Image via Ahmad Odeh

When Kayla found out that Ellen had danced with Merce Cunningham’s company and now taught at Juilliard, she couldn’t believe her good luck. Ellen’s child was having his mac and cheese, saying yuck as he found the leftover ones mixed with the ones she’d made fresh, when Ellen had explained what she did for a living. Kayla was speechless and had to will away her tears—such was the force of what she would later describe as epiphany.

Ellen had escaped New York City just as the pandemic was about to shutter the schools, bringing her four-year-old in tow. Up here they were closer to Niagara Falls than to Manhattan, but Ellen had interviewed Kayla carefully about her contacts. Had she been keeping quarantine? Kayla had, religiously. Her mother was recovering from cancer and couldn’t afford Kayla getting sick.

Do you know it’s Shakespeare’s birthday today? Ellen asked. She had a soft gamine hairstyle Kayla loved; thick hair she’d let grow gray without concern. 

Were it not for this virus we’d be watching a production. They have a theater in Cold Spring, you know, a festival every year.

Oh, Ellen was always bringing her tidings from a world that seemed farther and farther away. Cold Spring was half a day’s drive, though who could imagine spending the gas to see Shakespeare? Kayla had lived in Henrietta all her life, traveled just a handful of times to New York City. Her mother still reminisced about their last trip together, a mother-daughter soiree, as she’d called it, when they’d gone to see The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center, then splurged on pancakes at Times Square, which both Kayla and her mother liked to eat to mark a day well lived. Kayla remembered the dancer she’d accosted after the production, who’d given her an autograph she’d framed on her desk: Keep dancing, it read, never stop!  

The house Kayla worked in was Ellen’s old childhood home, unsold for the sake of some longstanding nostalgia. Most days, Ellen would leave her with Sid and head upstairs to prep her lessons and hold her classes that were happening remotely. But how did anyone dance facing a computer? How did that not bring up every inhibition?

Sid was short for Siddhartha, an Indian name, a sign of some long ago tryst with a father who wasn’t from America. Kayla loved the boy’s olive skin and his glasses. Though he was only four, the boy needed them to see the numbers on his subways trains. Just as soon as he’d had his breakfast of waffle and boiled egg, he’d harass her for something more sugary, then burn it off riding his bicycle around the porch.

Through mid-April it snowed. Amongst her other chores Kayla added shoveling the driveway, clearing enough of a path for her mother’s hand-me-down Ford to make it up the road. Sometimes she and the boy would play outside for hours, crafting snowmen with elaborate hats and eyes of pinecones. 

Once she spied Ellen in front of her computer, dancing. It was the most beautiful thing, the way her arms snaked as if they were channeling some old poetry. You could mimic a thing, Ellen had said over breakfast that day, or you could live it, and in the way she moved her bones, the sway and the command, Kayla could see that Ellen lived it through and through.

After the snow had mostly melted, she explored the property with the boy. Ellen’s house sat on a couple of acres, and they had just one neighbor, who lived in a house with a fenced off yard and a swimming pool big enough for a herd of elephants. Down in their driveway they’d parked an expensive car no one ever drove. Atop the house a satellite dish and next to it a miniature basketball court, where she’d never seen anyone throw up a shot. It was not a town in which one had to know the neighbors.

In the evenings Kayla tried to explain her new life to her boyfriend. They’d met working at a family-run chemical factory. That first time he’d taken off his Hazmat suit she could see there was something in his eyes, a sense of some larger adventure, though who knew if she’d been right? That was two years ago; since then, she’d learned you could dim the adventure out of a man with the simplest of traps. Until Ellen came, she too had felt stuck mixing those chemicals, watching the sluice run into the pond. Her boyfriend wouldn’t hear much of her new life. He wasn’t impolite but preferred his basketball. They weren’t playing live sports during the pandemic but old reels of playoff Jordan; this suited him just fine.

Kayla had the idea she’d ask Ellen if she had a chance at Julliard. She was twenty-four, maybe that was too old, and she had bad knees from all those years of ballet, and she was a little large for a dancer, she knew that. Except, she had what her mother described as midget hands and an overly small jaw, several rounds of dental surgery as a child. 

Ellen had been complaining that the student performances weren’t coming along, though who could blame them? These students were finding their art from family homes scattered over America or tiny apartments in New York City. Ellen was determined to make something of it in spite of the tragedies they read each day, the bodies being piled in the morgues, the nursing homes rotting of loneliness and death. 

On account of Ellen’s mood, Kayla took Sid out to the woods. The land was owned by the neighbor, but really it did not seem to her that anyone should own a forest, those tall pines giving way to the sloping light, some clearings full of dandelions, some streams from old rivers shooting through the earth. Birdcalls, even a heron wandered out from a lake—she tried to teach the boy to stop and listen. 

I want you to notice things, she said. What do you see?

At first the boy only saw the surface of things. The tree and its branches. More, she said. Look more. Then he saw the creeper on the tree was like the vein in his mother’s leg, he said. The wind that stirred the little pinecone. The worry in the squirrel’s eye. This would be her gift to him, she thought. A walking through the woods, a cultivation of stopping. For she knew he’d never lived this in the city, had always been rushed from train to school to meal. Once, they came upon a badger making its nest by the edge of a streambed. They’d walked so quietly and sat on their haunches the badger hadn’t noticed, continued its daily work.

I notice the gray hairs in his moustache, the boy whispered. 

Deep into the woods that day they saw what looked to be a teepee, but she called it a house made for elves. Someone had shaped logs into a structure that could bear weight and inside had covered the dirt with ferns. This is the palace of the elves, she said.

He looked at her with his long dark eyebrows; she made herself into a butterfly and expressed her wings around him and whispered a strange language into his ear until he laughed. 

But really she didn’t know who made these structures in the woods, whether it was the neighbor or whether it was another drifter like her. She’d meant to ask Ellen when they got back, but come evening Ellen was still sour. Then it was time for Kayla to go home. 

Her mother called that night. I won’t be made a fool of. They laughed at me, the doctors, the nurses, all the staff.

You need to be checked up, Kayla said. They saved your life. Only in your dream did they laugh at you.

Don’t tell me about my own dream, her mother said.

They had long pauses in their conversations, which felt comforting to Kayla. Sometimes they’d be on the phone for a whole hour and only say a few things. 

Are you in love with that woman? Her mother asked out of the silence.

That is a strange thing to say, Kayla said, but she knew her mother was right. She was in love with the Ellen who apprenticed her students, who’d once danced on every great stage, and Kayla was determined to learn from this Ellen, to see if something in her could be salvaged and made into art.

She’s too city for you, her mother continued. I didn’t raise you with those aspirations.

You know anything about that mansion next to them? Kayla asked. Her mother was the epicenter of all gossip and would hear of comings and goings in the area.

I know it’s fishy for folks to have so much money, her mother said. It’s just not right to have such a big swimming pool.

Don’t be righteous, Kayla said. It’s not like we ever went to church.

* * *

The next morning when they sat down to make their map of the day, as Ellen called it, which was really a strict schedule for Sid that Kayla tried to follow as if it were God’s decree, she blurted it out. I want to be a dancer, she said. I know I don’t have a chance, but still. 

Ellen looked at her boy who was serious into his waffle then at Kayla, eyeing her askance for a moment before a different look settled on her face. Kayla’s boyfriend had this same expression when he’d catch a fish in the stream before he let it fall back in.

Do you know Pina Bausch? Ellen asked. She’s a knife riding on fire.

Kayla shook her head no. 

We’ll start there, Ellen said. I’ll send you some links. It’ll be like building a house, one brick at a time.

Later, when she’d tell her mother of this exchange, her mother would ask incredulously, She called you a brick?

I think she was saying it was going to take time, Kayla would tell her mother. Indeed it was. All night she watched Pina cut an arresting figure across the screen. No matter what she did it was as if she had a knife and a feather.

Kayla practiced some of her new moves on Sid when they were out hiking in the woods. There was something striking about the shadows she shaped, the way the forest grew silent with every turn.

You don’t move like mommy, he said. 

I’m just learning, she said. These things take time, like building a log cabin.

This got his attention, and that afternoon they made their own fairy house next to one they’d found in the woods. Sid worked so hard carrying branches that he tired himself out and fell asleep on her lap; when it started drizzling, she carried him into the fairy home.

In that deep dark wood, she saw a man walk into the clearing. At first, through the rain and the mist, it felt as if he were only part of her imagination, but then she saw he was a man with an awfully long beard, and when he came closer, she could see his yellowed teeth, the line of his jaw. He had knotted hair and wild, wide eyes.

I make those, he said, pointing to the fairy house and wringing out his beard.

The boy was still sleeping, breathing softly against her chest. You live around here so? 

I care take, he said. I look after the property. I keep the nosy ones and the bad ones out.

We are neither of those, she said.

I’ll be the judge, he said. 

He marched off into the wood through a trail of melting snow. 

That evening, Kayla asked Ellen if she knew anything about the neighbors or a caretaker, but Ellen didn’t have the faintest. Her world was Sid and the classes that took place from her bedroom. It struck Kayla then that everything beyond those two acres meant little to Ellen; likely, she thought of Kayla in much the same way, as an object of temporary and fleeting interest.

Did you watch the Pina Bausch? Ellen asked, as Kayla handed Sid back to his mother.

Kayla nodded, feeling a tingling in her toes, a numbness along the line of her jaw.

Show me, Ellen said. Show me what you learned. 

Later, she’d told her mother: She asked me to dance. Right there in the living room. 

I told you the woman had no manners, her mother had said.

It had felt like she’d lacked all grace. Even Sid had seemed disappointed. There hadn’t been music.

* * *

The next morning Ellen called early. I’m coming down with something, she said. You’re not on your way yet, are you?

Kayla was already en-route to the house. Sometimes, she’d come half an hour early just to gather herself, sitting quietly in her Ford in the cold. 

I’m still puttering around, Kayla said, pulling off to the side of the road. Gathering wood.

Oh, good, Ellen said. I do have a temperature. In case I’m infected, you should probably stay away.

A few years before when she worked in a bakery shop, she’d sliced her thumb right open with a cake-cutting knife, and that’s how it felt now, hearing those words.

But how could you be infected? Kayla pressed. You haven’t seen anyone but me.

Well, I went to the post office over the weekend, Ellen said. Who knows, maybe it was that? Maybe it was while I was handling the packages? 

She wanted to say she didn’t care if she got infected, what did it matter? She felt a cleaving, a closing of doors. 

We might go back to the city, Ellen continued. Sid’s father already had it, and he’s offered to help take care of us.

Kayla wanted to say she could take care of them, but she knew an opportunity had already passed. Soon, Ellen’s childhood home would be empty again.  

Well, if you need anything, Kayla said, trailing off.

She left the Ford by the side of the road and wandered into those woods once more. Today she thought she could smell the first bloom, underneath that layer of frost. The sunlight illumined crags of mushrooms, revealed a lizard by her boot. She walked not caring if she got lost. 

Near where she’d sheltered Sid in the elven tent, she met the caretaker again. 

I saw you the other day, he said. Making your moves. 

He was good for nothing and smelled like the birch bark, but his voice was as soft as the moss she’d shown Sid. He no longer repulsed her. It was getting cold, the sunlight not yet spring light.

When she was a little girl, her mother had explained the moon supplied all the world’s rhythms. You don’t need music out there, her mother had said, those days before the cancer, the old age, the rotting smells. 

She’d never tell anyone else about the drifter, the odd way in which he reached his hand as if he wanted to waltz with her in the woods. And it seemed he did want just that, when he asked her in a voice like the stream’s unfreezing, Will you dance with me?

Jai Chakrabarti

Jai Chakrabarti is the author of A Play for the End of the World and a forthcoming story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf, 2022). His short fiction has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Jai was an Emerging Writers Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He lives in New York with his family.