The Last Dance

She stands by the bleachers in an auditorium that had been demolished years ago—a vision in a pale blue taffeta dress she’d worn to our high school prom. I stare at her, afraid to blink.

“Am I dead?” I ask.

She laughs, and the sound washes over me. Her cheeks flush as she smiles. “No, you aren’t dead. Just—elsewhere. For a moment.”

Pink balloons scatter across the old wood floor as she steps toward me, the edges of her dress whispering against her bare calves. Freckles dance like stars across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. I love her freckles.

“Are you gonna stare at me all night or are you gonna ask me to dance?” she asks.

I hold out my hand and realize I’m seventeen again, wearing the same ill-fitting suit I had mowed thirty-seven lawns to buy. Her hand slides into mine, and I feel my pulse pound everywhere our skin touches.

Heart in my throat, I lead her to the center of a makeshift dance floor blanketed in low draping lights. She raises my arm above her head so she can spin underneath it and winks at me over her shoulder. A smile breaks across my face, one that turns into a laugh when she tries to spin me under her arm.

She always knew how to do that. How to crack me open when I hardened, to bring warmth to my bones when I froze.

My hands shake as I pull her close, as she leans into me. “I Only Have Eyes for You” plays through the hazy speakers. The song she sang in the car, in the shower, in her studio as she painted. She wraps her arms around my shoulders, and she smells like summer flowers and sunshine, like soft rainfall on a Saturday morning, like cold nights curled under warm blankets, like love and laughter and all the dreams of the life we would have together. The life we built.

Tears fall down my face. She kisses them away.

I clutch her dress, blue taffeta wrinkling under desperate fingers, fearing she would disappear into old music and dusty memories.

“Save another dance for me?”

Smiling, she says, “Always.”

But we both knew I couldn’t stay.

I hold her close until the song fades to nothing.

***

I bring her old CD player to the funeral. I play our song.

My smile, sagging behind wrinkles of age and time and wear, wets with tears. But I can still feel the warmth of her palm on my chest, on my heart, as we danced among twinkling lights and pink balloons.

I don’t know where she went when she walked through the auditorium doors. But I knew that I would find her again. Someday.

And I knew that—wherever she was—she was saving me a dance.