She stares up at the sky, contemplating. The lights of our city have created a hazy halo overhead, pressing down on our darkness. “I did have a near-death experience. Not when I was in the hospital, but…” Beside me, I feel her whole body quiver with emotion.
“Becca, tell me,” I urge, brushing my fingers through her hair, combing it back from her cheek so I can stare into her eyes.
“There was a moment, after Ben left me—he thought I was dead, you know. He left me there on the sidewalk of my apartment and I remember seeing myself from above and thinking, ‘That is so much blood. Who is that poor girl?’” She gives me a bittersweet smile. “It was like being on a Ferris wheel, where I kept going higher and higher and the world on the ground got smaller and smaller, and I couldn’t take my eyes off this tiny little woman on the ground. I felt so bad for her, losing all that blood. And then this warmth began to overtake me.” She places her palm over her chest, rubbing it. “Like nothing I’d ever felt before, and then I didn’t care about the woman anymore. All I wanted was more of the warm feeling, wrapping all around me. I heard singing, all these voices praising God and Jesus. Like millions of voices, all at once.”
She stops, swallowing, and I notice that she’s begun to breathe heavily, sucking in big gulps of air. I don’t want her asthma to kick in again. “Becca, it’s okay. We don’t have to talk about this,” I soothe, pulling her closer. She forms against me like a reedy little flower, and I feel the strong muscles in her arm—the powerful biceps that betray how hard she trains her body—as she nestles close.
Gazing up into my eyes, she whispers, “Michael, I didn’t want to come back. The feeling of love and goodness there, it was that strong.” She searches my face, and I realize that she’s never told anybody this much. “Do you understand?” she asks, and I nod mutely. “Where Alex is, it’s not like this world.”
“But you did come back.”
“I guess the whale kind of spit me back out,” she laughs, overly loud. Her near-death experience is a much bigger part of her internal world than she might have wanted me to know.
“You never told anybody about this, did you?”
“Michael, ever since I came back, it’s like something inside of me has been frozen. It’s been hard and cold and dead feeling. But since meeting you and Andrea, all of that has begun to thaw out. I’m not sure I wanted to talk about how it felt until now. I mean, where I went, it’s real. God is there, but I’m stuck here.” Then she laughs, one of those golden, joyful giggles of hers that makes me laugh too. “Besides, my mother would so freak if she knew I went to heaven!”
I nod, grinning, “Yeah, that’s kind of a freaky statement there, Rebecca. By most anyone’s standards.”
Her expression grows serious again. “But Michael, I also wanted you to know because of Alex. I want you to understand that where he went, it’s not like here. All the suffering and inconsequential stuff, it’s all gone. He’s happy there.”
I can’t find my voice. I try, but it just flat eludes me. What I want to tell her is how much I’ve worried about his last moments. Whether he hurt or suffered. Whether he knew he was going to die. That one gets me most: the thought that he saw that car coming and comprehended what was happening to him. It keeps me awake at night, wondering if at the moment of impact an explosion of pain rocketed through his whole six-foot-four frame; if it sounded in his brain like rifle fire.
And it keeps me awake, questioning whether he simply vanished into ether and nothingness.
Reaching for her right hand, I touch her scar, the jagged flame through her center palm where she tried to stop the knife. “How bad did it hurt, Rebecca?” I need to know. More than anything else I’ve ever asked of her, I need this. “When he stabbed you?”
“I—I don’t really know,” she answers. “I can remember trying to breathe, how hard it was. I can remember the feeling of the knife cutting me, the cold sensation of it. How unreal it all seemed. I couldn’t believe it was happening—that’s what I kept thinking, that it wasn’t real. And I remember the fear, but I’m not sure about the pain.”
“Why not?”
She pulls my hand close beneath her chin, settling it there before she speaks. I know that what she’s about to say is important just by the way she’s staring into my eyes.
“Because, Michael, I don’t remember the pain. Afterwards, in the hospital, sure, it was unbearable,” she answers in a hushed, almost reverent voice. “But nothing of how it felt while Ben was stabbing me, or even right after he left me for dead.”
“Rebecca, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying—”
“Michael, when I went to that place? When I left here and started there?” she says, her voice filled with wonder. “Well, it was so perfect, I think God took all that pain away.”
***
Rounding the hallway, back toward my bedroom, I see that Laurel’s still on the deck. The glowing ember of her cigarette flares in the inky darkness as she takes a drag. I suppose she’s waiting for me, hoping to talk before bed. Then again, this is her ritual, smoking late like this. If she were home, back in Santa Fe, she might paint until the middle of the night, or morning even, if the muse were whispering to her just right.
I want to tell her how sorry I am—sorry that we can’t ever seem to get things right. We should be able to, with as much as we both loved him, with as close as we once have been. But then I think of that day last summer, just a month after he died. The papers being served to me at work; I think of sitting in my truck without the air-conditioning on, calling Marti, my hands shaking so bad I could barely dial the numbers on my cell phone. “Michael, calm down,” she urged. “Calm down and tell me what’s going on.” Marti’s own voice was shaking—it was too soon after losing him; too soon for another shocking phone call not to unsettle her.
“It’s Laurel,” I managed to grind out. “She’s trying to take Andie away from me.”
Marti had known Laurel her whole life, wouldn’t believe it, insisted there must be some misunderstanding. After a few tense moments, I phoned Laurel directly, there at her gallery. Her voice was tight, distraught as she told me that I shouldn’t be talking to her. Only to her attorney.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted into the phone. “Laurel, you gotta be kidding, ’cause you’d never tell me to talk to you through a damn attorney!”
“Michael, there’s not an easy way to handle this,” she answered, and seemed eerily calm. “But we must think about Andrea’s well-being.”
“No way in hell you’re taking my child from me. No way!” I shouted, and then, without even waiting to hear the lame explanation she’d begun to offer, I hung up the phone on her. After that, I lawyered up—fast, just like her—and prepared for an ugly battle. Only when Ellen phoned me the next night did I finally lose it, bawling like a baby into the phone, crying so hard that my whole body shook with it.
Her words, in classic Ellen Richardson style, touched the surface of much deeper veins of emotion. “Laurel has spoken with her attorney,” she said, “and everything is now resolved, darling. She’s so sorry, Michael, you must understand.”
“You fixed it,” I said numbly, realizing that once Ellen had figured out what Laurel was up to, she’d intervened.
“Laurel never wanted to hurt you,” she explained gently. “She is very sorry for what she’s done.”
“Sorry?” I cried, wiping at my eyes. “Like that settles it?”
“Michael, darling, you are hurting so badly. I know that. But try to understand, if you can, that Laurel is too.”
I do believe Ellen was telling the truth that night—that Laurel never would’ve tried a trick like that unless she’d been blinded by grief. But it doesn’t make it any easier to believe her now. And Rebecca thinks I could let Andie know the facts?
Watching Laurel sitting there on the deck, feet tucked up beneath her, hoping I’ll come back, I know that trust, once lost, isn’t easily found.
Slowly, without takin
g my eyes off her, I back away.
Entering my bedroom, I discover Laurel’s shopping bag placed neatly in the center of my quilt. She must’ve snuck it in here while I was outside with Rebecca. The bedside lamp’s been turned on too, creating a warm, inviting mood for the whole room. She’s nurturing me, or at least trying to, by leaving a gift here for me to discover.
Standing in the center of the room, I stare at the bag and imagine its contents. It’s a painting; I know that. I knew that earlier today, when she told me she had a present for me, for the house. The question is, what would Laurel have painted for me now? What did she hear when she sat down to create this mysterious, faceless work specifically for me?
Turning Al’s band on my finger, I swear I hear him tell me to loosen up. “You over-think this stuff, Michael,” he’d laugh. “Just see what it is.” Alex loved surprises, gifts, and he especially loved it when Laurel bestowed a new painting on us. There was no greater fan of Laurel’s lyrical work than her own brother.
Reaching into the brown paper bag, I feel around, and can tell it’s a small canvas, maybe a couple feet wide, no bigger. Carefully I retrieve it, the crumpled tissue paper rustling within my hands. I peel back the layers until the painting opens to me like an exotic flower. Dramatic splash of fiery red cresting over a mass of succulent green and blue, and there’s the familiar coppery amber—unbelievably, she managed to capture the exact shade of his hair.
She’s painted Alex. Alex on a beach, an abstraction, his pale arms extended upward to the sky as he holds the sun, the light literally radiating into his whole body like powerful cosmic energy. He’s rejoicing, the way it looks to me. Sweet Alex in the afterlife, right on the beach, exactly like in Andrea’s dreams. Exactly like Rebecca just told me outside.
She’s made him beautiful, filled with all that spirit and kinetic energy that defined each day of his life. Somehow, miraculously, she’s detailed my lover’s very essence, and I know this small painting is Laurel’s love poem to me, to what I had with her brother—and it’s her visual sonnet begging me for forgiveness.
Problem is, I’m not sure I’m capable of that kind of forgiveness. Not with the truth out there, the truth of Andrea’s parentage, waiting to destroy me like it always is—because a whole lot of my bitterness isn’t even about what Laurel did. It’s about all the power she still holds, and what she might do with it one day. It’s about how Alex dying changed the delicate balance of things, here in this world. Why didn’t we work this stuff out before he died?
Dropping heavily onto the bed, staring at the image of him I hold within my hands, I know exactly why we didn’t settle so many issues—because we always thought we had another day.
Allie, you left me in a mess of trouble, I whisper to him in my head. Why aren’t you here to help me figure it all out, baby?
That’s the real source of my anger, not the taxes. It’s that Alex should’ve realized he might die. He left a will, a planned estate, money for Andie’s college—he just didn’t tell me what to do with the truth about our daughter.
Setting the painting on the dresser, I lie back on our bed and lose myself in the swirling colors, the powerful brush strokes. I nearly fall asleep like that, bedroom lights on, staring at Alex, arms reached high to God in heaven. I’m not even sure how late it is when I finally strip out of my jeans and turn out the light.
***
I enter the glass atrium by a maze of other rooms. First through a hatch-like portal, then a narrow hallway; finally coming into the bright, airy openness of the butterfly house. At the far end of the palm-lined path, squatting down to Andrea’s six-year-old level is Alex, patiently explaining something to her. Metallic purple and ginseng-brown wings flit past her eyes as she reaches a timid hand to try and catch just one of the dozens of butterflies.
“Don’t touch, doll,” he cautions, capturing her tiny hand in his much larger one. “We can only look, okay? This is their home, not ours.”
“But I want to touch them so they’ll know how pretty I think they are.”
“They know, precious girl,” he assures her, smiling at her fleeting innocence. “They know.”
Then, Alex looks up at the sky, squinting as if he expects what comes next. As if he’s commanded it in some way. From above, a cascade of spectacular butterflies comes pouring through an opening in the ceiling, a river of iridescence floating right down to Alex and Andrea. Nothing stops them, all these pulsating, beating wings, descending from the sky overhead.
Alex sees me and waves, smiling broad as life, his strong hand clasping Andrea’s shoulder.
“Daddy!” she cries out loud, reaching with both hands toward the butterflies. But he seems oblivious, keeps waving at me, smiling. Again Andrea cries out, and this time her voice surprises me in its despair: she’s forgotten the butterflies and instead focuses on him, hopping beside him, hungry for him to notice her.
Then again, even more plaintive, “Daddy!”
Abruptly I wake to find the covers tangled around my legs and Andie wedged beside me beneath the covers. She must’ve walked here in her sleep—either that, or made her way silently while I slept on, oblivious. Her small frame has formed against my much bigger one, and she’s tucked up against my ribs like a warm, lumpy pillow. Over and over in her sleep she’s moaning, “Daddy…Daddy.”
“Sweet pea, wake up.” Slipping a tentative hand onto her back, I nudge her. “You’re dreaming.” She doesn’t move, only cries out again, and it seems nothing will rouse her. I keep at it, becoming more insistent, and finally she jerks awake, staring up at me in the darkness.
“You’re okay,” I assure her, remembering Weinberger’s strategies for coping with these nightmares. “I’m right here. You’re okay.”
“I’m scared,” she mumbles, blinking back the sleep, her delicate mouth turning downward in a disturbed expression.
“You’re right here with me,” I promise, nestling down in bed again and pulling her close. “You’re okay. Nothing to be scared of.”
For a while, we’re silent except for the soft sound of her childlike breathing, until she whispers, “The accident was scary.”
I sort through a strategy. “But that’s just a dream now, precious. You know that. You understand the difference.”
“But it could happen again, though. What if it happens again?” She looks up at me with a lost expression, beseeching me to be more than mortal. Less vulnerable than her other daddy proved to be. I can’t promise that I won’t die: it’s not a promise that’s mine to give.
“I’m right here,” I whisper back, willing her to feel reassured. “I am not going anywhere.”
Nuzzling close, she exhales, a drained kind of sigh, and without another word she drifts back into sleep. But not me. For hours it seems I lie there, staring at the ceiling, listening to my daughter’s downy-headed sleep sounds, praying that God will always protect me. Until the first purple light cracks the sky, I beg the One in whom I barely believe to keep me safe and alive and whole for the sake of this one precious girl who needs me so much.
I beg Him to help me believe like Alex did—at least just a little.
***
I wake to find the covers peeled back and Andrea gone. From the kitchen, I hear cheery-voiced laughter and giggling. The nightmare’s forgotten, left in the flotsam of darkness, and now she’s back in the embrace of Laurel’s tender care. Good. For once I actually welcome it because Andie needs a mother in her life. Not that I want it to be Laurel, of course, but if she can get some nurturing from her aunt, then I think that’s a good thing. Especially after last night.
I wonder how often she dreams about the accident? I thought that ended a while ago, but from what she said in the middle of the night, I’ve gotten to wondering. Maybe Rebecca was right, maybe I shouldn’t spend so much time fighting Laurel. I think of the painting she left on the bed, our conversation in the guest room yesterday: maybe I can trust her, like she wants me to believe.
Wandering into the living r
oom, I discover Andie and Laurel on the floor, pasting together a collage. When Andrea spies me, she leaps to her feet, hiding the work behind her back. “Don’t look!” she cries and I frown, confused until she explains with a grin, “It’s a surprise, Michael.”
“Oh, I see.” I touch the top of her auburn head, giving it a love pat. “A surprise.”
“It was Aunt Laurel’s idea.”
Laurel won’t meet my gaze, and I guess she’s uncomfortable about last night. Strange, but I’ve woken feeling different this morning, a little more ready to let her back in.
They go back to their collage, and I head to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. “You know,” I call to them across the bar, into the living room where they’re spread on the floor, “I was thinking about phoning into work. My boss said if I wanted, I could take today off since I’ve got… family here.”
“Yea!” Andrea cries, and her glee at the prospect of me kicking around with them warms me on the inside.
Laurel smiles at me cautiously. “I’d love that, Michael,” she agrees. “I’d love to have you with us all day.”
“And who’s up for some waffles?” I ask.
This one really gets a reaction out of Andrea, because she loves to pour the batter into the iron. “Can I help?” she asks, already scrambling to her feet.
“We’ll make them together,” I say, and she beams with delight. I’m not sure we’ve made waffles like that since Allie died. Which leads me to believe that Laurel’s visit may actually be a good thing.
After breakfast, Laurel, Andrea and I bike around Studio City. It’s so damned hot I swear I might expire by the time we peddle past the public golf course. So we stop for a small lunchtime picnic that Laurel has prepared for us, spread out on a park bench right along the roadside, beneath leafy palms that provide us some reprieve.
Laurel’s got her long black hair swept up into a neat ponytail, looking more athlete than hippie today. I can relax around her more this way, because she reminds me of Alex in her Nikes and running shorts, fixing me with that clear blue gaze. Not sure if it was my long talk with Rebecca, or maybe the painting, but some of my bile seems to have dissipated. I’ve even had fun, biking around like a family.
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