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I WAS PRACTICALLY DANCING down the street by the time I left home that morning. I couldn’t believe it – everything I had worked so hard for, all this time, it was finally about to come true.
I knew I had earned this. I had worked hard every day of my life, pretty much since I was able to stand on my own two feet, to get where I was right now. Some people might have looked at it as luck, but I knew it was a million times better than that. I deserved it, and I was going to walk in to my second day with this troupe with all the confidence in the world.
I had already been there the day before, just checking in and taking the chance to get to know everyone I would be performing with in the next few months. They had all seemed a little snotty to me, but that was to be expected; when it came to dance, everyone thought they were the special ones. That was how any of us got anywhere, after all. I was sure they would warm up to me as time went by, I just needed to prove I belonged here as much as anyone else did.
It was a cool, crisp day in early February, and I inhaled a lungful of the cold air and smiled. I could already feel the skip in my step, dancing to a beat I hadn’t even heard yet. I was doing this, really doing this, and nothing was going to stop me now.
I wasn’t just doing this for me, of course. I was doing it for my mother, too. I felt a pang in my chest as I thought of her, and hoped, somewhere, she was watching me do this – watching me go to my very first day as a professional ballerina.
When she came all the way over here to the US, I knew this was what she had dreamed of, a million times over; getting taken seriously, being given the legitimacy of recognition which would allow her to make her way in this world as a real performer. She’d had the skill when she had been training back in her home country of Serbia, and when she fled over here in the nineties, she had sworn to herself she wasn’t going to forget any of her passions from back home.
“I know what I want to do, and I go after it,” she explained to me, as I lay next to her in bed one morning. We’d spend Sunday mornings curled up together, drinking tea, and she would fill me in on all the stories that she was able to remember from back in Serbia. Dad was out at the store, which he’d open early to make sure he caught all the prodigious weekend shoppers, and I would stay at home with Mom and listen to her voice, still twinged with the remnants of an accent she had done her best to filter out, as she regaled me with everything that had happened in her past.
Of course, most of those memories were tinged with the reminders of her sickness. The hacking cough, the bloody tissues, the color of her skin as it shifted to something more pallid than I had ever seen it before. The cancer moved so slowly, and then so fast I hardly had time to keep up with it. By the time she was gone, I felt as though I had been fooled – fooled into thinking she would be around forever. That she would survive what she was going through.
But she hadn’t even made it to see me as a teenager, passing away just after my twelfth birthday. Dad had wrapped his arms around me at the funeral and held me tight, and I’d clung to him with everything I’d had, not wanting to let go. Knowing he was the only thing I could rely on in this world now that she was gone.
I had started dancing when I was barely four, Mom dancing me around the living room and showing me the steps she remembered from her days performing. She’d done it for years, never at a particularly high level but always committed to the point of obsession, and she wanted nothing more than for me to be able to pick up her dreams where she had left off.
“You have such grace about you,” she would tell me. “You can dance if you want to.”
After she passed, I threw myself into my dance training as best I could, not wanting to lose that connection with her. I might not have been the best to start off with, but I was the one with the commitment, the one who was willing to do anything at all to prove she had what it took. And soon, I rose to the top of my class, able to brush off everyone else and make sure I was the one in charge, the one impressing the agents who passed through our classes, the one who was talked about as a possibility for real success.
Ballet is something that requires utter and complete obsession in order to succeed. You can’t be a part-time ballerina and expect anything good to come of it. You have to be willing to throw yourself head-first into everything you’re doing, willing to practice and practice to the point of harm before you get it right. That’s what matters, and that’s what I always had after the death of my mother. As though, if I just pushed hard enough and kept trying with all my heart, I might be able to bring her back.
Of course, I never did, but I managed to secure myself an audition with the Downtown Ballet Company, a troupe with notable presence in the ballet scene in the city. It was a start – more than that, it was an opportunity, and one I knew I would never turn down. I went to the audition and made sure I danced harder and better than everyone else there, and sure enough, they offered me a spot.
Which was what I was on my way to right at the moment when it happened.
I could still remember the sound of the people around me, how my focus on where I was going seemed to drown them out as I thought about just what it meant that I was going to make it there. I could still hardly believe this was really happening, but at the same time, I knew this was what I deserved – what I was owed. I was going to start my career here, and I was going to make sure that everyone knew this was where I belonged. And if my mother was looking down from somewhere above me, then she would know without a shadow of a doubt I was doing this for her, that I was carrying on her legacy as best I could. The only way I knew—
The silence was what I remembered first. Nothing but dead, numb silence. And then, the pain – the shock of it, opening my eyes in the middle of the street and feeling that agony rush down from my neck to the small of my back, shooting along both legs like angry firebolts. The people I had tuned out before, I could hear them now, the sharp sound of their screams, of the chaos that flooded my senses. Cars screeched to halts around me, the cold tarmac against my back, and I tried to work out what had just happened – before I sank back into the black once more.
When I woke up again, I was in a hospital. The first thing I noticed, and was grateful for, was that it was quiet in here. No chaos, no cars, no nothing. But what was I doing in a hospital? It took me a moment to work out what had happened, to recall the pain as it ran down my body, and start to put the pieces together about what that might have meant.
“Darling...”
I recognized my father’s voice, at least I could hang on to that. I tried to lift my head, but the shock of pain stopped me in my tracks. He rose to his feet from where he had been sitting at the side of my bed and gripped my hand tightly.
“Oh, you’re awake.” He sighed and sank down a little so he could look me in the eyes. “How do you feel?”
“I... I don’t know,” I admitted. “What happened? Why am I in here?”
I was quite sure that I already knew the answer to that question, but I had to hear it from him. I had to hear him say those words I was so dreading hearing. If there was one person in the world who could make me feel as though this wasn’t as bad as I thought it was, it was my father.
He sighed again, heavily, as though that was the last thing he had wanted to hear come out of my mouth. He reached up to smooth a strand of hair back from my head, his touch gentle, and I could see the sadness in his eyes. The very same kind he’d had when he told me my mother had passed. My stomach flipped in my panic. Whatever this was, it was real, it was serious, and it wasn’t something I could hide from.
“Dad, what’s going on?” I demanded. Even the effort of speaking seemed to hurt, or maybe it was just the fear of what he was going to say next.
“You were....you were in a car accident,” he explained. “A car swerved on to the sidewalk as you were heading to your troupe, and it hit you.”
I closed my eyes. I could hear it now, the crunch of metal, the squeal of the tires, everything my brain had tried to save me from by blocking it all out. I had been in the middle of a thought and it had cut through me like a blunt knife, casting me into the air and sending me crashing down on the ground again. I could see it all, in my mind’s eye, the horror of it, the fear, the dread. The knowing that something had happened and I wasn’t going to be able to ever go back from.
“Who was it?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Nobody does. They were... they were gone by the time the ambulance got there. A few people said they had caught the license plate number, but I don’t think we’re going to have much to go on.”
His voice was laced with a sad, apologetic tone, and I almost wanted to tell him he had nothing to be sorry for – but I didn’t have it in me to comfort anyone else right now. The pain and shock of it all was making me selfish, and there was something else that I needed to know, something more pressing. Something I couldn’t hide from any longer.
“How bad is it?” I asked, softly. He knew just what I was saying – I wanted to know what kind of chance I stood of ever dancing again. He owed me the truth, then and there, and I prayed he would give it to me. I couldn’t stand the thought of having false hope dangled before me, only to see it ripped away when the time came to be honest about the extent of my injuries.
He lowered his gaze, not able to look at me. I knew then it was worse than he would ever want to put into words. How long had I been in here, that he had been able to talk to the doctors and get a good idea of how long it would take me to recover from my injuries? My stomach churned near-painfully with the horror of it, but I did my best to keep my gaze steady, asking him, pleading with him to tell me the truth.
“They’re not sure how long it will take you to be able to walk again,” he confessed. I bit back a sob of shock. Not even able to walk? I remembered the pain shooting down my spine, and I realized how bad it must have been. I had been through plenty of pain in the course of training for my ballet career, but nothing that had felt anywhere close to that. This was serious.
“And even when you do, the damage to your left leg is severe enough that they... they fear that you’ll always have something of a limp,” he explained.
“And the dancing?” I asked him, softly. I knew what the answer was going to be, but I needed him to say it out loud, I needed him to tell me what was going on inside his head right now. I needed to hear it from him, the truth of how awful this really was.
He shook his head – one quick gesture that ruined my entire life.
“You won’t be able to dance at that level again,” he told me. He couldn’t even look at me. I wasn’t able to hold back the tears any longer, feeling them begin to flow down my cheeks, but hardly able to acknowledge that I was the one producing them. It felt like it must have been someone else entirely, someone I had never met before, someone who would never be able to dance the way that I had for most of my life.
Because I didn’t know myself without dance. And had I lost that connection, the one connection I had left to my mother, when it escaped me, too. It wasn’t just a career, it was an identity that had been taken from me, by some clumsy driver tearing down the street, too careless to keep their eyes on the road.
My whole life, snatched away from me in an instant. I was lucky to be alive, I knew that much – but at the same time, I wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t have been more merciful to just let myself go, right there on the street, than to live this life devoid of all the things that made me happy.
