A Couple Fostered An 8 Year Old Girl Until She Returned 18 Years Later With A Secret

She stayed for dinner. I made spaghetti and meatballs. I didn’t even think about it. It just happened.

She ate two helpings. She complained that the green beans were overcooked. Daniel said some things never change.

When she left at nine o’clock, she hugged us both on the porch. She held on to me for a long time.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Ten o’clock. I’ll text you the address.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

I stood on the porch and watched her taillights go down our street and turn the corner.

Just like eighteen years ago.

Except this time, she was coming back.

After Ivy left, Daniel and I sat at the kitchen table. The wooden box was still there between us. The dream list was unfolded next to it.

Daniel took my hand.

“You know,” he said quietly. “I lost her too.”

“I know,” I said.

“I know you think it was just you,” he said. “I know you think I didn’t feel it the same way. Because I didn’t stop going to work. Because I didn’t close anything.” He shook his head. “I used to sit in the car in the parking lot of my office for twenty minutes every morning before I could go in. For two years. I never told you.”

I looked at him.

“Daniel…”

“And then,” he said, “I watched you lose the thing you loved most in the world. After her. I watched you close the studio. Put the photographs in the attic. Turn off the radio. And I didn’t know how to stop it.” His voice cracked. “I lost her. And then I watched you lose yourself. And I couldn’t do anything about either one.”

I looked down at our hands on the table.

“I don’t know if I can be that woman again,” I said. “The one with the studio. The one in the red dress in Las Vegas. I don’t know if she’s still in here.”

Daniel squeezed my hand.

“You don’t have to be her,” he said. “You don’t have to be anybody but who you are right now.”

He leaned across the table and kissed my forehead.

“Just don’t let fear take another eighteen years from you, Maggie,” he said. “It’s taken enough.”

That night, before bed, I did something I hadn’t done in fifteen years.

I went to the cabinet in the kitchen. I dug through the old CDs in the back. Behind the cookbooks. Behind the extra coffee filters.

I found it. The Glenn Miller one.

I put it in the old CD player on the kitchen counter. I pressed play.

Moonlight Serenade.

Daniel came into the kitchen in his pajamas. He stood in the doorway.

He didn’t say anything.

He just held out his hand.

He’s a terrible dancer, Daniel. He always has been. He has no rhythm at all. He steps on my feet. He counts out loud under his breath.

We danced in the kitchen anyway. Slowly. Back and forth.

And for the first time in eighteen years, there was music in our house.

The next morning, I drove to Columbus.

Ivy’s studio was on the second floor of an old brick building on the east side of the city. Above a laundromat. You had to go up a narrow staircase that smelled like fabric softener.

There was a sign on the door at the top of the stairs. Hand-painted. Slightly crooked.

The Open Door Dance Studio.

I stood in front of that sign for a long time.

Inside, it was one big room. The wooden floor was scratched and warped in places. The mirrors were old, with dark spots in the corners where the silver was coming off. One of them was held to the wall with duct tape. The windows rattled when trucks went by outside. The sound system was an old boom box sitting on a folding chair.

But children were laughing.

There were about fifteen of them. Seven, eight, nine years old. Running around the room in socks. Sliding on the wooden floor. Spinning in circles until they fell down. Laughing so loud I could hear it from the stairs.

Ivy saw me in the doorway and waved. She was on the phone. She held up one finger. One minute.

While she gathered her paperwork, I looked around the room.

And I noticed a little girl.

She was standing alone in the back corner. By the window. Away from all the others. She was about eight years old. Small. Thin. She had a big puffy purple coat on, zipped all the way up, even though the room was warm.

She wasn’t taking it off.

She was just standing there. Watching the other kids. With her back against the wall.

I knew that look.

I’d seen it on my front porch eighteen years ago.

I walked across the room to her. Slowly. I knelt down on my good knee, so we’d be the same height.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Margaret. What’s your name?”

She looked at me for a long time.

“Destiny,” she said. Very quietly.

“That’s a beautiful name,” I said. “Do you want to dance, Destiny?”

She shook her head fast.

“I’m bad at it,” she said.

“Who told you that?”

She shrugged. She looked at the floor.

“Then let’s try one step,” I said. “Just one. That’s all.”

She looked up at me with big, careful eyes.

“What if I fall?” she said.

I didn’t freeze this time.

I didn’t have to go sit on the floor of an office with my back against the door.

I just held out my hand.

“Then I’ll help you get up,” I said.

She looked at my hand for a long time.

Then, very slowly, she unzipped her purple coat. She took it off. She laid it carefully on the floor by the window.

And she took my hand.

“Like this?” she said, stepping to the side.

“Perfect,” I said. “Now step back.”

She stepped back.

“Now we’re going to turn,” I said.

She went under my arm. She spun around, once. Too fast. Her feet got tangled.

She stumbled.

I caught her.

And she laughed.

Soon, we were both laughing.

After class, Ivy came over. The kids were putting on their coats and their shoes. Destiny’s foster mother had come to pick her up. Destiny had waved at me from the door. A small wave. Like a bird.

Ivy stood next to me and looked at me for a long moment.

“You looked happy,” she said.

“I was,” I said.

I meant it. I hadn’t felt like that in eighteen years. My knee hurt. My back hurt. I was out of breath.

I felt alive.

“And,” I said, “I have a plan.”

Ivy raised her eyebrows.

“We?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “We. I’m going to organize a charity performance. A big one. We’ll invite everybody. The whole city. We’ll raise enough money to fix those mirrors and that window and get you a real sound system and pay your rent.”

I took a breath.

“But I’m not doing it as a guest,” I said. “I’m doing it as your partner. If you’ll still have me.”

Ivy threw her arms around my neck.

“Deal!” she said.

It took three weeks.

I hadn’t organized anything in eighteen years. But it came back faster than I thought it would. Like riding a bicycle. Like dancing.

I called every single person I’d ever known. Former students from my old studio. Some of them were in their thirties now, with kids of their own. They came. Kayla, my old instructor, drove up from Cincinnati. Gus, the retired mailman, was ninety-six years old now and living in a nursing home. He sent a check for fifty dollars and a note that said For the foxtrot.

Daniel did all the accounting. He sold tickets. He built a set. A painted backdrop of a kitchen. With a window and a stove and an old oak table.

A local church let us use their auditorium. The bakery next to my old studio, the one with the cinnamon rolls, donated three hundred of them for intermission. The newspaper wrote a story about it.

Former Dance Champion Returns to Help Foster Children Find Their Feet.

On the night of the performance, the auditorium was packed. Four hundred people. Standing room only in the back.

Ivy’s students danced first. All fifteen of them. In matching purple T-shirts Daniel had ordered online. They did a simple routine Ivy and I had choreographed together. It wasn’t perfect. Two of them went the wrong way. One of them stopped in the middle and waved at her mom.

Destiny was in the front row.

She didn’t fall once.

At the very end, the lights went down.

A single spotlight came on in the middle of the stage. On the painted kitchen. On the old oak table.

And the music started.

Moonlight Serenade.

Ivy walked out onto the stage from one side. I walked out from the other. My knee was wrapped in a brace under my dress. A red one. I’d bought it for the occasion.

We met in the middle of the painted kitchen.

And we danced.

Not a competition dance. Not something for medals. Just the box step. The basic waltz. A little swing. The same steps I’d taught her on the kitchen floor eighteen years before.

When we got to the turn, she lifted her arm, and I went under it. And I spun around. Once.

And she caught me.

The auditorium was completely silent.

Then four hundred people stood up.

That night, our charity performance raised enough to cover three months of rent. And new mirrors. And a window that closed. And a sound system from this century.

Afterward, backstage, Ivy hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe.

“You saved my studio,” she whispered.

“We saved it,” I said. “Together.”

The following Tuesday, we taught our first class together.

Ivy took the left side of the room. I took the right. Fifteen kids in purple T-shirts in between us.

My knee hurt by the end. My back hurt. I had to sit down twice.

But I didn’t stop.

Afterward, Daniel was waiting by the door. He’d come to pick me up. He’d been standing in the back of the room, watching the whole class.

He hugged me in the doorway.

“There’s my girl,” he said into my hair.

Then, from across the room, I heard music.

Ivy had turned on the new sound system. She’d found a song. An old song.

Moonlight Serenade.

I turned around.

“You remembered,” I said.

Ivy smiled her crooked smile.

“I promised,” she said.

The kids had all gone home. It was just the three of us. Ivy and Daniel and me. In the empty studio. With the new mirrors on the walls and the old wooden floor and the window that finally closed.

I walked across the floor toward her.

I held out my hand.

“May I have this dance?” I said.

Ivy looked at my hand.

She smiled.

“This time,” she said, “neither of us has to leave.”

She took my hand.

We danced across that scratched wooden floor while Daniel stood in the doorway with his hand over his heart. The same way he’d stood in our kitchen doorway, eighteen years ago, the very first time.

Later that night, at home, I found the dream list on the kitchen table. Ivy had left it there. She said she wanted it to stay in the house where it was written.

I unfolded it very carefully. The soft old paper. The purple and green crayon.

I got a pen out of the junk drawer.

Next to Learn to do five spins without falling, I made a check mark. Ivy had done six, that afternoon, to show the kids.

Next to See Margaret dance on a real stage, I made another check mark.

Next to Daniel learns to dance (Probably impossible), I wrote, Still working on it.

Then I looked at the last line.

When I grow up, I’ll buy us a house where nobody has to leave.

She hadn’t bought a house. She’d rented a second floor above a laundromat, with mirrors held up by duct tape and windows that rattled when trucks went by.

But a little girl named Destiny had taken off her purple coat there.

I picked up the pen.

And I made a check mark next to that one too.

The next Saturday, Ivy came to our house for breakfast.

She walked into the kitchen and stopped.

There on the old oak table, in front of her chair by the window, was a bowl of chocolate ice cream. With sprinkles. And a spoon sticking out of it.

She looked at me.

“Eat ice cream for breakfast,” I said. “Number two on the list. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

She laughed the hiccup laugh.

Then she sat down in her chair and ate every bite.

We haven’t gotten the puppy yet. Daniel says one thing at a time.

But I’ve seen him looking at pictures of puppies on his phone when he thinks I’m not watching.

Eighteen years ago, a scared little girl arrived on my doorstep with a duffel bag and asked how long she was allowed to stay.

I taught her to take one step. I told her I’d catch her if she fell.

And then I let fear lock the door to the yellow room, and turn off the radio, and put my whole life in boxes in the attic.

The little girl I’d once taught to find her courage came back with my medals in her coat pocket.

And she helped me find mine.

THE END…!