Eight Minutes

by Reisenbichler, Lori

  Pa starts the washer. I hear the water rush in, then an electronic chunking sound as the water stops and the agitator begins its work. It makes me think of my mom, who often put in a load of laundry before bed. As I succumb to sleep, I feel a nudge from her, almost a tuck-in.

  I sleep late. I hear Toby and Pa making breakfast noises, so I reach for my phone and send Eric a text.

  We’re at Pa’s. Don’t call me. I need some time.

  My phone rings immediately. I mute the ringer, stare at his picture on my screen. If I don’t answer, he’s going to ride his bike all the way to Tucson.

  “Eric?”

  “Shel.” He sounds like himself again. Relieved. Worried. Like he misses me. “Are you okay? Toby?”

  “We’re fine.” I pause. “Did you sleep?”

  “I must’ve. When I woke up, it took me awhile to figure out that you were gone. Thought you went out to get breakfast or something.”

  “Eric. Do you even remember what happened?”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. When are you coming home? We need to do a serious recap.”

  “How about you give me what you’ve got?” I say, still needing to hear him sound like himself again. “You start.”

  “Sure. Okay.” He pauses. “How far back? The first day Toby talked about John Robberson?”

  I can’t keep from recoiling when he says the name. I get out of bed, trying to find enough space in my head to actually have this conversation. I pace a few steps, then sit on the bench at the end of the bed and close my eyes against the waves of emotion, willing myself to float instead of drown.

  “No, Eric, let’s jump right to the part where Kay said, ‘Are you John?’ and you said, ‘I’m right here.’ ” With the phone tucked against my shoulder, I open my palms, holding the question between us, even though he’s not in front of me. I’m begging him to attach a rational explanation. “What was that? For you, I mean?”

  “Can we start at the beginning?” he asks. “It will make more sense, I think.”

  “Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “Let’s just try, okay?” He pauses, taking my silence as his answer. “Remember that day? At the Boneyard?”

  “Yes.” I pull a pillow to my chest. “Well, no, actually, I wasn’t there. Remember?”

  “Right,” Eric says, “Toby was with me. But I didn’t know anything had happened. But you picked up on it, Shel. Right away. I tried to tell you it was nothing, but you wouldn’t let it go. You knew.”

  I can hear the smile through the phone lines, like he thinks this is some kind of victory he’s conceding.

  “You didn’t listen.”

  He lowers his voice. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t piece it together until Kay got here. Really, not until yesterday.”

  “Come on. We both know this didn’t start yesterday.”

  “Right,” he says, excited. “When did it start?”

  I roll my eyes. “You tell me. When did it start? For you?”

  “Does March 16, 2010, ring a bell?”

  “The day Toby was born? Yeah, Eric, it rings a bell. I was there, remember?”

  “I know.” There’s a long silence before he speaks again. “I wasn’t. Remember?”

  I swallow my indignation.

  “I was gone for eight minutes. I came back,” he says, “but I don’t think I came back alone.”

  My chest feels hollow.

  He says, quickly, “I didn’t realize it at the time. Toby was the first one to know. I think he can see me, or maybe just hear me … both ways.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Shel. You were right all along. Only it’s not Toby. It’s me. I’m John Robberson.”

  Certain words, when combined and spoken at a certain time in a certain way, seem to reverberate on a frequency below cognition. That’s how this feels. Like someone has hit a gong, and the lowest possible vibration echoes in the chambers of my soul.

  “How long have you known?”

  “One day.” I hear him shuffle the phone from one ear to the other. “All the data was in one place, and just now, boom …”

  I’m sure he’s making a hand motion of some kind.

  He continues, “The barrier collapsed. And all this data is falling into place, like the blocks in Tetris, and as soon as it lines up, I get it, and I can make room for the next bit of data coming.”

  It makes sense. That’s exactly how Eric would process it. John Robberson bubbled up on him from a sinkhole he’s been vigorously denying. A little too vigorously.

  “You should’ve told me.”

  “I couldn’t tell you something I didn’t know,” he finally says.

  He couldn’t know until Kay showed it to him. Kay. Not me. It’s stupid, but I feel a pang of jealousy. I swallow the tears and choke back the truth that refuses to be swallowed.

  “So which is it? Are you my husband? Or Kay’s? You can’t be both. That’s the rule, right? One soul at a time. So which one am I talking to right now?”

  “I’m still me. I didn’t go away. The night of the accident … I just … I don’t know—picked him up, like a hitchhiker. Without knowing it. It’s more like he jumped into the backseat without my permission.”

  “And Toby?” I’m sick to my stomach. “What have you been saying to Toby?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit. He’s not making it up. He hears someone talking to him. Whispering.”

  Eric’s voice is deliberate. “If you’re going to make me guess—and believe me, it’s sheer speculation on my part—I’d say he hears with his heart, not his ears. We’ll have to ask him. I would never hurt him. I would never set out to deceive you. I wouldn’t do that. You know me.”

  “But I don’t know John!” My heart is thrashing in my chest. “That’s my whole point. You’ve been whispering—or letting him whisper—all along, and you don’t even know.”

  “But I’m not dissociating. I would have gaps. I don’t have gaps.”

  “So you do remember the eight minutes?”

  “Okay, I had one gap. But not after that.” His voice is deliberate. “Shel, you have to believe me. I did not consciously allow him to communicate with Toby. I never sent Toby any messages—not in my thoughts, not by taking him aside and whispering to him in secret, nothing like that.”

  “Oh, God. The sleepwalking.” I gulp though my sobs. “You do it in your sleep.”

  We both recognize it, but our reactions are polar opposites. I’m sick to my stomach with shame for not protecting Toby, and he’s acting like he won a round of Jeopardy!.

  “Of course! That’s helpful. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Think about it as a struggle going on internally, kind of a fight for my consciousness.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. At all.”

  “Ian’s party. I was drunk. My consciousness was altered and all that stuff about the plane came out. That’s when he shows up. When I’m sleepwalking. When my guard is down.”

  “The game,” I say, my voice cardboard flat. “You wouldn’t stop with the game.”

  “Now that was weird,” he says. “Every time, the details were clearer.”

  “So you knew something.” My vision contracts, my line of sight a laser beam of indignation. “You should’ve said it then.”

  “I wasn’t sure what it meant. If anything. And you were acting so … well, I couldn’t predict what you’d do. I wanted to figure it out first.”

  “And you couldn’t.” My knuckles are white on the edge of the pillow, and my voice crackles with anger. “So you made it about me.”

  My mind’s eye is full of images: the pathetic look on his face as he picked me up at the police station. The sickening tension in his jaw on the ride home, the hardening of his gaze born of a certainty that he’d married an emotional invalid. I remember the genuine shame I felt. The hours of therapy. Those conversations—the painful confessions of all I’d done behind his back, the apologizing.

  “What about
after Branson? I poured my soul out to you. For weeks. You could’ve told me then.”

  “I didn’t know what it was! Think about it. Why would I interrupt you, as you’re telling me all these things, to tell you about stupid shit that didn’t make any sense to me? And okay, I was pissed off. It didn’t make any sense. I thought it didn’t matter. I thought it was over.”

  “It matters.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not over.”

  “I know.”

  “Aaaaargh! I hate this.” I drag my hand through my hair. “I don’t know what to say. I’m going to need some time, Eric. I’ll call you back.”

  Pa apologizes for his refrigerator contents. He offers to drive me to the grocery store, unaware that it’s the very place I first heard John Robberson’s name. We push Toby in the cart.

  It’s the oatmeal cream pies that get to me. I face the packages of baked goods and cry.

  As we return, I get stuck behind a hybrid minivan crawling down Pa’s street at a snail’s pace. As we pass, I see the shadow of a driver peering at mailboxes. The van stops in front of Pa’s driveway, and I know who it is even before Lakshmi hops out of the driver’s seat and runs to hug me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Would you believe I was in the neighborhood?”

  “No. Definitely not.”

  She hugs Toby, who is disappointed that Sanjay isn’t with her. He runs inside.

  “Eric called me. He thought maybe you’d want someone to talk to.” She looks back at her van. “I brought my mother with me. I hope it’s okay.”

  We open the passenger door. Ms. Pushpa throws her arms in the air in delight, still in her seat belt. She reminds me of Toby in his car seat.

  Pa and Toby are putting the groceries away when I bring my guests inside and introduce them. I make coffee for Pa and chai tea (with the tea bags from Lakshmi’s purse) for everyone else.

  At first, Pa joins us at his kitchen table. The conversation is awkward. Pa and Ms. Pushpa are comically polarized, him in his industrial-gray coveralls and her in a deep burgundy sari with gold threads in the ornate trim. Pa doesn’t seem to know where to look. Ms. Pushpa’s exposed aging midriff, between the draping folds of her sari, forces his eyes above her waist, but the dark red dot between her eyebrows prevents him from eye contact. I continue to put my father in these painfully unfamiliar situations, and I love him for making the best of it.

  He takes a big sip of coffee and says, “First time you’ve ever been to Tucson?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” Ms. Pushpa smiles at him with passive peacefulness.

  She is obviously and patiently waiting for him to go away so the women can talk. Ms. Pushpa isn’t rude, but she does nothing to encourage a conversation with him. I’ve not seen her like this before. Then I realize she’s here at Lakshmi’s bidding for a specific purpose, and it has nothing to do with Pa. I ask about the banking errand he said he needed to do.

  As soon as he and Toby leave the house, I wonder which of us will start. I have a tiny déjà vu moment going back to all those project update meetings I used to facilitate. I glance at Lakshmi, half expecting her to provide handouts.

  She says, as if on cue, “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  Reliving last night’s experience isn’t difficult until I realize how much I can’t really explain. My eyes prickle with involuntary tears.

  “Last night, it felt like Eric was gone completely and all that was left was John Robberson. You should’ve heard the way he talked.”

  Lakshmi hugs me tighter than we’ve ever hugged. Ms. Pushpa’s tiny hand strokes the back of my head, which is buried in Lakshmi’s shoulder. When I pull back, Ms. Pushpa hands me a tissue.

  Lakshmi says, “So, what does he have to say for himself?”

  I blow my nose. “Today, he sounded like Eric again. He says it was like flipping a switch.”

  “Flipping a switch?” Lakshmi snorts. “John Robberson’s been here a long time.”

  “But now Eric knows.” I sigh. “I thought we were done with John Robberson. But not after Kay. I should’ve never allowed her to come.”

  “Ah. Kay.” Ms. Pushpa nods. “What do you make of her? Do you think she was aware her husband’s spirit was in Arizona before she made the trip from Branson?”

  “No way.” I shake my head. “She’d never even met Eric.”

  “What do you make of her reaction?”

  “I don’t know if she was mad or scared. Or both. The second she found out, she didn’t want to have anything to do with Eric. Or John.”

  “It’s too bad.” Ms. Pushpa says. “In her spirit, she was compelled to come, but ultimately she could not receive the very thing she sought.”

  “Closure?”

  Ms. Pushpa nods.

  “Well, John didn’t get his closure, either.” I sigh. “You know what I keep turning over and over in my mind? If Eric has been carrying the soul of John Robberson all this time, then which one have I been married to for the past three years?”

  Ms. Pushpa speaks up, without hesitation. “Your husband.”

  “So you think I should turn around, go back home, kiss whoever is inside my husband’s body, and pretend nothing happened to his soul?”

  She says, “No, no, not at all. What you call a soul, I would call the atman. The spiritual essence of a person, yes? I believe the universe is vast and the atman lives on. It is not for us to attempt to interrupt the karma of another. We must honor the progression of the atman. The soul’s journey.”

  “Eric’s journey is getting highjacked. By someone who doesn’t want to finish his own journey, evidently.”

  “The only thing that has changed is that you understand a bit more. So John Robberson has attached himself to Eric—what is the true significance of this? The universe accommodates all. The atman, with all its influences, existed before and will exist again. As will yours. And mine. For this life, in this flesh, he is your husband.”

  “It feels like I’m married to Kay’s husband. Eric has changed. He’s a completely different person, not the man I married.”

  “He was your husband then. He is your husband now.” Ms. Pushpa squeezes my hand. “You speak as if he is the only one who has changed. Surely you are not the same. Even a stationary stone over which a river flows changes its shape and texture over time. The river flows differently because the stone is there. Transformation is a part of life. We mature, moving from our childish concerns to our adult responsibilities. We change when we become parents. It’s expected that someone might change, like your husband did, after recovering from a near-death experience. I have been fortunate enough to benefit from life experiences, and these have changed me.”

  I shake my head. “This is different.”

  “How?”

  “There’s a difference between normal human development and a third party swooping in and taking over your husband’s body.”

  “Again with the talk of ‘taking over the body.’ You must open your mind. The soul is not a ‘thing’ that can be pushed to the side and bullied away.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  Lakshmi shakes her head at her mother. “Don’t lecture her now. We’re not here to make it worse.”

  “Perhaps there is more to your husband than you can visualize. This is not necessarily a bad thing.” Ms. Pushpa intertwines her fingers and gently shakes her clasped hands, as if she were trying her best to sprinkle drops of comprehension in my path.

  “Allow it to be a good thing,” she whispers.

  I bite my tongue. For the first time, I think Ms. Pushpa doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  *

  LEARNING TO LIVE WITH IT—OR NOT

  Not long after Lakshmi and Ms. Pushpa leave, Pa settles into his recliner. He makes sure I see the deliberate flexing of his toes before he says, “Let’s hear it, baby girl.”

  I kiss him right above his crazy eyebrows. He hol
ds my face close to his, and neither of us moves. We are forehead to forehead. I close my eyes and hold the moment. He nods his ancient head, and it feels to me like he understands everything in the world.

  I tell him I believe John Robberson is a soul hitchhiker. That he wasn’t ready to go. That he somehow latched on to Eric in order to get to Kay so she could forgive him. That Kay resents what she found out after his death.

  Pa shakes his head. “Nah. I don’t buy it. I met the woman. All she did was brag about her hotshot husband.”

  “I think she was overcompensating. She told us all this horrible stuff about the way he died, and she was so mad at him. She must’ve realized she said too much. It’s called denial, Pa. I saw both sides of her. She’s bitter, trust me. She needs to forgive him.” I shake my head. “She can’t grieve properly until she does. She’s stuck.”

  “Well, following that line of thinking, I figure you’re all stuck.” He bobs his head, as if to absorb the weight of his opinion, which has seemingly plunked itself into place. “She’s stuck with the truth and she don’t like it. John Robberson’s stuck to Eric, whether he likes it or not; it’s too late to second-guess that one. Eric just figured out he’s stuck with this John Robberson fella. So the downside of believing all this, as far as I can tell, is that you’re stuck with both of ’em, aren’t ya?”

  “Unless Kay forgives him. Then she can go on, and it releases him to be in peace.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I sigh. “Not really.”

  “Well, I’m no expert, but I’d be mighty surprised if it’s that easy. The way I figure it, there’s only a couple of ways this is gonna go.” He counts them off on his fingers. “One, she forgives him. Or not. Two, he goes away. Or not. Which, in my book, baby girl, is none of your business.”

  “How can you say that? John Robberson made it my business.”

  “Sorry, baby girl, but you’re the one making it your business—which brings me to number three,” he says, pulling on his third extended finger. “Once you get one of those ‘or nots,’ there’s only one thing to do. You learn to live with it.”