Chapter Six
Istep out onto Arabella’s chilly balcony a few minutes before eight a.m. with my black coffee to take the call from Joel Carson, my mom’s friend, the one who’s taken over the bulk of responsibility for all the logistics back home since my mom died.
It’s overcast and gray, as it so often is in London. My phone rings exactly at eight. My heart plunges as I answer.
“Hello?”
“Jocelyn? Hi, honey, how you holdin’ up?”
It’s my third time talking to him on the phone and it’s only ever bad news. I’ve actually never even met him. All our correspondence the last week has been via text, and he’s one of those older guys who texts with proper punctuation, which always makes the conversation seem weird and serious. But his tone on the phone is completely different. He sounds present and kind of cool.
“I’m okay. How about you?”
“I’m good, I’m good. So, you have a few minutes to catch up about all the stuff going on with your mom’s estate?”
I know what he means by estate , but it sounds like a laughable exaggeration of what is really just a two-bedroom shithole in sweaty Louisiana.
“Yep, I have time,” I say.
Joel was named executor of my mom’s…estate, which was fine with me, because I wouldn’t know the first thing about trying to handle any of this stuff. When he asked if I wanted to have a funeral, I said no. My mom didn’t know enough people. Not enough people who’d still admit to knowing her—all the men she had affairs with didn’t count. Although, since I didn’t know about Joel, I wonder how many other people I didn’t know about.
I also don’t know what Joel’s deal is. I assume he’s a lawyer or something who she slept with somewhere along the way who happened to be one of the good ones.
Joel tells me that, since I said I don’t want anything from the house, it will all be sold or donated. He said that the house was listed for sale and they were hopeful it would sell quickly. He said her car had been irreparable after the accident.
My mind flashes with a horrible imagining of what her final moments might have been like. A car accident feels so dark and sudden and frightening. Did she feel anything after? When they took her to the hospital, did she know? Her heart was still beating, barely, but was she aware? Would she have heard me if I had gone to her?
My breath becomes shallow.
I clear my mind.
“Just do whatever with the car. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need anything from the house or anything else. You have my permission to do whatever you think is best with everything left.”
He seems to sense my unease and gives me a minute before continuing on.
“Your mom had a life insurance policy,” he begins, my hope lifting just a little, “and that was just enough to handle her debt and the fees for the cremation.”
I breathe in deeply. “Okay. So it’s net neutral, basically.”
“Yes, except…for Mimi.”
“What about Mimi?” I ask stupidly.
“Her care home is several thousand dollars a month, and though there’s enough payment for this month, after that…there aren’t any more funds.”
I start to panic. “What about the sale of the house?”
Shameful as it is, I never thought about the cost of Mimi’s care. I had assumed Mimi had savings that paid for it.
“To be honest, it needs a lot of work and most of the sale price is going to the mortgage. Anything it makes, of course, is going to you, but I wouldn’t expect it to cover more than a couple months and that’s it.”
My body goes hot. “What happens then?”
He hesitates. “That’s what we have to figure out.”
I feel like I’m falling. My eyes catch on Arabella’s pack of Sobranie cigarettes and matches inside. I open the door, grab them, and light one. My friend Sylvie and I used to share cigarettes on my old fire escape and talk about everything in our lives. A lot of what I did was talk about how much I hated my mom. And how much I love Mimi.
“Well…what are our options?” I ask.
He tells me exactly how much the care home costs per month. “Your grandmother needs intensive memory care. And your mom”—he gives a fond laugh—“she wouldn’t settle for any less than the best facility.”
“Uh…wow, that’s…that’s really expensive.”
“I know, honey. I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” I blink down at my feet. “That’s really how much my mom was paying a month?” I ask, astounded.
“Yes,” he says. “She worked hard for the money to pay for it. She didn’t want your grandmother in a depressing place. She told me that.”
“Yes.”
“You could move her to another facility, though that could be costly as well, and if you want her to receive the same quality of care, then I imagine the price will stay around the same.”
“How did you know my mom?” I ask suddenly.
He hesitates, and then laughs, taken off guard. “Kind of a funny story, actually. We have the same therapist. We met in the waiting room. I was kind of a mess when I met her and she was just this great, funny, strong woman who came into my life. I was actually at a wine bar with her when I met my husband. She walked right up to him and told him I thought he was cute. The rest is history, as they say.”
I drag on the cigarette, feeling a little dizzy from it. Or is it from the surprise of this new information?
My mom was in therapy ? That doesn’t seem like her at all. Is there a chance she was trying to change? To grow?
I suppose this is the kind of story that I would have heard at her funeral. In theory. Somehow, I sort of thought no one would show up. No one would have anything to say. How many other stories about my mom like this are out there?
To Joel, it sounds like she was…well, normal . It feels impossible to believe it, but there’s a chance other people saw her differently than I did.
Of course, thinking otherwise is ridiculously juvenile. People don’t exist in a vacuum.
There’s something about Joel that seems so normal and cool. And capable. And grown-up. I can’t reconcile that with the fact that my mom and he even got along. And that he’s gay, no less, so presumably she didn’t just get him into bed.
The concept that my mom was more than I knew is far too much for me to consider right now. At this hour. When it’s this cold out. When I’m about to audition. When it’s so recent. When I hated her as much as I did.
So, I sweep it away under the rug like I have been doing with every other emotion related to my mom. Or at least the ones I seem to have a modicum of control over.
My chest stings. I glance inside and see Arabella is gesturing at the door. Her hair is swept back in a bun and she has her dance bag with the ribbons from her pointe shoes cascading out.
“Listen, Joel, I have to go. Thank you so much for all your help. And thanks for talking so late your time—I know the time difference made it difficult to set up a call.”
“Don’t give it another thought. We’ll talk soon when there’s more information to go off of. You take care of yourself, that’s what Brandy would want.”
I say goodbye and then get off the call and go inside, where Arabella is checking her makeup in one of the many mirrors.
“Sorry, I had one of your cigarettes,” I say.
“What’s mine is yours, darling. Mi cáncer de pulmón es su cáncer de pulmón .” I get the gist of what she says and smile politely.
“Come on. They said you could take class this morning. You can borrow some of my ballet warm-ups. I keep most of it at the theater in my dressing room.”
I follow her out the door thankful that what I grabbed the night before from Jordan’s were those pointe shoes, ballet shoes, and some leotards and tights. My heart is pounding at the idea of dancing again. I didn’t think Arabella would call immediately. I thought I had a few days at least. But I’ll take what I get right now.
Open classes are one thing, but dancing with a company—that’s a whole other level. Especially when, suddenly, my whole life and Mimi’s seem to depend on it. My thoughts swirl sickly as I do mental calculations. Even if I get taken on to dance with the Royal National Ballet—and that’s a big if, even with my talent and experience—then with Mimi’s bills, I will still be scraping together the money to eat and live.
And on top of all of this, I pushed away Jordan. Jordan, who would at least be able to keep me calm in this storm. Plus, he’s about to do a show that his agent says will make him a millionaire by next tax season. Maybe I should go back to him.
I cringe as I realize I just thought that. Oh my god , what’s wrong with me?
There’s always a latent fear lying beneath my skin. A fear that I am my mom. That I’m just one bad day—or one young retirement—away from drowning financially, living in whatever shithole I can afford, sleeping with anyone and everyone who might be able to get me further in life.
I am not my mother. I am not Brandy Banks.
It’s good I’m not with Jordan. I need to be able to stand on my own. I have to figure things out without someone else to depend on.
I can’t lean on him. And right now…I really can’t. The fact that I can’t—and even that I’m having to lean so hard on this stranger, Arabella—really scares me.
Arabella links her arm through mine. “I’m sure they’re going to love you,” she says. “The only thing is…you’re going to need a donor.”
“A donor?”
She reels, looking astonished. “You don’t have donors in the U.S.?”
“I mean, we do, but no one really talks about it. And I never even met mine. The company always emphasized the importance of donors. And we were frequently told to behave well because of the donors, but they were kind of like an out-of-sight boss for me personally. But that really didn’t have anything to do with other dancers. Some formed close relationships and enjoyed perks. But I—well, I guess I was lucky and just got to focus on dancing.”
She nods slowly as we keep walking. “Well…it’s a bit different here. I’ll tell you that.”
“Different how?” I had stupidly assumed with all the government funding for the arts in England and Europe that it wasn’t much of a thing here.
She exhales. “It’s a whole game. It’s a whole part of the job.”
What I know for a fact about donors is that they essentially invest in dancers. The more we succeed, the more they do. It’s like the stock market, only instead of numbers, it’s us. It’s our bodies. Our careers. Our lives.
I take a deep breath. To my donor in New York, I was a tax write-off. But I’ve heard horror stories about the experience for some girls. Not only do you feel a bit like a puppy being paraded to find an owner, but some feel they are treated like a high-end escort. Especially when it’s a man. I take the hair tie from my wrist and pull my hair up off my neck and shoulders and immediately feel myself cool down. I’ve suddenly become very hot despite the chill outside. I tie it up in a messy bun.
“If I’m honest with you,” says Arabella conspiratorially, “I kind of love the game. There are still very strict rules about donors and dancers. You’re obviously not allowed to sleep together and it’s meant to be all very protected. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a few benefits from the whole thing. My donor is named Cadence Montgomery—her family like invested in Harrods or something like this, and dios mío is she rich!”
She practically screams the last word and I laugh. “How rich?”
“So rich. And she takes me to all these events where there are other rich men! I haven’t paid for a meal in two years. I had a boyfriend paying my rent until last week. Which is why the extra room.”
“What happened?”
She rolls her eyes. “It was kind of a fucked-up story actually. His wife is a quite important political figure. I’ll stay quiet to protect her anonymity,” she says, putting a finger to her lips playfully. “And when she found out he was sleeping with me, they apparently had this huge fight, the fight turned to lovemaking, and then it turned out that the whole thing brought the spark of spicy stuff back into their love life. They would talk about me in bed; she would say, Tell me what you did with Arabella. ” She says this part in a bad English accent. “So eventually, they got the idea—maybe she did, maybe he did, I don’t know—that they should invite in the real thing. Me!”
“They…she found out he was cheating with you and then she invited you to, what, a threesome?”
“Not just one,” she says, “we did it for a few months actually. But then it got messy.”
“I see,” I say, not used to feeling like the prude in the room. “Well, at least they didn’t kink-shame themselves.”
She smiles again. “I’ll introduce you to some people. We’ll get you sorted out.”
A half hour later we walk up to a pale pink door in a building that must be hundreds of years old. She pulls it open and warm heat breathes out onto us.
“Follow me, new girl,” she says.