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One night a few weeks before, Dane had put up a trivia question on the drinks board, which said that anyone who got the answer right got a free drink. After Johi explained to him that he was an idiot and people were just looking up the answer on their phones, she proclaimed they’d just do a whole trivia night instead. Yeah, okay, I might’ve tipped her off about that one.
I had a bet with Caleb and Theo and Johi going about how long it would take before Dane insisted on writing all the questions and running Quizzo night himself.
At Dane’s behest, they began opening later and making the space available for groups earlier in the day—AA and NA meetings, but also meet-up groups, like knitting and craft groups, book clubs, and other activities. They were the kind of thing, he said, that he’d wished he’d found his way to when he was recovering.
Dane had also made the difficult shift away from attending as many meetings and working with as many sponsees as he had before.
I knew he still felt guilty at times that he couldn’t carry that mantle forever. But Caleb gave him a very stern lecture last month about embracing the things that nurtured him and distancing himself from those that were harmful that I had a sneaking suspicion might’ve been one right out of Dane’s own playbook.
This had happened when we were all staying at Matt and Rhys’s house in Sleepy Hollow for the weekend, and Matt had listened carefully to the whole conversation. Finally, when Dane was glowering in stony silence that I knew meant he thought Caleb was right but couldn’t quite admit it yet, Matt spoke up. He told Dane that the best way to help people was to educate them. That if he was only one person helping, all his expertise stayed with him, but if he passed his knowledge on to others, then all those people could go out and help.
Dane wasn’t used to making choices based on what would make him feel happy and safe. But when Matt phrased it as doing more good than he could on his own, it finally got through to him. So he began working with two of his former sponsees who were interested in doing the kind of work he had done. One wanted to be a rehab counselor and the other wanted to be a social worker, and I tried to impress on Dane that he’d essentially been unofficially doing the work of entire professions in his spare time. But he waved it off. He couldn’t ever quite acknowledge all that he’d done.
The other thing that had changed was how Dane felt about Skeleton. It had only taken about a week—okay, maybe a month—for me to get over the fact that the tiny kitten we found on Halloween adored Dane with a kind of pack mentality love that did not extend to me. Because watching him fall in love with her was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.
After I’d taken her to the vet and confirmed that she wasn’t crawling with disease—Dane’s words—I brought her home and the second we crossed the threshold, she leapt out of the box and climbed Dane like a tree, bumping her little head against his neck as he stood there, frozen and wide-eyed.
“She’s not rabid, she doesn’t have any bugs on or in her, and she got all her shots,” I said. Dane tilted his head to touch hers, very gently, and reached his fingers to her fur, and I saw him melt before my eyes when she stuck out her tongue and licked his thumb.
Ever since then, there was no further discussion about whether Skeleton’s home was temporary. She followed Dane around the apartment like she was his guardian, and when he petted her she purred in ecstasy. He tried to be stern about not letting her on the kitchen counters or the table, but she’d look at him with such resentment that he couldn’t stand it, giving her the run of the place approximately forty-eight hours after she moved in.
He tried to grumble and complain when she did things like curl up directly on top of him or use the side of the couch to sharpen her claws, but it was so clear he didn’t actually care that I hardly knew why he bothered. He was totally smitten with her, and I’d even caught him talking to her when he thought I couldn’t hear.
Watching him fall in love with her made me fall in love with him all over again.
* * *
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Maybe it was seeing Dane shift all that purpose and energy from distracting himself to making something that inspired me. Or maybe it was seeing the way he ruthlessly dug through his life to figure out which things were nurturing him and which were harming him. Maybe it was seeing him take such care of Skeleton. Maybe all of the above. Either way, over the past few months I hadn’t been able to stop working on dioramas. I could hardly even call them dioramas at this point, because they broke the bounds of their boxes and trailed around the house.
