My mother said I was dancing before I was walking. She said I’d hold on to the edge of the coffee table and bounce up and down whenever she played.
I took my first ballet class when I was five. My first jazz class at eight. By fourteen, I was taking the bus forty-five minutes each way, three times a week, to a real studio in Columbus.
At twenty-three, I was winning competitions. Regional, then national. Ballroom and contemporary. My partner was a lanky, sweet boy named Theo who could lift me over his head like I weighed nothing and couldn’t remember a single person’s birthday.
At thirty, I was performing professionally. A touring company. Six months a year on the road. Theaters in Chicago, Atlanta, Denver. Once, for three glorious weeks, a stage in New York.
By thirty-two, it was over.
It happened during a rehearsal in Pittsburgh. A simple jump. One I’d done a thousand times. I came down wrong. My left knee went one direction, and the rest of me went the other.
I heard it before I felt it. A sound like a wet branch snapping.
Then I felt it.
Two surgeries. A year of physical therapy. A doctor in a white coat sitting on a rolling stool, looking at my X-rays on a lighted board and shaking his head very gently.
“You’ll walk normally,” he said. “You’ll be able to dance at weddings. But Mrs. Burke, I’m sorry. You won’t perform again. Not like you did. The knee won’t take it.”
I went home and lay on the couch for three weeks.
I didn’t play any music. I didn’t open the curtains.
My husband, Daniel, came home from work every evening and sat on the edge of the couch and put his hand on my ankle. The good ankle. He didn’t say much. He’s not a talker. He’s an accountant. He likes numbers because they don’t argue with you.
At the end of the third week, he sat down on the coffee table across from me.
“You could teach,” he said.
“Teach what?” I said. “How to fall gracefully?”
“How to get back up,” he said.
I hated him for saying it.
Then I thought about it for a week.
Then I loved him for saying it.
So I opened a dance studio.
It was a narrow storefront on Main Street, between a shoe repair shop and a bakery that made the best cinnamon rolls in the county. The landlord gave me a deal because nobody else wanted it. It had been a pawn shop. It still smelled a little like old cigarettes and furniture polish.
Daniel and I put in the mirrors ourselves. We laid the wooden floor over a weekend, on our knees, with our friends. We installed the barres along the walls. I painted the sign out front myself. Burke Dance Studio. In blue letters, slightly crooked.
The first month, I had nine students.
By the end of the first year, I had sixty.
By the fifth year, I had over two hundred. Little girls in pink tights. Teenagers who wanted to learn hip-hop. Middle-aged women who’d always wanted to try tap. A seventy-eight-year-old retired mailman named Gus who took ballroom every Tuesday because his late wife had always wanted him to, and he’d never gotten around to it.
For years, I loved every single minute.
But dancing wasn’t my only love.
I’d always adored children. Always. Since I was a little girl myself. I was the one who babysat for every family on our street. I was the one who held the babies at church while their mothers sang in the choir.
I’d dreamed my whole life of having one of my own.
Daniel and I started trying when I was thirty-three. A year after the knee. We thought it would be easy. Everyone in my family got pregnant easily. My sister Carol got pregnant on her honeymoon.
It wasn’t easy.
It was a year. Then two. Then doctors. Then tests. Then shots in my stomach every morning that left little bruises like purple fingerprints. Then a procedure. Then another procedure.
Then a doctor sitting across from us in a small office with a box of tissues on the table.
I won’t tell you everything about those years. Some things belong just to Daniel and me.
But I’ll tell you that by the time I was thirty-nine, we’d stopped talking about it. Not because we’d given up. Because talking about it hurt too much.
We’d walk past the baby aisle at the grocery store without looking. We’d go to baby showers and smile and bring presents and come home and not say anything to each other in the car.
There was a little bedroom upstairs in our house, across the hall from ours. We’d painted it pale yellow when we first moved in. For a nursery, someday.
By the time I was thirty-nine, the door to that room stayed closed.
Then, one evening in October, Daniel took my hand at the kitchen table.
We’d just finished dinner. Pot roast. The dishes were still on the table. There was music playing on the radio, very low, because there was always music playing in our house.
“What if we became foster parents?” he said.
I looked at him.
“After everything we’ve been through?” I said. “Daniel, I can’t. I can’t love a child and then have to give it back. I can’t do that.”
He held my hand a little tighter.
“We still have a home, Maggie,” he said. “And we still have love to give. All that love. It’s just sitting there. In that yellow room. Behind that closed door.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
The radio was playing an old Glenn Miller song. Moonlight Serenade. My parents’ song. The one they used to dance to in the kitchen on Saturday nights.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Okay. Let’s find out.”
The classes took eight weeks. Every Tuesday and Thursday night in a church basement across town, with eleven other couples and a woman named Joanne Pruitt from the county who wore enormous glasses and spoke very fast.
She told us about trauma. About attachment. About what kids who’ve been moved around a lot might do when they come into a new house. Hide food. Refuse to unpack. Test you, to see if you’ll send them away.
“These children have learned that grown-ups leave,” Joanne said. “Your job is to not leave. Even when they push you. Especially when they push you.”
She told us one more thing, on the last night. She looked right at me when she said it.
“And you have to remember,” she said, “that the goal of foster care is reunification. With family, if possible. You might love a child with your whole heart, and still have to let them go. If you can’t accept that, this isn’t for you.”
I nodded.
I thought I accepted it.
I didn’t know anything.
Three months later, on a cold Tuesday afternoon in February, a little girl arrived at our doorstep.
Joanne Pruitt brought her. They stood together on our porch in the gray afternoon light.
Ivy was eight years old.
She was small for eight. Thin. She had dark hair cut short and uneven, like someone had done it with kitchen scissors. She was wearing a pink coat that was two sizes too big, with the sleeves rolled up three times.
She was carrying a blue duffel bag with a broken zipper. And a plastic grocery bag, from a Kroger, full of clothes.
That was everything she owned.
I knelt down on the porch so we’d be the same height.
“Hello, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m Margaret.”
She looked at me. She didn’t smile.
“Hello,” she said.
Her voice was very quiet. Very polite.
“This is Daniel,” I said. Daniel was standing behind me in the doorway. He waved at her. A small wave. Like he was afraid of scaring a bird.
Ivy looked at him. She didn’t wave back.
“Would you like to see your room?” I asked.
She nodded.
We took her upstairs. To the yellow room.
We’d opened the door for the first time in years. We’d cleaned it. We’d bought a white bed with a purple quilt and a little desk and a lamp shaped like a moon. I’d put a stuffed rabbit on the pillow. Daniel had put a box of crayons and a pad of drawing paper on the desk.
Ivy stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long time.
She didn’t go in.
“Am I allowed to sleep in that bed?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s yours.”
She looked up at me.
“For how long?” she asked.
I looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at me.
What do you say to that? To an eight-year-old who asks how long before she’ll even step into her own bedroom?
“For as long as you’re here, honey,” I said.
Ivy nodded slowly. Like that was the answer she’d expected.
She walked into the room. She put the blue duffel bag down on the floor next to the bed. She put the grocery bag next to it.
She didn’t unpack.
During those first weeks, Ivy asked permission for everything.
Everything.
“Can I open the refrigerator?”
“Of course, sweetheart.”
“Can I sit on the couch?”
“Absolutely.”
“Can I use the bathroom?”
“You never have to ask that, honey. Never.”
“Can I have a glass of water?”
“Ivy, you can have whatever you want. This is your house now.”
She’d look at me when I said things like that. A long, careful look. Like she was trying to figure out what the trick was.
She ate everything on her plate. Every single bite. Even the things I could tell she didn’t like. She ate fast, with her arm curled around her plate, like someone might take it away.
One night, Daniel found a dinner roll hidden under her pillow. And a granola bar in her sock drawer. And three packets of crackers in the pocket of her pink coat.
He came into our bedroom holding them in his hands. He didn’t say anything. He just put them on the bed.
I sat there and looked at those crackers for a long time.
Joanne had told us about this. Hiding food. Kids who don’t know if there’ll be food tomorrow.
Hearing about it in a church basement was different.
The next morning, I put a basket on the kitchen counter. I filled it with granola bars and crackers and apples and little bags of pretzels.
“This is your basket,” I told Ivy. “Anything in it is yours. Whenever you want. You don’t have to ask. And when it gets empty, I’ll fill it up again. Every time.”
She looked at the basket for a long time.
She didn’t take anything that day.
But the next morning, two granola bars were missing.
The morning after that, three.
A week later, Daniel stopped finding food under her pillow.
One evening, about a month after she came, she was carrying her glass of milk to the table and it slipped out of her hands.
It hit the kitchen floor. It didn’t break. It just tipped over, and milk went everywhere. Across the floor. Under the table.
Ivy froze.
Then she dropped to her knees.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
She was grabbing at the milk with her bare hands. Trying to wipe it up. Pushing it around on the floor. Her whole body was shaking.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry…”
“Ivy,” I said. “Sweetheart. Stop.”
“I didn’t mean to!”
I knelt down on the floor next to her. Right in the milk. I put my hands over hers.
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “It’s just milk. That’s all it is.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were huge. Terrified.
“Are you mad?” she whispered.
“Not even a little,” I said.
She stared at me.
She stared at me in total disbelief. Like I’d just told her the sky was green.
Daniel came over with a roll of paper towels. He sat down on the floor too. All three of us, sitting on the kitchen floor in a puddle of milk.
“You know what I did once?” Daniel said to her. “When I was about your age? I knocked over a whole gallon of milk. A whole gallon. In my grandmother’s kitchen. It went everywhere. It went under the stove. Her kitchen smelled like sour milk for a month.”
Ivy looked at him.
“Was she mad?”
“She was a little mad,” Daniel admitted. “But then she made me a grilled cheese sandwich. Because she said a boy who spills that much milk must be very hungry.”
Ivy looked at him for a long time.
Then, very slowly, the left side of her mouth went up.
Just a little.
It was the first time I ever saw her crooked smile.
But every night, she packed her clothes back into her duffel bag.
Every single night.
I’d go up to tuck her in, and I’d see it. Her clothes folded neatly and zipped into the blue bag with the broken zipper, sitting on the floor next to her bed. Her shoes lined up next to it. Ready.
In the morning, she’d take out what she needed for the day. At night, she’d put it all back.
“Sweetheart,” I said once. “You can put your clothes in the dresser. That’s what it’s for.”
“I know,” she said.
She didn’t put them in the dresser.
I didn’t ask her again. Joanne had told us. Don’t push. Let her decide when.
It took almost three months.
But slowly, Ivy began to feel at home.
It happened in little ways. So little you almost wouldn’t notice.
One morning, I came downstairs and she was already in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator, looking for the orange juice. She hadn’t asked.
One afternoon, she came home from school and threw her backpack on the floor by the front door and kicked off her shoes and flopped down on the couch with a big sigh. Like any eight-year-old in America.
“Margaret,” she called from the living room one Saturday. “Where are my crayons?”
“Under the couch, sweetheart,” I called back from the kitchen. “Where you left them.”
“And my shoes?”
“Also where you left them.”
“Where’s that?”
“Wherever you took them off.”
I heard her groan.
Daniel was standing next to me at the counter, making coffee.
He was grinning.
“She finally knows this is her home,” he said quietly.
That night, I went up to tuck her in.
The blue duffel bag was in her closet. On the floor. Empty.
Her clothes were in the dresser drawers. Not folded very well. Shoved in, mostly. A sock hanging out of the top drawer.
I stood there in the doorway looking at that sock for a long time.
I had to go downstairs and sit on the back steps for a while before I could talk to anybody.
A few weeks later, Ivy stormed upstairs because Daniel wouldn’t let her watch TV past bedtime.
There was a cartoon movie on. She wanted to see the end of it. It was eight-thirty. Bedtime was eight.
“That’s so unfair!” she shouted from halfway up the stairs. “You’re the worst!”
“Good night, Ivy!” Daniel called after her cheerfully.
“I hate this house!”
She slammed her bedroom door. So hard the pictures in the hallway rattled.
Daniel turned around on the couch and looked at me.
He was grinning from ear to ear.
“She’s finally being annoying,” he said.
I started laughing.
I laughed so hard I had to hold on to the back of the couch. I laughed until tears ran down my face. Daniel laughed too.
Upstairs, I heard Ivy’s door open a crack.
“What’s so funny?” she yelled down.
That made us laugh even harder.
But everything truly changed one evening in our kitchen.
It was a Thursday in May. Warm. The windows were open, and you could smell the lilacs from the bush in the backyard.
I was making dinner. Spaghetti and meatballs. The radio was on, like always. And an old song came on. Moonlight Serenade. Glenn Miller. My parents’ song.
I couldn’t help it. I never can, when that song comes on.
I started dancing. Just a little. Swaying back and forth at the stove, stirring the sauce. A little turn on my good knee. A little step.
Then I noticed Ivy.
She was standing in the kitchen doorway. Watching me. She had a crayon in her hand.
“Want to try?” I said.
She shook her head fast.
“I can’t dance.”
“Neither can Daniel,” I said.
From the living room, Daniel shouted, “Hey!”
Ivy almost smiled.
I turned the burner down under the sauce. I wiped my hands on my apron. And I held out my hand to her.
“Come on,” I said. “Just one step.”
She looked at my hand.
“What if I do it wrong?” she said.
“Then we’ll invent a new dance,” I said. “Nobody owns dancing, sweetheart. You can’t do it wrong. You can only do it your way.”
She hesitated for a long time.
Then she put her crayon down on the counter. And she came across the kitchen. And she took my hand.
Her hand was small and a little sticky.
“Okay,” I said. “Put your other hand here. On my shoulder. That’s it. Now just step to the side with me. Like this.”
She stepped to the side. A little stiff.
“Like this?”
“Perfect,” I said. “Now step back.”
She stepped back.
“Now we’re going to turn,” I said.
Her eyes went wide.
“I’ll fall!”
“I’ve got you,” I said.
I lifted my arm. She went under it. She spun around, once. Too fast. Her feet got tangled.
She stumbled right into my arms.
And she laughed.
A real laugh. A big, loud, surprised laugh. Like a hiccup. Like something that had been stuck inside her for a long time and just came out.
I’d never heard her laugh like that.
In the living room doorway, Daniel was standing there watching us. He had his hand over his heart.
From then on, dancing became our evening ritual.
Every night after dinner, after the dishes, Ivy would come into the kitchen and lean against the counter.
“Music time?” she’d ask.
“Only if you’ve finished your homework,” I’d say.
“That’s blackmail!”
“That’s parenting,” I’d say.
She’d stomp off to finish her homework. Ten minutes later, she’d be back, waving her worksheet in the air.
“Done! Now music time?”
Soon, she was dancing around the kitchen every single night.
I taught her the box step. The basic waltz. A little swing. How to point her toes. How to spot when she turned, so she wouldn’t get dizzy. How to hold her arms so they looked like wings.
She was good. Really good. She had a natural sense of rhythm. She listened to the music with her whole body.
“Margaret,” she said one night. “Can I come to your studio sometime? And take a real class?”
“Ivy,” I said. “You can come every single day if you want.”
She came on Tuesdays and Saturdays. She stood in the back row of my beginners’ class in a pair of pink tights I’d bought her, watching the other girls, copying every move. After three weeks, she was in the front row.
One night, in late June, we were sitting on the kitchen floor after dancing. Out of breath. Leaning back against the cabinets. Eating popsicles. Grape for her, cherry for me.
We’d just watched a movie together, earlier that evening. A silly one about a girl who finds a magic coin that grants wishes.
“Margaret,” Ivy said. “Can we make a list? Like the girl in the movie? Of wishes?”
“A wish list?”
“A dream list,” Ivy said. “Things we want to do someday.”
“Of course we can,” I said. “Everybody should have something to dream about.”
I got a piece of paper from the junk drawer. She got her crayons. We sat at the kitchen table, and she wrote it out. Very carefully. Her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
At the top, in big letters, she wrote:
OUR DREAM LIST.
Then underneath:
Get a puppy.
Eat ice cream for breakfast.
Learn to do five spins without falling.
Go to the ocean.
See Margaret dance on a real stage.
Daniel learns to dance. (Probably impossible.)
Daniel read that one over her shoulder and pretended to be very offended.
Then she stopped.
She was holding the crayon over the paper. Not writing.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” I said.
“How do you spell nobody?” she said.
“N-O-B-O-D-Y.”
She wrote it very slowly. Then she kept writing.
She folded the paper over before I could read the last line. She put her arm over it.
“That one’s a secret,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s fair. Everybody’s allowed a secret.”
She kept that list on her bedside table, under her moon-shaped lamp.
Sometimes I’d see her reading it at night when I came to tuck her in.
One evening, after our dancing, she asked me something that stayed with me for the rest of my life.
We were in the kitchen. The music had ended. She was standing in front of me, still holding my hands, a little out of breath.
“Margaret,” she said. “Can families stay together forever?”
I looked down at her.
“Sometimes they can, sweetheart,” I said.
“Can we?” she said.
I pulled her against me. I held her tight.
I didn’t know what to say. I knew what Joanne had told us. The goal of foster care is reunification. I knew we weren’t supposed to make promises.
But I held her, and I felt her heart beating against my stomach, and I couldn’t make myself say the true thing.
“I hope so,” I said into her hair.
Unfortunately, hope wasn’t enough.
Eleven months after Ivy came to live with us, our caseworker called.
It was a Wednesday morning in January. I was at the studio, in my office, eating a cinnamon roll from the bakery next door and doing the schedule for the spring recital.
Joanne Pruitt’s name came up on my phone.
“Margaret,” she said. “We’ve located Ivy’s relatives.”
I put down the cinnamon roll.
“What does that mean?”
“Her mother’s sister,” Joanne said. “Rhonda. She lives in Indiana. Near Fort Wayne. She didn’t know Ivy was in care until a few months ago. She’s been going through the approval process since October.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“And?”
“And she’s been approved,” Joanne said. “She wants to take her. Family placement.”
“She’s happy here,” I said. My voice was shaking. “Joanne. She’s happy here. She’s doing well in school. She’s dancing. She’s… surely that matters?”
There was a long pause on the line.
“It does, Margaret,” Joanne said gently. “It matters a lot. I know how much you love her. I see it. Everybody sees it.” She sighed. “But the decision has been made. The court has approved the placement. Family comes first. That’s the law. That’s always been the goal. I told you that, on the first day.”
“I know you did.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Can we stay in contact?” I said. “After? Can we visit? Write? Call?”
“We’ll discuss that with her aunt,” Joanne said. “I’ll do everything I can.”
I sat in my little office at the studio for a long time after I hung up.
Through the window in my office door, I could see my afternoon class coming in. Little girls in pink tights. Seven and eight years old. Laughing. Pulling on their ballet shoes.
One of them looked a lot like Ivy.
I couldn’t stop looking at her.
When we told Ivy, she was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework. Spelling words.
Daniel and I sat down on either side of her. I told her. As gently as I could. That her Aunt Rhonda had been found. That Aunt Rhonda wanted her to come live with her in Indiana. That Aunt Rhonda was her family.
Ivy didn’t say anything.
She just stared at the kitchen table. At her spelling worksheet. Her pencil was still in her hand.
After a long time, she said one word.
“When?”
“Next Friday,” Daniel said. His voice was rough.
Ivy nodded.
She put her pencil down. She got up from the table. She went upstairs to her room.
She didn’t slam the door. That was the worst part. She just closed it. Very quietly.
That night, I went up to tuck her in.
The blue duffel bag was out of the closet again. It was on the floor next to her bed.
Her clothes were back in it. Folded. Neatly. Every single thing.
Her shoes were lined up next to it.
Ready.
Two evenings before she left, I found her sitting on the floor of her room, next to the duffel bag. Just sitting there. Not doing anything. Staring at it.
I sat down on the floor next to her.
She didn’t look at me.
“Are you sending me away,” she said very quietly, “because I was bad?”
My heart nearly stopped.
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “No. No.”
“Because I yelled at Daniel? About the TV?”
“No.”
“Because I said I hated this house?”
“Ivy, no.”
“Because I broke that blue cup?”
It was the cup with the little white flowers on it. My grandmother’s. Ivy had knocked it off the counter in October, dancing. It had shattered into about a hundred pieces. She’d cried for an hour. I’d hugged her and told her it didn’t matter. It was just a cup.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Never. That cup doesn’t matter. It never mattered.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Then why can’t I stay?” she said.
I pulled her into my arms. Right there on the floor. Next to the duffel bag.
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “Do you hear me? Nothing. Not one single thing. You’re the best thing that ever happened to this house.”
“But I don’t want another house,” she said into my shoulder. Her voice was muffled. “I don’t want to go to Indiana. I don’t even know Aunt Rhonda. I met her one time when I was four.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“I want this one,” she said. “I want this house.”
I couldn’t answer her.
I couldn’t say anything without crying, and I didn’t want to cry in front of her. I didn’t want her last memory of this house to be me falling apart.
So I just held her.
I held her until she fell asleep against me. Then Daniel came and lifted her into her bed. And I sat on the floor of the yellow room until three in the morning.
On her last evening, after dinner, Ivy came into the kitchen.
She stood by the counter, the way she always did.
“Music time?” she said.
“No homework tonight,” I said.
“Can we do our song?”
I turned on the radio. I found the old CD in the cabinet, the Glenn Miller one, and put it in the player.
Moonlight Serenade.
We danced slowly in the kitchen. She stood on my feet, the way she used to when she first started, even though she didn’t need to anymore. Even though she was too big for it now. I held her hands and moved us around the kitchen. Slowly. Back and forth.
Daniel stood in the doorway and watched. He didn’t say anything.
“Promise you won’t forget it,” Ivy whispered. “Our song.”
“I promise,” I said.
“And you won’t forget me?”
“Never,” I said. “Never, ever, ever.”
The next morning, Daniel carried her duffel bag out to Joanne’s car.
Ivy came down the front steps in her pink coat. It fit her now. She’d grown into it. The sleeves weren’t rolled up anymore.
She hugged Daniel first. For a long time. He picked her up off the ground. I saw his face over her shoulder. He was crying. I’d only seen Daniel cry twice before, in eighteen years of marriage.
Then she came to me.
She wrapped both arms around my waist and held on. Very tight.
“I love you,” I whispered into her hair.
“I love you too,” she said.
Then she let go.
She got into the back seat of Joanne’s car. Joanne closed the door.
Ivy looked at us through the window. She put her hand flat on the glass.
Then the car pulled away, down our street, and turned the corner.
And she was gone.
For the first few months, we got updates.
Joanne would call. Or Aunt Rhonda would send an email. Short ones. Ivy is settling in. Ivy started at her new school. Ivy has a cold but she’s fine.
Once, in April, a letter came. In an envelope with an Indiana postmark. Inside was a drawing. Crayon. Two people dancing in a kitchen. One tall, one small. Music notes floating all around them.
At the bottom, in Ivy’s handwriting: I didnt forget the song. Did you?
I wrote back that same night. Three pages. I told her I’d never forget it. I told her about the studio. About Gus the retired mailman finally learning the foxtrot. I put in a picture of Daniel trying to do the box step, with his tongue sticking out.
I never heard back.
The updates got shorter.
Then they stopped.
I called Joanne. She called Rhonda. Rhonda didn’t call back. Joanne said that once a child’s placement with family was finalized, there wasn’t much she could do. Rhonda wasn’t required to stay in contact. It was her choice.
I wrote letters. Six of them. To the address in Fort Wayne.
The last two came back. RETURN TO SENDER. MOVED. NO FORWARDING ADDRESS.
Eventually, we lost all contact with Ivy.
As the years passed, Daniel and I stopped talking about her. Not because we forgot. Because we couldn’t stand it.
The yellow room upstairs stayed yellow. We didn’t take down the moon lamp. We didn’t take the stuffed rabbit off the pillow. We just closed the door again.
We stopped hoping we’d ever hear from her again.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Because something else happened, after she left. Something I didn’t understand for a very long time.
For months, I kept teaching at my studio.
I went in every day. I unlocked the door at nine in the morning. I turned on the lights and the music. I taught my classes.
But every time an eight-year-old girl walked through that door, my heart jumped.
Every single time.
A little girl with short dark hair. A little girl in a pink coat. A little girl who stood in the back row and copied every move. My heart would jump, and I’d think, Ivy? And then she’d turn around, and it would be somebody else.
One afternoon, about a year after Ivy left, I was teaching a beginners’ class. Seven- and eight-year-olds.
A little girl named Sophie came up to me after class. She had red hair and freckles and a missing front tooth.
“Mrs. Margaret,” she said. “Can you teach me how to do a spin? A real one?”
“Of course, sweetheart,” I said. “Come here. Put your arms like this.”
She looked up at me with big eyes.
“What if I fall?” she asked.
I froze.
I stood there in the middle of my studio with my arms in the air.
What if I fall?
I’ll fall!
I’ve got you.
Ivy had asked me those exact words. In our kitchen. The very first night.
“Mrs. Margaret?” Sophie said. “Are you okay?”
I couldn’t answer.
I forced a smile. I turned around and found another instructor, a young woman named Kayla who’d been teaching for me for two years.
“Could you finish with Sophie?” I said. “I just need a minute.”
I went into my office and closed the door and sat down on the floor with my back against it.
After that, even walking into the studio got hard.
I’d unlock the front door in the morning, and I’d have to stand there for a minute with my hand on the doorknob before I could make myself go in.
I’d hear the music and feel sick.
“Margaret?” Kayla would say, standing in my office doorway. “Are you listening? I asked about the spring recital costumes.”
“Sorry,” I’d say. “What did you say?”
I started canceling performances. The holiday show. The spring showcase. I told the parents it was budget problems.
I started handing my classes to other instructors. First the little kids’ classes. Then all the classes.
I’d sit in my office and do paperwork while the music played on the other side of the wall. I’d close my eyes and listen to the sound of little feet on the wooden floor. And it would hurt so much I couldn’t breathe.
At home, Daniel tried to help.
He tried so hard. I see that now.
“Why don’t we go dancing on Friday?” he said one night at dinner. “There’s that place downtown. The one with the big band on the weekends. We haven’t been in years.”
“My knee hurts,” I said.
“Then we can just listen to music. At home. I’ll make popcorn.”
“I’m tired, Daniel.”
He put his fork down.
“Margaret,” he said. “You haven’t played a single song in weeks. Do you know that? There’s no music in this house anymore. There’s always been music in this house.”
I looked at the radio on the kitchen counter. He was right. It was silent. I didn’t even remember turning it off.
“I don’t feel like it,” I said.
Three years after Ivy left, I closed the studio.
I sold the equipment to a woman who was opening a studio in the next town. I gave the mirrors to a high school drama department. I took down the crooked blue sign myself and put it in the garage.
Daniel helped me move everything out. He didn’t say anything the whole time. But on the last day, when the studio was empty and the wooden floor was bare and the light was coming in through the front windows, he stopped in the middle of the room.
“You love teaching,” he said.
“Loved,” I said. “Past tense.”
“Your knee isn’t that bad anymore. You could still teach. You’re the best teacher I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe I’m just finished,” I said.
He studied me for a long time.
Then he asked me a question I couldn’t answer for eighteen years.
“Are you finished with dancing, Maggie?” he said quietly. “Or are you just afraid to love something you might lose?”
I stood there in that empty studio.
“Every time I teach a child,” I whispered finally, “I remember Ivy. Every single time. Every little girl who asks me What if I fall. And every time, I have to lose her all over again. I can’t keep doing it, Daniel. I can’t.”
He put his arms around me.
He didn’t say anything else.
There wasn’t anything else to say.
I packed my competition photographs into boxes. I took them down from the hallway walls at home. Me and Theo, doing a lift in Atlanta. Me in a red dress at the national championship in Las Vegas. Me onstage in New York, in the spotlight, with my arms in the air.
I put them all in cardboard boxes and stored them in the attic.
I went looking for my wooden box.
It was a small box, about the size of a shoebox. Dark wood, cherry, with a brass latch. My father had made it for me when I was sixteen, when I won my first real competition. He’d carved my initials on the lid. M.E. Margaret Ellen.
Every medal I’d ever won was in that box. Every one. From that first little bronze when I was nine years old to my national championship gold. Twenty-six years of medals.
It had always sat on the shelf in the upstairs hallway. Right outside the yellow room.
I hadn’t opened it in years. I’d stopped looking at those medals after my knee. They made me sad.
But when I went to put it in the attic with the photographs, it wasn’t there.
I looked everywhere.
The hallway closet. Under the bed. The garage. The basement. The attic. I went back to the empty studio and looked in every corner. I called the woman who’d bought my equipment and asked if a wooden box had accidentally gotten mixed in.
It hadn’t.
“I must have misplaced it during the studio move,” I told Daniel. “I must have put it in one of the studio boxes by mistake. Or it got thrown out.”
“We’ll find it,” Daniel said.
We didn’t.
Eventually, I stopped looking.
Years passed.
Fifteen of them.
I got a part-time job at the library. Shelving books. Quiet work. No music. I worked there for twelve years. I liked it fine.
Daniel retired from his accounting firm. He took up woodworking in the garage, like my father used to. He made birdhouses. Dozens of them. He gave them to everyone we knew.
We went on a few trips. Arizona. Maine. We were happy enough. We had a good marriage. We loved each other.
But there was no music in our house.
And the door to the yellow room stayed closed.
Eventually, I stopped expecting either Ivy or my old life to ever come back.
Until that Sunday.
“Ivy?” I whispered.
The young woman on my porch nodded. She was already crying.
I pulled her into my arms.
Right there on the porch, with the door wide open and the dish towel on the floor at my feet. I didn’t even think about it. I just grabbed her and held on.
She was taller than me now. I had to reach up. Her gray wool coat smelled like cold air and coffee.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “Oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me,” she said into my shoulder.
“Are you kidding?” I pulled back and held her face in both my hands. “Look at you! Look at you!”
She was beautiful. She was a grown woman. Her hair was long now, past her shoulders. There were tiny gold earrings in her ears. She had a little scar on her chin I didn’t recognize.
But the eyes were the same. And that crooked smile.
“Margaret?” Daniel’s voice came from behind me in the hallway. “Who’s at the door? Is it those solar panel people again? I told them…”
He came around the corner. He stopped.
He stood there in the hallway in his reading glasses and his old cardigan sweater, holding the Sunday newspaper.
“Ivy?” he said.
“Hi, Daniel,” she said.
He dropped the newspaper.
He walked across the hallway in about three steps and pulled her into a hug. He held her for a long time. He’s not a hugger, Daniel. But he held on to her like she might disappear.
When he finally let go, he stepped back and looked her up and down.
“Well,” he said. His voice was rough. “You’ve certainly gotten taller.”
She laughed through her tears.
It was the same laugh. The hiccup laugh. The one that sounded like something that had been stuck inside her for a long time.
We brought her inside.
She stood in the front hallway for a moment and looked around. At the coat rack. At the stairs. At the shelf in the upstairs hallway where my wooden box used to sit.
Then she walked into the kitchen.
She stopped next to the kitchen table.
“You still have that table,” she said.
It was the same table. Old oak, scratched, with a burn mark on one corner from when Daniel put a hot pot down on it in 1997.
“Daniel refuses to replace it,” I said.
“It’s a perfectly good table,” Daniel protested.
Ivy reached out and touched one of the chairs. The one on the left side. By the window.
“I used to sit here,” she said quietly. “And draw.”
“And complain about vegetables,” I said.
She laughed again.
“Some things haven’t changed,” she said.
I made coffee. My hands were shaking so badly I spilled the grounds all over the counter. Daniel cleaned them up without saying anything.
We sat down at the old oak table. The three of us. Ivy in her chair by the window.
For a while, none of us knew what to say.
“So,” Daniel said finally. “Where do you live now?”
“In Columbus,” she said. “My own apartment. A little one. Over a coffee shop.”
“And your aunt?” I asked carefully. “Rhonda?”
Ivy was quiet for a moment.
“She’s in Arizona now,” she said. “We moved around a lot. Indiana. Then Kentucky. Then Texas for a while. Then Arizona. She tried, Margaret. She really did. She just… didn’t have a lot. Of anything.” She looked down at her coffee. “But I finished school. High school. And then two years of community college.”
I reached across the table and put my hand on hers.
“I’m proud of you,” I whispered.
She looked down at our hands.
But every few minutes, I noticed she was touching the inside pocket of her coat.
She hadn’t taken her coat off. She’d been sitting at our kitchen table for twenty minutes in her gray wool coat, buttoned all the way up.
And every few minutes, her hand would go to the inside of it. Right over her heart. Touching something. Like she was making sure it was still there.
Finally, I asked.
“Ivy,” I said. “Is something wrong, sweetheart?”
“No,” she said quickly.
“Do you need help? Are you in trouble? You can tell us. Whatever it is.”
She shook her head.
Then she took a deep breath.
“Actually,” she said, “there’s a reason I came.”
She stood up from the table.
She unbuttoned her gray wool coat. She reached into the inside pocket. A big pocket. Deeper than it should have been. Like she’d had it made that way.
She pulled out a wooden box.
I recognized it immediately.
Dark wood. Cherry. A brass latch. The initials carved on the lid.
M.E.
My father’s box.
“I haven’t seen that,” I whispered, “in years.”
I couldn’t move. I sat there staring at it.
Ivy placed the box on the kitchen table in front of me. Very carefully. With both hands.
“I took it,” she said quietly. “The night before I left.”
I stared at her.
“How?” I said. “Ivy, how? Where did you…”
“It was on the shelf,” she said. “In the hallway. Right outside my room. I walked past it every night. I’d seen you take it down once and open it and show me what was inside.”
She sat back down. She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug.
“The night before I left,” she said, “after you tucked me in, I waited until I heard you and Daniel go to sleep. Then I got out of bed and went into the hallway and took it off the shelf. And I put it in my duffel bag. At the very bottom. Under all my clothes. I was so scared you’d find it before I left. I didn’t sleep all night.”
Daniel leaned forward across the table.
“You took it?” he said. “Ivy. Why?”
Ivy looked down at the box.
“Because I thought,” she said slowly, “that if I kept something important from this house… I’d always have a reason to come back.”
Her voice started to tremble.
“I was eight,” she said. “I thought it was a good plan. I thought, if I have Margaret’s special box, then someday I’ll have to bring it back. And then I’ll get to come back here. To this house. To this kitchen.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Then I got older,” she said. “And I realized what I’d actually done. I’d stolen it. From the only people who ever…”
She stopped.
“I was so ashamed,” she said. “I was so ashamed, Margaret.”
“Oh, Ivy,” I said.
“I kept promising myself I’d return it,” she said. “Every year. Every birthday. Every time we moved. I kept it with me. In every apartment. In every town. It was always the first thing I unpacked. And every year I’d say, This is the year I’ll find them. This is the year I’ll bring it back.”
She pushed the box across the table toward me.
“I think it belongs to you,” she said.
I looked at the box.
I put my hands on it. The wood was smooth and warm, like she’d been holding it for a long time.
I slowly lifted the brass latch.
I opened the lid.
And suddenly, I remembered everything that happened after she left.
All of it. All at once.
Inside the box lay dozens of medals.
Gold. Silver. Bronze.
Some on ribbons. Some on little chains. Some just loose, rattling around in the bottom of the box. My first little bronze medal, from when I was nine years old, from the regional tap competition in Dayton. The ribbon had faded from red to pink.
Awards from competitions I’d almost completely forgotten. Columbus. Cleveland. Indianapolis. Atlanta. Las Vegas.
“Oh, my goodness,” I whispered.
I picked up a gold medal from the very top.
It was heavier than the others. On a wide blue ribbon. Engraved on the back: National Ballroom Championship. First Place. Margaret Ellen Burke.
“Daniel,” I said. “Look.”
He came around the table and stood behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder.
He smiled. A sad smile.
“Your first national championship,” he said. “Las Vegas. The red dress.”
“I can’t believe you remember the dress.”
“I remember everything about that night,” he said. “That was the night I knew I was going to marry you.”
Ivy nodded.
“I used to watch you polish those,” she said. “Remember? On Sunday afternoons. You’d take the box down and sit at this table with a rag and some silver polish and polish every single one.”
I looked at her.
“You remember that?”
“You told me every medal had a story,” she said.
I laughed through my tears.
“And you asked me,” I said, “whether the bronze ones meant I was terrible.”
“You said they meant you’d been brave enough to compete,” Ivy said. “You said the gold ones were for being the best that day. But the bronze ones were for being brave enough to try in the first place. And brave was more important.”
She touched one of the bronze medals in the box.
“I thought about that a lot,” she said. “Growing up.”
I looked at her across the table.
“But why take these, sweetheart?” I said. “You could have taken anything. Why my medals?”
“Because they mattered to you,” she said.
“But why not take something of yours? Something of your own? To remember us by?”
Ivy looked down at the box. She ran her finger along the edge of it.
“Because I thought,” she said slowly, “that if I took something you really loved, then maybe you’d come looking for me.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“I never imagined you’d taken it,” I whispered.
“I thought you’d notice right away,” Ivy said. “I thought you’d go to the shelf the next day and see it was gone and know it was me. And then you’d call. Or come to Indiana. Or write to me.” She swallowed. “I used to wait by the mailbox. Every day after school. For a whole year. Waiting for a letter from you that said, Ivy, where’s my box?”
“Ivy,” I said. “After you left, I could barely look at anything that reminded me of dancing. I didn’t open that cabinet. I didn’t go down that hallway. I didn’t even notice the box was gone for three years.”
She lowered her eyes.
“And when you didn’t come,” she said quietly, “I thought maybe you didn’t care about the box. Or me. And I promised myself that when I grew up, I’d find you. I’d bring it back myself.”
“But why wait eighteen years?” I said. “Sweetheart. Why so long?”
She looked down at her coffee.
“When I was little, my aunt wouldn’t let me contact you,” she said. “She said it would confuse me. That I had to let go of the old family and focus on the real one. She took your letters. I found them years later, when she was moving to Arizona. In a shoebox in her closet. Six of them. She’d never even opened them.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“And then we moved,” Ivy said. “So many times. I lost your address. I was twelve. I didn’t know how to find people. I didn’t even remember the name of your street. Just the yellow room. And the kitchen.”
“But you could have found us when you got older,” Daniel said gently. “When you were grown.”
Ivy nodded slowly.
“I know,” she said. “I did. I found your address almost a year ago.”
“A year?” I said.
She nodded.
“I found it on the internet. Property records. I drove here. Eleven months ago. I parked across the street. I sat in my car for two hours. I saw Daniel come out to get the mail. I saw you through the kitchen window, Margaret. Washing dishes. Just like today.”
She wiped her eyes.
“And I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I couldn’t get out of the car. I drove home. I came back four more times. I never got out of the car.”
“Why not?” I whispered.
“Because I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” she said. “Or that you’d be angry. That you’d never forgive me. For taking the medals.”
“So what changed?” I said. “Why today?”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“Last Sunday,” she said, “I was sitting in my car across the street again. For the sixth time. And I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. And I realized I was still that scared little girl. Sitting on the floor next to a duffel bag. Waiting for somebody else to come and make the first move.”
She looked up at me.
“And I didn’t want to be her anymore,” she said.
“Ivy,” I said. “We never stopped thinking about you. Not once. Not one single day.”
Daniel reached across the table and put his big hand over both of ours.
“Not once,” he said.
She wiped her eyes.
“I thought about you both too,” she said. “All the time. Especially when things got hard.”
I thought I understood now. I thought she’d come to give back something from our past. To say she was sorry. To close the circle.
But I was beginning to suspect she had something else in mind.
The way she kept looking at the box. The way she kept glancing at me, like she was working up to something.
“Were things hard?” I asked carefully. “Growing up?”
“Sometimes,” Ivy said. “My aunt tried. But we moved around so much. Eleven schools. I counted once. Eleven schools in ten years. I never stayed anywhere long enough to have a best friend.”
I squeezed her hand.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “You gave me something. Something that stayed with me. Through all of it.”
She reached into the box. She picked up the little bronze medal. The one from when I was nine. With the faded ribbon.
“Every new school,” she said, “every new town, every time I felt like I couldn’t do something. Like I’d fall. I’d remember what you said about the bronze ones. About being brave enough to try.”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it.
“Did you keep dancing?” I asked.
She laughed. The hiccup laugh.
“Actually,” she said, “I became a dance instructor.”
I nearly dropped the gold medal.
“You did?”
She nodded. She was smiling now. That crooked smile.
“In every town we moved to, the first thing I’d do was find the cheapest dance class,” she said. “Rec centers. YMCAs. Church basements. Wherever I could go for free, or almost free. And I’d stand in the back row and copy everything.” She shrugged. “Just like I did in your studio.”
“And now?”
“And now I teach,” she said. “Contemporary and ballroom. And a little jazz.”
She took a breath.
“And I opened my own studio,” she said. “Last year. A little one. In Columbus.”
Daniel slapped his hand down on the kitchen table so hard the coffee cups jumped.
“Would you look at that!” he said. “Would you look at that! Maggie! Did you hear that?”
I couldn’t stop staring at her.
“You became a teacher?” I said.
“Just like you,” Ivy said.
I thought that was Ivy’s biggest surprise.
But she had something even bigger planned.
She reached into the wooden box again. Under the medals. All the way at the bottom.
“Actually,” she said, “there’s something else I need to show you.”
She pulled out a folded piece of paper.
It was old. Soft, like fabric. Folded so many times the creases had worn almost all the way through. It had been taped back together in two places.
She unfolded it very carefully on the table.
Childish handwriting covered both sides. In crayon. Purple and green and orange.
“Do you remember this?” she said.
I looked down at it.
At the top, in big purple crayon letters, it said:
OUR DREAM LIST.
I laughed softly. My hand went to my mouth.
“We made this after watching that movie,” I said. “The one about the girl with the magic coin. We sat right here. At this table.”
“You said everyone should have something to dream about,” Ivy said.
I started reading.
Get a puppy.
Eat ice cream for breakfast.
Learn to do five spins without falling.
Go to the ocean.
See Margaret dance on a real stage.
Daniel learns to dance. (Probably impossible.)
Daniel read that one over my shoulder and made an outraged noise.
Ivy laughed.
Then I got to the very last line.
The secret one. The one she’d folded over and put her arm across, eighteen years ago, so I couldn’t see it.
It was written in green crayon. Very carefully. You could see where she’d pressed so hard the crayon had almost torn the paper.
When I grow up, I’ll buy us a house where nobody has to leave.
My vision blurred.
I couldn’t see the words anymore.
“You wrote this?” I whispered.
“You helped me spell nobody,” Ivy said.
I remembered.
I remembered that night. Sitting on the kitchen floor eating popsicles. Grape for her, cherry for me. Ivy asking How do you spell nobody? With the crayon held over the paper. Her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
I’d spelled it for her. N-O-B-O-D-Y.
And I’d never known what she was using it for.
“You really kept this?” I said. “All these years?”
“Of course,” Ivy said. “Through eleven schools.”
She took a deep breath.
“Margaret,” she said. “My studio was supposed to be that house.”
I looked up at her.
“What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“I wanted to make somewhere,” she said, “where kids could walk in and not feel like visitors. Where nobody would ask them how long they’re staying. Where they wouldn’t have to pack their stuff back into a duffel bag every night. Somewhere they could just… belong.”
“Do you teach foster children?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Most of them come at a discount,” she said. “Some of them come for free. I work with the county. The caseworkers send them to me.”
“Just like you once needed someone to help you,” I said.
She nodded again.
“Some of them barely speak when they first come in,” she said. “They stand in the back row. They don’t take off their coats. They ask permission for everything. Can I use the bathroom? Can I sit down? Can I have some water?”
She looked at me.
“Like you,” I whispered.
“Like me,” Ivy said.
Then her face changed.
She looked down at the table.
“But I’m struggling, Margaret,” she said quietly.
“With what?”
“Rent,” she said. “Insurance. Equipment. The mirrors are falling off the walls. The sound system is from 2004. One of the windows doesn’t close.” She shook her head. “The discounted classes don’t cover their own costs. Not even close. I’ve been paying for it out of my own savings. And my savings are gone. I’m three months behind on rent.”
I immediately reached for my purse. It was hanging on the back of my chair.
“How much do you need?” I said.
“Margaret, no.”
“Let me help,” I said. “Please. Let me help. Whatever it is.”
“I didn’t come for money,” Ivy said.
“Then what?” I said. “What do you need, sweetheart?”
She took a deep breath.
She looked at me across the old oak table. With her big brown eyes. The ones that used to look like they were waiting to be told to leave.
They didn’t look like that anymore.
“I came for you,” she said.
I froze.
“Me?”
“I need a partner,” Ivy said. “Someone who knows how to teach. Someone who knows how to build a studio from nothing. How to run it. How to keep it alive.” She swallowed. “Someone who knows how to make a scared kid take one step.”
I stared at her.
“Ivy,” I said. “I haven’t taught in eighteen years. I haven’t danced in fifteen. I don’t even play music in this house anymore. What if I can’t do it?”
“What if you fall?” Ivy said softly.
I looked at her.
“You taught me to dance,” she said, “when I was too afraid to take one single step. Remember? Right there.”
She pointed at the floor. At the space between the stove and the counter.
“Right there,” she said. “You held out your hand. And I said, What if I do it wrong? And you said, Then we’ll invent a new dance.”
I couldn’t speak.
“There’s already a room for you,” Ivy added quietly. “At the studio. An office. With a window. I painted it.”
“You prepared a room for me?” I said.
“I hoped you’d say yes,” she said.
She paused.
“I painted it yellow,” she said.
Daniel was looking at me. I could feel him looking at me.
I didn’t look back at him. I couldn’t.
“Perhaps,” Daniel said very gently, “you should go see it, Maggie.”
I looked down at the medals in the wooden box.
The gold one from Las Vegas. The bronze one from when I was nine. Twenty-six years of being brave enough to try.
Then I looked at Ivy.
“I’m not promising anything,” I said.
“That’s okay,” she said quickly.
“But I’d like to visit,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
Her whole face lit up.
“Really?”
“Really,” I said.
She stayed for dinner. I made spaghetti and meatballs. I didn’t even think about it. It just happened.
She ate two helpings. She complained that the green beans were overcooked. Daniel said some things never change.
When she left at nine o’clock, she hugged us both on the porch. She held on to me for a long time.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Ten o’clock. I’ll text you the address.”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
I stood on the porch and watched her taillights go down our street and turn the corner.
Just like eighteen years ago.
Except this time, she was coming back.
After Ivy left, Daniel and I sat at the kitchen table. The wooden box was still there between us. The dream list was unfolded next to it.
Daniel took my hand.
“You know,” he said quietly. “I lost her too.”
“I know,” I said.
“I know you think it was just you,” he said. “I know you think I didn’t feel it the same way. Because I didn’t stop going to work. Because I didn’t close anything.” He shook his head. “I used to sit in the car in the parking lot of my office for twenty minutes every morning before I could go in. For two years. I never told you.”
I looked at him.
“Daniel…”
“And then,” he said, “I watched you lose the thing you loved most in the world. After her. I watched you close the studio. Put the photographs in the attic. Turn off the radio. And I didn’t know how to stop it.” His voice cracked. “I lost her. And then I watched you lose yourself. And I couldn’t do anything about either one.”
I looked down at our hands on the table.
“I don’t know if I can be that woman again,” I said. “The one with the studio. The one in the red dress in Las Vegas. I don’t know if she’s still in here.”
Daniel squeezed my hand.
“You don’t have to be her,” he said. “You don’t have to be anybody but who you are right now.”
He leaned across the table and kissed my forehead.
“Just don’t let fear take another eighteen years from you, Maggie,” he said. “It’s taken enough.”
That night, before bed, I did something I hadn’t done in fifteen years.
I went to the cabinet in the kitchen. I dug through the old CDs in the back. Behind the cookbooks. Behind the extra coffee filters.
I found it. The Glenn Miller one.
I put it in the old CD player on the kitchen counter. I pressed play.
Moonlight Serenade.
Daniel came into the kitchen in his pajamas. He stood in the doorway.
He didn’t say anything.
He just held out his hand.
He’s a terrible dancer, Daniel. He always has been. He has no rhythm at all. He steps on my feet. He counts out loud under his breath.
We danced in the kitchen anyway. Slowly. Back and forth.
And for the first time in eighteen years, there was music in our house.
The next morning, I drove to Columbus.
Ivy’s studio was on the second floor of an old brick building on the east side of the city. Above a laundromat. You had to go up a narrow staircase that smelled like fabric softener.
There was a sign on the door at the top of the stairs. Hand-painted. Slightly crooked.
The Open Door Dance Studio.
I stood in front of that sign for a long time.
Inside, it was one big room. The wooden floor was scratched and warped in places. The mirrors were old, with dark spots in the corners where the silver was coming off. One of them was held to the wall with duct tape. The windows rattled when trucks went by outside. The sound system was an old boom box sitting on a folding chair.
But children were laughing.
There were about fifteen of them. Seven, eight, nine years old. Running around the room in socks. Sliding on the wooden floor. Spinning in circles until they fell down. Laughing so loud I could hear it from the stairs.
Ivy saw me in the doorway and waved. She was on the phone. She held up one finger. One minute.
While she gathered her paperwork, I looked around the room.
And I noticed a little girl.
She was standing alone in the back corner. By the window. Away from all the others. She was about eight years old. Small. Thin. She had a big puffy purple coat on, zipped all the way up, even though the room was warm.
She wasn’t taking it off.
She was just standing there. Watching the other kids. With her back against the wall.
I knew that look.
I’d seen it on my front porch eighteen years ago.
I walked across the room to her. Slowly. I knelt down on my good knee, so we’d be the same height.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Margaret. What’s your name?”
She looked at me for a long time.
“Destiny,” she said. Very quietly.
“That’s a beautiful name,” I said. “Do you want to dance, Destiny?”
She shook her head fast.
“I’m bad at it,” she said.
“Who told you that?”
She shrugged. She looked at the floor.
“Then let’s try one step,” I said. “Just one. That’s all.”
She looked up at me with big, careful eyes.
“What if I fall?” she said.
I didn’t freeze this time.
I didn’t have to go sit on the floor of an office with my back against the door.
I just held out my hand.
“Then I’ll help you get up,” I said.
She looked at my hand for a long time.
Then, very slowly, she unzipped her purple coat. She took it off. She laid it carefully on the floor by the window.
And she took my hand.
“Like this?” she said, stepping to the side.
“Perfect,” I said. “Now step back.”
She stepped back.
“Now we’re going to turn,” I said.
She went under my arm. She spun around, once. Too fast. Her feet got tangled.
She stumbled.
I caught her.
And she laughed.
Soon, we were both laughing.
After class, Ivy came over. The kids were putting on their coats and their shoes. Destiny’s foster mother had come to pick her up. Destiny had waved at me from the door. A small wave. Like a bird.
Ivy stood next to me and looked at me for a long moment.
“You looked happy,” she said.
“I was,” I said.
I meant it. I hadn’t felt like that in eighteen years. My knee hurt. My back hurt. I was out of breath.
I felt alive.
“And,” I said, “I have a plan.”
Ivy raised her eyebrows.
“We?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We. I’m going to organize a charity performance. A big one. We’ll invite everybody. The whole city. We’ll raise enough money to fix those mirrors and that window and get you a real sound system and pay your rent.”
I took a breath.
“But I’m not doing it as a guest,” I said. “I’m doing it as your partner. If you’ll still have me.”
Ivy threw her arms around my neck.
“Deal!” she said.
It took three weeks.
I hadn’t organized anything in eighteen years. But it came back faster than I thought it would. Like riding a bicycle. Like dancing.
I called every single person I’d ever known. Former students from my old studio. Some of them were in their thirties now, with kids of their own. They came. Kayla, my old instructor, drove up from Cincinnati. Gus, the retired mailman, was ninety-six years old now and living in a nursing home. He sent a check for fifty dollars and a note that said For the foxtrot.
Daniel did all the accounting. He sold tickets. He built a set. A painted backdrop of a kitchen. With a window and a stove and an old oak table.
A local church let us use their auditorium. The bakery next to my old studio, the one with the cinnamon rolls, donated three hundred of them for intermission. The newspaper wrote a story about it.
Former Dance Champion Returns to Help Foster Children Find Their Feet.
On the night of the performance, the auditorium was packed. Four hundred people. Standing room only in the back.
Ivy’s students danced first. All fifteen of them. In matching purple T-shirts Daniel had ordered online. They did a simple routine Ivy and I had choreographed together. It wasn’t perfect. Two of them went the wrong way. One of them stopped in the middle and waved at her mom.
Destiny was in the front row.
She didn’t fall once.
At the very end, the lights went down.
A single spotlight came on in the middle of the stage. On the painted kitchen. On the old oak table.
And the music started.
Moonlight Serenade.
Ivy walked out onto the stage from one side. I walked out from the other. My knee was wrapped in a brace under my dress. A red one. I’d bought it for the occasion.
We met in the middle of the painted kitchen.
And we danced.
Not a competition dance. Not something for medals. Just the box step. The basic waltz. A little swing. The same steps I’d taught her on the kitchen floor eighteen years before.
When we got to the turn, she lifted her arm, and I went under it. And I spun around. Once.
And she caught me.
The auditorium was completely silent.
Then four hundred people stood up.
That night, our charity performance raised enough to cover three months of rent. And new mirrors. And a window that closed. And a sound system from this century.
Afterward, backstage, Ivy hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“You saved my studio,” she whispered.
“We saved it,” I said. “Together.”
The following Tuesday, we taught our first class together.
Ivy took the left side of the room. I took the right. Fifteen kids in purple T-shirts in between us.
My knee hurt by the end. My back hurt. I had to sit down twice.
But I didn’t stop.
Afterward, Daniel was waiting by the door. He’d come to pick me up. He’d been standing in the back of the room, watching the whole class.
He hugged me in the doorway.
“There’s my girl,” he said into my hair.
Then, from across the room, I heard music.
Ivy had turned on the new sound system. She’d found a song. An old song.
Moonlight Serenade.
I turned around.
“You remembered,” I said.
Ivy smiled her crooked smile.
“I promised,” she said.
The kids had all gone home. It was just the three of us. Ivy and Daniel and me. In the empty studio. With the new mirrors on the walls and the old wooden floor and the window that finally closed.
I walked across the floor toward her.
I held out my hand.
“May I have this dance?” I said.
Ivy looked at my hand.
She smiled.
“This time,” she said, “neither of us has to leave.”
She took my hand.
We danced across that scratched wooden floor while Daniel stood in the doorway with his hand over his heart. The same way he’d stood in our kitchen doorway, eighteen years ago, the very first time.
Later that night, at home, I found the dream list on the kitchen table. Ivy had left it there. She said she wanted it to stay in the house where it was written.
I unfolded it very carefully. The soft old paper. The purple and green crayon.
I got a pen out of the junk drawer.
Next to Learn to do five spins without falling, I made a check mark. Ivy had done six, that afternoon, to show the kids.
Next to See Margaret dance on a real stage, I made another check mark.
Next to Daniel learns to dance (Probably impossible), I wrote, Still working on it.
Then I looked at the last line.
When I grow up, I’ll buy us a house where nobody has to leave.
She hadn’t bought a house. She’d rented a second floor above a laundromat, with mirrors held up by duct tape and windows that rattled when trucks went by.
But a little girl named Destiny had taken off her purple coat there.
I picked up the pen.
And I made a check mark next to that one too.
The next Saturday, Ivy came to our house for breakfast.
She walked into the kitchen and stopped.
There on the old oak table, in front of her chair by the window, was a bowl of chocolate ice cream. With sprinkles. And a spoon sticking out of it.
She looked at me.
“Eat ice cream for breakfast,” I said. “Number two on the list. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
She laughed the hiccup laugh.
Then she sat down in her chair and ate every bite.
We haven’t gotten the puppy yet. Daniel says one thing at a time.
But I’ve seen him looking at pictures of puppies on his phone when he thinks I’m not watching.
Eighteen years ago, a scared little girl arrived on my doorstep with a duffel bag and asked how long she was allowed to stay.
I taught her to take one step. I told her I’d catch her if she fell.
And then I let fear lock the door to the yellow room, and turn off the radio, and put my whole life in boxes in the attic.
The little girl I’d once taught to find her courage came back with my medals in her coat pocket.
And she helped me find mine.
