Page 2 of Dancing on Air

Don’t look at her.

She tried very hard to stare straight past the woman’s shoulders.

With each spin, her mother’s face oddly became clearer and more in focus.

She felt her body waver and had to stop the pirouette early. Madame Louis clapped loudly and ended the session early.

Damn.

Her mother had messed up her life… again. While everyone else in the room was busy changing or gathering their things, Cora marched across the room, grabbed her mother’s arm, and pulled her out into the hallway.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed.

“Why can’t I come to see you?” Her mother responded much like a child would have.

“Mother.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You know you’re not supposed to interrupt my lessons.”

Her mother’s eyes darted around, as she searched for an excuse.

When Cora was eight, her father, Paul Thomas, had moved back home full time. Since that time, her mother had been in and out of the facility a half dozen times.

Shortly after her father’s return, Cora moved into her school’s dorms full time and stopped returning home, except for two weeks each year during the holidays, when she had no choice. Normally, she’d stay with her aunt Patty, but after her aunt died in a car accident one winter, she’d been stuck returning to her parents’ place instead. At least with her father there, the old home had been improved and fixed up a little.

“Are you done for the day?” her mother asked.

Cora glanced over her shoulder and then nodded.

“Grab a coffee with me?” her mother asked.

Cora nodded again. “I’ll just be a moment.” She rushed back, removed her toe shoes, put on her sneakers, then slipped on her sweats and a jacket over her leotards and grabbed her bag.

God, she hoped her break in concentration wouldn’t affect Madame Louis’s decision to submit her to the BAC, the New York dance company that she was so desperate to get into.

Sitting with her mother at the coffee shop across the way wasn’t anything new. Her mother showed up at her class often when she was free and somewhat in her right mind. Strangely, that had been happening more often than in the past.

“You have a half-brother,” her mother said shortly after Cora had taken a sip of her coffee, causing her to spit the warm liquid out.

“What?” Cora asked after she coughed. Thoughts of a younger brother hidden from her somewhere raced through her mind.

“His name is JT Whistler,” her mother said.

Cora paused for a second and then laughed. “The author of the Crescent Creek series? The horror books?” Now she knew her mother was really losing it.

“Yes,” her mother said. “His real name is Jerry Thomas. It’s where your father was, before he returned to us. He was with them. You also have a half-sister, Kara, or Kayla.” She shrugged as if she didn’t care. “She’s of no importance.”

Cora shook her head and blew her mother off, but later that night, something caused her to search the internet for the man.

It was true. JT Whistler, aka Jerry Thomas, was the son of Mary and Paul Thomas. The same Paul Thomas that sat out in the living room watching the game every night that she was home.

What sealed the deal in her mind was a picture of her father standing next to a completely different family. It appeared to be an older photo. There was a blonde woman holding a young girl. Beside them stood an older red-haired girl who looked a lot like Cora. Her mother had only mentioned one half-sister. Who was this other one? Then there was the young Jerry, or JT, who was standing proudly next to his family.

She didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. Her mother was the other woman. Cora was somehow the other family. What had caused her father to choose to live with her crazed mother instead of what appeared to be a perfect family?

It hurt too much to think about, so she pushed it aside and focused on her dance.

Weeks later, school break started and Cora was once more stuck at her parents’ house. This time when she arrived, she noticed that her father looked sick. When she asked her mother about it, she claimed he was dying.

She didn’t put much stock in her mother’s words. Whenever Cora had gotten the flu as a child, she’d told everyone that would listen that Cora was dying.