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The other stair dancers were not as good as Cyril, but each performance had something special. Leah did a split leap; Gordon slid across the floor on his knees; Donald walked up the stairs on his hands.

Razi was the final dancer. It was pretty obvious he
was the young’un. But there was something about the way he sucked on his fingers during a particularly complicated step that made people in the audience nudge one another and point at him. Keisha could tell they thought Razi was beyond adorable.

At the end of his routine, Razi jumped off the steps. Keisha remembered that his big finale was to do a step-tap combination with one foot while he straightened his other leg, making sure it didn’t touch the ground. But something happened. Maybe he slipped on a piece of glitter or the bottoms of his shoes were too slide-y; but when he went to do the turn, he just slipped and fell on his behind.

Razi looked around, surprised. He frowned to himself and sat there, shaking his head “no.” Some of his young classmates started to giggle.

It was really about the most embarrassing thing that could happen.

Keisha stood up. Someone had to help Razi!

Grandma put her hand on Keisha’s shoulder. “Sit,” she whispered. “He knows the show must go on.”

Razi looked backstage. “What?” he asked in a stage whisper.

The audience exploded in laughter.

He turned wide-eyed to the audience as if he’d just remembered them. Then he broke into a big performance smile, rolled onto his back, did a break-dancing turtle-shell spin and hopped to his feet. He finished off by swiggling his hips and doing the disco arms, which Keisha had never seen on any Bill “Bojangles” Robinson YouTube video.

But the audience loved it and Razi got a standing ovation, too.

Later, at Marie Catrib’s, Razi was remembering every moment of the evening with a colossally long “and then” story. Since it was his big night, no one interrupted him.

“
And then
Ms. Perry said, ‘Improvise,’ but I thought she said, ‘In your
eyes,
’ and so I said, ‘What?’ like
what
is in my eyes,
and then
she said it again.” Razi paused, jumped out of his chair and made a stiff bow. “And then I did. The end.”

“You were marvelous, Razi,” Grandma congratulated him before slurping the last of her raspberry smoothie, complete with one of the travel parasols she kept in her purse in an old cigarette case. “Your future lies in stage and screen.”

“I don’t know how you think so well on your feet,” Big Bob added, pulling off another chunk of carrot cake for Paulo. “I would have frozen.”

“But I wasn’t on my feet, Big Bob,” Razi replied, hopping back into his chair. “Don’t you remember? I was on my bottom!”

“Your mom gave the okay,” Daddy told Marcus as he and Keisha stood on the school steps after jump rope practice. “She cleared it with Ms. Tellerico this morning. And Lt. Washington’s free, so we can propose your plan to him this afternoon.”

“Now? Before we go home?” Keisha wondered why her family could not remember to think of her stomach when making plans after practice.

Daddy tossed a bag of popcorn into the backseat. “This is for the movies.”

“I thought you said we were going to the V.A. facility.” Marcus caught the bag and tore it open before holding it out to Keisha for the first handful.

“We are. The movies at the V.A. facility. Sarge has something he’s dying to show Keisha, and Lt. Washington’s not free until five.”

As soon as they arrived, Sarge greeted them at the front door and led them to the community room. Keisha could tell he was excited by how fast he was walking.

“Ever since you told me about jump roping, I’ve gotten interested in the sport,” Sarge said as he cued up the
video and Keisha, Marcus and Daddy settled into armchairs. “I ordered this documentary from the Grand River Library. I’ve watched it a few times now. It’s called
Jump!
and it’s about five U.S. teams competing in the world jump rope championships. You’re not going to believe what these kids can do.”

The screen went black, the music started and what followed was an amazing display of masterful jump roping. When it ended, Keisha and Marcus looked at each other, wide-eyed. Their talking was all over each other: “Did you see what those kids from Houston did in double-Dutch freestyle?” “I didn’t know your body could bend like that! He did a flip
over
the top of the rope!” “Even with asthma, she was
first
in single speed. That’s dedication.”

“Time out, you two!” Daddy said after a bit. “We can’t forget our appointment, Marcus. Gather up your drawings and you and I will go see if Lt. Washington is ready to meet with us.”

“I’m glad you brought your jump rope,” Sarge told Keisha, putting his legs up on the cushions. “Because I have the jump roping bug in a serious way. Will you show me some of the things you do in your routine?”

“After that?” Keisha asked him. “You’re sure? It’s nothing like what we just saw.”

“Now, Keisha. It’s good to know what the top of the
mountain looks like. But climbing around base camp is fun, too. Just show me.” Sarge waved his arm to dismiss her worries.

Keisha could see he was serious. She pushed the chairs around until she had enough room to show Sarge some of her moves. As she jumped, she explained what she was doing. “You have to show that you can do the basic moves, so everyone puts them into their routine, like this double side-swing and jump, and this.…” She kept both legs together as she jumped to the left and to the right. “We call that the skier. The bell is the same thing, but you’re jumping forward and back.”

Keisha kept jumping, demonstrating straddle, scissors and crossover moves before getting into some slightly harder stuff, like a forward and backward 180, a kick swing and a double peekaboo.

“I’m getting tired just watching you,” Sarge laughed.

“You getting her to do your physio for you?” a young woman called out from where she was playing cards with some of the other vets.

“I wish,” Sarge called back.

“PFC—that’s Private First Class—Simon lost her leg about the same time I did, only she got hers amputated right away,” Sarge told Keisha as she moved through her paces. “We’ve helped each other deal with a lot of things. She’s pretty good with her new leg, but
she had some brain injuries, too. Now she works with the doctors to improve her short-term memory.”

Keisha stopped jumping to catch her breath. “I wonder how you exercise your brain.”

Then she remembered something she wanted to tell Sarge. “The other day, when I was listening to them rehearse for Razi’s performance, I made up some stuff. Just for fun, like you said. Now that I see how it goes in the big competitions, I realize you can be a lot more creative than we’ve been.”

“Show me what you came up with.”

“Well, it was the mid-winter concert and they had these snowflake dancers. It got me thinking.…” Keisha stood still for a minute, trying to remember the music. Slowly, she started twirling her rope. Then after a few swings, she started twirling, too, like a snowflake riding the breeze. It started out as a full turn with a heel-to-heel move, but Keisha changed it by using her whole body, dipping and shimmying her shoulders the way the dancers had. Then she transitioned into sort of a combination twist and shuffle, like something she’d seen Razi do. Step-tap-skippety-skippety … like a Bojangles snowflake skittering across the ground.

“Whoa!” Marcus was standing in the doorway. “I didn’t know you could do a cancan twist and a shuffle at the same time.”

Keisha stopped jumping, embarrassed. “How’d it go with Lt. Washington?”

As Marcus gave her a thumbs-up, Sarge said, “Don’t stop now. I think you’re inventing something new.”

“What’s that?” Daddy came into the room with Lt. Washington.

“It’s nothing, Daddy. Grandma and I were goofing before Razi’s performance. I called it fun rope instead of jump rope, and I was showing Sarge how it looked.”

“I guess I would call it interpretive jump rope,” Sarge said. “You know, like interpretive dance, where you interpret the music with your body. That’s what you’re doing, Keisha. Only with a jump rope. You should see this, Lieutenant. Hey, don’t you play the piano? That’s what I heard.”

“Well, I used to play some, but I’m out of practice.”

“What can you play? Play anything, and maybe Keisha can figure out how it looks in jump rope language.”

“Well …” Lt. Washington sat down at the piano. “I know some old show tunes.” He played a few practice notes. “Can you do something to this?” He began to pound the piano keys and sing: “Oooooooklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain.”

Keisha looked to Sarge for help.

“Maybe something softer,” Sarge suggested. Daddy
and Marcus took a seat and looked at Keisha expectantly. She wished they wouldn’t. Suddenly fun roping wasn’t so fun.

“Okay, here’s something from
The Sound of Music.
Edelweiss, edelweiss … um, I don’t know any more words. But I can hum it.” Lt. Washington pushed up his sleeves.

“Sure. Okay,” Sarge told him. “I think she just needs the melody.”

Did Sarge understand eye language? Keisha tucked her chin into her collar and looked at him with wide-open eyes.

“Don’t think about them, Keisha. Tune in to the music. Tune out everything else.”

So Keisha listened to the music. It was high and sweet. After thinking about it, she did a slow side-swing crossover into a grapevine into a twist-360-double-peekaboo. After another twirl, she stepped on her rope.

“That’s enough … I’m all out of thoughts … and I’m dizzy.”

“Well, I couldn’t see much, but you seemed to get the feel of it,” Lt. Washington said as everyone’s applause died down. He swung his legs around the piano bench so that he faced them. “We’ve got some creative kids here, Sarge. You’re not going to believe what
Marcus is proposing to keep you occupied—with your furry friend, Larry—for the rest of the winter.”

“Who told you about Larry?” Sarge glanced over at Keisha, who shook her head. “I thought that was my secret.”

“A good lieutenant understands the needs of his platoon, Sergeant. Recovering is hard work. I’m surprised
you haven’t named the birds, too, with all the time you have on your hands.”

“The cardinal’s Gloria,” PFC Simon said. “And there’s Zenobia, too … she’s a chickadee.”

“The nuthatches are Stalin, Marx and Lenin,” added PFC Simon’s card-playing partner.

After a good laugh, Daddy said, “The lieutenant has agreed to let us set up a few squirrel-attracting devices. They’ll still be in the wild area, in the ravine, but you’ll have a good view of them. Our Wild 4-Ever volunteers will keep them stocked with peanuts, so you should be able to see your friends on a regular basis—even when the weather’s bad. If all goes well, when the ground thaws, we can install something more permanent.”

For a moment, Keisha’s thoughts returned to the squirrels at Mt. Mercy. It wasn’t just people recovering from injuries who took a liking to wildlife … people everywhere did. She and Grandma were pretty certain that Jim the Handyman was using Sister Mary-Lee’s peanut stash to make friends with the squirrels. But they didn’t want to get him in trouble. Daddy had sealed up all the entry points they could find at Holmdene Hall, and the Carters were still brainstorming a good solution to the problem of the raining peanuts.

PFC Simon came over to join the conversation. Keisha couldn’t believe how well she walked. “Could
we help with building it? We hardly ever use the wood shop.”

“Excellent thinking on your feet, PFC Simon.”

“You mean my
foot,
sir. Or does the fiberglass one count?”

Lt. Washington cleared his throat. “I stand corrected,” he said. “Why don’t you talk to Private Graham about it? He’s a carpenter, isn’t he?”

Over the next two weeks, Keisha practiced hard with the jump rope team, and then again with Sarge. While Big Bob, Marcus, Wen, Savannah and any other available Wild 4-Evers built an apparatus for squirrel-feeding fun, she stayed back in the community room, working with Sarge in one corner while some patients watched TV in the other. Since the community room opened onto the new sunroom, people were always walking—or wheeling—in and out to watch the birds flit from feeder to feeder.