Maybe One Day (32 page)

I did
not
want to leave Olivia to go teach dance class. The week before, I’d gotten Stacy to cover for me, but Olivia had been irritated with me for doing that, and I knew when she
was feeling better later in the day she’d be mad if I told her I’d skipped again. When Jake and I pulled out of the driveway, the hospice nurse had just arrived, and I watched her walk out of her car and up the front steps. The nurses were always so calm. She would know what to do to make Olivia more comfortable.

The dance studio was empty. I hadn’t realized how early Jake and I had left the house, but there were at least ten minutes before class was scheduled to start. I put on some music. I’d gotten used to warming up with the girls, and as I did a few pliés, I could feel how much easier even the most basic moves felt now than they had a few weeks ago. I’d lifted my leg onto the barre and was leaning over it, stretching my back out, when I heard the door open. I looked behind me.

Charlotte had just come into the dance studio.

“Oh my God,” I said, dropping my leg and turning around.

“What?” she asked. Her voice was defensive, but I noticed how her eyes skittered nervously around the room.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” I said honestly. “Where have you been? Mrs. Jones tried to reach you.” I heard the accusation in my own voice and quickly added, “We were worried about you.”

“Yeah?” Charlotte asked, and then she shrugged. “I was staying with my grandmother for a few weeks. My mom was sick.”

I remembered what Mrs. Jones had said about Charlotte’s
mother, how she drank and smoked and maybe did other things. Was that what Charlotte meant by
sick
? “Is your mom better now?”

“Kind of,” said Charlotte. She had her bag pressed tightly against her side. “My grandma’s staying with us. Just for a little while.”

“Well, that’s good.”

Charlotte shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s kind of strict. I have a bedtime now and stuff.”

“Oh,” I said. “I can see how that would be kind of a drag. But, I mean, maybe it’s for the best.”

“Maybe.” Charlotte didn’t sound convinced.

“I’ve been meaning . . .” I took a couple of steps toward her. “I felt bad about what happened last time you were here. I shouldn’t have yelled at you for being late.”

She shrugged again. “I don’t care.”

If she wasn’t going to accept it, I kind of wished she would tell me I could take my apology and shove it up my ass, but considering she was only nine, that seemed unlikely.

“Well,
I
care.” I tucked my hair behind my ears, realizing as I did how long it was getting, how much time had passed since I’d gotten it hacked off at Hair Today Gone Tomorrow. I looked directly at Charlotte. “I realize now what a serious commitment you made to this class. I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate it sooner. I feel very bad about how I behaved, Charlotte.”

“Well, sorry, but I can’t control how you feel,” said
Charlotte. “Because, you know, it’s a free country.”

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. I laughed so hard I had trouble catching my breath.

“What?” asked Charlotte. And when I didn’t answer, she kept asking. “What is it? What’s so funny?”

Finally, I wiped my eyes and caught my breath. “Oh God,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought . . .” Was I seriously going to say,
I thought you would fall into my arms weeping with gratitude and understanding?
I shook my head. “I think I’ve been watching too many movies.”

“My grandma says TV and movies rot your brain. She hardly lets us watch any.”

“Yeah, well . . . your grandma’s right.” I went over to the wall and slipped off my sweatpants.

“Hey, you look all like a ballerina and stuff,” said Charlotte, observing my pink tights and black leotard.

“We’ve been doing a lot of dancing while you were away. I had to be able to move.”

“Okay,” said Charlotte. She put her stuff down, took off her sneakers, and unzipped her bag. She took out her ballet shoes, which she sometimes forgot. “Got my shoes.”

“That’s great, Charlotte.” I watched her slip them on her feet. “If you want, I can teach you what you missed before class starts.”

Charlotte tilted her head and looked at me. “I guess,” she said. “That would be cool.” Then, almost against her will, she
added, “Thanks.”

“No problem,” I said.

I started showing Charlotte the moves, and she executed them gracefully, seemingly effortlessly. She was a born dancer, and I told her that.

“Thanks,” she muttered, and even though she tried not to look like she cared, she couldn’t completely hide her smile.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

When the other girls arrived, they helped demonstrate for Charlotte how we threw a move from one person to another. There was more to catch her up on than I would have thought; it ended up taking most of the class. We really had covered a lot of ground over the past few classes. I was glad to have something nice to tell Olivia. I knew she’d want to hear how well things were going.

But when I got to the Grecos’ after class, Mr. Greco told me that after I’d left, Olivia had clearly been in a lot of pain. The hospice nurse had suggested starting her on morphine, which they had done. By the time I arrived, she’d already been on morphine for several hours.

Two days later, without ever regaining consciousness, she died.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

39

Over a thousand people showed up for Olivia’s funeral—kids from school, Olivia’s family, neighbors, people Mrs. Greco knew from her charity work, people from Mr. Greco’s law firm. The church was packed. People spilled out into the parish hall and the basement, and there they watched the speeches and listened to the music on a huge screen that had been set up for the occasion. Someone had told NYBC, and girls we’d used to dance with and even a few of our old teachers showed up. I barely spoke to anyone, keeping my head down, letting my mom guide me to and from a pew. At the cemetery, as they started lowering Olivia’s casket into the ground, Mrs. Greco wailed the same way she had that day in the hospital room, and as she pulled at her clothes and hair, Mr. Greco held her fiercely in his arms, almost as if he was sure she might throw
herself into the grave along with her daughter. It was only April, but it was brutally hot. A couple of old people fainted, and a few others had to be helped into the shade.

I wasn’t hot.

I was cold.

Icy cold, as if I’d headed to Alaska without Olivia, lain down in the snowy landscape, and gone numb. Everyone went back to the house after the funeral, and I sat in the living room with my parents. A few people tried to talk to me, but I delivered monosyllabic responses that finally scared them away. Even Mia took the hint. Twice she approached me and twice I got rid of her. As my family was leaving, I saw Calvin coming down the stairs. I don’t know if he saw me, but I managed to get out of the house with my parents before he could come over to us.

Days passed. At night, I dreamed about Olivia. I was at her house with a lot of other people. It was her funeral. Lonely, I went upstairs to her room, where I found Livvie sitting on her bed. She looked how she’d looked before she got sick, her hair long and thick. Sometimes she was wearing a leotard and tights, sometimes she was in a hospital gown, but no matter what she wore, the dialogue was always the same.

“Oh my God!” I said every time. “Livvie! I thought you were dead.”

She laughed. “You did? That’s so crazy.”

“Livvie.” I went over to her, feeling a sense of relief so
intense it was almost painful. “Livvie. I missed you so much. It was horrible.”

“Don’t cry,” she said. “It was just a dream.”

And I would wake up and I would be crying and Livvie wouldn’t be there because it had just been a dream.

The girls in the ballet class had the idea to dedicate the recital to Olivia, and in the program that’s what it said.
We dedicate our dance today to the memory of Olivia Greco
. When my mom saw it, she started crying. “It was so beautiful,” she said. “That they dedicated it to Olivia was such a beautiful idea, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was, I guess.”

My mom gave me a concerned look.

“What?” I demanded. “You asked me if it was beautiful. I said yes. Why are you staring at me?”

My mom squeezed my shoulder. “No reason,” she said.

My parents sat in the audience, but I watched the girls perform from the wings. They did a fantastic job. Thanks to Stacy, who’d gone to a florist that morning, I had a single rose to give every dancer, and they took their curtain calls holding them. They all hugged me after, even Charlotte, and I hugged every one of them back and told each one what an amazing job she’d done. Mrs. Jones told me how impressed she was by what the girls and I had accomplished, and she said that she was sure Olivia was proud of us also.

Every morning at school Mia brought me a latte. She didn’t say much besides, “Here.” On Friday mornings, after she said “here,” she said, “You want to come over and maybe watch a movie or something?”

Every day I thanked her for the latte. And every Friday I thanked her for the invitation. By the fourth time she asked, I told her she could stop asking. “I really appreciate your inviting me. But I’m not going to say yes.”

“Look,” said Mia. “I know you’re not going to say yes for a long, long time. But one day, even if it’s, you know, a year from now, you will. And when you do, we’ll hang out and watch a movie.”

The idea that one day I’d want to do anything—even watch a movie—would have been laughable if I could have imagined laughing.

Jake came back to school a couple of weeks after the funeral, and each time we saw each other, we hugged. I didn’t know what to say to him. Maybe he didn’t know what to say to me, either.

Why would he? I wasn’t a person. I was an icicle.

The first week of June, Mrs. Jones asked me to come by the rec center. I suggested we could talk about whatever it was over the phone, but she wanted to talk in person. So I drove down to Newark and went to her office.

“It’s a terrible thing when a young person dies,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed. I hoped I hadn’t driven all the way to Newark just to hear her say that. It had been a long drive.

“So,” she said, placing her hands carefully on the desk in front of her, “I was wondering how you were planning to keep Olivia alive.”

I laughed. “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head and blowing the air out of my mouth loudly in an attempt to get control of myself. “I really don’t know what you mean.”

Mrs. Jones didn’t seem to mind that I was laughing at her. She pointed at the center of my chest. “You need to be true to the part of you that has Olivia inside of it. The part of you that did such a beautiful job with those girls at that recital. The part of you that helped Charlotte. In short, I’d like to see you teach the dance class again next fall.”

So
that
was what this was about. Inwardly I rolled my eyes. “Mrs. Jones, I appreciate your saying all of those things. I really do. But I’m not Olivia.”

“No one would want or expect you to be.” She nodded as if she were agreeing with rather than contradicting me.

“Well, whatever.” I toyed with the car keys in my lap. “The point is, the only reason I stuck with the class at all was because Olivia wanted me to.”

Mrs. Jones nodded. “And now Olivia is gone.”

“That would seem to be the case, yes.”

“Well, Zoe . . .” She pressed her hands on her desk, straightening her arms and sitting back in her chair. “I think
the important thing for you to decide is how you are going to honor her memory.”

“With a gazebo.”

She sat forward slightly. “I beg your pardon?”

I leaned in also, lowering my voice as if I were revealing a state secret. “With. A. Gazebo,” I said slowly. “The Grecos donated a gazebo to Wamasset. There’s a ceremony at the school on what would have been her seventeenth birthday. That’s how we’re honoring Olivia’s memory.”

“That is a lovely thing,” said Mrs. Jones. “But it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“I know it wasn’t.” I got to my feet. “But I’m afraid it’s all I’ve got.” I extended my hand to her. “I appreciate your confidence in me. I’m sorry not to be more deserving of it.”

“Well, we’ll see,” she said after a pause. Then she too stood up, reached across her desk, and shook my hand. “Life is long.”

“Not always,” I reminded her, and I walked out of the office.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

40

The day of the dedication of the gazebo dawned hot and cloudless, a beautiful June Saturday. Principal Handleman was going to speak. So was Mr. Greco. The Wamasset High orchestra was playing “selections from Tchaikovsky.” Mrs. Greco had called and asked me if I wanted to speak, but I’d told her I didn’t like talking in front of crowds, and she said okay. I suggested that Stacy Shaw would probably love to say some words. It was the only conversation we’d had since Olivia’s death, and she must have called Stacy, because her name was on the program.