The Other Life (23 page)

“It’s beautiful. I got a bunch of brochures for you.”

“That really touches me.” Hayden put down his fork and gave his sister a hug. “It’s going to mean a lot to Cordell, too.”

“I was hoping to mend fences.”

“Thank you.”

“Is everything on track with you two?” she asked.

“Thank God,” he said, smiling. His pan sizzled and he went back to it. He checked for doneness and then began moving the pieces of chicken to a plate. “He got a small walk-on in an HBO show, and is going back to Los Angeles next week to shoot it. But then he’s coming back here to stay.”

“I’m happy for you, Hayd.”

“Thanks. We’ve been talking more about a wedding, so your timing with this stuff”—he paused to indicate the brochures—“is perfect.”

“I’m glad,” she said, and sipped her water. “There’s something else.”

“I thought so.”

“I was in their chapel,” she began, “thinking about how much you guys would love it, when I sensed something . . .” She trailed off, trying to find a way to explain it. She finished chopping the carrots and dropped them into the salad. Finally she just blurted it out. “There was a portal there, Hayden.”

She waited for a reaction. He stopped cooking and stared at her.

“You didn’t ...” he said.

“I had to. I could feel something critical happening. I thought it had to do with you and Cordell.”

“And?”

She shook her head.

“Mom?” he asked.

Quinn began peeling an onion. “No.”

“What, then?”

“Eugene.” She sliced into the onion. Her eyes burned. “And me.” She cut another slice. “In Fiji.”

Hayden gasped. “Get out!”

“There’s more.”

“More?”

“He proposed.”

Hayden’s jaw dropped. Suddenly, Quinn thought the story was sounding more entertaining than traumatic. Her brother’s reactions tickled her.

“How did he do it?” Hayden asked. “On one knee? With a diamond?”

Quinn smiled. “The size of a peach pit.”

Hayden’s eyes went wide. “What did you say?”

Quinn started to laugh. “I said . . .
yes
!”

“You didn’t! You’re killing me here. This is the best story I’ve ever heard and I can’t even tell anyone.”

“I’m not done.”

“What else could there be?”

“Guess.”

Hayden washed his hands in the sink as he considered this. As he dried them on a dish towel, his face lit up.

“Sex?” he said.

She nodded.

“You slut!” he said, laughing.

She laughed, too. “I had to, Hayd. I thought it would be the fastest way for me to get out of there. A real quickie, you know? But I miscalculated. He was like the Energizer bunny—kept going and going.”

“Viagra!” Hayden cried, and doubled over laughing. “I knew I should never have gotten him that scrip!”

Hayden and Quinn were holding on to each other, shaking with mirth, when Cordell walked into the room. They both turned to look at him, their faces wet with tears.

“Oh, my God,” Cordell said, putting his hand on his heart. “What is it? Has someone crossed over?”

This struck Hayden and Quinn as excruciatingly hilarious, and they collapsed into a longer fit of laughter than they’d had in years.

 

 

THE NEXT DAY, Quinn faced a daunting task, and laughter felt as remote as the lunar landscape. It was time for her to call the hospital and schedule her appointment for an MRI. She wondered if she would ever again laugh so hard she could barely make it to the bathroom in time. This test, she knew, was the moment of truth. She might not emerge from it with
all
the answers, but she would certainly have enough to know just how serious Naomi’s condition really was.

With the date of the MRI circled in red on her calendar, Quinn found it impossible to stay emotionally even, no matter how hard she tried. The following weeks were a tumultuous ride, as Quinn vacillated between sullen silence and fits of fury. She felt guilty for snapping at her husband and son, but it was beyond her control. She simply could not endure the wait with any kind of grace.

Then at last the day arrived, and Quinn was told to “just relax” as she was pushed inside a humming cylinder. She shivered from nerves, and found the words as hollow as the giant tube.

Quinn didn’t consider herself as particularly claustrophobic, but as she lay inside the monstrous machine, listening to the whir of a fan, and imagined her baby’s fate being sealed by the images being generated and analyzed, Quinn felt as if she could rip off her own skin if it meant getting out of there.

“How are you doing?” came a disembodied male voice.

“Not so great. How long have I been in here?”

They had told her it might take close to an hour, and she figured she had already been in there at least that long.

“Almost twelve minutes.”

Twelve minutes? Tears ran down Quinn’s still face. How would she ever endure this? She closed her eyes and tried to take herself on an imaginary journey. She was back in Fiji, this time with Lewis. But, no, the vision wouldn’t stick, as she couldn’t imagine a time in her life when such a trip might be possible. If Naomi lived, their family would forever be burdened with a disabled child. Such a trip would be possible only if the baby didn’t survive, and she didn’t want to envision that outcome.

“You still hanging in there?” came the voice some time later.

“Barely.”

“We’re almost done.”

Thank God thank God thank God, she thought. She counted backward from one hundred. She counted forward to one hundred. She counted to five thousand by tens. She sang songs in her head. Recited poems. When the hell were they going to pull her out?

“You have a strange definition of ‘almost done,’ ” she finally said.

“Sorry,” said the voice. “The baby moved and we need to take some pictures again.”

She closed her eyes. Okay, little girl, she thought. We’re in this together. Literally. If you hold still, I’ll hold still. Deal?

She imagined the baby as a sentient being understanding her message, and all at once, Naomi felt as real to her as Isaac did. She pictured the smooth skin of her cheek, the curl of her tiny toes, the thin skin of her delicate eyelids. And she would have a smell, Quinn realized, distinctly her own.

“Are you okay?” came the voice again, and Quinn realized that she was making crying sounds deep in her throat.

 

 

LATER, AS SHE Stood facing the painting of young Nan hanging in her living room, Quinn finally got it. Sometimes we don’t just simply grow and change. Sometimes life is so harsh and so dark, a part of us gets excised completely, leaving us permanently altered.

It was the day after her MRI. Lewis was at work and Isaac at school. Quinn needed her mother, and was trying hard to resist the temptation to slip through to the other side. So she got in her car and drove to her parents’ home. She wondered if she would ever be able to think of it as simply her dad’s house.

As usual, she dropped her handbag on the table in the hallway, and did a lap around the first floor. Everything looked in good order, but something about the family room gave her pause. What was different? She looked at the couch, the rug, the chairs, and then she saw it—the curio cabinet. That was it! The last time she was there, she had left in such a state that she hadn’t put the furniture back in place. Now the piece was where it belonged and all the knickknacks were back inside. How odd. Who had been there to straighten up? Wouldn’t Hayden or Lewis have told her if they had visited the house? Later, she would ask them. There had to be a simple explanation.

Quinn went into the studio and headed straight for the unfinished landscape resting on the easel. She undraped it and studied the painting.

“I need to tell you something, Mom,” she said to the dark figure in the distance. “I wish I could talk to you in person, because ... I don’t know. I really need you.” She stopped and thought of her mother in the other life. It would be so easy to go home and cross over. To stand facing her mother in this very room, looking into her eyes.

You should still be here, Quinn thought. You should be alive so I could tell you about your granddaughter.

“Damn you,” she said to the painting.

She knew it wasn’t her mother’s fault that the doctors had discovered brain matter in the sac protruding through Naomi’s skull. She knew Nan wouldn’t have been able to do a damned thing about the fact that her baby’s only hope was surgery, and even that offered no guarantees. But she was furious anyway.

She picked up the painting. “If only you were here!” Her muscles tensed in anger, and she looked for something to smash the picture on. She wanted to crack the wooden stretcher, break holes in the canvas. But as she glanced around the studio something shocking caught her eye, and she dropped the landscape.

The curio cabinet wasn’t the only thing that had changed since the last time she was in this house. There, leaning against the wall in the same spot it had been before the break-in, was a stack of unframed paintings. The stolen family portraits! Someone had put them back.

Quinn approached and pulled out each painting to be sure she wasn’t imagining things, then hurried to her cell phone. She called Lewis first, and wasn’t surprised to learn he didn’t know anything about it. Hayden would be working, but she left messages at his school, at home, and on his cell. She had to get to the bottom of this.

That night, when she still hadn’t heard from her brother, Quinn tried him again, but he didn’t answer. By the next morning she was getting nervous. She phoned the office at the high school where he taught, and was told he had called in sick. Quinn wasted no time. She got in her car and drove to his apartment in Brooklyn.

“Hayden, it’s me, Quinn,” she said into the intercom.

Nothing.

“I have a key,” she said. “If you don’t buzz me in I’m just going to let myself in. Please, Hayd.”

The buzzer sounded.

Quinn walked up the two flights to Hayden’s apartment and he answered the door barefoot, in a grubby T-shirt and pajama bottoms.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you answering my calls?”

Hayden pushed the door closed behind her and turned the deadbolt. He shuffled to the couch and dropped himself into it.

“It smells in here,” she said, picking up tissues from the floor.

He didn’t respond.

“Are you sick or depressed?” she asked.

Her brother turned away.

“Answer me, Hayden!”

“What’s the difference?”

Depressed. Her stomach twisted in a knot. “Are you taking your meds?” she asked.

“They’re not working.”

“Did you call Dr. Price?” Though she had met his psychiatrist only once, she had been hearing his name for years.

He shook his head.

“What happened? Is it Cordell?” Quinn felt a rising fury. If Cordell had done this to Hayden, she would tear him apart.

He didn’t respond.

“Answer me, Hayden. Please.”

He looked away.

“Fine, you don’t have to tell me. But I need to know if you’re okay.”

Obviously, he wasn’t okay, but they both knew that the question was shorthand. She was asking if he was suicidal.

She swallowed hard, waiting for a response. It took several moments before he finally spoke. “No,” he whispered.

Quinn gave his shoulder a squeeze and walked into the kitchen. She opened the drawer where Hayden kept his personal phone book and looked up Dr. Price’s phone number. She got his service and told them it was an emergency. The doctor called back within minutes. Quinn explained the situation to him and he asked to speak with Hayden, who took the phone into the bedroom.

Quinn straightened the living room while she waited, listening to Hayden’s soft murmurs from the other side of the door. When at last he emerged, he handed the phone to Quinn.

“He wants to talk to you,” her brother said.

Dr. Price explained to Quinn that Hayden had agreed to check himself into the psychiatric ward at New York University Hospital. He asked her to stay with her brother as he packed his things, and then bring him directly to the facility.

Quinn did as Dr. Price asked. She had lost her mother to suicide. She’d be damned if she was going to lose her brother, too.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER?” GEORGETTE ASKED A FEW DAYS LATER. She had stopped by unannounced and Quinn stood by her front door, blocking the entrance.

“It’s not a good time,” Quinn said.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She didn’t. What good would talking do? Would it make her brother well? Would it help her control all the things in her life that threatened to consume her? Quinn shook her head.

“I’m worried about you,” Georgette said.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Quinn said, and gently shut the door.

She picked up the basket of laundry, telling herself she would not go through the portal, despite her state of mind. She knew, though, that her resolve to resist the temptation had diminished. Between the situation with her brother and the truth about the baby, her whole life felt like an extenuating circumstance.

Downstairs, Quinn set the basket of dirty clothes on the dryer and opened the washing machine. As she dropped in items of clothing, one by one, she could feel the fissure behind her like a human force, calling out to her.

No, she thought, as she tossed in a pair of Isaac’s jeans.

No, she thought, as she threw in Lewis’s gray T-shirt.

No, she repeated, as she balled up her purple blouse.

She turned to the fissure.
Don’t you see what I’m doing?
she wanted to say to her mother.
I’m staying with my family! They need me. Just like I need you.