Finding Home (The Genevieve Dubois Collection, Vol 1)

ONE

ONE

The house lights went down.

Evie took a deep, focusing breath. Relishing the musty suffocating air of stage left.

Twelve feet.

In four feet she would be on stage. In twelve feet she would hit cue one. There, the hint of musty suffocation would dissipate and be replaced by the blessed coolness of the overhead fans and open stage.

The entire dance was choreographed to be black except for a single, soft lavender spotlight that would follow her precise moves across the stage. She had been praised in the past for using a stage shrouded in darkness as a silent dance partner. But she never saw it that way. The darkness never represented anything other than abject loneliness. Because darkness always felt lonely.

Closing her eyes, Evie waited.

Waited for the silence that came just after the dimming of the lights. When the audience, as one, bought into the energy and excitement with a collective, bated breath.

She didn't need to check that the white draped dress, as thin as a threadbare sheet, hung perfectly on her near skeletal frame because she trusted her costume designer implicitly and could feel the soft brush of fabric rustle across her skin.

Years of ballet and modern dance classes kept her body small, almost childlike. Her muscles were well defined and strong but her body lacked that traditional feminine softness, instead featuring jutting bones and long, lean muscle. Unlike the average sixteen year old, Evie never bemoaned her flat chest, instead relishing how her lack of a chest made clean lines when she did extensions.

She didn't let her mind wander to the fact that her body, her ability to form complex and beautiful poses, was the one constant in her life. The one thing in the world that had never let her down. Just as she no longer looked into the audience in hopes of seeing her mother.

At sixteen, she gave up pretending.

Evie stopped pretending that her mother would choose to support her only child instead of traveling the world with whatever wealthy man she had latched on to. Or the father she could hardly remember, would ever care.

No, standing in the wings of the quite stage, Evie thought only of the dance. Only of fighting the encroaching sadness within by losing herself in the music and movement.

She hadn't become one of the most premier modern dancers in Europe by clinging to the past or dwelling on what would never be. She had found her own way by practicing every spare second she had in her prestigious Swiss boarding school's rehearsal studios. And she was finding fame with her raw choreography.

But Evie thought of none of this as she took position at cue one and the red curtain twilled open. Her body fully extended as the first notes reverberated from the single piano. Each note was soft, filled with a beautiful lightness that Evie mirrored with her movements.

The music dipped and her body bent gracefully forward only to effortlessly stretch out her left arm and leg in a peaceful abandon as she caught up to the piano's higher tones.

Toe point, jump, arch back, release head and neck, fall – gracefully to the floor... The soft piano tones mixed with dark lower notes as heavier instrumentation was added. Her body dipping, bending, extending, pulled in poses she didn't even know she made as her muscle memory and feeling of being lost in the hopefulness of the music carried her from position to position.

And then - just the one, haunting note from the flute. So high it skirted down spines and caught your hearts in its power. And Evie's body stayed, motionless, coiled in – portraying the sadness of when darkness is at your door. When you know that you won't be able to outrun it this time. She let the slight tremor of that note fill her. She let her body, for one second, be fragile in front of this audience, and tremble. And as she knew she would, she felt the fear impart on the audience.

That was the power of dance. The reason she woke up at 4 to practice before her classmate's even considered hitting snooze on their alarm clocks. That one moment, when every person in that audience felt the fear Evie felt when she acknowledged, she was alone.

And then the note fell away, and the darkness caught her.

The music stopped for only a beat but that quietness, that singular moment, left an emptiness in the room, and each subsequent move Evie made felt vacant. The peaceful abandon she had started the dance with was gone, and the heaviness of the world was in the arms wrapped around her head, her torso. It was in each move of the leg, each bend. It was with her as she writhed gracefully on the floor. And was felt as the piano started again with crescendos and whispers and melodies designed to rip out your already fragile heart and lay it in front of you.

As she closed out the dance, Evie let every minute of growing up alone and forgotten in a boarding school drip out of her. She channeled every lonely moment. She let the fear she felt having to comfort herself reach from her fingertips to wash over the captive audience. And then she exacted her final sequence - crouched back on cue one, knees to chest, all weight on her back heels. Elbows resting on knees, and head loosely rolling across her outstretched hands.

She knew the picture she made. But her mind was numb. She could hear the soft cries of the audience, but her heart was numb. It was just the music fading away. In her mind it was just the moves of an accomplished dancer not the cowering of a scared child. It had to be.

The spotlight and last note of the piano faded quietly away together. Because light doesn't just go out on anguish, it is slowly extinguished. And she remained, crouched on cue one, in a position she had found herself doing often in the corner of her dorm room when the darkness of the world found her.

Except this time, when the darkness came, so did the applause.