Blade

Chapter Twenty-Four Ana

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ana

Now

Dawn steps aside and politely welcomes me in. Like I’m a stranger. Like we have no history between us.

I follow robotically. Accepting her invitation to take my coat. To remove my boots. Shake off the snow on the doormat. I walk behind her in my wool socks and say nothing as she tells me which way to go.

“The living room is through there,” she says. Like I haven’t been here before. “I made a fire.”

Dawn sits down on a love seat and motions for me to take the sofa.

The furniture looks new, with rounded arms and straight backs.

Large square cushions made of linen. Light gray.

Four decorative pillows sit in the corners.

Off white. Gone are the deep reds and blues.

The soft velvet. And the television that once hung over the fireplace—the one that would play my programs—has been replaced with a framed print of Monet’s Haystacks.

She sits up straight on the edge of the love seat.

Legs crossed. Both hands folded around her knee.

My mind lags, steps behind, fighting to make sense of things.

I mirror her movements on the sofa. Fold one leg over the other.

Interlace my hands on my knee. My back is perfectly straight, just like hers.

I hear her speaking, but I’m disoriented by this room, new and different, scrambling my memory. And by this woman who has loomed so large for my entire adult life, and most of my childhood, but who now looks at me without recollection.

“Ms. Robbins?” She’s been speaking, and I’ve said nothing. A deer in headlights of my own making. “How can I help you?”

I close my eyes and search for knowledge, drawing from my years in the courtroom, being thrown curveballs by prosecutors and judges. My clients. Questions in the air. Needing to find an answer. Scrambling. Everything at stake. And I whisper to myself the same words I do then.

Do your fucking job, Ana. I open my eyes.

“Anything you can tell me about Grace would be helpful,” I say, my mouth bone dry, voice trembling. But I get the words out. “And her relationship with Emile.”

Dawn clears her throat and tilts her head. “I really wish I had something useful to tell you,” she says with a shrug. “I’ve thought about nothing else since I heard the news. And after they found the blood on her skate . . . Well, you can imagine it came as quite a shock. What is she saying?”

“That she didn’t do it,” I tell her. My voice is steady, though it feels like it belongs to someone else. Like I’ve been divided into two people. The girl crying in the closet at Avery Hall. The lawyer saving a child in a courtroom somewhere back home. “I’d like to understand the history.”

“Well,” Dawn says, more quickly than before. “There was nothing out of the ordinary. Grace has had a spectacular year. Her training has been flawless. As for the rest of her life, it’s not really my business.”

Her eyes are wide, like she’s trying to hold an expression. I recognize this body language from my work. She’s defensive, and knowing how to read her feels like a lethal weapon I can use.

“Whose business would it be?” I ask. The lawyer kicking into gear, calming the child in the closet. “Grace lived here year-round. We used to call girls like that Orphans.” I speak of my past like it has no power over me. I speak of it like it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Dawn sinks back against the square cushion. She pulls a throw pillow under her right arm. She appears casual. Nonchalant. But it’s stiff. Orchestrated. She’s having to think about it.

“Have you spoken to Shannon Finch? She’s the dorm mother,” Dawn asks. “From what I understand, she takes a very close interest in the girls’ lives. And Grace’s mother. Jolene Montgomery. She was a skater. I imagine she was very involved, even from afar.”

I think now of what I would do if Dawn was on the stand.

Or in an interrogation room. A stenographer taking down every word.

A device recording our voices. Maybe even a video, capturing every inch of her face.

The wrinkles growing deeper when she pretends to be surprised.

The corners of her mouth curling as she fakes a smile.

“Yes,” I say. “I have.” I don’t tell her what I’ve learned. Instead, I press forward. “What do you know about her relationship with Emile?”

“I can only speak to what I observed at the rink,” she says, this time with a little shimmy of her shoulders like she’s shaking off the question. “Emile has a wonderful rapport with the skaters. He’s very casual with them.”

“Casual?” I ask.

“He jokes around with them. Makes them laugh.” She says this as if he hasn’t been murdered right down the mountain outside her house. In the woods by the side of the field. “We make a good team that way.”

“Good cop, bad cop?” I ask, remembering the first thing Jolene said to me about Emile Dresiér. “He dries the tears Dawn makes you cry.” I picture Kayla mocking her. “That’s so poetic.” And the anger begins to rise.

“Well—I don’t like to think of myself as a bad cop. But I am stricter, and I don’t joke around,” she says. “You said you skated here years ago. Was Emile here then? You must know what I’m talking about.”

She’s lying now. I know she remembers me. And Jolene, and Kayla and Indy. I whisper again, to myself. Do your job, Ana.

“So nothing more than that?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I have a lot of students, Ms. Robbins. I can’t be their coach and their mother. There’s no time, and it would be inappropriate.”

I want to scream now, at the top of my lungs, into this room where we watched my videos.

This house where she had me for secret dinners.

Picked me up on the corner so no one would see.

I wonder if she really believes this. That she did her job as a coach and left it there.

That what happened when we left the ice was none of her business. None of her making.

“But you must hear things,” I say, finding the right words as I consider the possibility that she believes this. That she had no idea what damage her training methods caused. “From the mothers in the stands. The other coaches.”

“What things?” she asks.

Fight, Ana. Throw the punch.

“Things like Emile planning to leave The Palace and take some of your best skaters with him?”

She reaches her hand to the back of her neck and gently squeezes a small, tight bun of bleached blond hair.

I have a flash to another time I saw her do this.

It was at a competition in Minneapolis. The year I made Nationals.

It was Indy’s turn to skate, and she was by the boards. I remember every detail from that day.

I train my eyes on her face, my heart in my chest with thoughts of Indy.

I picture me and Dawn in the foyer, which I can see from the corner of my eye.

On the day I told her about the bruise and begged her to help.

She shoved that skate into my hands, mocking me.

Knowing I could never do anything to hurt her.

The desire was there. For Indy, but also for myself.

I could feel what she was doing to me. The weed growing inside.

I wanted to take that skate and press it against her throat.

Press the heel of the blade into her skull. But I froze.

I move in for the kill now, the way I wanted to then.

“Emile was going to leave and take your skaters with him, and I think you knew. But more than that,” I say. “You knew about the information he was giving to a reporter. The exposé about The Palace.”

She stares at me, her face steeled. But I can feel her blood pulsing through her veins as if it were my own.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to answer.” I hold my hand in the air and trace her outline with my finger. “I can see it,” I tell her. “On your face.”

Dawn leans forward again, her arms crossed at her chest. “And I can see that you think you’re clever.

All grown up. Some big lawyer,” she says.

“You think you’re somehow better than this place.

Better than these girls who are making it to Nationals and the Olympics.

Because it’s just skating, right? It doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? ”

She says this to drag me back to the time in my life when skating was everything. When I lived and breathed it. When I lived and breathed her. But she’s wrong. I don’t know if I realized that until just now.

“This isn’t about me,” I say. “I’m a lawyer now—and Grace is my client.

And tomorrow I’m going to tell the assistant district attorney that she needs to widen the investigation.

There’s a three-day window for Emile’s murder.

I imagine there’s some time in there that you can’t account for.

Living alone the way you do. You had access to Grace’s locker.

And she was such an easy target, wasn’t she?

You knew exactly how to do it. You showed me, right here in this room. ”

I look directly into Dawn’s eyes. I hear the question inside my head. Are you really doing this? Do you really have no fear? How many times have I sat in this room, desperate for her affection? Hanging on her every word?

I look at her now, saggy skin hanging over frail bones. The smell of cheap cosmetics. But something else. A rotting from the inside. Maybe that’s just the anger coming out, any way it can. Through petty, juvenile cruelty. But I swear I can smell the weakness.

Then Dawn tilts her head to the side like she’s having a pleasant recollection. “Rhapsody in Blue,” she says. “I remember now. It was a free skate, wasn’t it?”

And I think, yes, the free skate my last year at The Palace. The one Jolene was playing on her computer earlier that morning.

“You had the most beautiful layback,” she says. “We put it at the start of the program, didn’t we?”

I make split-second calculations about where this is going. Whether I should respond, let her lead us down this road, diffusing my accusations.

“Yes,” I answer. There’s no point in denying it. I haven’t forgotten one moment with this woman.

“I remember,” she says. “We did that so you would get more points for the jumps.”

“Yes,” I say again. Everything was about the points. We put the hardest jumps after the halfway mark.

She smiles now, and I know—I just know—I’ve made a tactical error opening this door to the past. Behind the armor plates of my accomplishments, my knowledge, is the girl crying in the closet, and she knows it.

“The truth is,” she says. “It was really the only thing you were any good at.”

The words worm their way inside and start to rewrite the past. I was never a promising skater. It was all a lie. Dawn was just doing her job. She wasn’t trying to hurt me, hurt us. We were just weak, alone. The Orphans. She did nothing wrong. We just couldn’t handle it.

I look to the entrance of the foyer where she held that blade to my temple. Then the dining room where she served me dinner with linen place mats and crystal glasses. And I think of the night when there were three settings.

I try to shrug her off.

“I’ve thought over the years,” I tell her, “that if I’d been a better jumper, I could have made it to the podium at Nationals.

Maybe even to the Olympics. And then what?

” I ask. “I would have wound up right back here. Or some other rink. Never anything more. I suppose it was a stroke of luck that my jumps were for shit.”

Dawn lets out a guttural sound from deep inside her. And then she says, “Not like your friend Indy. She was a fabulous jumper.”

Heat rises inside me. I want to grab Indy’s name from the air and shove it down her throat until she chokes on it. I want to see her gasp for air. I want to see nothing but fear in her eyes. But I stop myself, because that’s what she wants. And I won’t give it to her.

“I should get going,” I say. “My office is following leads on that exposé. I have a lot of work to do before tomorrow. And the storm is getting bad.” I stand up as if we’ve just had a pleasant cup of tea. I know how to do this. Still, I’m hanging by a thread.

She stands as well, now mirroring my actions. I follow her out of the room, into the foyer, and to the front door. She places her hand on the knob. Then she stops and turns to face me.

“Have you considered,” she begins. “All the things Emile might know? From the time when you girls were here? If there is a story, might you not be the headline?”

I hold her stare and keep the blood from rushing into my cheeks.

“Thank you for your time, Dawn,” I say. Then I put on the boots that sit by the door. And the coat that hangs on the hook on the wall. I zip up the coat and pull the hood over my head.

She opens the door, and I walk past her without saying another word. Into the storm. To Jolene’s car, which has gathered an inch of snow.

And then I hold my breath until Dawn disappears in the rearview mirror and I reach the end of the driveway, past the fork that led to the guest cottage where Emile lived. Her last words still swimming in my head. About all of the things Emile might know.

The girl inside me flies from the closet, tears streaming down my cheeks.

Another lesson I’ve learned from my work.

Revisiting a source of trauma outside a therapeutic setting is not cathartic—it just inflicts a new wound.

But there’s no time for that. I think about the things Emile might know—not just about her but also about us.

The Orphans. Three of us, all nearby the night he disappeared.

One of us, at least, wanting him dead.