Part 2: Ready to Leave
“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?”
A long silence stretched over 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.”
After I hung up, I sat in my little studio office for a long time.
Through the window in my door, I watched my afternoon class file 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 staring at her.
We told Ivy while she was at the kitchen table doing her homework. Spelling words.
Daniel and I sat 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 said nothing.
She simply stared at the table. At her spelling worksheet. Her pencil still in her hand.
After a long while, she spoke a single word.
“When?”
“Next Friday,” Daniel said. His voice was rough.
Ivy nodded.
She set down her pencil, stood up from the table, and went upstairs to her room.
She didn’t slam the door. That was the worst part. She just closed it. Very quietly.
That night, when I went up to tuck her in, the blue duffel bag was out of the closet again. It sat on the floor beside her bed.
Her clothes were back inside. Folded. Neatly. Every last thing.
Her shoes were lined up next to it.
Ready.
Two evenings before she left, I found her on the floor of her room, beside the duffel bag. Just sitting. Doing nothing. 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, my grandmother’s. Ivy had knocked it off the counter in October while dancing, and 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 gathered her into my arms, right there on the floor beside 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 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.
I couldn’t say a word 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 simply held her.
I held her until she fell asleep against me. Then Daniel came and lifted her into 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 Glenn Miller CD in the cabinet and slid it into the player.
Moonlight Serenade.
We danced slowly around the kitchen. She stood on my feet, the way she had when she first started, though she didn’t need to anymore. Though she was too big for it now. I held her hands and carried us back and forth across the floor. Slowly.
Daniel stood in the doorway and watched. He said nothing.
“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 lifted her off the ground. I saw his face over her shoulder. He was crying. In eighteen years of marriage, I’d seen Daniel cry only twice before.
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 climbed into the back seat of Joanne’s car. Joanne closed the door.
Ivy looked at us through the window and pressed her hand flat against 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 phone. 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 arrived 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 enclosed a picture of Daniel attempting the box step, tongue sticking out.
I never heard back.
The updates grew shorter.
Then they stopped.
I called Joanne. She called Rhonda. Rhonda never called back. Joanne explained that once a family placement 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.
In the end, we lost all contact with Ivy.
As the years passed, Daniel and I stopped speaking of her. Not because we’d forgotten. Because we couldn’t stand it.
The yellow room upstairs stayed yellow. We didn’t take down the moon lamp. We didn’t remove the stuffed rabbit from the pillow. We just shut the door again.
We stopped hoping we’d ever hear from her.
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, switched on the lights and the music, and taught my classes.
But every time an eight-year-old girl walked through that door, my heart leaped.
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 of seven- and eight-year-olds.
A little girl named Sophie came up to me afterward. She had red hair, 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 gazed up at me with big eyes.
“What if I fall?” she asked.
I froze.
I stood 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 said those exact words. In our kitchen. That very first night.
“Mrs. Margaret?” Sophie said. “Are you okay?”
I couldn’t answer.
I forced a smile. I turned 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, shut the door, and slid down to the floor with my back against it.
After that, even walking into the studio became hard.
I’d unlock the front door each morning and have to stand there a minute, hand on the knob, before I could force myself inside.
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. The little kids’ classes first. Then all of them.
I’d sit in my office doing paperwork while music played on the other side of the wall. I’d close my eyes and listen to 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 down his fork.
“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 couldn’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 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 stored it in the garage.
Daniel helped me move everything out. He said nothing the whole time. But on the last day, when the studio stood empty and the wooden floor was bare and light poured 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 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 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 wrapped his arms around me.
He said nothing more.
There was nothing more to say.
I packed my competition photographs into boxes. I took them down from the hallway walls at home. Me and Theo, midway through a lift in Atlanta. Me in a red dress at the national championship in Las Vegas. Me onstage in New York, in the spotlight, arms raised.
I sealed them all in cardboard boxes and carried them up to the attic.
Then I went looking for my wooden box.
It was a small box, about the size of a shoebox. Dark cherry wood with a brass latch. My father had made it for me when I was sixteen, the year I won my first real competition. He’d carved my initials into the lid. M.E. Margaret Ellen.
Every medal I’d ever won was inside. Every one. From the first little bronze at 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. After the knee, I’d stopped looking at those medals. They made me sad.
But when I went to put it in the attic with the photographs, it wasn’t there.
I searched everywhere.
The hallway closet. Under the bed. The garage. The basement. The attic. I went back to the empty studio and checked every corner. I phoned the woman who’d bought my equipment and asked whether a wooden box might have been mixed in by accident.
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 took a part-time job at the library, shelving books. Quiet work. No music. I stayed twelve years. I liked it fine.
Daniel retired from his accounting firm. He took up woodworking in the garage, the way my father used to. He built birdhouses. Dozens of them. He gave them away to everyone we knew.
We took 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.
In time, 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 lying at my feet, I didn’t think twice. I just grabbed her and held on.
She was taller than me now. I had to reach up. Her gray wool coat smelled of 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 cupped her face in both hands. “Look at you! Look at you!”
She was beautiful. A grown woman. Her hair was long now, past her shoulders. Tiny gold earrings glinted in her ears. A little scar marked her chin that I didn’t recognize.
But the eyes were the same. And that crooked smile.
“Margaret?” Daniel’s voice floated from the hallway behind me. “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, holding the Sunday newspaper.
“Ivy?” he said.
“Hi, Daniel,” she said.
He dropped the newspaper.
He crossed the hallway in about three strides and pulled her into a hug. He held her a long time. Daniel isn’t a hugger. But he clung to her as if she might vanish.
When he finally released her, 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.
In the front hallway she paused 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 beside the 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 set a hot pot 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 shook so badly I spilled the grounds across the counter. Daniel wiped them up without a word.
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 laid my hand over hers.
“I’m proud of you,” I whispered.
She looked down at our hands.
But every few minutes, I noticed her touching the inside pocket of her coat.
She still hadn’t taken it off. She’d been sitting at our kitchen table for twenty minutes in her gray wool coat, buttoned to the chin.
And every few minutes, her hand would drift to the inside of it. Right over her heart. Touching something. As if 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 drew a deep breath.
“Actually,” she said, “there’s a reason I came.”
She rose from the table.
She unbuttoned her gray wool coat and reached into the inside pocket. A big pocket. Deeper than it should have been. As though she’d had it made that way.
She pulled out a wooden box.
I knew it at once.
Dark wood. Cherry. A brass latch. The initials carved into the lid.
M.E.
My father’s box.
