You laugh because it’s true. It’s funny how people would debate those things, arguing that everything was small, not seeing that even the smallest things contained infinity.
“So number nine is a doozy,” he says. “Feels like I’ve been working on it for eternity already, and I’m still on the top part of the list. Because that’s where you are, right near the top of the list. Of the people I cared about. Of the people I hurt. I want you to know… I know how much I hurt you. How I put you in so many impossible situations. And I want to thank you for trying to help me even when you had no idea how to. Even when I had no idea how to help myself.”
He puts down his tea, and locks his eyes on you. You didn’t realize that tears could happen here; up until now it’s only been smiles and dancing. But as you look at him, you realize that tears are part of the splendor too. “I’m sorry,” he says.
For a moment, you feel the tug of your former self, the urge to judge and recriminate, to remind him he’s apologized a thousand times before, that his actions have consequences that he can’t undo with two too-easy words. But you’re larger than that now. Now you have the wisdom to know so many differences. And you know that this time is different, that he means the words he says. Your eyes dance with his eyes, following their lead into the territory of tears.
“I forgive you,” you say, and he drops onto the couch and hugs you, a hug with his full self, the way he used to hug before those tiny crystals of dark magic took away your friend, your brother.
“I wish I could give you something,” he says. “Something to thank you.”
The song transitions, to an upbeat remix of a ballad about the healing of beautiful broken hearts. You jump up. “You can do something! You can dance with me!”
He laughs as you drag him to the dance floor. “Is this the afterlife or the upside-down?” he says. “I was always the one trying to drag you out to the parties.”
The crowd parts to make space for the two of you, and you need it, you need all that space to leap and dance and twirl each other around. Suddenly you’re not dancing on the floor anymore, you’re dancing on air, gliding over the crowd in a flight of ecstatic joy.
Still soaring, you pull him close and whisper, “I always understood, you know. How you wanted to get somewhere… higher. You just took a wrong turn trying to get up here.”
He hugs you tight, embracing you in the air. “That’s a kind way to put it. And you’ve always been kind.”
You and your friend dance for hours, and the DJ seems to be playing just for you, playing songs from all the times you shared together. Even the songs you got sick of because they were on a loop at all the clubs for an entire year — even those songs seem perfect now. You dance a dance that’s much more than nostalgia, it’s the making of a new album that has the greatest hits of the past and a whole new set of rhythms that were only just invented.
Then he says, “I’ve got to go. I have a lot of rounds to do.” He hugs you goodbye.
You keep dancing by yourself, and the music is even better now than it was before — how does it keep getting better when it was so absolutely perfect from the start? Such questions are unanswerable; your only answer is to dance out all the joy that’s surging through your body.
You’re taking another break, crouching on the shore, letting the tide wash over your feet and the bassline wash over your ears. It’s nighttime now, though the passage of time is hard to gauge here. You haven’t seen a clock or a watch or a tiny screen measuring the passing of seconds since you got here. You don’t miss the clocks or the screens or the schedules, not at all; they were what kept you away from this for so long.
That’s when the two of them find you. For the first time since you’ve been here, your volume of delight comes down from 11. You hope this won’t take long, that they won’t try to keep you from the dance floor.
“We want to share something with you,” she says, “if you’ll come with us for just a minute.”
“Things are different now,” he says.
“I’m not leaving the party,” you say, unmoving from the sand.
They look at each other, nodding, as if they expected this.
“Then we’ll do it here,” she says.
“The music is nice,” he agrees.
Your father turns to his left, and an oven rises out of the wet sand. Your mother turns to her right, and suddenly she’s in front of a wood-top island that’s traveled from the kitchen to the ocean’s edge. In a flurry, your parents are chopping and whisking and sautéing. The music shifts to a soft jazz beat as the scents of garlic and butter and cilantro fill the air. Your parents smile as they work, dividing the labor effortlessly, which is jarring, because they could never be in the same room together, especially a kitchen, for more than five minutes before the shouting started. And your father never knew how to cook anything other than eggs over easy.
“I’ve learned to cook here!” your father says. “For a while, I was having trouble finding my way, figuring out what I was supposed to do. Then I found the feasting courts — have you been down that way?”
“No,” you say, confused about where the feasting courts could be. It’s all one endless dance party from horizon to horizon.
“When I found the feasting courts,” your father goes on, “I realized this is what I’ve been missing. I spent my whole life trying to fix things, but I never learned to make things. To cook things up!”
Your mother lets out a harrumph. “Five decades of marriage and I’ve got to wait for the afterlife for this man to finally learn to cook.”
Your father laughs. This isn’t like they used to fight, the take-no-prisoners mutually assured destruction. This is different, the playful sparring of two people deeply in love.
You find it all quite disorienting.
“So we wanted to find you,” your father says, “and offer you this feast!”
“We wanted to give you something for a change,” your mother says. “Even when you were a little kid, sometimes you took care of us more than we took care of you.”
A kitchen table appears on the wet beach, the waves lapping against its wooden legs. Your kitchen table, the one from the house you grew up in. Your parents set the table with the feast that they’ve created — mofongo, pasteles, collard greens, crème brûlée — every single one of your favorite dishes. Your father lights candles and your mother pulls up a chair for you, inviting you to sit.
Part of you still wants to go back to the dance floor, the jazz two-step calling to your feet. But the scent of the meal made just for you is seductive, and you appreciate that your parents have made such an effort. You wonder if that’s part of the magic here — that it’s easier for people to find the power inside themselves to make the effort.
You sit with your parents and eat. The food tastes like home. Not the home you had, but the home you almost had, the home that could have been perfect if things had been just a little bit different.
As you eat, your parents tell you about their wanderings. You had no idea there was so much more to this place, that this world kept going beyond the party. But then you only just got here, and the party’s demanded all your attention, like a lover that’s been waiting all night for you to come home.
Your mother cracks open the top of her crème brûlée as you finish the meal. “We’ve been here a while,” she says. “And we think we’re almost ready to go up to the second floor.”
“There’s a second floor?” you ask.
“Oh yeah,” your mother says, gesturing toward the forest. At its edge, an old wooden staircase ascends into the heights of the redwoods. You’ve seen it before but always assumed it led to a treetop pavilion, a special section of the dance floor with a spectacular view of the ocean. You’ve been meaning to check it out, but haven’t had the chance. “We needed to see you first. To share this meal with you. To offer you a little nourishment. To thank you for all the ways you nourished us.”
“I spent so much time trying to get you
to be something you weren’t,” your father says. “When the whole time you were this kid who was perfect just exactly as you were.”
“Thank you,” you say, and you can tell it’s what they need to hear. The music shifts from jazz to salsa, and the three of you smile at one another. You all stand up and dance around the kitchen table as the tide comes in, your feet splashing in unison with each other and with the congas.
Your mother takes your hand. Your hips and her hips move as one. It’s familiar and comforting to dance with your mother, just like you used to when you were little.
Then the beat shifts to a rhythm you never expected. Your mother twirls you around and passes you to your father. He extends his right hand, much to the surprise of your left hand. He places his other arm around your shoulder, shocking your shoulder blades. He’s positioning himself to follow, inviting you to lead.
This is even more disorienting than the feast, but the compass of your body manages to find its bearings. You take your father’s extended hand, and place your other hand on his back. You guide him through the dance in the shallow waters. Splash-splash left. Splash-splash right. His body follows yours as easily as his smile. You feel, for the first time in your existence, living or dead, that your father is seeing you. A tiny team of tears finds its way from your eyes back into the ocean.
The song ends. Your parents kiss you goodbye and say they’ve done all they came to do, that they’ll see you on the second floor when you’re ready.
For a moment you wonder about these people who keep finding you, how all of them seem to have a mission, a list of things they need to get done. Should you have a list too? You used to have so many lists, in so many places. Post-it notes, memo pads, email reminders, taskmaster apps. In life, you made list after list, lists of all the lists you had to make, so many lists you nearly drowned in them.
No. No lists for you here. Your only mission is to dance.
The music goes on. The sky is clear, and the stars, the planets, the constellations are all swirling to the beat, the most spectacular light show you’ve ever seen. Even the Milky Way is dancing, that river of lights undulating to the soaring orchestral rhythms. You dance for hours with those celestial bodies.
Then you see him. Smiling, shimmying his shoulders as he dances towards you. He’s still so sexy. It irritates you that he’s still so sexy.
“Hey, tiger,” he says, dancing in a circle around you. He knows you love it when he calls you tiger, like Mary Jane and Peter Parker. “I’ve been looking for you. Never guessed that you’d be here. I thought for sure you’d be in the library. Have you been to the library? It’s just like this, but with books, every book there ever was, whole cityscapes of books. You’d totally love it.”
You half-smile, but you’re determined to resist being manipulated. Redemption may have been possible for the others, but not for him. What he gave you was a scar, not a wound, and scars last, even longer than the bodies they lived on.
You come to a standstill on the dance floor. “You lied to me,” you say.
He stands still too, just a foot away from you. “I lied so much,” he says. “And my lies enchanted you, every one of them.”
You spent the last decade of your life preparing for this moment. You have whole monologues prepared, treatises on all his wrongs, interrogations of all his untruths. But it does you no good that you ran your lines so many times; you still aren’t ready to perform off-book, not for this, not for him. Of all the lines you rehearsed, all you can remember is one, one single question that you never got the answer to: “All those times when you said you couldn’t kiss me because I had severe halitosis, was that a lie too?”
“Total lie,” he says, grinning. “Except one time. The first time, your breath really was terrible. That was what gave me the idea. All the other times, I just didn’t feel like kissing you, and that was the easiest way to get out of it.”
You knew it. You always knew that was a lie too. So much smaller than all his other lies, but the one that might have hurt the most, like a hatchet as small as a paper clip.
The music gets ominous, and all the joy scatters away from the dance floor like cockroaches running when you turn on the kitchen light.
“I lied so much it was like scratching an itch,” he says. “I did it without thinking. But here’s the funny thing: now I never lie. Here, I only say true things.”
This conversation is nothing like the others. He’s not even trying to apologize, this person who hurt you worst of all — who made you lose your faith, not just in him, but in yourself. In everything.
You wish he would leave. You wish the happy music would come back.
He looks up at the Milky Way, still dancing above, oblivious to your misery. “The truth is we should have broken up three years earlier. I was terrified of you seeing… how broken I was. My soul did somersaults so you wouldn’t see how much I was hurting. I made up all those lies to… please you — and to manipulate you. I turned away from you when you kept reaching out. And I never even told you why. It wasn’t because I didn’t have enough love for you. It was because I didn’t have enough capacity. I wish I’d been strong enough to love you right. I owe you that much truth, at least.”
He’s dancing around an apology. Even here, he still can’t say the simple words I’m sorry. Part of you wants to be large, to forgive him anyway, like you did your friend and your parents. But you’re not that big yet.
“Okay,” you say, and that’s the most you can offer. The music shifts to a pop remix you’ve always loved. “I’m going back to dancing now.”
You can see in his eyes that he’s disappointed you haven’t given him your forgiveness. You’re stopping him from getting through his list. Part of you feels some satisfaction in that, though you know you shouldn’t, not here, not in this place where delight makes old grudges nothing but needless weight.
“I was going to go upstairs soon,” he says, “you know, check out the famous second floor. But maybe I can dance near you for a bit?”
“I guess that’s fine,” you say, which you guess it is. Before all your affection ran into the shadows, before you found out all the ways he lied, you used to love dancing with him.
You dance, not with each other, but by each other. You never touch, but your eyes meet a few times each song. He looks at you with adoration, with desire. You can’t remember the last time he looked at you like that — not since long before you separated. You can’t deny how nice it feels.
A while passes, and then he gets close to you again. He clutches your shoulders and looks you up and down, like you’re a skyscraper and he has to crane his neck to take in all of you. “Is this really all you’ve seen?” he says. “Just this party?”
“Well, yeah,” you say. “It’s the best party ever.”
He erupts in laughter. You don’t quite understand the joke, but you sense there’s nothing mean-hearted in his laugh. It’s a laughter of irony — or appreciation, maybe — and you get the feeling he’s laughing at himself and the world as much as he’s laughing at you. “That is so rich,” he says, wiping laugh-tears from his eyes. “That is so perfect. You spent your whole life taking care of everyone but yourself, going through all those lists of things that had to get done. You never slowed down enough to enjoy the party. So here you are.
“I’m going upstairs soon,” he says. “You were my last one. But before I go I’d like to ask you for two more things, even though I’ve got no right to do that. Can I give you one last kiss? The kiss I should have given you a long time ago? And can I tell you one more true thing?”
There were so many nights when you lay awake desperate for a kiss goodnight, craving the touch of the person right there on the other side of the bed. It comforts you that at least one of your regrets is mutual.
“Yes,” you say, “you may kiss me. But only if it’s wet and passionate and sends shivers through my soul.”
He looks into your eyes like you’re a goddess and you just answered his prayers
. He comes in close and kisses you and your mouth is full of fireworks and his hands are touching you in all the places you love to be touched and just at that moment the DJ transitions to a new song, and it’s your song, the song that you and he loved long before the sexless nights, when the two of you were at your best, two heroes at the beginning of a romantic adventure, except this time the adventure doesn’t disappoint, it keeps going and going just like this kiss, which is the quest and the map and the magic elixir all at once.
He kisses you like he never wants to stop, but eventually the music shifts to a different song and you pull away, because your tongue is tired and your legs are ready to dance again. He steps back and watches you dance, still catching his breath. “That was amazing,” he says. “I was so dumb not to do that every single second you were in my reach.”
You nod as you bop to the beat, because it’s true, that was dumb of him.
“So here’s the last thing,” he goes on. “The other true thing I have to tell you. You deserve that kiss. And so much more. You deserve all the joy in the world, because you are wondrous and lovable and sexy and sacred.”
You’re having trouble hearing what he’s saying, because you sense that there’s wisdom in it, and that feels deeply unfair — the last thing this person should be allowed to do is offer you wisdom. An amazing kiss is one thing, but wisdom is where you have to hold the line.
He reaches out to run his fingers through your hair. “I’m sorry I stopped you from seeing your own beauty. I hope that here you get all the joy and desire and love that you deserve.”
It Gets Even Better Page 25