Chapter Text
we ain’t got a long time, and there’s a lot to do
but first, you’ve got to decide
to leave some things behind
During an open-call audition for a show that ends up tanking, Ken glances over a seventeen-year-old Nadine and leaves her off his callback list. He never makes that mistake again.
He next meets her when she’s eighteen. She’s all wild dark hair and huge brown eyes and passion stretching from her long legs to her fingertips, and he knows midway through the second audition combination that he needs to hire her. She’s meant to dance, and he’s meant to give her a stage.
She’s young still, and green, so he casts her in a minor role to start and asks her if she wants to also be the first understudy to both female leads. For the first time, her steely composure cracks. “I’d love that,” she says, buzzing with childlike delight, and darts close to give him the world’s briefest hug before backing away and turning bright red. “Could I—is there a phone I could use to call my sister?”
Ken points her to the far wall.
Ken has no real reason to be nervous about Nadine’s first rehearsal session, but it feels strangely like preparing for his first day of school. Even though he’ll be doing the teaching, and even though he’ll be in his own space, and even though he’s known Nadine for decades, he agonizes over the choreography for his selected six-minute cut of music (the “marathon” project piece she’d requested) up until the minute she walks through the studio door. Reason one: this is her return to New York and her return to dance. It’s surely more important to her than she’ll ever verbalize, and he’s going to do his damnedest to make it perfect for her. Reason two: he’s certain that Nadine isn’t any less of a perfectionist than she was thirty-something years ago, and her high standards have always extended to the people in her circle, so she’ll be quick to tell him if his choreography skills are slipping.
Their last meeting had stunned him. As he’d hovered in the doorway to the studio and watched her dance with Anna, he’d first marveled at how Nadine could still dance with professional precision while pouring her day-to-day energy into keeping democracy and diplomacy intact. After he’d emerged from his hiding place to surprise her, though, she’d looked different up close than he’d expected. Overflowing with joy, but still somehow…faded.
Ken had asked the loosest form of the question. Her calm, horrifying answer had made him feel sick. How had he not thought to check in with her more often these last few years? And how had he failed to notice the signs of ill health during the various telecasts of signings and summits she’d been a part of during this administration?
He’d offered her his help in getting back to the stage that day. In true Nadine fashion, she’d protested, claiming she was undeserving and that such an opportunity wouldn’t be fair. But he’d gotten her to agree in the end, and the day that she’d finally called him to ask for some time in his studio, he’d had to fight back tears.
When she arrives for her first rehearsal, he has to fight back tears once more. Nadine sets down her black dance bag in the corner by the barre and then rushes over to Ken. She embraces him for a long time before letting go. “Thank you so much for doing this.”
“My pleasure.”
Her hair, even done up in a bun, is notably thicker than it was the last time he saw her. There’s more color in her cheeks, too, and more muscle across her shoulders. She looks happy.
She looks healthy.
Ken stops short of saying it out loud. Even nowadays, to tell a dancer she looks healthier than she used to is to implicitly tell her that she also looks like less of a dancer. Nonetheless, it’s a tremendous relief to see.
“How was the move?”
Nadine’s smile lights up the room. “It’s been so great, Ken. I found an apartment that I love and it finally looks like more than a pile of boxes. I’ve been to class quite a few times already, and…” Already, her attention is veering off toward the mirrors. “Oh, I was thinking—I’d love to either host you and Anna in my shoebox home or go out to dinner with you both. Catch up, have an evening of just like old times…”
Ken decides to spare her the torture of having to wait any longer to start rehearsing. “Dance now, talk later?”
“Was I that obvious?” Nadine’s shoulders sag in relief. “Yes, please.”
Well, she hasn’t changed a bit.
“Before we get started, is there anything we should be doing differently in these rehearsals?” He doesn’t want to trigger the more long-lasting complications she’d mentioned, and he suspects they’ll impact these rehearsals if they’re anything like the exercise intolerance that had destroyed her attempt at returning to his show after her initial treatment.
“No.” She straightens as she says it. “Absolutely not.”
Which Ken doesn’t buy at all, because twenty-year-old Nadine also used to straighten up like that when she’d try to convince him she could go onstage with a hundred-and-three degree fever because no one would be able to tell from her voice. But that’ll have to be a battle for another day. “If I tell you to give seventy percent instead of a hundred percent during our first couple of sessions, will you give me eighty percent instead of a hundred and ten?”
“Probably not,” Nadine says, smirking. “But you can always try.”
“Would it kill you to mark once in a while?”
Her fabulously contagious laugh echoes off the studio walls. “Yes, it would.”
“Again,” Ken calls over the piano to Nadine. The best way to gauge his new-ish dancers’ capacity for reckless abandon is to push them to their physical limit and see if they allow the music to take over. “More. Give me more.”
Within ten seconds, he realizes his miscalculation. Most dancers only start to give most of what they have once he starts to drill them like this. Nadine has been giving everything she has for the last six hours straight.
Ken watches, speechless, while Nadine dances deep into the ground and up into the air all at once. Exhaustion is obvious in every movement, but so is love. Nadine loves the music and the character and the act of dance more than just about anyone he’s ever met. And it’s breathtaking.
As he plays the last chord of the four-minute piano piece and she freezes in her ending pose, Ken opens his mouth to tell her that she’s marvelous. The first consonant dies on his tongue as Nadine begins to cry. Nadine, his tough-as-nails dancer who usually acts like she’d rather die than be vulnerable for five seconds. “I—I don’t have any more,” she tells him, breathing so rapidly that she almost chokes on the simple words, and sinks to the floor in tears. “I’m sorry.” She covers her face with both hands. “I’m so tired. I’m sorry.”
Unprompted, his other dancers collectively busy themselves with adjusting their shoes, hair, or dance bags. Crossing to the center of the studio floor, Ken squats down beside Nadine. She’s shaking from head to toe, and she looks exhausted. “Please step out in the hall with me.”
She glances up at him, eyes wide and red-rimmed. “I don’t—”
Suddenly very aware of how many people are watching their reflections from the studio mirrors, Ken drops his voice to a whisper. “Please.”
He offers her his hand and helps her to her feet, then leads her out the door under his arm.
In the hallway, Nadine leans limply against the wall. “I’m sorry. I-I don’t know why I’m crying. I…”
“Go home. Ice your muscles, eat something, get to bed, and catch up on sleep. Come back tomorrow.”
Nadine’s blinks seem to be taking too long, like she’s minutes away from falling asleep while standing up. “I can finish the rest of today,” she protests. “Please.”
The realization hits. “This isn’t a test, Nadine. There is just about nothing you could do to lose this job except work yourself so hard that you burn up before opening night.”
She relaxes for only a second or two before stiffening. “I’m not sick.”
“You will be if you keep this up.” Ken thinks back through their past week of rehearsal. It’s been grueling for all of his dancers, but not so jam-packed as to prevent them from staying rested so long as they’re also staying balanced in their routines. “When was the last time you slept for more than a couple of hours?”
An odd mixture of shame and pride crosses her face before she responds. “Tuesday.”
It’s Saturday.
Desperate, Ken tries tough love. “No more doing this to yourself. Understood?”
“Okay.” Nadine clears her throat and repeats herself. “Okay.”
“Where’s your dance bag?”
“Back…along the back wall. Far right corner.” She wipes her eyes.
“I’m going to get it for you. Take a minute and pull yourself together..”
When he returns to the hall with her bag, having pointedly ignored the sea of staring eyes during his walk across the room and back, Nadine is sitting with her back to the wall and her knees to her chest. Her eyes are already half-closed.
“Are you alright to take the train home or should I call you a cab?”
“I’m…” She blinks a few times. “…What?”
Cab it is.
"How did that section feel?"
As Ken pauses the music, Nadine lifts one hand to her lips, visibly overcome with emotion. Apprehension clamps down on his chest. “Are you okay?”
Her voice wavers. “It’s so good to be this kind of tired again.”
Ken knows the feeling. Muscles all burning with the same dull ache, eyes stinging from sweat, mind still riding the high of the music, body already trying to sink into the floor. His time for it has come and gone, but watching Nadine dance right up to the brink is the next best thing.
For now, he trusts that she’s not going to dance over the brink like she used to, and based on her dancing today, she certainly seems capable of running rehearsals at her usual breakneck speed. So he lets Nadine do it her way for their next workshopping session. But halfway through their third, she stops mid-number for a water break with a preoccupied look on her face and an odd tension in her posture, and he decides to do it his way instead.
“I’m going to ask again. Is there anything we should be adjusting in these sessions?”
Nadine drinks nearly half of her water before capping the bottle and shaking her head. “No.”
Ken waits.
“I’m fine, Ken. I feel great. I’m muscle-sore today. That’s it.”
“Your hands are shaking.” The face she pulls at his comment reminds him so much of her obstinate teenage self. “Nadine.”
She glances down at her fingers, now looking genuinely surprised. “Okay. Okay.” Pressing one hand to her abdomen and the other to her back, she takes a deep, slow breath. “I got caught up in the dancing. I wasn’t paying attention.” She takes another deep breath. “Can I take a minute?”
“Have as much time as you need.” Should he step aside? Leave the room? Help her with something?
Nadine settles crosslegged on the floor and pulls her dance bag over to her side. “You can stay.”
Coming from her, that’s a surprising response in and of itself.
“Please tell her she can’t go on tonight.” Anna herds him down the hall to the dressing room she shares with Nadine. “She can barely fit her ankle in her boot for the opener.”
“Oh, Christ.”
Nadine had twisted her ankle toward the end of a put-in rehearsal for their swings earlier today. She’d walked offstage on both feet, though, and Ken had been bombarded with too many people and too many questions after the number to slip away and check on her.
“I told her it’s only previews. I said I’d rather dance with her on opening night than have her risk it for this. She needs to hear it from you, though.”
He finds her sitting on the floor of her dressing room, her back to the wall and her injured leg propped up with a folded jacket, a seat cushion, and her dance bag. She looks sullenly up at Anna. “You had to go run to teacher?”
“Can it, Dee.”
Bracing himself for pushback, Ken crosses the tiny room in a few steps. “Show me.”
Nadine lifts the bag of ice away from her ankle, revealing a sea of dark bruising.. The swelling has already crept down into her foot and up into the base of her calf.
Ken winces. “Anna, can you find Diana and tell her she’s on tonight?”
“Yes.” Anna starts to leave, then turns back around and squats down next to Nadine. “ I love you, Dee.”
She quickly kisses Nadine’s hair before rushing down the hall.
“I can do it,” Nadine says as soon as Anna is out of earshot. “You know I can block it out.”
He does know. Nadine has proven herself to be one of the most stubborn, unrelenting performers he’s ever met when it comes to complete disregard for her own physical wellbeing. At various points over the last few years, she’s insisted on dancing for him through a separated shoulder, strep throat, cracked ribs, a broken toe, two severe migraines, a torn hamstring, and a concussion—most of which she’d downplayed, some of which she hadn’t even mentioned to Ken until after they’d resolved, and all of which had made him begin to fear her utter lack of self-preservation. The fact that she has solo vocal numbers in this show has helped somewhat, if only because she can no longer convince him that she can dance through illness when she can’t also sing through it. But Ken can’t shake the thought that Nadine will put her career and her body in the ground one day, and that when it happens, it’ll be his fault for not intervening sooner.
“I don’t want you to. If you get in the habit of doing that now, you’ll get away with it for just enough years to end up broken by thirty. I want you dancing for a lot longer than that.”
Suddenly tearing up, Nadine adjusts the bag of ice on her ankle.
“Every night you dance when you shouldn’t be dancing or sing when you shouldn’t be singing, you’re losing months—probably years—off of the other side of this bookend. Take it from me.”
A few months later, she’ll tell him that her neck is riddled with cancer. And after treatment, when she returns to the theatre as a ghost of herself, he’ll realize that she’s never going to have the chance to heed his advice.
He watches, silent, as Nadine pulls out a bottle of Tums from her bag and chews half of one. She swallows, then closes her eyes and takes a few more slow breaths through her nose before glancing in Ken’s direction.
“What can I do?”
She laughs softly. “You can take a few deep breaths yourself. I’m fine.”
So maybe he’s not doing as good of a job of hiding his concern as he’d thought.
“Can you sit with me for a few minutes? We should—I should explain.”
Ken joins her as instructed, even though his knees and back will pay for it later. Shifting to face him, Nadine clears her throat. “My most recent surgery more or less left my one remaining parathyroid gland for dead. Because the hypoparathyroidism became more severe, I had to recalibrate all of my calcium and Vitamin D supplementation to match. This—” she gestures at the studio mirrors—“this intensity of exercise tends to put my blood calcium in the toilet. In a week or two, I’ll be better at calculating how much I should compensate in advance to stop the lows from hitting in the middle of rehearsals and classes. Right now, it’s still trial and error.”
It doesn’t much surprise him to hear that this is connected to her cancer, but getting confirmation almost takes his breath away nonetheless. Watching her struggle through rehearsals with no light left in her eyes had broken his heart three decades ago. Even though she looks a hundred times happier and steadier now, the familiar image of Nadine looking very small and very vulnerable on a studio floor will always rattle him.
“You got like this during our last rehearsal around this time. I’m sorry I didn’t realize sooner, or I would have said something.”
“I—” She frowns. “Did I?”
“Yes.” He would’ve expected her to notice the signs. Then again, he would’ve thought that he too would recognize it for what it was. He doesn’t remember much of this from her aborted attempt at returning to Broadway, though.
When Nadine speaks next, it’s as though she’s just run through the same thought process.
“Last time—when I was trying to return after treatment, I was overcompensating so much that I almost never felt the lows. That, and I was having such a hard time dancing through the hyperthyroid symptoms that I rarely was able to go long enough to reach the point of low calcium. Most of what you saw happening was rooted in the oxygen starvation and the heart issues.” She winces. “And the fact that I was practically starving.”
“I called her a cab. She’s going to take tomorrow to rest and we’ll regroup after—”
Slumped on a stool backstage, Anna immediately breaks into sobs. “I can’t watch her do this.” When Ken steps closer, she stands up and reaches for a hug with one hand while burying her face in the other. “I want to solve everything for her, but I can’t—”
He opens his arms and lets her lean against him. “I know.”
Nadine had come out of the gate far too fast in her first rehearsal back, just as they’d both known she would. Still, she’d kept herself together well enough to quell the worst of his worries.
Today has done the opposite. An hour in, Nadine had buckled to her knees mid-dance number. The pulse in her wrist had to have been pounding at damn near 200 beats a minute when he’d helped her backstage, and her breathing had sounded like she was being actively strangled. Against his better judgement, he’d allowed her to step back in after half an hour of rest. She’d stayed upright for only another half hour of dancing after that before sprinting offstage to be sick.
For the last hour, she’s been curled up on the floor of her and Anna’s dressing room, using a dance bag as a pillow and trying to recalibrate her body. Ken had only allowed her to leave the theater once she stopped shaking all over. She’d insisted on going by herself, but even now, he half-wonders if somebody should be following her home.
“She’s lost so much weight,” Anna says. “I’m begging her to eat and she won’t. I don’t know what to do.”
One of his leads is trying and failing to learn how to live again, and the other cares so deeply for her that it’s ripping her apart, and Ken can’t do anything to make any of it better. “Anna, she’s been going through hell for months. It’s going to take time.”
In one tearful breath, Anna voices everything Ken has been trying not to say. “It’s not just that. It’s not just from the treatment. She’s shutting down. She’s not coping.”
He doesn’t want to believe what Anna’s telling him. But during intermission on Nadine’s first and only night back, when she reaches the crescendo of a debilitating panic attack and medication side effects all in the same minute and tells him she’s not ready, he has no choice but to accept it as the truth.
“I’m working very hard to be responsible about it, but it’s so easy to ignore it for too long when I’m dancing. Which feels so much better on my body lately than it did when I felt awful all the time, so I’ve been doing more of it and I’ve been going at it harder.” She sips from her bottle of water. “This is frustrating, obviously, but the fact that I’m only treating a very mild low right now instead of cramping all over and being sick to my stomach and completely grounded for hours is…” Her next breath is shaky. “Remarkable, actually. I can’t begin to tell you how new this is to me, Ken. Feeling this good as a baseline again. I can’t remember…”
Trailing off, Nadine tips her head back against the wall.
“I’m not crying today,” she declares after a few seconds of silence. “You’re not allowed to make me cry.”
At this rate, she’s going to make him cry.
“Let me say this, then. We’re both older. I’d like us to also be wiser relative to when I used to allow you to nearly kill yourself every month for the sake of dancing, so I’m going to set some terms for this arrangement. We’re going to take this slow.”
Nadine reacts as predicted. “I don’t do slow.”
The indignant look on her face makes him snort. “I don’t mean slow slow. You said you wanted a marathon. I’m not having you run twenty-six miles right off the bat. We’re going to pace these rehearsals. Regular breaks, regular check-ins. No ignoring any sort of pain. I’m not concerned about you losing your insatiable drive to be perfect during the few minutes you take to have a sip of water and a Tums.”
She smirks.
“Are you really hearing me?”
Nadine unleashes one of her formidable eye-rolls. “Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” But she turns abruptly to stare through her eyebrows at him. “This time wasn’t because I was trying to ignore it. I’m not doing that anymore. I need you to know that. I was just having too much fun to notice.”
Ken is surprised to realize that he believes her.
maybe it’s time
maybe it’s time
“You’re still nuts for that, by the way.”
“Because it’s still good.” Anna sprinkles another spoonful of corn across her flatbread—their meal of choice for a quiet evening in the spirit of their old routines.
“It’s corn on pizza, Anna. It’s nuts.”
“Look at yours!”
Hers is topped with kale and sweet potato, so maybe Anna has a point.
Nadine slips the two flatbreads onto a baking sheet and into the oven, sets a timer, and gestures to the heap of puzzle pieces on the black folding table by the bookshelf. There’s nowhere enough space in this place for it, but it’s worth it to have a designated surface other than the coffee table where glasses of water can’t drown a thousand pieces at a time. “We should be able to sort out most of the edge pieces by the time dinner’s ready.”
“I feel eighteen again,” Anna says as she crosses the room. “The puzzle table back in action and everything. I can’t get over how great it is to have you here—coming?”
“Just a second.”
Nadine pauses to fish a quarter of a calcium tablet from the bottle by the stove. Anna watches her closely. “Everything okay?”
“Ken pushed me hard today and I’m trying to stay on top of my levels, but I’m completely fine.” In a backwards sort of way, she appreciates that she’d experienced a low this morning in front of him. It had been brief and mild and easy to handle, and she’d needed the reminder that managing her health while asking her body to perform again had to be an active habit instead of a passive one.
Visibly relaxing, Anna glances at the picture on the puzzle’s cardboard box. “I’ll start on the purples.”
“I’ll sort blue.” She washes down the lingering taste of chalk with half a glass of water before joining Anna by the puzzle. “How was this week at the theatre?”
“It’s been…” Anna shrugs halfheartedly. “This hasn’t been my favorite show, to be honest. I’m selfishly glad that it was always supposed to be a limited run.” After a long sigh, she glances up from the puzzle. “Anyway. I’m sure I’ll call you sometime this week for a rant, but I don’t want to waste tonight on that. How’s…how are your three musketeers faring without you?”
Nadine plays along with Anna’s obvious attempt at changing the subject. “Lilith is just fine, probably because she wasn’t seeing me everyday to begin with. I’ve been told that Jay’s doing an admirable job of pretending not to be rattled. He and Blake are essentially best friends now, so that’s been helping both of them.”
Eyes brightening, Anna sits forward. “You think it’s forever with Jay?”
Her cheeks start to heat up. “I want it to be.”
Saying it aloud feels right.
Anna smiles softly. “It was about time one of us finally found someone worth spending a lifetime with.”
For just a moment, Nadine thinks she sees a hint of moisture in her eyes. But then Anna finds a missing edge piece buried within the pile and exclaims in delight at her accomplishment, and whatever might have been there disappears.
They lapse into comfortable silence for a few minutes of searching for puzzle pieces. When Anna next speaks, she seems to have perked up. “How much time left on the flatbreads? God, it smells so good in here already.”
Nadine squints over at the oven timer, her stomach growling as if on cue. “Two minutes.” She can’t believe how much her appetite has increased since returning to regular dance classes. Her body’s cues come when they’re supposed to now, a far cry from the long stretch when she’d forgotten how to identify either hunger or fullness. And her brain and her body are on the same page about sleep lately, and her dreams aren’t riddled with death, and her muscles aren’t threatening to give out on her during acts as simple as walking up or down stairs. She hasn’t stopped marveling at all of it yet.
She clears her throat. “By the way, I’m warning you now that my three musketeers are going to try to turn you into a double agent.”
“What?”
Later, Nadine will realize that Anna’s startled reaction is a little too startled to be genuine. Not now, though. “Blake and Jay are losing their minds back in DC. They say they’re not, but they’re full of crap. They’re used to me needing them a lot more than I do right now, so they have some sort of bizarre feedback loop of worry going on between the two of them. Which is fair, because I’ve given them a lot to worry about over the last few years.”
She’s shared bits and pieces of it with Anna during her past visits to New York, but she hasn’t yet spelled out just how bad things had been at the peak of all of it. Her health, her now-diagnosed PTSD, her eating disorder, her treacherous relationship with Vincent, her job, her fear of relying on even her own sister for support—
If she traces the reluctance back to the source in the way that Dr. Moore always tells her to, it’s half grounded in the fact that it’s very nice to be living somewhere where people only know the details of the first time her life fell apart. And it’s half grounded in the fact that making Anna carry any more than what she already knows seems patently unfair, given that Nadine had bolted from their friendship in the process of bolting from New York.
She’ll have to work on that.
“They’re going to track you down and make you deliver messages to them in code so they know I’m not lying to them about doing well. And Lilith—she’ll be even worse than the two of them, because she knows you already and also because she’s decided that sharing all of our DNA means that I automatically forfeit the right to tell her she’s interfering in my life.”
“Seems fair to me.”
Nadine turns on her best attempt at a whine. “Anna…”
“I’m kidding!” Anna holds up both hands in surrender. “I think it’s sweet of them to care so much, that’s all. I’d also love to crash a group dinner if you manage to get all of them up here for a visit at the same time.”
“They would all love that,” Nadine says, absentmindedly rubbing her left thumb over her right fingernails. “As would I. I don’t know if Blake and Jay will ever be able to leave DC at the same time, but I should at least be able to arrange it so one of them and Lilith can visit at the same time at least once.” Jay had gotten to know Anna during the wonderful weekend when Ken had first proposed that Nadine come back to New York, but Anna and Blake deserve a chance to interact without one of the worst days of Nadine’s life getting in the way.
She glances down at her hands and, without thinking, hums in surprise.
“What?”
“My nails aren’t brittle anymore. I used to spend so much time examining them as some sort of nervous habit. I’ve stopped doing it nearly as often now, so I didn’t realize that they were growing out so much stronger than they were.”
Anna’s smile widens at first but then falls away. “Why are you looking at them now?” Seeing Nadine’s confusion, she clarifies. “You said it was a nervous habit. What are you nervous about?”
It’s dizzying, sometimes, being seen like this. All of these wonderful people in her life who know how to cut right to the core of her worries, spot all of the truths that Nadine doesn’t like to look at head-on, and tell her why none of it is as bad as she believes. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be used to it.
“I’m sorry.”
“What on earth for?”
“Getting overwhelmed and running for the hills? And coming back like I didn’t do that and trying to pick up where we left off?”
Anna shakes her head. “Don’t do that to yourself.”
“But—”
“Don’t. You went through a lot of shit, found your footing, and went off and changed the world. And you’re here now and you’re happy again. God, Dee. All I wanted back then was for you to be happy again. How could I be anything other than proud of you?”
If Nadine looks at her, she’ll dissolve into a weeping mess in a matter of seconds. She says the only words she can find. “Thank you.”
“Thank you.” Anna takes one of Nadine’s hands in between both of hers. “Thank you for coming back.”
maybe it’s time
to leave your chains behind