Will nodded, his eyes still fixed on his hands.
“One day my dad gave me this old stuffed rabbit toy. I’d never seen it before, but he said it belonged to my grandfather. He’d found it while clearing out his belongings and he thought I might like to have it. The rabbit was called Colin, and it was the saddest thing you’ve ever seen. Three limbs, one ear, big clumps of fur missing. He looked like he’d been run over by a lawnmower. In fact, I think he actually had been run over by a lawnmower. But Colin made the best listener, even with one ear. I could talk to him about my grandfather in a way that I couldn’t talk to people.”
The corner of Will’s mouth twitched slightly.
“I know, I know. Go ahead and laugh. I’m only telling you this because I know you won’t talk. Otherwise I’d probably be out of a job tomorrow.”
Will reassured Mr. Coleman that his secret was safe with a finger to the lips and a subtle nod.
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” said Mr. Coleman. His chair groaned slightly as he leaned back and crossed his arms. “The truth is that I felt comfortable talking to that rabbit because, unlike everybody else around me—my family, my friends, my teachers—Colin wasn’t trying to fix me. He didn’t pretend to know how I felt. He didn’t expect me to ‘be like I was before’ ”—Mr. Coleman made quotation marks with his fingers—“as if nothing had changed and life should somehow continue as normal despite this gaping hole that had suddenly appeared right in the middle of it. He didn’t expect anything because, well, he was just a stuffed toy. All he could do was listen. So that’s what he did. He listened. And it helped. Before then I didn’t think I’d ever be able to talk about my grandfather again. But I’ve since come to realize that difficult things don’t necessarily have to be difficult to talk about. The difficult part is finding the right person—or rabbit—to talk to. Not that I’m saying you should start talking to animals, of course, although if you do, then please, don’t tell anybody that I was the one who suggested it. I’m sure Colin would be happy to give you a free consultation, though, and you’re more than welcome to talk to me anytime, even though you probably think I’m crazy by now. We can play charades if you’d prefer.”
Will smiled as he pictured Mo yelling at the class from his imaginary taxi.
“I guess what I’m trying to say, Will, is that when terrible things happen that we can’t understand, sometimes it takes something equally unexpected to help us make sense of it. Do you see what I’m saying? Or am I rambling like an idiot?”
Will rocked his head from side to side to indicate a bit of both.
“Okay, that’s good enough for me,” said Mr. Coleman. He tore a piece of paper from a spiral notepad, scribbled Sorry Will and Mo were late, I was rambling like an idiot, and signed it before handing it to Will. “Give this to your next teacher so you don’t get into trouble.”
Will looked at the note and frowned when he saw Mo’s name. Mr. Coleman nodded towards the door behind Will, who turned just in time to see Mo’s face quickly disappear from the window.
“He’s been waiting for you the whole time,” said Mr. Coleman. “He’s good at charades, but he’s terrible at hiding. Go on, get going.”
CHAPTER 17
When Danny was twelve, he tried to impress a girl on his street by shinning to the top of a sycamore tree. The purpose of the mission, aside from showcasing his climbing skills—something he believed, like most boys his age, to be one of the defining characteristics of a superior boyfriend—was to rescue a cat that didn’t even belong to the girl in question (he didn’t know this at the time) and almost certainly didn’t need rescuing (he had an inkling this might be the case, but he needed a pretext to demonstrate his pre-man manliness, and saving a cat from a tree seemed as good a reason as any). As if to emphasize this, the animal calmly waited for Danny to scale the most challenging parts of the tree until the two of them were well within spitting and hissing distance of one another, at which point the animal scarpered down the trunk and bolted up an adjacent tree while Danny was left teetering in the branches for just long enough to contemplate how stupid he looked before he lost his footing and tumbled to the ground.
His plunging body took a trajectory that miraculously avoided every branch, a divine stroke of luck that enabled him to limp away from the scene with his dignity shattered but his body intact. Danny often thought how fortunate he was to survive the accident at all, never mind with all of his appendages still working and his brain fluid still in his skull, and sometimes he had nightmares about that day, flinching awake in the darkest hours with the sense of falling still churning his guts. As with all good bad dreams about falling, however, he always woke prior to impact. But that night, when he crawled into bed after his session with Krystal and once again found himself tumbling towards the earth as the neighbor’s daughter looked on in horror and the cat looked on in morbid amusement, not only did he hit the ground before waking, he also hit every branch on the way down. He lay there in agony at the bottom of the tree until the sound of his alarm delivered him from torment. When he groggily opened his eyes and tried to switch it off, the slightest movement hurt so much that he felt like somebody had broken into his apartment and beat him all night with a rolling pin. He wondered for a second how pain from a dream could migrate to the real world before his foggy brain caught up with him and he realized that his dream was in fact a manifestation of the actual pain that he now felt as a result of yesterday’s visit to Fanny’s.
Forcing himself onto his feet and into his slippers, Danny ignored Will’s curious stares as he hobbled around the kitchen and made his breakfast before waving him off to school. Then, lowering himself onto the couch, slowly, as if he were entering a scalding-hot bath, he quietly took stock of the situation.
He wouldn’t be dancing that day, that much he knew. Nor would he be dancing for the next few days unless he somehow developed Wolverine’s gift of recovery. Still, given his laughable earnings so far, Danny felt confident that his temporary stasis would have no impact on his current financial situation. He did rue the wasted hours that he could have spent practicing, but unable to move so much as a finger without fearing it might fall off, he grudgingly accepted that whatever dance moves he wanted to try would have to be tried in his head.
Recalling his conversation with Krystal, he rolled off the couch and over to the television cabinet, where he searched through the various DVDs and computer games for Liz’s copy of Dirty Dancing. She used to own it on VHS, but she’d watched the film so many times that the tape had worn out (particularly around the parts where Patrick Swayze appeared without his shirt on), so Danny had bought her the DVD for Christmas one year, although that didn’t stop her from trying to wear out that copy as well.
He’d lost count of the number of times she’d asked him to watch it with her, seriously at first and then later jokingly when she realized it was never going to happen. Over time it became something of a running joke between them, with Danny responding with deliberately elaborate excuses whenever she suggested popping it into the DVD player. He’d always planned to give in one day, to surprise her when she least expected it by either agreeing when she asked him or perhaps even suggesting the idea himself. It had never occurred to him that he’d never get the chance, that a day would come when their running joke would no longer seem funny but instead unbearably cruel. As the opening bars of “Be My Baby” started playing over the title credits, all he could do was grab Liz’s picture and prop her up on the couch beside him.