The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily(21)

“Benny and I decided to start taking what we have seriously. Which means moving in together. And moving in together means moving out of the building I’ve been living in most of my life. I told Lily about it yesterday, and she didn’t take it well. I knew she wouldn’t…but I guess I’d hoped that I’d be wrong. That she’d understand. But why would she understand?”

“Are you saying that she couldn’t understand because she isn’t, you know, in the kind of lasting relationship that, say, you and Benny are in?”

Langston shook his head. “Not everything I say is a rebuke to you, you know.”

“No. Maybe it’s just a buke. And then when you repeat it in twenty minutes, that will be the rebuke.”

Langston whistled a note and looked out over the water, as if maybe the Statue of Liberty was going to sympathize with him for being stuck with me.

“The funny thing,” he said, still facing the bay, “is that Lily’s the only person I know who’s as high-strung as you are. Thinking is your favorite thing to do, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s endearing but sometimes it’s completely exhausting.”

It wasn’t like Langston to concede that Lily and I had anything in common. So I decided to take this as a compliment. And at the same time, I decided not to press the point.

I followed Langston’s glance and stared out at the water, too. At Ellis Island. At the receding giants sitting on the downtown shore. Anyone who’s lived in Manhattan all his life always feels torn whenever he leaves it. There’s the satisfaction of breaking free, for a time. But that’s balanced heavily by the feeling of leaving your whole life behind, and to see it from a distance.

I wanted Lily to be there next to me. I knew that made no sense, since if she’d been next to me I wouldn’t have been looking for her—but at the same time, it felt like perfect sense. She was the person I wanted to share life with the most, and it was the moments of noticing that made me feel this most acutely.

I couldn’t tell if Langston was thinking of Benny, or of Lily, or if he wasn’t thinking of anyone at all. I wasn’t sharing this with Lily, but I was sharing it with him. Or at least I knew I would be sharing it with him if we kept talking, if we bridged my experience of the moment and his experience of the moment.

“You want to hear something strange?” I said, my voice a little louder to make headway against the wind. “This is the first time I’ve ever taken the Staten Island Ferry. I always meant to, but it was never a priority. I took a ferry to see the Statue of Liberty on a field trip in, like, fifth grade—but other than that, I’ve stayed away from the water.”

“I once dated a boy in Staten Island,” Langston replied. “I met his parents on the first date. And the second date. And the third. So I tend to associate the borough with guys who don’t particularly want to get away from their families. Unfortunately, by the time the fourth date came around, I wanted to get away from his family.”

“When you broke up with him, did you do something drastic? Like, say, burn down their Christmas tree?”

Langston didn’t smile. “What kind of madman would do that?”

“A madman in love?”

Now he smiled…a little. “That, sir, is a very interesting point.”

“We always torch the ones we love—”

“—the ones we shouldn’t torch at all.”

“Precisely.”

Full stop. More wind. More wake. The Statue of Liberty behind us now, no longer greeting us, but instead looking like we’d left her to fend for herself, waiting for the guy she’d met on the Internet whose first words to her would be “You looked smaller in your profile pic.”

Langston turned to look at the island we were approaching. “The answer is: I didn’t burn down his tree. Or his house. Or his heart. I just stopped talking to him. I disappeared back into Manhattan. I imagine he’s found a nice boy from the neighborhood, and their families have dinner together every Sunday at five.”

I couldn’t help myself—I had to ask, “Is that a family trait? Disappearing?”

Now he turned back to me. “Yes. But you have to understand—Lily’s not like the rest of us. Lily’s the best we’ve got.”

“I hope you don’t mind if I agree with that point. Although she does seem to have disappeared.”

Staten Island was clear to us now, its houses and hills a contrast to the land we’d left. I’d thought it would take longer to get there. I had to remind myself that we were still in the same city. If our information was correct, Lily was that much closer. But she was still gone.

“It’s all my fault,” I found myself saying to Langston.

He leaned on the railing, put his hands in his coat pockets. “Why do you say that?”

“I haven’t been able to reach her. And if I can’t reach her, there’s no way to keep her from being lost.”

The blast of a horn drowned out any possible response. The ferry sputtered, as if it was having second thoughts. Then it pulled into the dock.

“Come on,” Langston said.

I followed him down the plank, into the terminal. When we got to the door leading to the street, I asked him, “What now?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

This was not what I wanted to hear. I imagined he’d have a serious plan, involving the triangulation of coordinates, the canvassing of neighborhoods, the cross-examining of samaritans.