Finally her mother spoke. She sounded a little impatient, a little amused. “You always were such a liar, Savannah. You had a television in your room. Like a little princess in a castle! Just look at all those trophies! Don’t you think I had better things to do than drive you around to ballet recitals across the country? I had a life of my own, you know!”
So that’s how she lived with it. She did it the way so many people lived with their regrets and mistakes. They simply rewrote their stories. Her mother had re-created herself as a devoted mother: as if ballet had been her daughter’s favorite extracurricular activity, not her own obsession.
“You were only moderately talented,” said her mother after a long pause. Her words were beginning to slacken as the two sleeping tablets did their job. “You weren’t a protégé like your brother. I knew that from the beginning.”
Your father got the protégé.
The girl folded herself up. Neatly. Geometrically. Like origami.
She went back into the kitchen and cleaned with swift, hard, tiny, graceful movements. She scrubbed at a congealed spot of grease on the stove with a dishcloth, pulled tight over her thumb, until it was gone. She swept the floor. She cleaned the sink until it shone.
She went back out to her loving mother and found her sound asleep on the couch, head tipped back, her mouth open in a perfect oval shape, like one of those fairground attractions.
Her mother had said earlier that day that sometimes the sleeping tablets worked too fast and she fell asleep on the couch and woke with an aching lower back. She said this as if it were somehow the girl’s fault.
So the girl took charge. She picked up the remote and turned off the television. “Let’s get you to bed, sleepyhead! No sore back for you!”
She had to drag her under her armpits, but her mother was as light as air, as light as a tiny ballerina. She dragged her to the closest bedroom, which happened to be the one that had once belonged to the girl, the one with the old-fashioned lock on the door.
These days it was illegal to have bedroom doors that could be locked from the outside. A safety issue.
There seemed to be no safety issues when the girl was growing up.
The girl heaved her mother onto her old bed. She pulled the sheets up tight and smooth over her chest and under her mother’s chin.
Once she was done she found she was breathing fast yet with a controlled kind of exhilaration, as if she had performed something extraordinary yet ordinary, remarkable yet required, like thirty-two fouetté turns en pointe.
“Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.” She kissed her mother on her forehead. She felt her breath warm on her cheek. At the doorway she said, “Now, you know I do need to lock this door. That’s the rule. You gnawed on those bones like a disgusting little pig!”
The girl found the key to the bedroom door where her mother had always kept it, in the little trinket dish an ex-husband had given her as a gift. It had a cartoon of a man and a woman hugging on it. Hearts floated above their heads. It said: Love is … being loved back.
He’d been one of the nicer husbands, he’d taught the girl to cook, and then he was gone, taking his surname along with his cooking utensils. If he’d stayed, he would not have let what happened to her happen.
There were many people who would have stopped it, if only they’d known, if only they’d looked a little harder or bothered to ask a question or listen.
There were teachers and other ballet parents and doctors who could have noticed. Like the plastic surgeon who had seen her when she was a child. Dr. Henry Edgeworth. Her mother took her for an appointment to see how much it would cost to pin back her “unfortunate ears.” (It cost too much.) “I’m hungry,” the girl whispered to the doctor as he studied her unfortunate earlobes, and he chuckled as if it were funny that he was examining a malnourished child.
He’d recently paid an expensive price for that kindly chuckle, although he thought he’d paid a bargain price for an affair with a trashy young girl he met at a nightclub. Either way was fair.
While her mother slumbered that night, the girl went to the supermarket. She bought six boxes of Optimum Nutrition Protein Crunch Bars. They looked delicious! She bought a shrink-wrapped pallet of bottles of water. She carried the supplies into the bedroom and left them on the floor near the bed. Her mother breathed peacefully through her mouth.
She wrote her mother a friendly note. This looks like a lot but you will need to ration carefully. Remember: self-discipline!
She relocked the door.
The girl left that night for Sydney. It was back when there were no border closures, when you could move across the country with your new Irish boyfriend and not think about it.
She hadn’t expected to be gone as long as she was. She got busy! Life! Her relationship d
idn’t work out, but she met new people and visited old friends and acquaintances. She tied up some loose ends. She had a few cash windfalls. She even did some charity work. She “reached out,” as the Americans said, to her famously successful brother, and he was kind, and they agreed they would get together once this crazy world returned to normal. He said he never wanted to see either of their psychotic, fucked-up parents again, and she understood. Neither did she, really, but she was a devoted daughter just like her mother had been a devoted mother.
She kept the key on a chain around her neck. It seemed important, essential even, to keep it close. It demonstrated her love.
“Going back home?” asked her muscle-bound seatmate as the plane began to taxi toward the runway. It was a time when people everywhere were going back home. The man had gentle doglike eyes over the top of his mask.
The flight attendant demonstrated what to do if an oxygen mask fell from the ceiling. First remove your mask. The virus will no longer be your main concern!
“I’m visiting my mother,” said the girl.