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Her mother joined in, shaking her head. “Yeah, well. Maybe I’m just a crazy old lady. You ready to go home?” The laughter tapered off and then drained out of her. She felt a little better, more calm. But still scooped out and hollow like a gourd. Sophie shook her head.
“I think I’m going to just walk around for awhile. Look in the mirror, or whatever. I’ll meet you at home in a bit?” Her mother brushed a kiss on Sophie’s cheek and squeezed her shoulder.
“Of course, sweetheart. Talk all the time you need.”
Sophie smiled, feeling for the first time in a day like it wasn’t a painful chore. “Thanks, Mom. I love you.”
“Love you too, snickerdoodle.” Her mom always had a million and one nicknames for her. Sophie chuckled, waving as she watched her mom climb into the car and pull away.
She watched for several minutes, just staring into the distance as the silver Saab got smaller and smaller. She sighed. Was there something to what her mother had said? Was she seeing everything in a funhouse mirror?
Her phone buzzed. Slimy snakes coiled in her belly as she pulled it from her pocket. She really couldn’t deal with talking to Henry again right now. Or Darren. Or anyone. Sophie wanted to think. The number on the screen was an unlisted one, but she recognized it from the earlier call. Carl. He wanted her to hear him out. Well, she would. But not right now.
Sophie tucked the phone back in her pocket and headed back to Main Street. She do a little more wandering and study her mirror. Maybe there was a warning she was missing.
Chapter Eighteen
It snuck up on her. She wouldn’t have thought it could, given how much time she’d spent there as a girl. But then it hardly resembled the cheerful place she’d come to every week for dance lessons. Body In Motion had been a sanctuary away from home for Sophie. Now the glass windows that looked in on the front room, where all the pictures of the kids in their leotards had hung, were boarded up. The sign was missing almost all of its letters, leaving only Bo—n—on.
Some delinquent with more daring than brains had broken the second n. The sign now read Bo—n—or. Sad to think of her childhood refuge as a crash pad for punks whose idea of humor was misspelled penis jokes. There was graffiti on the boards too, though it was too layered to make any of it out. It just looked like random swirls in various colors.
Compared to the elegant building of glass and plaster full of classical music and Miss Clara’s firm repetitions of “One, two, three, one, two, three,” the place was now a broken shell.
“We used to be great once, huh old girl?” Cold sorrow filled her chest. Sophie knew, intellectually, that she still had a perfectly good life. Great, compared to a lot of people. But she didn’t feel great. She felt... derelict.
She pressed a hand against the splintered wood where the front door had been. It too was boarded up. Still, maybe...
Sophie glanced at the shops to either side of the boarded up building. To the left was a bar, not yet open. To the right was a florist. She bit her lip, slipping down the alley on the left hand side of the old studio. Surely the vandals had figured out a way in. She’d just take a peak.
Behind the studio was a small grass lot, the space shared with the florist. The owner of the flower sho
p was using part of the area for a small greenhouse, but no one was outside. Sophie picked carefully through the small bit of refuse, mostly broken boards, near the back wall of the studio. As she’d suspected, there was a door hidden beneath the wood propped against the wall. It hung crooked, unable to shut completely. She tugged hard, and it popped open with a dull thunk.
She entered carefully, not sure what she might find. It actually wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. It was dusty and littered with broken glass and cobwebs, but she didn’t see any rats, or condoms, or paraphernalia of partying kids. The room she’d entered had once been the office, she thought. There was a discoloration on the grey wall in the shape of a filing cabinet and another that might have been shelves. She’d never been in here when she was little.
Only kids that were in trouble were sent to sit in Miss Clara’s office. Sophie was never in trouble. She had wanted to be there, loved being there. Time in Miss Clara’s office would have meant time not dancing.
“And to dance is to be alive, children,” she echoed softly in Miss Clara’s dreamy sing-song. Her childhood dance instructor had been something of a cross between a strict disciplinarian and bohemian philosopher. It was an odd, incongruous combination that had somehow worked.
Sophie stepped gingerly over some crumbled plaster as she moved out of the office and into the back classroom. The big classroom, they’d called it. There were two more small ones up front, the bathroom, and then the front room with cubbyholes for parent pick-up. Unlike Sophie’s studio, which catered to people of all ages, almost every class Miss Clara had been for children. Or teens.
She’d offered one adult level class every 3 months, and that was it. Usually a beginner course for people who just wanted to learn the basics. “People get too old, they lose the joy of movement. They’d rather stay still. I’d rather teach children. They know how to move. You know what they say... a body at rest...” Newton’s first law was a favorite thing for her to quote. It’s where the name of the studio had come from.
Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she was just too old. Too wounded. Her body wanted to remain at rest.
The mirrors were all gone, of course, either taken when the place had closed or broken. Sophie had watched herself for endless hours in their silver surfaces, reveling in the twist and turn of her body, in seeing the muscles tighten and bulge as she bent and flexed.
She scuffed a shoe against the dusty floor. It was still the same, at least, if a little worse for wear. It was these floors that had made her go with the springy wood for the classrooms in her studio. She had fond memories of the way it gave beneath her feet, the sound of her ballet slippers sliding over it. Sophie pictured the room as it had once been.
It had been a little dark, the three walls not lined with mirrors a dove grey. She would have put in a skylight. Or some high windows to let in the sunshine. There were none in the back classroom, and only small slits in the front ones.
Come to think of it, perhaps that had influenced her decision to go along with Darren’s suggestion for the enormous glass window wall that lined the front of her own studio. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She could almost hear the faint strains of Vivaldi, or maybe Chopin, floating through the big room. Miss Clara had been fond of both.
Sophie hummed to herself, stretching her arms up over her head. The way she had felt here! Like she was discovering a whole new world, this beautiful place of such peace. Ballet had eventually become tedious to her, which is why she had left the company for competitions. A lot of dancers thought you only competed if you couldn’t cut it as a ballerina.
But Sophie had stopped feeling that peace, the sweet joy that had flowed through her as she danced. She’d found it again with tango, and spent the next five years in a whirlwind of joyousness like nothing she’d felt since her first few years here, in this place.
She flexed her feet, moving up onto her toes. Not quite on pointe without the shoes, but close enough. She wasn’t a dancer anymore, after all. Just a broken woman in an abandoned building. Eyes closed, she moved through several beginner routines, her arms moving smoothly out to her sides as her feet slid along the floor.
