Maybe One Day (34 page)

There is nothing that makes the unbearable bearable.

Instead, I hugged her back and thanked her for letting me take the memory box. Then, though it was almost too big for me to get my arms all the way around it, I picked it up and headed out the door of Olivia’s house for the very last time.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

42

The tree branches hanging over my back deck made it shady and cool, and there at the picnic table I sat, going through Olivia’s memory box all afternoon.

It was crazy the stuff that she’d kept. There must have been a hundred programs, one for every ballet we’d ever been to. Ticket stubs. Dried flowers from performances we’d given. Unlike Olivia’s drawers, the box wasn’t in any kind of order. Underneath the program from our eighth-grade graduation was a picture we’d ripped out of
Dwell
magazine freshman year. It was of a penthouse apartment in the West Village. The photographer had stood on the enormous roof deck and shot the apartment through the wall of glass windows. On the elegant white sofa in the middle of the stark living room, Olivia had drawn two stick figures. Above one she’d written
Zoe
, and
above the other she’d written
Livvie
. Leaning against the sleek kitchen counter were two more stick figures, and above them I had written
Our hot boyfriends!!!

I started to laugh. Next I came to a bright yellow Post-it that said, in Livvie’s handwriting,
Definitely!
and below that, in mine,
Not!

Definitely what? Definitely not what?

If she were alive, I could have called her.

If she were alive, I wouldn’t have been sitting here alone going through the box of memories of our friendship.

I stopped laughing.

The Post-it was stuck to a shoe box, and I slipped that out of the bigger box, planning to open it. But when I lifted the shoe box, I found a thin box wrapped in pale gray tissue paper. Across the front, in blue pen, Olivia had written
Happy Birthday, Zoe
.

As if she were there, I saw Olivia sitting across the table from me at the restaurant the night of my birthday.

It’s not something
you
messed up. It’s something
I
messed up. It’s your present. By the time I figured out what I wanted to give you, I didn’t have time to make it
.

You’re
making me
something?

Maybe . . 
.

Hand shaking, I pulled the package from the bottom of the box and carefully unwrapped it. Inside, there was a layer of tissue paper, and when I moved it aside, I found myself looking
at a framed collage composed of dozens of pictures of me and Livvie.

They stretched back to the beginning of our friendship. There was one of us from when we were about seven or eight, taken in front of the Wamasset movie theater before it had been closed and reopened as an American Apparel. There was one of us eating pizza at the place around the corner from NYBC where we’d gotten slices and club sodas at least four times a week for years. There was one of us at about eleven, squinting into the sun, sitting in the motorboat her dad had had for a couple of summers before he’d decided it was too much work and money and not enough payoff and he’d sold it.

In every single picture, we were wearing a variation on the exact same color scheme. In the one from the pizza parlor, I had on a blue tank top; Olivia had on a white one. In the one from the boat, I was wearing a white T-shirt with a blue collar and Olivia was wearing a dark blue dress with a thin white stripe. In the center of the collage was the photo of the two of us from the first day of school this year, both of us wearing blue-and-white T-shirts, both of us smiling into the camera, both of us blissfully unaware of the bomb that was about to explode our lives.

I ran my fingers over the photos, as if the joy we had felt when they were taken might be something I could touch.

“I love you, Livs,” I whispered, brushing away the tears on my cheeks before they could fall on the pictures. “I love you so
much.”

I put the collage down, and saw there was something still in the box. It was an envelope. There was nothing written on the front, but I slid the flap open and pulled out a card that had a photo of two girls in tutus on the front. One of the girls had blond hair and one had black. Each of them was holding a bouquet of roses almost as big as she was. They were facing each other and laughing, and they looked so much like me and Olivia that it hurt my heart to see them.

I flipped open the card.

Inside was a letter from Olivia.

Her handwriting—as familiar to me as her face—covered the shiny interior in slanting, neatly formed letters.

Dear Zoe
,

My hands were shaking so much I could barely hold the card, and I had to set it down on the table to read what she’d written.

As you can see from these photos, for almost a decade we have been trapped in a tragic fashion Groundhog Day. Please promise me you won’t wear white or blue (or white and blue) quite so regularly in the future
.

I’m so grateful that I got to have thirteen amazing years with you. And I’m sorry I won’t be there to see your life, but I know it’s going to be fantastic. Do not forget to have plenty of day-into-evening wear. Do not forget to have extra adventures since you will have to have them for me, too
.

I’ve been thinking about what we said about heaven, and I think heaven would be a place where you could still somehow remember things that happened when you were alive. I wish I knew for sure, but I can’t really imagine a place where I’d exist without remembering us
.

I found this quote that I wanted to share with you. (No pressure or anything. I just thought you might find it interesting.) It’s by Merce Cunningham
.

“
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
”

Whether you dance or not, I hope you feel alive your whole life, Zoe
.

I love you
Olivia

Taped to the card just beneath her signature and tied to each other with a thin red ribbon were two locks of hair. One was the one I had saved the day we’d shaved her head. The other was mine. When the woman at Hair Today Gone
Tomorrow had asked if I wanted to save a lock of my hair, I’d said no.

But Livvie had taken it.

I was crying so hard I couldn’t even finish the letter at first. I just kept reading a word or two and sobbing and putting it down and catching my breath. Then I’d start reading again and the same thing would happen. It must have taken me half an hour to just get through the letter once. And then I had to read it over and over again. I read it so many times I almost memorized it. Flavia came over and sat beside me, and I just rubbed his head and cried and read Olivia’s letter.

Finally I couldn’t sit there crying anymore. I snapped on his leash, and we walked for a long, long time. I wished Olivia and I had had some special place that we’d used to go so I could take Flavia there, but we didn’t. Except maybe the fortress, and I didn’t want to go there. But I wanted to be with Olivia. I wanted to be someplace that was so much a part of me and Olivia that being there would make me feel like I was still with her. I missed her so much and I was never going to see her again.

And suddenly I had a sharp, bright picture of sitting across the table from Livvie the last time I’d seen her before she’d relapsed. She’d been talking on the phone with Mrs. Jones, and then she’d hung up and tried to get me to teach the dance class with her next year.

Was that where Livvie was? In dancing?

I remembered the first class I’d taught with her, back in the fall when she was still well enough to Skype, and how at the end of the class, I’d felt as if I’d spent an hour surrounded by ghosts.

Maybe being surrounded by ghosts wasn’t such a bad thing.

Maybe that was what Mrs. Jones had meant when she’d asked how I was going to honor Olivia’s memory—maybe she’d been asking if I could handle spending a little time with some ghosts.

We turned onto my driveway, and I let Flavia off his leash. When he started barking like crazy, I raised my head to see what he was barking at, and that’s when I saw Calvin sitting on the front steps of my house. His car was parked in my driveway. I’d been so lost in thought I hadn’t even noticed it.

I made my way slowly up the steep drive. He didn’t get up, just sat there, letting Flavia jump all over him,

“Be careful,” I warned Calvin from a few feet away. “He can be pretty vicious.”

“I can tell,” he said, petting him.

Flavia let out a little whine and sat down on the step next to Calvin. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts, and he was ever so slightly tan.

He looked great.

“Hi,” he said, looking right into my eyes.

“Hi,” I said. I couldn’t quite look at him, so I studied a spot just past his shoulder.

“How was your walk?” he asked.

I toyed with Flavia’s leash, running its rough edge through my fingers. “I was thinking about Olivia,” I said. “And about dancing.”

“What about it?” Calvin scratched him behind the ears as Flavia barked happily.

“I don’t know exactly. I think . . .” I wrapped the leash around my hand a couple of times, still not looking at Calvin. “I think I might not be done with it.”

“Yeah,” said Calvin. “I could see that.”

I forced myself to finally meet his eyes. He was looking at me. I could feel my chin start to quiver. “I just miss her so much, Calvin.”

“I know,” he said, but when he stood up to come to me, Flavia started barking.

“Jesus, Flavia, enough!” I snapped.

Calvin gently nudged him off the step, keeping his hand on Flavia’s head and scratching him. Then he reached his other hand up to mine. After a second, I took it and let him pull me down onto the step. Only our hands were touching, but I could feel the warmth of his body next to mine.

“When do you leave for Middlebury?” I asked, swiping at my nose with the back of my hand.

“Actually . . .” He hesitated. “I decided to defer for a year.”

“Seriously?” I turned to look at him.

He met my eyes for a second, then looked away. “Yeah. I’m going to be doing this thing with building houses for about six months. My parents thought it would be good for me to have a year before college. You know.” He made a deep, dad voice. “‘Get a little life experience.’ I don’t know. I kind of like the idea. After everything that happened this year.” He shrugged. “Jake says he’s ready to get away, but . . . I don’t know if I could really give a shit about college right now.”

I thought of how hard it must have been to be Jake’s best friend this year. I remembered that first day in the hospital, how I’d wished it had been Jake instead of Olivia who’d gotten sick. Like death didn’t touch you if you were a couple of degrees removed from it.

I’d been such an idiot.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “I think I can see that.” I threw the end of the leash out in front of me, as if I were fishing on my driveway. “So where are you going? Africa? Ecuador?” Rich kids from Wamasset were always spending their summers helping people in Latin America and Kenya build schools and houses or start small businesses. It was like the
ultimate
for college applications.
My summer in Quito and how it changed my life . . 
.

Eyes on the blacktop, Calvin said, “Ah no. I’ll be in Philly.”

Philadelphia was about an hour from where we lived.

I stared at him. “Oh my God,” I said. I said it really quietly.

“What?” he asked, finally turning to face me. Flavia barked with annoyance, but both of us ignored him.

“I . . . when you said that, I was happy. I mean, just for a second. I felt . . .” I could feel my eyes filling with tears. “I felt happy.”

“Clearly,” said Calvin. He laughed, then reached over and wiped my wet cheeks. I stopped him, taking his hand in both of mine. Touching him—even though it was just holding his hand—felt good.
Really
good. I let my mind search, like when I had a loose tooth and my tongue would seek it out and wiggle it. There it was. Poking through the detritus left by the horrible ice storm of the past year. A tiny green shoot.

A tiny green shoot of happy.

I was still holding Calvin’s hand in both of mine. He slipped his other arm around my shoulder and we looked at each other. Then he pulled me to him. He kissed the top of my head, and I squeezed his hand tightly in mine.

We sat like that for a long time, not talking.

Just being together.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

acknowledgments

This is a work of fiction. Whenever possible I tried to include accurate medical information, but when the narrative required it, I chose the story over the realities of cancer treatment. Though it is not discussed in the novel, I want readers to know that the vast majority (approximately 70 percent) of pediatric cancer patients survive. As advances in treatment continue, there is every reason not just to hope but to assume that these statistics will only improve.

This book would not have been possible without people who gave above and beyond the call of work, friendship, and love. I am tremendously grateful to Dr. Fein-Levy, Dr. Amy Glaser, Emily Jenkins, Bernie Kaplan, Barbara Kass, Sarah Lutz, Louise Maxwell, Julie Reed, Dr. Blythe Thomson, and Lilah Van Rens.