The Other Life (8 page)

“But she’s with her mommy?”

“I suppose so.”

“I want to see them.”

“We can’t.”

“But they’re so close. Closer than Lima and Bean,” Quinn said, referring to the nicknames Nan had given to Lindsay and Ben, the twins next door.

“How close?” her mother said.

Quinn pointed to a spot on the floor near the wall, where she had felt a connection to the baby self who had died with her mother. Nan looked frightened then and pulled Quinn close.

“Don’t ever try to go there, Quinn. It would be dangerous. You have to stay with me. You understand?”

She heeded her mother’s warning and eventually convinced herself none of it had even happened. The memory faded and all but vanished. Then, one day, when she was playing with Hayden in the backyard, it all became clear to her again—clearer than it had ever been. And from then on she understood that every big decision she made had an equal and opposite reality.

Quinn brought her face toward the fissure in her basement wall and pushed her head right inside the hole. She had to see, once and for all. The pinhole of light seemed to recede. She poked her head in farther but couldn’t get any closer. It was moving away from her.

I should get a flashlight, she thought, and tried to back up. But she couldn’t. Quinn was being pulled inside. She tried to fight it, tried to brace herself against the solid walls of the foundation, but the force was too strong, and suddenly her entire body was sucked inside the darkness. Terror seized her, but only for a second, and then it vanished like vapor. A calmness overtook her, and she floated gently as she was pulled along in the darkness. It was like swimming without effort, the air around her cozy and quiet. Quinn closed her eyes. The tranquillity was intoxicating, and she wanted the feeling to last. She lost track of time, lost any real sense of conscious thought. Slowly, an awareness entered her. She realized she was in warm water now, no longer in darkness.

With a jolt she was Quinn again. And she was underwater, in a very real place with three dimensions and an ordinariness that took her by surprise.

She sat up and looked around. She was in a warm bathtub, and everything about the room was familiar. The striped shower curtain, the sink, the toothbrushes. That was her blow dryer on the shelf above the commode, Eugene’s Rogaine on the counter. All the consciousness of this life was as clear to her as her life with Lewis and Isaac. This was
her
bathroom, the one she shared with Eugene in the Manhattan high-rise they had moved into three years before. Eugene was on the other side of the door, dressing to go out. He was being interviewed about the award he had just been nominated for. Minutes earlier she hadn’t known any of this. But now it was as if she had lived this life all along. She closed her eyes and pictured Isaac and Lewis. Yes, it was all still there. She was as present in one life as she was in the other. Quinn was straddling both worlds.

There was a sharp rap on the door.

“Are you going to be in there all day?” Eugene asked.

“I’ll be right out,” she heard herself say.

Quinn stepped out of the tub and put her hand on her stomach. No baby. No pregnancy. It was just her and Eugene. She looked back at the tub, her lifeline home.

“Did you call Isabel?” he yelled through the door.

“Not yet,” she said. This too was clear to her. Isabel was their travel agent. They were going to Fiji next month on vacation, and Eugene had a list of requirements about the accommodations. Quinn was supposed to go over this checklist with Isabel.

She wrapped herself in the plush green robe that hung on a brass hook, then opened the bathroom door and stared at her bedroom and the man standing in the middle of it. It was Eugene, looking older than he had when they lived together, but the same in all other ways. His nervousness surrounded him like an impenetrable aura.

“Is this okay for the Plaza?” he asked, showing Quinn his outfit. He wore jeans and a blazer over a checked shirt. He was meeting a reporter from
People
for lunch. In this life, he had taken the cable television job and his star was rising.

The attraction she had once felt for him was still there, like muscle memory. His lower lip, red and just a little plump, protruded a tiny, sexy bit. She tied her robe tighter and tried to assess his appearance objectively.

“You look a little rumpled,” she said.

“The shirt?”

She nodded.

Quinn studied him as he took off the blazer and threw it on the bed. His thin hair was thinner now, and more salt than pepper. But his posture was good and he moved well—his gym membership was paying off.

“The black?” he asked, opening his closet.

She shook her head. “The tan cotton sweater.”

As he took it from the shelf in his closet and changed into it, Quinn glanced around the room. The landscape her mother had been working on when she died was hanging on the wall over the king-size bed. It looked bigger in this room, richer. Even the tiny figure seemed more distinct.

Eugene put his sport jacket back on and presented himself to Quinn. “Better?” he asked.

“Better,” she said.

“I have to run.” He kissed her on the mouth. His lips were dry and cool. “You won’t forget to call Isabel?”

She followed him out of the bedroom into the living room. “I won’t forget.”

He opened the door to leave. “And the bed? You’ll make sure it’s firm? I couldn’t sleep last time on that mush.”

“Yes, I’ll make sure. But don’t worry. It’s a luxury hotel.”

“Right. I won’t worry. Because, you know, I can always turn that off when you say so.”

“It’ll be fine.”

He paused at the door and turned back to her, opening his palms to indicate he wanted one last assessment of his clothing.

“You look good,” she said. “Hot. Susan Dennis won’t be able to keep her hands off you. You’ll wind up running off with her and leaving me all alone.”

“You wish.”

“See you later,” she said.

“Bye, babe.” He grabbed his keys from the table by the door, stuffed them into his pocket, and turned to leave. “I forgot to tell you,” he said, turning back around. “Your mother called.” Then he shut the door behind him.

Her mother?

Quinn sat on the couch. Her mother was alive? She looked down at the phone on the side table, trying to wrap her mind around that. Could she really pick it up and dial her parents’ number in Long Island and talk to her mother? Her scalp prickled.

Quinn rose and paced the room. I shouldn’t do this, she thought. I should go back into that bathroom and find a way back. I’m not this person. I’m not a single woman living in New York with her famous boyfriend. I’m not someone who can go to Fiji next month and stay in a luxury hotel with heated towel racks. I’m Quinn. I’m married to Lewis. I’m Isaac’s mom. I’m pregnant with a damaged baby.

And my mother is dead.

Quinn picked up the phone and put it down again, her hands trembling. She went into the kitchen and looked around. The place should have been strange to her, but from the moment she emerged from that bathwater it was all hers.

She opened the cabinet and saw the mug imprinted with the cover of Eugene’s book. She turned it over and examined the underside. Most of the inscription had worn off, but the tops of the letters were still there. It was the very same cup she had in her cabinet at home—the one Eugene had given her the day they met.

Quinn filled it with water and put it in the microwave. She’d have some herbal tea, get her wits about her, figure out what to do.

She ran her hand along the smooth counter. Everything about the place was so familiar, so ordinary, and yet. Yet this wasn’t where she lived. This wasn’t where her life was.

The microwave beeped and she took out the steaming cup. She opened the cabinet where she knew she kept the tea and then shut it, realizing that she could have a glass of wine, since she wasn’t pregnant. She pulled a bottle from the wine rack and stopped herself. No, she thought. I can’t do this. I have to get home. She went back to the bathroom, where she kneeled beside the tub and ran her fingers over the porcelain of the bottom, looking for the fissure.

It has to be here, she thought. It has to.

The phone rang and Quinn stopped what she was doing. Ignore it, she told herself. But on the second ring she rose and went into the bedroom, where there was an old phone on the nightstand next to the bed. It was a fifty-year-old collectible she and Eugene had bought in the Berkshires last fall. He had gotten a kick out of the fact that this heavy black relic—the kind of phone he remembered from his early childhood—was now an antique. And so they bought it, assured by the store owner that it worked. Of course, it had a heavy old dial and no caller ID, so they didn’t use it much. But Eugene enjoyed the nostalgia of it.

It rang a third time and Quinn just stared. On the fourth ring she picked it up.

“Hello?” She had expected her own voice to sound strange, but it didn’t. A bit nervous, maybe, but that was all. It was just her, Quinn, picking up the phone in her bedroom.

“Hi, kiddo,” said the voice on the other end.

Quinn pulled her robe tighter against the sudden chill that ran through her. She swallowed against a lump in her throat before she could speak.

“Mom?”

“ARE YOU OKAY? YOU SOUND UPSET.”

Quinn realized tears were spilling down her face. She wiped them with the back of her hand. “I’m . . . I’m okay.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m just . . . catching a cold or something.” Quinn covered her mouth so that her mother wouldn’t hear her weeping. God, she was talking to her mother. Her
mother
!

“Of course you are. You hardly get any sleep. If you don’t stop burning the candle at both ends . . .” Nan paused. “Are you crying?”

“Mommy.” It was primal. Juvenile. She couldn’t help it.

“You
are
crying. What is it?”

Quinn paused to regroup. She glanced around the room, trying to think fast. “Just . . . something dumb on TV.” Quinn sniffed, attempting to recover.

“TV? Oh, for heaven’s sake. Really, Quinn. If you want to cry, read a book or something.”

“I know,” Quinn said, smiling now through her tears. Her mother’s disdain for television was practically legendary, and it comforted her to know she hadn’t changed. She picked up a tissue and blew her nose. “Guilty pleasure.”

“You’re better off with chocolate. Or sex. But listen, Dad and I are going to be in the city on Monday to attend a gallery show, and I was wondering if you and Eugene were free for dinner. We can make it an early birthday celebration, since you’ll be turning thirty-six in Fiji.”

That’s right, Quinn thought. The Fiji trip was a birthday present from Eugene. It was as clear as every birthday present he had bought her the past ten years in this life, each one more elaborate than the last. He did everything he could think of to keep her from leaving him. Everything except propose, that is. Eugene was freaked out by the thought of marriage.

“Dinner,” Quinn said, “sure.”

“Great. We’ll meet at your apartment and then head over to that place on the corner. I’ll call Hayden and see if he’s free, too.”

Quinn imagined standing in the living room of this apartment and seeing her mother in the flesh. She had to sit down on the bed to catch her breath.

“Quinn?”

“Yes. Okay, next Monday. I’ll see you next Monday.”

“Perfect. Bye, cookie.”

“Wait!”

“What is it?”

Quinn pressed the heavy receiver into her face. She didn’t want to let go. “Nothing,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” her mother said. “Love you.”

Quinn swallowed. Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. “Love you, too.”

She hung up the phone and sat there, too stunned to go back into the bathroom and search for the portal. Or maybe the part of her that wanted to stay in this life and look into her mother’s eyes again was short-circuiting the part that needed to get back to her husband and son.

Quinn found herself supine on the bed, staring up at the ceiling as she tried to recall her last good conversation with Nan in her “Lewis life,” which was how she now thought about it. All she could remember was the final talk she’d had with her mother in her studio, and the stupid fight they’d had a few weeks before, on Thanksgiving.

Quinn and Lewis were newly married and excited to make the feast at their place. They lived in a renovated prewar apartment in Queens, and though it was spacious compared to the tiny Manhattan box Quinn had lived in after she moved out of Eugene’s place, it had just enough room to fit the two families around the table. Quinn was tense about the get-together because she knew her mother wasn’t too fond of Arlene, Lewis’s mom, and made no effort to hide her feelings.

But all was going well, and when Arlene’s husband asked Quinn what was new at the bookstore, she didn’t think her response would be incendiary. She said that the latest event—a reading by an acclaimed novelist—had drawn an embarrassingly small crowd.

“Unfortunately, people just aren’t reading much fiction these days,” Quinn explained.

“Makes sense to me,” Arlene said as she reached for the stuffing. She put half a spoonful on her plate.

“How so?” Nan asked, and Quinn tensed. This was just the kind of remark her mother could sink her teeth into.

Arlene took a deep breath. “I never did understand the whole appeal of novels.” She straightened her earrings and then her bracelets. “Just open the newspaper any day. There are so many interesting things going on in real life to read about.”

Just let it go, Mom, Quinn thought. But one glance in Nan’s direction told her there wasn’t a chance. Her mother was glaring at Arlene like a bull ready to charge.