Angels Unawares

by Jeffrey Anderson

Day Three

  Devon dropped her overnight carry-on beside the table and stood opposite Laura across the narrow laminate top at the airport coffee shop. Laura was glad she’d arrived first and was seated, because she couldn’t have trusted her legs if she’d been standing. The woman across from her was the exact image of Josh as a young adult—a female Josh with numerous ear piercings and blond highlights in her coal black hair, but unmistakably Josh. Or Josh’s, she corrected herself as she caught her breath—not her dying ex-husband reincarnated as a woman but their thirty-six-year-old daughter standing there before her.

  “You’re Laura,” the woman said—a statement, not a question.

  Laura nodded once.

  “I’m Devon.” She paused a moment, perhaps waiting for Laura to make some move; then she extended her hand across the table.

  Laura reached out and took the offered hand in hers, held it for just a second longer than would’ve been normal for a casual introduction, then let it go and slowly withdrew her arm.

  Devon remained standing and the two stared at each other in a spreading pool of silence till finally Devon broke the spell by sitting, waving to the waitress, and ordering a latte.

  Laura asked, “Is it how you imagined?”

  “Meeting you?”

  Laura nodded.

  “I don’t know yet. You?”

  “I’ve only had four days to even contemplate it. I’ve barely caught my breath from the agency’s contact, let alone hatched a scenario.”

  Devon smiled. “Hatched?”

  Laura could laugh at that. “Mother hen, I guess.”

  “Did you not ever wonder—before the agency’s contact?”

  Laura shook her head. “I couldn’t let myself. I understood when I signed the papers that I was surrendering all rights of communication, and that I should not expect to ever see you again. To imagine such a meeting would’ve doomed me to a hopeless longing.”

  Laura spoke these words while gazing out the window at a plane being towed from its gate by a tractor. When she was finished, she looked back at Devon. A single tear leaked from her daughter’s right eye and coursed slowly down her cheek, glinting in the sunlight. Laura stood suddenly, moved around the table with two quick strides, and kissed Devon lightly on the cheek where the tear was now drying. Then she retreated and sat down, calmer now than she’d felt all day—all three days, really; since leaving California. The taste of Devon’s tear and the texture of her cheek hung on her lips.

  Devon brushed her cheek quickly. “You’re older.”

  Laura laughed. “Than the hills.”

  “No. Than I imagined. But you need to remember that the idea of meeting you started for me nearly thirty years ago. It hasn’t changed since then. And you were younger then.”

  “Yes. All of us.”

  Devon nodded then smiled.

  Her latte arrived and they both let that excuse for a pause in their conversation extend forward. Laura calmly watched her daughter as she sipped her drink and stared out the window at the tarmac. She smiled at the froth of cream that left a moment’s white mustache on Devon’s upper lip before she swiped it clean with a flick of her tongue. Only then did Laura feel the first stomach-wrenching gasp of regret at having missed this girl’s childhood and adolescence. How could life have been so cruel? How could her choice have been so dreadfully mistaken?

  Devon faced her with a calm gravity that, for the moment at least, called her away from the pain of regret. “You need to know why I’ve contacted you now.”

  Laura nodded slowly, almost reluctantly, unsure she was prepared for what would follow.

  “We want to have a child. I want to carry the child.” Devon hesitated, took a deep breath, then continued in a rush. “All the forms ask about my parents’ medical history. The clinic needs to know what the genetic risks might be, if there are any.”

  Laura’s expression revealed her confusion.

  Devon’s composure faltered and she blurted out the rest. “I’m gay. My partner has no interest in carrying a child. I could be implanted with her egg, but I said, ‘If I’m carrying it nine months, it sure as heck is going to have my DNA.’ So that’s when Jocelyn—my life partner—said, ‘Then we need to find out if your DNA is A-O.K.’” She spoke the last sentence with an accent drawn from the deep south, and laughed to herself at the memory. Then she looked up at Laura. “So here I am.”

  Laura leaned back in the metal chair. She felt as if she were falling into a dark chasm, the bottom of which was invisible, somewhere far below. Her thighs tightened in the beginnings of a movement that would lift her out of the chair, across the room, and out of the restaurant, the terminal, this woman’s life. But instead, in unabashed desperation, she locked her gaze on Devon’s eyes, which were Josh’s former eyes—healthy and hope-filled, not dying—and let those eyes arrest her free fall, her instinct to flee.

  It was Devon now who could offer forth kindness and calm across the table. “I’m sorry Laura—.” She paused at the awkwardness of using Laura’s name at such an emotional moment. It seemed simultaneously presumptuous and impersonal. “Could I call you Laura-mom? It’s a name that came to me on the flight here. I have a Mom—she’s alive in Louisiana and I love her. But I don’t have a Laura-mom.”

  Laura could smile at that. “I’ve been Laura to everyone I’ve ever known. The ‘mom’ part might take a little getting used to.”

  “You have no other children?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “Someday I’d like to hear about that.”

  “It’s not a long or particularly interesting story—but sure, someday (soon, I hope) I’ll be glad to tell you.”

  Devon nodded. “I’d like that.” Then she laughed. “Where was I, before the ‘Laura-mom’ part?”

  “You said you were sorry.”

  Devon nodded vigorously. “I am sorry, to land in the middle of your life for a selfish reason. It’s certainly true that I’ve wanted to contact you for almost as long as I can remember. But at the same time, I was frightened—at what I might find in you and, I now realize, at what I might uncover in myself. So I put it off. It took Jocelyn to force my hand.” Devon grinned. “She’s good at doing that. She thinks it’s her main job in life, and I’m happy to let her think that.”

  Calm at last, Laura bore all these charged revelations stolidly. Somewhere beneath the tempest of information and emotion, she saw clearly that this was her biological daughter, and that this daughter had grown into a fine woman—perceptive, kind, open-hearted. She followed this realization with an obvious corollary, the words actually spoken in her mind if not aloud—No thanks to you. That stark reminder hurt more than she would’ve guessed. To pull her back from that precipice, she returned her focus to the harbor of her ex-husband’s young and playful eyes in the face of their daughter. Those eyes were waiting now, watchful, maybe a little frightened, wondering what these recent revelations might prompt.

  “A month ago,” Laura began, “I didn’t believe in destiny. I’m a soil scientist, and dirt doesn’t have destiny. But I’m starting to think that maybe humans do.” She paused and laughed at herself.

  Devon’s eyes relaxed, but were still waiting.

  “Devon—.” Now Laura paused, then added with a smile, “Devon-daughter, I’m deeply grateful to you—and your Jocelyn, and maybe to destiny—for this chance to finally meet you, whatever the reason or cause. I can only hope to give you what you need.”

  Devon could smile now. “Your DNA?”

  “That part’s easy.”

  “And my father’s?”

  Josh lay in the bed with his head rolled to the right on the pillow watching the fluffy clouds march across a silver-tinged pale blue sky behind the branches at the uppermost reaches of the poplar trees with their nascent leaves giving a green glow to their tips and edges. He imagined vividly (but couldn’t see) the ecosystem springing to life at ground level where the sun had warmed the soil and humus, where grasses, weeds, flowers, and seed
lings of every type were bursting forth in riotous life, all racing to absorb and transform the new unadulterated sunlight into chlorophyll and more growth to produce more chlorophyll and more growth before the leaves higher in the canopy unfurled and stole that sunlight long before it reached the ground. Ahh, life, he thought. Another cycle started, and hurtling headlong toward that pre-dawn this fall that would see the frost slash it like a scythe. Or the deer tooth nip it in the bud. Or the hailstorm beat it flat like King Billy bomb-balls. So it’s Yeats, he thought, and at such a late hour. Who would’ve guessed that?

  With his meds in balance, his day passed by in a clean and smooth mix of dreamy semi-consciousness and dozing soothing dreaminess. He could, when called upon, raise himself to a moderate level of alertness, could focus on the real world and converse with Laura or Sherri or the doctor when required. Even now, he heard the dull drone of the T.V. in the den, remembered that Sherri was in there watching her soaps and Laura was off running errands and it was early afternoon on a Wednesday. And always at the fringes, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of horizon, was the pain—a forest fire banked at the moment but ever threatening to flare up and consume him.

  But in the meantime, he could float, like those clouds beyond the window, pushed resolutely forward by the jet stream of time toward a certain denouement. And he could think calmly, riding those clouds—Bring it on. I’m ready.

  “Not yet,” Vicki said to him from her hiding place in a vast field of daisies.

  He was calling her name, looking for her across the endless field. How could she be invisible in the calf-high flowers? Where could she be hiding?

  “Not yet,” she said. “Not yet.”

  Then he found her, right where he’d left her (he thought)—fringed in flowers, her face gazing up at him, her young body (from when he’d first known her) naked and open, beckoning. So he lay down on top of her, seemed to melt into her, made together a single new thing, neither one of them left but just this new entity.

  “Where is Angie?” Vicki asked out of the darkness.

  “I just found you; now you want me to find her?”

  “Where is Angie?”

  Josh paused before the question. It seemed a physical presence before him, a new obstacle to his future. He waited for it to move or disappear, but it wouldn’t budge. So he said, more to move the moment forward than with any degree of commitment or certainty, “She’s on her way.”

  Vicki said out of the dark, “Don’t wait too long.”

  Josh said, “I won’t.”

  With that, Vicki’s body reformed beneath him and he was steadily working atop her in their old best selves, each of them moving to and for the other’s pleasure. A part of Josh wondered when he’d last had such a blatantly erotic dream. But the rest of Josh surrendered to the allure of Vicki’s warm and pliant skin, fell fully into her embrace then beyond, into dreamless rest.

  Angie for her part was, at just that moment, preserving the life of a young Iraqi boy as her left thumb and forefinger held closed the nicked artery in his neck while the field doctor—Jacob was his name, a Jew saving the lives of Muslims who might one day return the favor by blowing him up—swiftly removed the forceps and replaced them with a surgical clip. All around the three of them life and death swirled together in a haze of blood and mucous and excrement and torn clothes and surgical supplies and the staccato orders of corpsmen (and women) and the screams and moans and cries of the injured and the dying.

  It’d been a quiet evening with a beautiful sunset and she’d been reading (rereading, for the third time) Pride and Prejudice in the orange-tinted dusk when the radios and alarms jolted to life with the now familiar news of another bombing in the town two kilometers east. The calm matter-of-fact voices of the Army dispatchers belied the chaos that Angie knew was unfolding at the blast site, a chaos that would momentarily engulf the world of this field hospital. She’d set her book down on the plastic lawn chair and half-walked, half-jogged into the large tent to prep for what she’d known was coming.

  And now in the thick of that chaos, surrounded by more instances of heroism, courage, and tragedy than the average person would witness in a lifetime, Angie felt amazingly calm, almost detached. Her responsibilities didn’t suffer in the least—if anything, her actions were surer for this detachment, more clear-headed. But at a complete other level, both above and surrounding her real world’s demands and commands and confusion, Angie felt cradled by someone or something that would keep her safe from the very real threats and chaos that surrounded her, would keep her whole and intact even as her world was in danger of being blasted into tiny bits like the body of the suicide bomber—a woman not much older than she was, though you wouldn’t have been able to determine that from the pieces that were left of her—she’d had to help gather as evidence last week.

  The regimental shrink—a balding middle-aged man from Kansas so desperate to preserve the illusion of the practice he’d left behind in the States that he’d rigged speakers to pump Muzak into his tent—asked her if she experienced sudden outbursts of anger or fear. And she’d always answered honestly, “No.” She’d never told him about these moments of profound peace and security in the midst of chaos and danger, but she worried more about them than she would outbursts of anger or fear. How could one find peace amidst severed limbs and dwindling arterial spray?

  But gradually she’d grown to accept these moments of calm without trepidation or analysis. For better or worse, they’d become a part of her response to stress. And as she’d held that boy’s pulsing life between her latex-coated fingers, she’d said aloud though softly, “Thank you, Mom.” She’d come to attribute this peace to the spirit of her dead mother watching over her.

  Jacob glanced up as he finished setting the clamp. “Holding you again, is she?”

  Angie smiled, gave him a quick nod, then hurried off to find a unit of plasma to replace what the boy had lost to the dusty street and the floorboards of the car he’d been delivered in.

  But her mom’s spirit offered her no protection whatsoever as, some hours later, Jacob rose above her as she lay naked on her back on the cot and together they found a primal release that was, in its own way, as jumbled and chaotic as the field hospital had been earlier in the evening. They surrendered to that risk in panting yips and moans muffled against discovery by pressing each their mouth tight to the other’s ear, screaming their compressed shrieks of life directly into the other’s ear, straight to the brain, to minds simultaneously numb and hypersensitive.

  After a few minutes of gradually slowing gasps of cooling night-time desert air, Jacob wrapped his arms and legs around Angie’s torso and carefully rolled them over on the cot, leaving her on top, free to rest her head on his chest and curl her legs into his lap. He was most of the way into sleep when Angie whispered into his right ear, “It wasn’t only Mom tonight.”

  Jacob pulled himself back from the threshold of sleep. “Then who?”

  “Josh.” She’d stopped calling him Dad after the split. She avoided talking about him at all, but would title him “my father” when required to refer to him. And in the years since she’d hardly thought of him, and couldn’t recall the last time she spoke of him. But just now, in this distant desert dark, his informal first name came as naturally to her lips as “Mom” had earlier in the evening.

  “Josh?” There was a hint of jealousy in his tone.

  “My father.”

  “I didn’t know he was alive.”

  “Nor do I. He may not be.”

  “You’ve never spoken of him.”

  “I’ve not thought of him for years, at least since Mom’s funeral.”

  “He was there?”

  She shook her head into his chest.

  “Then why tonight?”

  “Then why anything, Jacob?”

  He couldn’t argue with the empirical honesty of that statement in this setting, instead let that truth emanating from voice and breath and warmth of the body on top of hi
m ease him back toward the sleep that had been briefly forestalled, sleep that descended so quickly and completely that he didn’t notice the warm tears slowly pooling on his chest.

  That night after dinner Laura sat in the chair beside Josh’s bed and listened to the ebb and flow of his shallow breathing. To distract her from her worry over his fast-fading strength, she tried to imagine where his consciousness went during all these hours of unconscious. Did his apparently still clear mind hatch a steady narrative out of his unconscious, one that was paused during his occasional waking only to be resumed upon his return to sleep? Or were the dreams staccato bursts of disconnected images, voices, and scenes—a random slideshow played by the subconscious? Or was it all just dark, a foreshadowing of the permanent shadow to follow? She wanted to ask Josh where he went, but wondered if he recalled the place on waking. And if he recalled it, would he tell her the truth? She didn’t feel she had the right to ask. She’d grown quickly comfortable with emptying his bedpan or wiping his butt, but something blocked her from asking about his dreams. That still seemed too personal.

  But she might not have much longer to ask. The doctor was steadily raising his morphine dosage to bank the ever-raging fires of pain, his minutes of consciousness were growing fewer by the day, there was always the risk of a crisis like yesterday that might prove terminal, and tonight for the first time she’d had to cut up his food as his right hand no longer had the strength or dexterity to perform the task. Was it sadness or relief she felt at this silent awareness of Josh’s accelerating and inexorable decline?

  Josh’s younger eyes in Devon’s smiling face suddenly filled her mind and Laura was both consoled and unsettled by the image—consoled by the fact that after all these years she finally had a flesh and blood reality to replace the hollow void that had existed deep inside her, unsettled by her daughter’s request for Josh’s DNA. She could acquire the DNA easily enough—Josh’s blood, mucous, and epithelial cells abounded in this room: who would miss a vial full or a swab’s scraping? But to take Josh’s DNA without his knowledge or permission was not only illegal, it struck Laura as the height of treachery. What’s more, it highlighted the debate that had been churning, quietly in her subconscious, for decades: should she tell Josh of their daughter? It was a debate forced to the forefront of her life by the twin realities of Josh’s dying and Devon’s appearance. Laura, normally clinical and decisive, was at a loss as to how to proceed.

  To avoid thinking about the issue, she opened her laptop, accessed the Internet, and typed “Angela Earl” into the search engine. The query returned the normal tens of thousands of responses, but only a handful appeared to refer to real women named Angela Earl. After travelling down a few dead-end cyber alleys (a soccer star at a Tennessee high school, the newborn daughter of Buck and Sandra Earl), Laura clicked on a blog titled “a.earl.inthedesert.”

  The page that opened was devoid of the typical slew of quirky photos and jazzy designs, loud logos and hidden hyperlinks. It was a simple white page with a narrow black border enclosing chronological journal entries in a small black generic font. The most recent was dated four days earlier:

  descending desert’s darkness danger

  daring dissolves disaster’s distance

  Though not a religious person, I now understand why this god-forsaken region is home to three of the world’s dominant religions and who knows how many lesser cults and sects, why this spot on earth is thought by billions to be God’s home or at least the spot on the globe where God chose to touch humans. And the reason why is that the landscape is so massive, the sky so all encompassing, and the darkness—the huge voracious desert dark—on a scale (or off the scale) beyond any hope of comprehension. I no longer leave my tent after dark. When I used to sometimes go to the toilet in the middle of the night, I would never let go of the rope guide strung against the prospect of sandstorms or nocturnal power loss. I would hold that rope tight as if against a gale even when there was no wind. Even in the pervasive silver-orange glow of the base’s vapor lights, I felt the desert dark pulsing beyond these frail human attempts to hold it at bay. I felt that darkness tugging at me, pulling my frail soul toward its bottomless vortex. So I clung even tighter to the rope. But now I no longer leave the tent at night. I’ve got a small plastic bucket under my cot and some Kleenex to wipe me dry. And I’ve got the canvas walls and roof of the tent to help me pretend that the desert darkness isn’t out there waiting, waiting, waiting.

  Though Laura had never met Angie or her mother, she immediately knew that the one writing these words was Josh’s daughter, recognized his irreverence and his sensitivity and his fatalism as surely as she’d recognized his eyes in Devon’s face earlier in the day. She scrolled through all of the earlier entries to the intro of the blog.

  Hi. I’m Angela Earl, called Angie, 1st Lieutenant in the Reserve Medical Corps of the United States Army, a Nurse Specialist called to active duty and stationed now somewhere in Iraq. I’ll be using this blog as a combination journal and therapist’s couch. Sit in on a session or two, as you see fit. The entries may be entertaining. They may be amusing, tragic, or boring. Whatever these entries are or aren’t, they will be honest. They will be me, Angela Earl.

  Laura looked up at the sleeping Josh. She felt strangely guilty at what she’d just discovered, that she was somehow betraying him by accessing his daughter’s journal, that she now knew more about his daughter than he did—about his two daughters, she thought, then winced.

  She set the laptop on the nightstand, still opened to Angela’s journal. She slid off her slippers, quietly lifted the covers to Josh’s bed, and slipped in beside him. She laid her head on the extra pillow and watched his face in the pale light of the nightstand lamp to see if he might rouse to meet her approach. But his profile, deeply cushioned in the down pillow and facing the ceiling, gave no sign of stirring. She reached back over her shoulder and turned off the light. Thick dark closed around her, then slowly loosened to reveal the twin silver glows of the rising moon beyond the window and the backlit LED screen of her laptop.

  Again, Laura waited, watched Josh’s profile (now just a dim silhouette against the lighter background of the pillowcase) for any sign of waking, movement, or welcome. Still nothing.

  She leaned over, kissed his cheek and the shut eyelid, then spoke in a firm whisper directly into his ear, “I now know the whereabouts of your two daughters. Twelve hours ago, I didn’t know. Now I do. I need to tell you.

  “Your older daughter, the one you don’t know you have, is named Devon Atwater. She’s thirty-six years old and at this moment staying at a motel near the airport. She lives in Texas with her lesbian partner Jocelyn. She wants to have a baby and needs your DNA to help safeguard her and the baby from possible medical complications.

  “Your younger daughter, the one you had but lost, is indeed alive, or at least she was four days ago. She is an Army reservist serving in Iraq, a nurse in a medical brigade.

  “Neither one of them yet know of your condition. I am certain in my heart that they would both like to see you, and soon. What do you want, Josh? Tell me what to do, please.”

  Laura waited and watched in the new silence for any sign Josh had heard. Behind her, the computer silently shifted into suspend mode, the screen suddenly going black, robbing the room of one of its sources of pale light. The moon shined ever brighter through the large window, casting gray shadows of shivering branches and limbs across the bed and floor and walls, the shadows dancing like skeletons in this tomb, on their graves. “There’s danger aplenty in this full close dark, too,” Laura said aloud to the faraway Angie whose spirit was suddenly perilously close at hand. Laura thought that—perilously. But then added, in her mind at least, But perilous to whom?

  Her confession delivered, Laura considered reaching behind her, turning on the light, sliding quietly out from beneath the covers, and moving to prepare for sleep in her own bed in the adjacent converted nursery. But instead of reaching for the lamp, her hand as if
with newfound intention all its own reached toward Josh, found his cheek in the silver dark, brushed gently across his lips, then over the stubble on his chin, then down to the hollow of his neck and the depression where his neck joined his shoulder. She felt there his pulse, faint and slow but at least regular—proof of life (this minute, anyway). Her hand slid under the covers and past the open collar of his flannel pajama tops. Her fingers brushed the cool dots of his nipples rising above his chest hair. The three large buttons of his shirt yielded easily to her fingers as her hand slid across his stomach, paused briefly at his naval, then slid under the elastic waist of his pajama bottoms.

  Though Sherri took care of bathing Josh’s groin—a token gesture toward Josh’s privacy and Laura’s dignity—Laura had glimpsed Josh’s penis and testicles several times since arriving. And at those glimpses, those organs had seemed just pieces of flesh, shrunken and frail like most of Josh’s flesh now. But as Laura’s fingers explored under the covers beneath the waist of his pajamas and found his penis and testicles in their cradle of pubic hair, they seemed not so much imperiled appendages as the very core of Josh’s life and the conduit of his legacy. The organs beneath her fingertips had yielded the sperm that had fertilized the eggs that had grown into Devon and Angie. Cupped in her one hand was the source of what would, one day soon, be all that remained of her ex-husband.

  Her mind drifted back to those long ago nights—in potent dark not unlike that which embraced them now—those nights in the car or the hayloft or the cot in the shack when Josh’s penis seemed simultaneously the source of ease (for them both) and an entity unto itself, full of need and threat (to her, anyway; and maybe to Josh as well). Had she only more fully understood and accepted the core procreative purpose at work within the pulsing gyrations of this modest sack and humble tube of flesh, had she only been able to communicate this understanding to the enslaved-by-his-cock (at least periodically) Josh, then maybe, just maybe, they could’ve made a life together; then maybe, just maybe, Devon would have her real parents and she’d be lying in this bed beside her dying husband as a true wife instead of a stopgap interloper.

  Then, in desperation that was perhaps something like the hunger that long ago powered Josh’s libido, Laura’s mouth began to kiss and lick its way from Josh’s neck down across his chest and stomach and naval and groin, on downward to his penis and testicles exposed now under the tent of the covers as her hand held aside his pajamas. There she smelled a faint whiff of urine, but also the heady odor of potential life, a smell not far different from the familiar smell of rich soil stirred up in the spring. She kissed first his penis and then his testicles, then licked them lightly with her tongue.

  Laura rose from beneath the covers. Josh still hadn’t stirred. She turned on the light and slid quietly out of the bed, then went to her room to get ready for bed. Later, after brushing her teeth, putting lotion on her hands and face, and peeing, she returned to Josh’s bed, slid quickly beneath the covers, and turned out the light. This would be where she slept—beside him, now till the end.

  The sleeping Josh perceived rapid movement, a kind of meteor’s rush across the sky trailing sparks and globs of fire, black space above, a blur of mottled greens and browns below, endless blue to either side. And the rushing racing fire-fed motion unfolded in the roar of absolute silence, a vacuum of silence so complete that it seemed both the end and the inclusion of every sound he’d ever heard, every sound ever made. And in that roaring rush of silence, he wondered if this were the travel to the end; and if it were in fact the end, that in the end and for all eternity your whole life played as a single sound that wasn’t sound, in ears that weren’t ears, in a place where nothing was heard? If so, then play on.

  But then the roar of silence was replaced by true silence, and the meteor’s rush across the sky was replaced by absolute stillness, suspension in a blank void. This surely must be all. Josh either spoke or thought or maybe heard or felt a simple “thank you.”

  But then music out of the dark void—choral music, all women’s voices in a perfect blend of sopranos, no words but tones only, each syllable perfect in its beauty: a siren’s song from some invisible shore. God, just where are you taking me?

  “Not God, Josh,” Vicki said, standing within arm’s reach before him.

  “You?”

  Vicki laughed. “Since when did I have any say over where you were headed?”

  “Maybe now.”

  “That’s your guilt talking, Josh. There’s no payback here. This is way beyond payback.”

  “What, then?”

  “The absence of longing.”

  “You must fit in perfectly.”

  “After a spell.”

  “And I don’t stand a chance.”

  “Chance has nothing to do with it, Josh. You’re drawn into it, into wholeness. It’s what you’ve been seeking your entire life—with Laura, with me, with Joan.”

  “Joan was sex.”

  “We all were sex, at least at first. Sex was your glimpse of wholeness. You just weren’t ever able to make it permanent.”

  “And now it’s too late.”

  “Never too late, Josh. But time to look in other places.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ve got Laura there. You’ve got me here. Summon Angie. Find Joan. Welcome the other. She’s the one you’ve been missing the most.”

  “The other?”

  “The one you’ve longed for from the start.”