Free MARY AND O'NEIL by Justin Cronin Page A

on.” Arthur steers her with a hand at her spine. “Let’s dance.”
    She dances with Arthur, then O’Neil, then Stephen. A wonderful energy fills her. Song after song—“Satin Doll,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “Chain of Fools”—the dancing continues without rest. When the band finally breaks at ten-thirty, Sandra appears to drink a soda and dance with O’Neil—a DJ spins records to keep the party going—and then the band takes the stage again, kicking off their second set with a tart blast from the horn section and the theme from
Hawaii Five-0
. A wonderful, surprising, joke; whole tables rise to their feet and take the floor again.
    The evening roars onward, a party so unexpectedly marvelous it cannot be refused. All through the second set Miriam dances; she cannot recall an evening when she danced so much, not for years and years. Arthur to O’Neil to Stephen and back again; when the band pauses between songs, she gets herself a cup of beer—just awful, thin and warm as dishwater, but somehow perfect—and stands off to one side to catch her breath and watch.
    Then O’Neil is at her side. His face is flushed with pleasure, his brow glazed with sweat. He takes her by the hand. “Ready?”
    “No, really. I’m exhausted.”
    He laughs incredulously, and gives a little pull. “I won’t take no for an answer.”
    “I just need a little breather, sweetie.”
    “I don’t believe it.” He frowns, though not seriously. “Well. The next one, okay? With Sandra up onstage we’re one girl short.”
    She nods. She cannot help herself; how marvelous, she thinks, to be called a girl. “The next one.”
    She watches O’Neil head back into the crowd; she realizes that for the first time that evening, she is alone. And yet she does not feel alone. The wonderful music, the spinning lights, all O’Neil’s friends there (for more have arrived; he seems to know everyone); she has the uncanny sense of stepping into his life, and all the promise it contains. With her eyes she searches the open floor again and finds O’Neil dancing with a dark-haired girl she does not recognize; she sees Arthur dancing with Eliza, and Stephen, a solitary figure at the base of the stage, swaying his hips and pumping his fist, a beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other; she sees Sandra swinging her trombone back and forth in time to the music’s joyful rhythms. She knows that O’Neil has left her, that his life has begun, but the thought does not grieve her. It is as if time has thrown off its moorings, revealing all—that she, Miriam, has disappeared. She thinks of her father, gone twelve years, and her mother, too, sleeping her way into death not long after, as if it were not possible for her to remain in the world without him. A hole had opened; she had only to step through. After the funeral, the second in a year, Miriam walked alone through the Brooklyn apartment, not so much missing them as marveling at their absence. The places they had been, had sat and stood and walked and slept and eaten: fifty years of life in this place, and now they were gone. And yet their presence was vivid, palpable—a thing not seen but felt, like a parting of air. It was as if she were walking through the rooms of memory. She is remembering this, and watching too; the music stops—not the end of a song, merely a break in the action—the dancers stop in their tracks, and she sees O’Neil, the dark-haired girl swung out to the very tips of his fingers, throw back his head and laugh. The words, half remembered, form in her head.
See? It is all so simple. The children are gone; they have flown away from you.
    And this is when she feels it—the first pain. What she has experienced until now has been more of a presence, a sense of something
there
. It was this awareness that brought her fingers to her breast to find the lump two weeks ago. But now, at this moment watching her son and his friends dancing,