The Man I Love (21 page)

Their first day of work, the boys arrived at Mallory Hall and Erik froze. He had not walked into the building since the day of the shooting—six weeks ago—let alone into the theater. Nauseous and anxious, he dug in his heels at the auditorium doors and David did an inspired job of getting him inside.

“We’re going in,” he said, like a platoon leader. He had Erik by the shoulders, half-hugging, half-shaking him. “We’re going in. This is our theater, we own this place. Say it with me.”

“We own this place,” Erik said, his voice sticking in his throat.

“All my enemies whisper together against me. They imagine the worst for me, saying… What do they say, Fish?”

“He will never get up from the place where he lies.”

“My enemy does not triumph over me. Fuck the fucking fuckers. Come on, Fish, we’re going in there. You’re lying down right in the aisle where it happened, and then you’re getting up again.”

“Raise me up,” Erik said, a little stronger now, caught up in the call to arms. “Raise me up, that I may repay them…”

“We’re going in.” David yanked the theater doors with both hands, threw them open wide, and they went in.

Erik sat in the aisle by row M, his back against the seat sides.

“Here?” David asked.

“Here.”

“And he was where? Like this?” David stood a little in front of Erik but Erik waved him off.

“Don’t. Don’t be him. Just…let me do this.”

David moved out of sight. Erik closed his eyes. Opened them again.

His hand went into his pocket.

He was still carrying the penny around. And every time he tried to analyze why, it was as if a garage door came down in his mind. It was easier not to think about it.

“You all right?” David crouched by him.

“I have dreams,” Erik said. “I’m sitting right here and he shoots me. Then he goes back onstage and shoots Will and Daisy. Shoots to kill. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You tried, Fish,” David said, a comforting hand on Erik’s shoulder. “It was a crazy thing to do but if anyone could have done it…”

Erik put his head down. Tears wet the knees of his jeans. David pulled him close. “It’s all right. You got him to stop. You did.”

“I didn’t mean for him to…”

“Nobody did. Nobody knew this would happen. Nobody imagined it.”

Wiping his face on the back of his hand, Erik looked around. He looked good and hard at the bloodstains. It was them or him now. He’d either get up and face it, or sit here forever.

He got up and went down the aisle, hopped on the apron of the stage. David followed and stood center, hands on hips, looking stage left.

Erik walked past him, through the black curtains of the wings. He looked down at the floor. Bloodstains here, too, but something else. A block of graffiti, roughly forming the outline of a human body. He crouched down, peering at the multi-colored words. Signatures. Messages.

RIP Trevor.

Love you, my brother. Be with God.

Trevor, angel, I miss you so much.

Trevor King, forever in our hearts.

“Trev died here,” Erik said.

The scuff of David’s work boots as he came over. “Right there, yeah. The police outlined him in tape, just like you see in the movies. People came back and filled it in.”

Erik stood up and walked further backstage. He found four more graffiti-filled outlines. Aisha. Manuel. Taylor. And Allison Pierce.

He patted his pockets. “I need a pen,” he said. “A Sharpie or something.”

“I’ll get one.”

Erik sat cross-legged by Allison’s outline, his fingers resting lightly on what would have been her shoulder. David brought him a marker. Erik laid on his stomach and found a few inches of space. “Okey-dokey, girl,” he wrote. And couldn’t think of anything else. He felt lame and useless. He signed beneath the words, then went around signing the four others.

David was back in the middle of the stage. Erik joined him. They got down low, practically put their faces on the floor, mapping the bloodstains. Here, from Will’s wounds. And over here, from Daisy’s.

“So much of it,” Erik said. “Jesus, it’s even more than I remembered.”

“This is my nightmare,” David said. “Right here. Down in the blood. Holding Daisy’s head. It’s fucking horrid. The reality is burned on my eyelids anyway. I don’t need to dream about it.”

“I know,” Erik said, putting his arm around David’s shoulders.

“Fuck the fucking fuckers.”

“My enemy does not triumph over me.”

“We own this place.”

Together they stared down the blood on the stage floor.

The blood blinked first.

They shrugged, young and dismissive, full of resilient bravado. They spit their contempt for fate, rubbed it into the stage floor with their steel-toed boots, and got to work rebuilding their theater.

Their landlord was taking the summer to give Colby Street a much-needed paint job and tend to some other maintenance issues. So Erik and David took a dorm room on campus, sharing digs with the students attending the conservatory’s summer programs. On weekends, they headed out to Bird-in-Hand. There they bunked in the Biancos’ carriage house, which had been converted into a little guest apartment. It was a sweet, homey space overlooking Francine’s rose gardens, with two bedrooms, a shared bath, galley kitchen and living room. David took one bedroom. Erik took the other and Daisy came in with him.

Erik was impressed at how openly the sleeping arrangements were made. The Biancos were astonishingly hip to their daughter’s relationship. No coy pretenses or raised eyebrows when Daisy moved her things over to the carriage house. When it was time to say goodnight, they simply said, “Goodnight, sleep well.” In the morning, they said, “Good morning, sleep well?”

It was a lovely arrangement. It would have been lovelier had Daisy and Erik actually been having sex.

Her hands were warm and encouraging in the night and his body responded. Yet his mind was elsewhere. Detached and idly watching from a corner of the room. “It’s hard to explain,” he said, although he knew he didn’t have to. Under his touch, Daisy’s body was open, but ambivalent. She could take it or leave it.

“I guess it’s a post-trauma thing,” Daisy said, her eyebrows wrinkling. “I don’t feel much like it. I like touching you. And holding you. But I just feel so tired.”

“Tired’s one thing but I just feel unwired,” Erik said. “I don’t feel like me.”

She put her face against his chest. “It’ll be all right. Sex is probably first out and last back in. We’ll just keep throwing time at it.”

Time was kind and plentiful for them. All the weekends through July and August, when Daisy’s pain levels became more manageable and she gradually gained some mobility back, they lay naked in bed together, as comfortably twined as they could get. They kissed. They never tired of kissing. They talked the hours away. They laughed. They stared—they could still lock eyes and go into their private universe, and they went there frequently.

But they weren’t making love.

Not much, anyway.

Some nights she woke up screaming, and he soothed her. Unlike his Technicolor night terrors, her dreams were without imagery. “It’s pitch black,” she said. “And huge. There’s nothing to see but I can sense it goes out for hundreds of feet and up for hundreds of feet.”

“Is it a room? Or a cave?”

“I don’t know. It’s just the biggest darkest space I’ve ever known and it’s terrifying. I’m trapped there. No one else is in the dream. No story. No circumstance or context. It’s just vast black space and I can’t get out. It’s right behind my own eyelids and I can’t open them.” She moved further into the circle of his arms, shivering with unspeakable revulsion. “It doesn’t sound like anything but God, I just feel sick when I wake up…”

“It’s real,” he whispered. “It’s real and it’s something. I know, Dais. Believe me, I know.”

Erik’s dreams were on him again, too. He’d wake up yelling into the dark and Daisy would bring him back into the light. She curled up against his back, her hand flat against his pounding chest, her head on his head, murmuring him back into rest.

But rarely back into her body.

* * *

Daisy’s team of trainers and therapists was more than pleased with the rate of her leg’s progress. Both calf and thigh were getting stronger by the day. Oddly, the most challenging injury to overcome and the most chronically troublesome all her life was the ligament damage in her ankle.

“Come on, Marge, that’s like being shot in the ass and going blind,” David said in mock disgust. “Can’t you do anything right?”

Once, not long ago, Daisy would have rolled her eyes, clucked her tongue or outright ignored David’s teasing. Now she laid her temple against his upper arm and laughed. David was allowed to call her Marge now. Daisy allowed him anything. He had proved himself Erik’s true and trusted friend, and Daisy herself was too singularly and fanatically focused on her goals to be bothered by his ribbing. Nothing bothered her.

Or so it seemed. The brave face she put on in the daylight was nothing indicative of what transpired in the dark.

Only Erik knew what came in the night.

He watched Daisy work. Nobody worked harder, fought tougher. He could see, almost taste the frustration, and he knew the unending aggravation from her leg’s unwillingness to cooperate was nearly unbearable. It was offensive to her. For Daisy was so used to her body doing what she told it to do. Every dancer was.

“Dancers are narcissistic as hell about their bodies,” she said. “We love the mirror.”

They were lying in bed, up in the carriage house. The last full moon of August hung in a corner of the window.

“You have a fierce vain streak if you’re a ballet dancer,” Daisy said, “and you feel no shame about it. You’re entitled to it because you’ve been working your body to death for years. You hate the mirror. The mirror tells the truth. Ballet is so cruel because it allows one right way to do a step or pose, and fifty wrong ways. And on those good days, when you look in the mirror and you see it, you see your reflection looking just the way you want it to? Then God, you love the mirror. It’s our drug. It’s every dancer’s little, twisted addiction.”

He could take it as a cue to launch into a pep talk, assure her she would find the fix again. But Erik understood her at a much more elemental level. She didn’t need him telling her what she already knew. He let her be, and let her work it out.

“It’s so hard,” Daisy said. She was sitting up now, looking out the window, out over her mother’s rose gardens bathed in silver moonlight. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve had one vision all these years, being a principal dancer in a ballet company.” She looked back at him. “I don’t know if it’s going to happen now. I’m fighting like hell, but at the same time… I feel like I need to start thinking like you, and having some other irons in the fire. What’s my Plan B?”

“Any ideas?”

“None. I don’t know what else I am,” she said, her voice splintering apart. “I can’t think of anything else I…” She trailed off, sighing, her chin on her hand. “You have so many books on your shelves, Erik. I just have one.”

He lay on his elbow with his body curved close to her. His hand ran down the length of her hair and along her spine, then back up again. “Think you would ever teach?” he asked.

Her mouth twisted. “I guess. Keesja says nobody plans to be a dance teacher. It just naturally evolves for some. Maybe it will with me.”

Erik watched her, helpless. Helpless with love for her. And admiration. All these weeks he had been watching her gather her will during physical therapy, amass every shred of cunning and ingenuity, and settle the bit of recovery between her teeth. It broke her down. She fought and lost. She cried bitterly, but they were her productive tears, her means to go back and try again.

Now she was turning her laser focus inward, taking an unflinching look at what she might or might not be able to do, facing up to the practical decisions which might need to be made in the near future. And making a plan. Or at least, making the plan to make a plan.

He laid his palm on her leg, across the scars on her inner thigh.

“We’re all shaped by our scars,” Omar had said, as he inked a daisy into Erik’s wrist.

“I love you so much,” Erik whispered. He loved her calm, pragmatic poise. She took on her problems without drama or tantrums. Beneath her stillness lay rich and complicated passion. Erik knew how scared she was. But afraid or not, Daisy would look her life in the face and do what she had to do.

“I’ll be there,” he said. “Whatever you want to do. Or not do. I’ll be there.”

She looked at him, the moonlight in her eyes. “I know how to dance,” she said. “And I know how to love you.”

“There’s a book on your shelf,” he said.

They stared, breathing each other, pulling into their little haven.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said.

“You’ll never have to know.” He smiled, reached and tucked her hair behind her ear. She lay down again. In what had become a ritualistic gesture lately, he set his daisy tattoo—now with the added Hindi script beneath it—against the little red fish inked by her hip.