Instructions for Dancing(60)

I look at him and wait for him to give me some kind of answer because he’s my dad and he’s supposed to have the answers. He always used to.

He looks out into the blue-dark night, and it’s a long time before he says anything.

Finally, his eyes travel over my face. “You’re getting so big. I couldn’t have imagined you would get this big.” He looks out over the courtyard. “Here’s what I think. If you get very, very lucky in this life, then you get to love another person so hard and so completely that when you lose them, it rips you apart. I think the pain is the proof of a life well lived and loved.”

“That’s a shitty answer,” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says. “It is.”

I’m crying hard now, inconsolable. All I see is X’s face on the funeral program.

In loving memory: Xavier Darius Woods.

In loving memory.

In memory.

“It’s not worth it,” I say.

Why do I have to love him? How am I supposed to live without him?

“I can’t answer your questions, Evie. I don’t know why we lose the people we love and how we’re expected to go on after we lose them. But I know that to love is human. We can’t help ourselves. The philosopher-poets say love is the answer, but it’s more than that. Love is the question and the answer and the reason to ask in the first place. It’s everything. All of it.”



For a long moment, I watch the lights across the courtyard turn on and off and then on again. I wonder what’s happening in each of the apartments. Who have they lost? Who are they about to lose? What have they survived?

Someone laughs high and loud. It sounds like something breaking. A small wind blows, and there’s no warmth left in the air now. My tears dry on my face.

“Dad, I don’t think I can go to your wedding after all.”

I feel how much I’ve hurt him, and then I feel his struggle to accept what I’ve said.

“All right,” he says.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to forgive you.”

He drops his head into his hand. “It’s all right, my sweetheart,” he says.

Somehow the way he says it makes me feel like maybe I’m the one who needs forgiveness.

“It’s all right,” he says again.

And it’s not all right, not really. But it’s nice of him to say so.





CHAPTER 53





The Light and the Dark



WHEN I IMAGINE X dead, I don’t see darkness. In darkness there’s still hope. Some hidden thing in the places you can’t see. Grief to me feels like an endless landscape of white light. No secrets. And no surprises either.

You can see clearly all you have lost.

Everything that’s no longer there.





CHAPTER 54





One Million, Eight Hundred and Fourteen Thousand and Four Hundred Seconds



SOMETIMES THE ONLY thing to say about a period of time is that it’s passing and that you’re surviving it.

Graduation festivities kick into high gear. The yearbook comes out, and everyone, even the most jaded and cynical kids, turns nostalgic and earnest. We reminisce, sign each other’s books and make promises we really want to keep.

Cassidy’s parents go away to Europe, so she throws some kind of party almost every night. I go to all of them.

At my request, we start going back to Surf City Waffle. I have too many memories of X by the pool at Cassidy’s house to want to go there anymore.

Every Sunday, I wonder if this is the Sunday when Sophie and Cassidy will break up. Things between them have been getting slowly worse. They smile less and touch less and bicker more.

Martin notices, but we don’t talk to each other about it. What’s there to say? Every Sunday they don’t break up feels like a gift, like a little extra time the four of us get to share.

But finally, BreakUp Sunday arrives. They sit next to each other in our booth at Surf City Waffle but don’t touch at all. It happens just the way I saw in my vision. It’s like having a movie-length déjà vu.



After Cassidy leaves, Sophie cries for an hour. She tells us that things have been bad between them for a while. She says it’s like Cassidy had gotten bored with her. She did careless things, like forget when they had a date. Whenever Sophie complained, Cassidy told her she was too sensitive.

Martin and I hug her and let her cry until she stops. She tells us she doesn’t think she wants to go on the road trip. I’m disappointed all over again, but then I let it go.

Later, after I get home, I call Cassidy and listen to her side of the story. Surprisingly, it’s kind of the same. She says she thinks maybe she isn’t a good girlfriend for anyone yet.

The next Sunday, Martin and I go to Surf City Waffle alone, but it’s just too sad. We leave and go back to my house. I make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We eat outside on the patio.

Mom starts seeing Dr. Bob twice a week instead of just once. I want to tell her not to put herself out there again. Doesn’t she remember how she felt after Dad left? Doesn’t she remember taking down their wedding photos? Right after he moved out, we tried living in our house for a few months. I’d catch her staring at the places Dad’s stuff used to be. One toothbrush next to the sink instead of two. Empty spaces on the bookshelf, like missing teeth. The house became a museum of all the places love used to be. A few months later, she agreed to sell the house and we moved.