Dancing on the Edge Read online

  “Yeah, I could tell Dane loved his daddy,” she said, sticking her wad of chewing gum under the seat of her rocking chair and lighting up a cigarette.

  “Said he got his artistic talents from him, not from Gigi, like Gigi’s always implying. Of course, what I know about prodigies is that they don’t really get it from anyone except God. It’s not inherited, it’s a freak thing. But Dane liked to say he got it from your grandaddy.” Aunt Casey laughed and smoke came out of her mouth. “It riles Gigi good, I can tell you.” She nodded. “Yes indeed, Dane loved his daddy.” She rocked awhile then, out on Grandaddy’s slipped-down porch, and I rocked with her, chewing on the piece of gum she had given me and thinking over what she had said. If being a prodigy came from God, how was I supposed to become one? I didn’t have much time left. I would be thirteen soon, the age Dane had been when his first book came out. What would happen to me if I never became a great dancer, or I never developed any supernatural powers like Gigi? Then Dane never would come back, even if the house did belong to him.

  A new thought struck me. Maybe I’d disappear. Maybe on my thirteenth birthday I’d just melt. I sat chewing on my gum thinking about this, and that’s when Aunt Casey said, “Remember way back when Dane disappeared?”

  I stopped rocking. No one had mentioned Dane and his melting since it had happened and just hearing her bring it up, as if she were reading my mind, gave me a strange, spinning feeling in my head, and I had to suck in a big breath of air and let it out again before I could speak.

  “You mean when he melted?” I said.

  “Yeah, okay. Well, I thought for sure what had happened was he had run off here. I thought he had run off to be with his daddy.”

  “But he didn’t, right?” I said, looking over my shoulder, hoping against hope that he would be standing behind me smiling, that he and Aunt Casey had cooked up this great surprise for me. But the porch was empty. I turned back around. “He’s not here. We’re here. It’s just me and Gigi, come to live with Grandaddy Opal.”

  “Yeah, I wondered awhile about that. Why would Gigi come live with her ex-husband after all the tugging and fighting they did over Dane, and after she walked out on him? And you know what I figured?”

  “What?”

  Aunt Casey took a long, slow drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose. We both watched it swirl up and up and dissolve slowly in the air, like an astral body.

  “I think she’s waiting for him.” Aunt Casey took another drag and nodded. “I bet she thinks Dane’s coming back, and when he does, he’s coming here.”

  She said it, and I knew it was so.

  Chapter 9

  WAITING. That’s what we had been doing. We had all been waiting for Dane. That’s why no one dared speak his name. It held too much hope, too much expectancy. It’s why Gigi hid out in the back of the gift shop until that summer when she met her Other Realms friends. Even Grandaddy Opal had sat in his room all day, listening for Dane’s footsteps on his front porch. Even he had been waiting. But then, after Grandaddy Opal found all those bruises on me, it all changed. My bruises were a signal of some sort. I didn’t understand it, but I knew that all the changes, the way they seemed to have stopped waiting, had to do with the bruises. I was pushing them away somehow, from Dane, and from me, but I couldn’t help the bruises anymore.

  I spent most of my days on my own after Grandaddy Opal went into the seat belt painting business and Gigi joined The Other Realms. In the afternoons I would go down to the basement and sit on Dane’s bed surrounded by the candle bottles I had dug up out of one of the boxes, and I’d read stories or go to my fairyland and talk to Dane. Every time after I visited with him and asked him my questions—Why did you melt? Where are you? When are you coming back?—I needed to dance my wild dances. I’d go upstairs and push all the furniture against the walls to make room for them. I’d put on music, first Grandaddy Opal’s old Patsy Cline albums so I could start out slowly, moving just my hands, making shapes. Sometimes, I practiced melting to the slow music, testing it out, in case it would be my turn someday. It didn’t feel as scary as I thought it would be. I moved slowly, easily, feeling my body go limp, part by part, starting with the head and sliding down to the legs, down to the floor, where I’d lie still, a melted puddle, my eyes closed, feeling the beat of the music against my body. I imagined myself melting into the floor and then deeper, into the earth, deeper still, below the earth, beyond the earth. Then where? Where did Dane go then? There’s where I always got stuck. I could never imagine what lay beyond the earth. All I knew was Gigi’s world of spirits and spirit guides, and they were all people who had died and were caught in the ether world. But Dane wasn’t dead, so he wasn’t with the spirits. What else lay beyond the earth?

  When my thoughts got too disturbing—most disturbing—I would jump up from the floor and put on one of Dane’s Bob Dylan tapes, or some of his exciting-sounding classical tapes, and dance wild. I danced, shook, and rattled the thoughts clear out of me. I danced until I felt the ecstasy, until I felt the bruises.

  When I could hear my heart pounding in my ears, when every muscle and bone ached beyond endurance, I stopped. I turned off the music and went to my room and flopped down on the cot, breathing hard, listening to my heart beating in my ears.

  Sometimes I turned on the old black-and-white TV set. It was still broken. I turned it on and off, on and off. When I turned it on, the screen flashed with light, but when I turned it off, the light would shrink, getting smaller and smaller until it was just a pinpoint in the center of the screen. I watched it, fascinated, getting up closer to see if I could see inside the light, maybe see Dane, before it went out.

  Grandaddy Opal caught me staring into the tiny light one time and he said, “What you doing there? I been hearing you turning that durn thing on and off near a hundred times at least. You think that’s going to fix it?”

  I jumped away from the set. “I like seeing the light go out.”

  “What light you talking about?” Grandaddy Opal came into the room wiping his paint-splattered hands on a rag and stuffing it back in his pocket.

  “Watch.” I turned the set on for a few seconds, then turned it off. I did it three times and then did it two more times real fast so it would count as five times because Gigi said bad things happen in threes. Numbers and other superstitions were becoming more important to me then. Gigi’s rules about numbers and colors made me feel safe, less afraid of that dark emptiness I had discovered that lay beyond the earth. Sometimes, when no one was around, I got the feeling that maybe I was slipping into that empty, nowhere place. I could feel it happening and I’d look around, searching for something to hold on to, but there was never anything there anymore.

  Grandaddy Opal got up real close to the TV the way I had been. He squinted at the screen and shook his head. “Well, how do you like that? I’d forgotten how the black-and-whites always did that. I’ve got a color TV set in my room.”

  I nodded. “And it works.”

  Grandaddy Opal pointed at the set. “Do that again. Go on, let me see it go on and off again.”

  I did it seven times. Odd numbers were good, even threes sometimes, but I wasn’t sure when threes were good and when they were evil. Gigi said there was divinity in odd numbers. I liked the numbers five and seven—they were safe, no evil side to them.

  “You know what that puts me in mind of?” Grandaddy Opal asked, backing away from the TV.

  “No, what?”

  He grinned at me and his eyes flashed as if tiny bits of light were dancing in them. Even his angel hair, still charged with the static from the TV, appeared to be dancing.

  “Come on and I’ll show you,” he said, prancing out of the room and down the hall.

  I followed close behind him, eager to see what he had. He stopped outside his own door and I held my breath. I’d been living with Grandaddy Opal over two years and I’d never seen inside his room. He opened his door only halfway and the two of us slipped sideways
through the opening. When I was clear of the door, I let out my breath and looked around. Grandaddy Opal’s whole life was crammed into the very cracks and crevices of his tiny space. He had a cot like ours and an old stuffed chair with half the stuffing popping out of the armrests. The chair faced the TV set, and the set sat on a shelf that Grandaddy Opal must have made. It held everything—his books, an ancient bicycle wheel, lots of radio equipment that he said let him tune into programs and communications from all over the world, a stack of yellowed newspapers, some of his painting equipment, carpentry stuff, and bicycle fix-it tools. Empty Coke cans lined one wall, pyramid style, all the way to the ceiling, and he was starting another one to the side of his TV-watching chair. I was so overwhelmed by all his wires and tools and books I’d forgotten why we were there.

  “Now let me see,” Grandaddy Opal said, running his fingers along the rows of books. He had art books and bicycle books and science books and how-to-build-it books and the whole set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. On the bottom shelf were books on writing.

  “Were you a writer, too?” I asked, stooping down and fingering one of the books.

  Grandaddy Opal slapped my hand away. “Keep off of those.”

  I jumped back up. “But were you?”

  “Nah, I was just interested in how it all works. I’m a self-educated man, you know.” He pulled a book off the shelf and opened it up. “Here’s what I wanted to show you. This here chapter is about black holes.” He looked up at me. “Ever hear of them?”

  “No.”

  “Hah! Didn’t think so. You know what a star is, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Those lights in the sky.”

  “They’re made of gas, you know that?”

  I nodded. “I learned it in school. It’s hydrogen gas, mostly.”

  “Did you know stars can run out of gas?”

  “Like a car, you mean?”

  “Kinda,” he said. “The star just gets so hot and gives off all that gas until it uses it all up and then guess what?”

  I shrugged and tried to peer over his shoulder at the book. He pulled it away. “I’m telling this,” he said. He put his finger on a spot in the book and continued.

  “See, what happens is the star, once it loses all its fuel, starts to cool off and shrink, like the light on your TV set, and then once it shrinks enough, gravity pulls on the star.” He looked up from the book. “Now here’s where it gets interesting. The gravity is pulling on the star so much that the light, instead of being sent out in the universe so’s we can see it, gets turned inward, like pulling on a sock and turning it inside out. See, and if you pull that sock inside out and all the light was on the outside of the sock and now it’s on the inside, well, then you have a black hole, because without the light you can’t see it, and the light can’t escape back out the hole. It’s invisible. Just like staring into a TV set when it’s off. Now imagine all the invisible holes in the sky up there. And you know what scientists think about black holes?”

  I shook my head.

  “They think that if we could go inside one and survive all that gravity pulling on us we could travel back in time! Now how about that?”

  “Back in time? Where does it say that?” I said, grabbing his arm and pulling the book toward me, trying to see the words. “Say it again. Say about going back in time.”

  Grandaddy pointed to the words. “See, space and time fold in on themselves in a black hole, so if you passed through it you’d go back in time. They say no one’s ever done it for real. All that gravity pulling on us every which way would tear our bodies apart before we could get too far.”

  “But—what about something melted?”

  “Melted! Like another planet? Like ice cream?” Grandaddy Opal shook his head. “I don’t know nothing about melted.”

  I studied Grandaddy Opal’s face. Was he trying to tell me something? Trying to pass me a secret message? Was he saying, without really saying, that Dane had traveled back in time? Was he saying it in a way Gigi would never find out he told? Was that what we were waiting for? Had Dane melted into a black hole?

  Grandaddy Opal scrunched his nose up at me. Then he looked down at my hand still grabbing onto his arm. “You’re cutting into me with them nails of yours, girlie. Let go.” He yanked himself away, and the book fell to the floor.

  I stared down at the cover of the book. “Black holes,” I said.

  “Yup,” Grandaddy Opal stooped down for the book. “And they talk about wormholes up there in those black holes and they say if you could pass through a wormhole then you could come out in some different universe altogether. Now that’s fascinating, ain’t it?”

  “Wormholes?” I said, still staring at the book, trying to think, trying to put it all together.

  Grandaddy started talking about going back to the age of the dinosaurs, pretending he didn’t just pass me the secret message, and I just knew I needed to get away. My mind was racing. I, needed to be by myself and think, slowly, carefully. Think about melting and black holes.

  “Excuse me, Grandaddy, I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I said, backing out of his room and leaving him in midsentence with his mouth open.

  I ran to the bathroom and closed the door and locked it. I climbed inside the bathtub, pulled the shower curtain, and sat down to think.

  What if Dane melted so he could go back in time? It’s possible, isn’t it? If he did, then he was probably going back to the time just before Mama got hit by the ambulance. He’s probably making sure she doesn’t go to town to see the doctor that day. He’s keeping her at home, reading poetry to her or that Kafka story about the man who turned into a cockroach that he liked so much. Yes! He’s reading to her, and she’s only half listening while she rocks in her chair, resting her hands on her belly, on me, and thinking about how it’s going to be—Dane, and her, and me, the new baby, living in a cottage by the sea. She’s thinking about me growing up, playing in the sand and sunshine, running with the other girls and boys, going to school and having friends and teachers who understand me. And we’re happy. Dane is writing new books, and Mama is singing and fixing me tuna and tomato sandwiches and buying me clothes—red, yellow, green, and orange clothes, no purple. We wouldn’t need purple. Yes, Dane melted. He did it for me! And just like Aunt Casey said, like Dane himself had whispered to me, he’s coming back, and he’s coming with Mama. He’s coming here! That’s why we’ve all been waiting, why nobody can breathe his name. He’s on an important mission and we don’t dare disturb the atmosphere. Dane and Mama, they are the true winds of change!

  Chapter 10

  I DANCED NEW DANCES. I didn’t push back the furniture in the great room anymore, I danced all over it. The twin towers of National Geographics that stood alone ever since Gigi threw out the old La-Z-Boy toppled over and I danced on them, too. I created special dances for Dane and Mama, beautiful dance stories about our new life, the way it was going to be. Every chance I got I was dancing, living the dream in my mind, living it so much it seemed more real to me than the world around me, more wonderful.

  Gigi almost caught me dance-dreaming one day when she came into the house with her new friend, Mr. Eugene Wadell. I had just leaped from one piece of the sectional sofa to the other when I saw Mr. Eugene Wadell opening our front door and bowing to let Gigi enter. I jumped off the couch and sat down in the pile of National Geographics, picking one up and opening it as if I had been sitting there reading all along.

  Gigi entered the room with her smiling eyes on Mr. Eugene Wadell, so it took her a few seconds to even notice me.

  “Mercy, what a mess!” she said, when she did notice. “Miracle, what are you doing?”

  I held up my magazine. “I’m going through all these National Geographics.”

  “What a ridiculous thing to do.” She glanced at Mr. Eugene Wadell for confirmation and then returned to me.

  “Your aura’s changed from green to yellow-orange. Did you know that?” she said, and I knew she was showing off.r />
  “It means you’re thinking too much about yourself. That’s typical for a soon-to-be teenager, I suppose.” She turned to Mr. Eugene Wadell. “She’ll be thirteen in just two weeks, and she’s growing like a weed.”

  He nodded and opened his mouth as if he were saying “Ah,” but no sound came out.

  Gigi came back to me. “You just keep wearing your purple, now, you hear?” Then she stepped over the magazines and went off to our bedroom, leaving me alone with the funny-looking Mr. Eugene Wadell.

  He was standing in front of me, nodding and looking like a bowling pin about to tip over. His hair grew out more on one side than the other and it made him look lopsided, as if he’d have a limp when he walked.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You wear your purple. It will help bring you in touch with the spirit world.” He stopped Dane’s Mozart tape and nodded some more in the uncomfortable silence he created.

  I tried not to stare at his big belly, the way it jiggled when he moved even the slightest bit. I hung my head over the magazine in my lap and pretended to read about the rainforest.

  A few minutes later Gigi returned with a purple boa draped around her shoulders and a different pair of shoes, ones with higher heels.

  She pulled on Mr. Eugene Wadell’s sleeve and the two of them left, leaving me still sitting in the pile of magazines, listening to the click-click of her high heels and the pat-pat of Mr. Eugene Wadell’s Hush Puppies going down the porch.

  I wondered about her and that Mr. Eugene Wadell. She had been going out with him a lot. She met him at one of her Other Realms conferences and at first she said she didn’t like him because he kept following her around and staring at her. Then it turned out both of them had the same spirit guide, Rasmus. Gigi said she didn’t know that it was possible to have the same guide, but Mr. Eugene Wadell assured her it was.