by H. G. Nadel
At that moment it hit her—Julia would never hear that sweet accent and contagious laugh ever again. She shivered. She felt cold inside her bones. Her rain-damp skin was covered in goose bumps. She needed to towel off and put on some PJs. But it was more than that. She sneezed. “I’m so cold, Mom,” she said.
Suddenly the bathroom’s small wall heater turned on next to her head, startling her. Simultaneously, the scent of gardenias filled the room. Julia knew that smell: it was her mother’s French designer perfume. What… She turned to stare at the heater. She knew she hadn’t pulled the chain to start it. Her dad had installed the heater years ago, because their San Clemente home was rarely heated in winter. Surely it couldn’t turn on by itself just because it was old. Though Julia was startled, the heat felt good on her skin. But that smell filled her chest with a painful ache of longing. Earlier that day, she had decided against wearing her mother’s perfume, knowing it would only make her cry more. Yet now it smelled as if her mother were standing right beside her. The heat and the smell together overpowered her senses until she grew dizzy and faint. She clutched the edge of the sink.
Then she felt it.
There was no mistaking it—the feel of her mother’s arms reaching around her sides to cradle her like she used to do. Julia almost expected to hear that sparkling laugh. She looked in the mirror but saw nothing. She was afraid to look behind her. Instead, she ran out of the bathroom and into her bedroom, where she sat on the bed, shivering again. This time she welcomed the cold, hoping it would snap her back to reality.
Her rational mind had long since written off the incident in the bathroom as nothing more than an electrical surge. As for the smell of perfume and feeling her mother’s touch, those could easily be explained by exhaustion and depression following the funeral. She’d been missing her mother, and in her sleepy state, she’d half-dreamed her presence. It must have been wish fulfillment, plain and simple, like Freud described. Still, she had to admit, she might not have been so eager to work for Dr. Bertel if that moment in the bathroom hadn’t made her curious about the possibility of an afterlife. So here she was, working on a project that, if it worked, would prove that her mother was not only right, but that she was still out there. Julia had never told her father the exact nature of Bertel’s current research, saying only that they were studying residual energy in the brain after death.
“Julia! Julia, what the hell is going on?!” Julia heard her father’s voice echoing through the corridor of Research Building Three and jumped back to reality. When he saw Julia’s disheveled appearance, Morton ran down the hall and grabbed her by the arms, his eyes frantically searching her face. “Are you okay? What happened? You’re bleeding.”
He let go of her, and they both stared into his palms covered in Julia’s blood. Julia reached up slowly like a sleepwalker and touched her arms where her father had grabbed her—where Dr. Bertel had grabbed her just minutes ago. So strong. How could Dr. Bertel be so strong after he just … came back from the dead? “I’m okay, Dad. But Dr. Bertel died—”
“He’s dead? What happened?”
“No. I mean yes. He’s alive now. But he died for a few minutes. I revived him with the paddles, and then he grabbed me.”
Her father wasn’t listening. “Can we get a medic over here? My daughter’s hurt!”
But the medics had their hands full. They were wheeling Dr. Bertel down the hall on a stretcher. One of them paused to take a quick look at her arms. “This isn’t life threatening. It’s probably easiest if you just drive her across campus to the emergency room, sir.”
Her father put an arm around her shoulder and started to walk her to the elevator. Then she heard a man’s voice behind her. “Wait a minute! Is she the one who revived him? I need to ask her some questions.”
Julia turned toward the voice, which seemed familiar somehow. She turned her head, and her eyes rested on a man that she had never seen before—but she knew him immediately. Their eyes locked, and her chest surged with a dense, pulsing heat, as if she’d just drunk another Americano, quadruple shot.
A surge of electricity ran through her like a lightning bolt. She felt herself drawing close, as if an unseen force were puppeteering their first encounter. Emotions washed over her in waves—shock, recognition, longing, love, loss. Then the basement seemed to fall away, and she no longer knew where she was.
For a moment she felt herself transported to another time and place—she was now standing in the middle of a garden with the same young man wearing a long flax tunic and carrying a book. Then, she was in the basement again, staring at him in a blue shirt with notepad in hand, listening to the elevator doors slide shut behind the stretcher carrying Dr. Bertel.
Desire cascaded over her body like a tsunami. She wanted to run her hands through his thick brown hair, to trace his chiseled features with her fingertips, to stare into his ocean-deep eyes—just as she felt she had done a thousand times before. The instant recognition and resulting shock were mirrored in his own eyes. It was as if they had been waiting for each other.
Then both worlds doubled, tripled, quadrupled, until she was spinning through a revolving door of centuries. She felt herself falling forward and saw two strong arms reach out to catch her. Then her world went dark.
FOUR
Julia sat in the quiet cocoon created by the privacy curtain around her emergency room bed and went over the story she would tell the cop, the detective her dad said wanted to talk to her: Dr. Bertel had been changing a dead light bulb. The lights had gone out, and she’d heard a crash. She had found him unconscious with no breath or heartbeat. She’d used the defibrillator to bring him back to life. When he’d come to, he’d flailed around and scratched her. End of story. No demonic eyes. No superhuman strength. And no French, which she knew Bertel didn’t speak. He had always expressed envy that Julia knew a second language.
“I never saw the point of going beyond the required second-year Spanish,” he’d said. “I needed those extra hours for AP science.”
“At least Spanish is more useful in California than French,” she’d told him.
“Yes, but you sound much cooler ordering a café au lait.” He’d butchered even that simple phrase, though she didn’t care. As big a geek as Dr. Bertel was, she liked that he found anything about her cool.
And now maybe he would die, and maybe it was partly her fault. But that was the other thing she had to leave out: no science experiments involving dead brains and electric shock. But surely that wasn’t what he was up to. The research they’d been doing had been much too complicated, most of it in the theoretical stages. Even he wasn’t that crazy.
She wondered where Tyler was. She found herself suddenly missing him. Whenever he was around, she always felt more … normal. Tyler wasn’t serious about much of anything, and that was exactly what she needed in her life right now—a break from the serious. Long hours of experimental research and her mother’s death had taken a heavy toll on her body and psyche, and Tyler made her forget about it all, at least for a few moments.
“Knock, knock!”
Julia gasped as the curtain swept aside to reveal a face she didn’t expect to see. “Holy crap, Nadia! You nearly scared me to death.”
“Why should that bother you? I hear you have powers over death.”
“What do you mean?” Julia asked nervously. Not even her best friend knew exactly what went on in the research lab.
“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean?’ You brought back the Kentucky fried doctor, didn’t you? You know, the hottie who turned out to be a real hottie?”
“Oh.” Julia relaxed. “You’re so gross, Nadia.”
“True, but I clean up pretty good.” She plopped down on the bed and looked from Julia’s bandaged arms to her face. “Speaking of gross, have you looked in the mirror? You look like the Bride of Frankenstein.”
The pair had been friends ever since childhood. Even then Nadia had baby doll looks: smoky hazel eyes, silky hair, blemish-free skin,
and full, wide lips that belonged on a pop star. Nadia, as she grew into a stunning young adult, had a knack for saying what she wanted, doing what she wanted, and getting what she wanted, which Julia admired.
She also got away with things Julia didn’t approve of, but Julia told herself that her friend would grow out of it. In grade school, Nadia put rabbit poop in a box of chocolate-covered raisins and gave it to her little brother, just for laughs. (“I never knew projectile vomiting could launch that far, did you?”) In middle school, she shoplifted a pair of friendship bracelets with split-heart charms and begged Julia to wear it. (“Don’t you love me, Julia?”) In high school, she’d asked Julia to tell Tom Callahan that Nadia wanted him to ask her to prom, even though they both liked him. (“He already told me he just likes you as a friend, Julia. If one of us can’t have him, the other might as well.”) That one had tested Julia’s limits. Yet every time she was tempted to give up the friendship, Nadia did something generous, like giving blood to Julia’s mother, or giving Julia a total makeover for her first date with Tyler, or helping her with her science fair experiments—though the last one did backfire.
Nadia understood what it was to be smarter than the herd, though she preferred to hide her intelligence behind her bombshell body. She planned to become a plastic surgeon. “Not everyone is lucky enough to be born as sexy as me. But I’m happy to help them try,” she said, and Julia laughed. Her confident friend seemed just as at ease among the popular crowd as she was with the science and math geeks. For better or worse, Julia looked up to Nadia.
“Hey,” Julia said, “You’re not family. How’d you get in here?”
“I told the nurse she was family,” her father said as he entered the doorway.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hello, Doc,” Nadia echoed.
“How are you feeling, Julia?” her dad asked.
“Much better, thanks. I don’t know why I fainted. It was probably the adrenaline.” She and her father locked eyes for a moment, and his seemed like magnets drawing her into their profound sadness. She resisted that pull and forced a smile. He gave her a big hug, and she involuntarily stiffened.
“Sorry I couldn’t make it last week, Julia.”
“What’s one week in the afterlife? Probably no more than a blink. Mom would understand.”
An awkward silence followed. Even Nadia looked uncertain about whether to stay or go. Of course, Nadia was never one to be left out, so she stayed and made an elaborate show of reading gossip magazines.
Would they ever feel comfortable around each other again? Dad had once been so proud of her. “My little Marie Curie,” he would say. As a child, Julia had spent long hours at the pharmacy, watching her father work and, later, working with him. They’d forged a bond that seemed impenetrable. Her mom, not one for jealousy, had encouraged their close relationship. She’d been proud that her daughter was smart enough to enjoy the scientific conversations with Morton that sometimes put her to sleep. But after her mom’s death, her dad spent hours sitting in the dark, staring at nothing. Julia had tried to get him to talk to her like he used to, but then they had only argued. She’d started spending less and less time at home, until she finally moved out. As far as she knew, Morton still spent every night sitting pensively on the couch.
“I was thinking,” Julia tried again. “It sounds like they don’t plan to keep me here. So maybe we can go to the cemetery tomorrow. Then how about I follow you home afterward and fix you dinner? Like old times.”
He smiled. “That’s be great.” Then the smile evaporated as quickly as it appeared, a failed experiment. He looked around the room. “So where’s that boyfriend of yours? Does he know you were almost killed tonight?”
Nadia loudly flipped a page in her magazine and refused to meet Julia’s eyes.
Julia sighed. Please don’t start, she thought. But she only said, “He doesn’t even know what happened yet.”
“But how could he not know? Didn’t he call you when you didn’t show up for your date?”
“Maybe. I haven’t exactly checked my messages, Dad.” That was a lie. She’d already checked several times. No message from Tyler. She didn’t want to call him and listen to him tripping over himself with excuses before she even had a chance to tell him what happened to her. If he cared, he’d call. That would be soon enough to tell him.
“He forgot again, didn’t he?”
“We weren’t supposed to meet until after the cemetery anyway.”
Her dad shook his head and muttered, “That’s no way to treat my little girl.” He spoke louder, “Especially not on a day like today.”
“He doesn’t know what happened to me yet, Dad,” Julia repeated.
“No, I mean the anniversary of … of your mother’s death.”
“The anniversary isn’t really today. It was last week, remember? Anyway, I’m sure basketball practice just went late.” She put a tentative hand on his arm. “Don’t worry, Dad. He treats me fine.”
“Or at least as well as anyone can really expect from a teenage boy,” Nadia chimed in.
Julia gave her the stink eye. She wasn’t helping.
“Whatever you say, Julia. But I’ll just say one more thing.”
“Promise?”
Nadia swallowed a snort.
“There’s no way your mother would have sat around waiting. Sometimes I think …”
“What, Dad?” Julia sighed. “That I’m making a mistake? That he’s not good enough for me? Tyler’s smart and sweet and funny and … “ And he knows how to have fun, she thought. Remember fun?” And we’ve been friends since elementary school. Tyler’s a great guy.”
Morton put his hands in the air in surrender. “Hey, you don’t need to convince me. Just make sure you’re not trying to convince yourself.” He slumped onto one of the stools across from Julia, looking as deflated as she felt.
Morton changed the subject. “Are you ready to talk to the detective?”
“If it’s okay with the doctor.”
“The doctor says it’s okay with him if it’s okay with you, so I guess I’ll go get him. Nadia?” He gestured to Nadia to come with him.
“And miss this? Not on your life.”
“He wants to talk to Julia alone.”
“Oh fine,” Nadia pouted. She leaned down to kiss Julia’s cheek, then whispered in her ear, “The detective’s a hottie too. Maybe this time you’ll need the defibrillator.”
Julia pushed her away playfully.
A moment later, the curtain opened, and when she looked up she felt dizzy again. The moment when she’d first seen his face came back to her. “It’s you.”
But this time his eyes wouldn’t meet hers, at first. He seemed to be focusing on a point between her nose and her chin. He held out a hand. “Detective Austin Moore.” His soft baritone was a surprising contrast to his boyish face.
“You’re a little young for a detective, aren’t you?”
“A little. I’m the junior partner,” he said with a wink. “Been in the force since I was out of high school. I guess you could say I’m a little competitive.”
“I knew we had something in common.” Why did she put it that way? “Um, I mean, it’s nice to meet someone who takes his job so seriously.”
When she said that, he lifted his eyes to hers, as if he could no longer resist. His sparkling blue eyes gazed intently at her, searching, probing. She returned his stare with equal intensity. She felt as if she were being engulfed in the depths of his dark blue eyes. Then he blinked and smiled, removing himself from the trance. “I’m sorry for staring. It’s just that you seem so familiar—your face, your voice, even the things you say. I keep thinking we must have met before.”
“You seem familiar too. But I can’t imagine how we would’ve met. Unless you were with the cops who broke up the senior party at Tyler Barrett’s house a couple of months ago.”
He laughed. “No. That wasn’t me.” He shook his head, as if trying to shake a dream. “I’m sorry. I kno
w you’ve had quite an ordeal, so I’ll try to make this quick. It looks like what we have here is a simple accident involving a double-wired breaker and an overloaded fusebox. But we have to cover our bases.”
He asked Julia to tell him what she remembered. She stuck to her story. But then he asked her a couple of odd questions.
“Did you ever know Dr. Bertel to take any kind of drugs, for medicinal purposes or otherwise?”
Julia tried to cover her dismay with a puzzled frown. “No. Why?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that. Sorry.” He looked down at his notes, sighed, and said, “Has Dr. Bertel seemed depressed to you lately?”
She pressed her lips together. “I only met him a couple of months ago, but he’s seemed depressed ever since I met him. He’s super nice, but I just figured he was one of those Charlie Brown kind of guys, you know?” With each passing minute, it was becoming harder to convince herself that Dr. Bertel’s electrocution was an accident.
“Just one more question, Julia. Does today’s date mean anything to you?”
“Today’s date? Yes, it’s July seventh.” The day my mom was buried. She rubbed at the familiar ache in her chest.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Dr. Bertel’s son died on this same date, six years ago.”
This time she made no effort to hide her surprise. “Dr. Bertel had a son?”
“You didn’t know?”
“No. I read up on Dr. Bertel’s research when I applied for the job, but I never read anything about his personal life.”
“The kid was two years old. The latch wasn’t completely closed on the baby gate. Timothy Bertel fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. There was an investigation. It was ruled an accident.”
