Anybody Out There?

  “How about Jenni’s?” It was some twenty-four-hour coffee place. On account of her condition Rachel knew lots of twenty-four-hour coffee places. “See you there in thirty minutes.”

  I pulled on some clothes and ran out the door; I couldn’t wait in the apartment a moment longer. In the taxi I saw him walking along Fourteenth Street, but this time I knew it wasn’t him.

  I arrived at Jenni’s far too early, ordered a latte, and tried to eavesdrop on the intense conversation which was taking place between a foursome of gaunt, good-looking men dressed in black. Unfortunately I only caught the occasional word: “…getting high…”; “…let go with love…”; “…a dash of teriyaki sauce, dude…”

  Then Rachel arrived. “It’s a while since I’ve been here,” she commented, looking nervously at the boys. “I’m getting introspection flashbacks.” She sat down and ordered a green tea. “Anna, are you okay? Has something happened?”

  “I dreamed about Aidan last night.”

  “That’s normal, one of the things that’s meant to happen. Like seeing him everywhere. So what did you dream?”

  “I dreamed that he was dead.”

  Pause. “That’s because he is, Anna.”

  “I know that.”

  Another pause. “You’re not really acting like you do. Anna, I’m so sorry, but no amount of pretending that everything is the same will change what happened.”

  “But I don’t want him to be dead.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Of course you don’t! He was your husband, the man—”

  “Rachel, please don’t say ‘was.’ I hate all this past-tense stuff. And it’s not about me, it’s him I’m worried about. I’m so afraid he’ll freak out when he discovers what’s happened. He’ll be so pissed off and scared and I can’t help him. Rachel,” I said, and suddenly I couldn’t bear it, “Aidan’s going to hate being dead.”

  29

  Rachel looked blank. Like she wasn’t listening to me, then I realized she was in shock. Was I that bad?

  “We had so many plans,” I said. “We weren’t going to die until we were eighty. And he worried about me; he wanted to take care of me, and if he can’t he’ll go mental. And, Rachel, he was so strong and healthy, hardly ever sick. How’s he going to handle having died?”

  “Er…um, let’s see.” This had never happened before: Rachel always had a theory on emotional ailments. “Anna, this is too big for me. You need professional help, someone who specializes in this. A grief counselor. I’ve brought you a book about bereavement, which might help, but you really need to see an expert—”

  “Rachel, I just want to talk to him. That’s all I want. I can’t bear to think of him trapped someplace awful and not being able to contact me. I mean, where is he? Where did he go?”

  Her eyes got bigger and bigger as the dismay on her face worsened. “Anna, I really think—”

  The men in black were leaving, and as they passed our table, one of them clocked Rachel and did a double take.

  He had a lean face, skin marked from old acne scars, tormented brown eyes, and long dark hair. He wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  “Hey!” he said. “I’ve met you? The meetings in St. Marks Place? It’s Rachel, right? I’m Angelo. So how’re you doing? Still conflicted?”

  “No,” Rachel said snippily, giving off such strong “this is so inappropriate” vibes you could nearly see them zigzagging through the air.

  “So? You gonna marry the guy?”

  “Yes.” More snippiness. But she couldn’t resist sticking out her hand for him to admire her engagement ring.

  “Wow. Getting married. Well, congratulations. He is one lucky dude.”

  Then he looked at me. A look of deep compassion. “Oh, little girl,” he said. “It’s bad, hey?”

  “Were you listening to our conversation?” Rachel’s snippiness was back in force.

  “No. But it’s sorta”—he shrugged—“obvious.” To me he said, “Just take it one day at a time.”

  “She’s not an addict. She’s my sister.”

  “No reason for her not to take it one day at a time.”

  I went to work, thinking, Aidan is dead. Aidan has died. I hadn’t actually realized it until now. I mean, I knew he’d died but I’d never believed it was permanent.

  I moved through the corridor like a ghost, and when Franklin called, “Morning, Anna, how’re you doing?” I felt like answering, “Good, except my husband died and we were married less than a year. Yes, I know you know all about it, but I’ve just realized.”

  But there was no point saying anything, it was old news for everyone else; they’d long moved on.

  We’d been on our way out for dinner, just me and him, and what was unendurable was that this was something we rarely did. Restaurants were for sociable nights out with other people, but when it was just me and him, we were more likely to snuggle on the couch and ring for takeout.

  If we’d stayed at home that night, he’d still be alive. In fact, we almost didn’t go. He’d booked a table at Tamarind but I’d asked him to cancel it because we’d eaten out just two nights earlier for Valentine’s Day. But it seemed to mean so much to him to go that I gave in.

  So I was waiting on the street for him to pick me up when, alerted by honks, beeps, and shouted expletives, I saw a yellow cab lurching across three lanes of traffic and heading in my direction. Sure enough, there was Aidan, making a scared face and flashing seven fingers at me. Seven out of ten. Nutter alert. Our personal scoring system for mental cabdrivers.

  “Seven?” I mouthed. “Good work.”

  He laughed and that made me happy. He’d been a bit low for a day or two: a few nights earlier he’d had a call—work—that had wrecked his buzz.

  With a shudder, the cab stopped beside me, I hopped in, and before my door was even closed, we screeched back into the heavy traffic. I was flung against Aidan and he managed to kiss me before I was thrown back in the opposite direction. Eagerly, I said, “Seven out of ten? We haven’t had one of them in a while. Tell us.”

  He shook his head in admiration and said in an undertone, “It’s good, this one, Anna, it’s good stuff. He saw Princess Diana in his local 7-Eleven, buying a bottle of Gatorade and twelve doughnuts.”

  “What flavor?”

  “A mixed box. And last year, he saw the face of Martin Luther King in a tomato. Charged his neighbors five dollars a look until the tomato went moldy.”

  Without warning, we zigged across Fifty-third Street and were thrown, with force, against the right-hand door. I clutched Aidan. “And, of course,” Aidan added, “there’s the quality of his driving. Brace yourself for a zag.”

  Funnily enough the accident wasn’t the fault of our seven-out-of-ten driver. In fact, it turned out to be no one’s fault at all. Making quite nippy progress through the dense postwork cars, Aidan and I had moved onto a mundane conversation about the state of our apartment and what a pig our landlord was. We were totally unaware of the events playing out on the junction of the cross street—a woman doing an unexpected dash across the road, an Armenian cabdriver swerving to avoid hitting her, and his front wheel connecting with a pool of oil, there from when a car had broken down earlier and spilled its guts onto the road. In blissful ignorance, I was saying “We could try painting the—” when we passed into another dimension. With brutal impact, another cab had plowed into the side of ours and its front bumper was trying to get into our backseat—the sort of thing that only happens in a nightmare. My head was full of grinding and breaking, then we were spinning backward in the road, like we were on an evil merry-go-round.

  The shock was—still is—indescribable, and the impact broke Aidan’s pelvis and six of his ribs, and mortally injured his liver, kidneys, pancreas, and spleen. I saw it all—in slow motion, of course: the shattered glass filling the air like silver rain, the tearing metal, the short gush of blood from Aidan’s mouth, and the look of surprise in his eyes. I didn’t know he
was dying, I didn’t know that in twenty minutes’ time he’d be dead, I just thought we should be angry that some asshole, going far, far too fast, had side-rammed us.

  Out in the street people were screaming, someone yelled, “Jesus, Jesus Christ!,” and whirling past me were people’s legs and feet. I noticed a pair of red spindly-heeled boots. Red boots are such a statement, I thought hazily. I still remembered them so clearly I could have picked them out in an identification lineup. Some details were imprinted on me forever.

  I was really lucky, everyone said later. “Lucky” because Aidan took all the impact. By the time the other driver had had his momentum broken by Aidan’s body, he was nearly all out of steam, with barely enough force left to break my right arm and dislocate my knee. Obviously there was collateral damage—the metal in our ceiling buckled and tore and gouged a deep furrow in my face, and the tearing metal in the door ripped off two of my nails. But I didn’t die.

  Our driver hadn’t a scratch. When the never-ending backward spinning finally stopped, he got out of the cab and looked in at us through the hole where his window used to be, then backed away and bent over. I wondered what he was doing. Checking his tires? Then, from the sounds he was making, I realized he was throwing up.

  “Ambulance is coming, buddy,” a man’s voice said, and I wondered if I had really heard it or just in my head. For a short time, things were oddly peaceful.

  Aidan and I looked at each other in a “can you believe this?” way and he said, “Baby, are you okay?”

  “Yes, are you?”

  “Yeah.” But his voice was weird, kind of gurgly.

  On the front of his shirt and tie was a sticky, dark red bloodstain and I was distressed because it was such a nice tie, one of his favorites. “You’re not to worry about the tie,” I said. “We’ll get you another one.”

  “Does anything hurt?” he asked.

  “No.” At the time, I felt nothing. Good old shock, the great protector, gets us through the unbearable. “How about you?”

  “A little.” That was when I knew it was a lot.

  From far away, I heard sirens. They got nearer and louder, then they were right up beside us, when abruptly, midshriek, they stopped. They’re for us, I thought. I never thought this sort of thing would happen to us.

  Aidan was taken out of the mangled car, then we were in the ambulance and things seemed to speed up. We were in the hospital and on separate gurneys and running through corridors, and from the way everyone paid attention to us, we were the most important people there.

  I gave our health-insurance details, which I remembered with crystal-clear, photo recall—even our membership numbers. I hadn’t even known that I knew them. I was asked to sign something but I couldn’t because of my right arm and hand being destroyed, so they said it was okay.

  “What is your relationship to this patient?” I was asked. “His wife? His friend?”

  “Both,” Aidan answered, in the gurgly voice.

  When they rushed him off to the operating room, I still didn’t know he was dying. I knew he was hurt, but I had no conception that he couldn’t be fixed.

  “Make him be okay,” I asked the surgeon, a short, tan man.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “He’s probably not going to make it.”

  My mouth fell open. Excuse me? Half an hour earlier we’d been on our way to have dinner. And now this suntanned man was telling me that Aidan might not “make it.”

  And he didn’t. He died very quickly, barely ten minutes in.

  By then the pain had started in my hand and arm and face. I was in such a fog of agony that I could barely remember my name, so trying to understand that Aidan had just died was like trying to imagine a totally new color. Rachel showed up with Luke; someone must have rung her. But when I saw her I thought they’d also been in an accident—why else would they be at the hospital?—and was confused by the coincidence. Sometime around then, I was given drugs, probably morphine, and it was only at that point that I thought to ask about the other driver, the one who’d rammed us.

  His name was Elin. Both his arms had been broken but he was otherwise uninjured. Everyone was adamant that the accident wasn’t his fault. There were a million witnesses who insisted he’d had “no choice” but to swerve to avoid hitting the woman, and that it was sheer, unadulterated lousy luck that the patch of oil had been dumped right on that spot of road.

  I spent two days in the hospital and all I can remember is a nonstop stream of people. Aidan’s parents and Kevin flew in from Boston. Mum, Dad, Helen, and Maggie came from Ireland. Dana and Leon—who cried so much he was given drugs, too—Jacqui, Rachel, Luke, Ornesto, Teenie, Franklin, Marty, people from Aidan’s work, and two policemen, who took a statement from me. Even Elin the driver came. Shaking and crying, both of his arms in plaster, he sat next to my bed, apologizing over and over and over again. There was no way I could hate this man—he was going to have nightmares for the rest of his life and he’d probably never get behind the wheel of a car again. But my pity for Elin left me at a bit of a loss: Who could I blame for Aidan’s death?

  Then we were on a plane to Boston, then we were at the funeral, which was like our wedding, but a nightmare version of it. Being pushed up the aisle in a wheelchair, seeing faces I hadn’t seen for ages, felt like a dream where a disparate collection of people are inexplicably gathered together.

  Then I was on a flight, then I was home in Ireland sleeping in the living room, then I was back in New York, and I’d only just faced what had really happened.

  Part 2

  30

  Extract from Never Coming Back by Dorothea K. Lincoln:

  About a week after my husband died, I was in my sunroom, flicking through the National Enquirer—the only reading matter I was able to concentrate on—when in through the open window flew a butterfly. It was incorrigibly beautiful, intricately patterned in red, blue, and white. As I watched in wonder, it flitted around the room, alighting on the stereo, a pot plant—as if reminding me to water it!—and my husband’s old chair. Then it flew to my copy of the National Enquirer and landed heavily on it—it seemed to say, “Tut tut, Dorothea!” (Interestingly, my late husband would not permit that particular publication in the house.)

  As the World Turns was on the TV, but the butterfly hovered over the remote. It seemed to be telling me something—could it be that it wanted the channel changed? “Well, okay, buddy,” I said. “I can try.”

  I flicked through several channels, and when I got to Fox Sports, the beautiful creature landed on my hand, as if gently telling me to stop. Then it sat on my shoulder and watched half an hour of the U.S. Open; the room was filled with a deep, deep peace. When Ernie Els went to three under par, the butterfly stirred, flitted to the window, hovered on the sill for a moment, as if saying good-bye, and finally flew away into the wide blue yonder. There was no doubt in my mind that this had been a visit from my late husband. He’d been telling me that he was still with me, that he always would be. Several other bereaved persons have reported similar visitations…

  I put the book down, sat up, looked around my living room, and thought, Where’s my butterfly?

  It was about four or five weeks since my early-morning conversation at Jenni’s with Rachel and not much had changed. I was still working long hours and producing little of value, I was still sleeping on the couch, and Aidan was still dead.

  I had a nice, little daily routine going: I’d wake at the crack of dawn, ring Aidan on his cell phone, go to work for at least ten hours, come home, ring Aidan again, construct elaborate fantasies where he hadn’t died, cry for a few hours, then doze off, wake up, and do it all again.

  Crying had become a great comfort, but it was difficult to arrange times for it because my face took so long to return to normal. It wasn’t safe to do it in the mornings because I looked terrible for work. And it wasn’t safe at lunchtime for the same reason. But evenings were good. I looked forward to them.

  I got through each day
and the only thing that kept me going was the hope that tomorrow would be easier. But it wasn’t. Every day was exactly the same. Horrific, unbelievable, like having walked through the wrong door of my life, where everything was identical, apart from one big huge difference.

  I had hoped that by returning to New York and using normal stuff, like work and friends, the nightmare would disperse. But it hadn’t. The work and friends had just become part of the nightmare.

  This morning, like every morning, I’d woken horribly early. There was always a split second when I wondered what the terribleness was. Then I’d remember.

  I lay down again, a dull persistent ache in my bones, what I’d imagined rheumatism or arthritis would feel like. When the pains had first started, I’d thought that maybe I’d caught a virus, or was suffering side effects of the accident. But my doctor said that what I was feeling was “the physical pain of grief.” That this was “normal.” Which came as a bit of a shock. I’d known to expect emotional pain but the physical pain was a new one on me.

  I looked terrible, too: my nails kept splitting, my hair was dull and broken, and despite access to every exfoliator and moisturizer anyone could need, my skin was flaking off in tiny gray pieces.

  I popped a couple of painkillers and switched on the telly, but when I couldn’t find anything to catch my interest, I flicked through Never Coming Back. Great title, by the way, I thought. Cheery. Bound to perk up the spirits of the recently bereaved.

  It was one of a deluge of books—arriving in the post from Claire in London, being left outside my door by Ornesto, handed over in person by Rachel, Teenie, Marty, Nell, even Nell’s strange friend—and even though I could barely concentrate long enough to read a paragraph, I’d noticed the butterfly motif was a common one. But no butterflies for me.

  Funnily enough, I wasn’t that keen on butterflies. It was a hard thing to admit because everyone loves butterflies and not liking them is akin to saying you don’t like Michael Palin or dolphins or strawberries. But to me, butterflies were slightly sneaky; all they were were moths in embroidered jackets. And, yes, moths were creepy and their flapping wings made a nasty, papery sound—but at least they were honest; they were brown, they were dull, they were stupid (flying into flames at the drop of a hat). All in all, they hadn’t much going for them but they didn’t pretend to be anything other than who they were.