My room is a museum of pictures. The walls shine with Anna Pavlova and Karen Kain, and all of the world-renowned dancers who are living my dream. I never had stuffed animals. The room was given to me, already painted and decorated, as a surprise from my mother when I was six. She said that she always prayed that I'd become a ballerina like her. But I didn't want to be like her. I didn't want to be the person who abandoned my dad.
Living in Murray Hill has its advantages. My mother has a place here. She bought it after a long fight with my father one spring. I remember, because I had to switch schools. "We're both too busy with our jobs," she'd told me, as if there were something there to explain. But she loves him. She always has, and I'm old enough now to understand that my little brother is proof.
I could bore you with details about my life as a girl in this generation. But what's the point? I keep my days in a journal, and I keep the journal under my bed. A long story short, I live a life in two parts. One is ballet. The other is the Greek god Jonas Mill.
"Are we going?" I ask. I sling my bag over one shoulder. I have a lesson at the Merce Cunningham Studio, and I'm dangerously close to running late. My mother isn't paying attention. She does a slow twirl under the chandelier.
I sigh. "With the price that you're paying per lesson, Mom, you'd think it was worth showing up." I pretend not to notice her soft grace. My mother is a natural dancer. She's obsessed with perfection, and with her latest part in Manon Lescaut.
We drive through the buzzing streets of New York. It's raining. I'll remember that ten years from now. I'll think of the way that the sky looked through the glass, and how, when my mother spoke, I thought her voice was a song. "I'm going to be spending tonight at the studio," she rambled. "There's money for food on the table. Don't forget to pack for your dad's." I should have listened, but I didn't know what I was up against. You never appreciate the simple blessings until they're gone.
Jonas's apartment looks like a reflection of ours. I notice this as we pull next to the curb. I come here to my father's on the weekends. It's a break from school and ballet. I've made a small collection of friends over the years, but none of us remained close. None, that is, except for Jonas Mill.
I have a section in my journal devoted to him with scribbled love poems and stick-figure cartoons. The story began that when I was twelve, I spent a summer here. My mother was performing at Covent Garden, in the Royal Ballet. She couldn't look after Brent or me. He was one, and very accident-prone. "You need a gardener," I told my father. "I'll do the job." So I toted my brother out into the yard and let him hold the hose. It took all of ten seconds to lose him. I was canvassing the yard for a spot to plant the seeds. There was a scream. In the time that it takes to a draw a breath, a boy came tripping down his porch steps and into the street. He grabbed Brent as he was tottling into the path of a car. "Is this thing yours?"
I kept a picture from that summer as a souvenir. I'm smiling, the natural kind of smile that cameras don't usually catch. We're dangling our feet over the dock at some pier. My coppery blonde hair is a mess, and my freckles poke out under sunburnt cheeks. Jonas sits posed with grace. I still blush when I see it. There's something to how his arm grazes mine. Did you ever have something perfect, I wonder, and still wish there were more?
"Welcome home," Jonas calls. He waves from where he sits on his steps. I flash him a sideways glance, only long enough to capture the doe-brown eyes that know my secrets. I tell him everything: my dream of attending Juilliard, or of drawing my parents back together. How I wish on shooting stars for someone to look past the dancer, the child, and see me.
My father's apartment is different now than what it was last week. I try to pinpoint the change. He's sitting across the table with Brent, and I catch part of their conversation as I pass. I never understood baseball or his job as an accountant, so the times that we've talked have been rare. Maybe it's easier to love your father when you're six.
The bedroom at the end of the hall is mine. It's small and simply furnished. The carpet is the color of bone, and the walls are painted a similar white. A painting hangs above my mahogany sleigh bed. I try to think how old I was when Dad had that done. The girl in the picture is leaning over to lace her new slippers, her first pair of Pointe shoes. "I'm so proud of you," he'd told me. "I'll come down next time you perform."
I recognize the change now. The smell is back. I smell the vodka when I pass the master bedroom, and I can't stop my tears as they well in my eyes. "It's my imagination," I whisper, but I'm already trailing toward his room. Everything comes into perspective. There are bottles in the trash can, on the dresser, half-tucked under the bed. My dad's recuperating from an old drinking problem. It came up with the divorce. Why, after ten years, would this come back?
"What are you doing?" My father asks. I jump. I hadn't heard him coming. He's standing in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest. His eyes glow with an expression that I can't read. "They're not what they look like," Dad whispers, hurt.
"The bottles?" I ask. They are exactly how they seem. But he's shaking his head, stalking toward an open drawer. I hadn't noticed it until just now. Dad tries to pull it shut, but I grab his wrist. The drawer is full of ticket stubs. "War and Peace, Carmen, Madama Butterfly." I read the titles slowly. "These are tickets to Mom's ballets." She's a dancer for the Metropolitan Opera. But nothing about this fits. The drinking, and the tickets.
He collapses onto the patterned rug. "I've seen every one." I close my eyes and become painfully aware of his secret. Everything comes together to point to my mom.
"You love her," I whisper. It's his downfall, the root to my father's vice. Shakespeare knew what he was talking about when he vowed that true love never ran smooth. The weekend passes in a whir and I'm packing to go back to Mom's. I consider if it would be right to tell her. My father made me his confidante, and trust is a very fragile thing. But this is my dream, as much as Juilliard or anything else. I want a family. I don't want a father here and a mother in Murray Hill. I don't want to be split like a pizza for the next year of my life. Sometimes, I imagine Christmas mornings the way that they were when I was growing up. I'd wake up and open presents, and have breakfast in my pajamas with the two parents that I loved. When they were screaming or challenging each other in painful silence, did they ever once think of me?
The drive home is half of an hour of silence. I keep to myself. The radio is playing too loudly, drowning out my thoughts so that I can just look at my suitcase and frown. "You're speeding," Brent murmurs, and I raise my brow. How can he tell? "The trees are going too fast," he points out, matter-of-factly. His fingers are pressed against the glass. My father ignores his remark. His hands are shaking against the wheel. It occurs to me, too late, that he'd been drinking his vodka all afternoon. The car brakes. It careens into the shadow of a tree.
"Allison?" A woman in white is steadying a cup at my lips. "Take a sip, honey. You don't want to get dehydrated." She smiles, and the lines around her become clear. This woman is a nurse. I'm in a hospital. The room smells like rubbing alcohol and bleach. "Miss Jackson, you can come in now."
Time is rolling in slow motion. My mother's holding my hand. There's a strange numbness below my waste, and a tightness in her stare that makes it harder to breathe. "I need you to be strong," she's repeating. "I need you to get through this for me."
My father and brother were killed in a car accident. The car swerved when it slammed on its brakes, and it lost control. Testing found alcohol in his blood. This is how my mother sees it, at least. I know what she doesn't, what I try not to think of as I fall apart at the seams.
I leave the hospital on a warm day in September. The leaves are the pretty colors of Fall. I'm going home to Murray Hill, but we won't be staying. Mom says it'll do us both good to leave the memories behind. I'm confined to a wheel chair now. I can't dance. And without that constant in this life, I don't feel like Allison Jackson. I'm just what's left: her broken shell.
"I miss you, kid," I whisper. "Life isn't the same without you around." The sky is a soft shade of blue today. I can smell the dogwood and the lilies, and all of the sadness that fills this place. His headstone is shaped like a cross. "Brent Border-Jackson," it reads. "Blaine Jackson", says the one to its left.
"So you wheeled yourself all this way, did you?"
I blink, startled, and Jonas steps into view. He slips out of his jacket and hands it to me, a friendly gift. "My mother gave me a ride," I answer. I hold the jacket close to catch his scent. "I had to say good-bye."
"I'm going to miss playing ball with him," he tells me. The world falls silent, making way for his voice. He's the only one who can help me now. "It's nice that they buried them here." Them. Two people, two lives stolen from an unforgiving world.
When I don't speak, he takes a hint. Jonas kneels beside me, and I move instinctively closer. I rest my head on his shoulder. "It wasn't supposed to happen. I gave up my dream. Now my mother's giving up hers."
"No," he whispers into my hair. "It wasn't. You couldn'tve taken the bottle out of his hands, Allison. I watched your father sit on his porch every night and drink that stuff. It's all that he thought he had. He was selfish." Jonas throws his head back and catches a glimpse of the sky. "But you can be the one to help your mother."
He's right. She shouldn't have quit her job at the opera house for me. She's my lifeline, one of the few things that make me happy I survived. "I'm going to talk her out of it," I reply.
"And I'm going to drive you home." Jonas steps behind me and wheels the chair down the gravel path. We wave good-bye to the rows of people where beautiful spirits once were. There's beauty in everyone. I don't have to know them to tell. It's dark when we reach the house, and the stars are starting to unfold. "You think that your dreams are lost," he says, out of nowhere. "The way a child tries to catch a star and believes that he can't.
"Because she isn't tall enough," I murmur.
He touches his hand to my cheek. "Because she's wrong."
And maybe Jonas is right. Maybe I'll grow up, and by the grace of God, I'll learn to walk again. Things have a way of working themselves out. But until that day comes, I know that I have a purpose to take on. I can save my mother, catch a star, save myself.
Author notes
This is a little long, I know. But please read every word. I wrote it for the contest and based it on Option #6, where I was given a character and situation and crafted a story from them. So tell me what you think. Is it realistically portrayed? I did research on the Metropolitan Opera House and New York, but I was glad to already know a lot about ballet. Thanks for reading.
A contest entry
- Options, Options, Options by Nesa Lyrel.
325 points, ended September 7, 2007, 16 entries
Silver trophy winner
• next story in this contest, remove from contest - Overcoming Obstacles by Ayesha Raees.
170 points, ended September 29, 2007, 7 entries
Silver trophy winner
• next story in this contest, remove from contest
What do you think?
Comments
1 - 8 of 8
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w.o.w
its just amazing
an excellet entry for the contest and i did i had a smle on my face... i love it! its just simply awesome and great!!!
i had this fluttering feeling in my stomach when i was reading it and it was really awesome because the girl totally overcomed the death of her father and tried to stand up on her feet and started to make plans... because it is true that another person shouldnt suffer because of one's loss... and if he does as a kind gesture, the other person shouldnt be selfish to stop him for doing that so...
an excellent story
keep up the good work
and good luck in the contest!
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"There's a strange numbness in my *waist*" - Just some editing
I really enjoyed this. I realise you think this is long but the time span seemed a bit too fast paced for me. - It could be my taste. Otherwise, it was realistic. Something to add on to (should you want to) would probably be more emotion over the death of her family members. The reaction seemed pretty far removed from the situation.
Your theme/idea and extended metaphor of catching a star was really sweet. I really liked the whole storyline too. It was an original plot.
Great stuff and good luck in the contest!!
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Could swear it was real
Your level of vocab is excellent, your use of symbolism (room is a museum, the buzzing streets) is superb, and the depth of feeling throughout the story is great. The first paragraph speaks to a depth of feeling that is reflected throughout the rest of the story. And the ending, despite other comments, shows not sadness, but hope!
Thank you!beginning: 5, language: 5, plot: 4, ending: 5, dialog: 4, characters: 5.
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So sad
Your story was well written and kept me captivated to the end. I can't say I liked the ending because I thought it was so sad. But just like the real world it can't always have a happy ending.
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Wow, this is wonderful. You made my heart feel so much emotion. You write beautiful. Keep penning my friend.
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Wow. This is great. It really brought tears to my eyes. Thanks for doing such a great job with it! I don't know what else I can say. It was so near perfect that I don't have much of a comment. Again, just WOW. And good luck in the contest!
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Aah, its GOOD!!!!!!I liked it. There were a few spelling mistakes, but it doesn't really matter. It didnt cramp the style of the story. I dont like reading tear jerkers but this kind of ending is always welcome.Good job!!!!!!!!!!!!
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