he asked her, battling exasperation. “You’ve been showing me your positions for weeks now. Get out here and show Ms. Rutherford.”
Katie shook her head.
“Do you want to learn this stuff or not?”
There was a pause before she nodded.
“Then come on. We talked about this.”
After another long pause, Katie poked her head out, looked at Ms. Rutherford, then back at him. There were tears in her eyes.
His heart sank.
“It’s okay, Mr. Campbell,” Ms. Rutherford said in a soft voice. “I understand that Katie is a special young lady.”
Sensing what was coming, he hurried to say, “She’s just having a moment. Let me talk to her.” He started to lift the chair to get Katie out from under it.
“Please let her be,” Ms. Rutherford instructed. She returned to her seat on the other side of her desk. “I know enough about these things to assure you she’ll come out when she’s ready. For Katie, that chair is a safe place right now.”
With his daughter’s tears ingrained on his mind, he released the chair and sat back down. He leaned back in a slouch of his own, bringing a hand up to rub his eyes.
“Maybe this just isn’t going to work,” he said. “I was so sure…”
“Where did she get this other lesson?” Ms. Rutherford asked when he trailed off.
The hand lowered from his eyes. “Just a stranger. A dancer who happened to be with Katie in a waiting area.”
“A female?”
Curious that she asked about the stranger’s gender, he sat straighter and replied, “Yes. She was about my age, I think.”
“And how did she approach the lesson with Katie?”
“I don’t know, actually.”
Ms. Rutherford looked from him to Katie’s empty seat. “It seems to me that she connected with Katie in a way I can’t. Is our studio the first you’ve visited?”
He shook his head.
“And those other studios didn’t meet your needs?”
“No.”
“I see.” After a moment of consideration, she asked, “Is there any way you can get in touch with this other dancer?”
“Oh, I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” he hedged, recalling the heated words they exchanged.
“Mr. Campbell, forgive me for being so straightforward, but Katie clearly has very specific needs. I’ve met a number of young people in my lifetime, some of them with similarities to your daughter. With someone like Katie, you need to pay attention to the cues she gives you. If there is any way you can reach that dancer and ask her how she approached working with Katie, maybe we can find someone here who can try that same approach and connect with Katie the same way. That said, you may want to prepare yourself for the reality that Katie won’t find that connection with anyone else.”
The very suggestion had Will’s mouth going dry.
“I’m sorry if I’m coming across too plainly. I’m merely speaking from experience and could be wrong. But until we better understand how and why Katie responded to that first lesson, I fear you’re only causing her undue stress by trying to recreate it.”
He wanted to take offense. After all, he was just trying to bring Katie the joy he’d seen in her while she posed in front of the mirror.
One glance at her balled up under the chair had him nodding instead.
“Thanks for the advice,” he said, getting to his feet.
“Of course. I hope it helps and that we’ll get the opportunity to work with Katie sometime down the road.”
Will supposed the visit had gone better than it might have. At least he walked away—once he managed to convince Katie to crawl out from under her chair—with a glimmer of an idea of where to go from there.
But, damn. Did it really have to involve that ballerina?
He supposed it did when he saw the telltale tracks of dried tears on Katie’s cheeks as he loaded her back into the truck. If it would make his little girl smile again, he’d cheerfully walk through the flaming pits of hell itself.
The question then was how to identify and contact the unknown dancer, he mused on the drive home. Everly Parker was a stickler about patient confidentiality. There was no way he could imagine her just offering up a patient’s name and contact information. He considered and dismissed the idea of a bribe, knowing that wouldn’t work either.
There was one other option.
Really, his only option.
So when he got home and had a minute of privacy, he pulled up the team contact list on his phone and tapped the number he needed.