The Venus Fix

Ninety-Three

On Sunday, I picked Dulcie up after her three o’clock performance. We were quiet in the car as it pulled away from the curb. We still had to resolve our differences. And I knew, because Mitch had told me, that she still had her heart set on trying out for the television series because they still hadn’t cast anyone.

The driver headed west and at Eighth Avenue, turned the corner. The light changed. We’d stopped just a few feet away from the Playpen Theater.

It had only been two days since Stella had almost blown us all up in there.

Blythe was already out of the hospital and home with her parents. She had been given sleeping pills but just enough to sedate her. Stella was in a psychiatric hospital under observation; I doubted she’d ever leave.

A shudder went through me. Inside that theater, I hadn’t thought about how much danger I’d been in, but now sitting next to Dulcie, it hit me harder than I expected it to.

Protecting everyone had been all that mattered to me.

Dulcie. Nina. Blythe. My patients.

Long ago, my mother.

I hadn’t thought about protecting myself.

It was something, to use the analytic phrase, that I would have to work on.

“What do you want to do this afternoon?” I asked Dulcie when the car started moving again.

She shrugged.

“Nina invited us to go ice-skating with her. Do you want to do that?”

I could see that the suggestion had piqued her interest. Her eyes had widened and she’d almost smiled, but then she’d remembered that she was supposed to be mad at me. “I guess.” She managed to keep any expression out of her voice. She really was the consummate actress. I thought of my mother and sighed. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.

At Wollman Rink in Central Park, a waltz played, the ice shimmered, and dozens of pairs of silver skates flashed as they raced past. I watched my daughter as Nina must have once watched me. The wind blew her dark hair out behind her and her eyes sparkled as she sped across the rink, skating so fast her feet were a blur.

Nina and I were skating arm in arm, very slowly. She was concerned that with the cast my balance might be off. I didn’t think it was, but I didn’t mind the contact or the comfort she offered. Despite the cold bite in the air, I kept circling, watching my daughter’s agile body flying across the ice, feeling the warmth of Nina’s arm against mine. Going around and around. No beginning to the circle, and no end.

Afterward, we went back to Nina’s brownstone. I sat in the kitchen while she and Dulcie hovered over the stove, melting chocolate in a double-boiler until it was shiny and soft and then stirring in milk. It wasn’t hot cocoa, but hot chocolate, prepared the way they had been making it in Europe for the past three hundred years. The way Dulcie had wanted me to make it two very long weeks ago.

Sitting around the coffee table, sipping the thick, fragrant elixir and munching on cookies, Nina asked Dulcie about the play, and I listened as my daughter launched into a soliloquy about the rewards and frustrations of performing on Broadway. I wasn’t surprised when she segued very nicely into how much more exciting it would be to do something different every week. Like be in a television drama.

She managed to shoot me a look but I didn’t respond.

I just drank my hot chocolate and wondered how I was going to get my daughter back without giving in to what she wanted.