Starting from here, p.1
Starting from Here, page 1
By Paula Saunders
Starting from Here
The Distance Home
Random House
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Copyright © 2025 by Paula Saunders
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Photos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 copyright © 2025 by Kelly Winton
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Saunders, Paula.
Title: Starting from here: a novel / by Paula Saunders.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Random House, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025013587 (print) | LCCN 2025013588 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593978290 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593978306 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3619.A8249 S73 2025 (print) | LCC PS3619.A8249 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20250411
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2025013587
LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/2025013588
Ebook ISBN 9780593978306
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Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook by Vincent Mancuso
Cover design: Kelly Winton
Cover Images: Kelly Winton (horse, road, car, and woman), Shutterstock (dancer, desert, studio, and landscape)
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ep_prh_7.3a_152814724_c0_r0
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Phoenix, 1973: All the Right Reasons
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Rapid City, 1973: To Build a Bridge
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Phoenix, 1974: High Water
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Rapid City, 1974: Proving Ground
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Denver, 1974: Closer/Farther
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Rapid City, 1974: The Visitation
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Denver, 1975: Into the Wind
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
New York City, 1975: Ready or Not
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_152814724_
For my mother, who let me go—
and for my daughters, who reclaimed me.
Life was like that. Here you are, it said, and then immediately afterwards. Where are you?
Jean Rhys, Quartet
Phoenix, 1973
All the Right Reasons
1
Though Al objected to the idea of his son traipsing around in a tutu, Eve enrolled Leon in a local dancing class, figuring that since Leon was always tripping on the playground and running into things, ending up with stitches, concentrating on where his body was in relation to what was around him would be good for him.
Of course René wanted to do everything her older brother did. But she was too young for school, too young for dance class. So she’d skip and hop, twirling around the living room as Bobby and Sissy polka-ed through the champagne bubbles on The Lawrence Welk Show, Al’s favorite—making Al chuckle and Eve stop whatever she was doing to laugh along.
“Always hogging the spotlight,” Eve would say, shaking her head as Leon let the screen door slam behind him and took off on his bike to meet up with the neighbor kids.
* * *
—
Years later, after Leon and René had been studying together night after night at what may have been the world’s most unlikely ballet school—the only one for more than three hundred miles on the great, unbroken plains of South Dakota—René was in pas de deux class, turning, whirling through multiple pirouettes en pointe under the power of her brother’s hands.
Leon was tall and strong with dark wavy hair and deep brown eyes, and he knew just how to keep her on balance—an unspoken, unerring bond linking their weight and movement, one to the other. And as she spun through rotations she never could have managed on her own, the world was reduced to a single point of light. Everything quiet.
Then glissade and lift, and she was flying. From there, straight into piqué arabesque, then tour jeté, Leon effortlessly setting her up onto his shoulder. And after a mere blink of suspension, she was diving headlong, nose-to-the-ground, Leon catching her at just the right moment, placing her directly onto her pointe for a single beat of sublime, trembling balance.
Was there anything else like it on earth?
There was not.
* * *
—
Leon was teased at school, called “twinkletoes,” “pansy,” and worse—even by teachers—and willfully ignored by Al, whose attention he craved.
Al smoked and paced and worried whenever he was home, off the road for a few days between cattle sales. No one was ever particularly happy to see him. He and Eve fought day and night. Mostly about Leon: Leon’s friends, Leon’s hair, Leon’s dancing. Especially Leon’s dancing.
But when René danced, they’d stop their bickering to cheer her on, whatever was wrong between them left behind for a moment of peace and camaraderie.
So she’d grand jeté and chaine through the house, trying to lighten the mood, while, in the fallout from one of Eve and Al’s regular shouting matches—“You don’t listen, Eve. I’ve told you a thousand times!” and “What do you want from me, Al? You’re never around. I do everything. Everything, for God sakes,” and “Oh yes, everything. Like turning your son into a ballerina. Just where do you imagine we live, Eve? What part of the country?”—Al watched The Carol Burnett Show, smoking cigarettes down to the nub, Eve slammed pots and pans in the kitchen, the youngest, Jayne, played quietly with her Kiddle Kologne dolls, and Leon, who’d given up dancing by the end of ju nior high, simply disappeared, skipping school to raid the liquor cabinet at one of his new friends’ houses, to kick back with a bottle of whiskey or tequila.
* * *
—
Eve had met Al when she was just fifteen and he was twenty-two, home from air force training. She’d graduated valedictorian of her high school class, but instead of going to business college like she’d planned, like she’d always wanted—to become a personal secretary, a “professional girl”—she’d married Al on her eighteenth birthday. “How stupid was I?” she’d say again and again, charging through the house with a dust rag or the vacuum cleaner, shaking her head. “So stupid. Jesus Christ. A bona fide idiot.”
It was René’s dancing that made Eve proud—that made them both proud. Eve bragged about it to her bridge club, and Al went on about it to the other cattle buyers at the livestock auctions in Philip and Fort Pierre. And René was talented. She knew the thrill of controlling her body, of attending to detail, of marshaling the power to cut through space.
So she’d been sent away to Phoenix. Not because the fights she and Eve were getting into were suddenly turning fierce and incomprehensible—Eve blaming her for how unfair it was that she “got everything” and Leon “got nothing.”
No. She’d been sent away for one reason and one reason alone—to become a dancer, to “make something” of herself, as Eve said it.
And now, in Phoenix—living with an unfamiliar family, in an unfamiliar house, on an unfamiliar road—she was making a new beginning. Like in the fairy tale, she just needed to spin straw into gold.
2
A street ran by the house where she was staying in Phoenix, the house where she lived, the house where Eve and Al were paying “good money” for her to be. She didn’t know what street it was or what part of town it was in or whether it followed a river or led to a highway.
The house was in the country, or nearly in the country. At least, there weren’t any stores or other houses nearby. Not that she could see. It seemed like maybe there was a railroad. At night she imagined a freight train running right across the street, which she knew it didn’t do. But it was definitely in the country because there were lemon trees in the back and grapefruits and limes, plus a stone walkway that led to a little cottage where a grandmother lived, though René had never seen her.
There have to be neighbors somewhere, she thought. Maybe way down the road where the cars disappear?
But she was too young to drive, and the parents at this house never continued down the road in front. They simply turned left out of the driveway, rounded the nearest corner, and went straight ahead onto a street that was empty but for large warehouses set off in dusty fields dotted with sparse bunches of what must have been cactus. And suddenly—instead of far-off jagged mountain peaks like back home—there were low-slung strip malls popping up, multiplying, coming to line both sides of whatever thoroughfare they’d ended up on.
3
All her life she’d been told she was beautiful. In summer the sun streaked her hair with gold and sprinkled her nose with pale freckles, and her mother said she was beautiful and her grandmother said she was beautiful and everyone she met seemed to comment on some aspect of her appearance—her dark blond hair falling down the length of her back or woven into two long braids, her long legs and lean build, her dark brows and long lashes, her blue-gray eyes and Cupid’s bow mouth and sweet smile.
“Well, isn’t she a picture. Isn’t she a beauty! Look out. Hahaha,” people would say, winking at Al or giving Eve a look of warning.
And she was all right. She was good-looking, for sure.
But no matter that everyone seemed to agree that a girl should be at least pretty enough to attract a stranger’s attention, she could see now that, for her, being “pretty” was going to be complicated. Because the dad at this house in Phoenix—who was thin and hairy and supposedly an orthodontist, though he never seemed to go to work—sat every night in his chair pretending to watch television as he snuck sidelong glances at her in her white cotton nightie. Every night, after she’d changed out of her ballet clothes, he trained his eyes on her as if she were the fox and he’d gone a-hunting—scratching his head and thighs with abandon, enormous flakes of dandruff raining onto his bathrobe as he ogled her through thick Coke-bottle glasses, grinning and blushing.
“He’s taking time off,” the mom told her quietly one morning, seeming to be both apologizing and attempting to explain.
Though René hadn’t asked why the dad sat in his chair day and night like that, she’d been wondering.
“He had a heart attack last spring and he’s very weak,” the mom whispered, pouring milk into a serving pitcher.
And strange as he was, René felt sorry for him. Not just because of the heart attack. She could see how his whole life must have been. Lonely. So she figured that, under the circumstances, she shouldn’t mind if he looked at her that way, piercing the thin white of her nightie with his big round eyeballs. But she did mind. It bothered her. She’d only brought the one nightie, since there were other, more important things she’d needed to pack when she left home. And it was white—not sheer but not not sheer, either.
Still, the mom’s explanation clarified one thing, and René began to understand why they’d agreed to let her live with them here—wherever this actually was—in the first place. Despite the blooming succulent garden, the hearty fruit trees, the meandering pink stone walkway, the lush green vines winding up to the awnings, with the orthodontist spending whole days in his leather recliner in front of the television, they likely needed the money Eve and Al were sending.
* * *
—
The mom was a tall German-looking housewife who kept her hair in a long, smooth roll at the base of her neck, ear to ear, like a croissant, and maintained a constant cheerfulness, wearing a grin that wasn’t really a grimace, though it often seemed to René that it might be. She kept to an internal code of conduct and had a simple way of being nice while at the same time making you notice that she wasn’t losing her temper.
But the grandmother—who lived in the little cottage at the end of the pink stone path, just beyond the grove of citrus trees—was only for the real children, their children: a younger boy, Heinrich, called Henry, and a girl René’s same age, Galiena, called Gali, who was in both René’s ballet class and her class at school.
Catching sight of René in the school hallways, Gali would lean into her circle of friends and laugh into her hand, clearly whispering about René’s tall knee-highs and too-long uniform skirt, since the rest of the girls at Mother Mary Ignatius wore shoes with no socks, in defiance of dress code, and skirts hemmed up to just under their bums. She’d perform the gesture even when the other girls didn’t join in, even when it caused them to look at her skeptically.
And she applied variations of the same at ballet class, pulling girls close to make side-eye remarks about her new roommate—about the way René’s leotard fit low and flat around the tops of her legs and high around her neckline, like some “dancer from the olden days,” or how René pinned her two long braids across the top of her head for class, in what René’s own grandma had called a “golden crown,” but which too easily suggested the name Gali made sure René overheard: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
