The police came and got me up. Their voices were soft and mine was soft. They pulled a white jacket over me like some old lady’s shawl. I shrugged a little to get it off, but my arms wouldn’t move. When I looked for my hands, I couldn’t find them. The police didn’t ask many questions, and I didn’t say nothing the whole time. At the precinct, a doctor talked to me real quiet-like and said the leaves would go away forever if I told him everything that happened to the dead man and to me. But they didn’t call him Metro, they called him some other name with an accent in it. A name I didn’t even know. I asked the doctor again about the red leaves. He promised they would go away. “What about the blood?” I asked. “Will I step in the blood?”

“Not if you come clean,” he said.

“What about my sneaks?” I asked him. “Will they get dirty?”

PART TWO

PART TWO

Ruella

Ruella

I wasn’t even out of my building yet, and there I was rushing to a job. Then it hit me how I hated taking the subway. I hated all the darkness and the smell of burning electricity and the speed rattling loud at my head. I didn’t want to be that close to all those people. Falling into step with folks I didn’t even know. Everybody going somewhere. Fast-stepping when the music was only a waltz. Where was Fred Astaire when you needed him?

At home it was a different kind of dance, Jesse cleaning the apartment like a maid gone mad, washing each dish as soon as it got dirty, sweeping crumbs from the kitchen floor. He was about to drive me crazy. I couldn’t even throw my leotards onto the bed anymore, without him coming up behind me and folding them neat. I’m glad I didn’t smoke, or he’d have been forever emptying the ashtrays. And wouldn’t you know, when he wasn’t cleaning or exercising or straightening up, he sat perched like a trapped bird searching my windows, which were clean now on both sides, thanks to him. What that man wouldn’t have done.

I teased him to get his sense of humor back. I tried out something new, a pas de deux with sounds and steps. “Eh-yah?”

“Caroom-boom clack,” he answered.

“Eh-yah.”

“Caroom-boom clack.”