Everything After(46)

Emily smiled at him and stood up from the piano bench, but he shook his head. She sat down again, not sure what he had in mind.

“Since we’ve got our band back together again, we’re gonna play one more song for y’all, the finale we used to jam to thirteen years ago. So please give us a break if we don’t remember all the words.”

He turned to Emily. “Only love can break your heart,” he said.

She smiled at him, wondering if she would actually remember any of what she was supposed to sing.

He kept going, and she responded without even thinking about it until the duet started in earnest.

It all came back to Emily, almost as if the song had shortcut her brain and somehow appeared in her fingers and in her vocal cords. She stood up, nudging the piano bench to the side with her foot, and was flirting with Rob on stage the way they used to. They were laughing and teasing each other, and then they got to the final bit they sang together, facing each other. They sang about how wonderful life was because they were both in the world.

And Emily realized all of a sudden that the part that came after that was a kiss. Rob raised his eyebrows at her, and a piece of Emily was tempted to nod, to say: Yes, kiss me. To feel his lips against hers again, to turn back time, to rewind to the days before they’d played Webster Hall, before she’d gotten pregnant, before she’d fallen and broken her hand and broken up the band. But she was an adult now, and she couldn’t go back. She shook her head, and instead the two of them hugged, Rob swinging his guitar to the side, so it wouldn’t get caught between them.

“I really am so glad you’re in the world,” he whispered into her ear. “It makes it more wonderful to me.”

“I’m glad you’re in the world, too,” she whispered back. “I really, truly am.”





xxviii



I know I said that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have children, but meeting Ezra has made me reevaluate that. I think I might want Ezra to be the father of your brothers or sisters. He’s the best man I’ve ever met. He’s just . . . good. He’s a deeply good person. And he makes me want to be better, to focus more on other people, on helping them, on being like Dr. West. He has a quote stenciled around his living room, traveling from wall to wall, just under the seam where it meets the ceiling, that says: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

When I first got to his place, I didn’t notice it. In the dim light, I thought it was a design, some kind of decorative border on the top of the wall. But once he turned the light on, I could read it. I turned in a circle following the phrases to their end.

“Weird for a guy who was raised Jewish to have John Wesley’s quote on his wall, I know,” he said. “But my mom’s dad was Methodist, and before I was born, my parents stenciled it like this around my bedroom. I grew up with those words, and I really believe them. So when I moved here, my parents came and helped me stencil them here. It reminds me what I want to do with my life.”

I stood in his living room and read the quote again. “It’s beautiful,” I said. And I vowed then that I would always do the same. I wanted to follow him into this world of trying to help people. Of consciously choosing good. Of that ideal being the motivating factor of my life. I know I said that Dr. West changed my life, and that’s true, but Ezra changed it, too.

We sat down on his couch then, and Ezra popped up to offer me a glass of water or wine. I took the wine. I hadn’t slept with anyone since your father. It had been years. Eight of them. And I’d been afraid—afraid that I’d do it again: break someone else’s heart, break my own. But I thought there was no one in this world I’d met who was better than Ezra. And the idea of losing him, of not having him in my life, overwhelmed my fear of getting hurt, of hurting someone else.

“Did you ever watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood?” I asked him when he came back with the wine. “When you were a kid?”

He nodded as he sat back down next to me. “I loved the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. There was a guy who lived in a clock with no hands because make-believe was whatever time you wanted it to be. I tried to take the hands off the clock in our living room after I saw that.”

“Daniel Striped Tiger,” I said. “He’s the one who lived in the clock.”

Ezra’s eyes lit up. “You loved it, too!”

I smiled. “Maybe not as much as you did, but I always remembered the episode where Mr. Rogers said that if the news gets too scary, you should look for the helpers in the story. The police officers and firefighters and doctors and the regular people who reached out to give other people a hand. When I was older and my mom was sick, I remembered that. I looked for the helpers, and things felt a little more manageable.”

Ezra put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed.

“You’re one of the helpers,” I said to him. “You’re one of the people who makes life less scary.”

He put his wine down and kissed me. Then he whispered, “You are, too.”

I hadn’t thought about myself that way before. Ezra gave me a gift in that moment. He let me see myself through his eyes. And made me realize who I wanted to be. I wanted to be one of the helpers, just like he was.