I always try to find the meaning in them. When I was worried about losing my job, her nudge didn’t mean I wouldn’t lose my job. It meant that I was going to be okay even if I lost my job. When the layoffs came, I realized she was right. I guess I’ve gotten used to the idea that a spirit can interact physically with the living.
But I’ve never smelled her.
Before Eric and I met, I read a study somewhere that said that the olfactory function, the sense of smell, was the single most salient trigger to the brain’s memory banks. As soon as I learned this, I stopped changing perfumes every day. I picked one and wore it from that point on.
When we get home, Toby immediately blurts out that Thud was there. Eric laughs. I decide right then. There’s no point in mentioning the stupid JJ part. It would just take away from what happened with Thud. Maybe tonight, Thud is going to be the thing I can use to get Eric to listen to me.
After I get Toby to bed, I ask, “Can I talk to you about what happened today?”
“If you want to.”
I start to tell him the whole story about Vaughn Redford—well, everything except the actual ticket price and the JJ part, but I do include the message that Thud’s not in pain. Eric doesn’t roll his eyes or anything, which I take as a good sign. When I tell him I smelled the dog, actually smelled him, Eric gets really quiet. Maybe I’ve pierced a hole in his rational, cognitive veneer. It’s an opening, or at least I want it to be.
I sit up on the bed, my back to the headboard. I pull the covers up to my armpits and tell him about the woman with the P-name baby, Patrick, and how I pictured birthday balloons. My eyes fill. I remember what my due dates would have been for every single one of our babies, whether they made it or not. First Baby. Second Baby. Third.
“So this made you think about babies,” he says.
“The ones who didn’t make it. If they had ‘come through’ or whatever, if I’d found out some weird detail about them … I might be more skeptical. I might be able to explain it away. Like my desire or my intention sent out some kind of vibe this Vaughn Redford character picked up. If that had happened, I’d always believe there was some hocus-pocus to it.”
“But now you don’t? Because you were thinking about babies and not expecting to hear from our dog?” He stifles a smirk.
“It proves I had nothing to do with it, right?” I ask. “See what I mean? And he knew Thud suffocated—how could he nail that? Not only does the name have to be right, the information has to line up. If Vaughn Redford had called out my mom’s name, told me how much she loves me, or that she sees Toby—it just wouldn’t sound real. I’d know he was a fake. If she showed up and told me my hair still looks like shit, well, maybe that would’ve been convincing.”
I look down at my hands, because it’s not funny. “But that would’ve made me really sad, too. That she still doesn’t see who I am.”
“Her loss, Shel. I tell you that all the time.”
It’s my loss, too, but he doesn’t get it. I can’t explain it, either. There are some things I wish I didn’t know. But I’ve been to the canyon of grief. It’s like you’re standing on all the things you’re so sure of, until the pain drips and drips like battery acid and eats holes into the cliff you’ve been standing on your whole life. So you fall into the dark, and you stagger around until your eyes adjust, and when you climb back out, you can see the shadows in everything. You can’t know that until you’ve been there.
A lot of the time, I feel dumb around Eric. He’s got a brilliant mind. I’m no slouch, but we both know he’s smarter than I am. But his cognitive certainty is a luxury position, born of the things he hasn’t had to learn.
Like how it feels to ride the roller coaster of hope and let yourself fall in love with a tiny person you can’t even see. I know how disorienting it is when your otherwise dependable and healthy body defies you. I know exactly when the roller coaster goes downhill and you start to believe there’s no place inside you soft enough to hold a baby, because you’ve failed at the one job that’s supposed to come naturally to you—one time, two times, three times. I know that finally, you have to learn that maybe it’s not up to you.
I know how it feels to outlive your mother, which doesn’t sound all that horrible because at some level, you think that’s how life goes. But I know how hard it is to look back and realize I spent almost half my life arguing with her about my freaking hair. And I know how helpless it feels to not be able to get to know her at the time in my life when I actually want to do that. I know how much I wanted to find a reason why we both got stuck with a brain tumor that brought out the worst in her and how hard it was not to take it personally, as if there was something more fucking true about what she said when she didn’t have control of her facilities. I know that’s bullshit, and I also know how it feels to be neck-deep in it.
I know how sickening it is to realize, one day, that she’s in a coma before I can make it right. I felt my heart shatter every time I reached over and held her unresponsive hand up to the bump in my belly—one month, two months, three—so I’ve come at it the hard way, but I know that eventually even I can learn to be grateful for intangible, illogical things like nudges and smelling my damn dog. I don’t want to know these things, but I do.
How can Eric know what he doesn’t know?
“Something weird happens when we get too close to that line, between this world and the other. It feels like I was there today.” I check his reaction. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Shel.”
“Even when …” I shake my head and don’t finish. “I just can’t help thinking about your accident. You were right on that line. Where do you think you went? For eight minutes?”
Even before he says anything, I can tell I’ve ruined it.
“Really? When are you going to let that one go?”
I sit up straighter on the bed and pull my pillow into my lap.
“You want to know where I went?” He moves away from the headboard, squaring off to face me. “Nowhere. I’ve told you this all before. I laid there on the table until the medical intervention worked and my heart started beating again and the oxygen returned to my brain …” and his voice becomes a blur in my head.
He doesn’t remember anything about the eight minutes. Or the ambulance ride. Or the accident. Or leaving work that day. Or even going to work that day. Or the day before. He has a weeklong black hole in his memory. The doctors said that was to be expected. One of his doctors told me he thought it was God’s grace to survivors, to not remember the trauma.
I didn’t understand at the time.
I bought Eric a book about near-death experiences. It provided detailed accounts of people who saw the tunnel of light and felt the floating over their bodies, the wash of contentment.
Eric doesn’t remember a floating sensation, but if it happened, he thinks it’s because that’s what happens when blood flow is reduced to the part of your brain that controls spatial sensations. He says he doesn’t have any memory of a tunnel of light, but it wouldn’t surprise him because that’s what happens when your retinal nerves are compromised.
After he finished the book, he told me he thought that self-report was possibly the worse scientific evidence in the world. It’s based on memory, with no physical evidence. There’s no way to quantify it, and worse, everyone who is self-reporting is doing so at times when their brain cells are misfiring like crazy and maybe even shutting down. Not exactly a reliable resource. As everyone knows, memory is notoriously fickle and highly open to suggestion. So there’s no way to know if everyone sees a tunnel of light because we’ve all read about how you’re supposed to see a tunnel of light. Well, Eric was never going to play along with that.
There’s nothing spiritual about it for him.
He concludes, “So, sorry to disappoint you for the millionth time, but nothing happened in those eight minutes.”
“But Eric, what if something happened and you just don’t remember it?”
H
e snorts. “What if nobody remembers it? What if one guy made it up and wrote a book, so everyone has read the same book since the seventies, so now there’s a whole generation of people who expect to see it? What if nobody actually remembers anything of his own experience? Has that ever occurred to you?”
His condescending tone, painfully familiar, seems to glide past that metallic taste on my tongue, slide down my throat, strangle my empathy, and pluck my vocal cords, until it finds the one that will produce the most defensive note in my voice.
“Nobody remembers anything? Because you don’t?”
“When we don’t have all the data, there’s a human tendency to fill in the blanks. So maybe they report what they thought they were supposed to see. Maybe they want it to be true.”
“What if it is true?”
“Maybe it is for some. But the uniformity of the reports leads me to believe …” He stops, searching for the right words. “I think it’s very hard to think for yourself. To have an open mind.”
It’s my turn to snort. “Like you?”
“Yes, like me.”
“Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re open-minded.”
He crosses his arms. “Define open-minded.”
“Really?”
He says, “The way I see it, you think you’re open-minded because you are willing to seriously entertain every idea under the sun. As if you can try it on and assume it’s true until you are proven otherwise. And sure, there’s something to that approach. But here’s the issue: you think I’m not open-minded because I have the ability to observe something I don’t understand, file it away, and refuse to jump to an early conclusion. I am actually more open-minded than you, because I don’t have to force a hypothesis to be fact. I have the patience to know when I need more data. I can tolerate the ambiguity of not knowing.”
I’m struggling to keep the defensiveness out of my voice. “But Eric, you don’t feel what you don’t know. We can’t even talk about this, three years later. You won’t allow it. You refuse to allow your personal experience to override your cognitive beliefs. That’s why you say you don’t remember. You’re so afraid your experience might validate something you don’t understand.”
He looks me in the eye. “No. I’m just not willing to force my personal experience into somebody else’s theory. Particularly if I experience things I don’t fully understand.”
“Like what?”
There’s a long pause. Too long. “It doesn’t matter,” he finally says.
It feels like my throat just collapsed. I choke out, “It matters that you think you can’t tell me anything.”
“I don’t tell you things because lately, there seems to be no limit to your ridiculous interpretations. I’d be throwing gas on a fire.”
I break down once again. He sits on the side of the bed, just watching me like I’m a stone that’s inexplicably leaking, inconveniencing him. Finally, I say, “Eric. Please. I’m so tired of arguing. I hate this … distance between us.”
He waits a long time before he responds. I reach for his hand, but he pulls away. “Well, I’m glad you said it.” He sighs and drags his fingers through his hair. “This seems like the right time to say it. I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
“I went to see Anna today.”
“Therapist Anna? Why?”
“I wanted to get an objective opinion.”
“About what?”
“About our marriage.”
My stomach does a ten-story runaway-elevator plunge. I’m sure all the color drains out of my face. I stare at him, but he won’t make eye contact. My ears feel like they’re being bricked off. I can’t feel my feet.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I need a minute.”
I close the bathroom door behind me, sit down, pull off a way-too-long stream of toilet paper, and use it to cover my mouth in case I make any sound while I cry. With shaky hands, I wipe my tears, flush the toilet, and wash my hands. I lean into the mirror and take a deep breath.
When I come back, Eric is sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s pulled the bedroom chair over so it faces him.
“Sit down,” he says, patting the chair.
I can’t figure out how to just crawl in bed on my side and go to sleep. Maybe if I just go to sleep, he won’t say whatever horrible thing he is about to say.
“I’ll sit down,” I say, “but don’t make me say yes to fifty logical conclusions first. Just come right out and say whatever you’re going to say. What are we talking about here?”
“The distance. Between us.” He shakes his head. “It’s too much. We’re getting too far apart on too many things.”
“So let’s close it, Eric. That’s all we have to do.” I keep my voice even. Logical. “Things ebb and flow. It’s good you said something. We’re too far apart; okay. We know what to do. We close the gap.”
“Shel. It’s not just ebb and flow. It’s so wide now—like an abyss. I don’t know if we can anymore.”
I can’t stop the hot tears or the tremble in my voice. “That’s why you went to see Anna? Because you’re having doubts about our marriage?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say? She told you we could fix it, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “But I told her, just like I’m trying to tell you, I’m not sure we can.”
My mouth is so dry I can barely swallow.
He says, “Look. I know why you really went to see that psychic guy.”
“You do?”
His tone is even and measured. There’s no judgment in his voice. “You were trying to contact Kay, weren’t you? Or John Robberson. Right? So you can ask him why he wants Toby to go see her.”
I nod.
“That’s what I mean. You couldn’t even tell me that. Instead, you come home crying about miscarriages and your mother and talking about smelling our dead dog …”
I feel as if he’s slapped me in the face.
“Anyway. That’s not my point. You can’t tell me the real reason, but you and Lakshmi are totally together on this, aren’t you? It’s all you talk about.”
“You can’t be jealous of my best friend. I get to have friends, Eric.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have friends. But you have to admit, right now, you’re closer to Lakshmi than you are to me. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“It’s different.”
“How? You confide in her. It’s like your little secret world, and I can’t get in. You keep your true thoughts and feelings from me and spend all your time trying to sell me on your latest theory. Do you care what I think about any of this? No. Anytime I try to tell you my opinion, you get all defensive and we get into a fight about it.”
“But—”
“I even tried to objectively demonstrate how misguided you are, how much weight you’re assigning to random acts of imagination. That was the whole thing with the game, which you blew way out of proportion. I’m trying, but what do I get back? You smelled the dog? Do you hear the words coming out of your mouth? But if I don’t pick up a fork and eat an entire plateful of the shit you’re dishing up, you think I’m attacking you. I can’t win.”
“What if—”
“Look, Shel. I see where you’re going. I see what you want to believe. Maybe it has to do with losing your mom, or the miscarriages, or whatever … We’re not on the same page anymore.”
“Is that it? We’re just not communicating? We can fix that, Eric.”
“I wish it was that easy. I’m sorry, but it feels like our belief systems have shifted.” He makes the same hand motion that weathermen make when they’re demonstrating how tectonic plates shift in an earthquake. He jerks one hand toward him, the other toward me, until they’re barely touching on the sides.
I flinch.
“I’m over here,” he says, indicating the hand closest to him. “And I can’t get to where you are, over here.” He pushes his other hand even farther
in the other direction.
He takes a breath before he continues. “Hear me out. I can’t bring myself to respect what you’re doing. I realized the other day, my entire picture of you, of who you are, has shifted. You were always so smart and reasonable … You used to see the world the way I do. And now … Shelly, you’re chasing a ghost. The widow of a ghost. And you think it’s your motherly duty. And you’re so convinced there’s something there, you don’t give a rat’s ass if I like it or not. You’re hell-bent on pursuing this. It’s like you can’t not do it.”
He’s right. I can’t say anything in response.
“I just don’t know if I can spend the rest of my life with someone who believes something so far away from what I know to be true.”
“Eric, lots of couples have different beliefs. I don’t understand why we have to believe the same thing.” I reach for his hand.
“Because of Toby.” He pulls away. “I refuse to teach him to believe his imaginary friend is more important than his real life. I can’t support you teaching our son to believe in a ghost, to assign some cosmic significance to the games he plays on the playground. What you believe about John Robberson is so fundamentally ridiculous, I literally cannot believe what comes out of your mouth anymore. I have to force myself not to think about it just to get through the day, and I dread coming home and listening to your latest speculation. You’re caught up in this thing that only exists in your own head.”
I blink, stupidly.
He rakes his hand through his hair. “Haven’t we been through enough? Why are you doing this to us? To Toby?”
“I’m trying to protect Toby.”
He shakes his head. “I know you don’t want to listen to me, but see if you can hear this: I will not allow you to drag him into this. You are not protecting him. But I will.” He looks at me, his eyes even and cold. “Is this sinking in with you? I will do whatever it takes to protect him. Even from you, if I have to.”
My ears are ringing, and I’m not sure if I can speak. We have just crossed a line that I never thought we would. We haven’t even been married ten years, and this is the most dangerous conversation we’ve ever had.
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