CHAPTER 1

The Tiny Dancer

The Tiny Dancer

DEE

The atrium rises twelve decks above us, glittering with glass and polished brass. A chandelier the size of a small car hangs down the center of it, throwing broken light onto everything, and the glass elevators slide up and down the far wall like beads on a string. Music drifts down from somewhere overhead — a live band, not a recording; I can hear the piano player reaching for a note and not quite catching it — and it echoes through the open space until it seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. There is the smell of new carpet and cut flowers and, underneath, the faint sweetness of the drink somebody is muddling at the bar. Somewhere above us a child is running the length of a hallway and being told, twice, not to.

Once, that music would have sent me straight to the dance floor.

Tonight it stops me in my tracks.

I know this feeling. I have felt it in grocery stores when a song comes on that John liked, and in the car, and once, humiliatingly, in the waiting room of a tire shop. It arrives the same way every time — a hand closing around the back of my throat — and I have gotten very good at walking through it as though nothing is happening. Embarkation day is the worst of it. Everything shining and new, everyone arriving with somebody, the whole ship dressed up and holding its breath for the week ahead.

The memories come like tidal waves hitting quickly, often without warning and threatening to drag you to the bottom. Admittedly, it is better than it used to be. I tell others it’s because you learn to notice some warning signs or you avoid times that you know will trigger it. Coping strategies also emerge along the way as you learn where your life jackets are or how to get to high ground before the wave hits. Mostly you understand that it will pass if you can just hold on until it eases. My style is avoidance: stay away from what hurts most, which includes music and dancing.

Lou steers us toward the bar with the flat of her hand between my shoulder blades, the way she has steered me toward and away from things for thirty years, and I glance at the open-air dance floor, where a woman well past eighty is dancing in a knee-length red dress that sways as she moves. Her white hair gleams like a crown. She is thin and elegant, and it is not her delicate frame or her age that holds me — it is the confidence she radiates, the presence of a woman who has lived and loved and is not finished with either.

She is dancing completely alone, surrounded by couples gliding across the floor. Her arms are positioned as though she is holding an invisible partner — one hand lifted to rest on a shoulder that isn’t there, the other held out and lightly closed, as though a larger hand were folded around it. Her eyes are distant and shimmering. She sways gently, lost in a world only she knows. The couples give her a wide berth without seeming to notice they are doing it, the way water moves around a stone.

I tune out the music and look away to keep the memories from flooding in.

“Two glasses of the sauvignon blanc,” Lou tells the bartender, “and don’t be stingy, we’ve had a day.” She has, too — she spent forty minutes at guest services over a cabin key that wouldn’t program, and she enjoyed every second of it; Lou is never happier than when she has a small injustice to correct. She hands me a glass and clinks hers against it without a toast, because we stopped needing to say the words years ago.

“I’ve been watching her,” she says, and tips her head toward the dance floor. “She’s danced every dance alone.”

I nod and fight back tears, and I turn my face a little so Lou won’t see me do it, though of course she sees me do it; she misses nothing, which is the best and worst thing about her. There is something hauntingly familiar in that face. I know that look — the look of seeing something no one else can see. Maybe I am only seeing myself.

Here is what I would tell you if you asked me, and no one asks me: I have gotten very good at not going into rooms like this one. I schedule around them. I have skipped the dinner and made the excuse and gone back to the cabin and called it an early night more times than I would admit to Lou, who booked this trip precisely so that I could not do that, and who is watching me over the rim of her glass right now to see whether I will try.

And I am tired. Not the ordinary kind. I am tired of avoiding rooms like this one.

So instead of turning away, I watch her closely. To the rest of the world she appears alone. But I can tell that in her mind she is not. She is embracing her memories and allowing them to bring her joy.

And I feel something I don’t have a name for and don’t much care for. Not envy, exactly. Something nearer to suspicion. That woman is enjoying herself, out loud, in public, at eighty-some years old — and some part of me has quietly decided she must be doing it wrong. That she is being unseemly. That grief has rules and she is breaking them, and that if I watch long enough I will catch her paying for it.

It is not a kind thought. I notice that it is not a kind thought. I have started noticing them lately — these small mean verdicts I hand down on other people’s happiness — and the noticing is new and does not feel like an improvement, because now I get to see myself do it and can no longer pretend I don’t.

I travel back to a time when I was on that floor with my husband John. We danced at this same hour, before dinner, every evening of our twenty-five cruises. He was a natural dancer. He moved across the floor with ease, practically carrying me with him at times. I would not describe his style as elegant, however; it was active, full of dips and twirls, and it left him a little short of breath. It also meant some sweat on his brow and down his back. All the while he was sweeping me off my feet he would quietly hum, or — heaven help me — sing the wrong words and forget the melody entirely, stone-cold tone deaf. But he made me feel alive and completely special.

When our girls were around they hid their faces, embarrassed by the show mom and dad were putting on. I learned quickly to love being in his arms and just laugh and enjoy it when he added some unexpected antics. He enjoyed being the center of attention, while I enjoyed fading into the background. We complemented one another and never got in each other’s way.

As I watch her I feel John’s arm at my waist and the gentle squeeze he would give me — two quick presses, our private code, I’m here, I’ve got you — that he used on dance floors and in hospital corridors and, at the very end, from a bed he could no longer get out of, his hand finding my waist and pressing, twice, when he could not find the breath for the words. I smell his scent, the cedar soap he bought in bulk and the coffee that never entirely left him. I feel the warmth of his skin.

The band eases into “The Lady in Red,” and there it is — the song, our song. Sitting in a bar with mocktails (he was a recovering alcoholic) and telling tales of adventure a band unexpectedly started playing. He didn’t really ask me to dance, he just reached out and took my hand, pulling me to the dance floor. I stumbled a lot as there was not much rhyme or reason in his steps or those unexpected moves. I fell in love with him right there on the dance floor, he just knocked my socks off with his confidence and total abandonment to life. By the end of the evening his shirt was soaked and I was exhausted but feeling joy I had never really known before. He was the complete opposite of my uptight ex-husband, who only danced while we were in high school, only slow songs, and only 1-2 per event. He was constantly worrying about what others would think and trying to tell me if we wanted to dance we needed to take ballroom dancing lessons.

“Dee.” Lou’s voice, and her hand on my wrist. “You disappeared for a bit there.”

“Sorry.” I set my glass down on the little standing table between us. “I was somewhere.”

“I could see that.” She doesn’t push. She waits, which is a thing Lou can do that almost no one else in my life can — she can leave a silence lying on the ground between us and not reach down to pick it up.

I lean toward her. “John and I danced every night before dinner. And a lot of nights after.”

“I remember.” She smiles. “You told me at his funeral. You told about eleven people at his funeral, actually. It was the one thing you could say without coming apart, so you kept saying it.”

“Did I.”

“You did. I thought it was the loveliest thing I ever heard, and I also thought, that woman is going to talk about dancing so she doesn’t have to talk about anything else.” She says it gently. Lou can say almost anything gently; it is her great gift and her most dangerous weapon. “Are you open to finding someone again?”

The question lands somewhere I wasn’t guarding. I mean to deflect it. What comes out instead is: “Funny how one dance can wake up more than one memory.”

“What?”

I could stop here. I have stopped here, at this exact place, a dozen times — the sentence forming and dissolving before it reaches air. But the tiny dancer turns in her invisible partner’s arms, and John’s hand is still warm at my waist, and I am so tired of the weight of the unsaid thing.

“There was someone else.”

Lou sets down her glass. In thirty years of friendship, I have surprised her perhaps four times, and I know the exact face she makes each time, and she is making it now: the eyebrows still, the mouth going careful, the whole of her attention swinging around to bear on me like a lighthouse.

“Since John?”

“I met him on a cruise. We texted back and forth late at night for months. Then he disappeared.”

“Disappeared how?”

“Disappeared like he was never there at all.”

Lou is quiet a moment — a real moment, long enough that the band gets through most of a phrase. Then: “And you’ve never said his name out loud, in five years, until tonight.”

I don’t answer that, because she isn’t really asking, and because the answer is standing in the room with us now that she’s said it. Five years. I have carried this man around in my chest like a stone I swallowed, and I have never once set him down where another person could see him, and I do not entirely understand why I have chosen a Tuesday, an atrium, a glass of mediocre wine, and a stranger in a red dress to do it.

Except that I do understand, a little. The dancer has something I want and can’t ask for. She has made a peace I haven’t made. She is holding her ghost out where everyone can see and refusing to be ashamed of him, and I am at a standing table twenty feet away holding mine in secret and calling it dignity.

The band starts the theme from Titanic. I stand up before it can finish, because there are limits, and a ship at sea playing the drowning song is well past mine.

“Let’s go to dinner.”

“It’s twenty past five.” Lou doesn’t move. She is still looking at me with the lighthouse face.

“Then we’ll be early.”

She holds my eye one beat longer — deciding, I can tell, whether to follow the name I dropped or let it lie until I’m ready. She lets it lie. She picks up both our glasses, drains the last of hers and most of mine, and stands. “Early it is. But Dee.” She loops her arm through mine. “You started a sentence back there. I want you to know I heard the beginning of it, and I intend to hear the end.”

“There’s no end. He’s gone.”

“Mm,” she says, in the way that means she has filed this and will be back for it, and steers us toward the stairs.

Behind me the music swells and the tiny dancer turns in her invisible partner’s arms, her red dress opening like a slow flower, her eyes fixed on a face I cannot see and she can see perfectly, and I have the strangest feeling — as though I have been introduced to a version of myself I have not yet decided whether to become.