“Quit changing the subject,” she said.
“This too is Torah, and I must learn,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ll tell you another time.” He released her hand. “Jacob fell asleep on a stone pillow at Mount Moriah and saw a host of angels on a ladder. Some were climbing up and others climbing down. God was watching from above, and Jacob from below. Some say the ladder represents prayer—connecting us to God. Some say it’s a vision of the twofold nature of the world.”
“And you?” Abigail said. “What do you think?”
He reached out and touched her cheek. “I think the ladder is a bridge, connecting all the worlds. The world of action, the world of formation, the world of creation, and the world of intimacy.—Do you know that according to kabbalah, each time a man and woman make love, they create a child? It may only be in the spiritual realm, never the physical, but still—you want to be aware of the kind of offspring you are making.”
“Do you really believe all that?” she asked.
“I do,” he said. “Do you believe any of it?”
“Possibly,” she said. “A little.”
He spoke softly, as if he sensed she was falling asleep, which in fact she was. “When Jacob awoke, he said, ‘God was in this place and I, I did not know it.’”
“That’s beautiful,” she said, her eyes slowly falling shut. With her eyes still closed, she asked, “Why did he say the word I twice?”
Teddy laughed. “You’re a good student, like your mother. Well, there are lots of theories, and you need your rest.”
“Okay,” she said.
He reached over her and switched off the lamp on her side of the bed. She felt the darkness as a kind of coolness entering the room, since she did not bother to open her eyes. In the new dark, she felt the man at her side still looking at her.
“I’m not the self I was before Iris,” she finally said. “So when Jacob wakes from the dream maybe he’s become a new person. A new I. ‘God was in this place and I, I did not know it.’”
He lifted her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Did you know we’d end up in the same room like this?”
“Like this?” he echoed. “No. Absolutely not. But I prayed to God, and was hopeful in my soul.”
“Who said that?” she asked.
He squeezed her hand. “I did.”
AUGUST 2012
The Last Time
The phone call came at 1:00 a.m. on a summer’s night. The phone shrilled next to Mimi’s sleeping head, in harmony with the deeper-toned phone downstairs in the kitchen. The whole house seemed to reverberate from the sound, as if from a fire alarm going off.
“Mimi?” the voice said. “You awake?”
It was Nicole’s voice—her new, rougher, octave-deeper husky voice, slurred from the effects of the morphine.
“I am now,” Mimi said. She shook her head hard to make it true. “I’m awake.”
“It’s time,” Nicole said. “You sure?”
“Absolutely,” Mimi said.
“It’s perfect,” said Nicole. “Full moon, stars, the works.”
“I’ll be over right away.”
“Good,” said Nicole. Then, “Thank you,” and she hung up.
Mimi opened Rianna’s door and peeked in. She left the door open a crack as she exited. Then she went into Julian’s room and woke him. “Listen, honey, I’m going out for a little while.” He blinked at her sleepily.
“How come?” he asked.
“Aunt Nicole needs me.”
“Oh. Okay,” he said, and closed his eyes again so that she wasn’t absolutely sure he had heard her. But then he added, “Is she dying?”
“No,” she said. “At least I hope not. Not right this minute.”
“Okay,” he said again.
“Keep an ear out for the baby,” Mimi said. “She’ll probably sleep through the night. But just in case, I’ll leave a bottle of soy milk out, and you can always give her some of those little oyster crackers. But don’t let her stay awake or she won’t go back to sleep. I won’t be gone long. You have my cell number. Call if you need me.”
“Will do,” he said. He reached out his long fingers and touched the back of her hand. “Mom?” he said.
“What?”
“Drive carefully, okay?”
“I will.”
“And give Daisy a kiss for me if you can—and Aunt Nicole.”
“Do you want me to wake you when I get back in?”
“No.” He yawned hugely. “I’ll be asleep.”
Nicole was waiting out by the front door, a canvas beach bag in her hand. She wore a long caftan and, over that, a light cotton sweater. “Blanket, towels, morphine patch,” she said. “Ideal midnight picnic at the beach.”
“How about a flashlight?” Mimi asked.
“Good idea.” Nicole went back into the kitchen, rummaged through a drawer, and was back after a few minutes. She moved very slowly these days.
“Do you want to leave a note for Jay?”
“Done,” Nicole said, nodding toward the kitchen. “I left the light on so he’d find it before he could get scared. It’s funny,” she added. “I used to think nothing could frighten him. And I turn out to be the most terrifying thing.”
Mimi helped her swing her swollen legs into the car. “Windows down?” she asked. Nicole nodded. How many times had they driven to the beach in summer, Nicole with her beautiful head thrown back, threads of red hair blowing in the wind, her feet out the window. Now she just sat slumped in the passenger seat, her head turned, smiling out at the night.
Mimi did not have to ask where they were going. Nicole’s favorite beach was in Oyster Bay, a small private beach that closed at sundown and in any event was reserved for residents of Oyster Bay with the proper stickers on their car windows. But at this hour it wouldn’t matter. The town beach was so far off the beaten path that no one bothered to fence it in, and the Oyster Bay cops had better things to do than chase down the few souls who ventured there at this hour. Yet strangely, when they finally got there—gliding over back roads as if they were made of black glass, no traffic this time of night, even the changing green and red streetlights seeming superfluous—the beach was roped off, like the entrance to a movie theater, blocked by a heavy metal chain. Mimi grabbed the flashlight and hopped out to investigate. The chain had a large lobster-claw clasp at one side. All she had to do was open it and drag the chain over to the other side. Then she drove through and refastened the chain. Theirs was the only car in the small parking lot.
“Come on,” Nicole said. She got out of the car and hobbled straight down the hill toward the water. Mimi was suddenly afraid she might not stop when she got to the edge. What would she do if Nicole tried to drown herself? What if she loaded down her pockets with stones like Virginia Woolf and waded into the bay? Would Mimi have the courage—or the cruelty—to drag her back? But Nicole’s voice came echoing back from the beach, and gravelly and hoarse as it was, it was a happy cry. “Hurry!” she called.
As soon as Mimi got fifty yards from the water, a fog rose around her. She could feel it swirling on her face. “Where are you?” she said. The flashlight was worse than useless. It bounced the light straight back into her eyes.
“Just follow my voice,” Nicole said. Then she made her voice higher and squeaky. “Follow the yellow brick road. Follow the yellow brick road.” Because of the roughness in her new voice she really sounded like a Munchkin.
Mimi slid and slipped down the sound. She nearly fell over Nicole. “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my,” she said.
“Sit,” ordered Nicole.
Mimi sat. Nicole had spread out the blanket and anchored it down with stones, with her slip-on shoes, with the edge of the canvas bag holding the rolled-up towels.
“Want to swim?” Nicole asked.
Mimi shivered. “Do you?”
“Absolutely not,” said Nicole. “I may be dyi
ng, but I’m not crazy.”
Mimi tilted her head back. “It’s funny,” she said. “I can’t see the beach, and I can barely see you, but I can see the moon, and even some bright stars. Why is that?”
Nicole shrugged. “You’d have to ask someone smarter than we are, like Julian. But I know those are planets, not stars.”
“How do you know?”
“One, hours spent in planetariums. Two, they’re too big and bright, and they don’t twinkle.”
At that instant a streak of light arced across the sky and seemed to fall straight into the dark blur of the bay.
“Now that,” said Nicole, “was a star.”
“A shooting star.”
“I don’t know what to wish for.”
“I do,” Mimi said quickly.
“No. Don’t waste your wishes on that,” said Nicole.
They sat for a few minutes in silence. The fog seemed to grow patchier, seemed to lift slightly, though maybe it was just their eyes growing used to the dark. The waves slapped lightly against the shore, splashing one-two, one-two.
“This is so nice,” Nicole said finally. “I’m happy. Thank you for bringing me.”
Mimi had to speak around the lump in her throat. “You know,” she said, “we’ll never forget this—the beach at night, that shooting star, the waves. We will always remember this.” She could not bring herself to use the pronoun I, even if that’s what she meant.
“I am remembering it now,” said Nicole.
That was the last good night. Nicole’s condition went down from there, gone out of control. Despite all their efforts, she had to be moved to the hospital, where she saw less of Daisy, to her sorrow and relief. Jay had been furious when they came home from the beach that night; of course he had wakened, and then waited for them to show up.
He waved the torn piece of paper on which she had scrawled “Gone out. Don’t worry.” He waved it over his head, his eyes wild. “What kind of a note is that? You call that a note? I was going out of my mind. What if you’d gone out to kill yourself?”
“What if I had?” Nicole said calmly. “I’d have left you a better note than that. Besides, Mimi was with me.”
“A fact that you forgot to mention!”
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She sank down into a kitchen chair. Her face looked puffy. “It was so beautiful out.”
He kneeled before her, instantly contrite. “Was it?” he said. He sounded wistful.
She realized that he was angry mostly because it wasn’t him she’d chosen to take along. “My great darling.” She put her palm flat on the top of his soft hair. “You I love,” she said. It was a joke between them. The engraver had gotten it wrong on their wedding rings, and instead of writing I love you, had engraved You I love. The misengraving had become a secret code between them.
“You I love,” he’d said. “Now let’s get you back to bed.”
Now she never moved from her bed, except to stagger to the toilet and back, and sometimes not even for that. For two weeks now the pain had raged out of control, a wild animal that could not be tamed. Her lungs kept filling with fluid. She’d blow up like a balloon, and then they would have to pump the fluids from her body and she’d be all right for a day, maybe two. Only she was never really all right. She went from morphine-laced stupor to an agony that seemed centered in the middle of her body, an iron anchor that held her to the bed. She had only felt this kind of pain once before, in labor, during the transition phase, and then at the end of it she’d had little Daisy to hold in her arms. Soon she must let go of all holding.
Jay climbed into the hospital bed and clasped her hand. The night nurses were always kinder than the strict day nurses; they allowed this kind of thing. Nicole felt like the Woggle Bug in one of the later Oz books, parts of her stick-thin, other parts swollen. She could no longer stand to look in a mirror; she could hardly bear to have Daisy look at her, for fear her daughter might only remember her this way. Jay was running his thumb softly up and down the back of her hand. In the old days, that touch had been a prelude to lovemaking. She tried to turn toward him, but the mere shift of her body brought a jolt of pain like a stroke of lightning, and she lay flat again, watching his hand on her hand. Tears spurted to her eyes. “No more!” she cried out in her new hoarse voice. “No more!”
The days got worse, and longer. Finally, late one night, Aunt Patti, Jay, and Mimi all gathered in the room. Jay brought her chips of ice to suck; Mimi brought flowers; Aunt Patti had provided a music player that was now playing old Sinatra songs.
“Why is this taking so long?” Nicole asked.
“I have to break up the ice with this plastic knife,” Jay said.
“That’s not what I mean.” Her words came slow, broken up by pain or morphine, or both. “Why is this taking so long? I’m ready. I’m ready to go.”
“No, you’re not,” Jay said. He came over to the bed and leaned over her as if to do—something. Some act of rescue. Mimi and Aunt Patti turned toward her.
Nicole raised her voice. She was actually yelling. “I am ready—but you won’t let me! None of you. Why won’t you just let me go?”
“Easy now,” Jay said.
“It’s not easy—it’s too hard. Why can’t you let me go?”
“Oh, Nicole,” said Mimi.
“Why won’t someone help me? Why are you holding me here?”
Aunt Patti turned away from the music player. “We can help you,” she said. “If that’s what you really want.”
“It’s what I really want,” answered Nicole.
A day or two later the judge received his strangest invitation yet in the mail. It was not an invitation to give a lecture, or to visit a foreign country, to contribute to a charity, or to teach a class. He had received all those invitations and more. This was an invitation to a funeral. It was the funeral of Nicole Greene, but under date and time were written the words “To Be Announced—please watch the papers.” And she had signed it herself, in a loose raggedy scrawl.
“That is absolutely heartbreaking,” Sarah said. “A woman sending out invitations to her own funeral.”
Sol turned it over in his hands, as if the blank back of the card contained some secret message. It certainly was peculiar. “I think—” He hesitated. “She wanted to take her life into her own hands. I think that’s what the trial was all about for her. And this”—he turned the card yet again—“is very generous. It’s an act of forgiveness.” He wondered if her cousin Ari Wiesenthal had gotten the same card.
He had not. But it was not because Nicole had not made one out—she had. And she had even added the words. “Please come.” But when Jay saw the envelope, he confided to Mimi, “I just can’t do it. I hope she’ll forgive me. But if I saw him, I might just kill him. And Nikki wouldn’t want me to go to jail for murdering her cousin.”
Mimi patted his arm. “It’s all right, Jay. Really, it is. You’re carrying enough.”
He wasn’t so sure, but nonetheless he shredded the envelope into pieces, and threw them into the cafeteria garbage can, under mounds of cottage cheese and discarded salad, apple cores and half-drunk cartons of milk.
Daisy was sleeping over at her friend Claudia’s house. Nicole sat propped up on pillows, watching them quickly, nervously tearing open the morphine patches. The late afternoon sun shone outside the window. All she could see was the line of traffic, red taillights glowing on the expressway nearby.
They were unwrapping all of the patches they had on hand. Plus the ones they had managed to squirrel away. Aunt Patti had been especially good at arguing for more, alternately charming and bullying the nurses, playing one shift off against another, accusing the hospital of incompetence. Nicole called, in her new, deep, hoarse voice, “Jay!”
He turned around. His face was so full of sadness, so full of fear.
She licked her chapped lips. She said, “I want you to know what I’m thinking.”
He nodded, waiting for her to continue. Eve
ryone else stopped their preparations a moment. Aunt Patti’s hands were full of the morphine patches.
“After I gave birth to Daisy, I sent you home for clothes, remember? I gave you a list. And you brought me this crazy stuff. The red-striped maternity pants and pink top. And the wrong boots. I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere in this outfit.’ Remember?”
He nodded again.
“You went home for me, and brought back the things I wanted, and you never complained. You never said a word.” Nicole’s eyes filled with tears. “I was such a—stupid—vain—ridiculous.” She shook her head hard, as if to clear it. “I was always so lucky! So lucky.” She shut her eyes and reached out. His hand entirely enclosed hers, square and broad and muscular. An athlete’s hand, still. Jay’s hand. “I want that on my gravestone, ‘She was lucky in love.’ That’s what I’m thinking. I want you to know—” She must have fallen asleep, because it was another minute or two before she said, “Jay. I’m just running back home to get something. This time I’m going ahead of you.”
“Don’t go yet,” Jay said.
Nicole nodded and closed her eyes again. This time she did not reopen them. He thought, Never in this life will I see those eyes again. He could not bring himself to move, or to let go of her hand.
Aunt Patti said, “Are you ready, doll?”
Nicole moved her head up and down on the pillow to nod yes. “We’d better hurry,” Aunt Patti said, “before the nurse comes back and we all get arrested for murder.—Mimi, keep an eye on the door. If someone starts to come in, go out there in the hall and tell a joke. Try to make it funny for a change.”
Mimi made a noise between a sob and a laugh. She placed herself at the door while Jay and Aunt Patti set to work applying the patches. “Hurry!” Aunt Patti said every minute or so. “Hand me two more.” Mimi hurried over with the patches in her hand, set them on her friend’s chest, on the V where the white skin shone translucent above the green hospital gown. She could still feel Nicole’s breathing——but it was shallow. She pressed her hands down as if she could speak through her palms, as if she could say good-bye with just the weight of her hands against her best friend’s heart. Then she went to stand guard at the door.