The Notebook Under the Bed
Chapter 02 - The Notebook Under the Bed
The pianist left his hands suspended above the keys. Sophie looked at Adrian, then at me. I crossed the floor and knelt so we were eye to eye.
“You did beautifully,” I whispered.
“But the man said stop.”
“He's asking about the dance, honey. You didn't do anything wrong.”
Adrian came nearer, though he kept a respectful distance. The photographs in magazines had made him look colder than he did now. He looked tired, and underneath the immaculate suit he seemed suddenly much older than his fifty-nine years.
“Was that Lydia's winter variation?” he asked.
I nodded once. Celeste had turned strangely motionless by the microphone.
“That's impossible,” she said. “It was never performed publicly.”
“I didn't say it was performed publicly,” I replied.
Adrian noticed. “You knew my daughter?”
I could have told him everything then. Instead, I remembered the hospital corridor five years earlier, Lydia's trembling fingers pressing a notebook into my hands, and the voice message she'd sent before her car went off the road.
“Not here,” I said.
Celeste stepped between us. “Adrian, security can handle this.”
“No,” he answered. “Security will let Ms. Ellis leave with her daughter. We'll speak in private if she wishes.”
The phrasing mattered. If she wishes. Nobody in this room had offered me a choice until that moment.
We left through the side door. My supervisor, Mr. Keating, caught up in the corridor and muttered that I'd made trouble. He threatened my next shifts. Adrian's assistant, a woman named Nina Park, heard him and asked that any decisions about my employment be documented.
Sophie slipped her hand into mine. “Mom, are we in trouble?”
“No, sweetheart.” I wished I sounded more certain.
In the apartment we shared over a laundromat in Queens, I took the blue notebook from a box beneath Sophie's bed. Its corners were softened from years of handling. Lydia had drawn steps in the margins, leaving arrows and little stick figures with impossibly elegant arms. She used to laugh that choreography was mathematics with bruised toes.
Sophie climbed onto the mattress. “Are we going to give it away?”
“I don't know.”
“Aunt Lydia said it was for people who wanted to dance, even if they didn't have money.”
That was true. Lydia had taught free Saturday classes in a church basement, sometimes arriving straight from rehearsals at Lincoln Center. She'd been Adrian Bellamy's daughter, yet she carried donated tights in the trunk of a fifteen-year-old car.
Five years earlier she'd told me the foundation was turning away children while its accounts showed thousands of scholarship awards. She'd wanted to ask her father for an independent audit.
Three days later she died in a highway crash.
The police concluded that the road had been slick and that she was driving too fast. I hadn't known enough to challenge them. I'd known only that Lydia was afraid before she died.
At eleven, Nina called. “Mr. Bellamy would like to meet tomorrow. No lawyers, no press. But you're welcome to bring someone you trust.”
I looked at the notebook.
“Tell him I have something his daughter wanted him to see.”
Sophie curled beneath her blanket. When I kissed her goodnight, she whispered, “Do you think Aunt Lydia would have liked my dance?”
May you like
I kissed her forehead. “She would've cheered loudest of all.”
Then I listened to Lydia's last voice message again, hearing in the background a second voice I had never been able to identify. This time, after watching Celeste at the gala, I thought I recognized it.
