. He took the miscarriage hard but we’ve never talked about it. Me with an uncertain job future.”

“You know you’ll come back after this, right?”

“I do but he’s always telling me I should take night classes in case my career suddenly ends.”

“So you hear all of that and what do you do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You put these other things in the boxes to avoid internalizing it. There must be something you do with your father’s words.”

“I think I eat them. That sounds so weird.”

“Not to me.”

“You’re a therapist. Nothing I say ever sounds weird to you.”

“No, sometimes you say dance words and those sounds weird.”

“Careful, Ham, you might be straying into funny territory.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that. So you eat your father’s words. Do you purge them?”

“I used to. I’ve avoided talking to him lately.”

“You’ve restricted.”

“This metaphor’s freaking me out.”

“It’s apt, and I think you knew that when you came up with it. So you’ve restricted and you’re afraid you’re literally going to cause a binge of disapproval. I’d like you to not eat his words at all, you know.”

“Impossible.”

“Hardly.”

“Liar.”

“Have I ever?”

“No.”

“Alyona, whatever your father says to you, those are his opinions, and they are not facts. They’ve never been facts and they’ll never be facts. They’re just things that a man is saying out of his own worldview because he is concerned for someone he loves dearly. That doesn’t make whatever he says right when it hurts, but it means that you get to discard his worldview the same way you disregard Zed’s parents’ worldviews.”

“I don’t disregard them. I understand them. I just don’t follow them.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s not the same.”

“But it is.”

“It can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“He’s my father. What he says matters.”

“I didn’t say it didn’t matter. I just mean you get to cherry-pick what you want to hear, not just what you think you hear, and what hurts the most. I want you, not your tendencies toward masochism or your eating disorder, to pick what works for you and doesn’t work for you.”

“I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“I believe it is. And I believe that you can do it.”

“I don’t want him to come though. I’ve been having a run of good days. I feel like there’s a tipping point. Even when I’m not pregnant I don’t have this many good days one after another.”

“You have all the coping skills you need to get through his visit. And if you have bad days, we can handle those. We’re good at that. Zed is good at it. You are good at it.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise you.”

Zed

I’ll be late to play practice. Again.

Thankfully it’s just the chorus today, learning new choreography. They’re less uptight than the main cast. Hopefully they’ll forgive me while I try to
find
the damn choreography sheets. My office has looked like a bomb went off in it these past few weeks. As Dan dryly said, it’s not like my head’s been in this particular game lately. I used to be so good at compartmentalizing my life. But lately, I’m carrying everything with me everywhere. I bring Aly and
Rubies
to school, school and Aly and
Rubies
to play practice, play practice and school to Aly and
Rubies
.

“Hi,” comes a surprising voice from my doorway. And some things appear unexpectedly. I jerk my head up from where I’m shuffling papers at my desk and stare at Aly. She’s gorgeous like this, her face a little softer in the past week or two, her pale blue shirt stretched over her baby bump, meeting skinny jeans that prove she’s maintaining her dancer physique against all odds. She brushes her hair behind her ear and I clear my throat, caught checking out my own pregnant girlfriend.

“Hi. Wasn’t expecting you until later at DBC,” I say, finding the bright red choreography folder. “Everything okay? How was your session?”

“Alright,” she says, tilting her head to the side and watching me move toward her. Her eyes flutter closed as I slide an arm around her waist, hand splayed on her lower back, and kiss her forehead. She feels warm and small, her hands coming up between us to touch my chest. “Do you mind? If I watch?”

Any other day, I’d tease her about those words.
You like to watch.
Any other day, I might have told her to hang out in my office or my classroom, that the kids didn’t need the added pressure at this stage of someone else in the room. They were still nailing the choreography and some of them hadn’t ever been in front of an audience. If I made them nervous, Aly would make them pee their pants. Any other day, I might have summoned the courage to say “no” to a woman I almost never denied.

But there was something fragile about her right then in the doorway to my office, something very tentative and unsure, the way she kept her hands between us instead of stepping into my embrace, her eyes skipping past mine to look at the art on the walls.

“I don’t mind,” I tell her cheerfully. “Nothing like having someone who can actually dance the choreography dropping by on the day when you’re teaching choreography.”

“Been forever since I’ve been in here,” she says, following me inside the auditorium to the stage. “And you could dance it.”

“Showing up early and picking fights,” I say lightly, my heart tightening with tension and frustration. “Sure everything’s okay?”

Her steps slow and then I feel her fingers grazing my arm, sliding down my wrist to my palm. I can’t stop the shiver as she laces her fingers with mine. I squeeze her hand and she squeezes it back. She turns her face, nose brushing against my bicep and then I feel her mouth press against my arm at the hem of my T-shirt. We remain in the shadows of the balcony, before the lights stretch long shadows in front of us, the stage lit up and full of teenagers goofing off and flirting, trading secrets and bad pickup lines. I want to slide underneath her skin, peel back the layers of her discontent and wariness, uncover her reasons. But we’re at school, so I’m still at work, and her mouth against my arm feels like an apology rather than a request.

“I’m tired. Therapy was hard today,” she admits, and has the audacity to sound guilty. I squeeze her hand as she adds, “And I wanted to see you. I’ll just sit quietly, I promise. I didn’t want to be alone.”

Now I turn to study her in the dark. “Okay. It won’t be too long, I promise.”

She nods and we step out from the safety of the dark, untwining our hands and walking down the slight slope toward the stage. I cup my hands around my mouth, red folder flapping against my head, and shout at the top of my lungs, “If you have gum, spit it out. If you have a hoodie on, please consult your Theater Club dress code. If you know where you’re supposed to be standing, get to that spot. You have fifteen seconds.”

Aly’s laughing softly as she splits off from me and finds a seat in the front row, pulling up her legs and tucking them beneath her. I wink at her as I pass, making my way up the stage stairs carefully.

We rehearse the steps of the fox-trot for almost thirty minutes before I break them into small groups to practice. I pace between them, correcting posture and steps, making sure the guys are leading—which they are almost never because when it comes to confidence in dance, the girls are always yards ahead of the guys—when one of the kids says he doesn’t understand what I mean by
leading
.

There’s no chance in hell I put a hand on a student to demonstrate this, so after trying to explain posture, steps, pacing and timing to a couple of worn-out students, I take a deep breath.
She won’t say no.
It’s just you.
When I turn around, Aly’s still comfortably cross-legged, but she looks like she’s anticipated my request, leaning forward and beginning to untangle her legs before I even get the whole line out.

“Want to help me demonstrate?” She’s nodding by the time I get to the question mark and makes her way onstage. As she makes her way up the steps, Emily, one of the students who worked with Aly last year and danced at District Ballet’s summer intensive lets out an insanely high-pitched squeal.

“Oh my God!” Emily just points at Aly’s stomach.

Aly hasn’t been here since she started showing. I had forgotten about that tiny minor detail, where my kids didn’t know she’s pregnant, but Aly hadn’t. She laughs a little as the kids swamp her and shoots me a look over their heads. I shrug at her, trying not to smile. She doesn’t need rescuing, not from my theater kids.

“When are you due?” Emily demands, and then she spins. “Wait! Mr. Harrow. Is this
your
kid?”

I snort. “Definitely my kid. Kicks harder with its right foot.”

Aly shakes her head at me, barely holding back a smile and I mentally high-five myself for pulling that out of her tonight. She makes her way through the sea of kids, answering questions as she goes. When she reaches me, I hold up my hand and she slides hers into it comfortably, stepping close to me so my other hand can settle at the small of her back. It’s hard to maintain eye contact with her this close and still lead. She’s intoxicating that way.

I clear my throat and narrate the steps, counting them off, showing how it’s my force and power that turn Aly into the first steps, and then out of the next turn, my hand leading her, even though she knows the steps. Both Aly and I have to consciously be less nuanced and a little more dramatic, but by the third or fourth turn, the kids all have that light in their eyes where they get it. They reach for their partners and begin to practice, so I stop dancing.

Aly leans against me a little and I sling an arm around her, knowing I probably shouldn’t but I want her here, tucked against me. She feels a little less anxious and wound up than she did walking into the auditorium, so maybe it had been a good thing for her to come up here. She’s always been better onstage. Her fingers touch my sides unexpectedly and I glance down at her.

“You’re thinking so hard,” she whispers to me, “that you’re giving the poppy seed and me a headache.”

“Headache by osmosis,” I tease, turning a long blond lock around my finger. The baby’s bigger now, but poppy seed remains our favorite name. “Literally.”

She rolls her eyes, her fingers pressing into my side. “It looks like they got it.”

“We’re good teachers.” She’s right. The groups all seem to be dancing a little better, helping each other out and trading partners appropriately. Everyone’s focusing well too, which is just a bonus.

I finally call it quits for the day, checking in with everyone about their rides home. A few students ride the Metro and I usually walk them there since that’s my primary mode of transportation. Apparently Aly will be joining us today. I answer dozens of questions, keeping Aly in my periphery as we head out of the school, and I see parents. We chat lightly and then one of the parents whom I’ve known for years now, taught all her kids in theater and musical theory, catches sight of Aly.

“And I see I should be saying congratulations,” she teases me, waving to Aly.

I smile slowly, glancing at Aly over my shoulder. The afternoon had been an unintentional announcement for her. She looks tired though, standing off to the side, drawing her toes in half circles around her. I turn back to the parent. “We’re very excited, yes, thank you. See you later!”

The kids walking to the Metro walk ahead of us and as soon as we’re off school property, I catch Aly by the hand and pull her to a stop. She looks up quizzically and I touch my forehead to hers. “Hi.”

She closes her eyes, swallowing hard. “Hi.”

“I’m not going to pry into what’s going on right now.” I tell her before she starts to melt down here. “We can talk about it at home. But first, I’d like to kiss you.”

“You never need to ask,” she breathes, but she’s wrong. I love asking. I love seeing the anticipation part her lips, dilate her eyes, make her cheeks flush a muted shade of pink. When I kiss her gently, she breaks a little, her bravado slipping just enough for me to feel her hope and need in her mouth. I break it off, hooking my fingers through the loops of her jeans. Her belly presses against me, changing the way we mold together. She tilts her chin and kisses me quickly. She runs her hands through my hair and then down my face, over the carefully maintained scruff, her fingers arching so her nails scrape against me.

I close my eyes as her mouth finds mine again. I whisper against her smile, “We should be walking. Chaperone to the Metro and all.”

“Worried we’re bad influences?” she teases me softly. “You already knocked up your girlfriend.”

“I’m not saying we’re bad influences,” I tell her. “Just you.”

“I should be insulted, but I’m not,” she says with a smile.

I wrap an arm around her shoulders and she slips an arm around my waist. The kids didn’t even notice we stopped. We walk to the Metro in slow motion, leaning against each other and quiet as rush hour picks up on the road by the school.