Chapter 6

Solange

Four hours remained before the curtain rose.

Outside, the rain came down hard while the whole company gathered together and ran through our final dress rehearsal. Nadine stood at the very front of the stage, her voice carrying that quiet she only used when she had something to say.

"Tonight I want everyone to give it everything," she said. "No matter what happens, tonight is a special night."

Her words offered no real comfort. If anything, the mood in the company grew tighter because of that calm, a muffled, inward-pulling tension. Margot grabbed my wrist and tugged me two steps to the side. "Are you ready?"

"I'm ready," I said. "You?"

She drew a deep breath and nodded.

An hour before curtain, I sat down in the makeup chair reserved for me. The makeup artist and hairdresser worked around me, and as I watched myself in the mirror, minute by minute the face reflected there grew more like Giselle and less like my own. The theater's glass panes rattled under the rain until they seemed ready to shatter, the sound loud enough to make my ears ache.

"The forecast says the rain won't let up until ten tonight," the makeup artist said, a note of worry in her voice. "And the traffic outside is already snarled. No telling when it'll clear."

I looked toward the window in the mirror. Fat drops of water were already sliding down the glass, and the sky had darkened earlier than usual. I said nothing, but something I couldn't quite name sank a little inside me. I had seen New York downpours before, the kind that turned subway steps into waterfalls and made cabs vanish from the curb without a trace.

No one wanted to go out and watch ballet in weather like that.

As the hairdresser slid the last pin into place, Nadine pushed open the door of the dressing room. She glanced out the window, then turned to me, her tone as level as if she were stating something beyond question.

"No matter what," she said, "this is a big day for you."

I glanced at myself in the mirror. The person reflected there had become someone else entirely. She was not Solange, she was Giselle, her gaze clear, her chignon flawless, the stage foundation on her face lending her skin the smoothness of porcelain, without a single visible crack.

Twenty minutes before curtain, a stagehand knocked at the door. My phone buzzed at that moment, Tyler's name lit up on the screen, but the stagehand was already hurrying me toward the wings. I only had time to see it was a missed call before the second knock came, and I never unlocked the phone.

I dropped it back into my bag. Maybe he only wanted to tell me he had arrived, and whatever it was could wait two hours.

The wings were crowded with dancers. The lighting had shifted into performance mode, the glow onstage leaking through the gaps in the curtain while nearly everyone backstage stood submerged in darkness. The rain was sealed outside by the heavy curtains and the theater walls, leaving only a low, distant hum, like something vibrating far away without pause. I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing.

The orchestra had begun to play, and it was then that I noticed the sound from the other side of the curtain, or rather, how thin that sound was. The audience was quiet, a quiet much like our ordinary rehearsals. By this point in the evening, even a hushed crowd usually carried the breath and weight that only living people give off, something you could feel through the curtain. But tonight there was nothing.

I didn't dare think too hard about it. I couldn't.

For a young dancer with almost no following of my own, a house that didn't sell out before a show was hardly news, and with weather this bad, if only half the seats were filled when the curtain rose... but if that were the case... then I would surely never get my chance at the Swan Lake solo.

The house lights dimmed and the curtain drew back. The light seeping in from its edge changed, turning into the amber of the stage lamps, and from behind it I could see the audience beyond. Out of more than a thousand seats, fewer than ten percent were filled. The people were scattered here and there across the theater, a handful of adults and a dozen or so children, several of the little girls still in ballet tutus. They looked as though some community group or school had brought them, and they sat so far from the stage I could barely make out their faces.

But in the center of the front-row VIP seats sat a man. He was the man from last night, dressed in a dark suit with a matching tie, leaning back in his chair with easy composure, one leg crossed over the other, watching the stage with perfect calm. He looked like the only person in the theater who took the evening entirely for granted.

Owen, dancing Albrecht, had already made his entrance in his peasant costume, one foot stepping forward. Just as he prepared to leap, he saw the house, and his step froze in place as though he'd slammed on a brake. He stood there at center stage, tilting his head slightly, and glanced down at the audience again, as if confirming his eyes hadn't failed him. The strings of the accompaniment moved on two more bars. The conductor sensed something wrong and quietly slowed the tempo, stretching the overture out.

Murmurs rose and fell in the wings. Someone cursed under their breath, others traded bewildered looks, and a few had already begun debating whether to go on at all.

I turned my head toward where Nadine stood. She was watching me, calmly and directly, like a kind of confirmation. She said nothing, only mouthed the words, "Is this the kind of nerves you can control?"

My body was trembling a little. I couldn't tell whether it was excitement, anger, or something else. I only stood there and looked down at the audience again. Among the girls in tutus, one had begun to lean forward, her small head craning toward the stage, rising on her toes to peer up, as if she had no idea what was wrong and was simply waiting for the show to begin.

The overture from the pit had stretched almost past the point it could hold. I drew in a breath and let it slowly out. I didn't know whether to call it courage or something closer to stubbornness. I only knew this was the performance I had dreamed of, the stage I had dreamed of, the Giselle I had dreamed of, and no matter how few had come, this dance deserved to be danced to the end.

I didn't wait for my cue. I went out early. I landed a pas de chat, light and precise, and the spotlight found me within half a second. The instant I rose into the air in a grand jeté, one of the children let out a soft "wow," short and quick, as if someone had let a thought slip out loud before clapping a hand over her mouth. The man in the front row raised his hands then and applauded.

Owen finally came back to himself. He caught up to me, his steps folding into mine so seamlessly it might have been the original choreography, and the strings in the pit found their place again.

What followed was a performance nearly two hours long. I can't say I "enjoyed" it the way I had as a corps dancer, and I can't say I merely "endured" it either. It was something more complicated than everything I'd lived through combined. I was nervous, I was furious, I was confused, and perhaps there was some of that stubbornness that only surfaces when there's no way out. I pressed all of it into the dance.

I became Giselle, the true Giselle. I loved Albrecht and was betrayed, I died, I forgave, and in the end even my spirit dissolved away. I danced through every one of her emotions, though how many of them were hers and how many were mine, I could no longer tell.

Midway through the second act, I finished the tail of a turn on the left side of the stage and let my eyes drift down to the house. One of the girls in tutus had fallen asleep, her head resting against the arm of the adult beside her. Another still had her eyes open, both hands on her knees, watching the stage in earnest, her small face wearing an expression of concentration in the dark that seemed almost too large for it. The man in the front row never once looked away.

I only knew that the music kept playing, so my body kept moving. I had no right to stop, because I was Giselle, and if I stopped, the whole stage would hold nothing at all.

When the curtain-call lights came up, I walked to the front of the stage. Sparse applause rose from the back rows, scattered and thin. The adults clapped in earnest, and the two or three children still awake clapped hard, off rhythm but honest. The one who had fallen asleep woke at the sound, lifted her head in a daze, saw someone bowing onstage, and patted her hands together too.

The man in the front row stood. He clapped with real attention, and the sound echoed on and on through the empty theater, ringing the way a stone rings when it drops into a deep well.

I bowed again, completing the first movement of the curtain call, then lifted my head and looked out with the professional, almost muscle-memory smile of courtesy. And it was then that my eyes met his.