Wish You Were Here (31 page)

Even though this is an article and I cannot
hear
his voice, there is something in his words that speaks to me. A desperation. A discombobulation. A…wonder.

I type his name into Facebook. There are a plethora of Eric Genoveses, but only one in Cedar Rapids.

I click the message button. My hands hover over the keyboard.

The psychologist has encouraged me to find a footing in this world, even if it feels strange. There is more than enough scientific evidence that the medication used to sedate me could have messed with my mind sufficiently to create what I thought was an alternate reality, but what everyone else recognizes as a drug dream. There are dozens of witnesses to the fact that I was lying in a hospital for ten days; I am the only person who thinks differently. Or to put it another way: the facts add up to one explanation that anyone rational would accept.

But none of those people experienced what I did.

And there are all kinds of things that used to be considered inconceivable but that turned out to be the opposite—from the earth circling the sun to black holes to diseases that jump from bats to humans. Sometimes the impossible is possible.

I don’t know why I keep feeling the tug back to that other place. I don’t know why I’m not thanking my lucky stars to be alive and
here
. But I do believe that there’s a reason I cannot let go of this—science and doctors and logic be damned.

And I think Eric Genovese might know what I’m talking about.

Hello,
I type.
You don’t know me, but I read your story in the newspaper.

I was on a ventilator for five days.

I think I lived a different life, too.

On April 19, we celebrate my birthday.

Finn orders a fat slice of cake from one of our favorite delis. “Carrot cake?” I ask, when he sets it on the table.

“It’s your favorite,” Finn says. “We always split it when it’s on the menu.”

Because it is
his
favorite, but I don’t say that. He’s gone out of his way to make sure he’s not working tonight, and he’s trying to make the day special for me, even if it looks and feels exactly like yesterday and I haven’t left the apartment in days.

When he sings to me, I have an uncanny sense that I’ve done this before, because I
have
. I think about how Beatriz made me a cake; how Gabriel and I slept outside by a campfire. How he gave me a volcano as a present.

Since we don’t have birthday candles, Finn scrounges up a fancy Jo Malone scented candle that Eva gave me for Christmas and lights it. When he hands me a jewelry-size box, my blood thunders in my ears.

Thisisitthisisitthisisit
. The thought becomes a second pulse. It feels like more than just the biggest question I will ever be asked; it is the understanding that the answer will be for life.

For life.

Which one?

Finn bumps his shoulder against mine. “Open it,” he urges.

I manage to stretch a smile over my face and I tug at the improvised wrapping paper—yesterday’s
Times
. Inside is a little bracelet that says
WARRIOR
.

“That’s how I think of you,” Finn admits. “I am so fucking glad you’re a fighter, Di.”

He leans in, threading his hand through my hair and kissing me. When I pull away, I lift the bracelet from the box and he helps me put it on. “Do you like it?”

It is rose gold, and catches the light, and it’s not an engagement ring.

I love it.

I look up to find Finn already digging into the slice of cake. “Get in here,” he says, his mouth full, “before I finish it all.”

I feed my sourdough starter. I watch YouTube tutorials so I can cut Finn’s hair. I have another session with Dr. DeSantos. I FaceTime Rodney and we dissect the new email we received from Sotheby’s, saying that we will continue to be furloughed through the summer.

The United States crosses a million cases of Covid-19.

I stop using my quad cane. Although I get tired if I am on my feet too long and even one flight of stairs leaves me winded, balance is no longer an issue. I go to put Candis away in my closet and when I do, I remember the shoebox with my old art supplies inside.

Carefully, I tug it loose and set it on the bed.

I peel back the cover and find acrylic paints and a crusty palette and brushes. My fingers sift through the cool metal tubes and my nails catch on dried bits of paint. Something unfurls in me, like the thinnest green shoot from a seed that’s been buried.

It has been so long since I painted that I don’t have an easel, I don’t have gesso, I don’t have a canvas. The wall is the perfect surface to work on, but this is a rental and I can’t. Finally I manage to tug the dresser away from the wall. It’s something we picked up at a secondhand shop and primed with the intent of repainting one day—but we never got around to it. The wood on the back is smooth and white and waiting.

I sit down on the floor with a pencil and begin, in rough, sweeping strokes, to draw. It feels otherworldly, like I’m a medium channeling from somewhere else, watching the unlikely manifest before my eyes. I tumble into the zone, blocking out the sounds of the city and the occasional ping of my phone. I squeeze a rainbow of color on the palette, touch the tip of a brush to a carmine line, and draw it over the wood like a scalpel. There’s a sense of relief at having made contact, and anxiety at not knowing what comes next.

I don’t notice the sun going down and I don’t hear Finn’s keys in the door when he comes home. By then, I have covered the back of the dresser with color and shape, sea and sky. There is paint in my hair and under my fingernails, my joints are stiff from sitting, and I am thousands of miles away when I realize Finn is standing in front of me, calling my name.

I blink up at him. He’s showered and a towel is wrapped around his waist. “You’re home,” I say.

“And you’re painting.” A smile ghosts over his lips. “On our bureau.”

“I didn’t have a canvas,” I tell him.

“I see.” Finn moves to stand behind me, so that he can view what I’ve done. I try to stare at it, too, through a stranger’s eyes.

The sky is an unholy cobalt, with breaths of clouds like afterthoughts. They’re mirrored in the still surface of a lagoon. Flamingos goose-step across a sandbar, or sleep with their legs bent into acute angles. A manchineel tree squats like the old crone in a fairy tale, poison at her fingertips.

Finn crouches down beside me. He stretches out a hand toward the art, but acrylics dry so quickly I know he cannot smudge anything. “Diana,” he says after a moment. “This is…I didn’t know you could paint like this.” He points to two small figures, far in the distance, so tiny they would easily be overlooked if you weren’t paying attention.

“Where’s this supposed to be?” Finn asks.

I don’t answer. I don’t have to.

“Oh,” he says, standing again. He takes a step away, and then another, until he has found a smile to wear. “You’re a very good artist,” Finn says, keeping his voice light. “What else are you hiding from me?”

By the time we go to bed that night, Finn has maneuvered the dresser back into position so that the lagoon I’ve drawn is flush against the wall, hidden away. I don’t mind. I like knowing there is a side to it that nobody would ever guess is there.

Finn, coming off a forty-hour shift at the hospital, is asleep nearly as soon as his head hits the pillow. He clutches me against him the way a child holds tight to a stuffed animal, a talisman to keep the monsters away from them both.

The first night Finn and I slept together, as he trailed his hands over my skin, he told me that you can never really touch anything, because everything is made of atoms, and atoms have electrons inside them, which have a negative charge. Particles repel other particles that have a similar charge. This means when you lie down in bed, the electrons that make up your body push away the electrons that make up the mattress. You’re actually floating an infinitesimal distance above it.

I had stroked my hand down the center of his chest.
So you’re hallucinating this feeling?
I said.

No, he replied, catching my hand and kissing it. Or so I felt.
It’s our brains working overtime. The nerve cells get a message that some foreign electrons got close enough in space and time to repel our personal electromagnetic field. Our brains tell us that’s the sensation of touch.

You’re saying this is all make-believe?
I asked, rolling on top of him.
This is why I shouldn’t date a scientist.

He held my hips in his hands.
We’re all in our own little worlds.

Come visit mine,
I had said, and I let him slide inside.

Now, I feel Finn’s heat surrounding me and the rough of his skin pressed to mine and I close my eyes. Even wedged against him, I imagine that invisible seam between us.

My throat is on fire and there is an anvil on my chest. I feel hands on me, tugging and rolling and smacking me hard between the shoulder blades. My eyes are crusted and stinging and the pressure under my ribs is unbearable.
Breathe,
I command myself, but the mandate dies in a vacuum.

Then suddenly the heel of a hand presses on my forehead and my nose is pinched shut and my mouth is covered. A gust of heat inflates me like a balloon. I use all my strength to push away, to roll to the side, and the dam bursts. I cough and vomit fluid that burns, that cramps my belly and my sides. I cough and cough and finally gasp in the sweetest, cleanest stream of air.

I fall back, spent, becoming aware of other sensations: the rasp of sand on my skin and the bite of stones, blood coursing from a cut on my lip, the weight of the sun on my brow. A strand of hair is caught across my face and I don’t have the energy to brush it away.

Suddenly it’s gone, and the bright light shining in my eyes is, too. A shadow spreads over me like a protective wing.

Diana.

I force my eyes open and there is Gabriel, dripping wet, leaning over me. His hands frame my face, and when he smiles, it pulls at me, like we have been sewn together with invisible thread.

Everything hurts and he is the sun I shouldn’t stare into but cannot turn away from.
“Dios mío,”
he says. “I thought I lost you.”

Coffee. I can smell it. I burrow deeper into the covers and then I feel a warm hand on my shoulder. A kiss on the back of my neck.

I turn, a smile lighting me up from tip to toe.

I push myself up against the pillows. Finn hands me the mug and I cup my hands around the ceramic, feeling its heat and its solidity.

Then, to my shock and his, I burst into tears.

“What did you tell Finn?” Rodney asks me, when we video-chat two days later.

“The truth,” I say. “Kind of.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Girl.”

“I said that I had a dream and I thought I wasn’t going to wake up.”

“Hm,” Rodney says. “That’s like when you bought a vibrator and said it was for neck massages.”

“First,
you
bought me the vibrator for my birthday because you’re an asshole. Second, what was I supposed to say when Finn found it? ‘Thought you might like a little help’?”

I watch as Rodney’s adorable little niece, Chiara, toddles up to him with a baby-size plastic cup. “You sit!” she orders, pointing to the floor.

“Okay, baby,” Rodney says, plopping cross-legged onto the carpet. “I swear to Jesus, if I have to have one more tea party I’m gonna lose my shit.”

Chiara starts lining up stuffed animals and dolls around Rodney. “The thing is, I was trying,” I tell him. “I did what Dr. DeSantos said. I started making routines and sticking to them. And since I’m stuck here all day in an apartment, I now clean and cook, too. I have dinner on the table for Finn every time he comes home.”

“Wow, so you single-handedly set back womyn’s rights by like fifty years? You must be so proud.”

“The only thing I did different that day was paint from memory. A little swimming hole that Gabriel and Beatriz took me to. I’ve been out of rehab for a couple of weeks, Rodney, and I haven’t dreamed my way back there until now.” I hesitate. “I tried. I’d lie in bed and hold on to an image in my head and hope I could still hang on to it after I was asleep, but it never worked.”

“Alternative thought,” Rodney suggests. “Gabriel’s been trying this whole time to break through to you. Kind of like the way Finn was, when he sat next to you at the hospital and talked to you while you were unconscious.”

“Then which one’s the real me?” I ask, in a small voice.

From a purely scientific standpoint, it would seem to be this world—the one where I love Finn and am talking to Rodney. Certainly I have been here the longest, and have more memories of it. But I also know that time doesn’t correspond equally, and that what is moments here might be months there.

“Wouldn’t it be weird if I were talking to you in this world and you were trying to convince me I don’t belong here?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Rodney says. “That kind of shit makes my head hurt. It’s like the Upside Down in
Stranger Things
.”

“Yeah, like with fewer demogorgons and more coconuts.”

“You already talked to a shrink…,” Rodney mulls.

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, I want you to talk to someone else. Rayanne.”

“Your sister?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Rodney says. “She has the sight.”

Before I can respond, the camera tumbles sideways and then rights itself and there is a woman standing next to Rodney who looks like a bigger, more tired version of Chiara. “This her?” Rayanne asks.

“Hi,” I say, feeling ambushed.

“Rodney told me all about what happened to you,” she replies. “This virus sucks. I work in a group home for developmentally disabled folk, and we lost two of our residents to Covid.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, that familiar wash of survivor’s guilt flushing my face.

“When I’m not working there,” Rayanne says matter-of-factly, “I’m a psychic.”

She says this the way you’d say,
I’m a redhead
or
I’m lactose intolerant
. A simple and indisputable fact.

“He says you’re salty because you feel caught between two lives.”

I make a mental note to kill Rodney.

“I mean, I don’t know if I’d put it quite like that,” I qualify. “But then again, I
did
almost die.”

“No
almost
about it,” Rayanne says. “That’s your problem.”

A laugh bubbles out of me. “I promise you, I’m very much alive.”

“Okay, but what if death wasn’t the ending you’ve been told it is? What if time is like fabric, a bolt that’s so long you can’t see where it starts or it ends?” She pauses. “Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it’s like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.”

I feel my heart start to pound harder.

“That new reality, it takes place for you at a normal pace, but within that giant fabric of time. What felt like months to you was actually days here, because again, time was compressed the minute you left that other life.”

“I don’t really understand,” I say.

“You’re not supposed to,” Rayanne tells me. “Most lives end and get compressed into that tiny, tiny hole and we pick up a new thread—a brand-new existence that goes on and on until it’s over and gets condensed down into a single stitch in the fabric again. But for you, the needle jumped. For you, death wasn’t a stitch. It was a veil. You got to peek through, and see what was on the other side.”

I imagine a universe draped with the gauzy textile of millions of lives, tangled and intersecting. I think of needles that might have basted together me and Finn, me and Gabriel, for just a moment in time. I think of yards and yards of cloth as black as night, every fiber twisted into it a different life. In one I am an art specialist. In another, a stranded tourist. There could be infinite versions, some where I cure cancer, or fall in battle; some where I have a dozen children, break a heart, die young.

“We don’t know what reality is,” Rayanne says. “We just pretend we do, because it makes us feel like we’re in control.” She looks at my face on the screen and laughs. “You think I’m loony tunes.”

“No,” I say quickly.

“You don’t have to believe me,” Rayanne replies. “But just remember…you don’t have to believe
them,
either.” She shrugs. “Oh, and you’re not done with all this yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Damned if I know. I just get the message, I don’t write it.” She glances to her left. “Real talk, though, right now the universe is telling me to change Chiara’s diaper before the stench wipes us all out like an asteroid.”

She hands Rodney the phone again. He raises his eyebrows, as if to say
, I told you so
.

Then he lifts the plastic toy cup in his free hand. “And that’s the tea,” he says.

On the days I visit my mother at The Greens, I pack a picnic lunch and always bring extra. I can’t give any to her, because I am still not allowed inside, but I always have a cinnamon roll or a slice of pumpkin bread for Henry, who is there every time I go, no matter what day of the week it is. I always leave a wrapped offering at the front door, too, for the staff, with a note thanking them for keeping the residents safe.

I start bringing a blanket with me, which I set up on the lawn outside my mother’s screened porch. When I call her, she answers, and I tell her the same thing each time: It’s a beautiful day, would she like to join me?

We talk like strangers who have only recently been introduced, which isn’t really that far off the mark. We watch recorded episodes of
American Idol,
and she points out her favorite singers, who are now being filmed from their garages and living rooms without a studio audience. We look over the weekly menus at The Greens. I tell her about the little dog in a yellow raincoat that I saw in the park, and the plots of the books I read. Sometimes she takes out photo albums and walks me through her journeys, while I sketch her in an unlined journal. She can remember the most minute details about the flooding rains in Rio de Janeiro in the eighties, a dynamite explosion in the Philippines, landslides in Uganda. She was in New York City when the Twin Towers collapsed and the air was white with ash and grief. She captured the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting. She did an entire series on the coyotes who brought children over the Mexican border. “I got into a lot of trouble for that one,” she tells me, running her finger over a grainy photograph of a man and a little girl walking across a barren wasteland.

“How come?”

“Because I didn’t show a clear villain,” my mother says. “It’s hard to blame someone for breaking the law when all your choices have been taken away from you. Nobody’s all good or all bad. They just get painted that way.”

I think about what my life would have been like if she had come home and sat down at the kitchen table with me and told me these stories. Surely I would have understood better what captured her attention and drew her away from my father and me, instead of only feeling jealous of it.

These days I am thinking a lot about loss. Because of this pandemic, everyone feels like they’ve been robbed of something, or—in the most extreme and permanent of cases—some
one
. A job, an engagement, a painting for auction. A graduation, a vacation, a freshman year. A grandmother, a sister, a lover. Nobody is guaranteed tomorrow—I realize that viscerally now—but that doesn’t keep us from feeling cheated when it’s yanked away.

During the past two months, the things we are missing have come to feel concentrated and acute, personal. Whatever we forfeit echoes the pain from all the other times we have been disappointed in our lives. When I was sedated and I thought I had lost my mother, it was amplified by all the times she left me when I was little.

She looks up and finds me watching her. I do that, now, trying to see myself in the curve of her jaw or the texture of her hair. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I’d like to go, one day. It’s on my bucket list.”

Her face lights up. “What else is on there?”

“The Galápagos,” I say softly.

“I’ve been,” she replies. “That poor tortoise—Lonesome George. He died.”

I was the one to tell her that, a day before my life changed. “So I hear.” I lean back on my elbows, glancing at her through the screen. She is pixelated and whole at the same time. “Did you always want to travel?” I ask.

“When I was a girl,” my mother says, “we went nowhere. My father was a cattle farmer and he used to say you can’t take a vacation from the cows. One day an encyclopedia salesman came to the house and I begged my parents to subscribe. Every month there was a new volume showing me a world a lot bigger than McGregor, Iowa.”

I am entranced. I try to connect the dots between her childhood and her move to New York City.

“The best part was that we got a bonus book—an atlas,” she adds. “There weren’t computers back then, you know. To see what it looked like thousands of feet up a mountain in Tibet or down in the rice paddies of Vietnam or even just the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—I wanted to be there. All the places. I wanted to put myself in the frame.” She shrugs. “So I did.”

My mother, I realize, mapped out her life literally. I did mine figuratively. But it was for the same reason—to make sure I didn’t get trapped someplace I didn’t want to be.

I don’t know what makes me ask the next question. Maybe it is because I have never struck a tuning fork in myself and heard it resonate in my mother; maybe it’s because I have spent so many years blaming her for not sharing her life with me, even though I never actually asked her to do so. But I sit up, legs crossed, and say, “Do you have children?”

A small frown forms between her brows, and she closes the photo album. Her hands smooth over its cover, nails catching at the embossed gold words.
A LIFE
, it says. Banal, and also spot-on.

“I do,” my mother says, just when I think she will not answer. “I
did
.”

Let this go,
I tell myself. Alzheimer’s 101 says do not remind a person with dementia of a memory or event that might be upsetting.

She meets my gaze through the screen. “I…don’t know,” she says.

But the cloudiness that is the hallmark of her illness isn’t what I see in her eyes. It’s the opposite—the memory of a relationship that wasn’t what it might have been, even if you do not know why.

It’s blinking at your surroundings, and not knowing how you got to this point.

And I am just as guilty of it as she is.

I’ve spent so much time dissecting how different my mother and I are that I never bothered to consider what we have in common.

“I’m tired,” my mother says.

“You should lie down,” I tell her. I gather up my blanket.

“Thank you for visiting,” she says politely.

“Thank you for letting me,” I reply, just as gracious. “Don’t forget to lock the slider.”

I wait until she is inside her apartment, but even in the space of those few seconds, she’s forgotten to secure the latch. I could tell her a million times; she will likely never remember.

While I’m waiting for my Uber, I laugh softly at my foolishness. At first, I thought maybe I’d come back to this world so that I could give my mother a second chance.

Now I’m starting to think I’m here so she can give
me
one.

Every night at seven
P.M
., New Yorkers lean out their windows and bang pots and pans for the frontline workers to hear, in a show of support. Sometimes Finn hears them when he is headed home from work.

On those days, he comes into the apartment and strips and showers and goes right to the cabinet over the refrigerator to take out a bottle of Macallan whiskey. He pours himself a glass and sometimes doesn’t even speak to me until he’s drunk it.

I didn’t know Finn even liked whiskey.

Each night, the amount he pours gets a little bigger. He is careful to leave enough in the bottle for the next night. Sometimes he passes out on the couch and I have to help him to bed.

During the day, when he’s at work, I climb on a step stool and take out the Macallan. I pour some of the whiskey down the sink. Not an amount that would raise suspicion; just enough for me to protect him a little from himself.

By the end of May we aren’t washing the groceries anymore or waiting to open our mail, but we’re freaked out about slipstreams, and whether you can catch the virus from a jogger who runs past you. I start receiving the unemployment benefits I became eligible for when I was furloughed, but they certainly don’t cover my half of the rent.