Chapter 45
My archery was still shit.
It wasn’t the scar on my hand. That had finally healed, once I’d stopped tearing open Sebastian’s stitches in Disruptive Anatomy. It was the tightness in my tendons, in my nerves. In my chest.
I stood there, the bow fully drawn, the fletching, from a wild turkey Thomas had shot early that summer, brushing my cheek. Beyond the shining metal point, the bull’s-eye waited, coaxing me.
Everything was perfect, here at home. The smell of juniper trees and ripe Duchess apples. The baying of the dogs running down squirrels in the Barrow Marsh. Target flags fluttering. My childhood mentor, Veronica, a steady presence at my side, the way she’d always been.
But I couldn’t let go.
The thought of the arrow carving through the air—piercing paper and rags, crunching into hay—was too pitiless, the eight-ring of the target too red.
Once I loosed the arrow, I couldn’t bring it back.
“Ribs still giving you trouble?” Veronica asked.
I let the bow undraw. “Everything’s tight. Too many days in bed.”
“Maybe this isn’t the best place to start.” Veronica stood behind me, taking hold of my biceps. “Too asymmetrical.”
“I’m just out of practice. Had to drop Archery after midterms, when I hurt my hand.”
“You switched to No Drama,” she said. “And got a C.”
A tremor went through me. For the first time in my life, I could feel the demerits in my ledger.
Veronica laughed. “Jessica, it’s Wolfie. The man’s a walking contradiction—the embodiment of drama. You, transformed into not-you.”
I felt myself smile. Her attempt at an Afrikaans accent was closer to when ordinaries talk like vampires.
She studied the metal staples in my scalp. “Do those hurt?”
“They itch sometimes.” And sometimes I see connections between people, or imagine ghosts in the Barrow Marsh.
“Give me good old-fashioned needle and thread.”
“My staples are fine, Veronica. I’m fine.”
I nocked and drew again—what I needed was to feel the arrow loose, to see it streak into the target. To imagine its razor point slicing arteries and skin, fulfilling its purpose. My purpose.
Veronica put her gloved hand over mine. “You’ll pull a muscle. We should loosen you up first.”
I let the bow go slack. “Climbing?”
She frowned at this.
“Running?” I suggested. “Muay Thai?”
“When’s the last time you had a proper dance lesson?”
The Great Hall was set up for ballet, two portable barres, a rosin box on the floor between them. Uncle Edwin’s phonograph player waited on its small table.
Some little cousins had been here last, leaving a smattering of rabbit shit in the corner.
“Mary,” Veronica said, looking down at the scat. “Never cleans up. And she misspells her own rabbit’s name.”
“Any idea what she has planned for Trotsky’s big day? She asked me to mentor.”
“Whatever it is, you won’t forget it. She heard the story of Mister Fluffernutter at the funeral.”
“Goggles, then.”
“Hah.” She was leafing through the vinyl records in the wooden milk crate by the phonograph. She lifted one out, turned it over to read the back cover. “A waltz, perhaps.”
I looked down at my feet—my worn tennis shoes were fine for archery, but a bit slippery for dancing. I went to the rosin box.
The needle dropped, and the hiss and crackle of old vinyl filled the room.
The music began. A waltz from a Mozart sampler, something we’d warmed up to a hundred times as kids. Beginner stuff.
Veronica held out her hands to lead, and I took my position.
It had been years since we’d danced together. I was a head taller now—it felt as though I should lead. But as we began to move, I became a kid again, waiting for the signals in Veronica’s hands, hips, eyes.
We box stepped in place at first, letting the three-count settle into us. In the simple pattern, I could feel her decades of practice, the way I saw years of bartending in her stir, even her pour.
Veronica lifted onto her toes, easing us into a turn, a series of change steps across the floor.
“You’ve been practicing?” she asked.
“No. There was a definite lack of waltzing in that hospital.”
“You didn’t go dancing in New York? You feel looser. You aren’t counting for once.”
Sebastian had always mocked how I muttered one-two-three under my breath. But there was too much else to feel in this moment—the familiar seams of the parquet floor, Veronica’s archery calluses, the bounce of my old shoes.
“Are you saying I dance like an accountant?”
“Many accountants are fine dancers,” she said. “Music is numbers, after all. Maybe it’s all that time spent with ordinaries.”
A hitch in my step. A frown from Veronica.
She guided me through underarm turns, chassés, butterflies, propelling me across the floor, slicing through the space around us.
We became aggressive, expansive, taking full possession of the empty ballroom.
Like our hand-to-hand combat lessons when I was little, the interlocking of bodies, reflexes, intent.
Halfway through a series of Viennese figures, the piece ended.
We drifted though one last spin, and Veronica stepped back. The vinyl crackled between tracks.
“Not bad.” She sounded almost surprised. “Maybe all you needed was a whack to the head.”
The next piece began, and she went back to the milk crate on the table. “Something more challenging, perhaps.”
I stood where she’d left me. “Was I really so terrible, back then?”
“You were competent, Jessica, as always. But you lacked flow.” A shrug as she leafed through more records. “You’re feeling the rhythm now. Sex with a target has loosened you up.”
A target.
My eyes closed, shutting out the room. The floor fell away in pieces, and for a moment I was underwater—compressed and breathless.
“It will get easier,” Veronica murmured.
Her words were a test. I couldn’t react. I couldn’t not react.
That’s when the music made its way in.
It was a choral piece, a prayer in Latin interwoven with strings and pipe organ. I’d heard it countless times, but this was somehow different. From the frayed piece of vinyl something new had risen up, flawless, coursing, vast.
The music engulfed me, whirling, as my body had whirled moments before. It cycled in patterns, like ripples colliding in a pond.
I could still see the math of it—each measure with its count, each harmony, its ratios. But the usual sums had spun themselves into lavish, superfluid excess.
The numbers were on fire.
The chorus of voices blazed, under my fingernails, at the back of my throat, in the trickles of sweat under my clothes. It rushed to fill the missing part of me, cut away by the crash. For a moment, I almost saw what I had lost.
Then the record finished. The needle of the aging phonograph failed to lift, trapped in a loop of rustle and static.
The music, gone.
The parquet floor rose again to meet my feet.
When my eyes opened, Veronica was taking the record off, placing another on the turntable. She came to join me on the dance floor, and stood looking at my face.
“What?” I asked, the word small in my ears.
“Nothing.” She reached out to brush a tear from my cheek. “How well do you remember your foxtrot?”