Life and Other Near-Death Experiences

by Camille Pagán

Although it was probably the ninth time I’d seen the movie, it felt especially poignant on this particular viewing, and I sat sobbing as I watched Luisa walk into the frothy waves. “Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea,” she said in a voice-over, and I curled up in the fetal position and wailed like a humpback, even though I wasn’t sure what, precisely, she meant.

  I was going to find out. I was going to go to Mexico while I still could.

  SIX

  There was just one teensy problem: my passport had expired. And I hadn’t noticed, because Tom and I hadn’t traveled in . . . gosh, how long had it been? A while. When we were younger, we went everywhere—Crete, Austin, Buenos Aires, Boston. In fact, Tom said he knew he wanted to marry me because we traveled so well together; it was a sign we were truly compatible, he claimed. But we hadn’t been able to make our vacations match up since he started working. Now I wondered if this had less to do with our respective calendars and more to do with Tom’s not wanting to have vacation sex with me. My cheeks burned as I recalled his reaction when I wanted to make love twice in a row during a trip to Paris. “I’m not a machine, Libby,” he said, and even though he immediately apologized, I slouched under the covers on our lumpy hotel bed, mildly aroused, moderately irritated, and severely mortified by my inconsiderate, overactive libido. (I could just hear Paul saying, “You know this has nothing to do with you, right?” Well, I did now.)

  The defunct passport was momentarily disheartening—I didn’t have six weeks to wait while the State Department issued a new one—until I discovered that for an extra fee, I could speed the process to just two weeks. Yes, I thought excitedly, that’s exactly what I’ll do. I walked to the drugstore and had a new passport photo snapped, and although the photo made me appear eerily cadaverous, I took the L to the post office and submitted it along with a check and the necessary forms.

  When I got home, I ate a microwave burrito while searching for beachfront properties along Mexico’s far eastern coast, which was supposed to be gorgeous in the fall. Thanks to what was apparently a fresh surge of drug-related violence, ticket prices were down and waterfront properties were cheap. I bought a round-trip flight that would have me in Mexico for a month and a half, then put down a deposit for a small cottage on a private beach in Akumal. If I tired of Akumal, I could head to Cozumel or Tulum or any number of places, although the specific location was really beside the point: the only things I needed for spiritual redemption were sand and water, authentic Mexican food, and buckets of margaritas. (I didn’t really drink, but I intended to start.)

  After Mexico, I would fly directly to New York, where I would finally tell Paul about the big C. Then he and I would drive to New Hampshire, where our father lived, and together we would deliver the news. The three of us would visit my mother’s grave one last time, and then I would die quietly, surrounded by the people I loved. Admittedly, the specifics of my post-Mexico plans were murky. When the pain became unbearable, I would theoretically put heavy rocks in my pockets and wander into a large body of water, or maybe find a nice warm oven and stick my head in. In reality, I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t go through with that, and so Paul and Dad would end up watching me suffer for at least a short while. This, more than anything, was devastating, so I tried not to give it too much thought.

  It was after eight when I finalized my itinerary. I decided not to prolong the misery of the day any longer and took two more of Tom’s sleeping pills.

  I crawled into bed, but visions of white sand and mariachi bands danced through my head, making sleep impossible. I gave up and made a giant bowl of popcorn, devoured it, then logged into my social network of choice and changed my marital status to single, even though I was aware that this would set off waves that would trigger a minor social tsunami. Fine. Let everyone be worried. My failed marriage could be a smoke screen for my failing health, which I didn’t intend to inform anyone about. When my mom was dying, long-lost relatives and distant church friends crowded our home, and later the hospital, eating up the precious few hours that we had left with her. This time, it was my march into the great beyond, and I was calling the shots. The first rule of the cancer club: there was no cancer club, and therefore there would be no well-wishers rubbernecking at the scene of the tragedy, reminding themselves how fortunate they were without absorbing any real loss.

  By nine, I was getting loopy—the couch was feeling not unlike an underhydrated waterbed, and when I looked in the mirror, my face seemed freakishly large—which should have been reason enough to put myself back to bed, but I kept hearing an odd noise in the background. Did the upstairs neighbors get a grandfather clock? Was that a gong?

  No, it was not. It was my phone. The number was blocked, but I picked up anyway. “Nice try, Tom,” I scoffed.

  “Libby?” It was Jess, O’Reilly’s wife. She was the closest thing I had to a best friend. I had trouble opening up to people I wasn’t related to or sleeping with, a problem Paul shared and attributed to our freaky twin closeness; but because our husbands had been best friends since childhood and I had known O’Reilly since high school, Jess and I warmed to each other over many, many years. I sometimes questioned our friendship, particularly when she was trying to pry into my psyche to get me to confess all the ways that I must secretly be dissatisfied, when the truth was, up until two days ago—provided Jackie wasn’t chucking something at me or I wasn’t thinking about how I was on the losing side of thirty and still didn’t have the children I had always wished for—I was pretty darn content.

  But Jess was fun and easily the most stylish person I’d ever met, which made most of our outings feel sort of like sociological field trips. (Some women spent six hundred dollars on a single pair of shoes; who knew?) Now, however, I was annoyed with her because if O’Reilly knew about Tom’s true sexual preferences before I did, that meant Jess did, too.

  “This is Libby,” I said, as though I didn’t know it was Jess on the other line.

  “Libby, are you okay?”

  “Of course, I’m okay,” I said. (I may or may not have been slurring.)

  “But how are you doing?” she asked, too gently.

  “How am I doing? How am I doing? My husband just told me he was imagining a manwich while he was between my legs. How do you think I’m doing, Jess?”

  “Oh,” she said. I honestly think she expected me to be bubbly about it, which was more my fault than hers, since effervescent was basically my M.O.

  I heard her whisper something.

  “Mother trucker!” I spat. “Is Tom there right now?”

  Jess didn’t respond.

  “Listen, it’s nice of you to check in on me, but I’m kind of in the middle of something.” I murmured a few sweet nothings to the invisible man sitting next to me on the couch, which was now feeling like a raft on a very choppy sea. “Ooooh! You are naughty!” I cried, then hung up. Tom didn’t want to sleep with me, so it didn’t matter anyway, but in my Ambien-addled mind, I’d just made it clear to Jess, O’Reilly, and Tom that I had already moved on.

  Then I got another idea, which is about the point at which things really started to go south.

  SEVEN

  Ty Oshira had worked with me for three years. Rather, he worked on the other side of the floor I was on, and because he was some sort of marketing genius, he had fairly regular dealings with Jackie. “And how is our lady of perpetual discontent?” he would say under his breath as he tiptoed up to my cubicle. “Full of grace!” I would respond, giggling like a schoolgirl. Ty was clever, charismatic, and—how do I put this delicately?—the hotness.

  I had a crush on him, the kind that has the primary purpose of making the workday more palatable. This crush was fueled by a healthy dose of interest on his part. I’d caught him stealing glances at my rear end more than a few times, and when I finally dragged Tom to our holiday party, Ty, who was reasonably hammered, cornered me at the bar, pointed across
the room to Tom, and said, “That guy is Mr. Libby Miller?” as though Tom wasn’t four inches taller than Ty and handsome in his own right.

  The last year Ty and I spent as coworkers, our casual-if-flirty acquaintanceship morphed into a friendship of sorts. We would often grab coffee and occasionally had lunch when Jackie was out of town. Ty would tell me about how awful it was to be a thirty-five-year-old man still on the dating scene; I would try to assure him that married life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, so unconvincingly that he would howl with laughter and accuse me of being a lobbyist for a pro-marriage organization. He wasn’t wrong. I loved Tom and wouldn’t have dreamed of cheating on him. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t love the way Ty made me feel fresh and fascinating—a woman to be won over.

  Then Ty left to work for another agency, and that was the end of that, until I ran into him on the street last spring. “Libby Miller, full of grace,” he said, breaking into an irresistible grin.

  “Hey, Ty.” I blushed, knowing that this chance encounter meant I would have to work hard to keep his face from surfacing during intimate moments with Tom over the next month or so. “How’s the job going?”

  “Well, the publisher doesn’t accuse me of being mentally disabled, so that’s a start,” he said. Then he smiled deviously. “And how’s that husband of yours?”

  “Fine,” I stammered. “He’s fine.”

  “Well, if that ever changes, look me up, Libby Miller,” he said, then strode away, like he hadn’t just stamped a question mark on my heart.

  I had a conundrum. Even if I had the time to try, there was simply no way to save my marriage. Yet I didn’t want to die having slept with just one man in my preternaturally short life, particularly given what I now knew about that man. To be honest, I would have been happy with a frenetic make-out session (as getting naked would be tricky; I didn’t want to have to explain my bandaged abdomen). I just needed someone—someone who was definitely not Tom, but who was also not a random serial killer—to affirm that I was an interesting, desirable person with a perfectly healthy sex drive. I was pretty sure that person was Ty Oshira.

  The problem was, I didn’t believe in cheating. And quickie divorce, as it happens, isn’t actually quick; I would have my passport long before I could expect to serve Tom with papers that would dissolve our union. (Tom had insisted on including “till death do us part” in our vows, even though I found this incredibly morbid. I hated that on this final item of business between us, he would probably be right.)

  I was going to have to do things the old-fashioned way.

  Now, I wasn’t planning to kill him. If I were going to meet up with God in the near future, I didn’t want Tom to beat me to the punch. Besides, all my stabby urges had been replaced by a wobbly melancholy. I was devastated when I woke each morning and remembered, yet again, why Tom wasn’t lying beside me. At one point I found myself simultaneously cursing him and reaching for the phone to call him and tell him all about how my terrible husband had wronged me, as if there were two versions of him: the imposter who had just hurt me, and the real Tom, who would curse imposter Tom and make it all better.

  Beneath my morose feelings was a not-unwarranted sense of urgency; and even deeper still—and I know this sounds strange—a beacon of optimism shone through. I was going to die, which was extremely unfortunate, but presumably I would see my mother again soon, just as I’d been waiting to do my entire life.

  Moreover, I could have been hit by a car an hour after Tom told me he was gay, and that would have been that. As much as I hated to admit this, even to myself, terminal cancer did offer one parting gift: a sliver of extra time in which to alter my narrative.

  I put on my favorite outfit, a burgundy sweater dress and high-heeled leather boots that Jess talked me into buying last year. Then I removed my wedding band, which I should have done three days before. I dangled it over the toilet bowl, daring myself to let it hit the white porcelain and disappear in a whoosh of water.

  Tom had picked out the ring for me. I didn’t see it for the first time until he was putting it on my finger at our wedding ceremony. “Do you really like it?” he asked me eagerly, moments after the pastor declared us husband and wife.

  “Yes,” I whispered, running my finger over the smooth gold. It was neither thick nor thin, and unlike the lovely engagement ring that had been my mother’s and was now mine, the band was not ornate in any way.

  It was, I thought at the time, exactly like the love Tom and I shared: simple and easy.

  Now I knew there was nothing easy about our love, nor much else in life. I stopped waving my hand precariously over the toilet and tossed the ring in my makeup bag.

  An hour later, I marched through the doors of Tom’s office.

  “Libby! Long time no see!” said Alex from behind the reception desk. Alex was my kind of person: too smart for his job, but wise enough to know that complaining wouldn’t help him fly the coop any faster.

  “Hey, Alex,” I said, reminding myself to smile. “Is Tom around?”

  “Yep,” he said, then rang Tom, who was out to the lobby like a shot. While I fully own that I maimed him and kicked him out of our home, I was still shocked to see that—why, yes, he actually seemed irritated that I showed up at his workplace.

  “Bad timing?” I asked.

  “No, of course not,” he said, leaning in to hug me.

  I bent back like the reigning limbo champion of Eastern Illinois. “No, no, no,” I chided playfully, well aware that Tom would catch the edge in my voice.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said.

  “Let’s not,” I said, directing him into the cube city that made up his workplace.

  “Libby, what’s this about?” he asked under his breath as I walked to his desk.

  If he was worried that I would out him to his coworkers, he needn’t have been. “I told you, I don’t want you at the apartment.”

  “Uh, okay,” he said, fidgeting with the buttons on his shirtsleeve. “So . . . are you here to talk? I was hoping we could do that sometime soon.”

  “No, I am not.” I could have spread it out, made a scene. But I’ll admit—I wanted it to be over. “It turns out that the State of Illinois decided that divorce should be a long and painful process.”

  “I already told you. I don’t want a divorce.”

  “You don’t, Tom, but you will,” I said. I felt a sob bubbling up from deep within me. I swallowed it and steadied myself. “So without further ado—”

  I glanced around to see if his colleagues were within earshot, and darn if he didn’t duck like I was about to pull out a gun.

  “Get up, fudgewit,” I said sharply.

  He rose slowly.

  “Tom Miller,” I said, “I, Libby Miller, divorce you. I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you.”

  I was expecting shock, but as my eyes met his, all I saw was hurt.

  This is not your fault, Libby, I reminded myself. Don’t let his pain emotionally derail you. He’s the one who threw you on the tracks.

  “Good-bye, ex-husband,” I said quietly. Then I turned and left his cube without looking back—not to make a point, but because I was not certain that I would be able to keep myself from rushing at him with apologies, acceptance, and absolution for us both.

  Slightly shaken but still committed to my original mission, I arrived at Ty Oshira’s office just as Chicago began to take lunch. The office occupied the bottom half of a brick row house tucked in a tony neighborhood just outside of downtown. I rang the doorbell, said Ty’s name into the black box as prompted, and was immediately buzzed in. I found myself in a sitting room filled with antique furniture and large oil portraits, any one of which would appraise for more than my net worth.

  Ty entered through a set of mahogany double doors. “Libby,” he said in a tone that was kind, but hardly oozing with the eager testosterone I
’d been anticipating. “What brings you here?”

  “Hi, Ty,” I said, flustered. We were already off script—and why was his expression one of platonic curiosity?

  “Let me guess: things with Jackie aren’t going so stellar,” he said with a smile.

  Tom, I thought with panic. You mean Tom. Remember? I laughed nervously. “You could say that.”

  Just then, a woman walked through the doors. I’d like to describe her as waddling, but alas, even at a good seven to eight months pregnant, she was all but gliding on air, a lithe goddess with a basketball of fertility attached to her abdomen. She was very pretty, and she beamed at me as though we were old friends. Then she put her hand on Ty’s lower back in a decidedly un-coworker way. I was momentarily puzzled—had I confused his home and work addresses?

  “Libby, this is Shea Broderick,” Ty said.

  I stared blankly. “As in—”

  “Broderick Media,” said Shea, just as Ty said, “My wife.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, my goodness. How wonderful.”

  “Isn’t it?” Ty said, grinning at Shea. “We were just married a few months ago.”

  “It looks bad, doesn’t it?” Shea smiled. “With me being forty, and Ty’s boss to boot. But I couldn’t have known when I hired him that we would fall in love.”

  If she was forty, I was fast approaching four hundred. No wonder my body up and quit on me.

  “Libby, can you blame me?” Ty said.

  I opened my eyes wide as though I understood completely, even as I began to pray for the rapture: How’s now for you, God? Because now is definitely a good time for me.

  “I mean, in the past year alone, Shea has funded literacy programs for—how many kids is it, baby?”

  “Oh, you, stop it!” Shea said, all faux humble.

  “Seriously! Libby, did you know that almost forty percent of people in Chicago proper can’t read?”