The Brandywine Prophet

11.2 The Chorus Room

Thursday: eighteen days to the National Championship

She made good dinners. She told him she loved him. She tried to be what he needed. She fought this calmly--lovingly--with a rational heart. She promised herself that, when this moment came, she would be okay. No more blubbering baby-KayKay on the phone with Mommy comforting her with baby-voiced encouragement. No more suffocating pillowcases to pace her breath. She would be confident. She would be strong...

...but it hurt so bad! and the hurt swelled sharp and warm against the back of her eyes, threatening to pop them from their sockets if she held back tears.

“Please, Hyde, don’t do it...” Speaking made it worse. Her lips pursed in a final effort to hold it together. “Hydey, please, please don’t do it.” Seeing his face made it worse so she looked out the passenger window at the foot traffic on Boulevard. She looked above the smiling couples, past the blinking neon distractions and through the flickering trees... one layer before the night sky she saw the stage. In her mind she knew the car was moving, but now--looking at the inky conformation--she felt completely still. It was the theater that seemed to twist, as if its foundation was a lazy-susan or the mechanical base of a spinning music box with stars spiraling like glitter in a snow-globe.

Focusing on the theater quelled the pressure in her eyes. It spoke to her. It told her that she did this before and she could do it again.

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” she said.

“You can stay at the house. I’ll find a hotel.”

Every word grounded her fear deeper in reality. Every word crushed her silent prayers.

When she prayed, she prayed to the stage. It was built from worldly brick and mortar, inspired by her mortal words, but it was no golden calf. God was still God; it was her brain that substituted the bearded cliché for something tangible. She could almost hear its music tonight, weaving through the honking cars and seeping with the summer air through the crack in the window.

Help me! she prayed again, and the theater responded:

(Live the life you imagined!)

But she was! Oh God, this was the life she imagined! Loving Hyde, caring for his aches and illness and bee stings... now that memory stung. She tried to shake it from her head (when her tweezers found the tiny obstruction and pulled it from her husband’s pale leg and he said, “Thank you, Kayla.”) The vividness of that golden moment turned the ventricles around her heart into eels with teeth that chewed their way to her core, noshing holes through beating blue webs and brown tissue. Nothing but divorce and death could desecrate such joyful memories. 

“Why is this happening?” she asked.

Hyde didn’t reply so she braved a look. His hands were griping the wheel at ten and two. Somehow, that detail was the thing that made her cry. “Is there somebody else?” she asked.

“No, Kay...”

“Is it because I’m a dancer?”

He didn’t reply.

“Is it because I’m ugly when I cry?”

“Of course not.”

When life dolled out her share of sadness, Kayla’s heart took control of her body and all her husband saw was a crybaby.

But if he could only feel this! If he could feel just one second of pressure on the back of his eyes--one second of toothed eels biting his heart--then he would understand! He would say, “Let’s go to dinner, Kay. Let’s make it work.”