Dancing on the Edge Read online

  “Rasmus, is that you?” Gigi asked.

  We started moving again, faster. The nail pointed to the word yes.

  “We want to talk to Sissy. Is she there?”

  The planchette moved away from the yes and then slid back.

  I started chewing on my lip. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to talk to Mama.

  “Sissy, your baby’s here. Your little girl. Your Miracle.”

  I inched forward in my seat and both Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole shushed me.

  The planchette started moving again, quickly, smoothly, almost floating over the surface of the board. It slid to the T, then the R, then O-U-B-L-E.

  “What kind of trouble?” Gigi asked.

  Again the planchette was moving, and I could feel my fingers trembling. I had chewed a sore into my lip, and I worked at it and watched the planchette float over to the D, then to A-N-E.

  Trouble for Dane, I thought. I began to relax. People were always saying that. “What’s the trouble with Dane?” they’d ask. “Where’s his next book?” they’d wonder. “Wasn’t that novel he wrote nine years ago supposed to be part of a trilogy?” Dane had been having trouble with his writing ever since Mama died and I was born.

  “What trouble, Sissy?” Gigi asked.

  I looked at Gigi. I wanted to talk. When was she going to let me talk?

  Again the planchette spelled out Dane but then continued to the G and then to O and then it paused and, just when I thought the message was over, it moved again to the N and then to E.

  “Gone?” Gigi asked. “Dane gone?”

  The planchette moved slowly to the yes.

  “Dane gone?” Aunt Casey whispered. “When?” She looked up at Gigi. “Ask Sissy when.”

  The planchette moved one more time and spelled out N-O-W.

  Chapter 2

  WE SCRAMBLED OVER each other trying to be the first one down the steps to Dane’s room in the basement. We were in such a hurry that no one thought to turn on any lights, and I heard Uncle Toole bumping down the steps on his bottom. He was shouting Whoa! Whoa! on his way down, but his cowboy boots must have been digging into nothing because he didn’t stop till he hit bottom. Then in the hallway, we stumbled all over each other again, feeling our way along the stone walls to Dane’s door. I got there first and flung open the door shouting, “Dane! Dane, we’re here!”

  Uncle Toole grabbed me and held me back.

  “Holy sh—,” he said.

  We all stood together in a breathless clump, bedazzled by the lights of Dane’s candle bottles. They were everywhere—on his shelves, on his desk, lining the edges of the window casements, and covering the floor like a flaming blanket.

  “What is this?” Aunt Casey asked, twisting to see Gigi.

  I answered her, whispering with pride. “Dane’s candle bottles. He likes to plug all his empty wine bottles with candles and then we light them, in ceremony.”

  “In ceremony of what?” Aunt Casey’s voice was harsh.

  “Casey, leave it,” Gigi said.

  “But where’s Dane?” I asked, stepping into the room. Uncle Toole caught me by the shoulders and pulled me back.

  “He ain’t in here, that’s for sure,” he said.

  Then Gigi brushed past us, her purple séance robe swinging into the bottles, making us all gasp.

  Aunt Casey said, “Lord, Gigi, you want to go up in flames? Watch that robe.”

  Gigi didn’t hear her. She glided around the bottles, moving toward Dane’s writing desk. Then she stopped and held up both her arms the way she did when calling on the dead spirits. We knew she had come upon something.

  “Would you look?” she said. “What in the world?”

  We all crept into the room, looking for what Gigi saw.

  “His clothes!” She pointed to a heap on the floor. “If that isn’t the strangest thing. Look at the way they’re setting, like he was just in them a second ago.”

  It was strange. We all agreed on that. Dane’s uniform: his sweats, his bathrobe, his underwear, his slippers with the backs mashed down, lay on the floor in the midst of the candles, looking as if his body had just melted clear out of them and all that was left was the heap of clothes.

  Then Gigi cried out, “He’s melted,” and I heard this and knew it was so.

  “Woman, you’re out of your head,” Uncle Toole said. “People don’t melt.”

  “The witch in the Wizard of Oz did,” I said, imagining Dane calling out for help and nobody hearing him. My legs began to shake.

  Gigi leaned forward and picked up two of the bottles and held them over her head and cried out again. “Dane! Dane!”

  I cried out, too, but Uncle Toole grabbed my shoulders again and tried to lead me back out of the room. “This ain’t nothing for a ten-year-old to see.”

  “But I want to. What’s wrong? What’s happened? Why did he melt?” I twisted away from him, my shoulders aching from the strong pressure of his squeezing fingers.

  “He didn’t melt,” Uncle Toole said. “See what you started, Gigi?”

  Gigi didn’t answer. She was on her knees, surrounded by the candle bottles, swaying in circles and moaning.

  I darted around the bottles and joined Gigi on the floor, and Uncle Toole stood behind us cussing while Aunt Casey yelled at him to shut up.

  Gigi and I stayed on our knees swaying for a long time. I don’t know when Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole left because I had to concentrate on being just like Gigi. I kept waiting for Dane to reappear, because it seemed to me that’s why we stayed down there on the floor with our arms crossed over our chests moaning to the spirits. I thought Gigi was trying to conjure him up, but he never came back. The candies burned down, and I grew tired. I climbed up on Dane’s bed and fell asleep, my face buried in my daddy’s bathrobe.

  PEOPLE IN OUR TOWN didn’t like hearing about how Dane melted. It was as if it were some kind of threat to them, as if they could melt any minute themselves—from the sun, a heated room, a candlelit dinner. Gigi said it wasn’t worth trying to explain to them that not just anyone could melt like that.

  “Our specialness scares them, baby, that’s why we’ve got to move,” she said to me one day when I came home from school and found her and Aunt Casey packing up the living room.

  And it was true what she said about us scaring people. Even the police and the newspaper reporters who swarmed around the house and the yard were timid around us. They suspected Gigi of foul play, that’s what the newspapers said at first: MOTHER OF PRODIGY SUSPECTED OF FOUL PLAY. Then when they realized that everything he owned and wore was still in the house, that wherever he was, he was naked, they suspected both murder and suicide and had the pond in back of our house dredged.

  About a week after the disappearance, as they were calling it, the papers got ahold of our theory about him melting and wrote a long article about Gigi and her practicing the black arts. The night after that came out, Gigi came creeping into my room in the middle of the night, her slingshot in one hand and her sack of marbles in the other.

  I sat up in bed. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Go back to sleep, baby. I just got to deal with some adults who ought to know better.”

  “What?” I rose on my knees and looked out my window. I could see something moving out there, dark shadowlike figures.

  “Your window’s the best chance I’ve got of getting a good shot.”

  “Who are they?” I asked. “What’s that they’re doing?”

  “Shh, I’ve got to get out on your roof without them noticing me. Here, you can hand me my sack once I’m out.”

  Gigi handed me the marbles and silently lifted my window. Someone outside lit a torch and I ducked, thinking they could see us, but Gigi kept on moving through the window and out onto the roof, as easily as a black cat in satin slippers. She had always been light on her feet even though she was heavy, her movements graceful, careful.

  I could see the figures real well now. Two of them held torches while thre
e others sprinkled something along the edge of our lawn.

  “Are they spooks?” I whispered through the window, remembering how some of the kids at school had said our house was full of them.

  Gigi turned her head to me and put her finger up to her mouth. “Shh. They’re just people up to no good.” She signaled for me to hand her the marbles.

  I passed the sack through the window and held my breath. So far no one had noticed her. Gigi selected her marble, placed it in the sling, and aimed. I knew it would hit its marie as soon as she drew back the sling. Dane always said Gigi had a dead-straight aim. She let go of the sling and in a flash one of the bodies out there, a woman’s, let out a scream, and dropped to her knees.

  “I’ve been shot! Lord, Ray, I’ve been shot, right between the eyes,” she howled. “I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!”

  The others stopped what they were doing and stood over the woman on the ground.

  Gigi took aim again and shot another marble through the air.

  “Dang!” came a man’s voice. He grabbed his head and fell on his knees. “They’re shooting at us! I’ve been shot in the back of the head.”

  Another voice said, “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “It’s that voodoo stuff,” the man hit with the second marble said. “Now, let’s get out of here. The bullet’s probably lodged in my brain, set to explode any minute.” He trotted beside the others, keeping low, as they lugged the fainted woman out to the truck.

  Gigi didn’t say anything until they drove out of sight. Then she stood up on the roof and let out a wolf howl.

  I stood next to the window clapping, proud to be granddaughter to such a fine person as my Gigi.

  The next day, I came home to find Gigi and Aunt Casey packing and saying we had to leave Alabama.

  “But didn’t we win?” I asked. “Didn’t they run off?”

  I looked at both of them. Aunt Casey’s eyes were red. I wondered why she had been crying.

  “It wasn’t about winning, sugar pie,” Gigi said, her back to me. She leaned over her table of glass figurines and wrapped one of them for packing. “I just didn’t want them trespassing on my property. But it’s time we move on now, with Dane melted and people around here so excited.”

  “But what if Dane comes back? We wouldn’t be here. He could come looking for us and we wouldn’t be here!”

  Gigi shook her head and turned around, but she still didn’t look at me. She looked at Aunt Casey, who held her head down, staring at her red-painted toenails, red, the color of rage.

  “I can’t raise you up around this. You need an accepting environment. You’re special, aren’t you, sugar pie?” She looked at me then and said, “Weren’t you born from the body of a dead woman?”

  I shook my head. “I’d better go pack,” I said, rushing for the stairs and keeping my head turned away so they couldn’t see my face.

  “Casey will bring you some boxes,” Gigi called after me.

  I ran to my room and closed the door. I didn’t want to hear their voices. I didn’t want to hear the story about Mama and my miracle birth. Ever since Dane melted I’d become afraid of that story, as if my being born from a dead woman had something to do with his melting. They were the same kind of thing to me. Thinking of either one of them made my stomach squeeze up tight. They made me feel all wrong inside, and there was something more to it—my birth and his melting—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. All I knew was that it had to do with me.

  The way the kids avoided me at school told me they knew, and the teachers who stood together and whispered about me knew, too. There was some big, wrong thing about me, and everybody knew what it was, except me. I wanted to run up to Gigi and ask, “What is it? Why don’t you see me anymore? Why are you always in your room now, or out? Why aren’t you home when I come home from school? What did I do?” But I knew I couldn’t ask those kinds of questions. I knew it would upset the karmic balance. Instead, I took to wearing Dane’s bathrobe, a soft coat of armor protecting me, wrapping me in its warm smells of cigarettes, wine, and musty old books—Dane’s smell.

  I heard Aunt Casey on the stairs, banging the wall with the moving boxes. She kicked at my door, and I let her in.

  “Here you go, Miracle,” she said, all out of breath. She dropped the boxes on the floor and leaned against the door frame.

  I picked up a box. “Thanks.”

  “No sweat. How about I help you with some of this stuff?” She hip-swayed over to my chest of drawers and picked up my Barbie doll. “It shouldn’t take long, you don’t have half of nothing. Just hooks.” She ran her hand along the top row of my bookshelf, looking like some lone wanderer dragging a stick along a picket fence. She tossed my Barbie into the box I was holding. “Shoot, you don’t even have a Ken doll. What’s a Barbie without a Ken? Huh? What’s a Barbie all by herself?”

  I brought my box over to the bookshelf. “I don’t like Ken. He doesn’t have real hair. It’s plastic painted hair.”

  Aunt Casey laughed, and I saw bits of red lipstick stuck on her teeth. “Now look at these books. Dane must have picked these out, all this Shakespeare—Hamlet and Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hasn’t he ever heard of Nancy Drew?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  Aunt Casey dragged her own box over to the shelves and started pulling out my books and stacking them in the boxes.

  “I bet you don’t get along too well at that school of yours, reading Shakespeare and listening to old-timey Bob Dylan.”

  “Dane loves Bob Dylan,” I said.

  “He sounds constipated,” said Aunt Casey.

  We each filled our boxes without saying anything more, and then when Aunt Casey handed me my purple spiritual clothes from out of my closet, the ones Gigi had picked out for me, for when the color of my aura needed changing, I said, “No one likes me at this school. I’m glad we’re moving.”

  Aunt Casey stopped handing me the clothes and squatted in front of me. “You’re special, that’s all. You’re different. I’m sorry what I said before about Nancy Drew.” She patted my shoulder, something Aunt Casey had never done before. “Shoot, they’re just jealous, I bet.”

  I shook my head. “They call me names and throw stuff at me. They say bad things about Dane and me.”

  Aunt Casey looked into my face, the rims of her round eyes still red. “What kinds of stuff, sugar?”

  “Mean stuff about how he always looks so creepy when he drives into town, like he’s drunk. They say he’s crazy. He talks to himself all the time and never answers anyone’s questions. And they say that sometimes he just walks into a store, picks out what he wants, and right in front of everyone, walks back out again without paying. They say he belongs in jail.”

  “Jail! Nonsense! You know, honey, that’s just Dane. He forgets to shave, to wash, to brush his teeth. He’s always been like that.”

  “They’re saying now we’re all crazy, and we got spooks living with us.”

  “Spooks? Who ever heard of such nonsense? Really!”

  “They’re even calling me a spook.” I said, telling her the worst of it, the part that troubled me the most, because I was starting to believe it, starting to feel like a spook.

  Aunt Casey stood back up. “Well, never you mind them. I’m glad you’re moving. I am. I just wish I were coming with you.”

  “You and Uncle Toole aren’t coming?” I hitched up my shoulder and turned away from her. Even if I didn’t like them much, I knew it couldn’t be a good thing losing them so soon after losing Dane.

  “Hah!” Aunt Casey said, coming around to face me. “Your uncle Toole can stay right here, but maybe I’ll come. That would serve Mr. Hot Pants right.”

  “You and Uncle Toole have another fight? Is that why you’ve been crying?” I studied her face, so thin and pinched, and I noticed even with her pain, she looked pretty. Her skin was smooth and her green eyes seemed greener, bigger.

  “I shouldn’t have been crying. Not over him, that . .
. that roving eyeball! Trotting after that Delphinnia woman. She’s got nothing special, besides her name. But I fixed Toole good—shaved off his eyebrows and cut his eyelashes. He was too drunk and passed out to notice. Went to work today wearing ladies’ sunglasses.” Aunt Casey laughed, but there were tears coming out of her eyes and the tip of her nose had turned red.

  She wiped her eyes and shook her head. “Of course, I’ve got my business. I guess I couldn’t exactly leave my beauty business, all my clients.”

  She went over to my chest of drawers and stared at herself in the mirror, patting her hair and fluffing it up at the top. She had dyed it black. Last time I saw her, it was red. She changed hair color as often as most people changed their socks, and it made her hair appear brittle and stiff and oversprayed.

  “No, I can’t leave my clients,” she said. “At least they need me.” She turned around. “But hey, how about I give you a new do before you go, huh? No charge. Wouldn’t you like a haircut, to celebrate the new you in a new town?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, I guess so.”

  Aunt Casey ran to the door. “I’ll only be a minute. I’ve got a kit in my purse. This will perk us up, won’t it? Now you be thinking how you want it, I’ll be right back.”

  She left the room and I stared at the door, thinking about Aunt Casey and her beauty salon. She owned it and managed it, and even had a wig-fitting business in her home where she fitted wigs for cancer patients. It was the only nice thing I’d ever known her to do until that day when she offered to cut my hair for me.

  I wandered over to my chest of drawers and stared down at the red fingernail polish I’d painted on my nails. I had painted them the day of the séance so Mama wouldn’t see the dirt underneath, but already the polish had chipped down to little flecks in the center of each nail. I made fists with my hands so I couldn’t see the nails and took a deep breath. I wanted to look at myself in the mirror, but lately, every time I tried, a queer, queasy-hot feeling came over me. I couldn’t look.