The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart Page B

expected.
    “Good luck,” she whispered in my ear. She said it like there was much more at stake than the safe arrival of a package.
    “Thank you,” I said, pulling away from the embrace. First she, and then I, said good-bye. It was a few short steps to my car, and then my home of the last three years was in the rearview mirror. As things always do, it grew smaller until it disappeared.

 
    Two

 
    8
     
    A bout a month after her father’s death, Sonia and I are sitting in the common room of our suite. We’re seniors in college. I’m flipping channels, looking at her as each new show or movie appears, to see if there’s any change in the vacant expression on her face. Finally I find
Dirty Dancing.
This seems promising to me. Early in high school it was our favorite movie, and we watched it until we could quote lines—“Most of all I’m afraid of never feeling again the way I feel when I’m with you.” We practiced Baby’s dance steps, counting one-two-three, one-two-three.
    “We used to love this movie,” Sonia says.
    “Remember dancing up and down your stairs?”
    “I remember your crush on Patrick Swayze.”
    “That was you.”
    She shoots me an amused look. “I’m not the one who had a shirtless poster on my wall.”
    “I put that up for you,” I say.
    “The sacrifices you’ve made.” She pats my leg. “What a friend.”
    I feel encouraged, even more so when she sings along to “Love Is Strange.” Since her father died, it’s been so hard to know what to do, her grief like a fog we’ve both been lost in. Her father doted on her. He called her Princess, and when he looked at her his love was like a spotlight—it made her the brightest thing in the room. Now she seems caught up in the movie, and so I let myself pay attention to it and not to her. During the scene when Baby confronts her father, my eyes well—I’m a sucker for father-daughter scenes, especially the sentimental ones, alien to my own experience, which make me feel a weird kind of longing mixed with scorn. Normally I laugh this off, saying in a breathy, little-girl voice to the character on screen, “Oh, will you be my daddy?” Now as Baby begins to cry, I do, too. Embarrassed, I try to sniff quietly, glancing at Sonia to see if she’s noticed.
    She’s not paying attention to me, her eyes riveted to the screen without seeming to see what’s on it. Her face is frozen in a mask of grief. I put my arm around her shoulders, but there’s nothing I can say. “I’m sorry” seemed used up even before the first time I voiced it. She doesn’t cry—she never cries—and so I feel like I’m crying for her. I rock her a little from side to side, patting her shoulder, like she’s the one in tears.
    Later that night, drifting on the edge of sleep, I snap awake when Sonia speaks from her bed across the darkened room. “I wasn’t a baby,” she says. “I was a princess.”
    I was neither. It’s hard to say whether that’s anything worth regretting. “I know,” I say.
    She’s silent, and soon I’m almost asleep, so that in the morning I won’t be sure whether I really heard her speak again. She says, “Now I’m nothing at all.”

 
    9
     
    W hen you drive across country instead of flying you really know how far you’ve gone. You feel the miles roll away beneath you, and as each one disappears, propelling you that much farther from where you started, it’s easy to believe you’ve left behind not just a place but everything you felt there, even grief. On the road during the day I was nothing but forward motion. I was a rocket cutting through time and space, a sealed and impenetrable metal thing.
    At night in the motel rooms it was different. The first night, I drove as late as I could, until I began to nod over the wheel. On an empty stretch of highway in Virginia, the only motel I could find had a horror-movie look. There were two beds in the shabby room, and in the center of one of them lay a knife. In the bathtub