But under all of it, the entire drive, what I’m actually turning over is how close I came, not to the watcher, to her. To the cliff I keep walking up to and stepping back from. How much smaller that step back gets every single time. How one of these mornings my foot is going to come down on nothing but air.
I get us back behind the walls. I don’t look at her when she climbs out. I tell myself it’s strategy.
It hasn’t been, not since the desert. I just don’t have another word yet for what it is, and I’m not ready to learn the one that fits.
18
CINDY
The car comes for me the next morning, and I almost don’t get in, because I’m still raw from the desert.
I didn’t sleep. I lay in the rich man’s guest bed half the night with the feel of that near-kiss still on my mouth, replaying the part I’m not proud of, which is that I leaned in too. He wasn’t the only one. For one second in the dust, with the engine ticking, I wanted him so badly I forgot every sensible thing I know. He’s the one who pulled back. Which means the scariest man in Nevada has better self-control than I do, and I’m furious about it, the specific fury of the one who leaned in first, then got left leaning.
So when Roma tells me there’s an appointment in the city and the car’s waiting, my first thought is no. My second is that I don’t actually get to say no, which is the whole shape of my life now. My third is suspicion, because the last time Sevastian arranged a thing for me without explaining it, I came home a kept woman in front of forty people.
“An appointment for what?” I ask Roma.
“He didn’t say.” Roma holds the door. “Just that you’d want to be on time.”
“Is it a body? Roma. Blink twice if I’m going to see a body.”
Roma looks at me for a long, flat moment, which is how I learn that the silent ones can also be comedians, because he does not blink at all, the entire drive, visibly, holding eye contact in the mirror at red lights like a man being paid by the stare.
Wonderful. Another of his productions. I get in already bracing for it, already rehearsing the bored contemptuous face I wear when he’s spending money to remind me he owns me. I’m good at that face now. I’ve rehearsed it in mirrors, which is the kind of thing you do when your life becomes a role with no script and armed costars.
It’s the one thing keeping me upright in all of this, the steady private knowledge that I’m using him right back. Taking his cash, his cars, his fortress, giving him nothing real. Whatever my body does in count rooms, my head is still mine, and my heart is locked in a box he’ll never find.
I hold onto that the whole drive. I’m still holding it when the car pulls up outside a glass medical tower on the good side of the city. The lobby has a water feature and a piano nobody’s playing. Medicine up here doesn’t smell like medicine.
It smells like a hotel where nobody dies. A woman in scrubs walks me up to a floor that smells like money over disinfectant, into an office with a view and a wall of framed degrees, where a man stands up from behind the desk to shake my hand. The chairs are leather. The tissues on the side table are the expensivekind, which tells you what sort of news gets delivered in this room.
“Miss Boon,” he says. “I’m Dr.Acheson. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
I don’t understand. I keep waiting to understand. He sits me down, pulls up images on a screen, and it takes me a full minute to realize they’re me. The inside of me. An X-ray of a knee I’d know anywhere, because I’ve been limping on it for seven years.
My knee. My ruined, dream-ending knee. There it is, lit up on a stranger’s wall like evidence. I’ve spent seven years not looking at this thing, and it turns out it’s been right here the whole time, keeping its own records.
“I’ve reviewed your old films and the imaging we took this morning,” Dr.Acheson says. His voice is gentle and matter-of-fact at once, the voice of a man who fixes impossible things for a living. “I’ll be honest with you, because I gather no one has been. The original repair was rushed. Whoever did it was trying to get a nineteen-year-old walking again on a budget. They managed it. But they left a great deal on the table.”
He points at something on the screen I can’t read. “This is reconstructable. Not perfectly. You won’t compete again, I won’t lie to you about that. But the pain you’ve been living with, the instability, the thing that’s been stopping you, much of that I can fix. With the right surgery and a year of real rehab, I think we get you most of the way back.”
“I understand you were a dancer,” he adds, scrolling to another image, as casual as if he’s noting my height. “Competitive. The films show it, frankly. The musculature, the way the joint wore before the injury. That’s a serious athlete’s knee under all the olddamage.” He glances up. “It would help me to know what level you were at. The demands are different for a recreational dancer versus someone who trained seriously.”
And there it is, the question nobody’s asked me in seven years, asked like it’s nothing, like my old life is a normal thing to have had instead of a grave I tiptoe around. Someone trained seriously. I have to swallow before I can answer.
“Nationally ranked,” I say. The words feel strange in my mouth. I haven’t said them out loud since before the wreck, because saying them out loud is how you invite people to feel sorry for you, or worse, to ask what happened. “I was about to sign. There was a company. A contract. I was nineteen.”
“Then we’re rebuilding for an athlete,” he says simply, like that settles it, like it’s a fact and not a wound.
“Dancers,” he adds, making a note, “are my worst patients, for the record. Football players cry and do their exercises. Dancers lie to me and do triple the exercises in secret, then act surprised when I can tell.” He looks up. “You’re going to lie to me and do triple the exercises.”
“Probably.”
“Wonderful. We’ll plan for it.” He makes a note. He moves on. He doesn’t make me watch his face rearrange itself into pity, and I could kiss him for that alone.
I sit very still. If I move, I’m going to do something I can’t take back. Crying, specifically. Or hugging a board-certified stranger. Or calling Sevastian and saying words into a phone that no take-backs clause on earth would cover.
Most of the way back. Nobody has said anything like that to me since I was nineteen. After the wreck they handed me a future with the lights switched off and told me to be grateful I could still stand. So I built a whole life around the dark, around temporary, around a stage at the Wet Sunset where a broken dancer can still earn rent shaking what’s left of her. I made peace with it. I told myself I made peace with it. And this man in his expensive office is calmly telling me the dark was never as total as they let me believe.
