“I’m flying. Can’t you tell?”
She jumped again and flapped her arms with a swanlike delicacy.
“But Mom, you don’t have wings.”
“I do, though, they’re just invisible, that’s why you can’t see them.”
I grinned and imitated her, hopping and moving my arms as my grandmother had taught me.
“I want to do it, too, Mom. Can I have invisible wings like yours?”
“Sure, Maya. You’ll realize one day you already do, and you’ll fly very, very far.”
“To where?”
“Wherever you want, because the place doesn’t even matter. What’s important is you’ll be free.”
She grabbed my hands and turned me, and I saw tears in her eyes and a big, bright smile on her face. She threw me into the air, and I laughed.
“Freeeee!” I shouted.
“Free,” she repeated. She hugged me and spun with me in her arms. “I’m sorry, Maya. I’m so, so sorry.”
“For what, Mom?”
“Not being stronger.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. I thought she was the strongest person in the world. She was making me fly and I didn’t even have wings. She looked me in the eye in a way she’d never done for a long time. Then she kissed me and put me down.
That same night, she left without saying goodbye.
Without telling me where.
She just left.
8
Happiness doesn’t depend on what happens to us, but on how we perceive what happens to us. I still hadn’t learned that, though, when I met with Natalia and her team. So I walked out feeling as if I’d been fired, thinking about the facts and their meaning and not how I felt about them.
And the facts were simple. I’d hurt myself. My professional ballet career was over. I was twenty-two years old and I had devoted eighteen of those years to ballet. My only goal had ever been to become principal in a major company. I had dreamed of joining the Ballet de la Opéra in Paris, or the Mariinsky, or the Bolshoi. And because of that, I had lived in my own world where nothing except dancing mattered. A world that demanded a great deal of sacrifice. A world that could be painful if you didn’t stand out. A world I had given myself to body and soul, and that now no longer had a place for me.
The door had closed in my face.
All I could think about was what a failure I was. How disappointed my grandmother would be. How all the work I’d done was lost and how I’d suffered to scale every step and had defended my position tooth and nail.
But I didn’t stop to think about how I actuallyfelt. About thatchain that had been so tight around my chest and was starting to fall away. That breath of fresh air sinking in among all that accumulated unhappiness. Layers and layers of unhappiness that had clung so tightly to my skin, it seemed I was born with them.
I walked briskly to the exit. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying.
The music of the second act ofGiselleemerged from the rehearsal studio, and I could hear my friend Mar’s voice repeating the steps for the ballerinas. My skin was standing up on end and I wanted to peek in. I didn’t, though. My heart wouldn’t let me.
I was nearly outside when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Maya.”
That voice.
I pushed the door and walked out without looking back.
