Once Upon Another Time (2 page)

With my hands cupped
over my mouth, I stood in disbelief at seeing that familiar broad, deep smile
that always made the corner of his eyes crinkle.  His ruffled hair was sun-kissed,
his complexion not paper white, but deeply tanned against his sky blue,
button-down Stafford shirt.  He wore brown loafers and was dressed in the
clothing I had chosen for his burial.  He despised suits. 

Matt was one of
those brilliant, sexy men who had a streak of mischief in his otherwise
military-like polite personality.  He spoke in a deep, soft voice with a slight
New Jersey accent and when he’d turn on the charm, women found him totally
irresistible. 

I brought my hands
down from my mouth and smiled back at him, thinking this could not be
happening.  Yet I felt the same girlish excitement and flutter in my heart I’d
always felt each time I’d look at Matt. 

Was I supposed
to say something?
 
Do I need to move my mouth?
 
Do I just use my
mind to speak?
 
Is this for real?

All at once my
head filled with his deep, soft voice, “Aubrey, find me.”  His voice had a metallic
quality, as if spoken in an empty room with a tin ceiling.

My mouth fell open
as I stared at him with a mix of shock and awe, when I felt a tap to my
shoulder.

I whirled around
to see Laura.

She gave me an
assessing look.  “Hey, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said as the
brow between her eyes creased.

“Ghost?” I
repeated through strained vocal cords that bumped my voice up a couple of
octaves.  “Why would you say that?” 

“Um, it was just
an expression,” she said, as her head cocked to one side like an inquisitive
puppy trying to understand a new command.  “Is something going on that I should
know about?”

I took a quick
glance over my shoulder.  Matt was gone. 

“Going on?” 

“Yes, as in you’re
keeping
something from me.  I can feel it.”

Best friends, we’d
known each other most of our lives and I was dying to tell Laura what was
happening, but I couldn’t find the words.  Maybe it was because of my years of
therapy, and our backgrounds being so different, but I knew for a fact she'd think
I was as cuckoo as a bird.

You see, Laura was
a solid blue chip who could trace her heritage back to the Mayflower.  Stepping
into her parents’ house for the first time at thirteen, I felt as if I’d
entered Camelot.  Her mother wore minks and diamonds and drove a BMW
convertible, a far different lifestyle than my mother who wore pink dyed
rabbit’s fur, mood rings, and drove a Volkswagen bus. 

Conversation
around the dinner table at Laura’s house centered on getting good grades, the
stock market, and her father’s next business trip.  Dinner, if a tofu casserole
could be classified as such, at my house always included talks about protest
marches and parallel universes filled with otherworldly beings.

“Well, are you
going to tell me?” she said, folding her arms across her chest.

“Ah, everything’s
fine.  I take it the guys are waiting in the car.  So, c’mon let’s go.”  I
tugged on her arm to usher her along.

“Stop,” Laura
said, and yanked her arm from me.  Her chin tilted up slightly while staring at
me.  “For weeks you’ve been giving off this strange vibe.  We’re not leaving
this house until you tell me what’s going on.”

There was a long
moment of silence.  Somewhere in the house, Buster, my Main Coon was meowing. 
I glimpsed the anniversary clock on the mantel, sighed deeply, and looked Laura
square in the eye.  Perhaps there was no
right
way to tell Laura about
Matt, and I couldn’t very well lie to her.

“Well, if you
must
know.  A few weeks ago, back in June, I was staring out the window at the
second full moon we’d had that month.  Anyway, I turned away from the window
and felt something furry between my ankles.  Buster tripped me and I fell and
bumped
my head right about here,” I said rubbing my fingers over the spot on the back
of my head.  “And that’s when things become very
strange
and I began
hearing voices in my head.  Well, not voices like commanding me to
kill
or anything having to do with the Zodiac, but more like thoughts.  Like words
popping into my head, not in the form of an actual
voice
, still I could
tell who was thinking what because…well what I’m trying to say is I’m able to
hear
what people are thinking.  But it’s not all the time…I mean…well it’s not a
regular occurrence.  Then there’s my grandmother’s
music
box, the one I
keep in my bedroom…well, you know it doesn’t work, but sometimes it
turns
itself on, and these mystical sounding wind chimes wake me up in the middle of
the night, but most amazing--which I still
cannot
believe--is that I’ve
seen
Matt’s ghost.  He’s trying to connect with me and I think…” 

The words died off
my lips as I stared into Laura’s unblinking, luminous green eyes feeling as if
all of what I said had fallen off into some deep, black hole. 

Laura’s eyebrow
jumped.  “Hmm, now it all makes sense,” she said, while slowly shaking her
head. 

The look of
empathy was in her eyes.  I knew it!  She thinks I’m insane.  She’d given me
the same look the time she called my shrink after my OCD episode.  I had gone
into hysterics after cleaning the house like a crazy woman and running out of
dusting spray, which I tried to explain was actually frustration over Buster
spraying the coffee table.   

“Aubrey, I am
so
sorry.  I feel awful.  I of all people should have realized how tortuous it
must be for you to go on blind dates.  I just realized it totally goes against
the grain of your
control
issues.  I hope you understand I was just
trying to help,”

“Huh?”

“I get it.  You’re
stressing because of me.  I’m sorry you had to make up that ridiculous story
just to show me how
ridiculous
I’ve been in playing matchmaker for the
past umpteen years.”

Did she not
hear a word I said?
 

“I promise I’ll
never interfere again,” Laura said, as she rubbed my arm.  “Forgive me?”

Probably
information overload, I thought.  Laura’s generous lips spread into a wide
smile as she tucked a tendril of platinum hair behind her ear.

“Of course,” I
said, as we retreated from the house without further comment. 

****

On the ride to the
restaurant, while the others chatted on about the weather and politics, I kept
wondering why Matt would be haunting me.  Was it because his death really was
my fault like I’d thought all along or was it because I wasn’t in touch with
reality?  Maybe my OCD was twisting my thoughts making me
imagine
things.  Perhaps something got screwed up in my head after fantasizing for the
past six years that one day I’d see Matt and we’d talk and I’d find the answers
to what really happened right before his accident.  Answers I desperately needed. 
And because he died shortly after the coast guard helicopter rushed him to the
hospital, I never had the chance to say any final words and tell him how much I
loved him. 

We arrived at the
restaurant and I forced myself to stop laboring over my self-inflicted guilt,
or even attempt to make sense of just seeing my dead husband suddenly materialize
after six years.

“Don’t you just
love the décor,” Laura said, while David spoke to the leggy, redheaded hostess
about our reservations.

“I suppose,” I
said, as Jack, my date, closed in on me so tight that he popped my air space
bubble making me feel uncomfortable.  I moved away from him to check out the
lobby walls that displayed various black and white photos of classic movie
stars like Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Maureen O’Sullivan, and a slew of others.  The
décor seemed reminiscent of the nineteen thirties with a romantic art deco styling. 
The dimly lit dining area had red-velvet canopies over velvet-lined private
booths with candlelit tables, which all seemed a little over the top. 

However, for Laura,
a former debutante whose teen years were chronicled in the society columns of
the
Providence Journal
, she was right in her element in upper crust
restaurants.  You know the kind with the “organic, grass fed, cage free, weekly
massaged” beef flown in from half way around the world.  Whereas, I would have
been just as content to stay at home and pop a frozen
Lean Cuisine
into
the microwave. 

Once seated at our
table, I couldn’t help but notice all the waiters gliding around the dining
room so effortlessly taking orders while dressed in full
Love Boat
regalia.  In the center of the room, a pianist tickled the ivories on a black
baby grand.  Service was fast, as it wasn’t long before my drink order
arrived.  Emotionally, I was a mess and downed my cosmopolitan like a sailor
whose ship had just pulled into port. 

While David,
Laura, and Jack were still conferring with one another over the wine list, I’d
made up my mind about Matt.  What I was experiencing had to be real--that
seeing Matt was
real
.  Granted, a dead husband trying to relay a message
to his wife was hardly a monopoly with the Sylvia Browne’s of the world
connecting with the dead at will.  However, I was just an ordinary person.  I’d
always thought of ghosts only in the fictional sense like
The Ghosts of
Motley Hall
and
Ghostbusters
, and suddenly it was as if I was on
some paranormal reality television show.

I couldn’t make
sense of why Matt would ask me to find him when he was right there in front of
me thirty minutes ago.  Besides, somehow after years of being dead, he had found
me
!  I felt a little cheated when Laura interrupted what could have been
my only chance to ask Matt what had happened the day of his death and tell him
how much I missed him, that I will never stop loving him.  Not being able to
remember what had taken place right before the accident on Block Island
magnified my obsession in wanting to speak with Matt.  My psychiatrist
diagnosed my memory loss as psychological trauma.  My OCD was rooted in guilt
over Matt’s death.  Somehow, I felt his death was my fault, but didn’t know why. 

With thoughts
still on Matt, I pretended to study the menu when I sensed someone’s eyes on
me.  Coyly, I turned my head to the left to look at Jack.  In my head, I heard what
he was thinking.  “Hmm, beautiful long, dark wavy hair, full lips, violet
colored eyes…remarkable resemblance to a young, thirty-year-old Elizabeth
Taylor.” 

People had told me
that same thing time and again.  As far as I was concerned, the only thing I
had in common with Liz was that I had just as much bad luck with keeping a
boyfriend as she had with keeping a husband. 

Jack was staring
at me with a glowing smile.  I was beginning to think he really was a
nice
guy, when in my head I heard him say, “Small-breasted though.”

Ugh, the
audacity
!  I turned back to the menu while pulling up on the spaghetti
straps of the vintage fifties little black dress I had borrowed from Laura.  She
was
so
into designer vintage clothing.

After a second
round of drinks, the waiter arrived to take our dinner orders.  By then, my
mind was in a mellow wad of haze.  I thought back to the yellow warning label
on the prescription bottle of the anti-anxiety medicine that I had taken,
WARNING, ALCOHOL MAY INTENSIFY THIS EFFECT. 

Oh well, too
late.

“And for you,
ma’am?”

A short,
twenty-something young man tapping a pen to his order pad stared down at me. 
His neck was a splotchy pink, as if his black bowtie was cutting off his
circulation.  Ordinarily I would have felt annoyed at his blatant impatience,
but I had no control over the relaxed grin that stretched across my face. 
“I’ll have the Peter Lorre Lamb Chops with Ethel Merman Mint Sauce,” I said. 

Laura leaned over
and whispered in my ear.  “You have that Mona Lisa look.  Maybe you should slow
down on
those
,” she said as she eyed the empty martini glass in front of
me.

“I’m fine,” I said
in a singsong tone, as the drink waiter swooped up to the table and set another
cosmopolitan down in front of me--my third.

I ignored Laura
and looked across the table at her boyfriend, David.  Spiky beach-boy blond
hair, soft green eyes, and golden complexion with an upper body that looked
toned under his expensive linen blazer.  He reminded me of someone who’d be
more comfortable riding a boogie board or hanging ten surfing the beaches of
Waikiki as opposed to being the financial “wizard,” he claimed to be.  Laura
always maintained an air of detachment about her that appealed to men who drove
expensive vehicles and vacationed in Palm Springs, and that fit David to a T. 

I was more like
the lollipop on the conveyor belt of “dating relationships” that never made the
final cut.  Too tall, slightly skewed shape, lacks sparkle, and has a big chip
of emotional detachment. 

As I cradled my
martini glass in both hands with elbows resting on the table, I examined Jack’s
brown hound’s-tooth jacket that looked as if it’d been hanging in his closet
since the nineties.  However, he did live up to the handsome professor type
with wavy, longish salt and pepper hair and lake blue eyes behind Buddy Holly
black-rimmed eyeglasses.

Although I felt
more than a little tipsy, I was holding my own while listening attentively to
Jack as he spoke about his tenure at Brown University.  He had a good sense of
humor, considering he was a political science professor.  Laura jumped in to
say he’d authored numerous theoretical articles in addition to authoring
several books, which really impressed me.

The waiter brought
a bottle of Pinot Noir to the table and poured a sampling into Jack’s wine
glass.  Lifting the glass, he waved it under his nose.  His nostrils looked
like the wingspan of a 747 as he sniffed in the aroma.  The swirling of the
wine in his glass lasted so long it was making me dizzy, when finally he took a
sip and began a tirade of spewing endless adjectives like nutty, buttery, fat,
thin....