The doorbell rang on a Sunday afternoon while I was washing dishes.
I almost didn’t answer it. On Sundays, it’s usually somebody selling something. Solar panels. Gutter cleaning. A young man with a clipboard who wants to talk to me about my eternal soul.
I dried my hands on the dish towel and opened the door.
A young woman was standing on our porch.
She was in her mid-twenties, with dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail and a gray wool coat buttoned all the way up to her chin. She was holding her hands in front of her, one gripping the other, the way people do when they’ve practiced what they’re going to say and can’t remember any of it.
“Can I help you?” I said.
She smiled nervously.
“Hi, Margaret,” she said.
Something about her eyes made my breath catch. Big brown eyes, set a little too wide apart. Eyes that looked like they were waiting to be told to leave.
“Do I know you?” I said.
“I hope so,” she said.
And then she gave me a smile I’d seen ten thousand times. A crooked smile. The left side going up higher than the right. A smile that used to show up over a bowl of vegetables she refused to eat.
The dish towel fell out of my hand.
“Ivy?” I whispered.
To understand why I couldn’t breathe on my own front porch, you have to know who Ivy was to me.
And to understand that, you have to know who I was before her.
I used to believe there wasn’t a single problem in the world that couldn’t be made easier with music.
I grew up in a small town in Ohio, the youngest of four girls. My mother played the piano at our church. My father couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he’d dance with her in the kitchen every Saturday night while the radio played. Big band music. Glenn Miller. Benny Goodman. My sisters and I would sit on the stairs in our nightgowns and watch them through the doorway.
My mother said I was dancing before I was walking. She said I’d hold on to the edge of the coffee table and bounce up and down whenever she played.
I took my first ballet class when I was five. My first jazz class at eight. By fourteen, I was taking the bus forty-five minutes each way, three times a week, to a real studio in Columbus.
At twenty-three, I was winning competitions. Regional, then national. Ballroom and contemporary. My partner was a lanky, sweet boy named Theo who could lift me over his head like I weighed nothing and couldn’t remember a single person’s birthday.
At thirty, I was performing professionally. A touring company. Six months a year on the road. Theaters in Chicago, Atlanta, Denver. Once, for three glorious weeks, a stage in New York.
By thirty-two, it was over.
It happened during a rehearsal in Pittsburgh. A simple jump. One I’d done a thousand times. I came down wrong. My left knee went one direction, and the rest of me went the other.
I heard it before I felt it. A sound like a wet branch snapping.
Then I felt it.
Two surgeries. A year of physical therapy. A doctor in a white coat sitting on a rolling stool, looking at my X-rays on a lighted board and shaking his head very gently.
“You’ll walk normally,” he said. “You’ll be able to dance at weddings. But Mrs. Burke, I’m sorry. You won’t perform again. Not like you did. The knee won’t take it.”
I went home and lay on the couch for three weeks.
I didn’t play any music. I didn’t open the curtains.
My husband, Daniel, came home from work every evening and sat on the edge of the couch and put his hand on my ankle. The good ankle. He didn’t say much. He’s not a talker. He’s an accountant. He likes numbers because they don’t argue with you.
At the end of the third week, he sat down on the coffee table across from me.
“You could teach,” he said.
“Teach what?” I said. “How to fall gracefully?”
“How to get back up,” he said.
I hated him for saying it.
Then I thought about it for a week.
Then I loved him for saying it.
So I opened a dance studio.
It was a narrow storefront on Main Street, between a shoe repair shop and a bakery that made the best cinnamon rolls in the county. The landlord gave me a deal because nobody else wanted it. It had been a pawn shop. It still smelled a little like old cigarettes and furniture polish.
Daniel and I put in the mirrors ourselves. We laid the wooden floor over a weekend, on our knees, with our friends. We installed the barres along the walls. I painted the sign out front myself. Burke Dance Studio. In blue letters, slightly crooked.
The first month, I had nine students.
By the end of the first year, I had sixty.
By the fifth year, I had over two hundred. Little girls in pink tights. Teenagers who wanted to learn hip-hop. Middle-aged women who’d always wanted to try tap. A seventy-eight-year-old retired mailman named Gus who took ballroom every Tuesday because his late wife had always wanted him to, and he’d never gotten around to it.
For years, I loved every single minute.
But dancing wasn’t my only love.
I’d always adored children. Always. Since I was a little girl myself. I was the one who babysat for every family on our street. I was the one who held the babies at church while their mothers sang in the choir.
I’d dreamed my whole life of having one of my own.
Daniel and I started trying when I was thirty-three. A year after the knee. We thought it would be easy. Everyone in my family got pregnant easily. My sister Carol got pregnant on her honeymoon.
It wasn’t easy.
It was a year. Then two. Then doctors. Then tests. Then shots in my stomach every morning that left little bruises like purple fingerprints. Then a procedure. Then another procedure.
Then a doctor sitting across from us in a small office with a box of tissues on the table.
I won’t tell you everything about those years. Some things belong just to Daniel and me.
But I’ll tell you that by the time I was thirty-nine, we’d stopped talking about it. Not because we’d given up. Because talking about it hurt too much.
We’d walk past the baby aisle at the grocery store without looking. We’d go to baby showers and smile and bring presents and come home and not say anything to each other in the car.
There was a little bedroom upstairs in our house, across the hall from ours. We’d painted it pale yellow when we first moved in. For a nursery, someday.
By the time I was thirty-nine, the door to that room stayed closed.
Then, one evening in October, Daniel took my hand at the kitchen table.
We’d just finished dinner. Pot roast. The dishes were still on the table. There was music playing on the radio, very low, because there was always music playing in our house.
“What if we became foster parents?” he said.
I looked at him.
“After everything we’ve been through?” I said. “Daniel, I can’t. I can’t love a child and then have to give it back. I can’t do that.”
He held my hand a little tighter.
“We still have a home, Maggie,” he said. “And we still have love to give. All that love. It’s just sitting there. In that yellow room. Behind that closed door.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
The radio was playing an old Glenn Miller song. Moonlight Serenade. My parents’ song. The one they used to dance to in the kitchen on Saturday nights.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Okay. Let’s find out.” 