As soon as it was daylight, Hunter walked the city, revisiting all the places that held her memory—the bend in the river where she’d sat on the stone wall and told him he would be king of the world; the streetcar she used to ride up and down St. Charles, pointing out the grand houses where she would go for tea when she became famous; the cathedral where she’d stood in white satin and pledged her love to another man.
And finally the tree.
Just after dark when the fireflies began their dance of lights, Hunter returned to the live-oak tree that guarded the two tiny cottages where they’d grown up. Hunter La Farge and Kathleen Shaw, poor white trash with last names their mothers had made up. From the time Hunter had rescued her from the tree where she was throwing stones at the children calling her a bastard, they’d stood two against the world.
He stood underneath the tree with the moss touching his face and fireflies lighting the branches like tiny Christmas tree bulbs.
“Goodbye, Kathleen,” he said. “Goodbye, my love.”
The leaves whispered in the wind, a ghost voice bidding him farewell.
Inside the cottage, he propped his hips against the faded Formica countertop and telephoned Rick to get a report on his diamond mines.
“The mines in the Transvaal are producing like Aladdin’s Cave,” Rick said. “We’re going to be obscenely rich.”
“I’m already obscenely rich. And I’d give every penny I have for one glimpse of Kathleen.”
“You don’t sound good, Hunter. When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t take too long, buddy. It’s dull out here on the dark continent without you. I haven’t been threatened by a croc since you left.”
A shadow moved under the oak tree. Riveted, Hunter stared out the window. Behind the curtain of moss was the silhouette of a woman with her arms outstretched. In the moonlight her hands shone as white as lilies.
“Hunter?” Rick said. “Are you there?”
The phone dangled from its cord as Hunter bolted toward the door. If he was going to be visited by a phantom, he was going to confront it, face-to-face.
He approached the tree cautiously, afraid that noise and haste would make the vision disappear. As he moved closer he saw the lithe outline of a woman’s body. She was dressed in black and her face was hidden by a dark veil.
She stood unmoving, her head tilted to one side, her hands nestled against her breasts like two snow-white doves.
Hunter could hardly breathe. He was so close to her now that the moss brushed against his cheeks. Still, she didn’t move.
“Are you a vision from heaven or a vision from hell?” he said.
There was no answer. A sultry fragrance perfumed the air, and he knew it was too rich and too close to be the gardenias.
He reached his hand through the mossy curtain, still half-afraid that the woman would prove to be a phantom.
“Who’s there?”
With his hand in the air, Hunter froze. The voice, deep and sultry, came from behind the black veil.
“Kathleen?” Hunter whispered.
She reached out slowly, and when she took her hands away from her breasts, a shaft of moonlight pierced the thick leaves and fell on the gold locket resting against her soft, creamy skin.
Shock almost sent Hunter to his knees. It was the locket he’d left in the knothole of the tree thirteen years earlier right before he’d climbed aboard the freighter going to Africa. His farewell gift to Kathleen. His pledge that he would return to claim her.
But it couldn’t be. She was dead.
The moon shuffled behind a cloud once more, and they were left alone in the velvet darkness.
“Is someone there?” she said. It was Kathleen’s voice he heard, Kathleen’s hands he saw reaching toward him.
“Don’t you know me, Kathleen? Don’t you remember?”
She took a step forward then, her hand stretched out in front of her. It grazed the mossy curtain, two inches from the place where his own hand hovered.
“Is anyone there?”
Even in the dark with the veil over her face, she should have seen him. Standing so close, she should have heard him.
The truth hit Hunter with the force of an explosion, and he doubled his hands into fists and shook them at the uncaring sky. Kathleen stood on the other side of the lacy Spanish moss, the gold locket shining against her cleavage.
The locket drew him like a beacon, and he reached out, his hand hovering so close, his fingertips almost skimmed her satiny skin. She tipped her head back, and behind the veil, her eyes stared straight into his.
“Kat,” he whispered. “Kat.”
She neither saw nor heard.
Silently cursing himself, he drew his hand back. He didn’t dare touch her, not in the dark while she was alone under the tree. She would be terrified.
She sighed, the sound as soft as wind through the leaves, then stepped back until she could touch the trunk of the tree.
“I must have been dreaming,” she said. And then she turned around and left the live oak with small, even steps, counting under her breath as she walked.
Hunter watched until she was across the yard and through the door of the tiny cottage where she’d been born; then he leaned his face against the rough bark of the tree. Her fragrance and the warmth of her hand still lingered there.
He closed his eyes, and down the corridors of the past came her laughter, as clear as bells.
“Listen, Hunter? Do you hear the music?” She lifted her arms and twirled around and around the tree. “I’m going to dance forever.” Dropping beside him on the grass, she covered his face with kisses. “Oh, Hunter. Don’t ever let the music stop for me.”
Hunter’s shoulders shook as he cried without sound. He’d let the music stop for Kathleen. How would she ever forgive him?
o0o
Kathleen felt the presence of the cottage before she got to the door. Resisting the urge to hold her hands out in front of her, she counted the remaining steps to the entrance.
Exactly four. And the door was where it was supposed to be.
Triumphant, she pushed it open and marched inside.
“I did it, Martha. I did it without a cane.”
Martha smelled like bath talcum and the tart lemony soap she used. Her large, solid hand caught Kathleen’s and squeezed her encouragement.
Kathleen took off her hat and hung it on the peg beside the door, then made her way to the table and sat in a straight-backed chair. She tried to move with the slow grace of a ballerina instead of the slow uncertainty of the blind. Sometimes, when she was tempted to curse the darkness, she remembered the final darkness that had claimed her husband, and she knew that being alive was a miracle.
It wasn’t the darkness that bothered her most, but the silence.
“Is the music playing, Martha?”
Martha squeezed her hand once. Yes.
“You won’t let it stop, will you?”
Two squeezes of the large, capable hand. No.
Kathleen held herself very still, and she imagined she felt the beat of the music vibrating the old wooden floor and coming through the soles of her feet.
“Martha, I had the strangest feeling at the tree tonight.” Silence swirled around her, and she pictured the other woman leaning forward, perhaps puzzled by the mysteries of Kathleen’s mind. Martha was a nurse, practical as a pair of rain boots, and just as sturdy.
“I felt Hunter there with me.”
The silence beat through her, and then she felt the glass that was pressed into her hand. Warm milk. It was Martha’s cure for everything.
“Are you going to make me drink this?”
One tap on the back of her hand. Yes.
Kathleen shoved the glass aside and ran her hands through her hair. It felt heavy and glossy. At least she still had her hair. And her arms and legs.
“Hunter was so real to me tonight that I felt his hands on me.”
She shivered at the memory. The presence she’d sensed in the dark had the power of gravity, drawing her out of herself, so that she felt as if she were trapped inside Hunter’s skin with his heart beating against her chest and his blood flowing through her veins. With the old wildness filling her, she’d flown free of the silent darkness and had tumbled headlong into the world of stunning color and heat and light that they’d visited so many years ago.
Even now, sitting on the hard chair in the small kitchen with the old smells of rusty faucets and molding linoleum, she still carried a part of that private world with her, still felt the heat rushing through her blood.
Impossible dreams, now. Impossible love.
“I’m glad it was only my imagination,” she said. “I’d rather die than have Hunter see me like this.”
Martha pressed the glass back into her hand, then tapped it twice, harder this time. Smiling, Kathleen picked up the warm milk.
“You’re a tyrant, Martha.”
Kathleen drank the milk, then pushed back her chair.
“I’ll be in my studio. And Martha... tell the president I’m not to be disturbed, and decline all invitations from England’s queen.”
She hoped Martha laughed. Laughter was certainly better than tears.
The president wouldn’t be calling, of course, nor the queen. Both of them thought she was dead. And that’s exactly how Kathleen wanted it, at least for a while.
She had no intention of being an object of pity. She’d stay dead until she could grace the stage once more, not as a blind ballerina but as the prima ballerina she’d worked so hard to become.
Sudden guilt slashed her. The news of her death would have devastated her Forever Friends. Still, if she contacted Helen and B. J. and Maxie now, they’d all drop everything and race down to New Orleans to take care of her. The last thing Kat wanted was to disrupt their lives, and as much as she longed to be with them again, she’d couldn’t bear the idea that they, too, might pity her.
Because she wasn’t concentrating, she walked smack into a wall.
She put out her hands to reorient herself. The doorway to her studio was three steps to her right, and when she was inside, she walked the perimeter, holding on to the walls and counting the steps. It wasn’t grand like the one in her flat in New York and the ones Earl had built for her in their houses in Charleston and Paris. But it was full of memories.
When she’d first discovered her love of and talent for dance, she and her mother had knocked down the wall between Kathleen’s bedroom and the dining room, then sold all the furniture in those two rooms except the bed in order to buy mirrors and a ballet barre.
After the room was finished, Karen Shaw had cupped her daughter’s face with her work-roughened hands and said, “You’re going to be the grandest ballerina of them all. Just you wait and see.”
The mirrors were gone now. Martha had taken them down so Kathleen wouldn’t crash into the glass and cut herself.
She went to the small cabinet that held her collection of CDs and ran her hands over the Braille labels. Tchaikovsky. Tonight she would reprise her greatest role. When the CD was in place, Kathleen counted steps to the center of the studio and stood very still, trying to feel the vibration of the music through the soles of her feet and the pores of her skin.
There was nothing except silence.
She went back to the sound system and ran her hands lightly along the front until she felt the knob that controlled volume. When she turned it up, she felt the first vibrations of music through her arms.
“I’m going to do it,” she said. “Just you wait and see.”
Sinking to the floor, she put on her ballet shoes.
o0o
Hunter heard the music coming from Kathleen’s house. Swan Lake. He’d seen her dance Odette/Odile in Paris, sitting at the back of the opera house with his glasses trained on center stage. She hadn’t even known he was there.
Except for a small light in the kitchen, her house was dark. The music came from Kathleen’s studio. He and Karen Shaw used to sit cross-legged on the floor and applaud while Kathleen spun around in the sun.
My very own spotlight, she’d say. Look. I’m dancing.
There was no sun now, no spotlight. Only darkness and the music.
Leaving the tree, he crossed the yard that separated their houses until he was standing just outside the pool of light pouring from the kitchen window. Every fiber in his body vibrated with the need to rush into her house, take Kathleen in his arms, and never let go. But it was very late... perhaps thirteen years too late.
He stood in the darkness and strained his eyes toward her studio window. At first he could see nothing, but gradually he made out her shadow, barely visible in the faint light that filtered down the hall from the kitchen and the small glow of the sound system. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the shadow became more distinct.
“My God. She’s dancing.”
Kathleen spun around the room, not in time to the music, but two beats behind, like a graceful shadow hurrying to catch its owner. Suddenly she wobbled. Hunter caught his breath. Kathleen’s arms fought the air until she had her balance, then she spun away once more.
And went crashing into the wall.
Tense, Hunter rushed to help her and was halfway to her kitchen door before he stopped himself.
“Fool. Do you think she wants your help now?”
Through the window he saw Kathleen slump her shoulders and bow her head, a picture of total defeat.
“Come on... come on,” he whispered. “You can do it.”
As if she’d heard, she straightened her shoulders and walked back to the center of the room. Then, with arms lifted and chin up, she leaped into the air once more.
Her landing was solid. In the darkness Hunter silently applauded.
“Brava, Kathleen. Brava.”
With dizzying speed she spun around the room... once, twice. Then she toppled like a tower of cards, vanishing from his view. Hunter clenched his hands into fists and counted to twenty-five before she rose up once more. She walked to the center of the room and stood with her arms outstretched and her chin pointed upward.
She waited, still as a carving while the magnificent strains of Tchaikovsky flowed around her. Hunter held his breath. Suddenly she exploded into movement.
“That’s my Kat.” Slowly he unclenched his hands.
The kitchen light went out, and the studio was plunged into darkness. As music poured into the night a fog settled over the land. Feeling like a thief, he stood outside her window, waiting and watching until at last the music stopped. Then he went to his bed and dreamed that he was searching for Kathleen in the fog.