Copyright 2010

               I push the button to roll down the back passenger window just before we cross the Whale Branch Bridge. My eighty-pound, thirteen-year-old Husky named Wipeout is drooling down my neck, wedging her graying snout between the shoulder strap of the seat belt and a smell she still recognizes. Warm slobber matches the consistency of the humidity that rushes in. Yellow-tooth breath is one with the sulfuric gases of the salt marsh.

               We are almost back but can’t go home. Wipeout doesn’t know that yet. She thinks she’s about to get out after a nine-hour-drive, stretch her legs and pee on the roots of Live Oak trees that lace a cool, mossy shade over Byrne Miller’s home. It was our home too, for a time. I know she still remembers, in happy dreams where she moans in her sleep and moves her paws through the air like she’s dog paddling in the creek, upside down. If she made a jump for it now, the outgoing tide would carry her past Half Moon and Ballast Islands, down the Intracoastal Waterway and up the un-named, deep-water creek that meanders in front of Byrne’s screen porch.

               But she’s content to hang out her tongue as we drive up the gentle incline that crosses the Whale Branch River. It is just high enough of a bridge to let you know how low the Lowcountry really is. A glissade, Byrne would call it, a ballet term for the graceful connecting step between flashy, show-stopping leaps. Behind and ahead of us is solid land, if sea-level deposits of sand and oyster shell can be classified as such. Stepping stones of the Gods are more like it, scattered from here to the Atlantic. For a brief, thrilling moment the Whale Branch Bridge releases all who travel over it from gravity. You look down, from a osprey’s eye view, into a fish-full ribbon of life. The water is a shimmering membrane, wide and porous. Salt and sweet, past and present, glide through in opposite directions.   It is my first trip back to Beaufort since getting engaged and I am just as anxious as the dog panting in my ear to tell Byrne all about it.

               My other mother, I sometimes call her, though she is on a different continuum than genetic. Hers is an influence somewhere between muse and instigator.  Byrne is the modern dance pioneer who adopted me when I arrived in Beaufort, twelve years ago, when I desperately needed adopting but didn’t know it.  That was before I knew a lot of things. Like the difference between needing a man and loving one. Or how trying to be everything a man needs is swimming upriver when the tide’s going out. It was before I could imagine Byrne not always living in her house by the creek, drinking wine on her screen porch under a wobbly ceiling fan. We were supposed to live there happily ever after – just Byrne, me and Wipeout – when I got through conquering the bigger pond of Washington, D.C.

               But a renter lives in her house now and I am taking Wipeout to visit Byrne in an assisted living facility. We picked the least of all possible evils when it had to be done, after the fall, after the blindness.

               “At least I like the name: Helena House,” Byrne had said. “It’s unpretentious, like me.”

               It was a joke, the unpretentious part, spoken by a Jewish Yankee who brought modern dance to the state that started the Civil War. So was the name part. But at least Helena House didn’t purport to be a “home” – in any sense of the word. “Institutional euphemisms,” Byrne called those, with a theatrical shiver through her lanky frame.

               I pull up to what looks like a cookie-cutter hotel chain, complete with faux second-story dormers and empty rocking chairs out front. Wipeout squats over a just-planted, already sun-scorched azalea bush and waters the fresh cedar chip mulch. We are parked on the street, not in a visitor’s spot, in case we need to make a speedy escape. It’s the same reason I don’t stop to sign the guest book, held open on its wood-veneer pulpit by a pen attached to a ball chain, like someone might want to steal it.

               “You aren’t planning on kidnapping Byrne are you?” the head nurse calls out from behind a desk. She recognizes me from earlier visits.

               “No sense leaving a trail of crumbs,” I whisper to Wipeout.

               The sliding glass doors close behind us and we are instantly trapped in a bubble of frigid air conditioning.  A corporate decorator must have reached for “beachy” but arrived at only relentless beige. Carpets, walls, people — all the color of putty. Byrne’s home, mine and Wipeout’s once, had radiated color – from the Navajo rugs on the wood floor to abstract paintings on its walls.

               “It’s a good thing Byrne can’t see anymore,” I tell Wipeout.

               She considers peeing again, on the beige, low-pile carpet posturing as sand, and I consider letting her. But I tug on her leash instead, knock on the door of room 101 and peek around the sitting area. Byrne is propped up in a mechanized bed, right arm outstretched and gripping the railing like it’s a ballet bar. She’s wearing headphones, listening to something that transports her far from here. Her magenta-colored sweat suit and costume earrings, normally so outlandishly cheerful, look garish. It’s the fluorescent lighting, I tell myself.

               “Hello gorgeous, is your dance card empty?” I tell her.

               For the first time in our life together, she doesn’t recognize my voice. No darling, so wonderful to see you. No how was the drive, come give me a kiss. Just a subtle lifting of her chin, elongating her already elegant dancer’s neck as if her ears need to be a little higher and then she’ll know who it is standing in her room. 

               “Byrne it’s me, Teresa,” I tell her, coming close enough to touch the top of her hand.

               “I’m not hungry,” she says. The smile that drifts over her face is pure politeness. Run along now, don’t bother me. Not even my name pierces through the fog.  Instead of telling her about the man I am about to marry I will have to introduce myself. The daughter she taught the steps of independence. Steps she, the teacher, can no longer dance.

               Wipeout pulls away from my grasp and jams her nose between the railing and Byrne’s hip, the one she broke the day after her 90th birthday. Byrne’s hand drops to her side, onto the silky fur between Wipeout’s ears.

               “Oh! Hello friend,” she says, dropping her voice. It’s how she always greeted Wipeout, in a deep, breathy tone that reminds me of an oboe. Hearing it is like eavesdropping on a secret password. Somewhere, a door is creaking open. Wipeout nuzzles even more insistently, like there might be a treat hidden under the sheets. Suddenly, Byrne reaches for my hand.

               “Come darling,” she says. “Let’s have a glass of wine on the porch.”

               A black patch covers where one eye used to be. The other catches only peripheral, ephemeral shapes. So Byrne can’t see the bottle of champagne I’ve kept chilled in a cooler since leaving Washington. Or the tears that spill down my face.

               “Why don’t we open the window, catch the breeze off the river?” I propose. There is no river, only an empty parking lot outside her window. I will have to bring the porch to her.

               “Byrne, I have wonderful news. I’m engaged to be married.” I wait for a sign that she can set any of my after-Beaufort story straight. “I found my Duncan, remember?”

               The smile that fills her face is real.  In the flesh, Duncan Miller was her soul mate of nearly sixty years. At Helena House, he is relegated to a black and white photograph on an otherwise beige wall. Byrne fervently hopes for a Duncan for all of her adopted daughters, even if their names escape her.

               “Wonderful to meet you,” she says, in the come-hither voice she uses with men. She thinks my Duncan is here, in the room. “Please, pull up a chair.”

               Her wrist leads an open palm on a graceful swoop through the air, a dancer’s grand gesture of hospitality and flirtation.

               “He stepped outside,” I tell her, so the music of the moment isn’t interrupted. “To let us girls catch up.”  I flick on the ceiling fan, a river breeze without the low note of decaying pluff mud.

               “Is he a handsome man?” Byrne asks, when she thinks it is just the two of us again. I squeeze her hand so she can feel how much. “Good,” she says. “Because you are a handsome woman and when the two of you step out together, heads should turn.”

               I know, with settled certainty now, that I have become one of the many pulses that flow through her brain in currents of memory. She is describing herself, and Duncan, and the private pride they relished in each other. Handsome, hell, they were magnificent. A love story, born in the Depression, that survived the powerful passions of artists’ lives and just-as-powerful personal tragedies. The mention of a new marriage is bringing it all back for Byrne and I can either swim to shore alone or go along for the ride. I have made this decision before and never regretted a moment of it. I hang on and share her history again.

               It isn’t steady, her grip on the distant past. She drifts in and out of being present, not quite asleep but never fully awake. It doesn’t matter if she skips around, leaves some parts out. I know the story of Byrne-and-Duncan’s love by heart. It was my only fairy tale, until I left Beaufort and created my own. Now it’s my turn to tell the storyteller how, in a few months, my Duncan and I will elope. She responds purely to the rhythm of my voice. I could be reading a beautiful poem, in a language she doesn’t speak. If I could gaze into her eyes,  maybe I could bring her gently back to here and now. Instead, her words start to circle, a little confused, like a kite that’s lost its string. The updraft of memories is all that keeps it dancing.

               Without warning, they take us suddenly backstage. Make that about to go on stage. Byrne is directing some sort of dance troupe and an orchestra is tuning up.

               “It’s going to be a disaster,” she tells me, sitting straight up from the waist in her mechanical bed. White sheets fan out from her hips like a Martha Graham skirt. Duncan’s photograph is now level with her head. He’s there for her, smoking his pipe and listening.

               “What is going to be a disaster?” I ask. The dreamy smile of listening is gone. Every tendon in her arms is tense. The eye patch twitches. I need to soothe her, somehow find the glissade to connect her steps.

               “The entire first act,” she answers, in a stage whisper. There are people in her head who might hear and she clearly doesn’t want them to.

               “Is there anything I can do?” I whisper back. I should open the champagne. The sound of a cork popping might snap her out of this. She turns her head in the direction of my voice, considering my usefulness.

               “Can you charm the conductor?” she asks. “Perhaps the orchestra can keep warming up until I can make that damn girl remember.”

               I must tread gently now. I’m not sure if she’s the damn girl or I am. “Remember what?” I ask.

               “The choreography,” she says. “We’ve rehearsed and rehearsed but she can’t seem to hear the music. She goes blank after the first thirty-two counts. And stage presence? The silly thing’s a pretty fish, flopping around on stage.”

               “Don’t any other dancers know the steps?” I ask. “Maybe you can move pretty Miss Flop-about back, into the chorus, and let someone else perform the lead.”

               “But I need someone sexy, with legs worth watching.”

               A piece of her biography is drifting back to me, like the hint of a familiar fragrance.

               “I wasn’t one of the great ones,” Byrne once told me. I had thought her modest, knowing that she had danced in New York, St. Thomas, Santa Fe, Mexico and Ireland before she landed in Beaufort in the late 1960s. It turned out she was anything but modest.

               “No darling,” she had said. “It was these bosoms that got me noticed. That and legs that wouldn’t quit. It was the Great Depression, remember, men needed a lift.”

               It is dawning on me what to do. The show must go on. I will simply dance alongside her.

               “Byrne you’re going to have to step in,” I tell her.

               An eyebrow, half hidden behind the patch, lifts up in an arabesque of interest.

               I continue. “You did the choreography, am I right?”

               She nods, still tense.

               “So who could possibly know the dance better? And you said yourself; the legs have to be worth the ticket price.”

               She reaches for her long legs, under the over-starched sheets, rubbing the tops of her thighs. I am shocked at how thin they’ve gotten. She is an elegant skeleton of a lifelong knockout.

               “But I’m not warmed up,” she says. “I haven’t even stretched.”

               I reach for her feet, loose them from the too-tight tuck of hurried hands. I begin to rub the still-high arches and calloused balls. Her bones are so brittle my fists could crush them.  I need to get the blood flowing. One hand cradles her heel while with the other I stretch her toes back, gently. Her calf muscles are lengthening, releasing the tension of inactivity. She’ll need the elasticity, for her imaginary pliés to spring into grand jetés across the stage.

               “Oh, that feels so good,” she says. “Now the other.  Hurry, can’t you hear the strings? They’re the last to tune.”

               “Hang on. I’ll sweet talk the conductor into giving us more time. What are they playing?”

               “Carmina Burana, of course,” she says.

               Of course. It was the soundtrack of a lifetime of seducing people into the joy of dance. Wherever Byrne went, this pounding drama accompanied her, coaxing confidence from reluctant students. Students like me.

               “Start your head rolls,” I tell her as I slip from my chair. “Slowly, keep those shoulders down. I’ll be right back.”

               I know this warm-up. Byrne is marking the movements her body can no longer manage. Her neck and torso gently sway. She is wind through the trees, when all that blows is ghostly moss.

               “Can you check on the men?” she asks. “There are lifts we must adjust.”

               Ah, the lifts. She was always too tall for men to manage. This is what still worries her. I can see it in her sinking posture. The dancer she’s replacing must be a tiny thing – all legs and no brains.

               “Why not shake things up a bit?” I tell her. “You are strong enough to lift the men.”

               She sits up straight again, vertebra by vertebra.

               “Scandalous,” she says with a thin, mischievous smile. Her hands flutter down to her hips and she pivots one shoulder to a jaunty angle.  Her chin lifts. “Just what this town needs. Call the newspapers. Get the TV cameras. You and I are going to turns things on their heads.”

               O Fortuna fills the room, timpani and snare drums drowning out the pitiful, piped-in muzak of Helena House. It is a concert hall today, and Byrne is back where she was born to be. I am in the front row, mesmerized. And when Wipeout hears the oboes, low as hello friend, she throws her head back and howls.