“She goes religiously to every session,” my grandmother responded.
Doctor Sanz nodded, but didn’t take his eyes off me. “Pains, cramps, inflammation…”
“No, none of that. Everything’s perfect,” my grandmother responded again. I agreed, though it wasn’t true. My knee and ankle ached when I overdid it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Pain is a part of ballet: You don’t need an injury for that to be true. You get used to it, and it’s just another part of your day-to-day routine. Besides, I wanted to get back on the boards, and I wasn’t going to risk that for the sake of something that could be controlled with anti-inflammatories and painkillers.
“Very good,” he said.
He looked back at the screen and clicked around with his mouse. I could see X-rays, test results, other data from a few days before. I was getting nervous, and I started scratching at a flake of skin on my finger.
“Will she be able to dance again?” my grandmother asked, sounding almost wrathful.
The doctor’s eyebrows rose, and he said, “Of course she will…”
“Thank God!” my grandmother exclaimed.
As I expelled a breath, he continued. “But not professionally, the way she did before. I’m sorry about that.” His tone was compassionate, but I felt the ground open at my feet as tears welled in my eyes. He didn’t take his eyes off me as my grandmother peppered him with questions, barely stopping to take a breath.
“Maya, your CK enzymes are very high still, and that leads me to think the damage to the muscle is permanent. And the other tests back that up. Your leg can’t take another year of professional ballet. Maybe not even six months. Even before the accident, you had bursitis, tendinitis, reduced bone mass…” He leaned forward, making sure he had my complete attention. “You’re just twenty-two years old. You have your whole life ahead of you. Do you want to live it with a cane or, more likely, in a wheelchair?”
I shook my head. Obviously no one just decides to spend their life in a wheelchair. And yet…
“There’s nothing I can do?” I asked in a thin thread of voice.
Doctor Sanz leaned back in his chair and joined his hands on his desk.
“Maya, you’re not the first ballerina I’ve worked with, and I’ve seen firsthand what it does to a body. When your leg is in the condition that it’s in, therewillbe further injuries. Itwillget worse. If you go back to dancing professionally, you’ll lose a lot more than just your career.”
3
My grandmother kept cursing as we got in the car to leave. For forty minutes, I had to hear how disappointed and hurt she felt, and how I could never make it up to her, and how she’d sacrificed so many years to get me to where I was and I’d spoiled it.
All she’d cared about was my future, she told me for the umpteenth time, from when she first started giving me classes and I was just a little girl. She’d devoted her time to molding me at her dance school, and years later, when I moved on to the conservatory, she continued guiding me from the shadows. She managed my time, dictated my studies, told me when to sleep, what to eat, how to dress, and who to hang out with.
I grew up under her wing, eyes fixed on the goal she had chosen for me: becoming nothing more and nothing less than the primary in the National Dance Company. Only that would do, and she never changed her mind, not even when other companies tried to woo me.
I eventually realized there was a personal motive hidden behind her obsession. I discovered this by chance, when Fyodora, one of my teachers at the conservatory and later a répétiteuse in the company, let slip that for years, Olga had gotten rejected at every audition she showed up for. She had never even been part of a corps de ballet.
She wound up opening her own school in Delicias in Madrid, where she went to live with my grandfather after they married. There, they trained dozens of boys and girls, preparing them for various conservatories and dance schools.My little angels, she liked to call her students.
Even once she’d parked in the garage and we were in the elevator, she didn’t let up with her reproaches. Only once we were inside and I saw my grandfather sitting on the balcony did I stop listening. Carmen, the woman who helped take care of him, was sitting next to him and reading him the paper. When she saw us, she stopped.
My grandfather’s head lolled aside and he scanned the living room when he heard our voices. His diabetes made his vision worse every year, and he’d gotten to where he could distinguish little more than light and shadow.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“What’s going on? It’s over, that’s what’s going on. Her entire career down the toilet. Years of effort, dedication, and money invested in her education. All of it in the trash can!” my grandmother shouted.
I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Money? I had worked myself to the bone to get one scholarship after another since I was sixteen. It had been six years since I’d needed help from her. In fact, I passed her money from my skimpy salary whenever I could. And now that skimpy salary was gone. Which made the house of cards that much closer to collapsing.
“Maya?” my grandfather called. He reached up and I took his hand, kneeling next to him and letting him stroke my cheek with the other hand. “Are you all right, honey?”
“Don’t treat her like a victim. Don’t you see it’s all her fault? If she’d listened to me the way she should have… For God’s sake, she was this close! A few more months, and she’d have made it,” my grandmother grumbled.
I clenched my fists and fired back, “Are you talking about me or you? Which one of us would have made it?”
Standing still and glaring, she said, “How dare you insinuate such a thing? With everything I’ve done for you. I sacrificed my life for you, to give you the opportunity to be someone, and we were almost there, right up until you…”
“I didn’t do anything,” I exploded, standing again. Grandpa squeezed my hand and whispered my name, trying to calm me down. “A car ran a light and hit me. Stop blaming me for it.”
