Why did things have to change?
* * *
Six
* * *
IT WAS AS THOUGH Michael hadn’t moved a muscle. The remote control to the television lay untouched on his bedside table. The nurse and Dale were gone—someone had probably used the Jaws of Life to pry Dale away—and Michael and I were finally alone.
“I brought your things.” I plopped the distressed leather overnight bag on the chair next to the bed and unzipped it, then grabbed his toiletries kit and carried it into the bathroom. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted your electric razor,” I called out. “So I brought one of my disposable ones instead. I don’t mean to insult your manhood, but it’s pink.”
“Julia,” Michael said softly. “Come sit down.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just let me put your clothes away so they don’t wrinkle. Oh, and Raj phoned. You should probably call him. He sounded like he was still a little worried.”
I shook out Michael’s jeans, suddenly feeling an urgent need to fold them. He watched my every move.
“Did you want to call Kate, too?” I asked, rerolling a pair of his socks. I seemed to be afflicted with a mild case of OCD, which could be convenient, because my desk was a mess. “Should she cancel your meetings for the week? Unless you think you’ll be up for talking on the phone. You could always call in. And I know you said you didn’t need a computer, but I brought one just in case—”
“Julia,” Michael said again. His gentle voice cut through my whirlwind of activity, making me stop as abruptly as if I were a robot that had short-circuited. I moved the bag to the floor and sat down, trying to quash the anxiety swelling inside me. Michael reached out for my hand. There it was again—the room was cool and he was only covered by a thin sheet; why was his hand so warm?
“Something amazing happened to me,” Michael said, his blue eyes latching on to mine. This nonstop eye contact was making me so nervous my hands felt sweaty—or maybe that was from Michael’s odd internal thermometer.
“It’s a miracle,” he whispered.
“I know,” I jumped in eagerly. “If you hadn’t bought that defibrillator—”
“Not that part,” he said, and I fell silent. The room was so stark and white; sure, it was a hospital, but couldn’t they add just a little flair? Was a measly framed print too much to ask for? It would definitely be easier to have this conversation if I had something to look at other than Michael’s blue eyes, which, right now, seemed to be the only colorful things in the room. They were so vivid and intense, it felt like they were physically pinning me to my chair.
“Something amazing happened to me,” he started again, “when I was dead.”
He beamed, looking as if he’d just announced he’d won a scratch-off lottery ticket.
“When you were dead,” I said slowly, as though repeating the words would make them snap into clarity.
“Something … happened,” Michael breathed. “I don’t know what to call it. There isn’t any word for what I felt, for what I saw.”
I swallowed hard. “Can I get you an aspirin?” I offered.
Michael burst into laughter and reached around with his other hand, to envelop mine between his.
“We’ve been scared for so long, both of us have. It kept us from seeing what was truly important. I know it might sound strange, but can you just open your heart and listen to me? The love I felt, but even more than that, the … the understanding. I’ve been living behind a veil for all my life, and it was just whisked away. Julia, everything I thought I wanted, I already had. It was already inside me.”
Michael blinked back tears as I stared at him in shock. Open your heart? Living behind a veil? My husband didn’t say things like that; he looked earnestly into my eyes and said things like “Have you seen my cell phone?” and “I’m thinking about shortselling some GE stock.”
Valium combined with a head injury could do this to a man, I reminded myself. I’d heard of near-death experiences before, but I wasn’t willing to concede one had happened to Michael.
I didn’t believe in the afterlife, or heaven, or whatever you wanted to call it. And neither did Michael.
We were atheists, for God’s sakes—so to speak. We’d been married before a justice of the peace, and we hadn’t set foot in a church since a friend’s son was baptized four years earlier. Even then, we’d been like a Laurel and Hardy team, with one of us sitting and one of us standing when we were supposed to kneel, and both of us heading for the exit when everyone else was just getting up to take communion. I blame that one on Michael—he was checking his e-mail instead of listening to the priest’s invitation for the audience to take the holy sacrament.
“Please,” Michael begged. “Just listen. I thought I wanted money. I thought it would make me feel powerful. But it was never enough. Don’t you see? The more I had, the more I wanted. I was a gerbil on a tiny little wheel. I kept going faster and faster, but I never ended up anywhere real. It was all an illusion.”
“Did you, um, mention this to Raj or Kate? Or to Dale?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Of course,” he said. “I want everyone to know. If I can save one person from making the mistakes I did …”
I can handle this, I thought, already snapping into crisis mode. This was nothing compared to a temperamental soprano with a fake sore throat. Michael might be out of commission for a day or two, but then he’d become himself again. He’d had a hell of a scare, on top of everything else, and we couldn’t expect him to act normally. My mind spun with plans: I’d tell Raj and Kate to take charge of the office. I’d stay in the hospital and keep everyone away from Michael.
“There’s so much I need to say to you,” he said.
I braced myself for more gibberish about peace and a white light. Peace, by the way, which could come from a little orange pill called Xanax, and a white light which could easily be explained by hitting one’s head.
But his next words shocked me.
“Julia, I’m so sorry I was going to skip your birthday dinner. How many of our anniversaries did I miss because I was traveling?”
His hands tightened around mine. “But the worst thing I did was not rush home from Los Angeles … I can’t believe I stayed around for a stupid fucking meeting the next morning even though—”
I cut him off. “Michael, why are you talking about this now?”
“I wasn’t there for you when you needed me the most,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I regret that.”
Tears filled my eyes, like no time at all had elapsed since that black hole of a night. This wasn’t fair; I felt blindsided. Michael and I didn’t talk about this stuff, not ever.
“I want to make it up to you,” he said softly. “All of it.”
“Michael.” I forced back my tears and kept my voice firm. “We’ve moved on. It was a long time ago.”
“I know, but we haven’t moved on,” he said.
This was too much; Michael was overwhelming me. How dare he bring up the pain in our past—in my past, really, since he hadn’t ever seemed to be affected by it?
“I need something to drink,” I said, yanking my hand away from his. “I’m going to the cafeteria.”
An old, buried anger burned through me as I rushed toward the door, erasing the protective instincts I’d felt for Michael.
“Wait,” he said, struggling to a sitting position. I heard an alarm sounding from a monitor by his bed, but I ignored him. “There’s something important I have to tell you—”
I let the door swing closed, cutting off the rest of his words. Let him spout off about understanding and peace like some bearded guy in a toga who handed out daisies at the airport. Let him deal with the fallout, which would probably be a blind item in the Reliable Source gossip column in the Washington Post. We’d made it there twice before—when Michael became a co-owner of the Blazes and held a party that brought Shaquille O’Neal to town, and again when we bought our house. Real estate transactions weren�
�t normally considered sexy, but it was a slow news week, and our $9 million house probably inspired the same awe in others that it had in us. The two-paragraph item detailed the hand-painted fresco on the ceiling of our library, and the twenty-seat home movie theater, and the steam room in the home gym.
I could imagine the headline this time: DELUSIONAL MOGUL COMPARES SELF TO GERBIL.
For some reason, Dale’s grinning face appeared in my mind. Raj and Kate would keep this quiet, but I wouldn’t put it past Dale to plant the item himself.
I pushed the elevator button and rode down to the cafeteria, forcing myself to nod at the middle-aged woman who was riding along with me.
“Beautiful day,” she said cheerily.
Sure, I thought, if your husband isn’t acting like a lunatic, and the fund-raiser you’ve been planning for a month isn’t probably falling apart, and you’ve eaten something other than a fifteen-dollar cupcake.
“He said what?” my best friend Isabelle asked a few hours later. “Hold on, I need to fortify myself.”
She reached over and grabbed the carafe of sangria from the coffee table and filled both of our glasses.
“I’ve been fortifying myself since I got home,” I protested, gulping down another huge sip. “If I get any more fortified I’ll fall over.”
“Luckily you’re sitting,” Isabelle said. “Besides, this is basically fruit salad with a little kick. We’re being virtuous.” She tucked her long legs beneath her. “Now, tell me again, from the top.”
She leaned back against the couch, her glossy black hair a stark splash against the white cushion. I knew I could confide in Isabelle; these days, she was my only real friend. That was another complication I hadn’t foreseen when Michael suddenly became so wealthy. You couldn’t always trust the motivation behind people’s kindness. I’d learned that the hard way.
“He said he understood everything now.” I waved my hand around and barely avoided sloshing ruby-colored sangria on my couch. Funny how things like that still made me flinch, even though we could buy a new couch any day of the week. You can take the girl out of West Virginia …
I took a gulp and felt the tangy sweetness of the raspberries and blood oranges explode against my tongue. Isabelle was right; they should sell this stuff in health food stores.
“He understands everything? How annoyingly vague.” Isabelle raised one perfect eyebrow. She was the one who’d sent me to Sasha, the eyebrow-shaping guru. I was convinced Sasha was able to charge such outrageous prices because he wielded pointy little instruments an inch away from your corneas. Who would be brave enough to tick him off by questioning the bill? It would be like mocking your brain surgeon’s toupee seconds before the anesthesia took effect.
“Oh, and he apologized for everything bad he’s ever done to me,” I said, frowning. “Suddenly he thinks he’s Mother Teresa.”
“But the whole idea about an afterlife … I mean, doesn’t it intrigue you?”
“Look, I know other people have said it happened to them,” I said. “But I can’t even think about that part of it. I’m too busy worrying about Michael. He’s acting so strangely.”
“What if there really is life after death?” Isabelle mused. “What if what happened to Michael was real?”
I spun my heavy crystal wineglass in gentle circles, watching my drink turn into a miniature whirlpool. “It seems so freaky,” I finally said. “Why would it happen to a nonbeliever? Wouldn’t whoever’s in charge say, ‘Hey, you don’t believe, so you don’t get in’?”
“I doubt there’s a bouncer in heaven,” Isabelle said, swatting my knee with a pillow. “Did Michael feel a presence? Did he see anything?”
“He didn’t say.” The sangria was warming me from the inside as the fear and strangeness of the day receded. Isabelle never questioned her place or her right to belong, and when I was with her, her confidence rubbed off. Being born into money could give a person that kind of poise, I supposed. Her family owned a frozen-food empire—“From vegetables to apple pie,” Isabelle had said when I first met her at a dinner party. “Brussels sprouts paid for my years at boarding school.” I hadn’t known how to respond. Was this rich people humor? Michael’s company had publicly issued stock the previous month, netting him all sorts of media coverage, and we’d been thrust into a new world so quickly I was still trying to figure out which of the four forks to use—but then Isabelle had winked. While I was gaping over her long eyelashes, she’d completely disarmed me.
“You know how every kid hates Brussels sprouts?” she asked. “For me it’s personal. Because boarding school was really awful.”
I laughed then, a surprised, natural laugh, and Isabelle joined in. We spent the rest of the night gossiping about books and the weekend’s quickie Vegas wedding between an aging movie star and a cocktail waitress (“Doesn’t anyone believe in true love anymore?” Isabelle wondered. “I think those crazy kids are going to make it.”) We rolled our eyes as Michael gobbled down both of our desserts along with his own.
“Does he always eat this way?” Isabelle asked me.
“No, I think he’s dieting.”
“We should kill him,” Isabelle decided. “Men have died for lesser sins.”
“But then who would drive you home?” Michael asked me.
“Oh—you mean you don’t …?” Isabelle fell silent.
“Don’t what?” I prodded.
“Sorry, I was just going to say, don’t you have a driver? I usually have mine take me to parties so I don’t have to worry about driving after a few drinks,” she said.
Michael and I looked at each other, and I could see him adding it to his running mental to-do list: Hire a driver. Get a personal chef. Learn about wines (Isabelle’s date and another man at the table had spent fifteen minutes discussing the nuances of the white burgundy we were drinking, and I could tell it was killing Michael not to be able to add to the conversation). We were playing catch-up as quickly as we could, and I felt like everyone could see us scrambling.
“What was it like?” Isabelle asked now, leaning closer to me. “I mean, this is really wild. Did he see a white light?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. We didn’t spend that long talking about it. He just said it was an amazing feeling.”
“Better than sex?”
“You are the only person in the world who would ask that.”
“What else did he say?”
Just then our house phone rang. I picked up the cordless and checked caller ID.
“It’s Bettina,” I groaned.
“Why don’t phone calls come with warning labels?” Isabelle wondered, lazily tracing a fingertip around the rim of her glass. “Answer at your own risk: Contents may be toxic.”
Bettina was Dale’s wife. She looked like she’d been drawn with a straightedge: her chin-length white-blond hair was always flat ironed, her clothes hung from her frame as cleanly as if she was a wire hanger, and her nose was a sharp triangle. Bettina even spoke in staccato sentences. Once when I was at her house for a cocktail party, she’d casually discussed the merits of the various maids she employed like they were hors d’oeuvres.
“I tried Hispanics. Asians are better,” she’d announced as a maid wandered by within hearing distance.
She and Dale were absolutely perfect for each other.
“Just let the machine get it,” Isabelle advised.
“No, I’d better take it,” I said. “In case there’s a work emergency or something.”
“Julia, how are you?” Bettina asked. She didn’t wait for my answer. “I heard what happened. Incredible!”
“I know,” I said, eager to spin the conversation in a good direction. “Michael’s doing so well, and he’ll probably be out of the hospital by Tuesday.”
“I see,” Bettina said. “And what will you do next?”
“Next?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
She paused, and I could hear her inhaling smoke from one of her long, thin cigarettes.
I couldn’t help it; I gasped. I could almost see the victorious grin forming on Bettina’s lips. She’d probably burn up the phone lines tonight describing my gasp to everyone she knew.
“Didn’t he tell you?” Bettina inquired, her tone cloyingly sweet.
What? Isabelle mouthed. I shook my head at her; I still couldn’t speak. Isabelle read the shock in my eyes and wrestled the phone out of my hand.
“It’s Isabelle. What’s going on? Did something happen to Michael?”
Isabelle was quiet as she listened, but I could see her jaw tighten.
“Charming,” she said calmly. “Michael nearly died today, and you’re calling his wife and upsetting her even more. Have you thought about getting a job at the National Enquirer? You’ve got the perfect touch. Oh, and by the way, you should wear longer dresses. Your knees are getting wrinkly.”
Isabelle slammed down the phone: “Vulture.”
I finally found my voice. “What did she mean?”
Isabelle shook her head. “She’s a pathetic gossip. She’s just jealous we didn’t invite her to your birthday party. Ignore her.”
“Do you really think he wants to quit work?”
“Nah. He would’ve said something to you first. Maybe he wants to take off some time and travel. He was probably just talking about taking a little break.”
“Isabelle,” I whispered. “Michael wanted to talk to me about something important, but I got so angry with him because of—well, because of some stuff I can’t go into now. I left the room. I wouldn’t listen to him … I went back an hour later, but they’d taken him away to do some tests. We never got to finish talking.”
Skipping a Beat Page 5
