The After Wife (2 page)

“Hello?” I say. Things go through my head, a work issue, talent gone mad, a deal falling apart, network boss having an early morning “best idea since Viagra” moment, John discovering the first organic persimmons at the Farmer’s Market.

The doorbell is still ringing. I am naked. I can’t open the door naked. Where’re my pajama bottoms? I find my top and slip my arms through.

“Am I speaking to Hannah Marsh Bernal?” a woman asks. She sounded serious.

“Who is this?” I respond. What was this phone call?

“I’m sorry, but I need to speak to Hannah Bernal.” Pajama bottoms, floor, angled at 10 o’clock.

Doorbell ringing. Pajama bottoms on. Check.

“Who is this?” I respond. “This is Hannah, who is this?” Why did my stomach feel weird all of a sudden?

“My name is Dr. Rogan,” she says, “I’m calling from Santa Monica Hospital.”

My fingers go cold. My knees start to shake. I wait, and listen. What did my body know that I didn’t?

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I say. Just like me to apologize for not understanding. It’s something I’ve been doing since first grade.

“Hannah, your husband, John Bernal. He’s been in an accident.”

My heart freezes.

“No?”

“Hannah, is someone there with you?”

“No? Where’s John? Where is he?”

“Hannah, Mrs. Bernal—”

“Where is my husband? I need to speak to him! Please! His … his chairs are here!”

“Hannah, please,” Dr. Rogan says. She’s so calm. I hate her. “You need to come down here. You need someone to bring you to the hospital. John was hit by a car. I’m afraid he’s—”

“I can’t! No!”

(“Mommy?”)

“No? NO?”

(“Mommy?”)

“Mrs. Bernal,” Dr. Rogan says, “I’m so sorry. I’m afraid John didn’t make it—”

“Where is he? I need to see him!” I beg. “He’s alive. Ellie’s here, he can’t—”

“Your husband died in the ambulance. He wasn’t alone. I’m sorry …”

“Mommy!” Ellie appears, somehow, in front of me. Her huge, round eyes stare up at me. John’s huge, round hazel eyes.

The phone rolls out of my hands. I grab Ellie. I look into her eyes, those eyes, John’s eyes. Grab her to my chest and hold her tight. I sink my face in her hair. John had washed her hair last night, in the bath. For the last time. John did everything Ellie. John was Ellie, and Ellie, John. She was his shadow. Were they ever apart?

John always took Ellie to the Farmer’s Market on these crisp Saturday mornings. He hadn’t taken her today. Today was different; Ellie wasn’t awake when he left.

Ellie lived.

“I … I hate God, Ellie,” I say. I start to wail.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” she asks. “What did God do? Why are you crying?”

“I love you, Ellie. Mommy loves you so much.”

Now, Ellie was starting to cry.

“Mommy has to call Uncle Jay and, and Auntie Chloe and Auntie Aimee, okay? I’m okay, really, Ellie. I’m okay …”

I start dialing Jay. The numbers dance as my fingers fumble.

“Can Daddy make me pancakes?”

My heart stops beating.

“Mommy will make pancakes,” I say.

“Mommy doesn’t know how to. Daddy knows how to!”

“I’ll learn. I promise. I’ll learn everything,” then, into the phone, “I’ll learn everything. Jay. Come here. Come here. I know it’s early. Come. Now. It’s John … please.”

Externally, now I am calm. I keep hysteria at bay, away from my voice. To this day, I don’t know how.

First five minutes post-worst-case scenario phone call:

Ellie followed me as I checked our bed. I checked it and re-checked it. Spice, our dog. John’s dog, circling me, watching.

“Mommy, what are you looking for?”

I threw off the covers, then threw them back on, and looked under the mattress. Then, I went through our closet. Ellie stood there in the doorway.

“Mommy, where’s Daddy?”

I ran and checked the kitchen, Ellie’s bathroom. I looked in the backyard. The garage.

John?

I scooped Ellie up and squeezed her so tight she started crying again, and then I took her, still in her pajamas, to my neighbor’s house, Home-of-The-Extremely-Loud-Comfortable-Using-Swear-Words Children. Four patio chairs, wrapped in plastic, were sitting on her porch.

“Can you … feed Ellie?” I asked the tall, sturdy mother-of-thugs, dressed in sweatpants, as she opened the door.

“Oh, Hannah, I signed for your chairs—”

She stopped.

“Can you feed Ellie, please?” I asked. “I’m sorry—”

I heard the familiar, comforting SpongeBob theme song. Proof that the world is normal, and that the phone call was wrong. All wrong. Kids were settling down with cereal bowls in their laps in the living room.

“Are you okay?”

We didn’t know each other well. I’m ashamed of this fact. She was friendly with John. I was the third wheel in the neighbor equation.

“I’ll be back,” I said. I put Ellie down. Hugged her again. She’s my everything in last year’s Christmas pajamas. The neighbor took Ellie’s hand; both stood watching me. The chairs would wait. I ran back to my empty house.

I pulled John’s jeans, T-shirts, jockey shorts, socks out of our laundry basket and put them all in a garbage bag. Preserve his smell. Right Guard and aftershave. The dent in his pillow. Don’t touch the dent. His notepad. His note to me. The bedcover had ink stains from where he fell asleep, his pen still in his hand. His slippers where I could trip on them. Yesterday’s sports section tossed on the rug. I picked it up. John was still alive. Evidence was everywhere! He had to be alive.

I slid back under the covers. And screamed. Spice put his paws on the bed and barked.

A car screeched to a halt on the street, a door slam, another door slam, a voice calling my name. Best Friend Chloe rushed in, breathless. “Hannah, oh Hannah … I came as soon as Jay called—what happened, where’s John?”

She went down on her knees and kissed my head, then crawled into bed and wrapped her arms around me while I clutched John’s pillow. The dent, gone now. Just like that. Chloe smells like motherhood. John’s pillow smells like him.

“Accident,” my voice is saying.

Next Best Friend Aimee rushed in,
click-click-click
, boot heels and keys and big jangly purse. “Motherfuck, baby—motherfuck—”

She climbs into my bed, too. She smells like an exotic bird.

My Third (and last—I promise) Best Friend Jay is lifting me out of bed. He hasn’t bothered shaving. Jay hasn’t appeared unshaven since a long-ago Halloween, where he dressed as a scruffy Al Pacino. He holds me, basically carries me to the car. Somehow, we make our way to Santa Monica Hospital. Somehow, we find the room, below ground level, where John lies, waiting. But he’s not waiting. He’ll never wait for me again. Somehow, I manage to identify his body. He is still warm. He looks … perfect. Perfect. His brain, inside his skull, broken.

“But … there’s nothing wrong with him,” I say to the man wearing glasses, dressed in white. We are surrounded by white—white walls, white slabs, white floors.
Are we in heaven?
(It’s cold as hell.)

“I’m sorry,” I say, apologizing, but for what? Tears make it hard for me to talk. My throat is closing up. Jay is holding me up, his arms literally around my waist, as though I’m a puppet. I’ll collapse if he lets go.

“I don’t understand. He looks perfect,” I say. “John? John?”

John is unmarked, but the brain is like that. Fragile. One blow directly to the back of the head.
Intraparenchymal hemorrhage
. I learn this term. I know it so well, I can spell it backward. Bleeding within the brain tissue.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I say. I’m apologizing again.

“I’m sorry,” the man says. We are polite with each other, as though we are both mistaken.

“I can’t leave him here,” I say. “It’s too cold. Can I take him home now?”

Jay pulls me away from the white room with the white slabs.

This is the last time I see John.

Until the next time.

3

September Mourning

“This is what we’re going to do, my angel,” Jay, my partner and first call in joy and tragedy, said. Sadness looked spectacular on him, with his tall, lanky frame, white-blond hair, and cheekbones for days. We were ensconced in my closet, which, prior to today, had been our favorite hideaway, our place to share a glass of wine, analyze shoes, bitch about work and his train wreck of a love life.

Jay sank down next to me in his gunmetal Tom Ford suit and stroked my hair. “Uncle Jay’s putting the ‘fun’ back in funeral,” he murmured.

Jay had called the rabbi. Jay made all “the arrangements” as per Jewish custom. Jay had called John’s father in New York to tell him his beloved son had died. Jay held me for two nights as I screamed and cried, as my knees and hands shook uncontrollably, as I clutched my stomach and threw up, so many times there was nothing but bile, then so many times there was nothing at all. I wept through Jay’s crisp new Prada shirt, ruining it with yesterday’s mascara. I dug my nails into his skin, begging him to get John back here, NOW. I heard him, from the next room, as he entertained Ellie, telling her Mommy wasn’t feeling well. I heard him pause when she asked for Daddy.

“Come here, Ellie,” he said, his voice cracking, “Uncle Jay needs a hug.”

And Jay insisted on dressing me for John’s funeral. I was too weak to resist his styling overtures. Payback for ruining a Prada shirt is a bitch.

“Here’s what I’m visualizing,” he said to the heap on the floor. That would be me. This was the first time I’d seen him in the last three days without Ellie attached to his hip.

“Elizabeth Taylor at Mike Todd’s funeral,” Jay said, then put his hand to his chest. “It’s going to be hard, I’m not going to lie to you, but I think we can pull off the bouffant—dream big, darlings.”

We weren’t alone. A petite blonde clutching a bundle of sage shook her hand; her Buddhist bracelets (or Hindu? I can never remember what religion bracelets are) stirred. Chloe Clybourne Lew wore an Indian prayer shawl and a floor-length tie-dyed silk dress, with no discernible makeup on a face Avedon would have stood in line to photograph. We’d been very close since my first official day of pregnancy in Dr. Scofield’s office. Now she was not having it. “Bouffant is another word for cancer. You know, of course, that hairspray causes global warming and birth defects.” In the background, I heard dogs barking and whining at my back door. Chloe had not arrived unattended; rescue dogs were her gay male escorts. She took them everywhere.

“Birth defects?” I asked. This didn’t sound right.

“Babies don’t even have hair,” Jay sniffed.

“The science is right there on my blog,” Chloe said.

“Whatever. I’m not going to let the planet get between my girl and her ’do,” Jay said.

Chloe was tirelessly concerned for everyone’s welfare—stray dogs, Planet Earth, the homeless, Darfur, and me.
And would not let any of us forget it
. Even after her husband, Billy the Asian Republican, lost his investment banking job, she had to be reminded to stop writing thousand-dollar checks to Doctors Without Borders or the American Cancer Society, as if the checks were parking change.

I met Chloe the day I learned I was pregnant. Seven months along, she was Westside P.C. from her Bolivian peasant blouse to her sandals made in a women’s shelter in Kenya to her almond-eyed children, who had jumped out of the Benetton catalog and were
reading, drawing, and occasionally questioning Chloe in their “obstetrician voices.” I watched them, in awe. I watched her, in awe.
People like this did not exist
.

“How many do you have?” she’d asked me.

“How many what?”

“Children,” she said, looking at me cradling my tummy, as though keeping safe whatever was in there. “Which number is this?”

“Kids? Oh, I don’t have any kids,” I said. “You’re looking at a miracle.” Since John, my whole life had become a miracle. I had a warm, sweet home, a man who loved me. And now … a baby.
Me
.

Little did I know, I had just become Chloe Clybourne Lew’s latest Very Special Project.

“Jay, drop the teasing comb,” Chloe said. As Jay’s eyes pleaded with me, we heard a
click-click-click
 … and Angelina Jolie’s slightly used older sister rushed in on five-inch heels, smelling of cigarettes and drinks with a Romanian spy in a Parisian bistro.

“I feel like shit,” Aimee Le Fleur said. “How’s my girl?” In her fishnet tights, diamond stud earrings from Disappointed Suitor, Spring 1996, and sleek black dress, she looked like Ms. Jolie working undercover.
In other words, impossible to miss
.

I’d met Aimee a hundred years ago, when I was a young buck casting assistant and she was a young buck actress. She came in to read, and I demanded to know where she got her shoes. She demanded a callback, and she would tell me. A draw. We both won. She nailed the gig, and her shoe size is the same as mine, so I borrow what I can’t buy.

“Is this your first funeral, Aimee?” Chloe asked. “You know this isn’t about you, right? Fishnet stockings, really?”

“Eff off, Princess,” Aimee said. “We can’t all rock the burlap look.”