by Jodi Picoult
“Well, I think ghosts stick around because there’s something they didn’t finish,” Win says. “Which is why you’d better help me write that letter to Thane. If you don’t, I’m going to haunt the fuck out of you.”
I picture that painting in the locked room.
“I’ll help you find him,” I tell Win.
* * *
—
EVERYTHING I KNOW about tears I learned from Meret, who had to do a science presentation on them once. She had four giant photographs on easels, X-ray crystallography of onion tears, tears of change, laughing tears, tears of grief. Close up, they look completely different from each other, because they are. Emotional tears, for example, have protein-based hormones in them, including a neurotransmitter called leucine-enkephalin, which is a natural painkiller. Onion tears are less sticky, and disappear more quickly from a person’s cheeks.
Although all tears have salt, water, and lysozyme—the main chemical in tears—how the crystals form differs, due to other ingredients. So onion tears look as dense as brocade. Tears of change resemble the fervent swarm of bees in a hive. Laughing tears are reminiscent of the inside of a lava lamp, with smarter angles. And tears of grief call to mind the earth, as seen from above.
* * *
—
BRIAN IS GIVING me a lecture. Well, technically, he’s practicing in front of me. I am supposed to be paying attention, but I am also on my computer, trying to find Thane Bernard, the man Win left behind.
“In the 1990s, physicists started running high-tech experiments to figure out how neutrons broke down into protons. That in itself wasn’t so special—it’s the core concept behind radioactivity. But weird things happened.”
He pauses, so I smile and give him a thumbs-up.
“Neutrons that were created in particle beams—”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a particle physics thing, a nuclear reactor that shoots out billions of—”
“Never mind.”
“Anyway, neutrons created in particle beams lasted approximately fourteen minutes and forty-eight seconds before breaking down into protons.”
There are over a million Google results for “Thane Bernard.”
“But neutrons that are put into a lab bottle break down a little faster. Fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds,” Brian says.
Add “France” to that search and the results drop to five hundred and thirty-seven thousand.
Bernard is the second most common surname in France.
“I know what you’re asking yourself.”
Was Thane even French, or was he only visiting, like Win?
“What’s the big deal with ten seconds?” Brian continues. “Well, there should be zero difference. That’s the big deal. All neutrons are identical and their behavior shouldn’t change depending on where they are.”
Thane Bernard is not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat. I can’t use a missing person’s website because he’s not technically missing. There are zero T. Bernards in the French white pages, but in today’s world of cellphones that means nothing. There is a Thane Bernard in academia, but he is on staff at USC and his field is ballet.
“There are two explanations,” Brian says. “Either neutrons are breaking down into something other than protons—although there’s no proof of this—or they somehow cross over into a mirror world and become mirror neutrons for ten seconds before flipping back. If that’s the case, maybe another world—even a multiverse—exists.”
I start typing Thane’s name into an international search engine for finding people. There is a fifty-dollar fee. I type in my credit card number.
“Before you go thinking that your physics professor needs a straitjacket, I offer this: we know—we have known since the 1970s—that dark matter in the universe outweighs visible matter by a ratio of six to one. But no one has ever been able to find it. There’s a world, literally, in which dark matter is hidden away. If that’s the case, the mirror world those neutrons are disappearing to briefly is huge. Huger than our own.”
Suddenly Brian’s phone dings. He looks down at it and frowns. “I think our credit card just got stolen,” he says. “I got a fraud alert from something called LocateTheLost.com.”
I fold down the clamshell hinge of my laptop. “Actually, that was me.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“I’m looking on behalf of someone who’s looking for someone. It’s one of my clients.”
“Your client is missing?”
“No. She wants to write a letter to someone she lost touch with years ago.”
“Like a secret love child?” For all of Brian’s braininess, he has a melodramatic streak. It’s why he insists on seeing Marvel Universe movies the day they come out, and why he conveniently manages to be in the room every time I’m watching The Bachelor.
“No,” I tell him. “It’s a man she used to love. She also wants me to deliver it to him.”
“Wait, what?” he says. “Is this Win? The one with ovarian cancer?”
I nod.
“You can’t do that,” he says.
In all the years I have been a death doula, I can count on one hand the number of times Brian has questioned my judgment. The biggest argument we had sprang from a client who wanted me to look into assisted suicide for her. I just didn’t feel right about it, and referred her to another death doula who does. Brian, however, was angry that I hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. She had a son who was a sophomore in high school, and Brian felt that it was irresponsible to not try to stop her.
“She’s the one who’s married to the driving instructor?” Brian clarifies, and I realize that all the time I’ve thought he was tuning out, he has actually been listening carefully.
“Felix. Yes.”
“And he’s okay with this?”
“He doesn’t know,” I admit. “He won’t find out.”
“Do you really believe that? What if the missing guy writes back?”
“There won’t be a return address.”
Brian shakes his head. “It’s still better to know than to be blindsided. What if, when Felix is putting away Win’s clothes and her books and whatever after she’s gone, he finds a note from this guy, or a ticket to a show he’s never seen, or a photograph of his wife looking happier than she ever looked with him?”
I think about the canvas in the locked room and say nothing.
“The guy is already dying by degrees. You’re going to kill him twice.”
“That’s not fair. Felix isn’t my client, Win is.” I gesture to his notes. “How do you know that in another universe, she isn’t living happily with this other man?”
“How do you know that she is?”
“I don’t really understand why, out of the blue, you’ve suddenly decided you’re an expert in my field,” I say coolly.
“Because you’re being a hypocrite.”
At that, I think of my dream of Wyatt, and my face is so hot I turn away.
“You’re helping a woman on her deathbed keep a secret. No, actually, it’s worse than that. You’re the match that could burn down that whole marriage even after she’s gone,” Brian says. “But you were angry at me for not telling you about every moment I spent with Gita where nothing happened.”
“I would have been angry even if you did tell me,” I explode. “The only difference is that if you’d told me, I would have known right away that there was apparently something so wrong between us that you had to go looking for it somewhere else!”
My voice rings in the silence between us. One thing I’ve always told caregivers and clients is that last words are lasting words.
I’ve always wondered what’s preferable: knowing the worst, or not knowing. Is it better to get a terminal diagnosis and count the days till you die, but have the tim
e to say goodbye to everyone and everything you love? Or is it better to die immediately—an accident, a stroke, an aneurysm—and not have to wait for the inevitable? I think the answer is: neither. Both outcomes are terrible ones.
“There are things I’ve never asked you about…before we met,” Brian says haltingly, and suddenly the reason for his indignation is laid bare. “I figured, after all this time, you’d have told me everything.”
There are things you wouldn’t want to know, I think. But I look him in the eye. “I have,” I say, because what’s one more lie.
* * *
—
FOR THE PAST few days, I’ve relayed to Win that I’ve been searching for Thane Bernard. She has had more energy lately, which happens sometimes before the end.
She knows that I haven’t made any significant headway, but I think that the mere fact someone is looking for Thane makes her feel as if the world is righting itself. “Maybe we should write that letter,” I tell her, multiple times, but Win shushes me.
“We have to do something else first,” she insists, and then she asks me to run an errand.
I come home from the art supply store with everything on Win’s list. She is too weak to stretch a canvas herself, so she directs me with military precision. The way you know if you’re stretching a canvas right, Win tells me, is if there’s tension.
I seal and prime the canvas, and we let it dry, and then Win asks me to go to the locked room and retrieve her paints. She keeps them in a plastic tackle box. Some tubes are so crusted over that I have to wipe their necks with warm water to get the caps unscrewed. I prop up Win with pillows on a window seat where the light is good. I watch her squeeze thumbnail-size bits of color onto a glass palette: white, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, ultramarine. From the primary colors, she blends purple and green and orange. She shimmies an entire scale from red to blue, filling the middle with purple shadows. She gives rise to rainbows.
I check out the window to make sure that Felix’s car is still gone. “Do you know Thane’s birthday?” I ask. “That would help me.”
“Why?”
“Because when you use online search engines to find missing people, it’s the first thing they ask.”
“He isn’t missing.”
“Well, that’s the other problem. And he’s overseas. Almost every database I’ve found is American. Plus, I don’t speak French, so I have to use Google Translate for everything.”
“I know he’s a Leo, that’s all. But we didn’t talk about our ages.”
Why would they, when he was her professor? When it only highlighted the differences between them?
“I know he was nearly forty,” Win says. “Which at the time, felt ancient.”
It would, to a twenty-year-old. I remember Win telling me that his wife had been pregnant. I wonder how old she was.
“Tell me again where you’ve looked,” she asks, as she touches her brush to the canvas.
“Facebook. Twitter. Instagram,” I say. “Genealogy websites. The white pages. The prison system in France.”
“What?”
“Well, I didn’t find him there, if that makes you feel better. He doesn’t show up in court records, either.”
I haven’t told her this, but I plan to check death records next. I don’t think it’s occurred to Win that Thane might have left this world without telling her.
“What are you going to paint?”
“Death. What else?” She glances at me. “Don’t peek.”
Instead, I catalog her. Her wrists are so fragile that the skin stretches tight over the bones; her complexion is ashy, her fingernails jaundiced. But her eyes are brighter than they’ve been in a week, darting from her palette to the painting and back again. There’s something almost mystical about her looking at a blank canvas and seeing something that nobody else can, yet. I suppose it’s not that different from peering over the edge of this world into the next.
Suddenly we hear the front door open, and Felix’s voice calling for Win. “In here,” she says, and his face peeks into the dining room.
His eyes are drawn immediately to his wife. “Look at you! I can’t remember the last time I saw you painting.” He kisses the top of her head. She tilts her face toward him, a cat stretching toward the sun. “Do you know how many Loew-Cornell brushes I’ve put in her Christmas stocking that she’s never used?” he says to me. “You’re a miracle worker.”
Win meets my gaze, our secret held between us. “Isn’t she, though?”
Felix cannot stop touching Win. His hand lights on her arm, her neck, between the wings of her shoulder blades. He has no idea that Win’s animation is due to the fact that she is tying the last bow of her life with a note to someone she loved more than him.
“Could I ask you a favor, honey?” Win says. “I have a crazy craving for buttermilk biscuits. But we don’t have any buttermilk.”
Felix blinks, stunned. We both know how long it’s been since Win finished a meal, much less asked for a specific one. “Coming right up,” he says. “I’ll even bake them from scratch.” Over Win’s head, he nods toward the hallway, a silent request for a private moment with me. I follow him out of the dining room.
“I know it’s not likely, but doesn’t she seem like she’s rallying? I mean, people prove doctors wrong all the time—”
“Felix,” I warn him. “Don’t go down that path. Win’s terminal. What you’re seeing is something that happens a lot, just before death. There’s like a power burst or something. I don’t know how long it will last. But it won’t be permanent.” I hesitate. “I’m sorry.”
“Right. Okay.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I guess I’d better get the buttermilk fast, then.”
By the time I return to the dining room, I’m angry at Win. For putting me into this position; for putting Felix second, when he so clearly idolizes her. For making me think that Brian is right—I shouldn’t be aiding and abetting this betrayal. “Do you see how much that man adores you?”
Win nods. “I always have.”
“Don’t you feel like you’re cheating on him?”
She doesn’t even falter. “There are times I wonder if my whole marriage has been me cheating on Thane. If that was the life I was supposed to have.” Win looks at me over the lip of the canvas. “I belonged with him long before I belonged with Felix. I’m not saying that I couldn’t love two men. Just that if I’d stayed with Thane, there wouldn’t have been a space in me to fill with Felix.”
I sink down into a chair opposite from the back of her easel. She has turned my thinking on end. Felix was the one she ended up with…but he wasn’t where she started.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Win continues. “Who I might have been, if I’d fought for Thane. An artist, maybe even a good one. A mother, definitely. But would I have moved to France? Would my son have lived? Would I have cancer? What if that one decision set off a whole chain of other forks in the path?”
I think of Brian’s multiverses. “Even if Thane gets your letter…you’re never going to know the answers.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t wonder,” Win says.
“It also doesn’t mean that this life wasn’t the best one. The one you were supposed to have.”
“Do you believe that?” she asks, putting down her brush. “That I deserve cancer?”
“That’s not what I’m saying—”
“I don’t think I do,” Win continues. “I don’t think anyone does. I think life is a roll of a die. I got a one, I could have gotten a six. It is what it is. But it isn’t destiny. It isn’t determined by three old witches snipping a thread at the minute you’re born. Not cancer, not my profession, not even who I love. The real question is whether I’d still be sitting here, dying, if I’d made different choices.” She looks at me. “Do you think that no matter what, everything you’ve done in
the past, every decision you’ve made, would still have led you to this room, this discussion, this moment?”
“Yes,” I say. “Probably.”
Win laughs. “Those are two different answers. Besides, I can prove I’m right.”
“How?”
“Close your eyes. Now picture the person you thought you’d wind up with.”
I can see him as if he’s standing in front of me. Drinking from a water bottle, his head tipped back, his throat working. His smile, when he catches me staring.
“You can ask that of anyone, and they always have someone in mind. Always. And here’s the thing, Dawn—it’s rarely the person they’re going home to that night.”
I imagine our legs tangled in the cooling sand, his hand a star on the small of my back.
Win raises her brows. “I knew it. Who is he?”
“Someone I knew in grad school,” I say softly.
“You aren’t in touch?”
“No.”
“But you still think about him.” A statement, not a question.
“Not very often,” I tell Win. “Not until you told me about Thane.”
She smiles. “Well, well, well. Methinks the doula doth protest too much.”
“I’m happily married,” I remind her.
“So am I.” She starts to paint again. “So…why did it end?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, right,” Win says. “You could probably tell me in excruciating detail the last conversation you two had.” She dips her brush into the blue, and then into the red, and makes a small purple heart on her palette. A medal for courage.
“Why did you wait so long to find Thane, if you never stopped loving him?”
“Because I also never stopped loving Felix,” Win says simply. “And women don’t get to have midlife crises where they run off to find themselves.”
