House of Dance Read Online Free

illumination I saw a woman with candy red hair in a tight-fitting black Lycra dress. She was working the air as if the air were silk, and behind the streaks of rain she disappeared and returned and blurred and bent, and I could not see a partner. It was just the woman and the mirror and the windows streaked with rain, just the woman, turning and snatching, and lifting one arm, and making two of herself in the mirror.
    I heard the boy with the bike pedaling up from the tunnel. I saw the tunnel people slowly dispersing. There were more cars on the road, sloshing the deep puddles sideways, and still the dancer kept dancing, wrapping herself up with her one arm, then spinning and unspooling. She did the same thing over and again, as if she had made some sort of deal with herself: so many repetitions, so many spins, so many tosses of the right hand. She spun out of sight, came back, then vanished.The place went dark. Wait, I thought. Come back. But she was gone, and when I was sure that she was absolutely gone, I started running home through the tunnel, lifting my arms beneath the clouds that were slowly getting lighter.
    “Is that you, Rosie?” my mother called when she heard me shut our door.
    “Just me,” I said.
    She came halfway down the steps, took one long stare at my streaming dark hair, tucked her own behind a porcelain ear. “You’re soaking wet,” she said.
    “There was a storm,” I told her.
    “What you need, Rosie Keith, is a warm shower.”
    “I know,” I said, and when her back was turned, I did a quick turn in the shadows.

SIX
    G RANDDAD TRIPLE STACKED HIS BOOKS , and in peculiar places between his books he’d stuffed papers and ribbons and things. He said it was his personal filing system, and when I asked him how I was supposed to know what to keep and what to toss, he said, “When you get to be in my condition, you don’t keep things for yourself. You let somebody else decide what should be held in trust.” He had asked me to focus on the in-between things. The books we’d get to later.
    “We should ask Mom,” I said.
    “You’re here,” he said. “She’s not.”
    “But how am I supposed to know what any of it means?” I asked, shaking an old envelope out of a book of Shakespeare sonnets. A crust of something flowerish plopped out from some fat textbook: crunchy, old, and gray. A package of seeds slipped from a dictionary. An old ketchup bottle label dropped out from The Old Man and the Sea . “I read this book,” I said, holding up the Hemingway so that Granddad could see.
    “A classic,” he said. “Built to last.” He was sitting upright on his couch with Riot asleep on his lap. He had put on his glasses, which made his eyes look even bigger than they were, more watery, like pools.
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “I forget your question.”
    I punched my free fist into my hip and turned back to his shelves. From between the pages of poetry slid a feather, red and puffy. “How,” I said, saying each word slowly, “am Isupposed to know what any of that stuff means ?”
    “Oh,” he said. “That’s simple. Ask.”
    I stared at him. I waited. I was learning about Granddad that he could be 100 percent exasperating, and maybe he liked being that way, or maybe that came from the cancer. The front part of his pure white hair had fallen down across his face. With his hand he pushed it back. I could see all his finger bones, as if there weren’t even any skin, and I thought about what Mom had said about the cancer’s starting in a place that nobody could see, and how it was his back that had ached at first, how it had hurt to work his garden, to ride his old bike with the basket, but he’d ignored it. Ignored it and then, when he’d found out what was wrong, done what he could to fight it, something called thalidomide, another thing called corticosteroids. But that had been three years ago, and the cancer had come back, and now it was too fargone to catch it. “I’m